📚 A Bookish Chat with 'The King of Good Intentions III' John Andrew Fredrick | Author Interview | #AuthorInterview #BlogTour #Interview @pumpupyourbook
John Andrew Fredrick is the author of five novels and one book on the early films of Wes Anderson. He is the principal songwriter/singer of an indie rock band called The Black Watch that has released twenty-two albums to considerable acclaim. As Popmatters.com has observed, he is an accomplished painter. His poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Press, Santa Barbara Magazine, and Artillery, among others. He lives in Los Angeles and London. Visit him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/john.a.fredrick and Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/177676792-the-king-of-good-intentions-part-three.
Welcome to The Writer's Life! Now that your book has been published, we’d love to find out more about the process. How did you come up with the idea to write your book, The King of Good Intentions III?
Well, as the King is a set of novels, a series, it was incumbent upon me to see the story through, as it were, and make it come full circle--to the beginning of the first The King of Good Intentions. For the most part, I write in order to make myself laugh aloud. It's like what Robert Smith of The Cure said about writing songs: that he makes something in order to have something to listen to! That's my very purport when it comes to songwriting as well.
To describe your series, people call it "rollicking," "uproarious," and "zany." Is that a correct set of words to describe your book?
It is a comedy, after all. Notwithstanding the fact that there are some quite sad and tender moments sprinkled throughout the text. The writers I most admire--Nabokov, Amis, Stella Gibbons--all have a wonderful knack for embracing the absurd.
How hard was it to write a book like this?
Not very difficult in that writing fiction's kind of like trying to master a sport: the more you do it, the easier and more fun it gets. I have written seven novels now, five published; and I started my first one when I was fourteen or so.
What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?
That it's filled with jeux d'esprit. That it plays games with the reader's sense of what's real and what's a put-on. The mere fact that my narrator's are often called "John" is a sort of feint or ruse, for sure. Just because we share the same first name and are described as tall, blonde, hilarious, and devastatingly charming and handsome, don't think that he's me!
Finally, is there a message that are you trying to get across with your book?
Hard to encapsulate in a single phrase or message, really, but I will try: it's that the world of indie rock is as heartbreaking as it is enthralling at times. And that Los Angeles is, paradoxically, the most ridiculous and most wondrous place in the USA.
As The Weird Sisters return from their first What-Could-Go-Wrong (spoiler alert – everything) National Tour, bandmates/lovers John and Jenny face their iffy futures together (or apart) as the brilliant and mysterious Katie upends the romantic/artistic balance that’s been precarious-at-best. The unmitigated vanity, the mythopoeic beauty, the megalomania and heartbreak, the exquisite talent and ludicrous hubris – it’s all here in Fredrick’s wonderful, tart-sweet, final installment.
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