J.P. Smith's Blog
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May.08.2010
The more I write—let’s be frank: the older I get—the more I find myself reaching back into my own life not so much for material to write about, but for the scenery of plot and narrative. For all of my years as a novelist I’ve really never used the materials of my own life, partly out of respect for...
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Apr.17.2010
In the summer of 1967 (and for part of the summer of ’68) I worked part-time at an East Village store on 10th Street called Paranoia. What had started out as a hangout (a college friend’s cousin owned the place) turned into employment. There were four rooms: the front room, which contained...
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Mar.17.2010
The time has come once again for a script of mine to go out to producers. This is a script I wrote in just under three weeks, then revised according to notes sent by my manager. But “going out” means it’s finished and ready to be seen by the eyes of Those Who Hold the Pursestrings. You have to be...
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Feb.03.2010
It began as a river of electricity working its way up his legs, into the pit of his stomach, through his heart and finally settling to simmer in his head, where it would cook and bubble for the next eight hours, wreaking havoc with the primordial life that clung to the corners and corridors of a...
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Dec.17.2009
When I was three years old I was looked after by a woman of Welsh extraction, not because my mother was incapable of dealing with the difficult child I must have been, but because back then children of certain social strata had nursemaids; what today we’d more glamorously call governesses or live-...
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Dec.04.2009
Some years ago I began work on a novel about a boy growing up in Paraguay with a father who had once been a Nazi and was now in hiding. It was to be called Eldorado, and I recently discovered the mere 37 pages I had written of it tucked away in a folder on my laptop’s hard disk. I had great plans...
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Nov.25.2009
One of the things I discovered when I first came to England to start my writing career in the late 70s was that many writers there were not limited to, say, being a novelist or a playwright. In fact, I knew this in advance, or at least had a sense of it, and so when we settled in London in our...
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Nov.21.2009
As I get older I find that I read less and less contemporary fiction and either go to older works I’d overlooked or had simply put off reading, or return to books I’d read years ago. Doing the latter is always enlightening, I think. The person we were when we first read the book is not the same...
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Oct.09.2009
So a month has nearly passed, and since that time I’ve received and signed a contract to write the script. In fact, I’ve already written a first draft. In a way, this is my second assignment, my first—a much more difficult one—being to adapt my first novel The Man from Marseille as a screenplay; a...
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Sep.12.2009
I haven’t blogged lately because, frankly, I haven’t had a great deal to say. I notice in reading other people’s blogs elsewhere than on Red Room, that there’s an awful lot of blogging about things such as What I Ate for Breakfast and What Band I like at the Moment. I suppose I could touch upon...
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Aug.06.2009
I had no sooner finished my little indie screenplay—written solely for my own amusement, really, and a script I’ll one day offer to small production companies, as it’s one of those quirky little low-budget projects that, if—big if—actually produced, sometimes even does quite well. “The Squid and...
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Jun.16.2009
We live in a world where our encounters with celebrity are becoming more and more commonplace, or at least where we believe we’ve seen someone, as in China Miéville’s novel The City & the City, where one sees and then unsees, for fear of trespassing on a forbidden second city occupying the same...
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Jun.03.2009
When I was a boy I was put on a train and shipped off to my first summer camp for eight weeks. This was not such an unusual occurrence back then; in fact one had no choice: it was either two months or nothing. Considering my sisters had willingly and happily done this since they were very young was...
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May.09.2009
A good friend of mine, an Englishman based in Vienna and a damned good screenwriter, has been urging me to take the material from my last blog ("Fly Me to the Moon") and turn it into a script. Over the years when I've told that same story, others have also urged me to do something more...
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Apr.25.2009
In my early teens, perhaps as a means of escaping a distinctly wacky homelife, I joined an organization devoted to the study of UFOs. While other boys were studying baseball statistics or even, god forbid, doing schoolwork, I was reading accounts of sightings, visitations and--though these were...
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About J.P.
I was born in New York City and raised five minutes from the Bronx. Once I'd completed my graduate work I returned to teach at my alma mater, Scarborough School. During my four years there I completed a novel a year and, because in the Seventies it was...
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