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February 6, 2013

Writer Wednesday: Traci L. Slatton

Hi Donna, Thank you for having me on your blog. I love that girl-who-reads.com overflows with ideas, tips, reviews, and interviews. It's a rich and lively site!

I thought today I'd talk about how I came to write THE LOVE OF MY (OTHER) LIFE. This story originated as a screenplay. A Hollywood actor was interested in producing it, but it kind of sat around on his bookshelf. Finally I decided to novelize it.

The Love of My (Other) Life takes place in New York city, where I live, and, in the other universe, at Yale, my alma mater. I have an irreverent affection for Yale, where I started as a physics major. But I didn't want to do physics, I just wanted to think about physics, which is way cool. So my first semester, I was taking physics, astrophysics, calculus, English 129, and Ancient Near Eastern Literature from the Earliest Times to the Time of the Akkadian Conquest--in which we read the Epic of Gilgamesh, among other things. But I  wasn't taking any labs. So, midway into the semester, the head of the undergraduate physics department tracked me down.

"You're a physics major, but you aren't taking any labs? Why not?" he asked.

"I don't want to do labs. I just want to think about physics," I said.

He shook his head. "That's not the way we do things at Yale." So I became an English major, as I was always meant to be. But I retained a respect for, and interest in, the sciences. Hence my character Brian. I always found science people intriguing.

Many of my novels come out of random daydreams. This is one of the great job benefits of being a novelist: I get to daydream and that's part of my work! How cool is that?

So one day I had the amusing notion, what if a man showed up claiming to be my soulmate--but from another universe? And I thought he was crazy? And then what if he turned out to be my soulmate, and I couldn't be with him? What if the one person who completed me was the one person I could never be with because he was from a parallel reality? That's when I started writing the screenplay.

One more thing about this novel. My friend composer David Sklar loved the original screenplay and he wrote a song for it called UNIVERSAL LOVE. You can hear it at www.davidsklarmusic.com

Thanks again, and joy of reading!
Traci

About the Author

Traci L. Slatton is a graduate of Yale and Columbia, where she taught freshman composition. She lives in Manhattan, though her love for Renaissance Italy inspired her historical novel Immortal [Bantam Dell], which is currently in film pre-production and reached bestseller status in Italy, Russia and Brazil. Also the author of The Botticelli Affair and the After trilogy (Fallen, Cold Light and Far Shore [forthcoming late spring 2013]), Slatton has published The Art of Life, a photo essay about figurative sculpture; a book of poetry; as well as a non-fiction title on science and spirituality, Piercing Time & Space. Her forthcoming novel, The Mission, is a meaty historical saga set during World War II.
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