Blog Tour: When I'm Not Writing - Charles Benoit, Fall From Grace

Fall From Grace by Charles Benoit
May 8, 2012; HarperTeen


*First off, I need to apologize. This blog tour post should have gone up a month ago, but didn't because of a variety of factors. For those of you who missed the earlier tour, I hope this will remind you to check out Fall From Grace!

Summary

Grace always has a plan. There’s her plan to get famous, her plan to get rich, and—above all—her plan to have fun.

Sawyer has plenty of plans too. Plans made for him by his mother, his father, his girlfriend. Maybe they aren’t his plans, but they are plans.

When Sawyer meets Grace, he wonders if he should come up with a few plans himself. Plans about what he actually wants to be, plans to speak his own mind for a change, plans to maybe help Grace with a little art theft.

Wait a minute—plans to what?(courtesy of Goodreads)

When I'm Not Writing:

Please welcome Charles Benoit to Alison Can Read! .

For a guy who makes his living from writing, I spend a lot of time not doing it. In fact, not writing takes up most of my day. This is even more surprising when you consider that my day job is at an advertising agency, writing ads that drive consumers into a buying frenzy. My official title is Senior Copywriter and Producer, and you’d think that with those titles I’d be writing all day long. But no, there are always lots of meetings to go to and campaigns to be launched and squirt-gun fights to get in, so my time spent physically pumping keys is quite short. The time spent in the writing process (staring at a blank screen, talking out-loud to myself, deleting all the ideas that I thought were brilliant at 6am but that were truly horrible) is longer, but not as long as the time spent not writing.

I do a lot of not-writing at home, too. I play tenor sax in two bands—the first is this all-over-the-place cover band that we started at the ad agency. We’re working on songs for a summer show now, but the highlight will clearly be our cover of Attaboy Skip’s cover of Ghostbusters (which just so happens to be the song I picked)



The second band is called Some Ska Band and we play covers of ska songs from bands you’ve never heard of like The Specials, Rancid, Goldfinger, The Clash, Madness and Buck-O-Nine. The song we’re rehearsing right now that I’m most excited about is (Let’s Get Moving) Into Action by Skye Sweetnam and Tim Armstrong. (Unfortunately, embedding is disabled for this song). This is the song that inspired Fall From Grace (and you can read how and why HERE.

So am I a good tenor sax player? Let’s just say I’m an energetic one and leave it at that.

I’m also married and—surprise, surprise—my wife likes to spend some non-writing time with me as well. Preferably on some exotic beach in Thailand, but she’ll settle for the backyard patio as long I mix her a drink with an umbrella in it. Other non-writing activities include sleeping (daily), watching Mad Men (weekly) and going to the gym (theoretically).

So when do I write? I get a 90-minute block of time every day, usually from 6-7:30pm, to do nothing but write. No Facebook, no Epic Fail pictures, no YouTube videos. Just writing. Or staring at the screen. More of the latter, really.

Wow. I used to think of myself as a writer, but after this blog post, it turns out I’m much more of a non-writer. Which makes me wonder, how did I ever write 5 books? Now I’ve got that to not-write about. Thanks a lot, Alison.