Fiona of the blog Author Interviews graciously interviewed me, and you can go read the results.
Here’s a snippet:
Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I am wary of messages in fiction. Many years ago, I was tangentially involved with several authors in the Christian Booksellers’ Association; there are some talented storytellers in that set, but I got a sense that they tended to elevate message over entertainment, often to the detriment of their work. I drifted away from them, I think, because of a difference in artistic vision. In the broader publishing industry, we are now seeing something similar to what I saw in CBA, what with the heavy emphasis on social justice or inclusiveness or whatever you want to call it, where message is emphasized to the point that craftsmanship gets neglected.
The reader is free to find any message or none in Jake and the Dynamo. I am sure some of my opinions crept into the text, and anyone who wants to try to tease them out may do so. But the only messages I had firmly in mind were along the lines of, “magical girls are awesome,” and “being a teenager sucks sometimes.”
In regards to other business, I am soon leaving to join Family for a Christmas vacation. I’ll be taking my computer, of course, but my plan is to spend as much of my spare time writing as possible. I am ambitiously hoping to have a complete rough of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo by the time my Christmas break is over.
While I am at it, I’d also like to do some maintenance on the blog. I habitually use an ad blocker, and it shows an embarrassingly high amount of blocked content on my own site, for reasons I know not. I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugins and then deciding which ones I can remove, to see if I can cut down on this blog’s code, which is much heavier than it has a right to be.
I’ve also been gradually learning about HTML and CSS, mostly for my job, and I’d like to try my hand at possibly adding some schema.org markup, which I know Google search likes. There are plugins for that, of course—but they probably stand a good chance of adding yet more trackers.
I’d like the code on this blog to be better than it is, but the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t do everything I’d like, and adding the code by hand takes so dang much time.
