Author Interview with TR Simmons ~ New Release: Crushing – #blog #wrpbks

Please help me welcome today’s guest, TR Simmons with his new book Crushing, released November 15, 2023 through The Wild Rose Press

Please tell us a little about yourself, where are you from? Where do you live now? Family? Pets?

I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, also known as, The Hammer for its long-standing industrial base with Steel Mills and manufacturing. It is a port city at the most south western tip of Lake Ontario.

Hamilton has been home for most of my life; although, I travelled and live in other places in my youth. I went to university in Ottawa. On two occasions, I froze my butt off doing construction work in the north to earn enough money for a couple of European backpacking trips. For over forty years I’ve been exploring parts of Canada and the United States on motorcycles. I especially like riding in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I didn’t really settle down until I was thirty. The idea that I should get married came to me while racing a storm-front on a vintage Suzuki between Alberta and Saskatchewan. By the time a made Regina, it had turned into a full-blown tornado.

Three years later, I met a Korean foreign student who was attending the local college in Hamilton to learn English. I took her to a Valentine’s Day party a week later.  Then, after a trip to Seoul to meet her parents, we decided to get married that very summer. We’ve raised two rambunctious boys and two cats. The boys played football all the way up to varsity level. The cats keep the mice out of our Edwardian home. I took over the family wedding business and did a couple of terms on the local School Board. Kyoung-Ju spent many years running marathons and owns and operates a hair salon. We just celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and we’ve managed to build a pretty good life in Hamilton.

Where did you get the idea for ‘Crushing’?

My wife and children inspired the story. Our boys were born in 1999 and in 2003. Little did we know that by the time they hit high school the burgeoning social media age would be upon all of us. Many of the pressures experienced by my protagonist, Atarah, were similar to what my children and their friends experienced. In Crushing, the supporting characters and school culture is an off-the-wall parody of what school might be like if social media became more entrenched than true reality. Even today, it is difficult to have a completely private social relationship. For youth, the drive for external praise and popularity can be overwhelming to the point that school-life and social media become seamless.

Why did you choose this genre (is it something you’ve written in before)?

I have always been interested in science fiction, paranormal, and romantic stories because they allow me free reign to world build. Crushing is the first novel I’ve published, but it is not the first novel I’ve written. My writing crosses genres of Sci-fi, paranormal, and romance. I think there is a romantic aesthetic in everything we experience, good or bad. It is at the heart of our emotions. I also like to explore how the human condition is affected using concepts associated with AI, human intelligence, consciousness, and love. Crushing was my first YA novel because I thought the setting and the story’s youthful perspective demanded it. Contemporary youth culture is difficult to pin down. It is always in a state of flux. This can make a YA novel out-dated very quickly. Sci-fi and fantasy novels free an author from contemporary norms and lingo/slang so that they can invent their own. The author must still tell a compelling story the reader can identify with.

Was there anything unusual, any anecdote about this book, the characters, title, process, etc, you’d like to share?

I usually write in the evenings. It is the most emotive part of the day for me. I need to feel the same emotions that I’m writing. It is sometimes helpful to put on a record and play music that conjures those same feelings. By the time I finish a manuscript the protagonist will have one or two songs that sum up their overall vibe.

I don’t plot my stories before writing. I imagine a world or a place in my head, and from there the characters emerge. I work the details out in my mind through the course of a day, so that it pours out when I sit down to write. Although this process gives me notions of what to write, my characters often have other ideas that transmit from my subconscious while I’m writing. I have learned to concede to their wishes. If I try and direct my character too much, I always hit a dead end. It is uncanny the way my characters tie up even the most obscure plot points by the end of the story. In Crushing, I did not know how it would resolve until I wrote the ending.

 How much of Crushing is realistic?

Predicting what the world could be like four decades requires the writer to form linkages with our present situation. For Crushing, I predicted that the cultural and racial mixing of families, along with advancements in gene modifications of children before they are born will make racist sentiments appear even more irrational and fade from cultures. At the same time, other aspects relating to passive identities, lifestyle and sexuality might become more socially gray. This is an underlining theme in the book. Identity is found in what motivates a person to choose to do one thing over another, and not found within the veneer of personas.

Throughout human history, technology has always been the biggest driver of cultural change. I predict in forty years we can expect AI will still be reflective of  humanity and so, become the most powerful institution in people’s lives; especially, if the machine’s general purpose is to garner human happiness (a conundrum all on its own).

Are your characters based on real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?

My protagonist, Atarah has many similarities to my wife, Kyoung-Ju who is a tomboy, was a competitive taekwondo blackbelt, a marathon runner, and she is now my personal trainer to offset the hours I spend sitting at my desk writing.

Every other character is a collection of diverse human traits I’ve sewn together from meeting so many different people from different places. Since my children are mixed, I’m privy to their unique points of view and experiences. Their peer groups are also socially and culturally diverse. I see them as the future.

Planning weddings for all kinds and types of couples also provides me with perspectives on the uniqueness of every person. Despite this, everyone still suffers from the human condition, which should be a uniting feature of our species.

What book have you read that you wish you had written?

I am an avid reader of most genres from almost any era. Science fiction/paranormal books are my favourite to read, so I have to pick, Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Writing a story from the point of view of an AI with very limited parameters and design capabilities requires incredible imagination. The novel has a wonderful story arc and I highly recommend it to readers.

How did your interest in writing originate? 

My mother tells me I’ve been writing stories even before I knew how to read and write. She collected pages of squiggly lines that I called my stories when I was very young. My stories became more cogent when I got older and had to sit in church. I learned to escape from the boredom by making up adventures in my head. Over time, this design process merged with lucid dreaming, and I would sometimes become so immersed that I’d start acting out the story in the church pew.

I enjoyed creative writing and essay writing in school. I wrote the first draft of what would become a political treatise for an AI control solution while in Athen’s Greece in 1994. I eventually published it in 2021, but I needed to first understand the guidelines and techniques of writing well. For success, learn to stay within writing rules before attempting to break them.

I took night classes and joined a writer’s group, and very quickly realized that most of what I wrote wasn’t very good. I kept practicing and allowed myself to be coached and criticized by more accomplished writers. I also diversified my reading list to experience different kinds of writing and ideas. Even still, my first few drafts of a novel are still pretty terrible, but I now have a process that allows me to polish my work over time.

Blurb:

Atarah is a high school tomboy and a stellar athlete, but of below average height and beauty. This is a problem when everyone’s physical attributes and popularity are ranked by an AI computer called Big Social. Atarah has five days before the Crush-it dance to find her secret admirer and become popular or she will have little chance of acceptance to a top university and their romantic reality shows. A cryptic message warns Atarah that Big Social’s selfish protocols for human happiness is killing Earth. A plan to subvert the AI will require Atarah to find true love on the night of the dance.

Author Bio

TR Simmons writes science fiction/fantasy Romance novels that blur lines between possible worlds and the paranormal. His characters expand our understanding of what it means to be human living in revolutionary times. In this way, a thread of irony runs in tandem with his protagonists.

His publication, Evolutionary Digital Environment Net describes a global solution for climate change using a general AI that is the personification of the natural environment. This is a source for his fiction writing.

He has lived real-world experiences as an activist, political theorist, entrepreneur, politician, writer, husband, and father. He is also an avid motorcyclist and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Website: www.trsimmons.com

Facebook: TR Simmons

Instagram: TR_Simmons

Author podcast: Living Side by Side with AI (Available on SoundCloud)

Tiktok: tr_simmons