Taste Testing Tuesdays with Author Joshua Braff!

Hi there everyone!

Welcome back to Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers.

Today, we're taking our usual Taste Testing Tuesdays post in a slightly different direction as I share a guest post from the author behind the curiously fun Fiction book, The Daddy Diaries.  Now, before you scratch your head TOO much wondering why you haven't heard of this title (or at least seen it on my site) until now, it's simple really...I've not reviewed it quite yet.  Call it a work in waiting if you will, but you won't be waiting much longer as it's just on the horizon (so stay tuned!).  Anywho...

As an early introduction of sorts, I thought today's post would work REALLY well.  How so?  Well you see, it's all about what's real in The Daddy Diaries!  That's right.  You know you always wonder just how much of "real life" goes into an author's fictional work, well here's your chance to find out! Take it away Mr. Braff!

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What's real in The Daddy Diaries?

...by Josh Braff

It’s easier to assess the patterns of a certain literary voice when there are a few books to assess. I too can see what it is I’m doing that’s “working” in this form. I take my own truth or the truths of people I know, and mix them with fictional occurrences so as to shape a story that reflects the emotional causeways of the human experience. My family moved to Florida from Oakland when my wife took a job in St. Petersburg, near Tampa. She’d go off to work, I’d take the kids to school and find a Starbucks to write bits of prose about being a dad. Maybe I’d write funny things my daughter said or talk about my son’s huge feet. Bake sales, toilet overflow, lizard in the mailbox. Parenting cannot be predicted. It’s an organism unto its own and needs to be lived, seen and smelled in the NOW to be realized wholly. I wrote and wrote and wrote. In time these entries would form into well-oiled chapters, which I then stacked like a tower. I’d then read the entire tower as objectively as possible and choose how to restack them so they flowed naturally.  

Day in, day out, the characters grow in dimension and I make them speak to each other. If it all works well it’s the characters that tell me the story. I use less of an outline and more of a trust that the setting I’ve chosen and the people I’ve built will evoke meaning, texture, familial recognition, maybe even existential thought to the reader. So it’s a yes and a no as far as the family being my family and the story being mine. I also draw from things my friends and acquaintances have told me about their children and their experiences in child rearing. Where it might be easy to believe that the son in the story is my son, there are many things about “Alex” that are very unlike my boy. My characters are often amalgamations of my observations.

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About the author....

I grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and went to Columbia High School. I graduated from NYU in ’91 with a BS in Education. In 1995 I entered St. Mary’s College of California. There I received an MFA in creative writing/fiction. I published three short stories during this time in national literary journals before I wrote a first novel called Digging Suburbia. I was never able to sell it but acquired my first literary agent with the book. I wrote The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green after my son turned 6 months old. The book would have three publishing offers right after I finished it two years later. I started writing Peep Show after hearing a story about a man who was an orthodox Jew, living in Long Island, who commuted to Times Square to run peep houses. The book turned out to be a complex ride about familial relationships and the tangles that disenchantment and history and self-absorption can cause. I live in California with my wife of almost 20 years and my two children, Henry and Ella. I love the game of baseball and played until I turned 40. I also love acrylic/oil painting in the Color Field genre. I’m most inspired by the painters, Barnett Newman, Dan Christensen, Kenneth Noland and Mark Rothko. I also play the guitar and drums.

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Special thanks to author Josh Braff and Meg over at Tandem Literary for the chance to share this post with all of you.  (THANKS!)  For more information on this title, the author, or what's on the horizon, please feel free to click through the links provided above.  This title is available now, so be on the lookout for it on a bookstore shelf or virtual retailer of your choosing....and remember, stay tuned for the review coming soon to a blog near you (as in THIS blog ^_^)!

Until next time...happy reading!