Joseph Rein’s debut novel, Youtopia, a techno-thriller, launched last week. Joseph is the author of the short story collection Roads without Houses (2018), which was nominated for numerous literary prizes. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty journals, magazines, and anthologies worldwide, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
He is also a screenwriter and critical essayist. His second feature-length film, Who Killed Cooper Dunn? (2022), was featured on Showtime and other streaming platforms. He wrote, produced, and acted in multiple other short festival films, and has two feature-length projects in pre-production.
He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. When not writing or reading, he can be found hiking with his wife Jessica, playing cribbage, or recovering from various small injuries inflicted by his four children.
Joseph, thanks for joining us on A Writer’s Block. In addition to your official bio above, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Joseph: I have been publishing fiction since around 2006, though I’d been studying writing and churning out pages since I can remember. I’m also, for better and often worse, a Midwesterner through-and-through.
My first short-story collection, Roads without Houses, was full of interconnected stories about Midwestern people and Midwestern problems: guilt and shame, connection and disconnection, alcoholism, passive-aggressive niceties (yes, they’re real).
I teach creative writing at a four-year public institution, and am wowed daily by how much better writers they are at nineteen than I was.
I’m also the father of four young children, one of whom is an amazing graphic novelist and with whom I hope to collaborate some day soon. Seeing how intently she works reminds me of myself at that age, but also shows me that she will certainly surpass me creatively some day if she wants to.
Tell us about your just-released book, your first novel published, Youtopia.
Joseph: Youtopia is a techno-thriller with elements of sci-fi—in that it’s slightly futuristic—and murder mystery. It also includes chapters of “found documents”: a television transcript, a blog, a screenplay.
If all this sounds ambitious, I would say, yes, it is. When I started writing it, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off.
But like most writers can attest, when an idea won’t leave you alone, the only thing you can do is write it.
And I’m really glad I did—it proved to me that creative adage of taking risks and pushing yourself in order to create your best work. This book was a lot of fun to write, and is hopefully a lot of fun to read.
How did you come up with the idea for Youtopia?
Joseph: I studied utopias in college, so I’ve always been interested in the idea of attempts at a perfect world. But the specific idea for individual “youtopias” started as a small chapter in a larger work—a simple conversation between my protagonist and his pot dealer, actually.
The dealer was spouting this far-fetched idea of people living in their own brains. At the time, I was probably exploring the idea in a safer space, through a person we weren’t necessarily meant to take seriously.
But as the years passed, as I saw more and more people living in their phones instead of the world before them, the more I realized the idea was serious, and that I should treat it as such.
While this is your first novel, you’ve written short stories and screenplays. When did you first think to yourself, “I want to be a writer”?
Joseph: I’m one of those “always wanted to be a writer” types. I think, for us, we get encouragement early on from teachers or mentors. For me, this was a story I wrote in fifth grade about a gazelle escaping a cheetah attack that my teacher highly praised.
Then, I wrote a story about a young girl dealing with divorce in ninth grade, and my English teacher suggested I submit it to a local contest. I won, and got the bug big time.
From there, I was always writing. An illustrator friend of mine and I tried comic books in high school—the gone-too-soon Dark Force. I wrote many quote-unquote “failed” novels. I’ve had the fortune of publishing short works, and having screenplays adapted to films. But in a lot of ways, Youtopia is that little boy’s dream come true.
How is writing a novel like producing a film? What’s the biggest difference creatively?
Joseph: Films are a wholly collaborative process, and recognizing that, you have to write in a lot of room for interpretation in a script. It’s far more bare-bones.
I have a friend in Hollywood who is primarily a screenwriter, and when he was trying to adapt his screenplay into a novel, he made an analogy to the effect of: “Novels are like art; screenplays are like fingerpainting.”
I tend to agree. With screenwriting, it’s broad strokes; with novels, it’s minute, pinpoint brushes and dabs.
That being said, I do bring a lot of screenwriting elements into my novel writing, particularly with Youtopia. I plotted it based on a common film “beat sheet” idea; I tried to write a lot of scenes cinematically. The prologue was actually an idea in my mind for a short film before it became the opening of the novel, and I think that shows in the description.
Tell us about your journey to your first book being published?
Joseph: I began writing Youtopia in earnest in 2018, and finished a good draft to send out around 2020, right when the pandemic hit. It was, to put it mildly, not a great time to try to break into the publishing game.
But I kept at it, pursuing almost every possible avenue for publication, and ultimately found a great home with Evolved Publishing.
The toughest task for most writers is marketing and promotion. How do you find readers for your books?
Joseph: I would agree that this is the toughest part of being a writer, simply because writers are—or at least I am—observers at heart. We like to sit back and take it all in.
When you have a book to promote, you simply cannot do that, cannot ask others to do for you what you won’t do yourself. I remind myself: if I’m not enthusiastic about my own work, why should a reader be?
So I dive headfirst into social media, book forums. I do interviews like this one!
I made a book trailer on Youtube that I’m particularly proud of, seeing as how I’m not a film editor. I’m narrating the audiobook version to try to reach those readers. I submit to contests and will submit to local book festivals.
Basically, you do whatever you can to get the word out.
A few questions about your writing process, which seems to be different for every author. Do you think of a character first then learn the story? Or do you dream up a story or plot first then develop your lead character? Something else?
Joseph: Usually, for me, the concept comes first. That’s particularly true for something speculative like Youtopia. I knew what I wanted to explore, and then the characters become extensions of that.
At some point, of course, your characters must be more than just part of a concept.
For example, my main character FBI Agent Anabel Downer needed a life outside of just investigating murders. She needed wants and desires and simplicity, like we all do.
Finding the depth in my characters generally involves just finding out that dramatic need, and then putting up a big fat roadblock to them achieving it.
Do you start with a theme, a message, or point-of-view you want to get across in your writing? Or does the theme emerge during the process?
Joseph: I generally don’t start with theme, because if I do, the piece ends up sounding like pandering, or the message overtakes the story.
If there’s a theme in Youtopia—and I think there are a few—most of it came from exploring the topic through the characters and story as I went.
For me, the story should make the theme, not the other way around.
What’s your favorite part of the writing process?
Joseph: It used to be the initial composing part, the first draft if you will—the early part of the romance, where everything is new and I’m enamored with the concept and building the characters. Now I find that’s one of the hardest parts.
Part of that has to do with writing-editing with word processing and the ease of the delete button. I try to remind myself that it doesn’t need to be great on a first go: it just needs to get on paper.
My favorite part is now the later stages, revising and rewriting. Making the sentences exactly what I want them to be.
Another analogy I use is the idea of a sandbox: the first draft is building the walls and dumping in the sand, getting all the parts there, and maybe even building a rudimentary castle.
But the true artistry for me comes in crafting the castle into something that hasn’t been seen before, and putting on those finishing touches that really might wow someone who’s willing to look close enough.
What’s your next project? Do you have a work-in-progress, and do you see Youtopia evolving into a series?
Joseph: Youtopia is slated to be a three-part series (with potentially a fourth...the ideas are always germinating!). Youtopia Reborn will be released in September 2024, and Youtopia Infinity in April of 2025.
I do also have something half-written that I will get back to—a fantasy dystopia titled The Paradise Hunt—but I’m going to ride the Youtopia wave as long as I have something interesting to add to it with each new installment.
I also have a film in pre-production, titled Black Bouquet. It’s a—surprise surprise—psychological thriller. We’re hoping that filming will start later this summer.
Any advice or tips to aspiring or up-and-coming authors?
Joseph: I work with young writers almost every day, and aside from all the ins and outs of writing and publication, my biggest piece of advice is twofold.
One, keep writing. It’s going to be hard, but embrace that difficulty. Recognize that, if it was easy, everyone would do it!
And two, write something you’re interested in reading. You can waste a lot of time trying to appease to certain audiences, but at the end of the day, if you write the book you would want to read, one that you haven’t read before, then you’ll be successful.
Oh, and three (I suppose I have three!): celebrate every success, big or small. If you get published or win an award, great! If someone close to you reads your work and tells you it impacted them, that’s also great.
In some ways, that second part is what we do this for.
Joseph, thanks so much for sharing your life and work with readers of A Writer’s Block.
For more about Joseph Rein and to find your copy of Youtopia:
In the individual, virtual-reality-like mind space of Youtopia, “Immersers” can live in their own perfect world, but chaos ensues when an Immerser is murdered inside his Youtopia.
FBI Special Agent Anabel Downer, one of the Bureau’s best, is assigned to the case. In her investigations of the mysterious murder, she interviews Youtopia’s staunchest supporters and naysayers, and gathers clues about the seedier sides of Immerser life.
Along the way, she encounters her own troubled past, and questions herself what is real. As the killer escalates his efforts, Ana must confront not only the hardest case of her life, but also her own demons.
EVOLVED PUBLISHING PRESENTS the first intriguing installment in the “Youtopia” series of techno-thriller/sci-fi/crime adventures, which, though fiction, seems all too possible in the real world... real soon.