Author Interview: AJ O’Connell

If you missed it on Monday, check out my review of my friend AJ’s new book on Kindle, Beware the Hawk. Without further adieu, the lady herself!

How did you come up with the idea for this piece? 

Beware the Hawk is more than a decade old, or at least the idea that sparked the novella is more than a decade old. I dreamed up the idea while I was riding the bus back and forth from Boston and New York to my parents’ home in Connecticut.

I was a year out of college, and working in Boston. I couldn’t afford a car so I spent a lot of time on public transit, listening to mix-tapes on my Walkman and daydreaming. This was a few years before Sept. 11, and there wasn’t any real security.  I remember thinking, as I lugged my bags through various stations and terminals that I could be carrying anything in my backpack. No one ever asked what was in there. I could very easily be a smuggler. Who would suspect me? (For the record, all I ever had in my backpack were dirty clothes, notebooks and my make-up bag.)

I started writing the story a few years later, maybe in 2003, when I was working with my first writers’ group. And then in 2004, for reasons I can’t remember, I abandoned it. This past summer, a friend, who was in that writing group and who now is an editor with Vagabondage Press asked if I’d consider submitting it for their novella series, so I spent part of this past summer revisiting and rewriting it.

How did you decide to make Beware the Hawk a novella length?  It’s sort of a crazy in-between form, but you manage it so well.

It is weird length, isn’t it? Actually, although it’s being marketed as a novella, Beware the Hawk is technically even shorter than a novella. Technically, it’s a novelette, which is a strange Victorian sort of length.

That said, I never intended to write Beware the Hawk as a novella. I went into the project thinking I was writing a novel, and I was actually under the impression that the story was much longer than it was. When I got close to the end I checked my page count, and it was 35 pages. That was a surprise.

I’ve always written short, though. I was the student who finished essay questions on tests early and who had a hard time writing the required number of pages for papers in high school and college. To make matters worse, I wrote Beware the Hawk while I was working as a reporter, and reporters are taught to pack as much information as they can into the smallest word-count possible. I guess some of that got into my fiction.

As you can probably tell by the length of this answer, I’ve overcome my tendency to write short.

Why did you decide not to name your narrator? Do you have a name that you call her in your head?

I’d better admit this up front: I’m a repeat offender with unnamed first-person protagonists. It’s a habit that drives some of my first readers nuts.

My reasoning is that, in first person, we see the story from inside of the protagonist’s head, and I doubt that most people include their own names in their daily stream of consciousness. I know that I don’t think of my own name that often, unless I’m signing something or introducing myself.  I also like the idea of leaving the narrator anonymous so that the reader can slip into his or her shoes.

That said, I felt that anonymity would be appropriate for this particular narrator. Her job as a courier for a secret agency requires anonymity, for one thing. For another, she’s driven to distance herself from her identity and from her past. I think she might prefer to forget her name.

I do have a name that I call her, though. It’s not her real name, but a nickname. My husband (who is completely unaware of pop music and didn’t know there was a singer of the same name) dubbed her “Pink.” [The character has pink hair.]

One of the characters turns out to be very different from what we think about him at first. Do you know who the character will turn out to be when you begin, or are you ever surprised?

I am often surprised by my characters. I usually start out with a sort of basic understanding about who the character is and what he or she is supposed to do. Then I start writing, and while I’m doing that, I find that the characters – particularly the secondary characters – evolve.

The character you’re talking about started much differently than he turned out. His basic role was the same, but his personality changed dramatically. That was a big surprise.

I love the amazing surprise ending! Did you know at the beginning that you wanted to end the story that way?

Not at all! I had a completely different ending all written and ready to go. In fact, I had written that ending before writing many of the other scenes. I loved it, and I was completely married to it for years. But this summer, when I was rewriting the novella, I began to realize that the ending couldn’t work; it didn’t make sense within the world I’d created. I felt badly about abandoning it, but it turned out that a new ending was exactly what the story needed.

Can you talk a little about other projects you’re writing at the moment?  Can we expect any more short stories/novellas, or are you concentrating in your novel?

I am working on a couple of literary short stories right now which I’m hoping to get out to journals in the next month or so. After that, my plan is to immerse myself in revisions for my novel, which is a story about a drag queen who is struggling to balance her ambitions with his desire to be a good son to his ailing mother. I’m hoping to have the revisions done by this summer.

I’ve also gotten requests for a Beware the Hawk sequel. I’m not sure if I’ll do one, but I am playing with some ideas.

What writers do you love that specifically inspired elements of Beware the Hawk?

I think that Pink’s voice comes from a lot of the genre reading I did when I was young. When I was in middle school, I went through this phase where my mom and I were reading the same mysteries. We’d pass them back and forth and talk about them. I read a lot of Sue Grafton and Susan Conant and other Janet Evanovich-type writers, whose work featured hard-boiled, smart-mouthed female protagonists. The idea that a woman could be as tough (and as foul mouthed) as a male detective pleased and inspired me.

The plot was influenced by the noir I read in college, which included a lot of Raymond Chandler’s work. The world and the premise of Beware the Hawk was very much influenced John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8. I was intrigued, when I read that book, by the image of a city as a jungle in which a small-town girl could lose herself and become someone else, to her peril.

I think Daphne du Maurier should also be mentioned. Her novel, Rebecca, is to blame for my unnamed-protagonist addiction. I read the book as a teenager, and I was blown away by her decision not to name her protagonist, while naming the book for a dead character. That was a bold choice. I’m still blown away by it.