Joe Clifford Faust's Blog, page 10
May 7, 2012
Facebook Fan Page: The Drive to 100
Having just noticed that the JCF Facebook Fan Page is a mere 14 people away from hitting the 100 mark, I am announcing yet another contest to give away one of my books.
When the JCFFbFP hits the 100 mark, I will open up my geek toolkit, remove two 10-sided dice, and toll up a number between 1 and 100. The corresponding person on the listing of Likes will receive his or her choice of the Beautiful Trade Paperback Edition of either A Death of Honor or The Mushroom Shift, personally autographed by yours truly and shipped with loving care by the United States Postal Service.
In addition, as a JCFFbFP liker, you will get JCF news first! The order things are usually announced is: 1) Facebook Fan Page; 2) this blog right here and my regular Facebook page, usually a week or two later; and 3), my wife, usually when she says, “And when did you plan to tell me about this?”
So click through and Like today! Hey, the odds are better than buying a lottery ticket!
And don’t forget, copies of The Mushroom Shift are also up for grabs in paper and Kindle editions as outlined here.
Live at the Apollo
Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of the better 33 1/3 books, although the “historical context” kind of gets left behind at the end.
May 3, 2012
Author Announces Book Giveaway in Honor of Law Enforcement Officers
CANTON, OH – To help raise awareness of Peace Officers Memorial Day (May 15) and National Police Week (May 12-16), author Joe Clifford Faust is giving away copies of his dark-humored police novel, The Mushroom Shift through the Amazon Kindle and Goodreads.com. Between May 12th and 16th, Amazon Kindle owners may download a free copy directly through their device or order it through the Amazon.com website. In addition, 10 autographed copies of the trade paperback version of the book will be given away through Goodreads.com. A Goodreads account is required to sign up for the drawing.
“This novel is based on things I saw during 4 1/2 years of working as a Sheriff’s dispatcher,” Faust said. “I saw quite a bit during my time there, from the hilarious to the utterly terrifying, including the loss of officers. Nothing I can do can make up for the sacrifice these men make, but I hope that this effort makes people more aware of the importance of May 15th.”
The Mushroom Shift tells the story of Clarence Raymond Monmouth, a deputy in a small town in Wyoming, who is finishing his third year on the despised Mushroom Shift – midnight to eight a.m. – in the final weeks of 1985. As the year draws to a close, Monmouth comes to realize that the county’s aging Sheriff will soon be succeeded by the political enemy who marooned him on that shift. Survival mode kicks in and he begins to consider his options, interrupted by his crumbling marriage, his drinking, and the never-ending parade of drunk drivers, family fights and perverts that make up small town police work.
The novel is a snapshot of a different world that is not that far in the past, in a time before political correctness. Its theme of men struggling to hang on to their jobs is universal.
Joe Clifford Faust was born in North Dakota, raised in Alberta and Wyoming, went to college in Oklahoma, and now lives in Ohio. He has been married for more than thirty years, has two adult children, and has worked at a local advertising agency since 1997. Besides The Mushroom Shift, he is also reissuing his critically acclaimed science fiction novels under his own imprint, Thief Media.
Faust may be contacted at thiefmedia at gmail dot com for interviews and guest blog posts, and is available to speak to writer’s groups or other organizations live or via Skype.
The Mushroom Shift Links
Amazon Kindle Version (non-affilliate)
Goodreads contest
Facebook Fan Page
April 19, 2012
The Hot Kid
The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great fun with Leonard’s larger-than-life hero Carl Webster. Ends abruptly, but it still works.
April 5, 2012
Looking Back at the Future
Sometime in 1989, Kurt Busiek, who had up until recently been my agent, called me from his new position at Marvel Comics. They were planning on taking another crack at a Science Fiction comic book, and they were going to put two twists on the genre. First, it was going to be written by real, professional, established Science Fiction writers. Second, it was going to be a shared universe – where all of the writers got to basically play in the same sandbox.
And he wanted me to write the opening story for the series.
Why me?
Open Space, Issue #1. Lead story by yours truly, set in a bleak near-future.
"Because you're extraordinarily good at near futures," he told me. And the near future is where Open Space, as the comic would come to be known, began.By that point in my career I had published A Death of Honor and The Company Man, both of which posited rather gloomy near futures and skated near the thin ice that could plunge one into cyberpunk (although I never considered them that, many readers did – after I thought about it, I suppose they were pre-cyberpunk in a way).
So over the ensuing years, you might wonder how some of my near-future predictions came out, seeing as how we just passed the 25th anniversary of the publication of Honor. Answer is, there were some things here and there in both books that kind of hit near some marks if you stretched it a bit.
But nothing like what has been happening in the past few months with the Pembroke Hall novels.
It all started in December, when an article appeared in Forbes online, accompanied by a couple of remarkable videos. The title was "Nanotechnology May Lead To The End Of Laundry", and I'm certain that a lot of people thought it was gosh-wow — except for the people who had read Ferman's Devils and/or Boddekker's Demons during the fifteen minutes they were in print.
One of the conceits in those novels was a laundry soap that used nanotechnology to not just ultra-clean clothing, but actually repaired it as well. It seems that by the time the author was writing those novels in the mid-1990s, he had seen a lot of preachifying about how nanotech was going to save the world by disassembling toxic chemicals at the molecular level and save lives by repairing heart valves without surgery, and so on. He realized these things were noble indeed, but that somebody was going to figure out how to make big bucks with the technology by making it do something mundane. And here we are:
And…
Now I had a friend who really needed a new heart valve a couple of years ago, and when local hospitals gave him the kiss off because he was self-insured, he went to India to have the retread work done. And I was left wondering, where was his nano-laced pill that would take care of that? Hmmm, seems the nano folks got to the making a buck part of the program before nobility could rear its head.
But I digress.
Back to the point. That was pretty strange, to see something like that happen, nearly a dozen years after the book came out. But then something else caught my eye yesterday – a story from the London Telegraph saying that Paul McCartney's son James is mulling over putting a band together with the sons of the other Beatles. Hey, I can't make this stuff up.
Nanos that do laundry, Beatles: The Next Generation, and a crumbling culture - they're all here.
Except that I did. It was kind of a running joke in the Pembroke Hall novels, a band constantly referred to as "The SOB's" – and then you find out halfway through that it stands for "Sons of Beatles", and that the band is made up of… yeah, you got it.Was I trying to wishfully think when I wrote that into the novel? No. I was making fun of our popular culture. It was, after all, the beginning of an era when artists began keeping their moribund careers alive by releasing sequels to hit albums of the past (the latest? Ian Anderson's Thick as a Brick 2. Seriously.). Maybe in retrospect I shouldn't have done it. Pop culture is just too easy of a target. I don't know.
Whether Beatles 2.0 comes off or not remains to be seen, but these things have made for a weird couple of months for me. Before you go calling me Nostradamus or anything like that, remember that there's lots of other stuff in those two novels that hasn't happened, like thugs becoming media stars. Everyone knows that commercial actors aren't thugs. Those are all found in the NFL and NBA.
Seriously again, I don't know what to make of this. They say things happen in threes, so maybe I will ignore this trend until one more thing like this pops up – when and if. So I guess I'll try not to be too unnerved until the other other shoe drops.
Meantime, if you want to catch up on this tale, I'm scheduled to have the Author's Intended Version of Ferman's Devils – ready for release just over a year from now. Maybe sooner if I can get those pesky Angel's Luck books out of the way. If you want to check them out sooner, check the used section of Amazon or on eBay.
And for you few who read the book, here's something that may keep you up at night: According to my calculations, Boddekker is now an eight year-old.
April 3, 2012
DOH!
Apologies to subscribers and those out there taking in this site via RSS feed. A couple of days ago, I noticed a glitch on a rather large number of posts and decided to fix a few… forgetting that whenever I updated them, they would show up anew on RSS.
A good thing I didn't fix all of the posts that had the glitch.
Now that I know about the issue, when I have time to sit down and fix it, I will turn off RSS for the duration and keep your news feeds clear of re-runs.
In the meantime, the Kindle version of The Company Man has completed the coding process and is undergoing the first wave of corrections and proofing. Look for it and a trade paperback version of same sometime later this month, hopefully.
And look for a preview of the cover art in these pages soon.
March 23, 2012
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Interesting look at the history of Free in merchandising and its implementation in the information age. Take heed!
February 9, 2012
The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Amazing story of a small band of political prisoners who escape from a Russian gulag in Siberia and make their way to India. A tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
February 8, 2012
Thank You!
A Death of Honor is currently the #1 Kindle book in Free Science Fiction and has cracked the Top 100 of overall Free Kindle Books. My thanks to everyone who has downloaded a copy and made this possible so far.
Honor will continue to be free through Saturday the 11th. If you haven't gotten your copy yet, click yourself over and snag one now!
February 7, 2012
Free for the Kindle (Limited Time Offer!)
So you've been wanting to read A Death of Honor on your Kindle and have been putting it off and putting it off. Well now you no longer have an excuse.
That's because A Death of Honor is currently available as a free download for the Kindle reader and the Kindle software for assorted platforms.
So click it, get it, read it. And post a review on Amazon. I don't care if it's a good review or not. Authors always love feedback.
But hurry. This offer turns back into a pumpkin at the end of February 11th.
