On The Air With Jason Latshaw

      I got the chance to talk to Jason Latshaw about his latest book The Threat Below. His journey is fascinating and I can't wait for you to read the entire interview. Latshaw is a writer who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, two children, a lizard and a fish. With a MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA, Jason Latshaw also writes television and film scripts. 

1)What inspired you to write this book?

One of the first thoughts that inspired me would be a pretty big spoiler to share here, so I won’t get into it too much here, but it had to do with this visual I started seeing in my mind, of a mountain peak shrouded in clouds, like what ended up on the cover on the book.

I moved from the east coast, an area where everything was basically flat and the same, to the west, where the entire world can seem vitally different from one place to another because of the elevation, and this was a revelation to me for some reason. I walk around in the mountains here often, it’s still so exotic, and the way the ecosystem changes from the ridge to the valley stuns me daily. When I’m hiking, often clouds will roll in below me and I’ll feel like I’m on an island in a white fluffy ocean, and I started imagining that the clouds were always there, and I had no idea  what what was down below them. That nobody knew, but that we were all scared. That led to this idea of people living on the top of a mountain, terrified to descend, where everything below the clouds was now just stuff of legends.

After writing The Threat Below, I realized that this metaphor, of a small group of people clinging to the top of a mountain for survival, surrounded by a wall, afraid to leave, could also describe my upbringing. I was raised in a close-knit religious community where just about everything “of the world” was considered dangerous and deadly, and I, like Icelyn, kind of yearned to see what, exactly, was out there. So I think this “your fortress is my prison” mentality that I struggled against in my formative years inspired it too, but on a deeper level.

Read Jason Latshaw's guest post: The Threat Below

2) The setting of the novel is 300 years in the future and nearly all of human life has been wiped off the face of the earth. Do you think that, hundreds of years from now, humans will face this same dilemma? If so, what would be the cause of our extinction?

If I had to bet money, I think humans will still be around in 300 years, because we’re resilient. Looking back, we’ve survived a number of apocalypses already – plagues, world wars, famines. I’m pretty confident we’ll figure out a way around future calamities, too, whether it be global warming, drought, over-population. We might have to leave this planet behind and find a new one, but I think we figure out a way to avoid extinction. (This isn’t really a compliment towards humanity, though, because I think we’re resilient often at the expense of everything around us, like locusts that come through and leave the fields barren before they move on to find more. It’s just a statement of fact, as a species we’re pretty skilled at surviving and growing our population.)

I know it’s strange, but actually the idea of a world with no (or, at least, very few) humans holds an odd appeal for me. I don’t like probably about 80% of what we’ve built on this world, and sometimes if I get too down at all the overdevelopment and gated neighborhoods encroaching into what was once wilderness I slip into this fantasy of sometime in the far future when nature has reclaimed it all. Maybe it makes me a misanthrope, but that’s a fascinating aspect of this story to me – earth reverting to a place with little human intervention.

If you had to push me and ask what would cause human extinction, my guesses would be (1) alien invasion, (2) the sun burning out, or (3) some kind of asteroid pummeling.

In other words, I think outer space has it in for us, and don’t trust it one bit.

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3) How did you create Icelyn, the main character of the novel? What is it that makes her so brave?

I have a teenage daughter, and Icelyn’s character is strongly inspired by her. My daughter is headstrong, confident, beautiful, smart, unpredictable, stubborn, and I absolutely adore her. Icelyn isn’t a perfect mirror image of my daughter, because characters always grow into their own, but my daughter was my leaping off reference point.

One way Icelyn differs from my daughter is in her casually biased perspectives. In her attitudes towards lower classes, she wouldn’t claim to be superior, but her every thought indicates that she believes that she is, just below the surface. I based that in some ways on historical attitudes – European aristocracy and colonial views towards natives and the working class. They all, at a base level, thought themselves inherently better than the rest. (And of course, these perspectives are in many of us today, but I think they’re a little harder to recognize now because I’m too close to see them as clearly.)

Icelyn’s bravery springs chiefly from two things – her youth and her inexperience. She doesn’t know how bad things can really get yet, she hasn’t felt the sting of losing treasures that she cherished, and she has that youthful optimism that tells you that of course everything is going to work out. I love talking to young people, because they still believe they can change the world. The jaded stiffness and disillusionment hasn’t set in yet. They haven’t yet realized that they need to grow up, compromise, and be practical. And because of that, they actually can accomplish impossibly impractical deeds. Icelyn is young, she thinks she can still win big, so she can afford to be brave.

If life were a game of poker, I think most adults are making small bets, just paying the ante, and folding as soon as things get a little risky. You can stay in the game a long time playing that way, but you won’t win very much. Young people are the ones pushing all their chips in, sure that they’ll strike it rich. That’s the way most of Icelyn’s bravery is – she’s sure it’ll pay off, so to her it doesn’t even seem that courageous. Just the steps she needs to take to find a world she wants to live in.

         

It’ll be interesting how this changes for her as the story progresses, because in The Threat Below she does suffer real loss. That can change a person and make them tentative, gunshy, and hesitant.

4) How much research went into crafting this novel?

It’s a lame answer, but if life is research, then a ton! I’ve already mentioned my love affair with mountains and different elevations, and my own personal wonder at discovering new lands, both physically (the exotic-to-me West Coast) and spiritually (striking out past the walls of the small community where I was raised and making a life in my own personal Down Below.) All of that is reflected strongly in Icelyn’s journey. Also, the philosophical discussions that are steadily running between Adorane and Icelyn, I’ve been thinking on those matters for my entire life, used to stay up all night talking them through with friends of mine when I was younger, so it’s been fun to find characters that care about considering them too.

I originally came to LA to get my MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA’s prestigious program. I’ve been a television and feature writer here in LA for the past seven years (with no credits to speak of, but a whole lot of stuff that’s been in development, as we like to say) so I think I’ve learned a lot about exiting a scene (or a chapter) on an intriguing beat, about structuring a story so it doesn’t meander too much, about telling a story visually, about entering a moment at the most compelling parts and ending before an audience gets bored. Many readers have commented that they have had a hard time putting the book down, that they stayed up too late reading just one more chapter, and could see the entire novel as a movie. All of those components of the book, if true, I think come from my training as a screenwriter.

In terms of actual academic research, I did a little to learn what the world would look like centuries after humanity went extinct, but most of what I found was completely speculative, so I decided to just let my storytelling instinct dictate how I portrayed that in this novel. Also, I’ve done a great deal of research into european contact with native people in the Americas, and in some ways the Kith’s misperceptions about and fear of the Threat Belows were inspired by those historical collisions.

5) What's next for you?

I’m writing Brathius History Book 2! I hope to have it out by next summer. Also, I’m assisting in developing a television series (with someone ranked much higher than myself) that will, if all goes well and the correct animals are sacrificed in the correct order, air next summer. But I haven’t quite figured out that trick yet, so don’t set your Tivo’s just yet. I’m also writing a feature script for a small budget production, and then I have another feature I have to write and a television pilot to complete. There aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m haunted by everything I want to write.

6) Where can we find you?

I have a website at www.himynameisjason.com and I’d love if people wanted to join my email list because I base my self-worth on how large my mailchimp database is and right now that monkey is mocking me. There’s actually a free short story which centers on a bit of back history between Adorane and his father, that you can download if you join. I also have a twitter account that I barely use. (I’m more of a re-tweeter if anything.) And I’m a little bit more active on Facebook, so people can find me there too.