Friday, November 21, 2014

GOTH TOWN: Five Questions for JESSE GILES CHRISTIANSEN

Five Questions:
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:


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.






Sunday, November 2, 2014

BEWARE:Author Trailer of Wendy Potocki

So I heard you all need a little brain freeze.

Luckily, I just finished my new promotional trailer so you can get that and have your intestines rearranged all at the same time.

The video will give you a sample of what my work is all about, and the best part is that you can rock out to one wickedly awesome song.

Let me know what you think.