Ask the Author: J.P. Smith
Answered Questions (7)
J.P. Smith
My childhood, to be honest. But I'm not going to write it.
J.P. Smith
I'm happy to say I don't. I've made writing a daily habit, so if I'm not working on a new book I'll be writing a review of someone else's book, or even starting a new screenplay.
J.P. Smith
Simply being allowed to use my imagination and work with words.
J.P. Smith
I cover this in the interview included in the back pages of The Drowning. So I'll leave it there for now!
J.P. Smith
As my 2020 novel, If She Were Dead, is off to the copyediting department at my publisher, I'm already into my next novel, set both in 1969 and today.
J.P. Smith
I don't. I write every day, as I have for the past forty years. One thing I learned when living in England is that artists—whether painters, actors or writers—view their work not as some spiritual quest or fulfillment of the soul, but as something we just sit down and do. I'll be covering this in an upcoming blog post.
J.P. Smith
When I was eight years old I was sent to a summer camp in Upstate New York. Towards the end of the eight-week-long season our swimming counselor lined us up facing the deep water and ordered us to jump in. Not being a swimmer, and deathly afraid of deep water, I begged him not to make me do it. Instead he threw me into the water, where I proceeded to drown. He jumped in beside me and I grabbed hold of him, and the look on his face was of a thwarted, angry man. He swam me out fo a raft and left me on it, saying (and I've never forgotten it), "Either you'll swim back or stay there and die." All these years later the thought came to me: what if he'd forgotten me, came down after nightfall with a flashlight to see if I was still there, and saw that the raft was empty. And my body was never recovered, either from the lake or the campus. And then, twenty-eight years later, the counselor, now a successful real-estate developer in NYC, realizes that I've come back to take my revenge.
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