ERIC MADEEN
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Q:
Please tell me about yourself – what kind of a person you are, your beliefs,
your nature, your follies, anything.
A: As for handling crises and dramas I’m laid-back but not so
laid-back as to be horizontal. At the same time I’m considered to radiate
high-energy and a certain joie-de-vivre and charisma. A Japanese fortune-teller
using Chinese astrology fortune-told me, determining that I have an extremely
high energy rate based on the total numerical value of the five essential
elements she read in my character. Anyway, my tremendous curiosity, energy and
love of adventure and travel took me fresh out of university as far as
francophone Gabon, Africa to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer, building a
primary school complex in an equatorial village surrounded by rainforest.
Village friends and I would sometimes go camping and hunting (yes, monkey, too
ended up in the cooking pot). The bottle of booze I’d pack in served as elixir
to help draw them out, to get them to crack it open regarding the oral
tradition, or orality opposed to literacy. In short, the gin or whiskey helped
inspire them to recount dramatically folktale after folktale around the
campfire. Their culture, with its living-in-the moment-full-blast for the
moment, was so alluring that I basically went native. Moreover, I lived for
several months with a young, gorgeous Gabonese lady. The whole experience fed
obliquely AND directly into my first novel, Water Drumming in the Soul: A
Novel of Racy Love in the Heart of Africa, which is personal, passionate
and, methinks … metold, unputdownable all the way through to its
heart-wrenching end.
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Q: Tell me about your writing journey, when and how did it all start?
A: From a very young age reading and writing came as naturally to me as
breathing. My first stories were inspired by the TV-show Batman -- back in
early grade school. English classes were always my favourites after P.E., of
course. Circling back to curiosity, I was always asking questions and follow-up
questions, to draw friends and family out if something interested me. This
curiosity also led to a love of reading and from an early age reading and
writing were as natural to me as breathing. I also loved – still love! -- to
play with language with the witticisms early on termed by my family as “Eric-isms.”
I was always searching for synonyms in the Thesaurus Rex and looking up words
in dictionaries with an eye to etymology; curiously, did you know porcelain
derives from the term for female porcine genitalia? That mel in ameliorate the
French mel, or honey? My love of writing and language led me to major in
journalism undergraduate then literary writing and literature in graduate
school where I earned my MFA. I worked for several years as a copywriter for at
that time the world’s largest ad agency Dentsu, for clients as diverse as Mazda
and Sony (Sony No Baloney!). During vacations at Tokyo City University where
I’m an Associate Professor of English, a photographer and I were hired by
All-Nippon Airways’ inflight magazine Wingspan to venture and
chronicle far and wide in Asia. These diverse travel stories just fed into the recently-released
travelogue Asian Trail Mix: True Tales from Borneo to Japan. Since
voice is more than a language function but rather the sum totality of a
writer’s experiences and means of expression, I’m always working on my voice,
humping the hell out of the muse to crank out one immortality project after
another. In sum, I hope that my riffing here has honeyed up your
love of language and desire to see my work at www.ericmadeen.com. On that note, my fifth
book, a novel, Tennis Clubbed, Snubbed and Rubbity-Dub Dubbed is just
now up and running on Amazon. Tennis, what with its inherent, wicked snubs,
serves as a metaphorical overlay for hierarchical and rather closed Japan; the
American protagonist is hellbent to break through rigid cultural barriers on
and off the courts in historically rich Yokohama. In the machinations and plot
twists the reader is left back-footed but can see the imminent dangers … but
can he? http://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FLDTLLZ
Q: Tell me about all the difficulties faced in getting a publisher to
publish your book.
A: For my first novel many
years ago, I was agented for several years but he never found a home with a
traditional publisher but came very close several times so he stayed with it.
Since a writer has to find an agent who will then hopefully find a publisher, it’s
an arduous process, time consuming and wracked with frustrations. Agents are
big-time whiners and basically glorified first readers but also gate keepers.
Hundreds of queries will be met with “Due to the high volume of queries we
receive …” You get the picture. So I gave up on them because they gave up on
this white dude who went indie bigly which has distinct advantages in that the
cut of royalties favours the writer and the fact that most readers these daze
buy their books online via Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The negative is that
most traditional print media won’t publish reviews of independently
published books, alas. Before I went indie I published two books with POD
houses who scammed me royally on royalties up their arse and as a postmodern
rupture to them here dig on this reworked logo of UPS: Here’s a Parcel Up
Your Arsel!!! 😊 So I went Amazon and
more and more positive reviews are streaming in – the joyous streaming in of
them!!!!
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Q: Do you believe that marketing is essential for the success of a book?
A: Absolutely. You can’t find readers without marketing. It’s the be-all
end-all of any publishing endeavor, be it traditional or indie. Ca va sans
dire, alors!
Q: What marketing ideas did you deploy for marketing your book?
A: I bombarded my Facebook page and hit up family, friends and colleagues,
etc. Peace Corps Writers has been quite helpful in featuring my stuff on their
blog. Further, I hire Fiverr Level 2 giggers, including the savvy Melissa
Caudle 😊 and one
AuthorWriterEnchanter who I’m hoping will enchant the socks off potential
readers!
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Q: Do you interact with your readers? What do they say about your book?
A: Besides family, friends and colleagues giving me baths of compliments
about my work, Amazon reviews are trending quite positive to the point that 98
percent of them are 5 stars. I also jam with them on my website and via email.
Q: What suggestions would you like to offer potential authors?
A: Block out precious blocks of time so you will block out interruptions
and distractions. Write religiously in those blocks of time and your
imagination and subconscious residing there will reward you with sublime gifts.
Read deeply and widely and whichever way the current’s flowing, swim against
it. Read the Greeks. Read Freud. Read Jung. Know archetypes. Write your dreams
– journal them. Know the canon not only so you can dialogue with it but also so
you can write beyond it and break new ground. Travel your ass off. Be a
spy as in eavesdropping on whomever to develop that fine ear. Finally, ignore
the trends of the day by going alone going deep.
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Eric Madeen is an award-winning author whose work has been published widely – in Time, Asia Week, The East, Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo Journal, Kyoto Journal, Japanophile, Mississippi Review, Metropolis and several academic journals, etc. His books include Water Drumming in the Soul: A Novel of Racy Love in the Heart of Africa; Asian Trail Mix: True Tales from Borneo to Japan; Massage World: The Novel, and most recently the novel Tennis Clubbed, Snubbed and Rubbity-Dub Dubbed. He has been interviewed on 9 radio programs (8 American and 1 Japanese). He’d love to hear reader comments at ericmadeen@gmail.com.
