These nine stories are about life as a maturing American watching maturing Americans mature. We all know how life can implode on us at any given moment. I am fascinated by how implosions usually don’t destroy us. They make us better and stronger and teach us lessons. And yet life continues to be such a special mess for each of us.
Implosions? Well, these stories aren’t really about huge destructions to personality, they’re more about the small stuff and the way that small stuff can affect love, dignity, and what gives meaning to waking up every day. Most of these stories, I realize after finishing the book, are memory games where longing and affection act like fogs over reality.
What I wanted to do with this book was try as best I could to remake the male psyche Continue reading →
Black bear (Ursus americanus ) removing a dead and decaying Salmon from a creek near Hyder, Alaska. Black bears tend to be more timid than their larger relative, the Alaskan Coastal Brown bear, so they come out of the brush, grab a fish, and then go back into the brush to eat it. Brown bears will generally eat the fish where they catch it. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Below is a very short excerpt from the middle of a story in the collection Implosions of America. I’ve tried as best I can over the years to write interesting, uncommon fiction that both touches deep and makes the reader wonder about the meaning of life. Don’t ever stop wondering. Don’t ever stop looking to be touched. That is what art is all about.
From “So Beautiful,” a story about reconnecting and maturing beyond beauty.
…She said she wanted to work with grizzly bears and wolves. She said people didn’t understand them. She wanted to represent wild animals. She said that Americans needed to know that black bears will track people for food just like polar bears.
“I read a story once,” she said softly, coming down off her tears. “It was about a black bear that stole children from a village in New England and piled them in a cave on the outskirts of town. The villagers finally found the children, still alive, but wildly frightened and cold. The bear had been filling the pockets of their coats with uneaten pieces of fish he’d caught. He was using the village children to store food for the winter.”
She told me this and in my memory I saw her beautiful face and gentle lips quivering below me. Back then I never imagined someone of such beauty could have those thoughts and laugh so dangerously close to insanity. … <snip>
Implosions of America: Nine Stories will be released to the Amazon Kindle Store on Friday, November 16.
Implosions of America: Nine Stories will be released Friday morning on Amazon as an ebook. You can already get it as a paperback at CreateSpace. The paperback will be available through Amazon before the weekend is over. I’m still thinking about whether I want to go through a shark jumping exercise and post to other sites like Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc. For now Amazon and CreateSpace are your best bets.
For what it’s worth, independent publishing is hard enough, what I’m doing with Implosions is close to insane. The Amazon-Indie system is astoundingly good for genre and pulp fiction — whether you’re talking romance, mystery, thriller, YA, or sci-fi. Historical fiction and non-fiction are also pretty well served. Throughout the Internet over the past several years large networks have been established for genre fiction. Book bloggers specializing in specific types of story are common. So are niche FaceBook sites, genre communities, Continue reading →
The eclipsing sun pierced my right pupil for just a split second as the moon slid into place and Bailey’s Beads began to spin. Bailey’s Beads are little solar flames of prismed ruby light bouncing off the valleys of a black moon. I just needed a glimpse of that one eclipse with my naked eye. Just one tiny split of a moment. That took place up in the Cascade mountains in 1979, more than thirty years ago. I’m sure this is the cause of my vision troubles today.
Dr. Davis has been after me for several years now to visit an ophthalmologist. I used to love the way Continue reading →
My first “Talking Indie” column, “Sorry, Your Buddies Won’t Buy Your Book,” was published today at the online magazine Talking Writing. If you haven’t read it, you can check it out HERE. It’s all about getting over the friends and family hump when you first step into the dark and stormy night of marketing in the book world.
Very quickly, I want to add a couple major items that this article implies for anyone looking for nuggets of wisdom on independent publishing in this new frontier.
1. Do Your Homework
There are some incredibly informative blogs and websites out there written by experienced and insightful Indie Authors and book marketing professionals. You really need to spend a few months Continue reading →
That sense that here I am touching more than myself, but, fantastically, and with dumb luck, I have stumbled toward the top of a ravine where the bottom that I can see below me reflects something more than schist and feldspar. I step over the edge and immediately I am falling what looks like a very long distance, enough to kill me. Momentarily, an image starts to go through my mind of my sweet lost mangled body crumpled into two or three fissures in the rock, bloody, limp, gone. Then, wham, I hit. And everything’s okay. Very quickly, I wonder if I was just flying.
Lightly, with the floppy thud of a large eraser in the shape of a man, I hit a soft, flat spot that I couldn’t quite see looking down. It’s dusty for a moment and maybe I cough once or twice. But the air Continue reading →
Guernica, which is one of the best online culture magazines out there today, just posted their November 1 edition, and it’s quite a compendium of stories, interviews, essays, art, and poetry. They offer a pretty insightful interview with Junot Diaz that gets old JD to let his hair down quite a lot about his alter ego Yunior de la Casa.
I can also very strongly recommend reading Frank Cassese’s essay, “It Doesn’t Mean We’re Wasting Our Time,” a poignant and quite insightful story about the meaning of a postcard he received from the late, great, and beloved writer, David Foster Wallace. For every writer out there on all levels, this essay is a must. And, to be honest, I think people who just love to read books as well as people who love writers (that is, sleep with them and commit loving but, hopefully, sweetly salacious acts with them) should also read this piece. Cassese gets at the heart of the question: Why the hell do we do this to ourselves? It’s a great essay. Guernica should be proud of themselves for getting this out to the rest of us. Continue reading →
Sometime this evening, I will be pulling the plug on my post of the title story to my new collection, Implosions of America. Read it now, save it, or print it out. And remember that November 16 is the release date for the book.
