Joe Clifford Faust's Blog, page 11
February 1, 2012
The Mushroom Shift
Okay, this is the big announcement you've been waiting for. Or maybe it isn't.
The Mushroom Shift, the police novel I wrote way back when during the mists of 1985, is officially available for you to read. You can get the Amazon Kindle version here, or for those of you who still love the feel, smell, and tactile experience of a real paper book, you can get the trade paperback version from Amazon here or from me through Amazon here.
(A Trade Paper version of A Death of Honor is also available here, but is not yet available on Amazon for some reason. Call it delay by dinosaur?)
The Kindle version went online in the middle of December, but I wanted to wait to make the official announcement until the paper version was available. Of course, if you'd liked my Facebook Fan Page, then you already knew about all of this stuff weeks ago.
If you're interested in the book, make sure you read the propaganda I wrote about it before buying it. The book is not at all politically correct (but since when are cops PC?) and is rather profane (but since when do cops talk like choirboys?). If you decide to take the plunge, I think you'll be rewarded with a novel that contains some of my best writing – not bad since it was only the second novel I wrote (I have a theory on why it turned out that way, but that's a topic for a future post).
There you have it. The chronicle of Clarence Raymond Monmouth, Badlands County Sheriff's Department, ready to come to your home and entertain you in whatever format you choose.
So buy early and often. And remember… I get paid whether you read the book or not!
Enjoy!
January 31, 2012
The Scariest Thing You Will Ever Do as a Writer
The Scariest Thing You Will Ever Do as a Writer by Susan Kiernan-Lewis
This is a great post about something all writers should be able to do. Luckily for me, I've always been pretty fearless about public speaking. Early in my career I showed up to talk to a college Creative Writing class with no notes, spoke for an hour, and the instructor told me it was the best-organized speech she'd ever heard in that class.
But it never occurred to me that I could take copies of my books and hawk them when it was over. Doh!
We can all still learn, folks. And it's not too late for you. Get out there and speak!
January 24, 2012
Morgue Drawer Four
Morgue Drawer Four by Jutta Profijt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Amusing procedural in which the narrator is a dead guy. Predictable in places, but a great ending.
January 21, 2012
Our Novels, Our Children
Like most writers, one of the most commonly asked questions I get from folks who hear I've written more than one novel is, "Which one is your favorite?" When I got that question, I used to say, "Whichever one I'm working on at the moment."
The problem was, people didn't get that answer. Most of the askers weren't writers themselves, and the concept of liking something that was incomplete was incomprehensible to them. So I switched answers. I began to say, "Picking a favorite novel would be like having to pick a favorite child." That tended to satisfy the asker.
But now I've hit something that demonstrates to me that maybe – just maybe – the books we write are more like our children than we want to admit.
I'm currently working on programming The Company Man to be read on the Kindle. It's double duty, as the cleaned-up file will also be the source of text for the trade paperback version. And as with A Death of Honor, I'm doing a little minor restoration on the file as I go, including undoing some minor editorial changes that I disagreed with – but as a professional, went along with.
Now this should be an easy thing, right? Except when it's not. The file I'm using as the source for TCM is one that I downloaded from a file sharing system. The scan to OCR stripped out all of the formatting: italics and small caps, which I use in my manuscripts without mercy, shrunk em dashes to en dashes, and blew up accented letters in words like cafe and most of the ones used in the book's "pidgin Spanish" slanguage. It made hash of line and paragraph breaks.
And the last time I read this novel was when it was in galley form – I don't read my novels after they are published. This would have been in the summer of 1988… nearly twenty-four years ago. As a result, a battered paperback copy of the novel is not too far from me and my Chromebook at any one moment.
Now this should be a pretty tough thing, right? Except when it's not. And it's not. I still need to pick up that paperback every now and then, but I'm not having to refer to it as much as I thought. I did a lot more in the beginning, but it's like the voice of the book, the pacing and the rhythm have all come back to me, and I'm sailing through it effortlessly.
Okay, that might be me picking up cues from things like surviving punctuation and paragraph breaks, but it goes beyond that even. Yes, I italicized titles of things and anything in pidgin Spanish, but I italicize lots of other words for emphasis. I get to a sentence where such a word was, and I think – that word right there I had put in italics. Twenty four years later during which I haven't done much more than move a copy of the book from one shelf to another, and here I am, remembering specifics on how things were written.
It's like I know this book as if it were one of my own children.
When I was a kid, I saw a John Wayne movie on TV that was called Without Reservations. It featured Duke as a GI returning home from the war (the film was made in 1946) who has to share a train seat with a woman (Claudette Colbert) on the way to Hollywood because her megablockbuster novel (think Gone With The Wind) is being made into a movie. She's travelling incognito, so Duke doesn't know she's the author… and there's no love lost between him and her book. They discuss it on a trip, he speaks his mind about why he hates the novel, there's comedy and romance, and if I recall, she ends up changing the script to reflect her new beau's preferences.
I only saw this movie once, but here's one scene that has stuck with me all these years. Our author goes into a liquor store to get some hootch, but it's in short supply. The storekeeper is reading her book, and she appeals to him to give her some booze because she wrote the book he's reading and enjoying. "Prove it," he says. She asks him what page he's on. He tells her. And Colbert proceeds to recite, word for word, what follows from the point the storekeeper leaves off. Upshot? She leaves with some booze.
The impression I got from that scene as a kid was enormous. Wow, do authors really have to memorize their own books? As time went on and I grew up, I realized it was just a made-up scene, and no, authors didn't have to memorize their own books.
Only now I'm rethinking that. We might not memorize them, true. But each novel we write is a journey we make, and the only company we have on the trip is… the novel itself, as it grows.
No, we don't memorize our novels. That's silly.
But we know these books. They're with us as they change our lives just by the very act of being written.
So yes, oh yes, most definitely indeed yes. They are our children. Our beautiful, flawed, singularly unique children.
January 12, 2012
The Great Movies III
The Great Movies III by Roger Ebert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Ebert continues to entertain with his insights on what makes a movie great.
January 6, 2012
The New Centurions
The New Centurions by Joseph Wambaugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Waumbaugh's episodic, genre-defining, dark-humored novel still packs a punch.
December 13, 2011
The Mushroom Shift Q and A
Q. So what's the deal with The Mushroom Shift?
A. The Mushroom Shift is a novel about police work that I wrote between A Death of Honor and The Company Man. This would make it the third novel I finished, Desperate Measures being the first.
Q. Why did you choose to release it after the reissue of A Death of Honor?
A. When I decided to do the reissues I thought it would also be a great time to release a couple of previously unpublished novels. To keep them in context of my career, I'm issuing them in the order they would have been published, had they found a publisher.
Q. And it's not a science fiction novel?
A. No. I'd never seen myself as a science fiction writer exclusively. I've always been interested in writing in lots of different styles and genres.
Q. Why hasn't it been published up until now?
A. Because the publishers who saw it couldn't figure out how to pigeonhole it. And my then-agent didn't really care for the book and showed it just enough to have the rejections to justify not shopping it any more.
Q. Some parts of it seem silly. Are these real cops?
A. If by silly, you mean some of the bits that seem almost slapstick, yes. Not that police work is Keystone Kops by any means, but I saw many things happen that could have been classified as slapstick. You get a guy out there who was on shift for eight hours, then spends another couple writing reports, then has to stay up because he's got court in the morning, and by the time he gets back to work the number of hours he's slept could be counted on one hand – he's going to get punchy and odd things will happen when stress kicks in.
Q. How realistic a police novel is it?
A. I wanted to be about what I saw, which means there is no gunfire in the book, and no car chase (although there is a scene where a car drives quickly and recklessly to get out of a bad situation).
Q. You mean nobody fires a gun at all?
A. None. Not even range practice or qualifying. Most officers go through their entire career firing their gun only when they're qualifying. Shooting bad guys dead all the time is a product of TV.
Q. Why publish it now?
A. It's still a good story. And I've known for a long time that I did some of my best writing in that book. There's a purity in it because when I was writing the Science Fiction novels, there was always a commercial consideration in the back of my head. But with Mushroom, I was writing it just for the love of writing, and for the love of those guys I worked with in Law Enforcement from '81 to '85, the ones who inspired the novel to begin with.
Q. How did they inspire it?
A. I think some of them thought that I should write a police novel since I was a writer, and they all knew I was a writer. I wrote Honor during that time. And on occasion one of them would come up to me and say, "So Joe, when are you going to write your Great American Novel about life and love at the Campbell County Sheriff's Office?" And I'd say, "Never. I'm going to become a rich and famous writer and forget about you guys." I was joking about forgetting them, but I had no plans to write a cop novel. Then one day a scene popped into my head and I picked up a notepad and wrote it, then set it aside when I was done. It ended up becoming the first chapter in the book.
Q. How did you come to write the rest of the novel?
A. A couple of years later I left the Sheriff's Office to try my hand at becoming a full-time writer. I sold Honor and was working on a new project, but 60 pages in it just wasn't working. I told my wife I was going to ditch it and try something else and she said, "Why don't you do something with that story about the policeman?" So I sat down without really thinking about where I was going to go with it, and the story came gushing out.
Q. The book takes place in 1985. Did you think about updating it before publishing it?
A. I did, but I'm basically a lazy writer in a lot of ways. I had 25 years of technological changes that I would have had to incorporate. The presence of just cell phones, for example, would have changed the entire dynamic of the book, from the opening scene to the frantic series of phone calls that make up part of the story's climax. And there were a lot of other bits in there that would have had to go because they'd no longer make sense. The whole book would need to be rethought and rewritten. I read it over and thought it held up as a period piece, so I decided to let it stand.
Q. You've said that in every one of your books there's a character you'd like to play if it got made into a movie. Which character is it in The Mushroom Shift?
A. Joe Quigley. I'd say more, but I don't want to divulge any spoilers.
The Mushroom Shift for the Amazon Kindle
The Mushroom Shift Trade Paperback (Coming Soon!)
The Mushroom Shift Facebook Fan Page
December 8, 2011
11/22/63
11/22/63 by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not his best, but certainly not his worst. Quite readable and only a little bit of cheating on the ending, but with one of his best ending scenes ever. And, as always, it should have been cut down by at least 1/3…
December 6, 2011
November 25, 2011
33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume One
33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume One by David Barker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This collection of chapters from different books in the 33 1/3 series is a mixed bag of work. There are pieces of unreadable pretentious tripe, fawning fanboy upchuckium, and insightful, well-thought out analyses.
