Interview with Vik Rubenfeld

Vik Rubenfeld created the hit CBS TV series, "Early Edition," starring Kyle Chandler, about a man who receives tomorrow's newspaper today, and uses it to save people.


He is married and lives in Los Angeles.





INTERVIEW WITH VIK RUBENFELD


WHAT WILL READERS LIKE ABOUT YOUR BOOK?
I think it lets you experience what it feels like to be a rock star in a vivid, immersive, almost 3D way. People are telling me that they are thinking about it long after they have stopped reading it. It stays with you. The more you think about it, the more you see in what you've read. It's also exciting. There's a lot of suspense. There's the story of, is the band going to make it? There's the love story between Reid and Kristy, and the question of whether their relationship can survive all the things that happen to a hit band. There's everything that's happening with all the groupies. And there's this animosity between Reid, the bass player, and Clay, the drummer, that puts future of the band in danger.


WHY DID YOU SELF PUBLISH?
Just as I was completing the novel I was very fortunate to speak to indie author Barbara Morgenroth (http://robinoneillebooks.blogspot.com/). She clued me in to everything that was happening with the self-publishing revolution. She sent me the Joe Konrath/Barry Eisler eBook, "Be the Monkey," as well as links to Joe Konrath's blog, and to other sites as well.


Not long ago I would have needed to spend years trying to find a publisher. Then it would have taken another year and a half to get the book into book stores. This way I can get started immediately. It's amazing how quickly you can go from having a completed book, to seeing it being downloaded from the top websites.


WHAT IS YOUR WRITING PROCESS?
This is a big subject for me. So much of writing is, I think, done with your subconscious. I try to embrace that. I find that once I have a specific question about how the book should go, I can do almost anything else - surf the internet, watch TV, make phone calls, work on other stuff - and my subconscious will be working away, looking for answers.


I BELIEVE I NOTICED SOME RUN-ON SENTENCES AND CASES WHERE A WORD WAS REPEATED IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. WAS THAT INTENTIONAL?
Absolutely. The story is told by Reid Taylor, the bass player for the band. Reid has spent his life around music, not writing. It would have sounded totally inauthentic to me if he had somehow told this story in perfectly crafted sentences. He pretty much is just using the first words that come to hand that say whatever it is that he's trying to communicate. I, on the other hand, had to work hard to achieve this style for his voice. I was inspired by "Catcher in the Rye," "Huckleberry Finn," etc. in using this approach.


WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THIS PARTICULAR STORY?
I've always been drawn to the world of entertainment. That's part of how I came to create EARLY EDITION, the hit TV show with Kyle Chandler, about the guy who gets tomorrow's news today. It ran for four years in prime time on CBS and has been in 73 countries around the world. I've wanted to write something set in world of entertainment for a long time. I was particularly drawn to what happens when you are on stage. I acted in and directed plays in high school so I had some limited experience with that, and it meant a lot to me. I wanted to communicate what that felt like.


Then there's the "band of men on a mission" thing that appealed to me. Guys who form a band and try to make it a success are really on an epic journey, and this happens in real life all the time.


And then there were the groupies. For some reason I wanted to write a lot of pages about groupies. :)


And one more thing - having lived that entertainment biz thing of trying to do something that seems impossible, and then getting it to happen - getting EARLY EDITION on the air - I wanted to write about what that felt like. I just put it into the life of a rock star.


DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING IN THE TV BIZ THAT HELPED YOU IN THIS NOVEL?
I sure did. In TV you learn how to, as they call it, "break a story." That is, you learn how to tell a story so that it's suspenseful and makes you want to keep watching. By the time I started this novel I had learned a lot about it, and it's one of the things that, I think, makes this novel such a page-turner.