Season of Waiting received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Jim Christopher.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
The title of my book is “Season of Waiting.” It was published November 17, 2020.
What’s the book’s first line?
In “Season of Waiting” the reader arrives in the middle of dialogue between the young boy Emerson and his mother Blair:
“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to, Em,” Mom said. “You know that.”
Immediately, lots of questions pops up. What is it that she’s doing? Why is it upsetting Emerson? Why doesn’t she have another option? As it turns out, they’re in a car with their dog Barfly, taking the dog to a kennel to sell her for some needed cash. Blair is justifying to her son her decision to sell the dog.
To be honest, I didn’t think a lot about this first line before I wrote it. I find it more productive to “just start somewhere in the scene” and adjust later if necessary. However, during editing, I found the dialogue captured the core theme of the novel. Making choices, being accountable for them, dealing with their aftermath, and the illusion to which we often succumb that our choices are fixed. So I went with it.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
The official logline is:
A terminally-ill man changes his end-of-life plans when a disembodied omnipotent voice offers him hope, and a deadly purpose.
The protagonist is Caleb Allard, an accountant who is facing incurable pancreatic cancer. He’s opted not to fight the disease, and has arranged his medically-assisted suicide. His kids have different opinions on the matter. The older daughter, Irene, is supportive. She remembers going through something similar with her mother and wants to protect Caleb from the pain and indignity. Caleb’s son, Wes, is adamantly opposed to the idea. As a recovering addict, Wes has learned that giving up is the worst thing you can do. The battle ends when you stop trying.
The sibling rivalry escalates when a God-like voice comes to Caleb, offering him a glint of hope. It convinces Caleb to seek out a boy in the Texas hill country – a miracle child with the power to heal the sick. Caleb enlists the help of his hope-filled son to find the boy, while logic-bound Irene assumes that Wes is taking advantage of their father once again. As Caleb seeks the boy, his children enter a battle of wit and wills, both trying to help their father while working in their respective moral codes.
All at once, several races kick off. Caleb races death, trying to reach the boy before his body gives up his ghost. Wes races Irene, outwitting his precocious sister to keep his father moving to the boy. Irene races Wes, trying to anticipate her brother’s erratic actions to keep her sick father out of danger.
The action of the book is there to pull readers in; around the action there is a constant theme that our choices matter. My goal was to create an entertaining and engrossing story that sneaks back into your thoughts after reading. I love books that stick like that – the ones you can’t “unread.”
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The biggest inspiration was my oldest daughter. She writes stories and works for the literary magazine in her high school. Over coffee one afternoon, we discussed the writing I’d done when I was younger, and how I’ve wanted to write a book but never could finish a first draft. Next Father’s Day, she gave me a collection of books about writing, moving the process forward, and getting the book done. It was a big motivator – my kid watching me with eager eyes, wanting me to succeed. I couldn’t let her down.
In addition, many aspects of the story I took straight from my own life. I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer, and there are some scenes in the book I still can’t read without tearing up. Wes’s behavior is a personal detail, too. I’ve coped with addiction and addicts for most of my life, seen these diseases defeat people and destroy families. I needed to get those memories and all the feelings around them out of my head somehow. Weaving them into a story is a healthy way to (figuratively, and quite literally) put those things on a shelf.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
To feel your feelings. Think your thoughts. Forget your life for a little bit. Immerse yourself in a catharsis that removes your reality while helping you deal with it. The book is full of hard things people face: cancer, death, addiction, relapse, sibling rivalry, the anxious churning from one day to the next. As we deal with these very real things, people want to believe they have a purpose. That the mystery behind our existence makes it all coherent somehow. Our choices must matter. Our pains must be lessons that change the world. Our suffering must exist to create balance in the universe. There is no comfort in not having these answers.
If that’s too ethereal, then how does an entertaining speculative thriller with spiritual overtones filled relatable characters dealing with modern social issues suit you?
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
Caleb Allard is the only person in the book who can hear the mysterious voice. As such, whatever insight the voice provides is filtered through him to the other characters, which creates some great opportunities for character and story development.
As far as who Caleb reminds me of, I see him as an amalgamation of several real people I’ve known. I had a teacher in high school who was deaf in one ear. His brain was ready to receive those inputs, but the inner parts of his ear stopped functioning properly when he was a teenager. He described “phantom sounds” in that ear, mostly single tones but every so often something that was more organized, like the squeaking of a specific door hinge from his childhood home. Just random neuro-chemical events in a part of his brain that was desperate to do its job. His situation stuck with me – having to question an unreliable reality – and it landed in Caleb Allard.
There are pieces of my mom in his character too. His disease, for instance, and his response to it. My mom fought her cancer when the fight made sense, and I think that Caleb Allard did too even though we don’t see that part of his story. When it became obvious that the cancer was going to take her, my mom put her energy into building memories with the family rather than scrambling for a miracle. Since writing the book, I wonder how my mom would have reacted if the voice came to her in those last days, offering her a longshot chance at more life if she gave up the time she had left. I’m certain she would have told the voice to shut up, in her own colorful way, and not to interrupt the sound of her grandbaby’s laughter as she pinched those fat little baby thighs.
When did you first decide to become an author?
Writing has always an outlet, although I haven’t been consistent at it. I wrote short stories when I was a kid. Mostly ghost stories, creature features, etc. As my reading palate expanded, so did my writing. My first real success as an author wasn’t fiction – it was technical writing. Specifically, documenting engineering software used by people way smarter than me building life-changing stuff. I learned a lot about reader empathy and understanding your audience from that experience, and I carry those lessons into fiction writing today.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
Yes. At least, Season of Waiting is the first book I’ve finished writing. There are five or six sketches or drafts of books that never quite came together. The story would peter out, or the characters wouldn’t congeal. This time around I tried a different process, one that focused on the entire story and characters from day one.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
My day-job is leading a team at an online learning company. We focus on applying various principles from learning sciences to our product and teaching. My career has largely been as a software engineer, working in aerospace, defense, gaming (casinos, not video games), and education. My academic background is in cognitive science and psychology. It’s a crooked career path, technical and analytical, which makes fiction writing a nice contrast to my day-to-day work.
I also love building and creating things. I built a tiny house – just like the ones you see on those TV shows, about 160 square feet of coziness. I cook a lot, and I like to cook, but to be honest I love to eat more than I like to cook.
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
This depends on what phase of the work I’m in. When ideating, I’m working on the book all the time. I have a notebook I keep close, where I jot down ideas for scenes or themes, or insights into relationships between characters, or even words I come across that I find particularly appealing. Once I have a story staked out, I allocate time daily for writing. I’ll block out a few hours every morning before work, during which I fit in two or three timeboxed writing sessions.
Getting from that first blank page to a first draft took about 18 months. Now that I’ve got a process that works, I want to improve it and cut that time down. My single goal for “Season of Waiting” was to finish it – to produce a complete, finished novel. I’ve proven I can do it, so now my goal is to do it again more efficiently.
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The best part is the lack of barrier to entry. Anyone can create something and put it in the same marketplace alongside of any other author. It is a different world than it was when I was young and considering a writing career. You couldn’t get your work in front of the masses without buy-in from a big publisher and setting up a massive distribution effort.
The worst part if being an indie? The same thing. With the low entry bar comes a metric ton of work. Marketing. Research into promotion platforms. Social networking. Quality checks on covers and typesetting. There is always something else to do. One can no longer excel by being a great writer without also investing enough energy to be at least mediocre at copy writing, data wrangling, and hundreds of other skills. Creating an indie career might be more accessible compared to a traditional publisher, but it isn’t easy by a shot from what I’m experiencing.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
Find a process that fits with your personality and pushes you to finish your project. “Write every day” is great advice, but get a system together that drives that daily effort into a larger outcome.
A question that writers often ask other writers is, “What works for you?” This is a great question to ask; however, get the larger context by following up with, “Why does that work for you?” We’re all different. Have different habits and quirks. Strengths and weaknesses. What works for me may or may not work for you, and vice versa – but understanding why something works for me will help you determine if it will work for you, too.
For example, I’m a “starter,” not a “finisher.” The beginnings of projects are my favorite part, whether it’s writing a book or building a house or developing software – figuring out how things will fit together, what the patterns should be, mapping out the process, that’s where I find joy. Once the detail work kicks in, my interest in any project wanes. This poses a serious problem for any large-scale effort, and I have no shortage of partial drafts and unfinished crafts I can point to as manifestations of this part of my personality.
Taking that into consideration, I fail miserably as a “pantser.” Those drafts that I just try to let flow out of me never get anywhere. Without the organization, there is no joy for me. Just writing to put words down doesn’t do anything for me, doesn’t move anything forward. The funny part is that I fail as a “planner” for the same reasons. Once a story’s plan is set, I can quickly lose interest in getting it written to any level of quality. In my head, the story is complete – the plots weave together, the themes are fulfilled, the characters real and engaging. The most joyous part of the process is over for me, the remaining to-dos to get a complete novel together far less attractive than starting over with another idea.
It wasn’t until I found a way to frame each layer of the process into something that I could “start” that I found myself producing a finished book. Looking at the book as a series of projects that feed into each other, instead of one big project. I won’t go into the weeds on the specifics, instead I’ll point interested readers to Randy Ingermanson’s How to Write a Novel using the Snowflake Method. The important point isn’t what I did that worked, but understanding why it worked for me.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
I honestly don’t know. I’m sure there is a litany of things a traditional publisher could take off my plate, which would leave more room for writing and producing work. Being a full-time novelist is certainly a dream, but I don’t know if traditional publishing could do that for me. I’ve grown so accustomed to working for myself that publishing indie was the natural thing to do. I guess it would come down to whether learning how to work with a publisher would take less time than doing the work myself to achieve the same goals. At this point I don’t have enough experience to figure that out.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
Writing this book was a bucket list item for me. Now that it’s out there, that bucket list item has changed. I’d love to be out and about somewhere and come across a stranger carrying my book in their hands. Reading it in a coffee shop or library. Seeing it on a random bookshelf. Knowing that something I made is being consumed, that it is changing someone’s thinking or emotional state, even in a slight way. Those small things reverberate over time, but we rarely see their effects – ironically (or not) this is one of the themes in “Seasons of Waiting.”
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
Oh, that’s easy: Cormac McCarthy. His books leave me gutted. Or uplifted. Or in rapt wonder. Or all of those things, at once. And his technique to evoke these feelings is sophisticated, you don’t realize it’s happening. One of my favorite books is “The Road,” and not just because I love end-of-the-world stories. It’s the last paragraph. A short description of trout swimming in a mountain stream. It captures a moment of beauty, an image of nature and life, benign in any other context. But after the grey and barren landscape of the novel, the image is so powerful. The colors more vivid. The image of life it exudes more bountiful. That is the image that sticks with you. And then later on, it finally lands in your head: the protagonists of the story weren’t heading toward the mountains, they followed the road to the ocean in hopes of finding food and a way to live. So why lift the reader from the seaside to the mountains to close the story? Why end the story at the other end of the titular road on which it takes place? It is to offer a modicum of hope? Or does it do the opposite? I think each reader will take something unique and emotional away from the beauty captured in those final words.
And God bless him for it, every McCarthy novel is like this for me. The final strokes of his pen bounce in my head, like bats in the belfry, and one in there, they thrive.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
There are a lot of books I admire, that I wish I could claim to have written as proof of my writing skill. However, I’m selecting my answer based on different criteria.
I wish I could have written “Peace” by Gene Wolfe. The writing is elegant and intricate, the story is fascinating and dense. I re-read this book about once a year, and each time I feel I gain more insight into the thing. Details that were seedlings in previous reads are now blooms. Characters move from shadow to light and back. And yet, each time I know I’ve missed things. It is as if the pages of the book change on each read, taunting me as the hold I thought I had on the work turns ephemeral as sand in the waves. Whenever someone asks what single book I’d want when stranded on a desert island, my answer is “Peace” by Gene Wolfe, because no two reads of it ever feel the same.
So, the reason I wish I was the author of “Peace” is to understand it the way Gene Wolfe understood it. How the story came to be, how the storytelling congealed. To know which pieces of the narrator are reliable and those are not. To finally feel the knot in my head loosen as my fingers find a grip on the story that is firm and sure.
Of course, I acknowledge that once I have that understanding, it may be the last thing I want. Like I said before, people need some mystery and wonder to make sense of things, and I know I am no exception.