I had the pleasure of
Lloyd Lofthouse author of Running with
the Enemy answer a couple of questions for us to see what he’s been up too
as well as any current project’s he’s working on to what he’s currently reading
so hurry and read below!
How did you come up with the title?
For years, the working
title was “Better a Dead Hero”; and then one morning I woke up and “Running
with the Enemy” appeared out of nowhere and I liked that title better.
What inspired you to write your first
book?
My first published book
was “My Splendid Concubine”. In 1999—while we were dating and before we were
married—my wife Anchee introduced me to Robert Hart. I’m part Irish and Hart
was Irish so my wife thought I would be interested in his story. She was
researching and writing the “Empress Orchid” at the time.
http://www.mysplendidconcubine.com/
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/min_empress.shtml
I Googled Robert Hart
and discovered that Harvard University’s Belknap Press published Hart’s
journals (the ones he did not burn
shortly before his death) and letters in several volumes. After I bought
and read these books, it was obvious that Hart wanted to hide the relationship
he had with his concubine Ayaou, and I became fascinated with the idea of
exploring what that relationship must have been like for this conflicted man
who didn’t want the world to know about Ayaou and his love and respect for her
as an individual.
Hart and Ayaou were
together for almost a decade and had three children together. Why would he want
to erase her from his own personal history? Before he died, he even asked his
family and friends to burn all the letters that he wrote, but they didn’t—fortunately.
What book are you reading now?
I just finished reading
and posting a reader review on Amazon of Tash Aw’s “Five Star Billionaire”, and
now I am reading Porter Gale’s “Your Network Is Your Net Worth”—a fascinating
nonfiction book that will help anyone who wants to discover how to network
properly. Porter Gale takes readers step-by-step through what it takes to
become a successful networker and overcome any inhibitions that may get in the
way while building a foundation that leads to happiness and success. I’m almost
halfway through her book and it offers a seamless transition for those of us
who want to learn how to network but are finding the process difficult.
Then there is
“Interrupt” by Jeff Carlson; “Shanghai Love” by Layne Wong; “Inferno” by Dan
Brown, and “The Chinese Secretes for Success” by Yukong Zhao—all stacked in
order and waiting for me to get to them.
What are your current projects?
Thank you for
asking. The working title is “Crazy
Normal, a Classroom Exposé” based on one-year of the thirty that I was a
classroom teacher. During that one year—about twenty years ago in the early
1990s—I kept a daily journal and I’m using that journal to write a memoir that
goes into detail of what a teacher’s job is like up close and personal that
includes my daily interactions with my students and their parents. Every day when I got home, the first thing I
did was to sit down in front of my desktop computer and write an entry in that
daily journal. Unlike most memoirs, I do not have to rely on a memory that is
decades old. I’m sure if you write the day’s events the day they take place, it
is about as accurate as one can get.
Can you share a little of your current
work with us?
The rough draft of “Crazy Normal” is finished and
the manuscript will be going through heavy editing and revisions for the next
few months. My own daily journal of that year was far too long to just publish
the way it was so I’ve been taming that work into something more readable.
I want to share the opening scene from the prologue
of this memoir and please remember that this passage is an unedited, unrevised
advanced proof copy:
"Mr.
Lofthouse, I hate you." A loud voice called, as I was leaving my classroom
a few hours after school had let out. I looked around. The campus was empty;
then I saw a familiar face but couldn't remember his name
He was standing at the far end of the
building by the back gate ready to leave the campus. He held up a paperback
book for emphasis.
"When I was in ninth grade, I hated
you," he said. "I hated reading. I hated those essays and book
reports you made us do-over until we got them right. You even got my mom to sit
by me at home to make sure I read the books and finished the homework. Now I'm
hooked. These fucking books are like drugs. I can't stop reading them." He
delivered all this with an expression of disgust. Then his face blossomed into
a smile. "And I still hate it."
He turned and walked off campus and into
the gang infested barrio where his family lived. Then I remembered who he was.
Four years ago, Fabio had been nothing but a pain-in-the-ass full of verbal
irony and sarcasm. He'd fought me every inch of the way, but his mother became
my ally. She was one of the few parents who listened to my advice, ditched the
self-esteem movement, and learned to say no.
It wasn't my fault I was a no-nonsense,
hard-ass, teacher who advocated a softer form of tough love over boosting
self-esteem. My older, illiterate gangster brother, my Bible totting mother,
alcoholic-gambling father and the US Marines were responsible for who I was.
What was the hardest part of writing your
book?
The editing and
revisions. No matter how hard I work at editing the manuscript, something is
going to slip by me and end up in a finished manuscript if I don’t eventually hire
a second pair of eyes and have a professional editor copyedit the final draft
but only after I have revised and edited until I’m sick of it.
For example, “My
Splendid Concubine’s” first rough draft was written over a period of about two
years and then edited and revised for another eight years until the stack of
revisions was taller than my six—foot-four-inches when all the printed papers
were stacked in one pile. And there were still typos discovered by my freelance
editors that escaped my own tedious twelve-step editing process.
Do you have any advice for other writers?
Yes, after you finish
the rough draft, edit and revise until you can’t stand your own writing and then
hire a professional to copyedit the work at least one more time.
Do you have anything specific that you
want to say to your readers?
I want to say “thank
you” to anyone who reads my work, and I hope you only read books you
enjoy. That’s what I do. If I start
reading a book that—for any reason—doesn’t appeal to me, I stop reading it, and
I only review books that I finish reading, the books that I enjoy enough to
recommend. The book doesn’t have to be perfect but it does have to have an
element worth recommending, and when I finish a book, it always has something
worth sharing. Otherwise, I would have never finished reading it.
AND!!
In case you missed my
raving 5 Star Review of Running with the
Enemy you can go ahead and read it here.
About Lloyd Lofthouse:
Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran,
served in Vietnam as a field radio operator in 1966. Back home, Lloyd was a
heavy drinker until 1981, never talked about the war and suffered from PTSD. In
the early 1980s, he confronted his demons by writing about his war experiences
in an MFA program.
Running with the Enemy started as a memoir and
then evolved into fiction.
His short story, A Night at the “Well
of Purity”, named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards, was
based on an event Lloyd experienced in Vietnam.
His novel My Splendid Concubine has earned ten honorable
mentions in general fiction—a few examples: the 2008 London Book Festival; 2009
San Francisco Book Festival; 2009 Los Angeles Book Festival, and the 2012 New
York Book Festival, etc.
In 1999, his wife, Anchee Min, the author of the memoir Red
Azalea, a book that was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year
in 1994, introduced Lloyd to Robert Hart, the real-life character of My
Splendid Concubine.
After an honorable discharge from the U.S. Marines in 1968,
Lloyd went to college on the GI Bill to earn a BA in journalism, and then
worked days as a public school teacher for thirty years (1975 – 2005) in
addition to nights and weekends as a maître d’ in a Southern California
nightclub called the Red Onion (1980-1982).
Lloyd on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lflwriter
Lloyd of Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lloyd.lofthouse
