Chris Tebbetts's new YA novel is Me Myself & Him.From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Me, Myself, and Him, and for your character Chris?Visit Chris Tebbetts's website.
A: The prologue of this book—where Chris passes out doing whippets behind the ice cream store where he works—is autobiographical. I first wrote about it as a short piece of creative nonfiction but then started to wonder what might happen to a character in the same position.
My first idea was that it would be a traditional novel, following Chris (who I named after myself, to reflect the combination of memoir and fiction I was using), who gets shipped off to live with his famous but difficult father in California for the summer as a result of his drug-fueled accident.
However, as I pecked away at that idea, and wrote… and wrote…and wrote… I just couldn’t seem to get Chris on that plane to California. It was like the story wanted him to stay home in Ohio, and I wasn’t quite sure why.
After some further writing and exploring, that notion eventually led me to writing a dual narrative where we follow Chris through two different outcomes. In one thread of the story, Chris is busted for...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue