The Brain Lair: Interview - Fade to Blue by Sean Beaudoin

Today, August 28, is Sean Beaudoin's birthday!
Happy Birthday Sean!

My Thoughts
I totally loved this book. I read it the day I received the ARC from Little, Brown on Facebook. Fade to Blue is not only the title, it tells the story of two characters in the book, Kenny Fade and Sophie Blue. The chapter titles were pretty cool because they go from 0 and count up, then there's a comic, and then it counts down to 0 again. All 3 stories are related. We follow Sophie as she tries to figure out what happened to her dad and why is that psycho ice cream truck always following her! If you like smart, funny reads loaded with pop culture, music references, and sarcasm this is your book. It also has virtual reality and comix!

About the Author

58% of the letters in Sean Beaudoin's name are vowels.

In ASCII binary code, his name is 01010011 01100101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000010 01100101 01100001 01110101 01100100 01101111 01101001 01101110

Backwards, it's Naes Nioduaeb. In Pig Latin, it's Eansay Eaudoinbay.

Sean Beaudoin has used his B.A. in photography as a springboard into the following jobs: construction laborer, circus roustabout, busboy, used book buyer, hotel desk clerk, camp counselor, statue repairman (really), seller of jazz vinyl, and a nine-day stint as The World's Worst Telemarketer. He now resides mostly in Seattle, but also sometimes San Francisco, with his wife and daughter.

I also tend to list my history and traits in the third person, as if someone else were writing it for me. I love hot sauce and almonds and Turkish coffee. I hate the phrase "it is what it is." When people say that, I tend to respond, in a much deeper voice than I really have, "NO, IT ISN'T." I like vinyl and French movies and books about unhappy people from the Fifties. I'm not particularly crazy about police procedurals, ketchup, rap-metal, Julia Roberts, cell phones, or Sudoku.

Interview with Sean Beaudoin
Was the Ice Cream Truck in Fade to Blue inspired by your friend's Pie Truck?

That's a funny question, but no. The ice cream truck was in the manuscript a good two years before Pie Truck reared its head on the rough and tumble streets of Alameda, CA. But Pie Truck is such an excellent, endearing, and tasty idea, that it may have to make an appearance in a future book.

I loved your advice to "Neither of These is Miles Davis", you understood her dilemma so well. Describe a situation where your personal space has been invaded. How did you "handle" it?

Hmmm. I was on a flight about two weeks ago where a family of six took up the entire row in front of me. They were, I will say, not a family of rigorous dieters. For some reason, the children, who were all in their teens, took turns sitting on Mom's lap. It seemed odd to me, since they appeared to be of the age where most teens wouldn't want to be caught dead anywhere near Mom in public, so I actually found it sort of sweet. Except for the fact that with both of them in one chair, and Mom having her seat back and tray table all the way reclined, they were pretty much sprawled right up in my business. Most odd, though, was when Dad decided to take his turn on Mom's lap. I am not making this up. Suddenly, there was six-hundred pounds of married bliss and suspect spatial awareness more or less announcing itself six inches from my face. At first I thought it was a joke, but they stayed that way a very long time, watching the in-flight movie. Mom rubbed Dad's back, while Dad stroked his beard, curled on her lap like a terrier. It was exceedingly weird. The way I handled it was to say nothing, marvel at their lack of self-consciousness, and bide my time for an opportunity to relate their behavior in an only marginally amusing interview response.

How did you come up with your book rating system? What book have you rated that you're glad you didn't write? (Don't need to give title, just a quick synopsis would be awesome)

I used to be extremely opinionated and even judgmental about what I thought good literature was. It was easy for me to toss around opinions and slam works I thought were inferior, derivative, cynically manipulative, or dishonest. Then I tried to write a book. Turns out, books are hard to write. My entire evaluation system changed drastically. It's very hard for me to be negative about almost any book now, because I can instantly relate to the struggle the author went through to get it on the page no matter what I feel about its merits personally. I also think with the internet it's far too tempting, and common, for people to be anonymously flippant, even cruel, about appraising someone else's work without realizing what went into it. At this point, if you've actually finished a novel, no matter what it's about, I'm more or less on your side.

That said, with almost 150,000 books published last year, there is a vast and mathematically unavoidable disparity in quality. Yeah, let's be honest, there's a lot of crap out there. So, my rating system is set up to kind of make a joke about the idea of standing in judgment, as well as being vulnerable to others' judgment, while still allowing me to talk about other books in a consistent and honest way. If someone finds that they share my taste or aesthetics, that's great, and they can decide if they want to read what I've reviewed or not. But, to answer your question even more obliquely, I'd have to say overall, about 70% of the time, I am impressed by other author's creativity, discipline, and talent.

Statue repairman, what?

I know, it was such a funky job. Essentially, I worked in a statuary that cast cement and marble garden and house sculpture, as well as bird feeders and faux-Rodin's and mini-Davids and such. Since it was sort of a shady operation, the statues would frequently come out of the molds missing snouts, fingers, arrows, wings, talons, and unseemly cherubic attributes. My job was to "repair" them, by re-attaching the lost appendages, or sort of cosmetically enhancing the flaws with a watery mixture of Quick-crete and paint. My job was also to dip them into this huge tub of noxious chemicals wearing shoulder-length rubber gloves (but no mask) so they looked aged when they came out. I figure I lost about 30 IQ points doing that. It was like breathing in huge gusts of deck stripper all day long. I frequently drove home in a weird, nauseated haze, humming along to static on the radio. But, it paid $10 an hour, and back then, that was really good money.

Sean has a new book coming out in Fall 2010 , You Killed Wesley Payne. From Sean:

You Killed Wesley Payne is Grease meets The Maltese Falcon. It's what would result if the DNA of The Road Warrior and Beverly Hills 90210 were spliced together and then grafted to Samuel L. Jackson's coccyx. It's cops and cliques. It's love and vice. It's a band called Pinker Casket who rocks so hard they may actually all be dead. And it's a pulp-noir murder mystery in which hard-boiled seventeen year old Dalton Rev must solve the mystery of "The Body" before it solves him.

Places to find Sean Beaudoin
Twitter - @seanbeaudoin
Facebook Fan Page - Sean Beaudoin

Fade to Blue Video Review from In Search of Giants