Book Review: The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman; Part Two:The Book Itself

Posted on March 18, 2012 by John Walters

In the first post about this book I recounted what the seventies mean to me personally.  Heady times they were, to be sure, and integral to my development as a writer.  Now I will go into an analysis of the book itself.

In short, I found it a disappointment – but part of it was my fault.  I was hoping that it would be something it was not.  I should have had a clue when I realized how short it was.  No book of 250 pages can hope to be an in-depth look at a decade.  What it gives is a bird’s-eye view of some of the main events and trends, while what I had wanted was a comprehensive history of the era.  As I read I kept hoping for more.  The writer would touch on a fascinating point, but then that was it.  The elaboration I longed for would never follow.  It would be a touch here and a touch there, and then onwards to something completely unrelated.  It reminded me of when I used to make out with girls in high school:  there would be a bit of fondling, a bit of groping, but then a great deal of frustration afterwards.

What the author does fly over in his distant aerial reconnaissance is fascinating indeed.  There is a bit of culture, a dab of politics, a sprinkle of economics.  He writes of the presidencies of Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, of Reaganomics and yuppies and privatization, of the rise of ethnicity and feminism, of independent filmmaking and punk rock, of rural communes and environmentalism.  But brief glimpses, all – the tiniest of hors d’oeuvres when what I desired was a sumptuous feast.  What makes it even more thin and spread out is that the writer covers not just the seventies but the era from around 1968 to 1984.

Okay, I concede that it is not necessarily the writer’s fault.  Perhaps all he intended was to provide a peek.  Perhaps all he had in mind was an overview.  But it left me disappointed.  It was not what I was looking for.  I have yet to find a comprehensive history of the seventies, though I will keep looking.  Maybe the decade is too recent for historians to give it the meticulous treatment.  But I hope someone has, or will.  It is a fascinating era, and there is so much I missed that I want to catch up on.

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Book Review: The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman; Part 1: What the Seventies Mean To Me

Posted on March 11, 2012 by John Walters

I graduated high school in the class of 1970, having just turned 17 years old.  After a few months of drinking and carousing I was off to university in California.  At the time I hadn’t a clue about what anything meant that was going on around me.  I had been raised in a particularly volatile era, an era of the Vietnam War, civil rights turmoil, youth revolution and many other manifestations of profound change.  I was clueless about it all, a slow learner, immature, unenlightened, stumbling around in a fog most of the time.  The only things I knew were books.  I read in my free time until my mother would drive me off the couch and outside, where I would play basketball by myself hour after hour until I came back in and got back down on the couch or on my bed and would stick my nose in a book again.

That’s how it went in my childhood years, and into my teen years as well.  Though I must say by the time I was sixteen I had quite a serious substance abuse problem.  It started out with alcohol at high school parties, with beer kegs and fifths of whiskey and vodka and rum and so on; we would all swill the sauce until we were stumbling about blindly.  It’s a wonder we ever made it home.  In my senior year in high school pot was added to the mix.  It’s much mellower in some ways; it slowed me down.  But I had no concept of moderation and so I’d combine the two to devastating effect.

So there I was at a California university in the San Francisco Bay area, an area that was still saturated with psychic effluvia from the cultural explosions of the sixties.  I simply couldn’t get my bearings for a long time.  Actually, during my year at university I never did.  I foundered.  One major reason was that hallucinogens were added to the mix.  But another reason was that I sensed the detritus of the sixties around me and I looked for something of substance from that era, the era of the Summer of Love and Woodstock, but couldn’t find it anywhere.  Oh, the trappings were there, no doubt about it.  But something had been lost, an innocence, an ideal, a feeling that the world could be changed for the better.  The world had got darker; a sense of evil stained the idealism after Altamont and the Manson murders.

Thus was my introduction to the ambivalence of the seventies.

I never found a way out of the confusion in California, but I kept going back to California again and again, sure that something of value must have remained there.  But eventually, after I realized that that for which I searched was not to be found in a particular place, I journeyed farther afield.  I had gone to the San Fernando Valley thinking to try my hand as a Hollywood scriptwriter, but I was getting nowhere.  And at some point I realized I had to cut loose and embark on a real quest, and to do it properly I had to leave the US and get some world perspective.  So I hitchhiked across the States, flew to Europe, and eventually traveled to the Indian Subcontinent.  What I learned on my quest you can read about in my memoir “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search”.  I did finally develop an outlook on things that would see me through the years to come, and in addition to this, and much more importantly, I found my voice as a writer.

So the seventies for me were a time of self-discovery and discovery of the world, a time of travel and soul-searching and writing, of meeting friends and having affairs and taking odd jobs in order to survive.  In short, it was an inward journey.  I was not so much concerned with what was happening in the world around me, except as it affected my visa situation or my safety in the country in which I found myself.  I did spend time in the States off and on in the seventies, but it was time spent on the road and I was not well aware of the political and economic and social situations around me.

Therefore, much of what Schulman writes about in this book has been a revelation to me, an eye-opener.  I have been searching for texts on the seventies for some research, and there are not many available.  I picked this one out more or less at random, after having read the Amazon blurb and reviews.

Stay tuned.  I will review the book itself in part two.

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Dark Mirrors: Dystopian Tales – Now Available!

Posted on March 4, 2012 by John Walters

My new story collection, “Dark Mirrors: Dystopian Tales” is now available in an electronic edition in the Amazon Kindle Store, and will soon be available in a print edition.  Here is an excerpt from the Afterword:

We don’t ever seem to learn from history, do we?  Yes, we learn this and that technologically speaking, but we don’t learn our lessons, in the sense that the phrase used to apply.  As fast as technology tries to solve humankind’s problems and theoretically create a better world, even faster does evil evolve in sophistication, malice, and scope.  As far as real goodness is concerned, we seem to continually be taking one step forward and two steps back.  Is there no end to it?  I long for a better world too, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon.  People are too greedy, too self-centered, too prone to take the quick easy way out rather than accept the slower, more difficult long term solution.

That’s why the stories in this volume are, for the most part, pessimistic, or at least contain many pessimistic attributes.  They are mainly set on hypothetical future Earths, and when I gaze into my writer’s crystal ball I don’t see Earth becoming idyllic and paradisiacal any time soon.  I wish, I hope, but I just can’t see it, especially judging by the past and present.  Sure, something could happen tomorrow to turn it all around, but do any of us really believe that it will?  I don’t think so.

In the meantime, though we see evil men prevailing, the environment eroding, economies unraveling, armies warring with one another, we still teach our children to read and write and figure, we try to exercise and eat healthily, we drop our empty beer can into the recycling bin.

Hoping for the best.

As well we should.

Hope is what keeps us going.  Though we can’t foresee a better future, we hope for one.  Otherwise we would just despair, curl up, and die.  The hell with that.

When I postulate dark futures it is not to get you to despair.  When I hold up dark mirrors before your eyes it is not so that you will see the worst in yourself and do yourself in.  Far from it.  Some of my greatest illuminations have come from deep dark prose.  I have written before of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, for example, and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.  No, dark literature is not meant to overwhelm us.  It is meant to purge us, to provide catharsis.  It is a cleansing and purifying process.  We must be aware of the evil within before we can clean it out, or at least we must get it under control.

Plus, let’s face it, battles of good versus evil are entertaining.  And despite Hollywood’s insistence, good cannot always win.  It doesn’t work like that.  But when good doesn’t win, when evil triumphs, it might hit us in the pit of the stomach for a moment, but then it should cause us to rise up like good knights or cowboys (or cowgirls) or star warriors and cry out, “No, this shall not be!  We shall rise again from the ashes of defeat and overcome the forces of darkness!”

As well we should.

After all, it’s not how many times you fall but how often you get up that’s important, right?

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Book Review: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Five Edited by Jonathan Strahan

Posted on February 27, 2012 by John Walters

Last year I reviewed a volume of best science fiction of the year edited by Gardner Dozois.  There were good stories and mediocre stories, but overall it was a good read.  This volume, however, was even more enjoyable.  I think the inclusion of fantasy made the difference.  I am generally opposed to genre divides, and I would be happiest if the so-called mainstream took science fiction and fantasy more seriously and the best short stories of the year could simply be the best, regardless of origin or content.  This is wishful thinking on my part; the publishing world is not so idealistic.  Categories must be devised, which seem rapidly to devolve into pigeonholes, molds, and storage compartments.  Be that as it may, one has to take what one can find, and this book has many fine stories in it.

No best of the year collection really represents the best of the year, because best is a relative term.  Probably the fairest thing to do would be to have a vote of readers, and that is the value of awards such as the Nebula and the Hugo.  An anthology like this represents the best in the opinion of the editor, and we readers have to trust that the editor is widely read and has sampled at least most of whatever the field has to offer.  Even so, many gems may have been excluded.  There are several similar anthologies that come out every year, and their table of contents are quite diverse.  A few stories overlap, but not many.  In this anthology were absolutely sterling stories that leapt out of the pack, some so-so stories that were okay but not exceptional, and some stories that after reading I wondered what the editor was thinking and why they ended up among the other better ones.  None of the stories were really bad, but one or two I had trouble finishing.  However, that’s just the nature of the beast.  I am not Jonathan Strahan and naturally would have chosen a different mix.

Four stories were absolutely stunning, with superb writing and fascinating subject matter.  “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis is a hard science fiction story about a Venus whose atmosphere is replete with cities floating in the clouds.  Not only does the writer manage to evoke a stunning sense of wonder but also sustains believability throughout.  Considering he is a scientist at NASA currently studying Venus, he has a jump on the rest of us as far as raw data is concerned.  “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky, however, is pure fantasy.  It begins at the protagonists death, and is told in stark scenes as she is called back from the dead to effect sorcery for those who call her.  It’s a very original, well-told take on classic themes of magic and alternative societies.  It won a well-deserved 2010 Nebula award for best novella.  “Alone” by Robert Reed was one of the most far-out in a collection of far-out tales.  A strange alien entity lives on the exterior of a massive intergalactic star ship, wandering by itself, exploring, trying to avoid contact with the diverse creatures it encounters.  Eventually it goes inside, and encounters strange environments and cultures in its ongoing millennia-long quest.  I didn’t so much like the ending; I felt it was a bit abrupt, but until the last few pages this long tale was so fascinating I was willing to put up with the less-than-satisfying conclusion.  “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains” is a fantasy by Neil Gaiman.  A strange small man searches for a fabled cave on an island, a cave in which vast treasure is supposed to be hidden.  As he travels he discovers truths about himself, and in the end when he enters the cave he finds that acquisition of the treasure carries a fearful price.

These four stories alone are worth the price of the book, and there were a number of other stories which I greatly enjoyed but did not measure up to the quality of those four I have described.  To sum up, I got what I expected.  I didn’t expect every story to blow me away, but there were enough that did to make this book a great ride.  Therefore, I recommend it.  I will probably try Strahan’s best of the year again in the future because, as I said, I appreciate it that he includes fantasy as well as science fiction.

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Short Story Author Highlight: Cordwainer Smith

Posted on February 19, 2012 by John Walters

Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, a military officer who specialized in East Asia and psychological warfare.  He wrote non-fiction and spy thrillers, but he is best known for the science fiction he produced in the 1960s.  He wrote one science fiction novel, “Norstrilia”, and a number of brilliant short stories, most of which are gathered together in the collection “The Rediscovery of Man”.  I have an edition from the British “SF Masterworks” series which was published in 1999.

Though Cordwainer Smith wrote only a little over thirty short stories, he is considered by many science fiction writers as one of the masters of the genre and a major influence upon their own work.  Most of his stories are set in the same universe, Earth and its colonies from 2,000 to 16,000 years in the future.  Humankind is ruled by a body called The Instrumentality of Mankind.  Animals, called Underpeople, have been transformed into human form to serve humans.  Considering how few stories he wrote, his unique universe is very richly developed.  I haven’t the space to go into details, though I will in brief in the descriptions of the specific stories below, nor would I want to deprive you of the pleasure of exploring and discovering these worlds for yourself.

In my post on my favorite short stories of all time I included one of his stories, “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, and for a description of that story you can look up the post.  Here are some of my other favorites:

“The Game of Rat and Dragon“.  This was my first encounter with the author, long ago during my one abortive year at university when I took a course in science fiction short stories.  In the anthology which was our text I discovered the story that changed my life, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, about which I have elsewhere written, but of all the other stories in that volume this one by Cordwainer Smith remained with me down through the years.  It tells of pinlighters and their feline companions who are sent out into deep space with starships to do battle with psychic creatures which live out in the darkness and feed upon souls.  The humans imagine these creatures as dragons and the cats see them as rats.  When these monsters are sensed, the humans launch their cat-partners at them to do battle with blazing light.  It is a wonderfully-imagined concept, wildly original at the time it was first published and still a great read today.

“A Planet Called Shayol“.  Shayol is the Hebrew word for hell in the Old Testament of the Bible.  When crimes are so severe that criminals are deemed unfit for society, they are sent to Shayol as punishment.  Microscopic creatures that live on the planet’s surface burrow into them and the humans begin to sprout extra organs, which are surgically removed and used for transplants by the rest of society.  The prisoners are administered powerful pleasure-giving drugs after the surgery, ostensibly to keep them in some form of sanity.  The amazing thing is that even when describing the horrors of this place and the grotesque appearance of the prisoners, Smith is able to inject humanity and sympathy in their interaction with each other and their plight.  It is a stunning achievement in literature.

“Scanners Live in Vain”  This is the story for which Cordwainer Smith is best known.  It appeared in the first volume of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame”, stories of distinction selected by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America from the years before the Nebula Award was begun.  Scanners are humans who have been altered to be able to work in deep space.  They have enjoyed high social status, a privileged position, but new technology has made them redundant.  Furious at having been rendered obsolete, they decide to rebel, but one of them, Martel, tries to warn the rest of humankind.  Like all of Smith’s work, this story was absolutely original and unique when it first came out, and hasn’t aged at all – it is still a wonderful tale.  Other similar stories may have been written since, but Cordwainer Smith was the first to deal with these concepts in such a compelling way.

“The Lady Who Sailed the Soul“.  This is a love story.  The Soul is a starship that plies through deep space, taking colonists and supplies to new worlds.  Special sailors are needed for these ships, who must be altered physically and then brave the dark loneliness of space for the sake of the passengers within.  In a short subjective space of time they age forty years, leaving young but arriving as old folks.  A beautiful woman, jaded with her fame and fortune, meets a sailor who has just sailed the stars and falls in love with him.  When he returns to the planet from which he has come in a state of cryonic sleep, she volunteers to sail the craft that takes him back, condemning herself not only to the loneliness and pain of the voyage but the realization that when it is completed she will be an old woman.  It’s a heart-touching love story and a rousing adventure too.

“The Dead Lady of Clown Town“.  Clown Town is where the Underpeople, the animals that have been converted into humans for slave-service, live.  The dead lady is a computer replication of a deceased elder politician.  Into this strange world stumbles a woman named Elaine, who becomes involved in the struggle of the Underpeople for liberation.

I cannot recommend these stories, and the rest of Cordwainer Smith’s work, highly enough.  Just writing about them makes me want to read them all again right away.  They don’t write them like this anymore.  For that matter, they never have.  He is a unique, original writer.  He died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53.  I wish he could have lived many more years and written many more books.  As it is, his scant output is worth more than countless volumes of a lesser writer’s prose.  He is one of the greatest science fiction writers ever, and if you are at all interested in science fiction and have not yet read Cordwainer Smith, you are in for a real treat, a great feast of unmatched and unmatchable prose.

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Who I Am

Posted on February 12, 2012 by John Walters

I am a writer.  That’s what defines me.  I never seriously wanted to be anything else.  Oh sure, when I was young I thought of doing this and that.  When very young I had a Classics Illustrated comic version of “Bring ‘Em Back Alive”, about adventurers journeying to far places to capture wild animals for zoos, and that’s what I wanted to do.  For a time I wanted to be an oceanographer, because the sea and the life within fascinated me.  But after those and other childhood fantasies I drifted rudderless until the revelation.

The revelation?

Yes.  I have written of it before, how I took a course in science fiction literature while majoring in drugs and lassitude at Santa Clara University, and in the assigned textbook, an anthology of stories edited by Robert Silverberg, came across the story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and realized by the end of it that I just had to be a writer – there was nothing else in the world for me.

It was a natural progression.  For as long as I can remember I loved nothing more than to curl up with a good book and become absorbed in it.  We had a beach house on Hood Canal in the State of Washington with a splendid view of the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic Mountains.  There were all sorts of things to do there:  play in the woods or down on the beach, go fishing, and so on, but every day during summer my mother had to pry me off the couch where I would be ensconced with a book, my head on one arm of it and my feet on the other, to get me to go outside and get some air.  It makes sense that a bookworm would eventually want to create that which enthralls him.

But there is many a slip twixt cup and lip.  Drugs and alcohol claimed me for a long time, fogged my mind, hindered my creativity.  I did make steps in the right direction.  I attended Clarion West science fiction writing workshop for six weeks and was taught each week by a different star science fiction writer or editor, including Harlan Ellison himself.  I moved from Seattle to Los Angeles to try my hand at script writing, an effort which came to absolutely nothing.  I wrote stories – not a lot, but some.  However, they were not good stories.  They were rubbish.  It was hard to come up with anything to say when I was so timid, withdrawn, fearful of life and its ramifications.

But I got over it, with the help of Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, and others, and decided, in the spirit of adventure, to set out on the road.  My road adventures can be found in my memoir “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search” so I will not again delve into the details.

Eventually, though, I became a husband and a father, and for years that defined me.  I stopped writing for about fifteen or twenty years, something I now regret.  Much else was going on, true, but in the end, when I decided to get behind the keyboard again, I had to start from scratch.  Be that as it may, here I am, back in the saddle, determined never to give it up.

So who am I?  I am a husband and a father and an English teacher and a world traveler and still a bookworm too.  But most of all I am a writer.  It is my talent, my calling, my burden, my joy.  I don’t know what I would be if I were not a writer, but I know I would not be complete.  I would be a sort of half-man, going through the motions in a half-assed sort of way – as many people do in this sad, sad world of ours.  As Thoreau said, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  They slog through their lives largely clueless that anything else, anything better, exists.  I too spend much of my time slogging to work and back, doing household things like laundry and cooking and shopping and cleaning and house maintenance – with five sons it never seems to end.  These things must be done.  Sometimes during the school year I have only a few minutes, a half hour, at most an hour a day to devote to writing.  But I am not in despair.  It still defines me, regardless of the amount of time I can devote to it.  When I do have free time, the first thing I think of is what I can do on the writing front.  It’s always there.  I am always thinking and planning and coming up with ideas for it.

There are other things in life, sure.  Perhaps you don’t give a second thought to such a pursuit as writing.  But I hope you have something that gets you through the days and nights.  Writing does it for me.

That’s who I am.

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Adventures

Posted on February 5, 2012 by John Walters

I am reminded of when I stood at the freeway entrance, my thumb out, ready to hitchhike off into the unknown, at the start of my first great journey.  I wrote about this experience in my memoir, “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search”.  You would argue, perhaps, that life itself is a journey, and in a sense you would be right, but I am speaking of physical journeys, of events that take you out of life’s comfort zones into the wildness of challenge and uncertainty.

Of course, all adventures need not be travel adventures, journeys from one place to another.  Many of them are.  In “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings”  Both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were common ordinary Hobbits until they hit the road.  In their cases they did not voluntarily embark on their quests but had to be pushed out; however, the decision was theirs.  They could have stayed in their comfortable holes but they chose not to.  But another story comes to mind, that of the couple at the beginning of “Up”, the wonderful animated film by Pixar.  When they were young they both craved travel to faraway places, but it never happened.  They lived a quiet life together until the woman died, but nevertheless she referred to the time they spent together as a great adventure.  Yes.  This too can be true.  A committed relationship can be a marvelous adventure, as can having children, as can working at a career that stimulates and fulfils you, as can many other things.  For me personally, especially when I was young and just starting to wonder what life was all about, discovering certain key books like “The Lord of the Rings”, “On the Road”, “Tropic of Cancer”, “Walden”, and “Stranger in a Strange Land” were terrific experiences.

So adventure can be different things to different people, depending on their backgrounds and talents and proclivities and resources.  But there is a common denominator.

We all have a tendency to be somewhat like hermit crabs.  We keep a shell around ourselves and crawl from place to place with it intact, thinking to shield ourselves from danger.  The shell is composed of familiar things:  the location we grew up in, family and friends and acquaintances with whom we are comfortable, job or school or other fixed routine.  Some people spend their whole lives within one shell, never venturing outside, never putting themselves at risk.  But to grow, even a hermit crab needs to leave the familiar comfort of the shell to find a larger shell.  And for us to grow as human beings we need to leave the safety of the familiar and try something new, something different.  Once we venture forth we do not always stay out in the wild; sometimes we wander for a time and then construct another shell around ourselves.  The shell in itself is not bad.  It is a survival tool, a defense mechanism.  The world is, in many ways, a nasty place full of real dangers, and we need to be concerned about our safety.  But not to the exclusion of everything else.

I was very timid, very frightened when I was young.  Books provided an escape but there is a danger in books or films:  they are meant to be a stimulus, a catalyst, but they are not the real thing.  I knew I had to get out and experience what life was all about, especially when I knew I had to be a writer, but I was afraid.  It was that simple.  I was afraid.  I stewed in my juices for years, unwilling to take the first step.  That’s why, when I finally did take the step, that first moment at the freeway entrance was such a transcendental experience.  I was going off into the unknown with only my duffle bag and the clothes on my back.  I had no idea what I would do, where I would end up.  But it didn’t matter.  I had broken free.  I could go wherever the winds of destiny carried me.

This all came up because I am, at almost sixty years of age, contemplating another major change in my life about which I cannot at this time speak.  But it is the same situation whatever your age.  Adventures might call at any time, in any place.  I’m not talking about forsaking your responsibilities, deserting your post.  I am talking about life-changes carefully thought out, open doors through which you can walk if you dare, opportunities that will bring growth to all and pain to none.  But adventures always involve risk.  Often, though, the perceived risk is a phantom, a nonentity, a puff of air that may appear to be a dragon but will blow away as soon as you take the first step.

When you know what you need to do, you just have to do it.  That’s all.  If you don’t do it you are doomed to oblivion.  If you do it you are destined for greatness.

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Book Review: Think Like a Publisher by Dean Wesley Smith

Posted on January 29, 2012 by John Walters

I stumbled upon Dean Wesley Smith’s blog about a year and a half ago, and it changed my life as a writer.  At the time he was writing the series “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing”, which is still available on his blog, and sometime along the way he began the new series, “Think Like a Publisher”, to help writers novice and experienced, young and old, navigate their way through all the changes taking place in publishing.

I had been publishing short stories in science fiction and literary magazines for a decade, but I was discouraged.  It was such a slow process.  Stories might make the rounds of the magazines for years before being accepted, and sometimes stories which I knew were good would be unable to find a publishing home at all.  The problem was, the markets were dwindling, as was the pay, but at the same time more and more writers competed for the few slots available.  It was discouraging, to say the least, to one who had a dream of eventually becoming a fulltime writer.

But DWS opened my eyes to a new phenomenon I had known nothing about:  the new independent (or indie) publishing movement, fueled by the rise in popularity of e-books and new online distributors such as Amazon and Smashwords.  These distributors allow writers to upload properly formatted manuscripts to their online sales sites for no charge, taking a small percentage of any sales.  In addition, Amazon had launched another service, CreateSpace, which allowed the creation of Print-On-Demand (or POD) physical paperback books.

Right away I was struck by the possibilities.  I began to read everything I found on DWS’s blog, and also on that of his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who was doing a series called “The Freelancer’s Survival Guide”, about which I have already written.

To make a long story short, I studied formatting and cover creation and all the other details and began to publish my own stories, starting with those that had appeared in recent years in magazines.  Then I got more audacious and created a story collection in both print and e-book.  It was great fun and I didn’t want to stop.  To date, I have published a couple of dozen individual stories and four books:  “The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories”, “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search” (a memoir of my hippy travel days), “Painsharing and Other Stories”, and “Love Children: A Novel”.

I have no intention of stopping.  My publishing schedule calls for at least four new books this year, which are all completed or almost completed, not to mention creation of new material.

The income has been slow to start flowing, as DWS warned.  You have to be in it for the long haul, and build up an inventory that readers can find.  I have been averaging about twenty or thirty sales a month, but I expect that to increase, and I have already received the first few small payments from Amazon and Smashwords.  I believe these sites are a wonderful opportunity for writers to step out and create as their muse dictates, unencumbered by the restrictions and limitations of big publishing.

As for the book itself, “Think Like a Publisher”, it’s a compilation of the first dozen or so blog posts of the same name.  I wish, actually, he would have held off publishing them, as he has since done a lot more posts and I would have appreciated having them all together in print.  But the book is advice for writers, and as such would be of interest mostly to writers.  If you are one, I highly recommend it – and then go check out DWS’s blog for further studies.

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Book Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Posted on January 22, 2012 by John Walters

This is an awesome book.  No superlatives can do it justice.  It’s one of the best novels I have read in years.

I haven’t read many of Stephen King’s books – in fact, only one other:  “On Writing”, which I have read and reread and consider one of the best books on writing ever.  But as far as his novels are concerned, I have been content to watch the films.  The subject matter has not always been my cup of tea as far as reading is concerned, and as for the stories that really caught my attention, “The Stand” and “Firestarter” for example, I figured that the gist was adequately captured in the movie version and have had no desire to check out the original.  For one thing, King’s books are generally quite long, the type of length I prefer to tackle in the summer when I have more time to read.

But this one was different.  The plot intrigued me.  Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I am always eager to read anything decent set in that era.  But even more, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a seminal moment in history.  I vividly remember when and where I first heard he had been shot.  I was ten years old and in the classroom of the Catholic elementary school I attended.  The Mother Superior came into the room – I will never forget her sober expression – and informed us that the president had just been shot.  I only recall bits and pieces of that part of my life, but that particular bit stuck with me.  What was Kennedy to me at the time?  Not much; I was just a kid.  But the legend grew over the years.

Stephen King postulates a sort of portal through which the protagonist, Jake Epping, can venture back to 1958.  Every time he goes through he always arrives at the same time and the same place and history has rebooted itself.  The man who discovered the portal, who is dying of cancer, persuades Epping to go back in time, wait around until 1963, and somehow prevent Kennedy’s assassination.  King tells the story of the man’s long journey from 1958 to 1963 with nostalgic detail.  There is a romance as well; as Epping bides his time in Texas waiting for an opportunity to stop Lee Oswald he falls in love with a small town librarian, who gets caught up in his quest.

I don’t want to give too much away because it is a joy to discover all the surprises as the plot unfolds.  King takes it step by step but each step of the way throws another curveball, unveils another enigma.  I used to think, without having read him, that Stephen King must be some kind of hack writer with rudimentary prose – I was so wrong.  He is a stylist of the first order, and even waxes downright poetic at times.

As I said, this is one of the best novels I have read in years.  It is well worth the time it takes to get through it.  My edition, the British edition, was about 750 pages; as I understand, the American edition is about 100 pages more – probably because the page size is smaller.  Be that as it may, every page is fascinating, and at no time is the reading of such a long work a drudgery.  As a matter of fact, when it was over I was disappointed that the end of the experience had arrived.  Check it out.  You won’t regret it.

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Step by Step

Posted on January 15, 2012 by John Walters

I felt overwhelmed today.  There are work issues, family issues, and urgent business that needs to be taken care of.  Our finances, as of those of most people in Greece, are in a tailspin.  To top it all off, it’s mid-January and freezing, bitter cold; the cold makes me ache, especially my fingers and toes, and it seems impossible to ever get warm unless standing right in front of a radiator.

But the worst thing, as usual, concerns the writing.  Just last week I pledged I would write a paltry 250 words a day five days a week.  It’s a pittance, really.  Though I have had little time even to do that I have tried to keep it up, but in my opinion those few hundred words I have managed to squeeze out suck.  They are crap.  I could be wrong, of course, and I often am.  I sometimes go back to stories I had set aside after writing convinced they had no value and realized they were just fine and I had simply got too close to the material.

Anyway, all these things put together were like a crushing weight upon my mind and spirit, until I decided to just slow down, relax, take one step at a time, and make each step a creative step.  That’s the key, really, the creativity.  Life can seem monotonous, a drudgery, something you’re stuck in like a prisoner and don’t know how to escape from – but the thing is, that can happen anywhere under any circumstances.  We all, I think, desire something better for ourselves, and have the delusion that if we had that thing everything would be easier.  For some it might be a lover, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife.  For a lot of us it’s money:  if I just had more cash, if I could just pay my bills, buy what I wanted, do what I wanted, life would be easy street.  I often fall for that one, though by this time I should know better.  For some it’s a dream job; for some it’s no job, a life of lethargic torpor watching TV or playing video games or whatever.  We all have fantasies of what would make life better.

But you know what?  It’s all bullshit.  It’s all an illusion.  Life is now, not later or earlier.  Oh, we can plan for the future to a certain extent, but suddenly something can happen that throws us a double-whammy, knocks us for a loop – often, in fact.  Sure, we can plan, we can dream, we can wish.  But life is now.

What do I do then?  collapse under the weight of the load?  Give in to the feeling of despair and start drinking or doing drugs or fly off the handle and take off for parts unknown?  The truth is, sometimes a change is what is needed.  But many of us are not able to instantly change our physical circumstances.  We can work towards that goal, sure, but usually all we can change instantly is what goes on inside.

Let’s change that, then.  Maybe we can’t change the world.  I know that I sure as hell can’t change the disastrous train wreck of the Greek economy.  I can’t take off and hit the road, hitchhike around the world like I did once upon a time.  But I can change my attitude, and when I do the whole world changes.  I can apply my creativity to every facet of my being, even the leaks in the roof and our diminishing pocketbooks and disagreements with progeny.  And when you look at something creatively you are an artist.

This may all sound too schmaltzy or simplistic to you, and if so you are welcome to emotional convolutions and complexities, but things around me are so complex I need a simple approach to cope with it all, and I will apply whatever works.

Postscript:  The last couple of days this was all put to the test.  It was grueling in terms of what had to be done.  Shortly after I wrote the above I was off to my first afternoon lesson, teaching English Proficiency to a teen who has been spoiled by one of the many inefficient, indeed inept, language schools around here.  He had been studying advanced English for a year and a half and learned practically nothing, hiding in the back of the fairly large class, and no one had bothered to catch him up on it.  I was recommended by a former student and hired to get him back on track, but it isn’t easy.  He’s way behind and has to work really hard to catch up, and a lot of my work is motivating him to want to after so long a period of turpitude.  In addition, we have the class in his room at his desk, and the room smells of stale athletic socks.  Whew.  Not easy.  But I got through that, went on to one of the schools where I teach and made it through two more classes.  The next morning I had to go to a government tax office to do paperwork – something, at least here in Greece, sure to strike terror, or at least extreme reluctance, into the heart of any foreigner who has a tough time with the language.  But I got through that miraculously easily too.  Then work around the house, then more classes, and on and on.  Now here I am exhausted but I made it.  And I made it step by step without that feeling of despair.

Now if I could only summon up the energy to write.  That’s the ongoing rub.  But sometimes I just need to bide my time, and be ready when the opportunity presents itself.  In the meantime I regard it all, every bit of it, as a work in progress…

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