[INTERVIEW] The Sales Crime Policeman, by David J. Rollins

Science Fiction / Humor / Romance

Date Published: November 19, 2013

The future is no place to fall in love.

Amazing advances in technology have all but replaced relationships. People can purchase spouses programmed to their individual tastes and desires, anything from an aversion to expensive guilt gifts to perfumed flatulence. Attachments are even available for the more discriminating customers. Anyone can have anyone they want, as long as they don’t want someone who looks like someone else. That’s against the law. It could also make things a little awkward at social events.

For one man, technology is not enough. He is a Telepathic Vacuum Cleaner Salesperson Policeman, and he wants to fall in love with a real woman. Like most men, he is not perfect. He has no name. He had to give up that up when he became a policeman. He is terribly afraid of roller coasters. And he doesn’t have any attachments.

When he finds the woman of his dreams, she is not what he expected. Like most women, she doesn’t feel the same way about him. She has a spouse certified to be her perfect mate. And she is in prison. The policeman had her arrested, because she is one of the most wanted criminals in his world.

Now, the policeman has to choose between everything he is and everything he wants.

The future is no place to fall in love.

--

Read on for the interview!

When and why did you begin writing?

I began writing when I was young, but then again, I guess most writers did. I think initially, I had thought it was a way to escape my life. I guess most writers did that too. Starting out, my writing was fairly derivative of the authors I read. Wait-a-minute, I think most writers did that too.

I am off to a good start. Look at me, I’m just like everyone else. But I’m not. No writer really is. Even the ones that try to mimic others, they still put something of themselves into everything they write and that something makes them different. We all may start from roughly the same place, but we all end up in our very own story.

So if I started out like everyone else, what makes me different? That’s a good question. I’m glad I asked. My writing is very distinct. I don’t think there is much out there like it. My books have been compared to expressionist paintings, Frank Zappa’s album Joe’s Garage, Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, as well as Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. My books are fun and silly and strange, and they strive to celebrate the absurdities around us all. That’s what makes me different.

Not to mention I seem to have problems answering some questions.

What inspired you to write your first book?

 When I was in Seventh Grade, I started out writing short stories. I was in a group of writers who called themselves “The Goody Group.” We based our name on the first man who was killed as a witch, or at least that is what I remember. I’ve since looked and haven’t been able to find any evidence of a man with that name being accused of witchcraft. In fact, “Goody” was used to reference unmarried women, not men. Goody Good was an old woman who was accused of being a witch, and that was as close as I could get. Funny, as smart as we thought we were, we weren’t at all.

Anyway, we all wrote short stories and argued over silly things and hung out in an abandoned classroom during school lunch. I wrote a very short story called “The Telepathic Vacuum Cleaner Salesman.” I don’t think I really thought much of it at the time. When I let my best friend, the sort of de facto leader of The Goody Group, read it, he simply wrote on the first page of my story “Publish.” So I immediately started building on the strange little world I created, which ironically, was not what my friend wanted me to do, but I was young and rebellious. My idea at the time was to create a series of extremely short stories. I had read somewhere that that was the easiest way to get published in a magazine. I wasn’t going to settle for just one short story though. That would be too easy. I had to write a series of them. I think, at one point, the series was up to forty-two stories, which kind of makes it a novel. I never submitted it to a magazine. I still hung on to it though. I reworked it and edited it down, and that became my first book.

Is there a message you want your readers to grasp?

To recognize the absurdity in the lives we live. I feel like once you recognize the absurdity of so much around you, then you can also see the incredible potential that is around you too.

It is a very amazing world we live in. We are told so many wrong things, simply because they are things other people want us to believe. And we believe them, because those things are all that we know, all that we have been taught. That is not the world around us. That is only perception. And you can believe and follow any perception you want. You can be and do anything you want. It may take work. It may take a lot of work. But you can become anything you want to be.

Just pick something fun. Life’s too short not to have fun.

Can you share a little of your upcoming projects with us?

I am working on a series of eight novellas called Angry Edenites. It is about four people who are searching for the Garden of Eden. Luckily, they have a map. I plan to publish about one a month. If you like The Sales Crime Policeman, you will like Angry Edenites. It is written in the same style. There are four of them published now.

Did you learn anything from writing any of your books?

I learned I really don’t like editing or grammar or the thousands of times needed to read a passage to get it right. Ironically, around the time I start hating something I have written is around the time it starts to seem good enough.

Are there any new authors who you have become a fan of? What about established authors?

Since I look for books and stories with an absurd component to them, I generally lean toward Science Fiction. I am currently reading a book by Brom, which is a wonderfully visceral read. It is called The Child Thief, and it is a reinterpretation of the Peter Pan story.

As far as established authors, I like Douglas Adams. How can anyone not like Douglas Adams, excepting those that don’t? I am a big fan of Robert Sheckley, James Morrow and Christopher Moore. Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff was hilarious. Alfred Bester,  Philip K. Dick  and John Gardner are some other earlier authors I truly enjoy. When I was in college, I had a professor who really turned me on to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Those are two really powerful works and scenes from both of them have stuck with me to this day. If you haven’t read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I can’t recommend enough.

--
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David J. Rollins

David J. Rollins is a paralegal by day, husband by night, and sometimes finds time to write. As a young man, he had had different plans, but that’s the way life works out most of the time.

David has been writing since Seventh Grade. He started with the adventures of Super Pimp and his sidekick Squirt. His hero was Philip K. Dick, who strangely enough did not write about things like Pimps and Squirts. Like any fan, David wanted to follow in his hero’s footsteps. Unlike most fans, he wanted to follow them even after finding out that his hero, at one point in his life, was so poor that he resorted to eating dog food. What David lacked in aspirations, he made up for in determination.

From those humble beginnings, David became the man he is today. He is happier than he ever thought he would be and is living a life he never imagined in his wildest dreams. And that’s the way David’s life worked out. He was and is very lucky.

As further proof of his luck, David has lost every one of the stories about Super Pimp and his sidekick Squirt. He has also never had to eat dog food.
Website: www.davidjrollins.com
Mailing List: http://www.davidjrollins.com/mailing-list/


BUY LINKS
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Sales-Crime-Policeman-David-Rollins-ebook/dp/B00CUJ3GE6