The good people at Shepherd.com invited me to post a “5 best” list on their site. I had a lot of fun with it. Thanks to Ben Shepherd for making this happen.
Here’s my list. Check it out…
https://shepherd.com/best-books/literary-novels-masquerading-as-crime-novels
Big shout-out and many thanks to Jeff Circle for making one of his famous dossiers on me. I had a blast. He’s one of the smartest and funniest guys I’ve met in a long time.
Check it out…
Many thanks to the good people at CrimeReads for giving me a chance to write about one of my favorite topics, the importance of setting in fiction.
Well, it finally happened—my first novel, Twice the Trouble, is now out in the world.
I gave a short (but probably not short enough!) reading at the Alachua Country library, after which we all retired to the fine Cypress & Grove brewery here in Gainesville for beers and pizza. Not a bad evening, I must say.
Big thanks to my brother Colin and my great friends Cindi Lea, Laura Fitzpatrick, Bill Cellich, Rhonda Reilly and many others for helping make my launch event a success.
In this episode, Ash and Margaret finish-off Jean Rhys’s classic 1967 novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Also, Margaret explains the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to Ash, while Ash considers how “Wide Sargasso Sea” might have been improved if the main character had known Kung Fu.
Most of the art I’ve included in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series has been from the 1970s and 1980s. Two golden ages of sci-fi, surely, which, more importantly, marked my golden age of sci-fi—my middle- and high-school years when I devoured all kinds of science fiction novels from the previous decades.
And so it is with some surprise that I submit this episode’s sci-fi cover, which is only from 1998. But it’s still a classic. An instant classic, actually, and not just because it was done for one of the most influential sci-fi novels of all time, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep. Calling PKD a science fiction writer makes a bit more sense that calling Kurt Vonnegut a science fiction writer, or Franz Kafka a science fiction writer, but not much. Like Vonnegut and Kafka, Dick wrote surreal, even psychedelic novels that deal with issues of compassion, violence, identity, sanity. Most of all, they describe the problem of discerning reality from the fake. (The “ersatz,” as Dick likes to call it in his typical Germanophilic style).
Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep is Dick’s most famous book, in part because it inspired Blade Runner but also because it’s just a fine, complex, and vivid novel. Rick Deckert, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter who finds and kills runaway androids (called replicants in the film, these are flesh-based artificial people who look and act like human beings, only crueler.)
The book was published in 1968 and has gone through dozens of editions and covers. But this cover, created by commercial artist Bruce Jensen, is my favorite. It depicts a male figure who might be a Greek statue, or a wax dummy (or an android), and yet whose expression conveys a sense of pathos that the viewer can’t quite look away from. This sense of pathos is amplified by the fact that lying between the viewer and the figure is a grid of what seems to be hog-wire, evoking a plot point in the book. Deckert, like many people in his dystopian future, keeps a farm animal as a pet—in his case, a sheep. But the wire also has echoes of the Holocaust, which is especially interesting since Dick’s inspiration for the book came after reading the diary of an S.S. Officer guarding a concentration camp. The figure is, we sense, a prisoner, although we don’t know what of. (Spoiler: it’s modern civilization.)
And then there is the sheep itself, rendered in a hallucinogenic little box over the male figure’s left eye. The only point of color in the work, the sheep draws the viewer’s attention the same way Deckert’s sheep draws out his latent humanity—it represents nature, vitality, warmth. Most importantly, it serves as something to love.
Love, as it turns out, is the last human quality that the androids learn (and most never do). It is also, Dick strongly suggests, the defining aspect of living things.
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Walter Mosely was when I saw the 1995 film adaptation of his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good movie, with fine performances by Washington and Don Cheadle, but it didn’t inspire me to seek out Mosely’s fiction. As far as I knew, he was just another solid mystery writer, one of many whom I hadn’t read.
Sometime later, I bought a copy of The Best American Short Stories and I was surprised to see a story by Mosely among that year’s selections. The story is called “Pet Fly” and it’s a deceptively simple tale of an office grunt (who happens to be black) trying to keep his integrity while working in modern corporate America. I was knocked-out by it. Later still, I stumbled upon an actual novel by Mosely, a science fiction work called The Wave, which turned out to be one of the best novels (sci-fi or otherwise) that I had read in years.
Continue reading “What I’m (Re-)Reading: “Devil in a Blue Dress””Many thanks to Gerry Fialka for interviewing me on his great podcast. I have no idea why he thought of me, but I’m glad he did. It was fun.
Yes, my lighting sucks. I’m working on it. Check it out anyway, pls…
I am a perpetual student of the writing craft and, as such, I am an avid consumer of books about writing. Here is a list of my favorites, from great to greatest…
10. Aspects of the Novel Kindle Edition — E. M. Forster
Forster is one of my all-time favorite novelists, a capital-G Great Writer who penned classics like Howard’s End and A Passage to India. So, he could write with some authority on both the broad and fine points of novel-writing. It’s also a very practical book. Best of all, it’s in the public domain, so you can get it for free/cheap.
9. Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer
J. Michael Straczynski is best known as the creator of the classic sci-fi TV show Babylon Five. But he’s also had a long, successful career in screenwriting and producing. He takes his title from a quote by his friend, the late Harlan Ellison: “The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.” Indeed. Straczynski has good, strategic advice for writers at every level, from novice to published (and wanting to stay published).
8. From Where You Dream – Robert Olen Butler
This is not a book on craft, but rather a high-level meditation on how to channel inspiration into the art of writing, and how writing itself can almost be a form of spiritual practice. Butler makes a strong case that this practice is what really separates “hack” writers from true artists.
7. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
An extremely witty and inspirational book about starting a novel, keeping momentum, and fighting off self-doubt. The title comes from an anecdote that Lamott tells about her father instructing her brother on how to write a big term-paper on local bird-life.
6. Stein on Writing – Sol Stein
This is one of my favorite books on the practical matter of writing fiction that doesn’t suck. From description, to pacing, to style and character motivation, Stein covers it all. His section on titles alone is worth the cost of the book.
5. Don’t Sabotage Your Submission: Save Your Manuscript from Turning Up D.O.A. – Chris Roerden
This is the absolutely best craft manual that I’ve ever found. No joke—reading it changed the way I write. What this book teaches you is the fiction-writing equivalent of not picking your nose in public. Avoid tons of stupid, stupid shit (that I have done and many others have done) in your fiction—the kinds of things that make an agent or a publisher sock your manuscript straight into the circular file. If you can find this book, new or used, it’s worth the money.
4. The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface – Donald Maass
Maass is the only author on this list who is also a successful literary agent. The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a great book about how to make the reader feel something—which, to me, is the highest (and perhaps the only important) goal of fiction. How do you do it? Well, obviously, by making your characters feeling something—that is, complex, believable, and yet somehow ineffable emotions.
3. Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True – Elizabeth Berg
This has recently become one of my favorite books on the writing life. One great quote:
I believe that fiction feeds on itself, grows like a pregnancy. The more you write, the more there is to draw from; the more you say, the more there is to say. The deeper you go into your imagination, the richer that reservoir becomes. You do not run out of material by using all that’s in you; rather, when you take everything that is available one day, it only makes room for new things to appear the next.
2. Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert is one of the best writers of her generation, so it makes perfect sense that she would write one of the best books ever on the creative process. While not limited to the literary arts specifically, Big Magic is a meditation on how any kind of creative art is a kind of inexplicable, real magic. It has to be nurtured, defended, shared, and—above all—respected.
1. On Writing – Stephen King
As one might expect, this is my favorite of all the books on this list, and the one I find myself re-reading. Stephen King is a master, and his is the most entertaining and trenchant book on this list. Part is devoted to practical matters like plot, description, dialog, etc., while the rest is a very compelling memoir.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.
As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).
Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.
How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?
Continue reading “What I’m Reading: “The Peripheral””
Ash Clifton, Writer 