Jamie Mason's "Monday's Lie"

Jamie Mason was born in Oklahoma City, but grew up in Washington, DC. She’s most often reading and writing, but in the life left over, she enjoys films, Formula 1 racing, football, traveling, and, conversely, staying at home.

Here Mason dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Monday's Lie:

Oh boy, this task is right up there with all the things I cannot do. Take dancing. I can’t do it. My brain doesn’t speak to my feet like that. In the case of assigning actors to characters I’ve written, it’s the same brand of desperate – mostly because I don’t see my invented people while they’re doing what they do on the page. At best, they’re watercolors. I know some writers see them to the hair of their chinny-chin-chins, but I don’t. I don’t need to. I just need to think them clearly.

I love movies and there are so many fine actors who can peel characters off a page and wear them like masks. I would love to see Monday’s Lie on a screen. I’m just the last person to ask who should do it.

For instance, the mother in my story, Annette Vess, is both a badass covert ops asset and a brilliantly nurturing, cul-de-sac mom. So who to put the swing in her stride and her cookies into the oven? I could imagine perhaps Sela Ward, or equally Uma Thurman if she were older. See? I’m terrible at this.

The only one in the book who even sketched-in at all toward an actual actor while I was writing him was the agent who reappears in the main character’s life after nineteen years. His watercolor looked a little like Clive Owen. But Brian’s not English.

*sigh*

At any rate, it is so much fun to hear from readers when they let me know who they saw in their mind’s eye as they were reading. Let the casting begin!

Visit Jamie Mason's website.

The Page 69 Test: Monday's Lie.

--Marshal Zeringue