JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: One of fiction's great gifts is its ability to explore deep questions about human nature, history, society, and ethics - all while making the reader think they're having fun. DUNE is a thrilling adventure set in the unimaginably distant future - and it's about the horrors of colonialism. HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a picaresque, comic adventure on the Mississippi - and it's about the evils of racism.
So you're thinking, yeah, Julia, but those are GREAT BOOKS and the moral lessons are super obvious. Well, yes. But. When those novels were first published, they didn't arrive with decades of academic papers pointing out the deeper messages (although, like the book we're discussing today, UKULELE OF DEATH, they got excellent reviews.)
Also, not every author understands what the story is "about" until later. Yes, Ray Bradbury sat down and wrote FAHRENHEIT 450 specifically about the threat of book burnings and intellectual repression (although interestingly, decades later he said he'd written it against "political correctness!") But for many of the rest of us - especially those of us drawn to genre fiction - the underlying theme doesn't reveal itself until we're well along in the manuscript. (Or later, even! I once had a journalist point out a major undercurrent in my first book I had been utterly unaware of.)
So even fun books have a point. Don't believe me? We're making it easy for you see for yourself: our well-loved author friend, E.J. Copperman, is giving away a copy of UKULELE OF DEATH.
All it takes is the author's desire to make a difference...
Do you know anyone who’s “the
same?”
I’ve been giving this some thought lately. My new book, UKULELE OF DEATH, introduces Fran and Ken Stein (I’ll give you a second) who are painfully aware that they are seen as “different.” They have good reason to think so: They have to plug themselves into a wall socket every few days to keep their life energy at a sufficient level. So they’re not exactly off-the-rack kind of people.
But that led me to wonder: Do you know anyone who is not different in some way? Isn’t everybody? Isn’t that another way to say that everyone is a unique individual?
I have a son who is considered to be on the autism spectrum. Is he different? I have friends who do not belong to any organized religion. Are they? People I know have come out as gay, as transgender, as gender queer. Some speak about their struggles with mental illness. Is that different?
If so, what is normal? Who gets to decide?
This series of books is going to be about being different. It’s going to look at what it means to be different and how we each (because we’re all different) cope with it. Fran and Ken will never be able to pass for “normal,” because they’re very large and very strong. One reviewer referred to them as “junior superheroes.”
They will stand out in a crowd, especially Fran, who talks about how much easier it is for Ken to be accepted with his oversize body than it is for a woman well over six feet tall. That’s different, at least statistically.
But there’s more to it than that. Fran and Ken are siblings, but they don’t know how they were created, whether they share DNA and if so, whose. So the series is about the family you create. Most people think about “family” in a specific way; they can’t. They work for people who probably weren’t raised by their biological parents. Does that make them different?
Are you sick of the word different yet?
Everybody, I think, feels like they don’t belong sometimes. Everyone who went through high school believes they were an outsider. Writers believe there’s something a little off about them because they don’t have a “regular” job. When I had the idea for Fran and Ken (which was quite a while ago), I hadn’t considered the repercussions of feeling (brace yourself) different. But as UKULELE OF DEATH took shape, it became clear that’s what the Stein siblings were all about.
Maybe you’ll find something just a little like you in them, too.
Are you different enough?
JULIA: Answer that question, dear readers, and you can be the lucky one who wins a copy of UKULELE OF DEATH!
E.J. Copperman is very different, in that it’s a name I use to write under. You can find that name on books in the Jersey Girl Legal Mysteries, Haunted Guesthouse, Agent to the Paws, Mysterious Detective and Asperger’s Mystery series. Each one of those books is… let’s say unique.
