Ask the Author: J. Aaron Sanders
Answered Questions (6)
J. Aaron Sanders
I don't feel inspired as much as compelled. If I don't write every day, I get cranky and impossible to be around.
J. Aaron Sanders
I run really far really slow. Or go to a movie. Or read someone else's book that aligns in some way with what I'm trying to do looking for a way through it.
J. Aaron Sanders
I enjoy nothing more than the smell of coffee in the morning and the sound of my fingers tapping the keys. I love the possibility in a new idea, the unpredictable ways it unfolds, and the momentum that kicks in as Act 1 turns into Act 2. It’s often grueling, lonely work, but it has gives me a satisfaction like almost nothing else.
J. Aaron Sanders
Read and write every day. I wish the advice were more sexy, but it’s just not. Read the books you want to be like. Study everything about them, and then write, write, write. One writer once told me that writing even ten minutes a day is enough to develop a life-long habit. It’s in the daily grind of writing that the muse appears.
J. Aaron Sanders
I’m hard at work on the second book in the series, The Blood of a Gentleman, which follows Whitman and his brother, Jeff, down to New Orleans where they become involved with an escaped slave, his vindictive master, and slave-trading pirates.
J. Aaron Sanders
The idea for Speakers of the Dead came to me while reading Justin Kaplan’s biography of Walt Whitman. In it, I happened upon the most amazing story: Whitman left home at age 12 to be a printer’s devil for a man named Samuel Clement. Being homesick, Whitman looked to Clement as a father figure, and so he was shocked when Clement was arrested for digging up the corpse of the recently deceased Quaker prophet, Elias Hicks. This story so affected Whitman that he wrote about it in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857, and perhaps reworked his adolescent, gruesome experience in the surreal poem ‘The Sleepers.’ This story gave me grave robbing, which led to the resurrection men, which led to anatomical dissection, which led to Elizabeth Blackwell—all set in the gritty mid-19th century.
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