Jim Maher

Just read Hemingway Man, a novel by Jim Maher on Smashwords. It’s the story of a 10th grader whose father has just passed away. A friend of the father tells him “you have to be the man of the family now”, and his own best friend tells him about Hemingway’s definition of what it takes to be a man: plant a tree, write a book, fight a bull and have a son. The kid, being part vulnerable and part idiot, takes this advice literally as a how-to guide, and sets about trying to do those exact things. The novel is very funny and written in an easy, engaging first-person vernacular that is almost always believable (though there are some “social observation” passages, such as a screed about modern impatience, that didn’t ring quite true to me – my instinct would be to remove those sections, and less would be more).

Highlights include an hysterical episode with a squirrel, a street fight with a gang of whores and an electrifying scene with a bull. All in all a terrific story about what manhood means to a boy on the verge of becoming one.

————————————————————————————————-

It took us quite a while – two months of nightly bedtime reading – but last night my son and I finally finished Seamus and Tessa: The World is Just the Beginning, and we were both left wishing for more. One of my constant refrains on the subject of fiction – of fantasy and science fiction in particular – is the lack of innovation in nearly all of it. You’re making stuff up, so make stuff up! Don’t just give me leprechauns again, even if this time they have machine guns (looking at you, Artemis Fowl). Let’s see you really use your imagination.

In Seamus and Tessa, Jim Maher veers towards imagination overload. He invents, he innovates, he makes stuff up with a vengeance and with only a couple of exceptions (there are pirates), everything in this amazing fantasy novel is fresh and original. Kids don’t just eat ice cream, they prefer the Peaches and Gravy flavor. There are snow farmers who work with special seeds that glow and only grow in the snow and have to be moved every twenty minutes or so. There are bald patches that are critically important, and life or death haircuts, and fire wolves and a variety of “scrubbas” and scientists who live in their labs in the bellies of undersea beasts. It’s not only a work of maximum creativity, but it’s also funny and fun and wild and outrageous.

I can only imagine that living with this book in his head must have been even more exhilarating and joyous than just being someone else reading it. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to be a writer and for that reason it’s exactly the kind of book you want your kid to read.

——————————————————————

Another fun book from Jim Maher, author of Hemingway Man, is Connor Stuart and the Sky Knights. This short story is an out-and-out romp through impossible things. I especially love the “unwritten rules” about harming animals, even enormous deadly ones – a wonderful touch that made my day.

Moxie Mezcal

Another great find on Smashwords is this writer, Moxie Mezcal. I just read her collection ‘3’ on a sick day off from work and enjoyed it very much, especially the first and third, which are mysteries of different sorts. The first story, called ‘Home Movie’, is about a porn-store clerk investigating an apparent snuff-flick accidentally discovered by customers. The third, called ‘Fake’, is about a journalist who concocted a hoax about a murder victim. The middle story, ‘1999’, in which ‘nothing happens’, suggests a sort of mystery by the end, but didn’t draw me in the way the other two did. I especially enjoyed the way the stories operated, this ‘drawing in’ of the reader, deeper and deeper until you think you’ve reached the heart of the matter, but find you’re only halfway there. They keep going, and that’s the mark of a fine storyteller, in my view, because by a certain point of most stories, you think you know how it’s going to end, what’s going on, who’s who and all that, but when ‘you think you know, but you don’t know’ (to quote the inimitable Jim Mora), that’s when you find yourself under the spell.

Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal
A mad saga of the dark side of Silicon Valley, destined for the San Jose Fiction Hall of Fame

Carla Herrera

Day Gazing, by Carla Herrera.

I loved these intense short stories. In several of them, beautifully sketched characters find themselves drawn, thrown, or simply awakened into inexplicably weird situations. I especially liked the pair called ‘Freedom/Stairs’, depicting protagonists choosing opposite coping strategies (‘Stairs’, especially, is a greatly empathic story). ‘The Protector’ is another sharp tale of unexpected and exciting new possibilities, while ‘Bunker Test’ and ‘White Room’ are in her wheelhouse of personal apocalypse. Highly recommended.

Note: I found this while perusing new free ebooks using a new Android app, SmashwordsAccess, developed by UnleashYourAdventure, after which I rushed to purchase her other books available on Smashwords, including Pink Eye.

—————————————-

Blue Tent, by Carla R. Herrera, available from Smashwords

One of the things that annoys me about most dystopias is the way they usually just start from a blank slate. They’ll wipe out everybody on the planet except for a handful of white, english-speaking young people and take it from there. Often, the back story of ‘how we got there’ is treated pretty lightly, leaping right over the realities of the struggles and the suffering that had to occur, but it simply isn’t that easy to get from here to there. Even the Black Death killed only about a third of the population of Europe, and those who died suffered horribly while those who survived were devastated in many ways. There’s no great ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘uberman-libertarian’ stuff going on. It’s miserable and hard and there are no shortcuts through it.

If you want to know what dystopias are really like in this world, you need look no farther than countries in the midst of civil war. In such conditions, the lowest of the low are kicked the hardest while the strong dominate with ferocity and terror, and they, the strong, are also the rich, meaning those who are rich now, not you or me in our Horatio Alger fantasies. The rest of the people, the ninety nine percent as it were, are those who are going to feel the pain. The only way out for them is to band together and fight, but such unity is difficult to come by and the fight is often to the death. Divide and conquer is a proven ruling methodology, and so is outright brutality. You can witness the former first hand right now through the phony ‘red states’ versus ‘blue states’ in the USA, when conditions are not even so bad, and the latter, as of this writing, in places like Syria.

Imagine, then, that the current trends towards greater inequality and higher base levels of unemployment and permanent underemployment of the youth continue on the course they’re on now. The next Great Depression is going to look different from the last, but who wants to think about it? We don’t see it in our fiction or in our films. We’d rather blow right past all this reality stuff and get to the wild primordial wilderness. But somebody’s got to tell it like it is, or rather, how it could be. We’ve relied in the past on books like this – “1984”, for example, or “A Handmaid’s Tale”, or “It Can’t Happen Here”. They are rare enough, but stories that reflect the way we’re headed as in a truth-telling mirror are often startling and stunning. “Blue Tent” is like this.

It’s a powerful story, one that I felt in the pit of my stomach as I got to the end. The characters are vivid and more than believable, as are the settings and events. This is no “do-over dystopia”. It’s a real one. Highly recommended.

“Two”, by Carla Herrera, available now from Smashwords

What if there were a secret society guiding the affairs of mankind? Such a myth has long attracted the popular mind, from the Freemasons and their mysterious symbols adorning American currency, to the Rosicrucians guarding the hidden family of the cross-surviving Christ, to the Trilateral Commission, that conspiracy of businessmen and politicians who control and own the world. The notion has appealed to writers as diverse as Balzac and Lovecraft, and has wormed its way into Birthers and Truthers and Kennedy assassination theorists, and even anti-vaccination-hippie-homeschooling cults. But what if there were, and what if this hidden group had succeeded so well it had transformed the woodland barbarians of Bavaria into the high tech civilization of today? Slowly, one step at a time, through the centuries, this cabal has guided mankind to its present lofty perch.

And now what? Where do you go once you reach the top? Having succeeded, perhaps beyond its wildest dreams, is this organization now obsolete, overcome by events, with nothing left to do but oversee its own dismantlement? What kind of bureaucracy would assent to such a course? Oh no, they could never be satisfied with their achievement if it meant spelling out their own imminent doom. They would want to keep tinkering, keep toying, keep pursuing some goal, any goal, as long as it meant perpetuating their own key roles. They might well become, by virtue of their own capability, no longer the greatest benefactor of humanity, but instead its greatest threat. Who but some among their own could stand in their way?

This compelling novel weaves a story previously unimagined, as far as I know, which is the greatest compliment I know – to see possibilities around the corner that have hardly been glimpsed before. Carla Herrera has a knack for doing just that. In ‘Two’ she has crafted a new legend-in-the-making, and I suspect its readers will be expecting more to come.

 

Tesla’s Secret

 

It is well-known that Nikola Tesla was an astoundingly brilliant inventor-engineer-scientist whose true life story is quite fascinating and well-worth reading about. He is also a great character for fiction, especially science fiction, as it’s easy to believe him to be capable of anything, After all, he was decades ahead in many ways, including his concept of a global wireless broadband network. Who knows what incredible gadgets he may have tinkered with and left behind in some basement somewhere? That is where this short story, Tesla’s Secret, by Carla Herrera, begins. A woman and her daughter come across such a device in a hotel whose owner wants nothing to do with the crappy-looking ancient machine. Messing around with it, they accidentally find it to be a sort of seance generator, able to bring back the spirit and form of dead people, but only for a brief period, a few minutes at most. I love what Carla does with this idea. Naturally, the first thing you think of is, who to bring back to talk to? The mother and daughter have very different ideas, and their disagreements and mutual disapprovals make for a very funny and entertaining story. The nature of the machine itself, its  limitations and side effects, are also interesting. Available on Smashwords and highly recommended!

Zvi Zaks

Three Short Stories by Zvi Zaks.

Each of them is a very well executed take on an original idea – a dog who can talk but is still just a dog, an advertising agency struggling with a law that requires them to be truthful, and a chip implant that collects a ‘pleasure tax’ on people. Witty, brilliant and fun.

Giando Sigurani

The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower by Giando Sigurani

This is a very, very funny book of short stories, available from Smashwords (currently free). If you like science fiction and have any sense of humor at all, you will enjoy this book or else I don’t know what your problem is. The war between the magic eight ball and the ouija board is as hilarious as anything I’ve ever read, and wait! there’s more!

Willie Wit

A Brave New Hope by Willie Wit

A Brave New Hope is just out from Amazon Kindle. Willie writes inventive and astonishing short stories and his new one is no exception. It’s the kind of speculative fiction that is eerily real. When well-meaning politicos try to engage the youth vote, they end up with a youtube-like voting craze, in which a mob of teenagers are swept into parliament in a wave of “likes” and “lol’s”.  The halls of government are suddenly filled with skateboards, angst and acne! What’s a good old fashioned ruling class to do? Check it and see.

Adam Maxwell

The Defective Detective: Cat Chaser – by Adam Maxwell
Very funny. Funny all the time, in fact. The book features a newbie detective who suffers from narcolepsy, so he’s continually falling asleep at inappropriate times. Since it’s told in the first person, neither he nor we have the full story of what’s going on at any moment. Very clever, very funny. Nicely done.

Eddie Wright

An excerst of a screenplay from the novel ‘Broken Bulbs’, by Eddie Wright, available on Smashwords

FADE IN:

INT. NOWHERE

The Nowhere is filled with nothing.

NO ONE, 20’s, not so tall and not so short, does nothing.

NO ONE
Nothing!

and a couple of memorable quotes:

“Why do people insist on pinky swearing? What’s so special about the pinky? Why is it considered such an honest appendage?”

“Everything is equal, Frank. Everything is nothing. Everything is our minds interpretation of what we see and the values that we ourselves place on them. All anyone wants in their lives is something. And if we look at anything and if we chose to place any value on any thing in our lives we have something. It all exists within us. We only have what we know. And we only know what we know. And what we know is that everything is actually nothing and nothing is actually everything. Because something and nothing and everything are all the same. All nothing is something if we want it to be.”

———————–

About a junkie screenwriter more or less.

This is the one of the best books I’ve found on Smashwords so far. The Moxie Mezcal review below sums it up very well. What got me was the banal suburban fantasies of the edgy urban darkside badtrip (“I wonder if there would be a TV show that we would watch every week together. I wonder if she would think of it as our show.”). This kind of juxtaposition gets me every time. The screenplay. ‘Nothing’, is perfect. Birdhouse goldmine. It’s funny and wretched at the same time.  “There’s nothing quite like nothingness.”

Review by: Moxie Mezcal on Jun. 06, 2010 :     
Broken Bulbs is either about a junkie trying to write a screenplay or a writer who thinks he needs to fix in order to create. Either way, it’s a compelling meditation about the intersection of art and addiction and the way that both are essentially born of our need to feel like our life has meaning. Narratively, the book plays out like a bad trip, existing in a world that’s all blood and puke and festering wounds and desperation. But often it’s the worst trips that are the most revealing, showing us the parts of our souls that are ugly and petty, tearing down the barriers between the stories we tell ourselves and the truths we try to evade. It’s gritty, it’s ugly, it’s brazenly experimental in both form and style, it’s allegorical, it’s satirical, it’s as darkly engrossing as staring at someone’s disfiguring wounds, and yet it also manages to be profoundly cathartic.

Lenox Parker

Back(stabbed) in Brooklyn – by Lenox Parker
Some really great dialog here – more than anything else, that’s what I enjoyed, and I read on her blog that she’s most interested in screen writing. I can see that. She’s got a fine ear for it.

Henry Baum

The American Book of the Dead – by Henry Baum
I really enjoyed the characterizations of some of the minor characters and their interactions. I wasn’t thrilled with the apocalypse-with-close-encounters stuff, but hey, that was the story he wanted to tell. Leprechauns hopping out of UFO’s not really my bag, but like I always say, go for it!