Bio

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F.A.Q.

Since my mother taught me that the letters of the alphabet connect in weird and wonderful ways to create words. My first organized stories were crude pieces of Judy Blume fan fiction, with characters from one novel meeting characters from another, completely unrelated, one. But I think my personal style began to gel when I was about ten. Within the span of about a year, I saw both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Fox and The Hound" in the theater. Both of those movies had ambiguous or sad endings, and that really floored me. Yet at the same time it was almost comforting, because even at that young age I recognized that life wasn’t usually fair, and I liked that someone finally had the balls to admit it to me.

Backword Books is a collective of self-published/indie authors (at the time of this writing the group includes Chris Meeks, Henry Baum, Andrew Kent, Bonnie Kozek, Eddie Wright, Kristen Tsetsi, and myself) whose work has achieved a level of success with both readers and critics. Our goal is to attain mainstream media coverage, generate sales, and to bring an aura of professionalism and legitimacy to self-publishing. For more information, including a list of Backword Books’ books, please visit the website linked above.

Where else can I find you online? Do you have any videos or podcasts?

I have put out several videos, including book trailers, video blogs, and an animated short. You can view them on my YouTube channel. I’ve also participated in several audio and video web chats and interviews. For a complete list of those, please see the Articles and Interviews page.

What is Waiting for Spring about?

Official tagline/synopsis: It tells the story of Tess Dyer, an emotionally repressed woman who struggles with deep seated feelings of worthlessness. It takes readers beyond the Maine tourists see, beyond lighthouses and lobster and rocky beaches, and drops them instead into a rural town whose citizens battle addiction, abuse, poverty, and heartbreak, yet push onward with stubbornness and humor.

What it’s really about is…well, it’s honest to goodness slice of life reading, with all of life’s beauty and horror and joy and pain. It’s about finding and losing love; about making mistakes and causing people pain, and about working toward redemption. It’s about confronting and dealing with life’s problems and pain head on, before you get buried by them. It’s about what happens when you don’t do that.

What kind of a book is it?

I call it gritty commercial literary fiction.

I began writing it out of frustration. I was growing tired of the cookie-cutter chick-lit books in the stores, with their urban settings and shoe-obsessed protagonists. There’s so much attention paid to where these characters shop and what brands of clothes they buy there and what kind of shoes they wear, and not enough to the actual characters. It was hard for me to relate to these women, or to care about them.

And even the books that are set in rural areas rarely depict the areas and people accurately, because most of them are written by people who live in the city. They might drive through the sticks to get to the lake or the coast while they’re on vacation, but that’s about it. They don’t live and work and breathe in these small towns, so too often their characters are stereotypical: Big Town Fish Out Of Water, Oppressed Small Town Girl Who Longs For Bigger Things, or Ignorant Hick. I wanted to shine a light on what we’re really like out here.

Although I consider the novel’s themes of loss, love, and redemption to be universal, its narrator is a woman, and it is definitely a woman’s story, so I wasn’t sure if it would resonate with male readers. Fortunately, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the positive response. Some men have told me that they see their wives or mothers or sisters in Tess, and that the novel has given them some insight into the struggles of those women. Others can relate with the men in Tess’s lives, and share their bemusement and frustration as she makes the same mistakes again and again. But the best response I’ve received from a male reader was in the form of an Amazon review: "As I got into the book, I was leaning toward classifying it as ‘chick lit,’ but it's more than that. It's just literature. Period."

Who is your favorite Waiting for Spring character?

Although I love Tess - although I love all of the characters, really - I think Zeke is my favorite. It might be because of how he was ‘born.’ As I started writing, I knew I’d need a confidante for Tess. Because of her sour relationship with her mother, Tess is almost incapable of befriending other women, so a female confidante wasn’t going to work. But she views most men as either an authority/father figure or a sexual conquest - or both - so giving her a platonic male friend was just as difficult a prospect.

The only way to solve the predicament was to make Tess’s confidante a gay man...in fact, he had to be a man whom she knew was gay before she even met him, so she wouldn't immediately try to seduce him. Thus Zeke was born, not as ‘the gay best friend,’ but rather as the only possible friend Tess could have had at that point in her life.

Because of this, I felt a very keen responsibility not to settle for any stereotypes, but to make Zeke a three-dimensional character, and he became very real to me. At the same time, I was very happy to have the opportunity to shine a spotlight on the kinds of difficulties gay men (and women) experience in rural communities.

Who is your favorite fictional character, overall? (in the reading you've done)

That is a tough one, but I can narrow it down to two: Bertie Wooster, from the P.G. Wodehouse novels and short stories, and Harriet Vane, from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

I do, right here. It’s called Ingenious Title To Appear Here Later (Clever Tagline Soon To Come). More than three years after its inception, both title and tagline are still forthcoming.

I am working on what I call a "sort-of sequel" right now. I'll have more information about it soon.

Can I ask you more questions? How can I get in touch?

If there’s one thing I love, it’s answering questions about my writing. You can contact me through my blog, by leaving comments there, or by emailing me at rjkeller.wfs@gmail.com