Title: Fresh Kills
Author: Bill Loehfelm
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Hardcover: 336 pages
ISBN: 978-0399155314
1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch. What’s your book about?
FRESH KILLS is a contemporary noir thriller, set in Staten Island, NYC, about an adult son’s violent reaction to his abusive father’s unsolved murder. It’s a character-driven story that follows the killing’s consequences for Junior Sanders, the son, who’s badly screwed up, and his younger sister, Julia, who’s got problems of her own and the two cops investigating the murder – both of whom have a history with the Sanders family. There’s a lot of dark history and tangled relationships. It’s very much about what happens when the ugly things we try our best to hide and forget are brought into the light. A friend of mine told me it was one of the most moving books she ever read about the search for grace, the often tough, ugly struggle to come to terms with life’s dark corners and find a way to live a decent life anyway. I really like that interpretation of the novel. It’s dark, but it’s also about the search for a way out of the darkness.
2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.
My journey was long, long, long, I’ve been writing my whole life, but I got through the door in a pretty unusual way: I won the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, a kind of American Idol for writers that Amazon sponsored along with Penguin Group. The grand prize was a publishing contract and a nice advance. It was like being in a public slush pile of 5000 manuscripts vetted by Publisher’s Weekly and in-house editors at Penguin and then voted on by the public. When I found the contest I saw that Amazon would be featuring contestant excerpts on their website, so having just finished FRESH KILLS, I entered just hoping for some exposure. It worked. So I did it backwards, I got the contract first, with the Putnam imprint, and then went out and got an agent, who has been just awesome to work with these past few months and who I’ve since brought into that contract.
Monday, April 7, 2008. Man, that first day isn’t hard to remember. On the Friday before the announcement, Amazon and Penguin flew the top three finalists from the contest to NYC for the award ceremony. They put up my wife and I and the other contestants in this swanky hotel in Chelsea and treated us like rock stars all weekend. Monday morning we all gathered in the hotel’s rooftop cafe to find out the winner. From the moment I found out I won, it was like dropping off that first hill of a rollercoaster. A Penguin publicist grabbed me by the arm and threw me in front of a couple of journalists. I got a short break, did a bunch of interviews over the phone then had my first editorial meeting with my new editor. Then my wife and I started calling everyone we knew. It was absolutely insane. I woke up Monday just another guy who’d written thousands of unwanted pages then BAM!, I’m in an editorial meeting with a Putnam VP. It was totally falling down the rabbit hole.
3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?
My second book, BLOODROOT, another thriller set on Staten Island, is with my editor at Putnam right now and I’m waiting to hear what she has to say. As soon as I’ve got her feedback, I’ll go back to work on re-writes. My agent and I made a deal for it last summer. This book is following the more traditional route. We made=2 0the deal, I finished it, got my agent’s blessing on it and sent it off to my editor. My agent’s really high on it so I’ve got my fingers crossed my editor likes it, too. If she does, we’re hoping to put it out in hardback late summer ’09, after we do FRESH KILLS in trade paperback in July.
Right now, I’m taking a break from BLOODROOT and getting the beginning going for my third book, which I hope to have done in about a year or so. This winter, I’m making my acting debut in a short, independent film that’s being shot here in New Orleans. That oughta be interesting. I get the feeling I’ll be sticking with writing. But it’ll be fun.
4. What’s your process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?
On the whole, I’m a night writer. I do most of my work between ten at night and dawn. Very early and very late in a manuscript, I’ll work afternoons and evenings but I do most of my real work in the middle of the night. My wife is a writer and she works in the mornings so our schedules complement each other. I work while she sleeps and vice-versa. I work pretty fast and usually spend at least twice as long with re-writing as I do pushing out the first draft. On a first draft, I’ll spend a lot of time on the first 50-75 pages defining characters and relationships and making notes on plot and at some point the switch will just click over and the story takes off. That’s when it really gets fun. I mostly start with dialog and a central locale and work backwards from there. I’m not one of those writers that likes long breaks. I’m not happy without a project in progress; I start to feel like a bum. Sometimes, though, the hard part is getting myself to back off. I skip meals, lose sleep, live on coffee and cigarettes. I slip into overdrive pretty easily. Finding a balance can be tough; it’s something I’m always struggling to maintain. On average I’ll work four or five days a week, anywhere from ten hours a week, if things are slow, to maybe thirty if I’m rolling.
5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.
I don’t have a cat. In fact, I have two20dogs, one of whom hates cats. The other I think stops at a hostile curiosity. Cats can’t be trusted. I’m with Dennis Leary on cats. Dogs live to protect you and make you happy and what do most dogs hate more than anything else? Cats. What does that tell you? I can’t love and feed and shelter an animal that only barely tolerates my existence. I’m telling you, if cats had opposable thumbs we’d be living in a different, darker world.
