Dear readers,

Prepare to be knocked off your socks!!!!!

Why?

Because James Cudney alias Jay author of Watching Glass Shatter and Father Figure agreed to asnwer my questions and, true to his writing, delivered a masterpiece!

He tells you ALL, the naked truth! And he played my game: writing some parts like he would a novel.

Results?

He sweated blood and tears for three hours to answer!!!!

Of course it gave an incredible and in depth interview but far too long to publish in one single post! He deserves to have your attention all along (mind you he took three hours to answer) and not finish with glazed eyes….

So we decided to publish in pieces.

One part every day for seven day.

In memory of Jay’s 365 days challenge 😀

Today is “Introduction day” and “Childhood day”.

Enjoy!

Introduction

Hi Jay,

Thank you so much for agreeing to answer my questions!
You are welcome! I always enjoy chatting with you, and this style and format just makes it even more fun.
I loved Father Figure and I am thrilled to get to ask you all this!
You’ll see that the questions are in bold but I do give some context.
Please only answer those you feel comfortable as I am sometimes really bold and could maybe push and probe some wounds. I really don’t want you to feel obliged to answer.
I’m an open book, so I’m sure everything will be fine to answer. You can eliminate some responses if it gets too long-winded.
You’ll see many questions about you and your past then about your work. I believe in getting to know the person behind the pen even if your 365 days challenge helped with this!
But others might not know you yet.

As you’ve gifted me with a wonderful and detailed interview we’ll make it into an interview saga kind of your 365 days or your family saga! Posting every day some pieces till we reach the end!

First post Saturday June 9th

I bet you are all wanting to know how little Jay was! Was he an unruly kid? And what room did he have as a teenager (smelly socks under the bed or pristine bedroom)?
Was he like poor Harry Potter in his small kingdom or like a King?

How was your childhood? Are you an only child? Did you have siblings to play with or hate? Did you always live in NY? What did your dad and mom do as work? Etc.

I am an only-child, so I lost out on having siblings to either love or torture me. I do wish I had brothers and sisters, as I love big families… perhaps that’s why I tend to write about them. My best friend lived next door to me for 20+ years, and we saw each other every day. She and I were essentially brother and sister from different parents. I also have ~15 cousins that I saw regularly, and a few practically lived with me, so it felt a bit like I had siblings. It’s different now that we’ve all grown up, but we still get together when we can.

My family has been in New York for over a hundred years, but my paternal grandparents moved to Florida in the late 1970s. After my parents married, they visited and subsequently moved to Fort Myers, which is where I was born and lived for a few years. When my maternal grandmother got sick, we moved back to New York and I lived in the same house my mom grew up in. She was a stay-at-home mom until I was in school full-time, then she worked in a school administration office. When I left school, she took a job running a doctor’s office and has worked there for many years. My father was a network administrator in telecommunications and aviation, so when you combine their two jobs, you essentially have the type of job I had when I was working full-time in previous years.

How were you as a child? Describe in 10 words.

Quiet, Organized, Picky, Shy, Curious, Afraid, Jealous, Competitive, Kind, Helpful

Did you already write in school? Won some contests? Did you have literature as your favorite class?

I wrote a lot as a child, but mostly in college is where I spent hours of my day writing. I won a few college awards. I was in the gifted track at school (that’s what they called it centuries ago, not my choice of words) but for some reason, I would always score perfect on mathematical and quantitative tests, but average on reading comprehension. The teachers or counselors told me that I read too fast and forgot things too quickly. Eh, that’s life, I say. You can’t win ‘em all, right?

 Describe your teenage room with your “writer” words. You are gifted with making me see the surroundings 😊 What was on the walls? On the desk? Music playing in the background? Scent from the kitchen? Noises from neighbors. Books on your shelf?

Okay, you didn’t tell me I had to work as part of these interview parameters. Let’s see… my room at 15… My house was on a large piece of property, so our neighbors weren’t very close; it was a converted summer bungalow set amidst former potato farms. In the 1950s when my grandparents purchased it, they were one of the first people in the neighborhood. Over the years when my mom grew up in the house and then I did a few decades later, my grandfather and father kept adding rooms. We ended up with a mix-match, sprawling ranch, but when I turned 13, my father wanted me to learn how to build things — I was in the books too much apparently! We dormered part of the front area and I lived in the attic. It was an early version of a man-cave, but I was not your typical resident. The walls were plain white, as I didn’t like color as a child. I was quite weird, as most will attest to. I had a platform bed made with formica, as my uncle was a carpenter and that was the style at the time. The desk and dressers were built into the lower part of the walls, but the ceilings were slanted and created tons of cozy nooks. The room was large, but I had nothing on the walls as they weren’t straight. It may be why I prefer a minimalist look in my own home now. The personality was in the books in lower book shelves and in my file cabinets. I kept spreadsheets and files to keep myself organized. What can I say, I was part gnome, part nerd! Everything was clean, simple, streamlined and in shades of grey. A psychiatrist would probably tell you that I still haven’t escaped my childhood, but it was a good one.

That’s it for today!

See you tomorrow!

Sophie