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| A.R. Taylor, Author SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION |
A.R.
Taylor characterizes her new novel, SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION as “a comic
novel, a piece of quality mainstream fiction.” Her reviewers love her humor—“Physics
has never been funnier!” -- but they also appreciate her characters and the
mystery. “She's
brilliant, incisive, wildly entertaining and profoundly touching. This is a
book well worth reading despite all its raucous conceits.”
The
award-winning writer has written plays, essays, and fiction and claims movie
scripts are the most difficult to produce, with documentaries a close second.
Although she continues to write, she dreams of owning a restaurant/tavern with
live music. Above all, she says “the
best thing in her life” is her daughter.
Don't miss the excerpt at the end of her interview.
Q: How would you
characterize SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION? Is it a romance, a mystery, literary
fiction, or…?
A.R. Taylor: It's a comic
novel, a piece of quality mainstream fiction.
Q: Reviewers
love your humor: “Physics
has never been funnier!”, “There
is no author funnier or smarter, nobody who packs her punch,” and “highly original sense of humor is
like that of no other writer of today.” Humor is difficult to write – people
see “funny” differently. Do you target a specific group with your humor? How do
you make your story funny?
A.R. Taylor: The only group I really target is people who like
to laugh, smart, interested readers who nevertheless will fall for the banana
peel every time. When you say "make your story funny," that's a tough
one. It's a matter of how you see the world, with a certain distance or irony,
and refusal to take yourself too seriously. There's an old saying, "It may
not be fun, but it's always funny."
Q: Reviewers also appreciate your characters. “Wonderfully
engaging characters”, “The characters, with all their flaws, were quirky and
lovable,” “Really liked the characters,” “characters were so well developed and
layered.” How did you make your characters engaging? Why do your readers care
about them, particularly your protagonist, David Oster?
A.R. Taylor: It's not possible to make readers care for your
characters, if you, the writer, don't. So, you have to love them even when
they're stupid or cruel or even villainous, and that can be tough. At times,
David behaves like a jerk, but he's a charmer too. You have to hold your
characters very close to your own heart––that will help other people like them
as well.
Q: You set SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION in the
Pacific Northwest, which enabled you to include “RAIN” in your title. Can you
comment on the value of using setting to tell your story, or any story.
A.R. Taylor: For me, a particular landscape and its weather
control a great deal of normal, everyday behavior. I lived in the Pacific
Northwest for five years, and I can honestly say that it rained 85% of the
time, at least to my sodden brain, and it caused (in my novel) "an
unwholesome addiction to drink, philandering, and crafts."
Q: How relevant is the concept of “heroes” vs “villains”
to telling your story?
A.R. Taylor: I often look at my stories and say, "Gee,
who's the villain?" Basically you get so immersed in a character's
problems that you come to see him or her as just trying to be good but failing
constantly. So hero and villain are twins in the womb. From a writing standpoint,
villains are fun to write, and everybody loves a good villain.
Q: SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION is, according to
reviewers, also a mystery, and one they couldn’t put down. How do you develop
suspense amidst laughter?
A.R. Taylor: With sweat and constant re-writing. This is just
the hardest technical trick in the world, especially in a comic novel, because
you can get lost in your own jokes, and the characters make you think of other
crazy things they could get into, but you must hang on to the thread of the
story like grim death. It's a bit like weaving a tapestry—just keep pulling
certain threads tighter and don't drop any. Easy to say, really bone crushing
to do, as all you writers out there know, and I'm honored that reviewers
thought I succeeded.
Q: In addition to entertaining readers, did you
also intend to deliver a message or educate them?
A.R. Taylor: I don't think good novels start out with the
intention to educate, but by indirection they can. So, in the case of SEX, RAIN, AND COLD FUSION several of the characters are scientists who happen to be
working on two entirely discredited theories, cold fusion and the fifth force.
I got very interested in these subjects, and I hope curious readers will look
into them, too.
Q: You have written in a variety of outlets
including as head writer for Emmy-winning shows. Do you have a favorite? Do you
prefer fiction or non-fiction? Scripts or novels? Books or short stories?
A.R. Taylor: You're looking at my checkered history of trying
to make a living at writing! I think movie scripts are the single hardest form
in the world, documentaries (in which I worked) a close second. The novel form
is wonderful for its scope, its expansiveness, and the variety of characters. I
love writing short stories, too, as a way to try out novel ideas or to work on
specific problems in fiction––say, the surprise ending. One summer I worked on
four such stories and had a ball.
Q: What’s next?
A.R. Taylor: Oh boy, I'm working on a new novel that I started
several years ago but dropped in frustration. Now I'm back at it. While it has
comic elements, it's also steamy and seriously romantic.
Q: Tell us something about A.R. Taylor. What do
you like to do when you’re not writing?
A.R. Taylor: First off, I'm really Anne with an "e."
I play paddle tennis at the Venice boardwalk, love to dance and cook––my dream
would be to own a tavern/restaurant with live music. I love learning languages
and speak French and Spanish, but just now (sigh) I'm going back to the piano,
and to prove it I've got a real live teacher. But the best thing in my life is
my beautiful, kind, talented daughter, with whom I spend a lot of time.
About A.R. Taylor
A. R. Taylor is an award-wining playwright, essayist, and fiction
writer. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest
Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley
Insider, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud, among others. The New
Short Fiction series featured her short stories, and her work has been
performed at the HBO Workspace, the Annenberg Center, and The Federal Bar.
Taylor herself played the Gotham Comedy Club in New York and Tongue &
Groove in Hollywood.
Her
awards include the De Golyer Prize in American Studies, a nomination for the
Henry Murray Award at Harvard, recognition from the NBC Program for New
Writers, the Writers' Guild East, The Dana Fiction awards, the Theatre of
Louisville Humana Prize, and the Writers Foundation of America Gold Statuette
for Comedy. In addition, she was head writer on two Emmy award-winning series for
public television.
Prepare
to meet physicist David Oster, a big thinker, a charming cad who flees Caltech
and his three girlfriends for the Pacific Northwest, pastoral fantasy firmly in
hand. Whatever will he do with all that rain, yet another beautiful woman, and
several crazy physicists intent on his ruin? Obviously he needs to discover
some entirely new physics principle, as yet unnamed, but can he deliver?
Excerpt
Days
later, David found himself seated high atop the administration building in a
glassed-in conference room with President Royce Thornton, a tall, gangly,
gray-haired man clad in a mustard-colored suit. Trying to ignore an
interminable discussion of university sports, he instead concentrated his
attention on the first serious downpour since his arrival. At Caltech, David
had perfected the art of fixing someone with a stare while at the same moment
making calculations. Counting was the trick. Watching from the front of his
head, he counted at the back, and his consciousness would remain on point even
though he wasn’t listening. This was a minor skill, but the rain offered a
promising medium. How fat were the drops, and how long did it take each one to
fall from the branches of a tree? These raindrops seemed lean and needlelike,
and he had just formulated their location on his new scientific creation, the
Oster Wet Scale, when Thornton turned to him, shuffling through a sheaf of
papers.
“Oster, Oster, is it?”
“David
Oster,” he replied, eyeballing the other gloomy men at the table, which
predictably included Niels Hoekstra.
“We
must get you to work, Oster. No point in you just catching things under the
ocean, or whatever you people do.”
As David opened his mouth to define the
nature of physical oceanography, Thornton gave a tremendous snort indicative of
a nasal problem so deep, so unreachable, he might well pull up his stomach to
get rid of it. He looked around, but nobody else reacted, not even Hoekstra.
The president pressed his face into a white
handkerchief while he continued speaking. “We would like to put on a show for
our basketball team, the Steelheads. Something amazing, diverting. Specifically
horses.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say, sir?”
“I’m sorry, what did you say, sir?”
“Don’t
toy with me, young man. Horses on the basketball court! Haven’t you been
listening to anything the others have said?”
“I
have, I have. It’s just that sports, per se, is not really my area.” David had
been a decent rugby player in college, and his father had been ferocious at
tennis, but in general, the American obsession with sports left him cold.
“Consider
it your area now. In addition to the Larson Kinne Institute, as of this year,
we have a new sports center courtesy of the same donor, named in honor of his
wife’s family, Crestole. Naturally, it has a state-of-the-art basketball floor.
The question is, can the floor of this basketball court withstand five or ten
horses on it performing a show for, say, fifteen minutes, something like that?
That’s a physics question, I think.”
“It’s
an engineering question, I believe.”
The
vision of a new, young person who was presumably a faculty member telling
President Thornton of Western Washington State University what he was supposed
to know already made the room seize up like a car engine low on oil. The
assembled males stared in open pity. Hoekstra, however, looked sly, almost
gleeful.
“I am an agriculturalist, sir,” Thornton
fairly shouted. “Do not play the dummy with me.” He slammed his papers down and
dismissed the meeting.
Links
Hi AR, I loved your book Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion -- the humor, the crackling dialogue, and your somewhat bizarre cast of characters (Particularly David and Viktor!) Do you have a favorite character in your book? Is there one that was particularly easy to write? Or one that was most challenging?
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