The Best Policy

I have definitely one, maybe two e-interviews to do this week. An e-interview is when an interviewer e-mails you questions, which gives you time to think up clever responses, so you look like you actually deserve this job.

You can't be completely honest, either. Take the first question nearly every interviewer asks a novelist: What inspired you to write this book?

Dishonest novelist: First, all of the planets aligned with Scorpio, which of course took place during the summer solstice, and flooded my soul with the most amazing creative reincarnation energy -- did I tell you I was once a French King's courtesan? -- and brought me back to Christ, only not in a Bible-thumpy way, but in an awesome non-denominational thing that doesn't mean I have to go to church or anything. At the time I was in the last stages of closure with my former spouse and best friend for life, who is making such wonderful progress through detox and preliminary sex-change hormone therapy, and after I sold his Porsche for $1 I felt I was open to all the possibilities, and recalled that the same exact thing had happened to Herman Melville just before he wrote Moby Dick, only probably not with a crack addict/gender-confused spouse, so I allowed my muse to express this by exploring the delicate relationship between a rebellious artistic androgynous teen shoplifter and her murderous ex-prostitute parent figure, but not like the one in White Oleander, I assure you, with a setting in the same Deep South tableau in which I grew to maturity as the child of alcoholic parents who may or may not have been blood related, naturally, and then....(500 more lines of the same babble.)

What's the honest answer to that question? If you're an aspiring writer, you already know it. If you're not, then send us an e-mail. We'll get back to you.