{Tour} Finding Mr. Brightside by Jay Clark (Interview + Giveaway)

***INTERVIEW***

Hi, Jay. Thanks so much for talking with us today! We are so excited about Finding Mr. Brightside and can’t wait to share more about it with our readers and get to know you better. Let’s get started!

The part where Juliette revises 1 Corinthians (in a good way, I swear!). I’m also for all the romantically antisocial moments between Abram and Juliette in the basement. If there’s a nook or cranny within a setting, I’ll find it and temporarily trap my characters there. But I also enjoyed taking J & A out of their comfort zones via road trip, impromptu karaoke face-off, etc. I couldn’t be any more all over the place with this answer if I tried, my bad.

First I’d try a pickup line to break the ice, something desperate like: “Hi, I’m the author of Finding Mr. Brightside, so I feel qualified to say that your beauty is practically writing itself right now.” Once that goes over weirdly, I’d recite the following haiku:

Adderall girl runs from love
Paxil won’t stop him
From running after like wind

Ding! I’m much more convincing outside of elevators, wanna grab a venti Starbucks or something

Warning: Aspiring writers should probably do the exact opposite of the following routine:

• Listen to a song or two—something with depressing lyrics but an inspirational beat.
• Think about how sitting is the new smoking and my chair is killing me softly with its swivel.
• Start freewriting like a second grader until I can’t hear my mind making comments, like, “You should download an app!” and, in Rod Stewart’s voice, “Have I told … you lately … that this idea is never going to work?”
• Enjoy the perfect feeling of it all coming together in some sort of cosmic, hard-to-explain way (until it all falls apart again in a few minutes).

You shouldn’t be allowed to write anything longer than two questionably double-spaced pages until you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Until then, you’ll remain a danger to yourself and others. Here’s a summary that won’t do it justice: Write what you love, milk your childhood for all it’s worth, whoa, whoa, whoa, one step at a time, write everything down (keep a notepad by your bed, etc.), commit to writing a not-too-overwhelming # of words each day (250-500 is a healthy number, leave the 3k-per-day’s to Stephen King for now), be kind to yourself.

Park (of Eleanor & Park) shows up for tennis team tryouts, and Abram holds out a bag of whatever he’s eating—Fiery Buffalo Doritos?—and encourages him to “pull up a bleacher and not stretch with me.” Meanwhile, Juliette and Eleanor run into each other at a nearby Starbucks and … nothing happens, they don’t really trust each other’s motives.

Thank you! I remember being 19 or 20, going to the university clinic in a bad mood about something unimportant (burnt popcorn smell in dorm?), and walking away with several sketchy sampler boxes of Paxil. Although I think/hope Paxil serves some sort of medical purpose, it didn’t serve mine very well. Took me a few years, 20 lbs, and some outside perspective to realize I’d taken a wrong turn. I liked the idea of two people helping each other get through a similar ordeal (under much more complicated circumstances) … at the beach.

Definitely nervous. In particular, I wanted to give the issues the respect they deserved but not tiptoe around them so much that they became all-consuming black holes of seriousness that sucked away everyone’s sense of humor. (The side effects do that enough as it is.)

Not sure if they qualify as under-appreciated or not, but these are the books that have resonated most with me in recent years:

• The Story of My Life, Jay McInerney
• The Pleasure of My Company, Steve Martin
• Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
• The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle

The question: Will you go to prom with me?
The answer: Girl, I thought you’d never ask, pick you up at 7, I’ll wear my best gray hoodie

Funny girls. Girls who make/laugh at inappropriate jokes. Girls who make/laugh at bad puns. Girls who are firm on the outside and warm on the inside like a chocolate chip cookie and quietly crave chocolate chip cookies but only around certain people, gotta earn her trust. Girls in running/tennis gear that doesn’t look like the tags were cut off recently. Girls that listen to audiobooks while they’re running. Girls that read, end of story. I could swoon on forever….