After today’s guest I think I need a break – I’m tired just thinking about all she’s done in the last year. I had the opportunity to meet Kim in Chicago this year and those pictures of her smiling are 100% accurate. She is so upbeat and positive that it’s hard not to smile when you’re with her.  So with that, take a moment to read on and see what Kim is up to these days.

Guest Author: Kim Fielding

Welcome Kim, I can’t believe it’s been seven months since you last visited.

Thanks for inviting me over again! 

Let me start with a bit of hero worship, I think Brute was a fantastic book. The fantasy element didn’t bog down the character driven plot.  Do you plan anymore books with those characters?

Thank you! Brute’s easy to fall in love with, I think. I’m not currently planning anything more with him and Grey, but you never know. My “to-write” idea file is 11 pages long and growing.

11 pages? Just slip this one toward the top. The other ideas won’t notice.  🙂 

They will! They call my name: “Me next! Me next!” 

Your new book, The Tin Box, is set in an abandoned, old style, mental hospital. That’s an unusual setting.

It is, and it’s one I’ve been wanting to use for a very long time. It’s so emotionally evocative.

Once upon a time the model for mental hospitals was to build old grand buildings in Victorian style. Most of these facilities have been abandoned. Pilgrim State in New York, Norristown State in Pennsylvania and St. Elizabeth’s in DC are some examples of these that that I’m familiar with.  How did you become acquainted with these facilities?

First-hand… but not as a patient! I have degrees in psychology, so I’ve been aware of these old facilities since I was in graduate school. Heck, maybe even longer than that. I grew up in Oregon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has always packed quite a wallop for me. More importantly, though, I got to know a former mental hospital in Stockton, California. It’s used for university classes now. It was built in the 1850s and was once the largest mental hospital in California. The campus is really pretty, and the main building’s on the National Historic Register. But it’s also a haunting place. Unmarked graves have been discovered on the grounds, which strikes me as so sad—patients so forgotten nobody even remembers where they’re buried. And I’ve walked the long corridors at night—many of the windows still have bars—and wondered about the thousands of people who lived there.

For some amazing photos of an abandoned (and now demolished) hospital from the same era, check out Matthew Christopher’s pictures of Taunton State Hospital: http://www.abandonedamerica.us/taunton-state-hospital.

I’m really glad the hospital in Stockton has been preserved. We need tangible reminders of what once was.

The book has many subplots – tells us about some of them.

With pleasure. On the one hand, there’s William Lyon, who’s trying to finish his dissertation on a fairly technical (some might say boring) subject related to memory. He takes a job as caretaker for the former asylum. We learn he’s also in the middle of a divorce. He’s been closeted his whole life—his parents forced him to undergo conversion therapy when he was a teen—and is now tentatively trying to find himself.

Then there’s Colby Anderson, who’s flamboyant and gregarious. He’s the clerk at the general store/post office in the little town near the asylum. He’s an upbeat kind of guy, but he has problems of his own. He’s had a difficult history and he’s yearning for something he believes he’ll never find.

And there’s Bill. William discovers a series of letters Bill secretly wrote in the late 1930s, when Bill was committed to the asylum for being gay.

How hard was it to write about the treatment – or mistreatment – of patients like Bill?

Very hard. There were times I had to stop for a while. Most of what we learn comes to us in Bill’s own words via the letters he wrote. I purposely didn’t go into a lot of detail about the things that were done to him, but even the barest descriptions speak for themselves. I think what made it most difficult for me was knowing these things were real. Bill may be fictional, but very real people suffered from these things—and not so very long ago.

Where did you find the information on what passed for ‘treatment’ eighty years ago?

I knew a lot already from my academic life. Some films were helpful too, such as Titicut Follies, which shows how appalling things still were in the late 1960s. I learned more from a few good websites. While there’s a fair amount of information on the history of asylums and mental health in general, I was surprised and upset to learn there’s very little on the forced “treatment” of LGBT people. It certainly happened—and not so long ago—but we seem hesitant to publicly acknowledge it.

Tell us something interesting that is not in the blurb for The Tin Box?

I didn’t really like William all that much as the story began. He seems pretty rigid and judgmental. But oh, I totally fell in love with him as the story progressed and I got to know him better. I think he and Colby may be my favorite characters I’ve written.

Given the characters you have already, that makes them pretty special.

Thanks, it does. I was honestly depressed for several days after finishing the book—because I missed the guys so much.

Are any of the characters based on someone you know?

Not really. I steal bits and pieces, though. For instance, I have several friends who married someone of the opposite sex and then divorced after becoming more comfortable with their sexuality. I know a lot of introverts like William, who often feel awkward when interacting with people. And I know some Colbys too—people who try really hard to see the best in every situation, and who can bring out the best in others. And Colby’s TOTAL DANCE WHORE tank top? I saw a guy wearing that last time I was in San Francisco.

What else have you written since Brute was published?

A lot! Brute came out in early December 2012. That same month I had two holiday short stories published: “A Great Miracle Happened There” and “Joys R Us”. Then in February my novel Venetian Masks came out, followed later by a novella called Night Shift and then the novel Buried Bones, which is a sequel to my werewolf novel, Good Bones. I wrote a fantasy novella called Treasure, which is available for free. Oh, and “The Gig,” a (free!) short story tying together the guys from the Bones books and the guys from Speechless.

Oh! And my Ennek trilogy is coming out in audiobook versions. The first one is available already.

But that’s not all! In October I’ll have a short story called “A Clockwork Heart” in Dreamspinner Press’s steampunk anthology, Steamed Up. In November, my novella Housekeeping will come out. In December I’ll have a holiday short called “Alaska.” And! I just signed a contract for a fantasy novella called Pilgrimage. It’s about a Californian fiscal analyst who gets zapped to an alternate world, where he has to undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of a death goddess. Luckily, he finds a hunky guide. That will release in February or March.

I’m exhausted just looking at all those titles.

Please! Your to write list is 11 pages long – you’re just getting started. 😛

I like to think so. J My muse is a harsh, cruel mistress. Picture her looking like a cross between Meryl Streep and Kathy Bates, wearing bondage gear and wielding a whip. But I wouldn’t trade her for anything.

Since there is always another story to tell, what are you working on now?

I recently began a new novel—it’s so new it doesn’t even have a decent title yet. It’s about a guy who picks up a hitchhiking ghost along the old Route 66. After that, I think I’ll write a third book in the Bones series.

You traveled a bit this summer and some of those trips turned into adventures. What happened?

My family took a Disney cruise to Alaska, which was great. I’d never been there before and it’s more gorgeous than I’d imagined. We saw lots of wildlife, including dolphins, orcas, seals, and two kinds of bears. And we took a train excursion up White Pass Summit, which the Yukon gold rush miners had to travel on foot. I wrote my holiday short story (titled, not surprisingly, “Alaska”) on the ship, while watching glaciers pass by.

Later I went to Iowa for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. I got to finally meet a wonderful friend in person. I got to sit in the basement for my first tornado warning in 20 years and later watch fireflies again. And thanks to airline screw-ups, I got an extra day in Iowa and far too much time at the Cedar Rapids and Minneapolis airports. While in the restroom in Cedar Rapids, I ran into someone I work with here in California!

After that came Denver for a wedding, where I experienced more weather (we don’t have weather where I live) and a zillion mosquito bites, plus a great wedding reception with Krispy Kreme donuts and Korean rice cakes instead of a wedding cake.

I took a weekend at the coast with friends, and not one but two of my car window mechanisms broke, leaving us unable to close the windows. We had fun anyway.

And finally, we were making a family road trip to Las Vegas when my husband surprised us all with a one night detour to Grand Canyon. I’d seen it only from airplanes before. It’s amazing.

I heard you ‘might’ be going to Turkey – what’s that about?

Istanbul’s still tentative, but such an exciting prospect! I’ll definitely be sending a week in Warsaw next month, and then all of November in Zagreb, except for a few days when I get to visit Sarajevo and Mostar. This journey is related to my day job, but I’m sure I’ll find plenty of writing inspiration.

Both of your daughters are teenagers now – how are you coping with that?

Is that a note of worry I detect? 😉

Actually, only one is a teenager. The other’s a preteen, which is just as bad. I do a lot of driving people around, and I’ve become used to lots of drama. We’ve talked about creating a catalogue of teenage noises and facial expressions (think 10,000 kinds of eye rolls). But I have to say, the teen years are also turning out to be a lot of fun. I love seeing the wonderful young lady my daughter is becoming. And she’s so much fun to tease right now, and it’s so easy! For instance, all I have to do is threaten to wear my T-shirt with this lovely illustration when I pick her up from school. Also, she and her friends have fairly recently discovered slash fanfic, and I get to appall her by demonstrating that I’m familiar with that genre too.

More than a note of worry – she’s not yet two and already giving me a ration of sass.

Oh, you have no idea of the joys awaiting you! I’m especially distressed because my older daughter is showing signs of growing up to become a lawyer.

What have you read lately that most people haven’t read but should?

Well, lots of people have read this, and now I’m in danger of being accused of sucking up, but I just finished your Purpose and really enjoyed it. It’s such an original concept. Tali Spencer’s Thick As Thieves will make anyone who enjoys fantasy happy. Madeline Miller’s take on the Achilles/Patroclus story, The Song of Achilles, is fantastic. And I liked Raising My Rainbow, which is about the author’s family, most especially her young gender creative son.

Last question is all yours – feel free to talk about anything you want your readers to know about you, your book, anything at all.

Thanks to you, Andy, for letting me blather, and thanks to everyone else for reading! I just wanted everyone to know that The Tin Box is a special book to me, and I hope it is to you, too. And I want to give a shout out to Anne Cain, who made the gorgeous cover.

Thanks for being my guest, now it’s time to plug your work –

Blurb:

William Lyon’s past forced him to become someone he isn’t. Conflicted and unable to maintain the charade, he separates from his wife and takes a job as caretaker at a former mental hospital. Jelley’s Valley State Insane Asylum was the largest mental hospital in California for well over a century, but it now stands empty. William thinks the decrepit institution is the perfect place to finish his dissertation and wait for his divorce to become final. In town, William meets Colby Anderson, who minds the local store and post office. Unlike William, Colby is cute, upbeat, and flamboyantly out. Although initially put off by Colby’s mannerisms, William comes to value their new friendship, and even accepts Colby’s offer to ease him into the world of gay sex.

William’s self-image begins to change when he discovers a tin box, hidden in an asylum wall since the 1940s. It contains letters secretly written by Bill, a patient who was sent to the asylum for being homosexual. The letters hit close to home, and William comes to care about Bill and his fate. With Colby’s help, he hopes the words written seventy years ago will give him courage to be his true self.

Buy Links:

Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

Excerpt:

With the menus gone, William had nowhere to hide. He pretended to be closely examining his surroundings, but in fact the Java Joint was pretty unremarkably decorated, and he couldn’t avoid Colby’s thoughtful stare.

“You don’t like me much, do you?” Colby finally said.

“I… I don’t think I know you well enough to not like you.”

“Yeah, but you sort of make these faces and you keep flinching away.” He narrowed his eyes. “Are you homophobic? Afraid you’ll catch my queer cooties?”

If William had been sipping his water, he would have choked. As it was, he coughed rather loudly. “I’m not a bigot.”

“It doesn’t bother you to be seen with a flaming gayboy?”

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” That was true, more or less. Once he’d given up on gaining his parents’ respect, the only judgment he’d feared was his own. Unfortunately, he was a harsh critic of himself.

“So then what’s the deal? Hermit? Confirmed introvert? Asperger’s? Maybe you just disapprove of my stylistic choices.” Colby gave a significant look at his own tight and fairly skimpy outfit, and then at William’s Oxford shirt and sport coat. “Are you the fashion police, Will?”

“William.” He wanted to frown, but Colby was looking genuinely upset, his sunny smile replaced by troubled eyes and a frown. For the first time, William felt guilty for how he’d been acting. Colby seemed like a nice guy. Friendly and cheery. It wasn’t his fault he made William uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Colby. I think I’m just kind of a jerk.”

The grin reappeared, and William was strangely relieved. “You’re not really a jerk,” said Colby. “We just need to work a little on your social skills. Loosen you up a little. ’Cause Will, my man, you’ve got a stick so far up your ass you must be tasting it. Who the hell put it there?”

William felt a little flutter of panic at the question. He intentionally pushed it down and focused instead on the coarseness of Colby’s language, which made him blush. It didn’t help that he knew Colby was right—William was about as uptight as they came. And Colby wasn’t the first to accuse him of it. Even Lisa used to complain and tell him to ease up, and she was wound pretty tight herself.

The coffee arrived, hot and blessedly caffeinated. William burned his tongue but didn’t especially care. Coffee had always been his one true vice, the one thing he wanted, knew he shouldn’t have, and couldn’t quite give up. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the rich, bitter flavor. He imagined he could feel his veins singing in happiness. Oddly, the song sounded a lot like the one Colby had been humming in the car.

“I’ve seen guys look less blissed out than that after a really good orgasm.”

William opened his eyes to glare. He looked around, but if any of the other customers had heard what Colby said, they weren’t reacting. “I need to buy a coffeemaker,” William said.

“Yeah, Frank’s will have one. How come you didn’t bring yours with you to JV?”

“JV?”

“Jelley’s Valley. See, now that you’re a local we can let you in on our secret lingo.”

“Oh.”

“So why no coffeemaker?”

After taking another soothing swallow, William answered carefully. “I didn’t have one before I came. I used to just go out for coffee.” That was sort of true. A few years back he and Lisa had splurged on a really nice Italian machine, the programmable kind that brewed coffee and espresso and probably did your income taxes if you punched the right buttons. Naturally, Lisa had kept it when he left. And during those miserable weeks of living in his office, he did go out for coffee, buying it from a campus vendor when he could afford it, pouring it from the burner in the graduate student lounge when he was broke.

“I guess that’s one of the advantages of living in civilization. You can go out for stuff.” Colby seemed neither sarcastic nor sad, just matter-of-fact.

“Have you really lived here your whole life?”

Colby had been slurping at his soft drink; now he smiled around the straw. “Why? You figure I’m a little too colorful for JV?”

“Maybe,” William answered cautiously.

“I thought so too, when I was a kid. Couldn’t wait to shake the dust from my feet. I graduated high school early, when I was only sixteen. Took off for the bright lights. San Francisco—homo heaven, right?”

“And your family let you go?”

Colby shrugged. “Dad was dead. Mom was remarried, to a truck driver. He has a house up in Redding but he spends most of the time on the road. Mom too. They’ve got their rig all set up like a little apartment, practically. It’s pretty cool. And Grandma and Grandpa, they were a little overwhelmed with me, I think.” He batted his eyelashes, which were unnaturally long. “I was just too fabulous for them to deal with.”

The waitress came to the table and plopped down laden plates. She pulled ketchup and mustard bottles from her apron pocket and set them on the table. “Anything else?”

“We’re good for now,” said Colby.

Bio:

Kim Fielding is very pleased every time someone calls her eclectic. She has migrated back and forth across the western two-thirds of the United States and currently lives in California, where she long ago ran out of bookshelf space. She’s a university professor who dreams of being able to travel and write full time. She also dreams of having two perfectly behaved children, a husband who isn’t obsessed with football, and a house that cleans itself. Some dreams are more easily obtained than others.

Kim can be found on her blogs:
http://kfieldingwrites.blogspot.com/

and on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/KFieldingWrites.

and on Twitter at @KFieldingWrites.