Interview with Adam Selzer

www.adamselzer.com

First off, thanks so much for joining us for an up-close and personal interview for TeensReadToo.com! My name is Jen, and I’ll be your server toda…oh, wait, wrong job! Anyway, thanks so much for taking time out of your writing schedule—which I’m sure is busy!—and answering a few questions for your readers and fans.

I see you suffer from waitress dreams? I used to get those - I'd be 2/3rds asleep and wake up hearing someone say "excuse me" or the back-of-house guy shouting "hands in the kitchen!" I gradually learned to tell myself it was a dream and I could tell the person to shut up and let me sleep. Took a lot of practice, though!

Let’s get some of the typical interview questions out of the way first. When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?

It was one of the careers I always imagined for myself, along with “baseball player,” “cartoonist,” “movie star,” and all of that. Then, in fourth grade, my teacher wrote that she was impressed by my stories on my report card. I’m not the kind of guy who got a lot of great marks on my report cards (even my preschool one says “Adam often seems to be in his own little world,”), I wasn’t much good in the coupe of dozen retail or restaurant gigs I worked, and I sure don’t want to be an executive... I never made it as a rock star. But few things in rock music match the subversive thrill of suggesting that people go read HOWL by Allen Ginsberg in a book marketed as “Ages 10+.”

Can you tell us a little bit about your road to publishing?

When I was in about 8th grade, I started sending fantasy and horror stories to magazines, where they were roundly rejected. In 10th grade I wrote a Dean Koontz-type novel called Instant Karma and sent it to a couple of agents, who wisely rejected it. Thank goodness they rejected it. I know a lot of great teen writers, but I don’t know anyone who looks back on the stuff they wrote in high school and wishes it was out. In college I got an agent to represent a religious satire I wrote with a friend, but it never did sell. Then I got another book, another agent, and got a deal. So I failed about every way you can fail on the way to being published, and I still fail from time to time. This is life as I know it.

Tell us a little bit about either your latest or upcoming release. If you could only tell your readers one thing about the story that had to convince us to buy the book, what would it be?

I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT is a satire on the paranormal romance genre. If you can’t stand TWILIGHT, you’ll love it. But even if you LOVE TWILIGHT, you might still dig this one. My job as a satirist is pretty much to job onto a bandwagon and stick a Garfield doll in the window, but I also have to be able to drive the thing. I wanted that book to be simultaneously hilarious and genuinely, heart-breakingly romantic (this, too, is life as I know it).

THE SMART ALECK’S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY can help you become the biggest pain in the history of your history teacher’s butt, and tell you all the stuff the Texas school boards don’t want you to know! It’s about time some history book had the courage to say General Ambrose Burnside’s facial hair made him look like a goofball, if I do say so myself. Usually when the book makes fun of a historical figure, it’s in that Rodney Dangerfield way, where you take a shot at their foibles or their hat and then say “but, hey, let’s hear it for him, folks. He’s all right!” Not Burnside, though. He wasn’t much of a general. History’s full of the type of people where making fun of their haircut is probably more polite than talking about their wretched careers.

What, or who, has been the greatest inspiration for your stories?

Looking at the world from a sort of sideways angle. I try not to write anything too autobiographical into my books, but just thinking about the statue of the naked angel on a tricycle that they used to have at the mall where I grew up and wondering what some kid who thought his dad was a spy would make of that thing. Getting ideas is all about making connections.

Let’s hear about your family, who I’m sure are thrilled to have a published author among them!

Did you ever watch Modern Family? That’s pretty much my family. My family is interracial, interfaith, and inter-all kinds of stuff. Our family portraits look like posters for Diversity Day or something. It’s pretty awesome.

Now for some fun facts. What’s your greatest comfort food?

Good mashed potatoes. And, for writing, cotton candy flavored gum. I used to chew that stuff while I worked in fantasy stories in middle school, and chewing it now still puts me in the mood to write.

What are the first three things you do when you wake up in the morning?

Check my email, eat some breakfast, and head for the coffee shop.

If I came to your house and looked in your closet/attic/basement, what’s the one thing that would surprise me the most?

Hmm…I don’t really have any of those! We live in a small apartment in Chicago. My wife sort of took over the closets, so my stuff is all in one of those “rolling wardrobes.” But if you dug under the bed or on top of the shelves or in any of the other clever places we’ve made into storage, you’d fine a LOT of old Star Wars stuff. Just a LOT of Star Wars stuff. There’s some pretty weird stuff, but it’s not labeled, so you probably wouldn’t be surprised. Like, (uh, strictly hypothetically) you wouldn’t know that the bent up clothes hanger came from Bob Dylan’s garbage.

Everyone asks the question about “if you could be a tree, which tree would you be?” so I want to know: If you could be a color, which color would it be, and why?

Smoky gray, because smoky gray is cool, daddy-o. I’d drift through the streets beneath the El tracks and haunt jazz clubs. Gray was my favorite color for years, but I gradually came to realize that I like enamel orange (think Old Volkswagon Orange) better.

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

Man, what a great question! I’m going to go with Troy McClure, whom I remember from such films as “Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly” and “The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot.”

Which cartoon character is most like you?

Probably TJ from Recess.

If you could beam yourself to anywhere in the world (“Beam me up, Scotty!”), during any time in history, where and when would it be—and why?

I should probably be responsible and go to some major historical event where an eyewitness could clear up a lot of mysteries (like “which side fired the first shot at Concord?” or “Did Christopher Marlowe really accidentally stab himself to death in a bar fight?”) But it’s safer just to go observe – I mean, what if I went to see some big religious event and found out it never happened? That could really screw things up back here. So I guess I’d go to one of Charles Dickens’s public readings – one of the nights where he did the scene from OLIVER TWIST where Sikes kills Nancy. Apparently that scared the crap out of people back then, but there’s no way to see it or hear it now. Ask me again next week and I might just want to go to see a Doors concert or something, though.

So what’s your favorite type of music to listen to? Favorite musical artists? Do you listen to music while you’re writing?

The big three for me are Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits. But every project develops its own soundtrack – sometimes the playlist is songs with the right “vibe” for a project, or songs the main character would probably like, or songs that I’m just into at the moment. My playlist for my current project has a lot of Jonathan Richman, some Mika and Lady Gaga, Gaslight Anthem, Dead Milkmen, Counting Crows, and 80s metal. The playlist for my book TANGLED UP IN BLUE, which’ll be out next year, had a lot of Beach Boys, Hold Steady and Moldy Peaches.

Do you have any favorite T.V. shows? Movies you watch over and over again? What was the last movie you saw at the theater?

We went to Alice in Wonderland with Claudia Gray a few weeks ago – that was pretty cool. I couldn’t help wondering if we’d think the movie was endlessly fresh and brilliant or a complete mess if we didn’t already know the Alice story. Around the house we watch an awful lot of Dr. Who these days. I watch “Almost Famous” again and again, and I’m probably due for another Rocky Horror outing. I have to go to Rocky Horror now and then just to keep my head in order. Sort of like how some people have to go camping occasionally.

You have the chance to give one piece of advice to your teen readers. What would it be?

Pay no attention to the miserable people who tell you high school should be the best years of your life. I hate to be one of those guys who says “in 10 years, none of this will matter,” because that won’t do you much good until 10 years from now, but no one ever looks back on middle school and thinks it was the best years of their life, and high school is just something to survive. Keep reading. Especially the classics and my books.

One last question. What stories can we look forward to from you in the future?

Next year I’ll have a book out called TANGLED UP IN BLUE, a John Hughes-esque romantic comedy about a girl who gets over an unrequited crush by embarking on a “holy quest” with a couple of misfits who have invented their own religion. I’m also working on this project called “the Satanic YA” book that’s building up some notoriety already, and a handful of other projects. I’m getting superstitious about mentioning works in progress before they sell, though, so I should shut up.

Again, thanks so much for joining us at TeensReadToo.com!