A bored employee in a rock star’s office begins an online relationship with a fan in the guise of his boss and sets off a chain of events he cannot control.

Indentity Theft by Laura Lee

Laura Lee is the author of 15 books with such publishers as Harper Collins, Reader’s Digest, Lyons Press and Running Press. Laura Lee is an amazing writer, best known for humorous reference such as The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation, which sold 85,000 copies for Black Dog and Leventhal. Her first novel was Angel published by Itineris Press. The San Francisco Chronicle has said of her work: “Lee’s dry, humorous tone makes her a charming companion… She has a penchant for wordplay that is irresistible.”

Today we have the priviledge to host her on our blog and we have a lot of questions to ask her, such as her Pubslush campaign for Indentity Theft, her upcoming contemporary, fiction novel.

• Well, Laura Lee who exactly are you?

 “Who am I? That is an interesting question considering the theme of the novel. (Identity and loss of identity.) Americans tend to answer this question by reciting their resumes. I am a full-time writer and the author of about 15 books. Most of them traditionally published. I was raised in suburban America but moved quite a bit. I spent my junior high school years in Bowling Green, Ohio, which is a bit of a small town when you take the university out of the equation. The essence of who I am may be an introverted person who likes to observe and reflect on human nature. I automatically reflect on things verbally. I don’t know whether that is nature, nuture, or habit.”

• How did you decide to pursue a writing career?

“I came to it by default. I studied theater, but never had any success at that. Then I pursued a career in radio. I did that for three or four years before I burned out. I had already started doing some writing on the side when I worked in radio. It was clear I had an aptitude because whenever I would write something I would get this great feedback. After a brief period working in Borders Books and Music, I moved to New York and got a journalism job with no formal background on the strength of clips. It is a shame there are not more of these jobs around because working for a newspaper and having to produce copy every day is a great practice. It hones your skills. You can’t sit around waiting for the muse, you just have to get to work.”

• Was getting published hard?

 “I had the great advantage that my father was a writer. He pushed me. I mentioned to him in passing that I had an idea for a book, and he would not let up on me until I had created a proposal and sent it out to publishers. My first book proposal was accepted within a month. So I had the advantage of an in-house mentor to show me how to do proposals and queries and how to research markets. Whenever I did, initially, doors opened fairly easily. I was lucky. From 1999-2001 I put out five books with increasingly large advances. The last in that run, The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation sold 85,000 copies. This all set me up with unrealistic expectations, I fear. I expected things to continue at that pace and to be as easy.”

• Are your characters based on people you know?

“No. I never write fiction that is autobiographical. My earliest attempts at fiction were fairly autobiographical. They were also terrible. I find that I need distance from my subject to make it into a story. There are things, here and there, that are drawn from my life but they are combined in ways that make them different. By the time I’ve finished a novel, even the things that are the most autobiographical stop seeming like my life story and they become part of the fiction.”

• What genre are your books?

“Identity Theft, if it is funded, will be my second novel. I have a hard time assigning a genre to either of my novels. Angel is literary fiction. Identity Theft is contemporary fiction with some humor.”

• Which of your books is your favorite?“I always like the one I am working on the best. Right now Identity Theft is my favorite. I would really like to share it with people so I hope your readers will look at the Pubslush page and consider ordering the book. The pre-orders will allow me to produce it to professional quality. With this crowdfunding platform, only projects that reach their goals are funded. It is hard to get people excited about a book in a short period of time and to get them to act and buy the book. It is especially hard with a book that doesn’t exist yet. I’ve put a sample chapter on the web page and a synopsis. I hope that my enthusiasm for the characters will rub off and people will take a chance on it.”

• Do you have a specific writing routine?

“It is different depending on whether I am writing non-fiction or fiction. With the fiction, what tends to happen is that I have an idea and I work at it in fits and stabs. I will write a bit and then find that it is not working, and I’ll set it aside and work on other things. Then at some point something will bring the idea back and I will work on it again. I may finish it, or I may get stuck again. Every time I start and set it aside, I come back to it with a new perspective. So the story grows and evolves. It is a process of layering. I never write from beginning to end. I write scenes, and then when I have a certain number of them, I string them together and look at what is missing and what needs to be added or subtracted.”

• What are your current projects?

“The audio version of my first novel Angel should be coming out this week or next. I am pleased with it. My main focus is Identity Theft. It is a novel I have been working on for 15 years or so. I think it has the suspense, intrigue, depth and humor that I want to put out there. I have gotten excellent feedback from those who have read it so far, and it would be a shame to keep it under wraps. I need votes of confidence from readers to make it a reality. I hope you will visit the Pubslush page and consider backing it. The funding level is the cost of the book, so it is essentially an advance order.”

This is Laura Lee, an amazing young lady and a fantastic author. You can check this out yourselves, just visit https://pubslush.com/project/3991 and read excerpts from her upcoming novel, Indentity Theft.

Here is a snippet:

Spider Under Glass Ethan Penn’s desk was right under the gold record. It hung a bit crooked, no matter how many times he tried to adjust it. He had some ideas about blue tack, it worked on his posters at home, but he never got around to bringing the stuff in. More annoying was the spider. At some point it had crawled under the glass and died. It had been there, preserved in the golden grooves since Ethan had gotten his job, about four months before. He looked at the dead bug every day.

What do you think? We say “Let’s help Laura Lee get this book published!”