Q&A With 'Mayfly' Author Jeff Sweat

1. Which scene in your book was your favorite to write? I loved any scene that let me looked at my favorite place, Los Angeles, from the lens of a far-off future. But my favorite scene, my most wrenching scene, was the scene with Apple and the Betterment. There was so much love and joy and loss in one place that it almost physically hurt to write.
2. What is your favorite character in your book? In all books? My characters tend to be kids that, however flawed, I would have liked to have known when I was a teen, that I’d be proud to have as a kid of my own. But I think I like Pico the best—he doesn’t fit into this world of his, he knows it, and he simply doesn’t care. My favorite character in all books is Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
3. What does your office look like? My office looks like my wife’s and my worlds thrown together, in a shade of pink that neither of us like. My half has an unplayed guitar, several yo-yos, and a rack of my black-framed glasses, which I buy in bulk from China. My wife’s half is full of knitting projects and design books, and her half always overtakes the other.
4. What were your favorite books to read as a child and teenager? I read anything I could get my hands on, from comic books to junk novels to slightly less junky novels. The ones that had an impact on me were the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, S is for Space by Ray Bradbury, and The Daybreakers by Louis L’Amour.
5. If you could spend one day inside any literary world/with any literary character, where and who would it be? The Golden Compass, with the armored polar bear, Iorek Byrnison. He doesn’t believe he has a soul, but somehow his Otherness tells us more about what it means to be human than any other character in the book.  
6. What’s next for you? There’s a whole world left in Mayfly, so I’ll be going there first. After that, I have a contemporary YA book based on my experience moving to New York for college, a couple of screenplays, and a sci-fi series that asks, “What if Europeans never came to America?”
7. What is your favorite literary quote? A line from The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “His dark eyes looked back so kind and nothing.” It’s evocative of a look and a feeling without ever really describing either. I liked it so much that a modified version made it into Mayfly.
8. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Write every day—not just because of creating good habits, but because when you write every day, the story never leaves you. Then new characters and plots emerge when you walk the dog, when you take a shower, when you’re thinking of nothing. Creativity tends to live along the margins, and you have to give it an opportunity to emerge.

Jeff’s life has been centered around the story—first as a journalist, then as a social media pioneer, and then as a public relations expert working with some of the top advertising agencies in the country. He uses his reporter’s training in every page of Mayfly, always coming back to the question: “What if…?” He grew up in Idaho as the middle of eight children—seven boys and one girl—and attended Columbia University in New York. 

Jeff lives in a big blue house beneath the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles with his wife Sunny and their three kids, two cats, a racing greyhound and a blue-tongued skink. He likes karaoke, motorcycles and carpentry. He was once shot in the head with a nail gun, which was not a big of a deal as it sounds. But it still hurt like crazy.