Questions and Answers

Q: Has The Son Who Paid Attention been published yet? When will people be able to buy it?
A: Whiskey Creek Press lists it on whiskeycreekpress.com as a September 2010 Coming Soon book. I think people will be able to place advance orders soon.

Q: In what formats will the novel be published?
A: My contract says that Whiskey Creek Press will publish The Son Who Paid Attention as an e-book and has the option to also publish it as a trade paperback book. Very likely it will be published in both formats.

Q: Is The Son Who Paid Attention based on a true story?
A: No. I made it up. It's based on my imagination.

Q: What is The Son Who Paid Attention about?
A: The murder of Vi Kostka and the solving of that murder case.

Q: Who tells the story?
A: The character who narrates the story is Gene Kostka, son of Stan and Vi Kostka.

Q: You describe the city of Azure as being on Lake Michigan 40 miles north of downtown Chicago and 10 miles south of the Wisconsin / Illinois border. On a map the city at that location is Waukegan, Illinois. Does the city of Azure, Illinois in your novel equal the city of Waukegan, Illinois in real life, and why did you choose to not use the city's real name?
A: I wrote the first drafts of the novel while living in the village of Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, in Lake County, a few miles north of Waukegan. I found it handy to use the geography of Lake County as the "stage" on which my characters act. The story actually takes place in Fictionland on the world of Imagination. I used fictional names to give myself the freedom to change reality to suit my plot and my whims. For instance, the city park that I put in Azure along the shore of Lake Michigan does not exist thus in Waukegan. My model for it was the real life lakeshore park in nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin. The model I used for the murder scene church building in Azure is in real life in a different town than Waukegan. There is no Slavtown neighborhood in Chicago; it's loosely modeled on several actual neighborhoods. And there are many other examples of my playing with reality as a child plays with toys in my writing of the novel.

Q: What inspired you to write this story?
A: Up until I began The Son Who Paid Attention, my fiction writing had been autobiographical. I wanted for a change to write something not at all autobiographical. I daydreamed of a film noir of the senior cop buddy goes bad variety. From there it was a matter of making a sequence of decisions regarding characters, relationships, motives, point of view, and so on. Being more familiar with that form, I decided to write the story as a novel. The choice of the motive for murder led to the choice of the theme -- the beginning of the end of patriarchy with the coming of the women's movement of the 1970s.

Q: Is this a conservative or a liberal story?
A: It's a story about law and order and about family values; about intolerance and self-righteousness versus forgiveness and empathy; about duty, control, and autonomy; about social decay and social progress; about tradition and changing times. In other words, yes.