Blog Tour and Author Interview: Whisper Hollow by Chris Cander #LoneStarLit

Author Interview: Chris Cander

What do your plans for future projects include?

I’ve started a fifth novel called Zephyr, which I can’t wait to return to. And while I plan to write more novels, I also love co-writing screenplays with my best friends Tobey Forney, David Eagleman, and Sarah Blutt; we’re working on one called “The Spreadsheet” right now.

Do you have any strange writing habits you’d like to share with your readers?

When I’d been working on my first novel for a few months, I decided to calculate my average daily word count, and I came up with an average of .87 pages. I loved that figure, because it sounded so surmountable, and yet I’d made such progress. It became my mantra and my output goal, and by now, my family and friends know exactly what I mean when I say, “I’m going to do my .87.” Any day I meet or exceed my .87 is a good writing day. Whether the 300 or so words are actually any good isn’t as important—especially on a first draft—as the commitment to the work they represent.

What book do you wish you could have written?

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. This story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family and their village Macondo is nothing short of perfect. Marquez spins their brutal truths, their tender lies into a magical, glittering tale that underscores the significance of family—even if we ultimately must die alone.

Who would you cast to play your characters in a movie version of your book?

I’d love for Morgan Freeman to play Roscoe Jones from my novel 11 Stories. As I was writing it, Roscoe began to speak in his inimitable voice. He weren’t the inspiration for Roscoe, though; the man I modeled him after used to sit with my grandmother during lunch at the memory care facility where they lived. I never heard him speak. I never met his family. But he sat there with this silent grace and dignity, keeping my grandmother company, and since he couldn’t tell me any of his stories, I wanted to give him some. I think Mr. Freeman would bring Roscoe beautifully to life.

Favorite line from a book:

From Beryl Markham’s West with the Night: “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”

If you were a superhero, what would your name be? What costume would you wear?

I am a superhero. Somewhere in Themyscira, Wonder Woman is wearing Chris Cander PJs to bed.

What is something you want to accomplish before you die?

I have many more books inside that I’d like to get out. And I’d like to figure out how to do it well.