10 Questions with Weston Ochse
1. If we were to have an apocalypse, what do you think would be the cause of the apocalypse?
GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. I’m in fear that soon all the seeds on our lonely will be by subscription only. Did you know what companies are selling and using seeds as you read this that will only produce for one year? In order to get the next year produced, you have to pay more money. Soon we won’t have natural fruits and veggies and wheat that just grow again the next year. Gone will be subsistence living and farming. And oh yeah, in a related thought, colony collapse disorder. That!
2. What’s the greatest moment in your writing career?
It’s funny. I keep having those. My first published story. My first story in this or that magazine or that anthology. My first novel. My second novel. They great moments keep coming. It’s why I continue to write.
3. How has your experience in the military influenced you as a writer?
I think it helped me get through the beginning stages. I’m a grunt at heart. We’re told to take hills. So I saw each obstacle as a hill to be conquered. Then later, when writing military fiction, it helped me considerably provide realism that most writers can’t achieve.
4. Who is your favorite writer?
I have no favorite favorite, but let me share my top three (not in any order) and explain why.
Cormac Mccarthy. Besides the fact that I’m envious because he can get away without any of the usual punctuation, there is no one out there writing with such power about the relationship and constant battle man (humankind) has against nature, be it the nature of self, the physical nature of the universe, or the nature of an idea. He is a master of it. Perhaps my favorite part of any text in any book, other than the section below, is from the last thousand words of the second book of his Plains series called The Crossing. The pang and loss the main character feels as well as his inability to do anything about it is so stark and powerful, the passage left me breathless.
But not everyone is ready for Macarthy. The move The Counselor directed by starring Cameron Diaz and Michael Fastbender wasn’t a hit. I personally think that the movie is magnificent. It’s pure Mccarthy. But what viewers want is a happy ending. They want to see a happy character arc. But as I mentioned, Mccarthy is the master of man versus nature and in the movie man comes up against the intractability of nature. Realize, with nature, you can’t argue with it, you can’t fight against it, it’s there.
One last thought on Mccarthy. I had never read any of his work prior to 2000. The reason I picked him up was because the New York Times came up with a list of the top fifty books of the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy was number one. Based on that, I had to read it. Talk about a powerful book about man versus nature… Blood Meridian will scour your heart and make you weep.
Ray Bradbury. Probably the reason I started writing. He was (and is) such a fabulist. I never knew there were horror writers or sci fi writers or fantasy writers. I thought everyone were fabulist writers and non-fabulist writers. When I first read The Sound of Summer Running (the story from which Dandelion Wine was created) in my school textbook, I was hooked. Brdbury’s ability to generate wonder in the reader as well as the characters is still unmatched to this day. Something Wicked This Way Comes is equally amazing in its ability to curate dread.
Let me show you. Here’s an excerpt from that story I mentioned above and you can see how he turned the love of a new pair of tennis shoes into summer:
It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks, stranding the houses. Any moment the town would capsize, go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood, trapped on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.
“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes . . .”
His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”
“Well . . .”
It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction than the real part of you above water.
“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted.
They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Then there’s Robert Heinlein. He was the first sci fi author I know to write about PTSD. You’d think it would have been in Starship Troopers, but it wasn’t. No one suffers from what they did in Starship Troopers and I think people were critical of that. Heinlein sat out to change that in Glory Road, which was also the first book I can think of written about Vietnam, although it never refers to it other than a war in Southeast Asia. From his earliest work all the way to Job: A Comedy of Justice, Heinlein’s literary through line held fast to the theme of social consciousness. He’s been called a libertine and an iconoclast, but there are few authors in our history who have touched on such a broad ranging group of social subjects and have made us think about them, even if we can’t always grok them.
Did you know that Heinlein came up with the idea of ‘Paying it Forward’ in his 1951 book, Between Planets. As a mentor to Ray Bradbury, he passed this idea onto him, which you can see in Bradbury’s book Dandelion Wine (see above).
Check this out:
How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....
5. Can you describe how it came about that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson signed on to star and executive produce a movie based on your SEAL Team 666 novel, and can you provide an update on the status of that project?
I’m honestly not sure how it happened. All I know is that I got a text from my editor at Thomas Dunne Books moments after I was released from 5 hours of secondary detention at Dubai International Airport saying The Rock is going to star in your movie and don’t tell anyone. Talk about instantaneous disbelief and thankfulness. However it happened, it was because of the hard work of Brendan Deneen. And the status? It’s still a go. Just waiting for Mr. Johnson to stop destroying California so he can be a bad-ass US Navy SEAL fighting supernatural monstas!!!
6. What advice do you have for beginning writers?
Define what kind of writer you want to be and then be that. What’s that mean? If you want instant gratification, then self-publish. If you want a long professional career, then be prepared for years of heart ache before you get that big break. Those years are necessary. There’s a professional standard we need to attain. If writing is a muscle, we need to spend time making it strong. But realize, once you get that break, a whole universe is then open to you that is only open to less than one percent of self-published authors.
7. Which medium do you prefer writing: short stories, non-fiction, graphic novels, or novels?
I really love the short story the best. Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants is the best short story ever written and I’m constantly trying to achieve that clarity of metaphor.
8. In Blaze of Glory, what made you decide to use the maggot creatures that you use to spell the doom of humanity?
I wanted to use something that people could recognize, something that people have already seen and have been grossed out by, then turn it up to eleven.
9. What is your best quality as a writer?
Gosh. I can’t answer that. This is something for you or fans to answer. I’m just a writer.
10. If Hollywood was making a film adaptation of Blaze of Glory, and the director asked you to cast the role of Buckly Adamski, who would you choose?
Well, it was almost Wesley Snipes. Yeah. You heard it. That was real right up until the moment I screwed it up. To hear the whole story, read the essay in the back of Blaze. But the movie would call for a strong African American actor. I’ve always been partial to Courtney B. Vance. Then again, Michael Boatman would do an awesome job as Buckley as would Chi McBride.
And oh yeah, my favorite part of writing Blaze of Glory was the crack-addled grandmother who turned nursery rhymes into precognition. Yeah. That.
GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. I’m in fear that soon all the seeds on our lonely will be by subscription only. Did you know what companies are selling and using seeds as you read this that will only produce for one year? In order to get the next year produced, you have to pay more money. Soon we won’t have natural fruits and veggies and wheat that just grow again the next year. Gone will be subsistence living and farming. And oh yeah, in a related thought, colony collapse disorder. That!
2. What’s the greatest moment in your writing career?
It’s funny. I keep having those. My first published story. My first story in this or that magazine or that anthology. My first novel. My second novel. They great moments keep coming. It’s why I continue to write.
3. How has your experience in the military influenced you as a writer?
I think it helped me get through the beginning stages. I’m a grunt at heart. We’re told to take hills. So I saw each obstacle as a hill to be conquered. Then later, when writing military fiction, it helped me considerably provide realism that most writers can’t achieve.
4. Who is your favorite writer?
I have no favorite favorite, but let me share my top three (not in any order) and explain why.
Cormac Mccarthy. Besides the fact that I’m envious because he can get away without any of the usual punctuation, there is no one out there writing with such power about the relationship and constant battle man (humankind) has against nature, be it the nature of self, the physical nature of the universe, or the nature of an idea. He is a master of it. Perhaps my favorite part of any text in any book, other than the section below, is from the last thousand words of the second book of his Plains series called The Crossing. The pang and loss the main character feels as well as his inability to do anything about it is so stark and powerful, the passage left me breathless.
But not everyone is ready for Macarthy. The move The Counselor directed by starring Cameron Diaz and Michael Fastbender wasn’t a hit. I personally think that the movie is magnificent. It’s pure Mccarthy. But what viewers want is a happy ending. They want to see a happy character arc. But as I mentioned, Mccarthy is the master of man versus nature and in the movie man comes up against the intractability of nature. Realize, with nature, you can’t argue with it, you can’t fight against it, it’s there.
One last thought on Mccarthy. I had never read any of his work prior to 2000. The reason I picked him up was because the New York Times came up with a list of the top fifty books of the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy was number one. Based on that, I had to read it. Talk about a powerful book about man versus nature… Blood Meridian will scour your heart and make you weep.
Ray Bradbury. Probably the reason I started writing. He was (and is) such a fabulist. I never knew there were horror writers or sci fi writers or fantasy writers. I thought everyone were fabulist writers and non-fabulist writers. When I first read The Sound of Summer Running (the story from which Dandelion Wine was created) in my school textbook, I was hooked. Brdbury’s ability to generate wonder in the reader as well as the characters is still unmatched to this day. Something Wicked This Way Comes is equally amazing in its ability to curate dread.
Let me show you. Here’s an excerpt from that story I mentioned above and you can see how he turned the love of a new pair of tennis shoes into summer:
It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks, stranding the houses. Any moment the town would capsize, go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood, trapped on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.
“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes . . .”
His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”
“Well . . .”
It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction than the real part of you above water.
“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted.
They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Then there’s Robert Heinlein. He was the first sci fi author I know to write about PTSD. You’d think it would have been in Starship Troopers, but it wasn’t. No one suffers from what they did in Starship Troopers and I think people were critical of that. Heinlein sat out to change that in Glory Road, which was also the first book I can think of written about Vietnam, although it never refers to it other than a war in Southeast Asia. From his earliest work all the way to Job: A Comedy of Justice, Heinlein’s literary through line held fast to the theme of social consciousness. He’s been called a libertine and an iconoclast, but there are few authors in our history who have touched on such a broad ranging group of social subjects and have made us think about them, even if we can’t always grok them.
Did you know that Heinlein came up with the idea of ‘Paying it Forward’ in his 1951 book, Between Planets. As a mentor to Ray Bradbury, he passed this idea onto him, which you can see in Bradbury’s book Dandelion Wine (see above).
Check this out:
How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....
5. Can you describe how it came about that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson signed on to star and executive produce a movie based on your SEAL Team 666 novel, and can you provide an update on the status of that project?
I’m honestly not sure how it happened. All I know is that I got a text from my editor at Thomas Dunne Books moments after I was released from 5 hours of secondary detention at Dubai International Airport saying The Rock is going to star in your movie and don’t tell anyone. Talk about instantaneous disbelief and thankfulness. However it happened, it was because of the hard work of Brendan Deneen. And the status? It’s still a go. Just waiting for Mr. Johnson to stop destroying California so he can be a bad-ass US Navy SEAL fighting supernatural monstas!!!
6. What advice do you have for beginning writers?
Define what kind of writer you want to be and then be that. What’s that mean? If you want instant gratification, then self-publish. If you want a long professional career, then be prepared for years of heart ache before you get that big break. Those years are necessary. There’s a professional standard we need to attain. If writing is a muscle, we need to spend time making it strong. But realize, once you get that break, a whole universe is then open to you that is only open to less than one percent of self-published authors.
7. Which medium do you prefer writing: short stories, non-fiction, graphic novels, or novels?
I really love the short story the best. Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants is the best short story ever written and I’m constantly trying to achieve that clarity of metaphor.
8. In Blaze of Glory, what made you decide to use the maggot creatures that you use to spell the doom of humanity?
I wanted to use something that people could recognize, something that people have already seen and have been grossed out by, then turn it up to eleven.
9. What is your best quality as a writer?
Gosh. I can’t answer that. This is something for you or fans to answer. I’m just a writer.
10. If Hollywood was making a film adaptation of Blaze of Glory, and the director asked you to cast the role of Buckly Adamski, who would you choose?
Well, it was almost Wesley Snipes. Yeah. You heard it. That was real right up until the moment I screwed it up. To hear the whole story, read the essay in the back of Blaze. But the movie would call for a strong African American actor. I’ve always been partial to Courtney B. Vance. Then again, Michael Boatman would do an awesome job as Buckley as would Chi McBride.
And oh yeah, my favorite part of writing Blaze of Glory was the crack-addled grandmother who turned nursery rhymes into precognition. Yeah. That.
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