JESSE GILES CHRISTIANSEN
In
celebration of the new release of GOTH TOWN, I decided to have
some fun by taking a peek into the diabolically talented mind of Jesse Giles Christiansen by asking him five questions. I made sure that
these questions were embarrassing enough to humiliate, shame and keep him off
social media forever if answered honestly! Being the trooper he is, Jesse took up the challenge and here are the results! Hope you check it and GOTH TOWN out!!! After all, what would you do if they took away Christmas?
Link to Buy: http://tinyurl.com/qabsgeh
Five questions
1. What’s the single most important
thing needed to become a successful writer?
Write directly from the soul, focus
on what you can control, and let go of what you can’t. In my writing career so
far, it has surprised how little is in the control of the author. I wake up
every day and ask myself three
questions. 1. How can I create better art than yesterday? 2. What can I do
today to get more eyeballs on my work? 3. Why do I do what I do? (The answer
cannot be wide recognition, because that is not a controllable goal).
2. In terms of highs and lows,
what’s the best and worst thing you’ve experienced in your writing career?
Describe your darkest writing day on earth and the one that brought you the
most joy. Please describe each in minute detail so we can live vicariously.
My best days are when I’m looking at
the computer screen and words are appearing in front of me that I can’t believe
are coming out of me. Creating great work is surreal, almost astral. The
feeling is incomparable, and at the end of the day, I think that feeling is
what keeps us going. The next great feeling is the excitement to share your
work with readers and literary professionals. I felt this way about PELICAN BAY
and, recently, GOTH TOWN, though all my novels have brought me this feeling to
some degree. If I don’t get that feeling, I’ll trash the novel and start over.
My worst days are when I share art and run into stifling apathy and deep
resistance. I have to remind myself why I do this, or else I might give up.
3. I’ve heard great writing
described as “an economy of words”. Do you agree? Disagree? What is your take
on how to select the procession of words necessary to tell your story?
Hemingway’s one of my literary idols
because he was able to get rid of everything not needed. This is one of my
greatest challenges as a writer, but I feel I’m evolving more every time I
write. This is why we have editors. But writers have to be editors to a large
degree, as well. I think of books as wonderful sculptures of clay that move
others, but lack details to move them thoroughly. “Economy of words” is all
about sculpting until you can see every slant and angle … every crevice. If you
have to wait years to get a literary work there, do it; it will pay dividends.
I feel that GOTH TOWN is closest I’ve come to such athleticism. It is a freeing
feeling … much like a man who wants to fly inventing better wings with each
attempted flight.
4. Your fairy godmother has just
granted you a private coaching session with any living writer. Which writer
would you select and what are the questions you would ask him/her?
It would be Hemingway. I would want
to know first and foremost, how he achieved such athleticism in his prose? How
did he move the world with the simplest of words? I’d also like to know how he
dealt with the extreme ups and downs of being a writer. What kept him going on
those dark days?
5. To close, I would love for you to
share the opening and closing paragraphs of the acceptance speech you’ll give
after winning your very first Bram Stoker award. (pssst … be humble!)
Hmm … love this question! I want to
write a full-fledged horror novel one day, as I love to read and watch it
myself. PELICAN BAY and GOTH TOWN have many horror elements in them, spooky
drifts …
I
believe it is not me, but my literary work that thanks you. That I stand here
today is evidence that I have mastered this genre and its novels to a degree
that I am receiving your recognition for it. Thank you hardly seems adequate,
however. I think more of a salute is appropriate. You have saluted me, and
should I want to return the salute, my objective will not be to think very much
about this award after today, but to honor all of you by dedicating the rest of
my life towards how to create even better works than these … so that one day I
can be the one standing in your place and saluting the one up here.
Yours in literature,
J.G.C.
GOTH TOWN
PROLOGUE
by JESSE GILES CHRISTIANSEN©2014
JAKE RAYNER is the only one, other than
Samantha Bryant, who had the vision.
He’ll never forget the first time it
happened. He was out for a walk in the woods by himself, a practice highly
discouraged by the Overseers.
He was always surprised at how little
everyone questioned the rules of the Overseers. Many of them seemed so
ridiculous. Then again, they owed everything to them. There would have been no
life here at all, if not for them.
That afternoon the hazy air was happy and it
seemed to seep into everything. Jake was reckless to allow it to seep into him.
His feet, his legs, his fingers, even his thoughts, were reckless.
I know they’re going to find me. I just know
it. Then they’re going to hook me up to the Recalibration Machine again.
But that day he didn’t care about a single
thing. He was mad with life. Life was mad in his veins. Life was livid in his
veins.
Everything spoke to him. The birds’ songs
were like shrilly operas stuck in fortissimo. The creek sneaking along by his
side crackled and popped the way a long-asleep radio wakes up hungry and eager
to play. The wind in the pines moaned softly like a lonely lover.
Then it happened.
He felt dizzy at first, his head so light he
thought it might float away. Something surged inside him that could have been
swallowed lightning, rising, writhing, and climbing up to his head.
The memory came.
Memories were demons; they were even more
forbidden than being all alone; they were not allowed to even start. When they
went in for their weekly screening, any evidence of memories prior to the
Anti-Emotion Movement was immediately erased. It was for their own good.
Really. They had to believe in the Overseers. They gave them everything, and
asked for so little in return. The Overseers picked them up after the Great
Fog.
He just stood there and could not stop the
memory. Oh, it was so warm. That swallowed lightning curled up, balled up in
his head and took to nuclear fusion, forming a miniature sun to melt all the
work of the entire Overseers’ brilliant technology.
But what an afternoon it was.
The first flash was of shiny boxes wrapped in
fancy bows under a tree that someone had stuck in a living room. What a bizarre
image. Why would someone put a perfectly good tree in a living room? Perfect
madness. Perfect madness, indeed. And the poor, poor tree.
The tree was wrapped with winking lights, and
as he stood there, letting this memory take root, he could see the pines around
him dressed the same. They were beautiful, and he overflowed with the urge to
take all the pines in the forest, shrink them down, and put them into
everyone’s homes.
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.
He heard footsteps, and the beautiful,
horrible, absurd memory vanished. The memory vanished like the scent of a woman
riding with you on a train—a woman you know you will never see again.
He waited for the Goth Town Police to arrest
him. And he cherished those seconds as the taste of a curious and wild memory remained
for a few seconds on his lips. Those few seconds were more blissful than the
rambunctious air that crept all through the forest that afternoon and shot rays
of perilous hope into everything. In those few seconds, he tried to chase the
echo that was home to that taste. That scent of a woman on a train. He tried to
return to it with the desperation of a legless man waking from a Boston
Marathon dream.
But at least the taste was there when they
handcuffed him.
At least the flicker.
A gray haunt … at least …
.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesse Giles
Christiansen is an American author who writes compelling literary fiction that
weaves the real with the surreal. He attended Florida State University where he
received his B.A. in English literature. He is the author of PELICAN BAY, an Amazon #1 list
bestseller, outselling Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. He's just released what is one of the most unique Christmas stories in years, GOTH TOWN.
One of Christiansen's literary goals is to write at least
fifty novels, and he always reminds himself of something that Ray Bradbury once
said: "You fail only if you stop writing."
You can also visit
this author at:
Web Site: www.jessegileschristiansen.com
Blog: www.jgchristiansen.wordpress.com
Goth Town Trailer: http://youtu.be/QVWYlXL5mEA
Amazon Link: http://ow.ly/DRY48
Goth Town Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBXOytQix0c
Blog: www.jgchristiansen.wordpress.com
Goth Town Trailer: http://youtu.be/QVWYlXL5mEA
Amazon Link: http://ow.ly/DRY48
Goth Town Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBXOytQix0c
PELICAN BAY (The Captain Shelby Trilogy Book 1)
“Christiansen
offers a tale sure to entrance readers—a story of love and wisdom and the
mystery of a forgotten graveyard under the waters of PELICAN BAY.”” – Man Martin, author
of Paradise Dogs
Some
things are better left alone…
After
Ethan Hodges discovers an undersea cemetery just off the beach of Pelican Bay,
South Carolina, he seeks answers from a grandfatherly fisherman named Captain
Shelby. The captain wants the past to remain buried, and he warns Ethan to stay
away. But Ethan doesn't listen.
Ethan's
best friend and secret love interest, Morgan Olinsworth, joins in the
investigation, unearthing intriguing secrets about the mysterious fisherman.
When Captain Shelby is suspected of murder and disappears, a manhunt ensues,
revealing a truth that unnerves everyone in Pelican Bay.
