Q. Which of your characters would make the worst roommate?A. Dagin Taliaferro from The Silicon Kings, a tech company gazillionaire, actually becomes the roommate of the novella’s protagonist over the course of the story. He’s terrible–self-absorbed, used to getting his own way, completely neurotic. He was a lot of fun to write, but he’d be awful to live with.
Q. What book do you wish you had written yourself?
A. Just about any of Shirley Jackson’s novels, but if I had to choose just one, I’d choose The Haunting of Hill House. It’s just about a perfect novel. It’s exactly the right length for the story it’s telling, it’s got a killer opening and killer closing, it’s got unreliable narration, it’s got deep and complex characters, and it’s got a haunted house. My own horror novella, The Ghost in the Green House, owes a great debt to Jackson and her work.
Q. Which of your characters would survive a zombie apocalypse?
A. Ro Peszke from Ladykillers is the character most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse, I think. She’s a former cop and current private investigator, and she’s a trans lady in rural northern New England who’s come out, transitioned, and lived to tell the tale. She’s a tough broad!
Q. What inspired the settings you use in your books?
A. Most of my settings are based on actual places I’ve lived. A Slow-Motion Suicide and The Ghost in the Green House are both set in an unspecified Great Plains town, based on Bellevue, Nebraska, where I lived briefly as a child. Ladykillers is explicitly set in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire, though I’ve used fictionalized town names.
Q. What are you currently working on?
A. My current work in progress is a romance novel centered on a pair who meet while both doing volunteer work for an LGBT youth center. (Not coincidentally, I met my own spouse while we were both volunteering to launch an all-ages LGBT community center.) It’s been enormously enjoyable to write so far, but I will admit I’m a bit stuck on the ending at the moment. Wish me luck!
J. L. Long (he/him/his) lives in New Hampshire with 1 spouse and 3 cats (exact numbers subject to change). He has the hugest possible writer crush on Shirley Jackson, and his fictional boyfriend is Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
J. L. has published two novels, a novella, a collection of short stories, and a poetry chapbook, as well as written pieces for some small local publications and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s anthology, Touchstone. He also hosts a monthly literary salon for writers, Rochester Writers Night. He happily shares his best macaroni and cheese recipes upon request.
His writing website is available at www.jllongwrites.com, and he can also be found on Bluesky and Tumblr.
Visit J. L. Long’s page at https://nhauthors.com/j-l-long/