An excerpt:

NRF: For Awesome, I know the main character came from a guy you saw wearing a Derby in [Atlanta's] Little Five Points…So, are you just constantly collecting information, sizing up everything around you?

JP: It doesn’t happen that often, so when it does happen, you want to grab onto it. You have to train yourself to notice and pay attention; if you have a strange, fleeting thought, you grab onto it and see if it’s going anywhere.

NRF: Can you give me an example of a strange, fleeting thought that you’ve had recently?

JP: Recently, no. I haven’t been writing much recently. Let’s see, an example…Well, there are a lot of examples in the book. I did have that idea for The New Yorker cartoon [from the character Dudley Durden of Lumber Land: “There’s this mime and this lady sitting in a fancy New York restaurant and they’re holding hands across the table and the lady is saying to the mime, “We need to talk.”] I thought, “That’s a pretty funny New Yorker cartoon.” The nice thing about writing is that I can just give a character the idea, and I don’t have to actually go to the trouble of learning to draw and submitting my cartoon to The New Yorker. That’s never going to happen in a million years, but I can have a character who has that idea, and it’s a nice defining thing for his character.

NRF: I’m glad that you brought up (the popular culture references) because there’s a lot of commentary in both books, and I was wondering how much of that commentary you believe to be true.

JP: None of it in a way. I have characters who have opposite points of view all throughout the books, and really the opinions belong to the characters, not really to me. Some of my opinions might get in there, but that would only be because some of the characters and I might share opinions. Usually the things about me in there are probably the things I like least about myself -- like the character who sends crank e-mails to Fox News. I’ve done that before, and I think it’s just silly. I don’t have a lot of respect for the character. I don’t like Fox News, but I don’t see anything noble about not liking Fox News.

So, there’s some overlap, but the good thing is that a lot of times I have conflicting feelings. One character can feel one way and another character can feel another way, and I can explore opposite points of view.

NRF: Do you ever learn anything about yourself as you go through the process of pulling these ideas and exploring them in characters?

JP: Apparently not. No, I think it’s just a way of muddying the water even more.

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