Meet the Author: Paul Lamb

 

 

I am happy to be welcoming author, Paul Lamb, to Books, Life and Everything today. Paul's second novel, Parent Imperfect is literary fiction about two gay fathers facing the challenges of raising their adopted son. It is the sequel to his debut novel, One-Match Fire. Both are published by Blue Cedar Press in 2022 and 2024 (June).

Welcome Paul!

Would you like to start by telling us a little about yourself and how you started as a writer?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been bookish. I wish I knew which of my primary school teachers made me into a reader; I’d send her flowers. I remember reading stories to my mother when I was old enuf to write, so I think it’s encoded in my DNA. I’ve kept handwritten journals in spiral notebooks all of my adult life. I’m scribbling in number thirty-one right now. Along with my observations and complaints about life, I keep notes about stories I want to write and have even tried out bits of description or dialog. Aside from some writing I did for the various places where I worked to pay my bills, my own first published works were feature articles for newspapers and magazines. That gave me bylines, a little money, and most importantly, confidence. My first published short story came about because the stars aligned and I happened to be walking down the hallway at a writers conference with an editor who asked what I might have for him. I sent him a story I was pleased with, and he published it, and forty-seven published stories and two novels later, I think I am ready to call myself a writer.

What are you interests apart from writing?

I am a father and grandfather, so family is an important part of my life. But whenever I get the chance, I sneak away to a little cabin I have in the Missouri Ozarks to cut wood, build campfires, spread gravel, and watch for wildlife. And, due to a recent incursion, to look with dismay at all of the trees a newly arrived family of beavers is taking down along my little lakeshore. I have eighty acres of forest, so their gnawing teeth aren’t a serious force in global deforestation, but for some reason they favor the oaks nearest my cabin. Yet I’ve always wanted to be a steward for the wild things, so I consider this part of the adventure.

Having my little cabin directly inspired me to write the short stories that eventual coalesced into my first novel, One-Match Fire. I wrote a story about a man who had to decide what to do with his father’s cabin in the woods – because he had overwhelming medical expenses – as a sort of template for my children to know what they might do with my cabin after my tenure was over. That single story spawned more stories about the cabin and the family who came to it. And those stories built toward a novel I didn’t know I was writing. That novel then inspired my second novel, Parent Imperfect, which continues bringing my fictional family to their cabin. I’m happy that my own cabin resulted in these two works (though I’m still a little annoyed by the beavers).

Tell us about your latest book without giving the plot away.

Parent Imperfect is the sequel to my first novel. It includes many of the same characters as the first and introduces an important new character. This second novel focuses on the marriage of Curt and Kelly and the son they adopt, who doesn’t feel he is loved or belongs. Many of the normal struggles of parenting, with the added dimension of adoption, are explored in Parent Imperfect. There are plenty of trips to the cabin, lots of campfires, some skinny-dipping, a budding artistic talent, two imaginary friends (who may not be imaginary), and the struggles and triumphs of fathers and sons. The novel culminates in a stolen car, a brazen act of vandalism to the cabin, and what may be a hopeful future.

What are your writing routines and where do you do most of your writing?

Because there was a time in my life when I had four teenagers living under my roof, I learned that if I wanted a hot shower, I had to be the first to rise in the morning. This led to me having some free time before my work day began, and I used it to dabble at my writing. Eventually this evolved to my current practice of rising ridiculously early each morning, generally around 3:30, to sit before my laptop and push words around. I begin my writing the night before by brewing myself a pot of iced tea to drink through my morning writing sessions. I write until the words stop coming, which can vary between a few hours to half the day. I don’t set myself any word-count goal; I don’t think that’s healthy for my creative mechanism. Some days I’m satisfied with just re-reading something I wrote the day before, maybe tinkering with a word or two. Other days I find myself writing several thousand words. I know I’ll rewrite most of those words, but that is part of my process.

I write on a repurposed dining table in a repurposed bedroom. It’s my little personal space, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. Because I can hear my heartbeat in my right ear (which my doctor tells me is not due to all of the iced tea I drink raising my blood pressure), I listen to brown noise while I am writing. It helps drown out the ambient sounds, but I think I’ve grown so accustomed to it that I can no longer write without it.

I am not able to write in coffee shops or at the library. Nor, sadly, at my little cabin. There’s too much going on in those places for me to immerse myself in my fictional world and listen as it tell its stories. But I have found that if I go to a different place to read through a story or chapter, such as the library or my cabin, I find all kinds of typos and word errors that I missed. That’s a handy tool I rely on.

If I’m not writing or rewriting a piece of fiction, I will still use my reserved time to work on the business side of my craft. I might research markets for my stories, discover potential publishers for my novels, and find ways to get publicity for both. I also consider reading good fiction to be part of my writing process. I don’t read writing manuals or how-to books or even this or that famous author’s musings on craft. Writing is unique to each writer, and what works for one may not for another. (Not only does it bug me when someone says that their rules and practices are the only ones, but when other writers accept and spread this as fact, I turn away as quickly as I can. We each must find our own process. As Socrates might have said, an unexamined craft is not worth pursuing.)

    How do you go about researching detail and ensuring your books are realistic?

When I first started writing fiction, I poked around in the different genres, trying to find my fit. I’ve written some speculative fiction, some mild fantasy, even cozy mysteries. But I realized I didn’t want to build worlds or create languages or understand scientific theories or learn the arcane details of police procedure. So I narrowed my focus to the life I know. I try to write about real people living real lives in the real world. I didn’t set out to be inspired by my little cabin in the woods, but that happened, and having such a place gave me well-documented research material. And because I recognize a lot of myself in these characters, I could reflect on how I might think or act in a given situation in order to know how my characters would. Somewhere along the way, they came to have their own lives, as writers often say happens, and I could watch how they would think or act in given situations. After that, they drove the plot in directions I never anticipated. I consider discovery to be part of my process, which is why I don’t plot my stories. I liken my development approach to riding a train. I know where I’ll get on. I know where I intend to get off. I know some of the stops along the way. But I have no idea what I’ll see out the window, the people I may meet, the conversations I might have, the revelations that could come to me. And I want to be open to all of that. For me, detailed plotting removes that opportunity. For example, the agonizing vandalism that happens at the end of Parent Imperfect would never have occurred to me in advance. It rose completely out of character development along the way. I never could have foreseen it, but when it happened, I knew that it belonged.

Were there any scenes which you had to edit out of your book which you still hanker after?

My process is to overwrite and then edit my way down to something that is coherent and true. As a consequence, there is always plenty of material that I must and will delete from my early drafts, even if it hurts. I deleted three entire first-draft chapters from Parent Imperfect because they didn’t belong. I partly understood this early on, and my beta readers confirmed it. One chapter involved an attempted seduction of one of my characters that he would never have let happen, and it was too raunchy in tone for the novel. Another chapter had been a stand-alone story – it was even nominated for a Pushcart Prize in its former life – but it just didn’t belong in the novel. It was a nice, reflective chapter, but it didn’t add anything or really advance the story. The third chapter I removed did deepen the characters, but it involved an incident that would have taken the novel in a different direction. I didn’t want to do that, and leaving the chapter in would result in a subplot that wasn’t resolved, so I took it out.

Can you give any hints about any upcoming books you have planned?

These characters won’t leave me alone. They still want to tell me their stories. I’ve written first drafts of two further novels about them. I don’t consider them sequels but rather adjacent novels. They exist concurrently with the timelines in the two published novels, but they take different perspectives and explore characters and issues in ways (and down rabbit holes) that couldn’t be done in the other two novels. I’m busy musing about these drafts, rewriting when revelations come to me and getting input from beta readers. I certainly think these two adjacent novels merit publication, but I don’t think they’re to that point yet.

There are other stories I want to tell, short stories and novels, so I chip away at those too. Better to be busy, I guess, than to be wandering in search of something to write.

Thanks for tell us all about your writing, Paul and good luck for the future!

About the Author

Paul Lamb lives near Kansas City but escapes to his Ozark cabin whenever he gets the chance. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, and his novels One-Match Fire and Parent Imperfect are published by Blue Cedar Press. You can learn more about him at paullambwriter.com. He rarely strays far from his laptop.

You can follow Paul here: www.paullambwriter.com/  |  Facebook  |  Instagram

 

Book Spotlight: Parent Imperfect   

 

Parent Imperfect, the sequel to One-Match Fire, tells the story of a man who was almost given up for adoption, another man who wishes he had been, and the son who came to them because he was.

Parent Imperfect is a novel about the joys and sorrows of fatherhood as two men, one an eager father and the other a reluctant father, face the challenges of raising their adopted son. One grows emotionally aloof because he fears he cannot love a child who is not biologically his own. The other battles severe depression yet knows he must remain the anchor for the little family. And as the son grows and sees all of this, he comes to doubt that he can ever truly belong or be worthy of love.

The boy finds solace in his grandparents, his growing artistic talent, which is haunted by horizontal lines that reveal their profound meaning at the novel’s climax, his imaginary friends, who may not be so imaginary, and the little cabin in the Ozarks where the men of the family have always found peace with each other as they shed their defenses (as well as their clothes when they skinny-dip) to find common ground. The novel culminates in a stolen car, a brazen act of vandalism to the beloved cabin, the revelation of long-held secrets, and what a fractious father and son find may be the beginning of a deep and hopeful relationship. It is ultimately a love story (with a hint of magical realism).

Parent Imperfect continues the saga of the Clark family in its newest generation, welcoming an important new character and saying goodbye to a beloved older one. It is a novel of resilience, hope, and the unlikely ways people find to bind themselves to each other.

Parent Imperfect is scheduled to be published on 01JUN24