ok. So on tonight's edition of my blog (tried to make it sound fancy there, but to no effect) I will be doing it on young author
JM Tohline. After about 2 hours of trying to get a 3 month old chihuahua to poop i'm feeling a wrecked & now i will do my best to impress Mr. Tohline in this blog (not to mention i am ridiculously nervous) and excuse my punctuation. Let me get the background into how i found out about JM Tohline. He added me on Myspace. Plain & simple. Actually I thought he was a handsome lad so i added him back. Friends of mine would know just how much i love boys. But honestly once i read his profile, he seemed like the type of guy I could have coffee with & talk about literature. Which brings me to the center of the circle. HE IS A WRITER! so I thought, "hey, let me check out what he's got going on" & i did. I read his first couple of pages from his upcoming novel entitled
"The Great Lenore". I'm always picky about my reading, I like books I can relate to or ones that Yvonne reccommend to me. So I read it, at first i kind of skimmed along and skipped and then I really sat down and read it. I was intrigued and i felt comfortable. The story sets a scene like a movie. I can see everything in front of me occurring as my eyes move along the words. && I didn't think I could relate to the main character but I could. it's as though i wanted that to be my life. So I think the best best way for everyone to get a feel for this author is to.... Check out my impromptu newbie interview && read the first few pages of his upcoming book
"The Great Lenore". Give it a chance. It won't kill you or turn you into a zombie but it will make you feel good. At least I think so. So here it is, my interview. && no worries, this will be spread around facebook & myspace.
1. state your name where you're from."State your name"? What is this, the interrogation hour? :) I was born Jordan Matthew Tohline (
Tuh-lean), and I grew up just outside of Boston. If you are wondering why I use the name "JM" for my writing, you can join the club. Sometimes I wonder also. I'm really not sure what the answer is.
2. occupationSimple answer to this question: Writer. I do freelance writing work for companies and corporations and blah-blah. I also teach SAT and ACT preparation courses for Kaplan. I enjoy teaching. I do not enjoy doing technical writing work. I dig the creative side of writing more than anything.
3. what made you become an author?Interesting...
Um...
Yeah.
I grew up wanting to play professional football. I was pretty decent at football -- I could have been on a college team (and never left the bench). But I definitely could not have made any sort of living playing football.
By the time I was 14 or 15 I had realized this sad reality, but I had not yet found anything else to be passionate about. And then...one day, quite randomly (it was summer, and I was 15, and I was sitting in my parents' van after church, waiting for them to come outside) I decided that I wanted to be a writer. It just sort of hit me. I went home that night -- it was raining outside -- and I closed myself in my room and wrote a story about a family during the Revolutionary War. I still have the story -- it's actually not half bad.
4. who's your favorite author.Hemingway.
As for the writers who inspire me the most: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Joyce, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Thompson, Plath, and Salinger. I have black and white pictures of these nine writers pinned to the wall next to my writing desk.
5. i read that you'd like to move from place to place, what would be the next place you would move to & what place have you been to before that you would go back to.I'll likely be moving to Denver at the beginning of 2010. Denver is one of those places that I could really dig.
I plan to settle down in New England eventually, so I would like to live (experience) some other places first.
My favorite cities to travel to (besides Boston) are San Francisco, New York, Virginia Beach, and New Orleans.
I'm a road trip fanatic!
6. You have a book coming out tell us a little bit about it and why you wrote it. What inspired you to write this book.As a writer, you don't ask yourself "why" you wrote a book -- you write it because you have no choice
but to write it!
I had had the idea for this book in my head for a while (the basic premise from which this book grew: A woman is unhappy with her marriage. She is the kind of woman who every man loves -- the kind of woman who has left a wake of destroyed men behind her throughout her life -- but in this marriage, she has met her match. She wants out, but she cannot admit defeat. Salvation comes in the form of a plane. She was supposed to have been on the plane --
had, in fact, been on the plane -- but she had forgotten something important, and she hopped off the plane and did not make it back in time. The plane crashed over the Atlantic, leaving her name on the manifest...and leaving her life still intact. Instead of revealing herself to her husband, she decides to "remain dead," and to watch the goings-on of her funeral -- she wants to see how her husband reacts to her death; she wants to see how the world reacts.)
I sat down at my desk with this basic premise in mind, and I spent about a month just jotting down notes and getting to know the characters, and getting to know the story, and then I transcribed it. I didn't write the story -- I excavated the story. I took something that already existed somewhere in the ancient burial ground of Story, and I pulled it up for all the world to enjoy.
7. What would you say is your interesting writing quirk? Quirks? No...they all seem normal to me :)
I am basically nocturnal.
I do all of my first-draft writing in a notebook, with a fountain pen, and then transfer it all to computer.
I always listen to music while I write (my primary writing companion is The Beatles).
Plenty of other things -- we'll leave it there for now!
8.How long does it take you to write a book? The Great Lenore is the fourth complete manuscript I have written (I wrote my first manuscript when I was 19 -- this is the first one for which I have seriously pursued publication).
The Great Lenore is not a long book. The first draft took me about three months, but...it's tough to really assess these things. The book is 9 chapters long, and I wrote the last 2 chapters in less than 48 hours (after laboring and going nowhere with the last two chapters for almost a month). I guess it all depends. Usually, though -- from the time I begin to know the characters to the time I finalize the editing -- about a year and a half to two years. The manuscript that I am working on right now will likely take much longer. It is going to be a long book.
9. If you could be anywhere at anytime doing anything what would it be and with who?I would be by myself, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, walking the beach, reading, and writing.
Or...
I would be with my family, in Plymouth, so on and et cetera.
10. tell us where to get your book, when it's coming out & any last words.My agent has just started shopping the book around to publishers, so it will still be more than a year before the book will be in stores. You can find the first few pages, however, at
www.thegreatlenore.blogspot.com. You can also find me on facebook by searching "JM Tohline" -- the facebook page is the best way to be notified when new developments occur in the publishing process.
* this is just a last thing: leave the readers of this blog with a quote you live by, stand by, or favor. Quote:
"Life is holy and every moment is precious." ~Kerouac
Cheers.
~J
Until next time guys,
chop chop.
Talk to JM Tohline:
http://www.myspace.com/jmtohlinehttp://thegreatlenore.blogspot.com/Facebookfind him, talk to him, just do something.
Finally, the puppy is sleeping.
Next blog will be on a band I'm in love with
&& future blogs will hopefully include JM Tohline,
stay tuned!
