I first came across remember to BLINK over at The Cult about a year ago; right about the time that I was sending off Payday . I got a copy of his copy in a countrywide read and sign. I read it, loved it, signed it, and then sent it off. I promised him a review of what I thought of it soon thereafter I finished. A year went by and still nothing.

However, a couple of months ago, when thinking about our new launch of Oxyfication, Jason Kane and I were shooting around books of first time authors to feature. Right away I thought back to remember to BLINK. And I didn’t think of it as some sort of redemption for not having provided the review. I thought of it in terms of entertainment. remember to BLINK is the sort of book that stays with you, both while you’re reading it, and long after you finish it. A month or so ago I read it again, and I amazed all over. Yes, it’s that damn good. As part of Jase’s book being featured over at Oxyfication Jason and I came up with a series of questions for Jase to answer. As you’re about to read, his awesomeness isn’t just limited to writing. Jase’s passion extends beyond his own creativity to that of helping create a place for others. But I won’t say anymore, you can read for yourself. But after you’re done, be sure to check out the links below the interview. They are more than worth your time. They are worth your input.

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For starters, remember to BLINK had to start somewhere. What started the novel going? What was the first thing you remember writing for it?

I can’t remember exactly. I tried to cheat and look up the original file, which I remember was five chapters of totally whiny garbage. I think the first sentence was “Fuck you” or “What’s your fucking problem” or something like that. I was giving up on music as a creative outlet, I needed something new but had no idea where to start. I’d been doing nothing but song lyrics for a long time. Then I read Fight Club. I never really enjoyed reading before that, I’d never seen that kind of prose before. It’s the rhythm and the choruses that struck me, made me think… “This is what happens when lyrics have no music.” I started thinking about writing this story idea after that, seriously considering trying to write something of that length, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

But what really kicked me in the ass was I caught an interview with Palahniuk in a magazine where he said something about how the market is mostly geared toward woman who want to read pleasant and uplifting things. If you stay off that radar though, there are virtually no limits on what you can talk about and explore, because nobody’s listening anyway. You could get away with murder. I remember thinking… “That’s freedom.” The presumption of failure became freedom to do whatever the hell I wanted.

In terms of the entire scope of writing the book, at what point did you get that feeling like ‘I’ve got something here’?

You’ve got it backwards. I started out thinking… “I’ve got something here!” That morphed into “I had something… somewhere…” then eroded to “What was I just saying?”
When I hit that wall, I turned to the lamest format ever: An outline. Organized my thoughts so I could see the whole mess in a few short pages. Then I was finally able to push through the first draft.

Tell us a little bit about where you got started in writing. Did it start for you at an early age? Did you take classes in high school, or college, or maybe outside workshop type classes that got the creative juices flowing so hard that you had to give in to them and write?

I tried writing a few short stories as a kid, then turned to poems, then eventually to song lyrics as I got heavily into music. Songs a good fit because they are tight and focused and easy for someone with a short attention span to write. I had to grow up and slow down before I could try writing a novel.

I remember one short story pretty well, this really goofy attempt at horror. Two mortal-enemy type kids stage an arm-wrestling match between the heat elements on an electric stove top, so that the loser would have the skin burned off the back of his hands. Because of the heat they start sweating like crazy and their hands slip, burning both of their palms instead. Neither want to give up though, so they duct-tape their hands together. The match goes on all night until exhaustion sets in and they agree to call it a draw. When they take off the duct tape their hands are healed together.

It was sort of a “tales from the crypt” phase. Then I got into playing guitar and writing songs instead. I’m sure that was for the best.

So really, how much, if any, of the specifics of certain parts of remember to BLINK –first thing that comes to mind is what the job entails–are true? As the copyright of the book infers, enough of it is true to make it seem real. But how much of you did you put in there?

I think to get into the specifics would spoil a lot of the fun. Call it the opposite of James Frey’s approach: I’m telling people it’s fiction, letting them guess what’s real, instead of the other way around.

On the flipside, did you ever find yourself putting too much of yourself in there? They say that every author’s first book is autobiographical in parts without even trying to be? Did you find that the case?

Karen Novak relayed some advice to the Cult awhile back, I can’t recall who it was originally from, but it goes something like this: Most first novels are revenge stories. It’s you, fantasizing about how you’d get back at all the people you feel fucked up your life. Everyone who writes a novel needs to write that book first. As soon as it’s done, throw it in the trash. Most people miss that last part, me included.

For me, the search for blame just kept coming back to myself. The target of my revenge became my own past complacency and conformity, but also a few good things that needed to be let go. Those good things get destroyed in the process of the book, but for me internally it’s about letting go what’s past and owning up to what’s left.

How long, from start to finish, did remember to BLINK take you?

Roughly four years. The first five chapters came out in one sitting. Then I scrapped those, started over, got about halfway through the story, which took most of a year. Stopped there. Wrote the outline. Finished the draft. That was about halfway through year two. I sent the draft to some people. A few good friends really hammered on it, gave me some valuable advice. Back to the drawing board. Another year. A whole new draft. Better now, covered new territory, got more confident with the things I was saying. After running it by a few more people, I spent a year on revising and editing the hell out of it.

General things that shouldn’t be that important, but are the types of things that writers wonder about other writers the most: What is your writing process? What types of music (if any) do you listen to? What types of books, or certain authors do you read/inspire you? How do you write (longhand, in notebooks, strictly on computer, etc)?

I don’t have a system at all. I write in moments of rest that come between the things going on in real life. If I try to shut out real life to focus on writing, I have nothing to write about. That leads down a dangerous spiral of frustration where I avoid the world even more, which only makes the problem worse.

I did go to a writer’s retreat for a week in Arizona to focus on writing, but I had an outline with me and a lot of the hard stuff done in advance, so it was easy to keep moving.

I write everything on the computer. I can type about eighty words per minute so it allows me to record my thoughts in near-real time. I also have a little notebook and scraps of paper and such, but those are just reminders of ideas. Sentence fragments, sometimes just be a word or two. I get help from my wife too.
Example: We’re at a concert. The opening act is on stage, and he sucks. Horrible. His first three songs are fucking awful. Then he settles down, gets into a song that sounds good, very catchy, I’m even nodding along. By that point though, nobody gives a shit anymore. I turn to my wife and said, “I need a favor.” She nods. I say, “Tomorrow, I just need you to say HOUSEFLY.”

This works, because to her, the word makes no sense for the situation and sticks out in her head. To me, it made perfect sense, so it doesn’t stick out and I don’t remember it. But when she says “HOUSEFLY” the next day, I’ll get ten pages out of it.
Once I was so afraid of forgetting something I made her text-message me from her cell phone so that I’d have a reminder the next day.

Inspiration comes when it comes, and you can’t always write it down. It’s good to have backup in that case.

You chose to self publish remember to BLINK using Lulu, which as big as it has become, does not have the “reputation” or “connections” of other Print On Demand companies. Why was that? What drew you to Lulu? What drew you to self publish? Did you attempt at all to shop the book around beforehand? What feelings have you walked away with about the whole process?

I’m a technical guy, so I made a technical decision. Lulu had all the ‘features’ I wanted, the lowest price, and the highest amount of control over the project’s look-and-feel. Of course, ‘control’ to me means ‘extra work’ to other people. I know my way around publishing software and have been given good advice from designers I know, so I had faith that I could assemble it myself.

Plus, I had no clue about how the publishing industry worked. Having produced two CDs with my band before, I’d been pretty lucky. With music, it’s pretty easy to make a CD that looks impressive. People listen to a song or two, if they like it, they’ll buy it (or download it, times have changed). There’s a quiet cool to making your own music, as if people think you might get big someday and want to be the ones who bought your CD back before you became this huge obnoxious sellout mainstream artist.
Being self-published with a novel is very different though. It carries a negative stigma immediately with anyone who knows what that means. The mediums are totally different in how they are marketed and perceived.

I seriously doubt that any publisher would have liked the book, so in a lot of ways I don’t regret the move. I saved myself the heartbreak of shopping it around for a few years. I’m going through that now with short stories, trying to build a real ‘resume’ of sorts. It sucks, but I’ve got to pay some dues if I ever want to go beyond self-publishing.

It was a fun experience that has brought me to meet a lot of interesting people and hell, a few people even liked it. There are a lot worse ways to spend a few hundred bucks.

What was your reaction to remember to BLINK when you finished? How about when you saw that first copy at your doorstep? What about when someone you cared for read the book, what types of feelings, if any, were running through you when they finished and you awaited a reaction? And what about a stranger’s reaction to the book, someone that you’ve never met before, good or bad, how was that?

Define “finished?”

I’ll assume you mean when I went ‘live’ with the book, when it actually came up for sale and people could buy it on amazon.com and such. At that point, it was a mix of “Thank God that’s done” and “Oh fuck what if someone actually reads this thing?”

Before that point, the ‘first copy’ experience was a mixed bag – it was a ‘proof’ copy. The cover looked great and I was thrilled with the quality of the materials and printing, but the formatting needed a lot of work and I was still finding a lot of errors and typos.

Reactions from friends are always going to be biased. The people who know me also know a lot about what’s true and what isn’t, so it’s a different experience for them. Especially if they witnessed any of it personally or feel that a specific passage is referring to them.

Strangers are completely different. My first completely-unbiased review came back very positive, which blew me away. I really wasn’t expecting that. At the time, my website was still incomplete and I was considering not finishing it properly, but that kicked me back in gear.

What would you tell someone who is reading this is who currently at work on their first novel, or at least considering taking on the challenge of writing one?

Join Write Club 2007? Wait, I’m getting ahead of your questions now…

I’m not really good at advice when it comes to how to get started. I don’t believe anyone can wake up one day and say “I’m gonna write a novel”. If it’s going to have substance, then it’s probably a story that’s been haunting you for a few years. Something that you have already explored the depths of it in your mind many times over.

If you’ve done that, and you’ve committed to get started, that’s where I can try to help, because the hardest thing really isn’t getting started – it’s finishing. You can shelve the book dozens of times in the process, but keep going back to it. If you can’t write anything new, just read what you already wrote.

Eventually, you’ll read your own work and get inspired to make it better. That’s when your eyes are fresh again, and you can continue.

Over time it gets done.

Aside from your own writing you’re very much involved with the creation and supervision of the online novel community, Write Club. And in addition to that you have another project Colored Chalk’s on the horizon, one that will incorporate the use of other media in relation to writing, and specifically poetry. How did you come to take on all of these tasks? How much time do they involve? Are you pleased with where they are going/excited about your vision of where they could go? Concerning that, what is your ideal vision of them?

Write Club was my warped view of how to turn the existing writer’s workshop at The Cult into something more conducive to writing a novel. The length of a novel makes it difficult to workshop properly, if people drop in and out and pick up somewhere in the middle or near the end, the feedback you get will vary a lot and may not be adequately informed of where the story has already gone. This can lead to a lot of wasted time.
With WC I just wanted to create a place where people could commit to one year working together so that everyone will be familiar with one another and skip the ‘getting to know you’ shit when you get closer to your ending. Originally I said “finish a novel in one year” but the experience over 2005 showed me that just spending one year writing one main project in such an environment is what really matters – you might need five years to write your book, but if you spend one solid year working on it then you hopefully have the momentum and direction you need to at least see how you can get to the end.

That’s where I ended up in December last year: A half-assed draft, which I rewrote into an outline, and now I need to rewrite the whole thing properly. Now it’s on the shelf so that I can come back to it with fresher eyes and let go of the things that don’t belong in the story. The things I learned from the guys who stuck with the first year of Write Club have stuck with me on everything I write, not just the novel.

In the meantime I’m working to get some short stories published and developing a new website for approaching short fiction in a new way.

In addition to all of that you are a very active member of the online community of Chuck Palahniuk fans, or The Cult as it’s known. What has that place meant to you? How has it changed you as a person and, in turn, as a writer?

The Cult gave me direction in writing where I had none before. The things I learned there make me embarrassed for many parts of remember to BLINK , so many simple things that could have tweaked the prose to be more effective. Again, though – at some point you have to let go and move on. I didn’t trash the revenge novel, but some might say that self-publishing it accomplished the same goal. Live and learn.

I’m not as active as I’d like to be right now because of my other projects but I still try to keep up and enjoy workshopping when I get the chance.

Assume for a minute that you’re in a position to order such a thing: what are the top five books that you’ve read in your life that every person should have to read?

No way I could answer this. I rarely read for leisure before I read Fight Club, so my list would be really misinformed or regurgitated from other recommendations. Plus, it depends heavily on what the goals of the reader are: Do you want to be inspired, entertained, learn something, what? Even with an answer to that, I’d find it hard to say.

In terms of writing projects, what is on the horizon for you? Another novel? Short stories?

Short stories, a little music, a little poetry, a little animation, a little non-fiction editorializing, and eventually back to finishing novel #2.

To the aspiring writer looking for creative spark and/or motivation, what sage words of wisdom can you offer? How can an upstart wandering into the process take the most from it?

If your life is worth writing about, that’s one place to start. It’s more interesting though to branch out, observe the world and people and creatures in it. People are scary, strange beings and if you’re looking hard enough you’ll find all the nuances you need to create a fictional world with a pulse.

Any last words for people reading out there?

HOUSEFLY?