Third-person boilerplate
Thomas Maurstad was the pop culture critic of the Dallas Morning News for over 20 years. Since his release back into the wild, he endeavors to create ambitious, engaging fiction. He is married and lives in Dallas, Texas.
First-person improv
I was adopted. My one sibling is five years older, so we grew up like only children in the same household. Growing up, my family moved every couple of years. I was always small for my age. One of my first memories is sitting in the back seat of our Buick LeSabre as we pulled out of the parking lot of whatever church we were going to in whatever place we were living as everyone else was talking about whatever that Sunday’s service had stirred, thinking “what if I don’t believe in any of this.”
Mind the Gap is a contemporary novel set, mostly, in Austin, Texas. It centers on two characters: Justin Mayhaps, an advertising wiz turned web-based marketing guru, and Ellis Presley, a musician-video artist on the cusp of indie/internet fame. The novel’s structure consists of alternating Him/Her chapters, creating two narratives on parallel tracks. Those tracks intersect when Justin and Ellis meet.
Mind the Gap’s story is both set against and driven by the immediate backdrop of South by Southwest, Austin’s annual multi-media Mardi Gras, and the larger context of a growing social/cultural protest, the eXit movement, an Occupy-like reaction/revolution prompted by the misdeeds of Wall Street and the exploding gap between the haves and have-nots.
Mind the Gap attempts to create a hybrid reading experience: literary fiction rooted in pop culture.
excerpts
Her
“Since she was a little girl, she had imagined her mind was a clear, cool lake high in the mountains, its glassy surface a radiant mirror reflecting impossibly puffy clouds and a perfect blue sky. Her thoughts were like fish swimming in that lake. Most of the time, you couldn't see them, but you knew they were there; then, without warning, one would leap out of the lake and arc over the water for a split-second eternity, tail twisting, mouth gulping, iridescent scales gleaming. And if you weren't ready with your net to lunge and scoop it into your boat, that fish was gone, bloop, back under the water, with only the sound of its splash and the already receding ripples as signs it had ever existed. Ellis' pencil was her net, and the notebook was the boat she had been filling with fish most of her life.”
Him
“For Justin, travel was a means not an end, since once he got wherever he was going, he felt no freer, no more engaged, no less burdened than before departing. To put a more precise point on it: he loved the going, not the getting there. Now, such a sentiment could easily devolve into a chorus of journey-destination jibberjabber, but Justin would never allow himself to buy into the idiomatic equivalent of a penny stock. He was too evolved, too knowing (the journey-destination phrase was, in fact, entry 31 on his CartoonJungle feature "Top 100 Smart-Sounding Stupidities") to be so pedestrian in his signature quirks. But such self-branding snobbery was also, coincidentally, buttressed by truth. It wasn't the journey Justin craved, any more than it was the destination. What he wanted, to such a depth and degree it was becoming -- or, speaking of truth, had already become -- a need, was to be in between, to be neither here nor there. To be nowhere. That meant it wasn't traveling Justin loved, it was airplanes and airports.”
where to purchase
Amazon
barnes & noble
indiebound
mind the gap author commentary
Mind the Gap began, as all my stories do, with a prompt, like a piece of grit, that embeds itself in my imagination and keeps prickling and irritating. This leads to curiosity and discomfort that I am impelled to resolve by applying narrative layers around that bit of grit to answer the questions it provokes. For Mind the Gap, the prompt was: You wreck someone, or someone wrecks you. Then, suddenly, they’re dead and gone, leaving you drowning in shame or drenched in anger.
PUBLICATIONS