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7 Questions for . . . is an occasional offering from WriteHook with the unapologetically blatant intention of getting you to know and read authors and books you might otherwise miss out there in the ever-expanding universe of fiction and creative nonfiction.

This installment features Carey Parrish, a one-time nurse who found his writing muse when he decided to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Check out his bio, check out his seven answers, and, of course, check out his latest novel, Big Business, the long-awaited sequel to Marengo.

A Brief Introduction

Carey Parrish is an American writer with credits on both sides of the Atlantic. He began writing professionally in his late thirties when he founded Web Digest Weekly e-magazine, which ran until March 2010. He also wrote for British based reFRESH magazine as well as Crime Rant, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications both online and in print. He is the other of the books Into The Light: Experimentations in Poetry and Prose, the short story anthology The Moving Finger Writes, and the novels Marengo and Big Business. He lives in Northern Georgia.

7 Questions for...Carey Parrish

1) Big Business is a sequel to Marengo. So what are the ups and downs of writing a sequel with serial characters?  

Writing a sequel was really more difficult than doing the first one because it had been a while since I wrote about these characters. Getting back into their “minds” if you will was something of a challenge. It was much easier to introduce the new characters and make them flow with the older ones. I didn’t really plan on Marengo being the first in a series but the reactions of readers to the cast was awesome and even after nearly two years I was still getting emails asking for more of them. Big Business is my answer to readers’ devotion.

2) You have lots of major characters. How did you develop so many distinct characters and what must a writer keep in mind about tying all the characters' stories together?

Having a cast of characters is a delight because I get to tell more than one story during the course of writing a book like this. The common thread of the apartment building and the family feeling among them binds them to one another in spite of their different subplots and it allows me to weave the stories together so that the ending will mesh and everything will be resolved, because ultimately they’re all working toward the same goal. By keeping everyone relative in this sense you don’t run the risk of leaving something hanging.

You also need at least four proofreaders/editors to help you avoid any plot holes that having more than one storyline going simultaneously might present.

3) You attribute your success to "taking all the things that were wrong in my life and replacing them with things that were right." Could you explain this for us?

Until I was 35 years old my life almost exclusively revolved around my family, both immediate and extended. When my grandmother died, I didn’t have anything to fill the void left by her absence. We were very close and I’d taken care of her in her last years, so I had to redefine myself. I realized I hadn’t made any of my youthful dreams come true and I felt like it was finally time for me to have a life of my own.

So I reevaluated everything in my existence and set my sights on becoming a professional writer, something I’d wanted since I was a teenager. Anything, material or otherwise, that wasn’t healthy or wasn’t working, I chucked. I made the choices that were necessary to build the life that I wanted for myself, and some of these decisions were difficult to make indeed. But my own personal happiness was more important to me.

I cultivated relationships with like minded people. I involved myself with those who share my interests. I learned from those who’d already made their lives what they wanted. I pretty much just went for it and so far the results have been exactly what I hoped they would be. I got rid of the “wrong” so that the “right” could be a permanent part of my life.

I also wasn’t a very healthy person in my younger life and I now believe that a lot of the negative energy created by the unhealthy situations I’d gotten stuck in were contributing to my physical deficiencies, as most of these issues have vanished in the last nine years. I don’t let negative people into my life anymore because they suck the energy right out of you. I focus only on the positive and the possible.

4) Your writing style is very "cozy British" in some ways, yet has also been described as something akin to an '80s prime time soap, like Dallas or Fantasy Island. What would be the experience you most hope readers have when they check out Big Business?

Whenever I write, my main goal is to tell a good story and I hope that readers can say they enjoyed my work once they finish the book. Setting Big Business, and formerly Marengo, in London came from my own love of the city and how at home I feel in England.

Writing in an “episodic” manner, as Dallas, Knots Landing, and the daytime soaps did, gives me the chance to have more than one or two characters’ stories to tell, and I can take ordinary personas and place them in extraordinary circumstances in much the same way as the nighttime, and daytime, dramas always did. It’s a formula, if you will, that I think involves my audience much more effectively. There’s something for everyone.

I also inject doses of humor here and there because life is often funny and you can’t make the two dimensional world of a novel seem real unless you mirror the world inside it.

5) You began as a nurse before deciding to see the world and then to write. How did your experiences in medicine and around the world influence and build the writer-you?

Working with the public gives you the chance to meet all kinds of people. If you’re willing to observe and learn from them, you’ll get a great perspective on what makes different people tick. Some you’ll like; some you won’t. Being a nurse, I got to do this in an arena that involves a lot of human drama and you see why some become heroes, some become jerks, and some never learn how to be anything more than average.

Traveling to other parts of the world is a dream I always had, from childhood on, and I tell everyone to get out there and see this planet we live on. It’s a big place filled with lots of people, cultures, beliefs, and experiences. Learn about and from these differing societies. Tolerance and respect come from understanding and if you don’t open yourself up to those we share this world with then you’ll never have the vision to see that everyone is equal, everyone is entitled to his own way of life, and no one is superior to another.

6) What other books have you written besides Marengo and Big Business?

My first book was a short volume of poetry and essays called Into The Light, which I think presented a picture of the path I took from the me I was before my grandmother died toward the me that I am now. My second book was an anthology of short stories called The Moving Finger Writes. It displays a couple of different genres I dabbled with prior to Marengo; namely there are a few paranormal tales contained therein.

7) What are you working on now (and when we can expect Part 3).

My current project is called Writer’s Block and it is a stand-alone novel. It’s about an attorney in Manhattan named Jon Aaronson who has to start a new life after his wife asks him for a divorce. He moves into an apartment in one of those sprawling old brownstones on Central Park South, called Burton Heights, that was left to him by a deceased aunt and his next door neighbor is JR Walden, a bestselling novelist suffering from a severe bout of writer’s block. The relationship these two men develop is complex and ultimately dangerous. I hope to have this one out in the spring.

Part 3 of the Number 56 Kensington Street series is in the outline stage of development. The core characters are all back, of course, and the new supporting cast revolves around a country estate which houses a priceless art collection that will be the catalyst for the adventure I’m plotting. Maybe it will be ready by late fall or early 2013.

Where To Go from Here:

Big Business by Carey Parrish. Click image to buy.Don't be one of those people who reads and runs. Get to know more about Carey Parrish here:

Website: www.careyparrish.com

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