Welcome to our stop on M. Beth Bloom's Drain You blog tour. This tour is to celebrate the launch of Drain You. All tour stops can be found HERE or HERE.
Author Bio: "Bloom's first short story “Love And Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape” was featured in Story Quarterly and selected by Dave Eggers for inclusion in The Best American Nonrequired Reading: 2003 (Houghton-Mifflin), which he curates annually. Bloom is the founder of underground dance label 100% Silk (profiled here in LA Weekly) AND the producer/lead singer of the band LA Vampires (written up in The Guardian as well as Pitchfork and Fader). Her next book will be published through HarperTeen.
M. Beth lives on the east side of L.A. where she indulges in raw fooding, magazine subscribing, thrift shopping, Sunday matinee'ing, and ladies book clubbing."
OUaT: What was your favorite chapter (or part) to write and why?
My favorite chapter to write is always the first/second/most boring one. I love non-action, I love to ramble, I love just overt character development and dialogue. I always panic when I get deep into the plot or have to push towards a climax. I love beginnings, when it feels like the book could go anywhere, and you’re just setting everything up.
OUaT: How did you come up with the title?
I stole it from an awesome Nirvana song that supplied me with the appropriate double entendre of paranormal/vampire and 90’s grunge.
OUaT: What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What as been the best compliment?
The toughest criticism is never necessarily what you have to change, or add, or delete – it’s always when you thought you nailed it, unequivocally, and someone whose job it is to know about nailing it tells you you have not. Every writer would be screwed without a thoughtful, caring, professional editor. And I just believe that they’re there to make those tough calls and give me the real talk, so I say Bring It On. As for the best compliment? Someone recently said that they thought I wrote my lead female protagonist like a classic ‘bad boy,’ and I thought that was the coolest, most amazing thing to hear because I love subverting genre roles. I love an edge of feminism. Another great compliment is hearing that your book is funny, because I think it’s so cool and transcendent to make people laugh.
OUaT: As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
First I wanted to be a dentist, for absolutely no reason except that my dentist was nice and gave me toys. Then when I got sort of obsessed with being a smartie know-it-all I thought the only way to succeed would be as a famous writer. God knows why! haha
OUaT: What do you do to unwind and relax?
I used to drink a glass of Prosecco but now I’m just strict into jigsaw puzzling. I find that hyper-focus actually tires out my mind and makes me sleepy and shifts my working/writing mind into exhaustion. Which I need at the end of the day.
OUaT: What genre are you most comfortable writing?
I like genre-bending and genre-hybrids. I’d love to be hired or assigned to write a science fiction novel, or a murder mystery, and then just subvert the form and vomit myself and my interests and attitudes all over it. Isn’t that the best part of post-modernism? That we have so much to deconstruct and so many diagonal ways to write?
OUaT: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Yes. For readers and for people in the publishing business, I think we need to get over the idea of a character being ‘likable’ – I don’t think that should be the be-all end-all. I wish bold characters weren’t such turn offs. We’ve wrapped our mind around heroes and we’ve wrapped our mind around anti-heroes, but what about someone who’s just plain difficult, or obnoxious, or sarcastic, or hypocritical, selfish – all the things that so many wonderful people are! Shouldn’t this make a character MORE relatable, and more fun to get inside the mind of? I believe so.
OUaT: How much of your work is realistic?
I think in every sub-genre – especially paranormal/supernatural (which is not necessarily my expertise, but one I have dabbled in – for anything to be good and have depth and cut through a lot of the other silly nonsense on the shelves, it HAS to be based in reality. So, even if you’re writing a GHOST, that ghost has to have a personality of someone realistic. That’s how you write soulfully, and reach an audience. Readers are just looking to connect and see themselves in the characters. So I’d say everything I write is based in reality.
OUaT: Do you have to travel much concerning your book (s)?
I don’t actually like traveling, because I’m kind of a couch loner. But I’d love to temporarily live in Paris for six months and write a book set in the city. Basically just any excuse to get me back to Paris!
I stole it from an awesome Nirvana song that supplied me with the appropriate double entendre of paranormal/vampire and 90’s grunge.
OUaT: What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What as been the best compliment?
The toughest criticism is never necessarily what you have to change, or add, or delete – it’s always when you thought you nailed it, unequivocally, and someone whose job it is to know about nailing it tells you you have not. Every writer would be screwed without a thoughtful, caring, professional editor. And I just believe that they’re there to make those tough calls and give me the real talk, so I say Bring It On. As for the best compliment? Someone recently said that they thought I wrote my lead female protagonist like a classic ‘bad boy,’ and I thought that was the coolest, most amazing thing to hear because I love subverting genre roles. I love an edge of feminism. Another great compliment is hearing that your book is funny, because I think it’s so cool and transcendent to make people laugh.
OUaT: As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
First I wanted to be a dentist, for absolutely no reason except that my dentist was nice and gave me toys. Then when I got sort of obsessed with being a smartie know-it-all I thought the only way to succeed would be as a famous writer. God knows why! haha
OUaT: What do you do to unwind and relax?
I used to drink a glass of Prosecco but now I’m just strict into jigsaw puzzling. I find that hyper-focus actually tires out my mind and makes me sleepy and shifts my working/writing mind into exhaustion. Which I need at the end of the day.
OUaT: What genre are you most comfortable writing?
I like genre-bending and genre-hybrids. I’d love to be hired or assigned to write a science fiction novel, or a murder mystery, and then just subvert the form and vomit myself and my interests and attitudes all over it. Isn’t that the best part of post-modernism? That we have so much to deconstruct and so many diagonal ways to write?
OUaT: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Yes. For readers and for people in the publishing business, I think we need to get over the idea of a character being ‘likable’ – I don’t think that should be the be-all end-all. I wish bold characters weren’t such turn offs. We’ve wrapped our mind around heroes and we’ve wrapped our mind around anti-heroes, but what about someone who’s just plain difficult, or obnoxious, or sarcastic, or hypocritical, selfish – all the things that so many wonderful people are! Shouldn’t this make a character MORE relatable, and more fun to get inside the mind of? I believe so.
OUaT: How much of your work is realistic?
I think in every sub-genre – especially paranormal/supernatural (which is not necessarily my expertise, but one I have dabbled in – for anything to be good and have depth and cut through a lot of the other silly nonsense on the shelves, it HAS to be based in reality. So, even if you’re writing a GHOST, that ghost has to have a personality of someone realistic. That’s how you write soulfully, and reach an audience. Readers are just looking to connect and see themselves in the characters. So I’d say everything I write is based in reality.
OUaT: Do you have to travel much concerning your book (s)?
I don’t actually like traveling, because I’m kind of a couch loner. But I’d love to temporarily live in Paris for six months and write a book set in the city. Basically just any excuse to get me back to Paris!
Author: M. Beth Bloom
Reading Level: YA
Released: July 24th 2012
Publisher: Harper Teen
Available: Amazon
• BN.comSummary: "Summer. The 90s. The rich, sun-bleached neighborhoods of the Los Angeles canyons. Enter Quinlan Lacey, a cool, bored, sarcastic, sexy 17-year old with a dull part-time video store job and a mild case of teen ennui. That is, until she meets the alluring, River Phoenix-esque James, and realizes the hills are alive with the undead. Inspired more by the early, dry L.A. short stories of Bret Easton Ellis than the current crop of serialized vampire fiction, the supernatural grunge romance, Drain You, narrates the headaches and heartbreaks Quinn undergoes in her quest to stay sane and cool and in love and alive."
Publisher's Weekly review (linked) with an excerpt: "Bloom debuts with a languid, stylish novel that reads like a love letter to cult vampire flicks like The Lost Boys, the work of Francesca Lia Block, and Southern California in the 1990s."
As part of this fun tour, you also have a chance at winning these great prizes: -5 Copies of 'Drain You' signed by the Author, -$50 Credit at Wasteland (Quinn's favorite store), -Pages from Quinn's Notebook (pics attached), -10 'Drain You' Bookmarks handmade by Quinn, -10 - 90's mixtapes curated and created by Quinn
Just enter below the rafflecopter!
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