About Janice Carr Smith
Janice Carr was raised in the ’60s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a short hike from Harvard Square. She loved to read, write, and act out stories with her stuffed animals and her brother, Charlie, while Dad’s Wurlitzer Organ buzzed the corners of the ceiling, rocking the house. Mom would be out marching for some left-wing cause.
All that ended when Janice was twelve. Cancer struck, first her mom, then her dad. By fourteen, she was orphaned and living in Florida with relatives who had a very different world view. When they moved even farther into their rural world, Jan rebelled and returned home to finish high school, living with a dear family friend to whom her first book is lovingly dedicated.
At Northwestern University, she majored in Geology as rock-climbing and spelunking with the Outing Club opened her city-born eyes to the natural world.
Years later, she married John Smith and became an Environmental Consultant, shepherding public works projects through California’s rigorous environmental compliance process for a rural county’s public works department.
In 2017, Janice retired. One day, in her garden, she started hearing voices. She looked up, and the Look’N Up was born.
Check out Smith’s website here.
Read BookTrib’s review of her book, Look’N Up Invasion, here.
BOOKS:
Look’N Up Invasion (2023)
Biggest literary influences:
Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Brian Lumley
What readers will take away from your book:
A dose of the Look ‘N Up Philosophy, a lesson in how to empathize with those that are different, and a fully imagined view of what the world would be like without diversity.
What is your ideal target audience?
The “woke mob” will like it, but ideally (perhaps unrealistically) it would be nice if it could reach some folks that don’t generally appreciate or empathize with aliens. I would pursue the left-leaning audience first.
If you had to describe your book as a cross between two well-known books, what would you say?
My book is totally original. I don’t know of any books like it. It is sort of like Dune or Lord of the Rings, because a young man comes of age through trials in a completely alien world.
The book that changed your life:
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck opened my eyes to the plight of the hopeless and the horrors of our economic system. The end was especially jarring because there was no resolution, the characters were even more hopeless than at the beginning. This hard-hitting, no holds barred, no punches pulled, really inspired me.
Tell us about the protagonist in your latest book, and who would play her or him if they made a movie out of your book?
Baput is twelve at the start of my first book, Look ‘N Up Invasion, and fifteen at the end. He is the green-skinned apprentice to his grandfather, the Holy Akash, the unquestioned ruler of the known universe, which consists only of their tiny village. When he finds himself, and his family, on Earth, he has to adjust, compromising the very religion he is destined to preach, and questioning the society he will rule, if they return home. I see Kaan Guldur in this role, if he is not too old when the movie comes out. He played Aqua Man as a child, and I clearly see that Jason Momoa must play his father, Valko, in the movie.
If your protagonist could befriend any character from literature, who would he or she choose?
He would relate to Harry Keogh from Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series, because of his supernatural powers, conversing with the teeming dead and travelling the Mobius Continuum is similar to Baput’s powers in surfing the Akashic Plane and picking up the entire internet in his head.
If you could write a retelling of any book (classic or modern) and put your own spin on it, which book would you choose and why?
It’s a movie, not a book, but I would like to make a sequel to Interstellar. It ends (spoiler alert) with astronauts Cooper and Brand (if Cooper gets back to her) on an uninhabited planet, equipped with a number of embryos in stasis. Meanwhile, the ship carrying a lot of Earth people is slowly moving toward that plant to re-establish human life. So, Cooper and Brand activate the embryos, and have some “natural” children of their own, which they can’t help but favor. Generations pass and a stratified society has developed with the “Natural Children” in charge. Finally, along comes the ship with a lot of Earth people with their own society, based on ours, but morphed over generations in space. I’d like to put that in the mill and see what comes out.
Your favorite literary character:
I admire Samwise Gamgee for his loyalty to Frodo. He is not macho, not particularly courageous or tough, but he still fights the orcs in the depths of Mordor, to protect the one he promised to protect.