Jay Nussbaum's debut novel, Blue Road to Atlantis, explores the current we all follow and how this current is inevitable to our daily lives. Bookworm reviewed this novel, saying it "contains an underlying theme of faith, destiny and hope."
FictionAddiction.NET's Apryl Duncan caught up with Nussbaum just days after his novel hit the shelves to discuss his own current that took him from a successful lawyer to a published author.
You actually left your law career in 1987 to begin a professional writing career. What made you take the big step most writers only fantasize about?
That was the first time I quit law to write. I was young, single and too naïve to be afraid of the consequences. I was broke, but rent was cheap, I visited my brother and sister-in-law when I needed a nourishing meal, and my old friends from law school sprung for the beer. I kind of enjoyed climbing into a taxi, checking my finances, and saying, “Please take me three dollars and eleven cents north.”
Unfortunately, your early manuscripts went unpublished. Are there any you'd like to revive to seek publication?
Yes, one especially. I recently re-read my first manuscript, and realized that the story was wonderful. It just didn’t happen to fall into the hands of a skilled writer. After all, an author’s first novel is an unpaid, unsupervised residency. And I did to the story what a first-time surgeon would do to a gall bladder were she left unattended during her first year of work. Best of all, that story--although in a completely different context--in many ways picks up where Blue Road to Atlantis leaves off.
It actually took 15 years before your first manuscript was published. In between that time, you returned to work. How hard was it to return to being a lawyer after leaving to pursue your writing full-time?
Very hard. I couldn’t have done it had I not fed myself the daily rationalization that many gifted writers starve, while even mediocre real estate lawyers own sailboats. Unfortunately, I never counted on how empty it would feel to wake up every day mediocre.
You earned your black belt in karate after seven years of training. Martial arts require a lot of self-discipline. Did you find this to be helpful with you writing path?
Certainly. Like many aspiring writers, I needed to maintain a full-time job, and so my typical daily writing hours were 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. But I knew that to prepare for a seven-hour black belt test requires thousands of hours in the dojo, and I transferred that same calculation to my writing aspirations. There was also the discipline of staying focused on the one, essential relationship--that of the writer and the words--and putting aside all extraneous issues like personal exposure or the ultimate marketability of whatever I was writing.
After closing a $52 million deal at the mortgage bank where you were working, you once again decided it was time to hang up your law career. How did you finally decide, Okay, this is it?
I got lucky. Coinciding with my realization that I was living a life of prosperous mediocrity was my wife’s acceptance into veterinary school. Quitting my job to enable her dream, in turn enabled mine. We moved to rural, snow-covered Ithaca, NY, where my commercial real estate background was rendered as obsolete as my Mazda Miata. Forced to seek other options, I taught a course in Eastern philosophy and martial arts at Cornell, and of course, wrote and wrote and wrote.
