Hero Interview from Triple Threat by Harry Wegley with a Giveaway

» Posted on Feb 19, 2015 in Blog | Comments Off on Hero Interview from Triple Threat by Harry Wegley with a Giveaway

This week I’m hosting Janet Lee Barton with A Daughter’s Return (US and Canada only), Harry Wegley with Triple Threat (print US only, ebook outside US), and Susan Anne Mason with Healing the Widower’s Heart (US and Canada only). If you want to enter the drawings for the books, please leave a comment on your post with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (Feb. 22nd) evening.

 

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Interview with the hero from Triple Threat by H.L. Wegley:

1. Joshua West, tell me the most interesting thing about you.

I’m 23 and should get my PhD this year, provided I don’t run into trouble with my dissertation. But I just found someone who can help me avoid that, if I can get up enough courage to ask her. Another thing—I’m a misfit, the rare jock-geek. Played tight end on a high school state championship team, but graduated at the top of my class. It’s tough finding close friends, because I don’t fit in with the geeks or the jocks. But I may have found someone who can help me with that, too. She’s another doctoral candidate who played shortstop for the UW women’s national champion softball team. What should I call her, a jockless-geek? Somehow, that doesn’t sound right. But what an arm she has! And the rest of her is even more incredible. Just don’t tell her I said that. Kate Brandt has a temper and knows enough karate to be one scary girl.

2. What do you do for fun?

Fun? Are you kidding? When you hit college your junior year in high school, using the Running Start Program, then skip your master’s and go straight for your PhD, fun is the last thing on a person’s mind. Preserving my sanity, that’s my number one priority, and I just found the person to help me with that. But, at the moment, she’s driving me crazy. She got my car impounded and almost got us killed by a lone-wolf jihadist. I guess the most fun thing for me, right now, is to watch Kate—she’s not quite 21—intimidate all the profs in the department. I don’t think she intends to do that, but a few questions from her and suddenly the professor starts squirming and dismisses the class early.

3. What do you put off doing because you dread it?

The department head, Prof Bergmeier, has been after me to teach some undergraduate Comp Sci classes. But 18-year-old geeks can be an obnoxious bunch. Graduate students, like me, are just cheap labor—slaves who enable the profs to do their research, write their journal articles, and try to take Bergmeier’s throne, whenever he retires. Uh, I’ve also been putting off asking Kate out on a date.

4. What are you afraid of most in life?

Not knowing what I’m here for, and the corollary, not accomplishing my purpose … if there really is a purpose. Kate seems to have that all figured out. She doesn’t push it on people, but God and Jesus seem to be enough for her. I’m beginning to think living like her myths are true is better than living life in limbo. But how does the finite prove the infinite? Not going to happen.

5. What do you want out of life?

I don’t want what my parents have. They’re consumers, trying to live so that they die with more toys than anyone else. I’m having a hard time making sense of life. But I think I’ve found someone who can help me with that, if she will.

6. What is the most important thing to you?

Thanks for asking me these questions. If you had asked me this question first, I would have probably given both you and me a snow job about some high-sounding, vague, moral value. But you’ve made me see that, most importantly, I want whatever Kate Brandt has. If I have that, then secondly, I want to have her in my life.

7. Do you read books? If so, what is your favorite type of book?

You’re going to love this. My favorite book is about 25 years old now, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by Mitchell Waldrop. But Waldrop makes me a bit uneasy when he waves his intellectual hands and things magically appear, like life on earth. He works at the edge of computational science, probing the edge of the infinite. Maybe that’s why he sometimes plays the magician. But I’m not going to believe something if it can’t be rigorously proven? Back to your question—I also like football biographies like Bart Starr and the Rise of the National Football League.

8. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Don’t take this the wrong way, but all my life I’ve been brighter than the people around me. And, as you can see, I’m a pretty big guy. So nobody intimidated me, mentally or physically. But Kate’s IQ is in the stratosphere. She’s always one step ahead of me. I would really like just to be me around her. I would like her to see Joshua West as he is, without the intimidation factor. That’s the only way I’m going to know if things could ever work out for us.

9. Do you have a pet? If so, what is it and why that pet?

A pet would be great, but I spend most of my time at the U, in the computer lab. No time for pets until I graduate. Someday there’ll be pets and a houseful of kids, I hope.

10. If you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?

I’d like to be sitting in a parka at Lambeau Field on December 31, 1967 watching that ice bowl game between the Packers and the Cowboys. As much as I love football, I can’t believe people would actually play their hearts out when the temperature is -15 and the wind chill is nearly 50 below. But I’d like to see what kind of men it takes to want to win so badly they would do that. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure my answer makes much sense, no more sense than that guy Jon Krakauer wrote about in his book Into the Wild. Just run off someplace where you can’t survive and then die. No. What I really want is to go forward in time and see that tall, slender blonde, Kate, walking beside me. If I could see that, then maybe there would be hope for Joshua West.

Check out Triple Threat on Amazon