Spotlight On…

Today, Ethel Rohan invites J.A. Tyler to light-up Dark Sky. Bring your shades.

Writing wise, where are you now? Where are you going?

Where I am now is in a book called WATER. It is about 60K words at this point (twice as long as any book I’ve ever written) and should finish around 75-85K. It goes from rain to flood to dryness to the last water in the world to flood again. I’m not sure where it is coming from or where it is going, but children are killing other children and children are rescuing other children and somewhere in there is a boy lost in the woods and a retelling of Noah and a breakfast of tumbleweeds and a story about a man who takes an axe into the woods. I have asked myself to write something that breaks open language, and I am trying my best to adhere to that.

You are remarkably prolific. What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

I write as often as I can, and honestly I pour out much deletion-worthy material when I am between books. I had just finished a collaborative novel(la) with John Dermot Woods (slated to publish with Jaded Ibis in 2011) before I began WATER, and at that point I didn’t know why I was writing all of this strange and sad vignettes about children in a playground, killing one another. I erased or trashed each of them nearly every day, just writing them because they needed to be written, until I realized that what I was really trying to start was a new book, then the narrative came together a little sharper and I was able to officially start the writing process. And in that time, the only thing that really kept me going was that if I don’t write, I feel like shit. If I don’t write, I am grumpy and sore and unpleasant to be around. I write because I must, and that keeps me going at all times.

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