New Book Reveal : I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU BEHIND

My next book? I’m going to surprise you: it won’t be a boomer novel! I bet you thought I’d publish more Boomer lit stuff – you’ve heard me talk about it so much these days, the hot new genre, bla bla, books that are written for the fast growing boomer market, transition to the Third Act in Life, my boomer book trailer for A Hook in the Sky etc. etc.

But no, at this very moment, I’m into something totally different. Don’t count on me to stick to any given genre! After all, The Phoenix Heritage, my New Adult series, swerved from paranormal romance to techno thriller! Ok, I’ll get back to boomer lit at some point in the future, I promise. It’s not something I want to give up, but not before a (long) detour in, guess what, science fiction! And if you’re about to learn everything about my 180° swerve, it's because I’ve been …tagged, or rather gently pulled into a game writers tend to indulge in: “blog hops”. Writers, like everyone else, love to shop talk and link with other author friends. Post and link, make a daisy chain of blogs! And there’s nothing they like better than to talk about the book they're working on! 

CORRECTION: Actually, this novella could probably be classified as boomer lit science-fiction! I know, I should have thought of this before. Science fiction can be a sub-genre of Boomer lit, why not? When you read further down you'll see why...I'll flag the reason out for you when you get to it. Keep reading, be happy and see you later! 

Before I do that, my thanks go to Jenny Gill for tagging me! Jenny is a talented writer, author of 5 novels, the latest one “But a Dream” just published in December 2012 - see her author page here  And you can check out her blog here where she tells you all about her next book, A Fairy Tale for grown-ups (yes, she's a boomer lit author!)

Now, here are the 10 questions of the Blog Hop I was asked to answer.

  

1. What is the working title of your book?

I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU BEHIND – actually that’s not going to be a novel, more like a novella. And I’m toying with the idea of making it the first installment in a series entitled The One Percenter Saga, and perhaps even publish it as a Kindle series…if Amazon agrees! Series are now a new and upcoming way to read books: each installment is longer than a chapter but shorter than a novel so it’s easier for modern harassed readers to find the time to read them, yet because they are linked one to another, readers would want to get the next installment. Sounds good? I like to experiment with different formats…

2. Where did the idea for the book come from?

From the observation that ours is a society fixated on looking young and staying young. Suppose that in a not too distant future, medical advances would allow us to live to the last day in our lives looking young and feeling fit. Imagine! Live all your life with a twenty-year old body, then, when your time is up, you suddenly drop dead. Is that the perfect solution to the pain of aging? Or would it cause new, different and unexpected problems?

WARNING FLAG: This novella is all about aging, a central issue in Boomer lit! Just imagine a future where the side-effects of aging are taken care of by medical advances: no more wrinkles, sagging skin, falling hair and teeth, weak legs, back pains, gnarled fingers! You're never going to go deaf or lose your eyesight, your voice will be strong and young to your very last hour, and not just your voice (grin)...Then you drop dead, pouf, you're gone in a burst of smoke! Ah, the perfect death, the painless aging.  
Or is it really painless? That is the question!

3. What is the genre of the book?

Science fiction, of course. One might expect the medical advances I’m talking about to take hold in about 100 to 200 years from now. It’s an interesting exercise in imagination: visualize the future, a future where current trends we notice around us now become  exacerbated – in particular the trend towards inequality, the One Percent against the 99 percent. The ultra rich against all the rest. It would be a world full of conflict, envy and hate. Like now, but probably only worse. Though some problems would be solved thanks to technology…That’s what the One Percenter Saga would explore, one instalment after the next.

4. Which actors would you choose to play the characters in a movie rendition?

More than a movie I see it as a TV series! I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU BEHIND features two major characters: a beautiful woman (the One Percenter) looking forever young and her lover who’s a ski champion (the 99 Percenter) and not aware of her true age. 

Yes, you guessed it, Natalie Portman would be perfect in the role of the woman and Daniel Craig as her lover! But there’s a minor character named Alice, a sweet young Swiss woman, very sexy who becomes the main character in the next installment. 

Scarlett Johansson would be the right choice for her, my perfect Alice!

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The year is 2213, medical advances have solved the problem of aging, she is 122, he is 35, they look the same age, they are in love but he doesn’t know her time is up, she’s got only 12 hours left to live…

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency/publisher?

I have to answer this one like Jenny: Self published but if any agents or publishers out there are interested I’m open to offers!

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It started out as a short story and was done in an afternoon! The expansion to novella-size, about 18,000 words, took another two weeks and quite a bit of research because some of it takes place in a remote village in the Alps. But since this is a series, I’m working on the next instalment and I expect it will take me at least a whole year before I’m done with the series…if ever! It’s the sort of thing one can keep going back…

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  

Think of the classics: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Or Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano where mechanization has displaced the lower classes and assigned power and wealth to the world’s engineers and managers.  I see my One Percenter Saga as a revised, updated version of that sort of book – looking at our society with a critical eye and extending some visible social trends to their very unsustainable extreme… Ok, I know, that’s pretty ambitious, but if you want to write something good, you need to aim high!

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?  

Are you happy with the way things are? Unemployment, poverty, wars and next to that, astounding wealth that shields a tiny elite from what is happening to the rest of the world…Now you can write about that as an economist – and I am an economist, a Columbia U. graduate – or you can turn it into dystopian fiction. That’s what I want to do. You reach more people that way than with (boring) (serious) non-fiction!

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Erotic scenes? Cold-blooded murder? Wild chases that will leave you breathless? Sure, it will have all that. Our world, 200 years from now, is not going to be a cosy, quiet sort of place. It will be exploding with violence and sex, it will be falling apart as the One Percent tries to defend its privileges against the 99 percent. You don’t believe our world is going in that direction? Well, I’m sorry, the statistical evidence of growing inequality is against you! In the last forty years, our world has moved in one direction only: more inequality…

Now, since this is a blog hop, it’s my turn to tag someone else and I’m tagging two persons  (the more, the merrier!). One is Emma Calin, inspired author of Knockout,  a passionate police procedural (great fun) and punchy short stories, and now she’s just published Escape to Love, a perfect Valentine gift!  Here’s her author page and her blog  Can’t wait to find out what she is working on!

The other is Tyler Roberts, a beekeeper and organic gardener (I love organic food!), who’s just published his debut novel, an apocalyptic book aptly called Truth’s Blood . God only knows what terrifying book he’s working on next! Check it out here in his blog.