Most authors I interview lead lives far different from mine. In today’s interview, it’s almost like I’m interviewing myself. Like me, Demetri Capetanopoulos received technical training and served as an officer aboard submarines before turning to writing. One of his stories appears in 20,000 Leagues Remembered and another is in Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne.
Like many boys of a certain age, Demetri Capetanopoulos discovered Jules Verne and was captivated—not just by the tales of scientific adventure—but by the example of the power of imagination to shape what might be possible with the creative application of technology. Who can say with surety what influence it had, but he became qualified as a nuclear submarine engineer and deep submersible pilot.
With a career spent in technical realms, Demetri has found in his writing a delightful synthesis of his passion for science, history, and the creative arts, all while rediscovering a boyhood inspiration. Surely Verne would approve. He dedicates his literary labors of love to his son, Leo, and to all those for whom submarine dreams stir the child within.
Let’s dive into the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Demetri Capetanopoulos: I don’t recall a ‘start’ to my writing, it emerged from me at the earliest age. In elementary school it may have been an essay or report for extra credit. In middle school I sought to emulate the short stories that I was consuming—those by Arthur C. Clarke were favorites. By high school I wrote my chapter book—a WWII submarine story—inspired by the type of storytelling I found in Alistair Maclean’s novels, which I was passionate about at the time. As I became busy with a career that produced its own adventures, writing was a way to capture moments and preserve emotions for some later “great American novel.” I also discovered that the ability to write and speak in a way that could move people was intoxicating and the military offered many opportunities to speak in front of an audience. I’ve come to realize that one of the things I enjoy most in writing is tackling challenges—whether it’s the strict format of a screenplay, trying to emulate the style of a particular author, stirring an audience to emotion, or bringing a past reality authentically to life. It’s still the challenge that thrills today which is probably why I seldom write the same type of story or style twice and why constraints inspire me.
P.S.: You just met an interested reader in an elevator who asks, “What sort of stories do you write?” The doors will open soon, so what short answer do you give this reader?
D.C.: Hopefully sticky stories—meaning those that feature some element that sticks in your subconscious and influences your creative engine even when all other details about the story have slipped from memory.
P.S.: Your website, “Precise Imagination,” looks far different from most author’s sites. It seems intended to inspire people to design and build things. Tell us about the purpose and philosophy of the site.
D.C.: It’s not a site intended to explicitly promote my writing, rather it describes my philosophy that I try and bring to all my creative endeavors. I can’t claim to originate it, but it is my synthesis of the ancient Greek musings on excellence and achieving that elusive optimization of both beauty and function. Those elements are as relevant to writing as they are to any creative activity including the building of things.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
D.C.: I was fortunate to have a solid grounding in the classics—Stevenson, Kipling, Poe, Wells, Twain, Verne, Bradbury and the like. But there came a fateful day when I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing which recounted the true, yet scarcely believable tale of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, when I realized within the nooks and crannies of history, non-fiction tales could satisfy every thrill, wonder, and amusement provided by fiction. I have seldom picked up a work of fiction since and so, have come to appreciate the nuanced difference between authors who can competently relate a compelling history and those gifted few who possess “a way with words” that elevates the narrative to something poetic. Fate is the Hunter by Ernest K. Gann is a top-notch example of this non-fiction art in my mind.
P.S.: Your background as a submariner explains much of your fiction. But what led to the non-submarine works Hadley the Lunar Rover, and On Ice?
D.C.: A lifelong passion for space exploration motivated the story about a plucky lunar rover waiting for humans to return to the moon. The sentiment seemed timely and I wanted to challenge my limited drawing skills with a very different artistic style than I used in Ned the Nuclear Submarine (which was deliberately simplistic to make what could be an intimidating subject, more accessible to kids). After my experience living and working at McMurdo Station in Antarctica it seemed obvious to me that fascinating, yet wacky, place was perfect for a screenplay, which I called “On Ice.” Having never written one before, I was drawn to the challenging constraints imposed by both the screenplay format and my own desire for compelling plot drivers grounded in realism (i.e., no aliens/UFO’s, Atlantis under the ice, sea monsters, etc.). I can attest that screenwriting will teach a writer discipline, but for me, when I write any story it is always running in my head as a movie, and I just write down what I am seeing in my mind.
P.S.: The world of submarines and engineering (your background) seems one of logical equations, arcane technical details, and high-tech machinery, while the world of a fiction writer involves deep emotions, the infinite complexities of the human heart, and the often-irrational behavior of flawed characters. How did you manage the transition from one world to another?
D.C.: A truly insightful question. The truth is I have never made a transition—I have lived a life and made a career in highly disciplined, technical realms but always stood somewhat apart from my colleagues as person who saw things slightly differently, processed experiences with perhaps deeper personal reflection, and always injected a bit of dramatic flair and staging to the way I went about my duties. The emotional intelligence, communication skills, and empathy that often exemplify writers turn out to be pretty good leadership traits that can garner success even in a highly technical and structured organization. I suppose in my case it made up for whatever deficiencies I had academically compared to my rather brilliant colleagues.
P.S.: When most people read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, they skip over the chapters devoted to the design of the Nautilus. Not you. You wrote a detailed, technical manual about how Captain Nemo built it. Tell us about The Design and Construction of the Nautilus and why you wrote it.
D.C.: It was only after I became a nuclear submarine engineer and had occasion to read a modern translation (Naval Institute Press) of the novel that restored much of the previously edited technical discussions did I appreciate that Verne’s conception of the Nautilus was much more specific and realistic than the innumerable later incarnations have suggested. I had gotten professionally interested in early submarine development and wanted to write a book discussing the evolution of the relevant technology and design principles without running afoul of concerns about classified information that my background might prompt. The answer was to use a fictional submarine—Captain Nemo’s Nautilus—to explore the technology of the period that inspired Verne and see how close reasonable extrapolations could have gotten to a workable design. No one with a similar technical background had attempted this before. The closest effort was a piece written by a French nuclear submarine engineer, Jean Gagneux, but he focused on a technical critique of where Verne’s design would fall short. Though the analysis was interesting and completely legitimate, I wanted to take the opposite approach. If at times the book seems overly technical or saturated with detail, my only defense is that nuclear submariners are every bit as critically minded an audience as Verne aficionados and I was keen to avoid being dismissed or laughed at by either.
P.S.: Ned the Nuclear Submarine appears to be unlike any other book on the market—a children’s book, told in rhyme, about a submarine. What inspired it?
D.C.: I think every new parent imagines they will write a children’s book, but it took me until my son was nearly eight years old to complete it! I was determined to do my own illustrations and (against all publishing advice) to do the story in rhyme—because kids like rhyme. They also like to learn how things work and don’t mind when some words or ideas that are over their heads now can be appreciated later, which is why the text is designed to stretch their literacy and the illustrations to expand their minds. But most of all, kids like a good story with compelling characters. In my observation, there are a great many exquisitely crafted children’s books today whose focus is about delivering moral messages that resonate with adults and are pretty thin on character and story. In this case I knew exactly what my target to emulate was: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel—a classic from 1939 that is still in print today. It offers a very realistic mechanical character that evokes real emotion while facing and ultimately surmounting authentic problems and fears. Just like Ned. I made Ned a submarine because the first rule of writing (and drawing for that matter) is do what you know.
P.S.: For the anthology Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne, you wrote “Rust and Smoke.” In it, you take readers to a setting of stark beauty in two different time periods. Tell us where the story takes place and why you chose that region.
D.C.: In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the fate of the Nautilus is left unknown, but Jules Verne offers three possible things that could have survived the story and persist in our world today: Captain Nemo’s coral cemetery in the eastern Indian Ocean, the subterranean refueling depot inside one of the Canary Islands, and the unusual iron dinghy that Professor Aronnax, Conceil, and Ned Land use to escape the Nautilus. So, I wrote a very different style of story for each of those loose ends. “Rust and Smoke” takes place in the Lofoten Islands that comprise the northwestern coast of Norway, but the reader is only gradually given the clues to figure this out, in part, to draw out the connection to the famous Maelstrom, which is located in these waters and the serves as the climax for Verne’s novel. I wanted to write a story in modern times that could provide a realistic connection to the events of Verne’s novel, hence the two story lines, set in differing time periods, that work their way toward their mutual resolution of one of the novel’s loose ends (while introducing a beguiling fourth loose end).
P.S.: Your story “Homework Help from No One” appears in 20,000 Leagues Remembered. Tell us about the protagonist, his problem, and the setting.
D.C.: This was the second of my three “loose end” stories (yes, there is an as-yet unpublished third) and the style and tone is intentionally quite different. For this piece, I wanted to write a story of the sort that might once have appeared in Boy’s Life magazine—specifically something in the same vein as the Mad Scientists’ Club stories, which were a favorite of mine growing up. So naturally the protagonist is boy of about the same age, and with the same sort of concerns and impulsiveness that I imaged the target reader might be. Innocently enough, he gets himself in real trouble while simultaneously making an amazing discovery related to the presumably fictional tale of the Nautilus. In keeping with the genre, it requires all his wits and dose of real science to work out the solution, along with a dash of bravado to pull off the surprise ending.
P.S.: Your newest release is a graphic novel called Rage Runs Deep. Tell us about the book and who you think its target audience is.
D.C.: Rage Runs Deeps expands on the snippet of Captain Nemo’s backstory that Verne provides in his subsequent novel, The Mysterious Island, and weaves that tragic narrative into real history much like the movie Forrest Gump. All the people, places, and events that intersect with Prince Dakkar are 100% real and accurate, eventually compelling his construction of the Nautilus and justifying in his own mind, the righteousness of his revenge as Captain Nemo. While it can be enjoyed by readers of all ages as a prequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, the story tackles sophisticated issues related to the blowback of imperialism and the extent to which acts of rebellion can be legally and morally justified—issues which continue to remain all-too-relevant today. The graphic novel was a natural format for a work that originated as a screenplay, but it also has the potential to expose a much broader audience to consider such substantive arguments.
P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?
D.C.: I just finished a novel in which the protagonist is a descendant of a famed fictional sea captain, who must manage the new technology of a steam frigate, a skeptical crew, and a bureaucracy harboring its own agenda, when he is sent in a desperate bid to chase down an unknown submarine boat that seems bent on destroying British shipping. It is decidedly NOT a sci-fi story, but rather a hard-core historical maritime adventure much more in the vein of C.S. Forrester or Patrick O’Brian. I expect the editorial process to be long because fans of such historical nautical fiction are demanding—not to mention rightfully protective of the legends of that genre—and I do not intend to let them down. I’m also in early draft on a non-fiction book that tells the story of volunteers in Ohio who began rebuilding a WWII B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber from five partial wrecks and discovered that much of the aircraft would have to be made by them from scratch if it were going to be able to fly again. It struck me as inspirational, but also fascinating, technically, and I have become a volunteer on the project myself.
Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice do you have for aspiring fiction writers?
Demetri Capetanopoulos: Do exhaustive research to ensure you get the details right—that’s what puts you in the moment, just as inaccuracy can shatter a reader’s mental immersion. But when actually writing, focus on the emotion you are trying to evoke in the reader with any particular passage. “Be in the scene”—meaning in the mood of the setting and the emotive state of the characters, and the right words will flow.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thank you, Demetri. It’s been an honor to interview a fellow submariner.
The current movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny portrays a retired archeology professor who comes across an artifact called the Archimedes Dial. You’re too late, Indiana Jones. I found it first.
The machine exists. And don’t call it the Archimedes Dial. Call it the Antikythera Mechanism. Note to scriptwriters: the machine couldn’t detect time fissures, but could predict future positions of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as upcoming eclipses.
Sure, it’s possible that Archimedes, using the science of his era, stumbled on the secrets of time travel, something nobody has done in the twenty-two centuries since. Or, perhaps someone in Hellenistic Greece found a way to mechanize the laborious task of predicting planetary motions, a real time-saver for astrologers of the time. You tell me which is more likely.
When I say I found the machine before Indiana Jones, I’m referring to the fictional Antikythera Mechanism. (The real one’s in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.) My story, Wheels of Heaven, involves a Roman astrologer who comes across the device. He’s delighted with how fast it performs calculations over which he would previously labor for hours. He provides horoscope readings for the crew of a ship, but encounters a sailor who doesn’t believe in astrology. My tale offers an explanation for how the machine ended up on the seabed off the coast of the island of Antikythera.
You’ll find Wheels of Heaven bundled with another story, To Be First, in a single ebook. I’d classify Wheels as ‘secret history’ as distinguished from alternate history. Secret history stories could have really happened, for all we know. In Wheels, I didn’t stray beyond contemporary technology, and nothing in the story would have changed history as we know it.
I don’t mean to disparage the Indiana Jones movie. I’ll see it at some point. But for readers anxious for a more probable story, more true to life, I offer Wheels of Heaven, by—
Sarah Bax Horton, a former police volunteer and great-great-granddaughter of one of the original investigators, identifies the killer as Hyam Hyams, an alcoholic and ‘wandering lunatic.’
Hyams already figured on the list of over a hundred possible Ripper suspects. Ms. Bax Horton might be right, but it’s astounding that over 130 years of professional and amateur sleuthing have not resulted in a definitive identification.
Could the Ripper have come across an artifact, a device, that rendered his identification impossible? If so, what was that device and what became of it?
I explored those questions in my ebook Ripper’s Ring. Read it to learn how the serial killer might have remained undetected. Follow the progress of the only Scotland Yard detective who stood a chance of solving the crimes.
Perhaps you’ll conclude that, after thirteen decades, the guy who correctly fingered the guilty perp is—
Sometimes, for these interviews, the emails don’t travel far. I’ve known Darrell Bartell for a few years, and we belong to the same local writing critique group.
Darrell Bartell—actor, playwright, short story writer, author, former cab driver, security officer, stage magician, future radio broadcaster, and cancer survivor—completed his MA in drama at Texas Woman’s University. His script, “Bragging Rights,” a ten-minute one-man play based on the school shootings at the time, earned him a trip to Valdez, Alaska, in June 2000, where he met and learned from the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights, Edward Albee and Horton Foote, and actresses Betty Buckley and the late Marian Seldes.
Darrell earned his theater degree after battling cancer and later earned an MA degree in English with a minor in communications from Southern New Hampshire University. As a US Army veteran and former private investigator, while attending the American Broadcasting School in Arlington, Texas, Darrell based the format of his radio show on television’s “Americas Most Wanted” and featured unidentified victims, missing persons, and wanted fugitives while providing leads to law enforcement and medical examiners for those cases.
A member of the Fort Worth Writers, Darrell wrote the play, “When the Echoes Whisper My Name,” which is based on several unidentified victims’ cases he is working on and received second place in the Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Inc. (OWFI) 2011 playwriting contest. Darrell’s play, “The First One-Hundred Days,” about the first woman president of the United States, also took first place in OWFI’s 2013 playwriting contest. “The Specter Society,” one of ten short plays Darrell wrote during the pandemic, was produced by Dallas College and Palo Alto College on Zoom in April 2021 and is available on Youtube here, starting at time 43:26. Darrell’s book, The Corona Monologues, won the 28th annual, 2022 Communicator Award for distinction in writing. He tries to find and write about subjects that haven’t been brought to the stage.
Here’s the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How and when did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Darrell Bartell: This could take a while. I never started out to be a writer. I went to Tarrant County College and took an English II class. I was failing my exams and the instructor hated my papers. So, I dropped the course. About a year later, I decided to get serious about my college education. I signed up for English II again and sure enough, I had the same instructor, Tawny Kilbourne. This time I was prepared. I passed his exams and was getting good grades on my essays. Then came the final essay. I was to take a poem, a play or a short story and take an event from my life and write an essay. I used Margaret Atwood’s story “Rape Fantasies,” and surprisingly got an “A” on the paper entitled “Nightmares.” My instructor said the paper flowed well and wanted to see it published. The essay was published in TCC’s Under The Clock Tower literary magazine. The rest is history.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
D.B.: It isn’t so much as who but what are my influences. I draw from my personal life and current events. They’re the greatest resources I can have when writing. My favorite books are the ones that provide information (resources) for my writing. I try to get as much detail as possible for the reader.
P.S.: Your bio lists many occupations. Have your drawn writing inspiration from all of them? Also, are there some jobs that influenced your writing more than others?
D.B.: I haven’t drawn inspiration from all of them, but quite a few. US Army, security officer, Texas Hold ‘Em dealer, and cab driver have given me a lot of material to work with. I would have to say the military is the one job that continues to influence my manuscripts.
P.S.: Would you agree that much of your writing could be described as dark? If so, what attracts you to that type of fiction? If not, what term fits better?
D.B.: I don’t know about dark. I write about a wide range of subject matter. I don’t have a specific audience. I simply write whatever comes to mind and my sense of humor is probably as unique as it will ever be. I leave it up to the reader if my writing is dark or macabre, but I do try to leave an impression.
D.B.: Thank you. The book is an anthology of 23 short stories about different people from different backgrounds dealing with different situations. Each one has a twist at the end no one saw coming that I hope leaves an impression with the reader.
P.S.: Of short stories and plays, which is your primary medium (if you have one)? How do you decide whether a new idea will end up as a short story or as a play?
D.B.: I want to say playwrighting, but it’s been more and more novel writing. To be honest, I don’t decide if the manuscript will be a play or short story. I let the words and the characters decide that. What I try to do most is find material that hasn’t been brought to the page or to the stage before.
P.S.: You teach creative writing. In addition to helping students, has that experience helped you grow as a writer, too? If so, how?
D.B.: Absolutely. As an instructor I see the writing styles of beginning students with potential. Reading their essays helps me look at their creative and critical thinking process. Which changes every semester with every class of students. So I learn from my students all the time.
D.B.: Barry McElroy is a 17-year-old high school student who has a chance to get into college. He’s been raised by a single mom ever since his father, an Army Ranger veteran left home after an episode of PTSD. On the way home from school, he’s attacked by a group of thugs called the Rosedale Gang and is rescued by the beautiful vampire, Casey. The next day, while researching his paper about unidentified victims and missing persons he comes across Casey’s niece who is listed as a runaway. When he brings this to her attention, they set out to find her in the hopes she doesn’t end up like Casey and become a vampire. He overcomes several obstacles from staying alive to staying a step ahead of law enforcement during the quest.
P.S.: What non-writing hobby or interest do you have? Does it complement your writing or is it a relief from writing?
D.B.: My non-writing hobbies used to be Chess and Texas Hold ‘Em. Unfortunately, I had to step away from them because I wasn’t getting much writing done. Lately, I’ve been researching my short stories by watching everything from American Horror Story to Friday the 13th, The Series. Hhhmmm. Maybe my writing is dark after all. 😉
P.S.: What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?
D.B.: Sometimes the easiest and the most difficult aspects of my writing is trying to find the through line. Making sure everything flows well and fits from start to finish. Also, making sure my characters are developed properly, It happens to the best of us writers, but sometimes we fall into the trap of our characters sounding the same.
P.S.: Your book The Corona Monologues contains many dozens of statements from people as if they were auditioning for a play. Through them, readers experience the spectrum of human reactions to the recent pandemic. Why did you choose to express your thoughts about the COVID-19 pandemic in this form, as opposed to a short story, novel, or play?
D.B.: At the time of the pandemic, I didn’t plan on writing a book of auditioning monologues. I was going to work on book two of Barry and the Vampire. Like everyone else in the country, I was temporarily laid off from work, but like I said, current events are the best resources for writing. Every time I turned on the television or logged on to the internet, a monologue was begging to be written. For every monologue I wrote, I probably missed ten or fifteen others. There were too many characters coming at me, and it wasn’t possible to put them in a play or short story form. This is what happens when you have a theater background.
P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?
D.B.: Of all things, I used to work as a security officer in a hospital. I got to know the doctors, the nurses, and the support staff. I kept trying to figure out how to write their stories and after I left, I suddenly got the idea to have a different take on the medical profession in ways that has never been done before from my perspective. I’m working on a third short story on my latest anthology that I hope to get published next year entitled: Haunted Tales from the Hospital. There will be something for everyone.
Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring fiction writers?
Darrell Bartell: Easy. Keep a journal. Writing in a journal is to the mind what exercising at the gym is to the body. It has to be done well and often for it to work. Write about your hopes, your dreams, and your fears. Write about your family history. Write about the friends you’ve made and the women you’ve loved. I’ve been keeping a journal for over 25 years, and I hope to turn them over to the Fort Worth Archives before I leave this earth. I should be on journal #60 by the end of the month. Also, find a writer’s group. You can’t go wrong finding a group of people who share the same passion as you and want to help you succeed. A group of fellow writers can help you by finding mistakes you over looked and making suggestions to improve your manuscripts.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thank you, Darrell, and congratulations on being a cancer survivor and on your many writing accomplishments.
If you write short stories, consider writing for anthologies. I know a great how-to book to get you started.
Perhaps you’d like to write fiction, but don’t know where to start or what to write about. Or maybe you’ve been writing what you want and can’t sell it, and now you’re wondering what you could write and sell.
Anthologies might be your answer. That market puts out numerous and constant calls for submissions. Anthology editors beg for your short stories and give you a prompt—a subject to write about. No wonder so many authors get their start writing for anthologies. It worked for me.
But the antho market offers no guarantees. After writing and getting rejected, you might become discouraged.
Kelly and Vonnie take you through all the steps including finding anthology markets, coming up with story ideas, submitting your story, dealing with rejections, understanding contracts, dealing with editors, and more. They also include appendices with helpful sample query letters and cover letters.
You may undergo an interesting transformation as you read the book. Bit by bit, you’ll find yourself thinking less like a part-time scribbler or writing hobbyist, and more like a professional author. That attitude shift will serve you well.
Even if you’re more experienced, with several stories already published in anthologies, this book will help you, too. It provides guidance on how to gather all your stories and publish them as collections. In addition, you’ll learn about opportunities to move beyond writing into editing the works of others.
I’m honored to have contributed the foreword for this book. It’s a valuable resource written by experts in every facet of anthologies. As I mentioned in the foreword, ‘This book does about everything except write and submit your story for you.’ But you’ll find those two tasks much easier after you’ve read How to Write for Anthologies.
If only the book had existed early in the story-writing career of—
Janice Rider (she/her) has always loved the natural world and resides in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, close to the Rocky Mountains. She has a BSc in Zoology with a minor in English Literature and a BEd degree. Springs and summers following university course work were spent at the Calgary Zoo where she helped look after many different animals. A trip to Africa was a highlight for Janice; there, she was able to observe wild animals hunt and play. Janice directs The Chameleon Drama Club for children and youth. Three of her plays for youth were published through Eldridge Plays and Musicals. As well, a nonfiction piece of hers on snakes was published in Honeyguide Literary Magazine. Three of Janice’s short stories are published in anthologies – Beware the Bugs! by Word Balloon Books; the North American Jules Verne Society’s Extraordinary Visions; and Speculation Publications’ Beach Shorts. Currently, Janice is involved in a two-year international mindfulness meditation program for teachers. She sees mindfulness as a way of coming into harmony with the natural world.
Let’s get to the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Janice Rider: I started writing when I was about fourteen years old. I loved to read and writing seemed a natural outlet for my love of words. As well, my dad liked to journal and wrote poetry and short stories for fun. He and my mom encouraged my interest in writing. When I was in grade eight, I received the gift of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for my creative writing, which was an added incentive to keep doing what I loved.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
J.R.: I have enjoyed so many different authors, but when I was in elementary school any books to do with horses interested me, books like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Glenn Balch’s Tiger Roan. As well, I appreciated the playfulness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, as well as A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. In my teens I particularly loved the books written by Charles Dickens, Richard Adams’ Watership Down, Jane Austen’s novels and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Currently, some of my favorite books are TJ Klune’s Under the Whispering Door, Thomas King’s short stories, Alexander McCall Smith’s The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Neil Gaiman’s short stories, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. One book I found horrifying but utterly impossible to put down was Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. I like novelty in short stories and novels and admire authors whose characters are unexpected. When reading I also look for the ability of an author to touch the heart and bring compassionate characters to life without slipping into sentimentality. Clever humor is always welcome.
P.S.: How do animals figure into the stories you write?
J.R.: My stories almost always relate to the natural world and animals in some way or other. My background is in zoology, conservation and education, so I have a strong desire to pass on my fascination with the living world around us. Animals may be central to a story’s outcome, as in a story I am working on about a young girl and her sister who learn that bulls can be dangerous. They may be part of a human character’s make-up, as in a short story I’m hoping to get published about Medusa. In some cases, the animals in my stories form close bonds with humans, even if they are creatures like hornets as is the case in another story I’m in the process of writing.
P.S.: What are the easiest and most difficult aspects of writing for you?
J.R.: That’s a tricky question. Sometimes, my stories seem to write themselves; at other times, I have to keep revisiting them while working on other things. I feel that the best way to progress is to make time for writing on a regular basis, which can be challenging for me as I am juggling a number of interests in my life. When stuck, I will turn to a few pages of a well-loved author just for inspiration. I also notice that, for me, it is easy to begin a story, and I have lots of ideas; however, unraveling the ideas into full stories is a process and often requires rewriting.
P.S.: Your short story, “Shark Out of Water,” appears in the anthology Beach Shorts. Tell us about that story.
“Shark Out of Water” was originally written for the drama club I direct for children and youth. The young people involved in the production had such a lot of fun with it! When Speculation Publications advertised for submissions on the theme of romance reading for the beach, it seemed like a great fit. The story is based on the Hawaiian myth, “The King of Sharks.” A young woman, Fabia, becomes smitten with a new face on the beach. This man is so very different from anyone she has ever known, but is he all he seems or will he take an unexpected bite out of her life? You’ll have to read the story to find out!
P.S.: I understand that you’ve been practicing Spring Forest Qigong for over a decade. What is that, and how has it helped you?
J.R.: Spring Forest Qigong, like Tai Chi, is one form of qigong. There are literally thousands of different forms of qigong practice. Qigong can be practiced as a martial art form, as an academic discipline, or as a way of maintaining or improving health. Spring Forest Qigong is aimed at bettering health. I find it meditative and calming. I have been leading this practice for a long time and feel that it helps me to be more focused and centered.
P.S.: The anthology Beware the Bugs!includes your story “Marvin’s Millipede.” What is the problem or conflict to be faced by the protagonist of this tale?
J.R.: Oh, I had such a lot of fun writing this story! It just flowed and gave me such pleasure! The story is about a boy, Marvin, who has a love of arthropods – the creatures with jointed legs, segmented bodies, and an exoskeleton. His favorite arthropod is the millipede, you know, the critter with the multitude of legs for walking on, the one you see cartoon pictures of with piles of shoes on its many feet. When he and his two friends, Lucy and Sophia, find an American giant millipede a little over three inches long, they decide to conduct an experiment to see if they can make the millipede, dubbed Maverick Miles Maddox or MMM, bigger. Does their experiment work? Yes, it does! MMM becomes very large indeed, gigantic in fact! Marvin and his friends must now decide what to do about MMM.
P.S.: You’ve written three plays that were published. Each appears to take inspiration from earlier works, but gives these works a twist. Please tell us a little about all three and tell us the twist in one of them.
J.R.: I’ve written far more plays than I’ve published, and it was satisfying to have a few published.
“Aladdin and His Sister,” is about a spoiled Aladdin who is fortunate enough to have a resourceful, courageous, and compassionate sister, Maliha, to help him manage his affairs. Two genies feature in the play.
“Cyrano and Roxanne” is based on Edmond Rostand’s play, “Cyrano de Bergerac.” In my take on the story, I provide Roxanne with three bosom friends, Chrystele, Danielle and Brigitte, who help to see that this time round there will be a happy ending for Cyrano and the woman he loves.
“When Science Bites Back” is really two plays that are part of one production. Both plays are science fiction, which is not an easy sell for the stage, and based on stories by H.G. Wells works with a touch of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, The Black Tulip, worked into the second story. In “Bacterial Broadside,” villains steal an experimental sample from the famous bacteriologist, Professor Parvulus. Will the world ever be the same again? In “Orchid Obsession,” rival botanists compete for first prize at the Exotic Blooms From Bulbs Competition. When one of the botanists receives a bulb under unusual circumstances, will the bulb bloom into something bloodthirsty?
P.S.: The Extraordinary Visions anthology includes “Want of Air,” a story of yours with no animals. What inspired you to write it?
J.R.: “Want of Air” does not have animals in it, but in the story, Jordan’s mother, Karen, is working to protect a marine offshore area, and his father was an oceanographer. Jordan is clearly fond of living creatures as his bedroom is hung with photographs and illustrations of numerous sea creatures.
The inspiration for the story was my oldest son, Nathan, who began reading a shortened version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas in grade four. Like Jordan, he became so involved in the book that he was identifying with the characters and their distress. He became anxious about the amount of air in our home. It was a cold winter day, and Nathan wanted the window open. For the story, I imagined what might have happened had Nathan opened the window on that bitter day. Thankfully, Nathan still has his dad in his life as my husband is very much alive.
P.S.: What is your current work in progress?
J.R.: I am currently working on more than one story. One of them is a science fiction tale about an elderly patient who has a robotic lion to help him manage his senior years. The patient’s son has tampered with the inner workings of his robotic pet who begins to engage in decidedly realistic lion behavior. The story is inspired by my dad’s current struggles and my work at the Calgary Zoo with lions.
Poseidon’s Scribe: What is your advice for aspiring fiction writers?
Janice Rider: Enjoy the writing process, connect with other writers, and carve out time to write, preferably each day. If I am writing something, and it ceases to be enjoyable, I step into another story and come back to the one I am struggling with later. I have a friend, Heather MacIntosh, who has also published short stories. Talking together and sharing our thoughts and tales has really inspired me to keep writing. When I write regularly, I feel content at the end of the day. It seems to me that writing, like qigong, is therapeutic.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thank you, Janice. It’s good that you enjoy writing. I fear if I wrote about snakes, millipedes, and sharks, I’d be creeped out, not calm.
Readers can find out more about Janice on LinkedIn.
You’ve been enjoying my recent author interview posts, I know, but this week I’ll take a short break from them. I’ve got at least two more interviews planned, so stay tuned.
Credit to Pixabay.com and Pexels
Today I’ll discuss a poem and how it relates to writing. Sam Walter Foss wrote “The Calf-Path” in 1895. It’s a funny little poem bearing a significant message.
In the poem, a small calf wanders through the woods in a haphazard, zig-zag way, just ambling in an aimless manner. It tramples foliage as it goes. When a dog walks that way later, the hound finds it easier to follow the trampled path than to carve a new one. More animals follow, still weaving along the same sinuous, torturous path first made by the calf. In time, people choose that path and over the centuries it becomes a well-worn route, even a paved street, albeit a bent and crooked one.
Foss explains the metaphor toward the poem’s end. He’s speaking of “calf-paths of the mind,” how people find it easier to follow tradition and precedent than to break away from them.
How does this apply to writing? Perhaps:
you’re basing the plot of your current story on a prior work, or
you’re force-fitting the story into a particular genre thinking it would sell better, or
you’ve portrayed one or more stereotyped characters, or
as you crafted each paragraph and sentence, your inner critic silenced your muse whenever she urged you to experiment with something new.
True, sometimes paths get worn because they work well. The tried-and-true plot types have proven successful. Genres exists because readers (with their own mental calf-paths) prefer books like the ones they’ve already read. Certain character stereotypes can work because readers don’t require a full description—they can fill in the rest themselves. And sometimes your inner critic is correct to dissuade you from your muse’s most outlandish suggestions.
I’m not suggesting you avoid the calf-path. I just advise you to recognize when you’re on it and make a considered choice whether to stay or deviate. It’s akin to the thoughtful decision discussed in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” In that poem, the narrator states “long I stood/And looked…” implying some deliberation about the options.
Some authors (like me) strike out at the plate for years before achieving their first sale. Others hit it out of the park on their first time at bat. Today you’ll meet one of the latter types, and a story by this author appears in the anthology The Science Fiction Tarot.
Marco Cultrera writes science fiction and is enjoying a fine start to his writing career. He sold his first story to The Arcanist magazine at pro rates, a rare accomplishment. He’s had other works published by Hybrid Fiction magazine, Polaris Borealis magazine, Total Quality Reading magazine, and The Science Fiction Tarot anthology. Another story is set to appear in the anthology Novus Monstrum. Since 2018, he’s served on the staff of Can*Con, the SFF convention in Ottawa.
Born and raised in Italy, he now lives in Ottawa where he’s found his theoretical physics degree to be more useful in his writing than in his day job.
Next up, the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Marco Cultrera: I’ve always been a voracious reader, from a very early age. I always thought that one day I may write, but I wasn’t in a hurry to start. There were so many wonderful books to read, I didn’t have the time to write my own. Eventually, in high school, I got into RPG games and that medium gave me the impetus to start creating adventures for my friends to play. From there, the switch to speculative writing was only natural. In my mid-twenties, I began writing in Italian a bit, just to test the water. But then life got in the way, I got married, moved to Canada, began working in videogames, where I started writing exclusively in English, and then kids began to pop-up. It was then, in the early two thousands, during the long nights half-awake between one feeding and another, that the plot of my first book coalesced in my mind, inspired by… Oh wait, I was getting ahead of myself, on to the next question.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
M.C.: The author I almost mentioned above was Steven Erikson. I got sucked in into his Malazan Cycle, to this day the best fantasy I’ve ever read, and probably ever will, and it got my creativity going. I wanted to create something similar, but also give it my own personal stamp. And so my first novel was born, a 200K-word mammoth that will probably never be published, but helped me immensely in improving my craft. I also rediscovered Science Fiction in that period, after having read all the classics in my youth (Asimov and Clarke above all, but also Jack Vance and Philip Jose’ Farmer), and I was blown away by the way the genre had evolved. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie blew me away, also I love how Andy Weir is able to insert rigorous science in all his books while keeping them extremely entertaining. I found his Project Hail Mary unputdownable. So naturally, my second novel – the one I’m sending to agents now – is a near future sci-fi story with technological and environmental themes. In general, I try to read broadly, including Literary fiction (The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell remains one of my all-time favorite), crime novels (I love all Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo) and I also go back the classics (reread recently The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, what a fantastic book).
P.S.: Is there a common attribute that ties your fiction together (genre, character types, settings, themes) or are you a more eclectic author?
M.C.: I would say no, I’ve written any kind of speculative fiction, from introspective reflections of the human condition and how it constantly changes confronted by technology, to action packed sword and sorcery. I really enjoy jumping from one genre to another, and the opportunity to explore the very different characters that creative freedom allows. At the end of the day, I live and die by the ideas I can come up. If one takes root in my brain, I just need to write it, no matter how wacky or out there it is.
P.S.: Tell us about “Malapropic Rhapsody.” Is it true you sold your first story at pro rates, and the editor accepted as is, with no revisions?
M.C.: Yes, it was quite shocking, to be honest, and it may have set some unrealistic expectation of the rate of publication of my short stories after that. I wrote that story on a whim, as part of a monthly competition in a private forum I was part of. Surprisingly, it won. Riding that enthusiasm, I looked up what were the best Flash Fiction magazines on the net, and I found The Arcanist. I submitted it, and I was delighted to hear a few weeks later that they loved it and wanted to publish it, with no editorial changes whatsoever. Payment was $50, which divided for the number of words, it came to about 8¢ a word, that at the time was considered pro payment. So I started writing more stories and submitting them everywhere, and naturally, shortly after, an endless train of rejections began to appear in my inbox…
M.C.: I have always been fascinated by how human consciousness may have arisen, and what evolutionary advantages have brought the Homo sapiens sapiens to become the dominant species on Earth. One day I was driving home, and passed by a church while ruminating on that, and I thought, “What if we knew that there was an afterlife? How would that have affected our evolution?” I decided that it would have hindered it, as surviving at all costs wouldn’t be as imperative if our ancestors knew that there was a new life after death. The next thing I knew, I had written 10K words about an evil corporation trying to find out if there was any truth about that.
P.S.: You’re a big part of the Ottawa-based SF&F writing convention Can*Con. Tell us about Can*Con, your role in that annual event, and how you started doing that.
M.C.: I discovered Can*Con in 2017, when I found out that my favorite fantasy author, the Steven Erikson mentioned above, was going to be the Writer Guest of Honor. I bought a full ticket and was blown away. In just a few days, I had met and talked with Steven and a ton of more established authors. I also got to pitch my novel to the editor of Daw and talked to a New York based agent! I learned more in that weekend at the con, than in the previous ten years trying to figure out the industry by myself. It was clear in my mind that I needed to be part of Can*Con moving forward, so I approached Derek Kunsken, one of the two co-chairs, and told him straight out that I wanted to help. He referred me to the other co-chair, the excellent Marie Bilodeau, and it turned out they needed someone to take over their website. I had all the knowledge necessary from my day job, so I accepted. Since then, I’ve made a ton of writer friends and become part of Ottawa’s writing community, that include some legends in the field, like Julie Czerneda, and Kate Heartfield, who is rapidly raising to a well-deserved stardom (her latest novel, The Embroidered Book, is just phenomenal. But don’t take my word for it. Come to Ottawa on the third weekend of October, you won’t regret it.
P.S.: Your story in The Science Fiction Tarot, “Support Group: Apocalypse,” earned a tarot card labeled ‘Apocalypse.” What is the premise of this story?
M.C.: Parallel Earths have become all the rage recently, but I swear I wrote this story before a certain entertainment corporation had to come up with something else after having dispatched a certain blue titan. What if victims of different apocalypses in parallel but equally doomed Earths could come together every week to a support group run by a licensed therapist? Would they be there for each other? Argue about who has it worst? Go read the story to find out…
P.S.: What are the hardest and easiest aspects of writing for you?
M.C.: Hardest one is finding the time to do it. I have a full-time job that keeps me quite occupied and a very busy household, with three daughters and four cats, so stealing time to write is a challenge. The easiest thing is coming up with ideas. I have always more concepts in my head than I will ever be able to actually write, so whenever I sit, I have no problem putting words on the page.
P.S.: In what way is your fiction different from that of other science fiction authors?
M.C.: I guess what I really like to do is come up with new ideas, or at least a new take on old ones so out there that they are hardly recognizable. Yes, characters are very important, and I work hard to make mine likeable or whatever shade of humanity they are meant to be, but my stories are invariably plot driven. Don’t get me wrong, I read a lot of character-centric fiction, and enjoy it a lot, but when it comes to my own writing I always start from an idea (or a set of ideas) that I have not seen anywhere before, and build a cast of characters around it to support it.
P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?
M.C.: I always have at least a short story and a longer project in various states of completion. The story right now is about how something like ChatGPT can be turned on its head in the right dystopian society. The novel is about an asteroid about to hit Earth. Wait a minute? I can hear you thinking. What happened to an original idea? I can’t think of a more used trope in the history of Science Fiction. Yes, but what if the impact is 18 years away, and the first ever woman to have become Secretary General of the United Nations is determined to save every single human and not just a small colony? And what if the progress of the salvation effort is monitored through a webspace in the holoweb, created and updated in real time by a group of people scattered all over the world that share visions of Earth’s last moments? Not enough? What if the first trillionaire private citizen is building a lunar base to become the only savior of humanity? Not enough? Well, then I can’t do anything for you. Just go back to watch Armageddon or Deep Impact again, patting yourself on the back that you were right all along…
Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring writers?
Marco Cultrera: This question made me chuckle a bit, as I still consider myself an aspiring writer. I would say my advice is to find like-minded individuals. Writing seems like a solitary endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. Join a writing group, online or in person, look for writing events in your city, go to book launches and talk to the authors. In my experience, the writing community is wonderfully inclusive, and everybody is always ready to cheer you on in your journey. Since I joined the Can*Con team, I made a ton of friends, and my enjoyment in the slow process of becoming an established writer has multiplied tenfold.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thanks, Marco. My readers and I will watch your career with interest. Your early success seems well deserved.
Readers interested in following Marco Cultrera will have to do occasional internet searches for now. He’s spending his sparse free time writing fiction, not posting on social media or updating an author website.
For today’s author interview, I flew to Australia and sat down with… No, actually, I did this one all by email. Mike Adamson has separate stories in both 20,000 Leagues Remembered and in Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne.
Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike secured qualifications in both marine biology and archaeology. Mike was a university educator from 2006 to 2018, has worked in the replication of convincing ancient fossils, is a passionate photographer, master-level hobbyist, and journalist for international magazines. Short fiction sales include to Metastellar, Strand Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Abyss and Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction and Nature Futures. Mike has placed stories on well over two hundred occasions to date, totaling some 1.1 million words. Mike has completed his first Sherlock Holmes novel with Belanger Books, and has appeared in translation in European magazines. You can catch up with his journey at his blog ‘The View From the Keyboard.’
Here’s the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Mike Adamson: I think I must have been a latent storyteller from a very young age. I would cite exposure to classic Star Trek and of course the many worlds of British TV producer Gerry Anderson as strong inspirations, as was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, my favorite story at age 5. It was also the classic Space Race era, those of my age grew up with the fact that space had become accessible, and this spurred many a reverie for inquiring minds. I remember being in school around age 5 or 6 and being given the exercise of drawing a picture and writing a caption, and what I produced was two pages of writing with a small drawing at the bottom of each—about a voyage to the Moon as I recall. I remember my teachers being in deep discussion over it! Then, not many years later, I would look at a blank writing pad and experience an almost indescribable urge to fill those lines with text, to create something wonderful, to tell a great story but also invent something, a world, a time that doesn’t exist, in the process. I must have been born for speculative writing!
As a kid I worked on a series of adventures about space travelers who fell through a time warp into an age of cavemen and dinosaurs, then tried a couple of more ambitious projects about space exploration and the colonization of the Moon. Around age twelve I learned to type and hammered away at an epic, if somewhat naive, science fiction novel, without actually completing it. I finished my first original science fiction novel at age sixteen: having digested the works of E E Smith and reveled in the early Star Wars and Galactica era, there was no surprise in it being space opera on a grand scale. In my teens I wrote rafts of fan fiction, which was a good exercise in learning to produce feature-length texts.
P.S.: Very exciting that your novel, Sherlock Holmes: A Tradition of Evil, will be coming out later this year. The video trailer is captivating. Tell us about the novel.
M.A.: I’ve been writing Sherlock Holmes short stories since 2019 and have had excellent success in placing them, so for my debut novel I wanted to do something on a big scale—real stakes for the characters and for society in general. I also wanted to explore Holmes earlier in his career than we usually encounter him, allowing the story to be foundational to the awe in which he is held in later years. I set the piece in the December of 1885, early enough for many Police to still regard him as a meddling amateur, which provides for some interesting frictions.
The story concerns government and law enforcement itself, and I needed the character of Mycroft to make the logic work. The story introducing Mycroft, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” is one of those which contains no date reference, but, luckily, some scholars place the story as early as 1885, and I chose to run with this. I have the full line-up of supporting characters—Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson and Bradtsreet, Mrs Hudson, Wiggins and the Irregulars, plus genuine historic figures, such as the Home Secretary, and the Commissioners of the City and Metropolitan Police Forces.
I wanted to draw the reader into the case at a very visceral level, so after gathering the threads together in the traditional way, I opted for a blow-by-blow account of the closing drama, a night of tension and action as Holmes and Watson pursue their man across the city. I’m hoping readers appreciate this approach and find the finale to be real edge-of-the-seat stuff.
Recently I was invited to work up a second novel, and am perusing my notes for the best storyline for a further outing.
P.S.: Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, that novel’s not your only story involving the iconic sleuth. What others have you had published, and how does your Holmes deviate, if at all, from Doyle’s original characterization?
M.A.: As I mentioned above, I’ve been writing Sherlock Holmes for the last four years, and currently have some twenty-two stories complete, around 220,000 words worth (with notes for a great many more). I began with a cross-over between Holmes and my own Victorian detective character, Inspector George Trevelyan (created in collaboration with my sister, Jen Downes, a very fine writer who has twice appeared in Analog, and with whom I’ll be sharing a table of contents next year in Sunshine Superhighway: Solar Sailings, from Jay Henge Publishing).
The Trevelyan stories are classic mystery with a supernatural edge, which contrasts with the Holmesian canon in which the supernatural is more or less “handled with tongs.” Having already completed a couple of Trevelyan adventures, I eased into Holmes by presenting him with a case that would not resolve without acknowledging a supernatural element, which he of course cannot do. He consults with Trevelyan to get to the bottom of it.
This piece, “The Misadventure of the Perspicacious Waif,” was accepted for Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine by the late Marvin Nathan Kaye in 2019, then switched to Weird Tales, from the same publishing stable, as he felt the readers of SHMM would not appreciate a piece which deviated from canon in recognizing a supernatural reality. That was fine with me, as it got me a berth in that grand old magazine of the strange! Unfortunately, after Marvin passed away, I’ve not been able to establish contact with the new editor, and the piece is in limbo—recorded by me as a pro-level placement but out there in some realm between the worlds. The stated theme for the next issue of Weird Tales is occult detectives, so I should have a fair shot, given that the story both fits the theme and has already been tacitly picked up. All I can do is watch like a hawk for the magazine reopening to submissions (which, on their random schedule, could be anytime) and re-pitch the piece to the new editor. Fingers crossed…
Since then I’ve written new adventures for the great detective across the period 1881 to (so far) 1916, with only a handful of unpublished pieces in hand at any one time. They’ve appeared in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (two acceptances, neither of which has appeared in print yet), Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (Sherlock Holmes tribute issue Jan/Feb 2021), Strand Magazine (two placements, both now published, the second of which was actually solicited) and a total to date of eleven anthologies from Belanger Books. I’m enjoying being a Holmesian very much, am continuing to write and to expand my publishing venues.
My Holmes is essentially canonical, though some might say they find him less caustic than the original. However, I group my material in ways that agree or disagree with Doyle’s approach—for instance, I probably have an anthology coming along in the next year or two, which will consist of purely canonical tales, but a later volume might collect those with supernatural or otherwise strange themes, under the title “The Dark Holmes.”
All my stories follow a chronology which compliments the original canon, filling in the spaces between the classic stories (an approach I’m sure many have followed previously), so, regardless of the nature or classification of the tales, they can be read in order from the earliest to the last, with the novel(s) forming part of that collective arc.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
M.A.: It’s difficult to say! My early influences included Clarke, Asimov, E E Smith and Heinlein, and in the fantasy vein Robert E Howard was the fascination of my youth, plus of course Burroughs. Later on I discovered Clarke Ashton Smith’s classic tales of cosmic horror, and finally devoured H P Lovecraft’s complete works. I read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon several years ago, of course, and have long enjoyed Jules Verne and H G Wells. Being a classics fan is an obvious benefit for writing in the public domain franchises, but leaves one rather out of touch with where the fields are at this point. (This also goes for writing “voice,” as there are times I find myself automatically composing in 19th Century expression, and have to wrench narratives back into contemporary “sound!”)
Among moderns, I would say Greg Bear has been a distinct influence—Eon in particular, whose imagery and concepts remain vivid to me. I would also cite the great Australian science fiction author Terry Dowling, whose saga of future Australia, the massive “Rhynosseros” arc, made a huge and lasting impression on me when I read the stories in paperback many years ago. His world-building still leaves me breathless, and the range and depth of his stories is epic. The late Jack Vance, a personal friend of Terry Dowling, is another whose world-building is legendary, and (as with Clarke Ashton Smith’s writing) lets one submerge in a cocoon of sensory stimulus that, I feel, modern stripped-to-the-bone writing hands away in the name of pace. Frankly, to me this is an unfortunate bargain in the name of attention-spans truncated by the speed of modern information access. No wonder I’m often accused of being heavy on the exposition…
From an early age I also considered myself an artist, so it’s natural that artistic influences should have impressed themselves strongly. Some artists shaped my view of both science fiction and fantasy from a young age: Chris Foss, the “Dean of Science Fiction Illustration” as he has been called, whose signature airbrush art remains the gold standard, tops the list for me, plus others from the British industry from the ’70s onward—the late Peter Elson, Angus McKie, Tim White and more. The great Bruce Pennington, whose distinctive non-airbrush style was like a signature for the New English Library range of the ’70s—I find his work strongly evocative and suggestive of story elements to this day. In the fantasy field, the late, great Frank Frazetta is the leading influence, along with Boris & Bell. Also past comics greats have played their part in shaping the color, texture and scope of my visualizations—Mike Noble, John Buscema, Don Lawrence, and so many others.
M.A.: Deakin Valley is a railway ghost story set in the Peak District of Derbyshire, England. Railways have an undying appeal all their own, but in the country where they were invented they also have the longest history. Britain’s rail map has changed often, with many old lines disappearing. Much of Britain’s railway engineering and architecture, its bridges and stations, is of Victorian vintage and it can be rather creepy when you encounter infrastructure long out of use. On the domestic rail network in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia, there are such features—disused stations, boarded-up tunnels, dismantled bridges—and observing those from passing trains got me thinking. A torn-up spur-line might once have led somewhere important, perhaps with a secret, something dark… And the story flowed from there.
I matched up a commercial photojournalist with a disaster a hundred years ago and gave him a mystery to chase, then threw in magic and a deep sense of existential dread that might reasonably dwell in a land so ancient, redolent with the fury and suffering of battles long gone by. I focused it all in a fatal attraction to solve the mystery—learn the truth, but die in the attempt? It was a lot of fun to write, and I have a second outing for the same characters in notes.
P.S.: Is it true you’ve made over 3000 story submissions in 88 months? On average, that’s more than a submission each day. Tell us about the importance of such persistence in the journey to publication, and about how you manage to write and submit so much.
M.A.: Persistence is everything! Well, not everything of course, it assumes you’ve mastered your craft and are submitting good ideas, well-written and edited. But when it comes to marketing, persistence, and a sense of self worth, are paramount. In the early days I took feedback from editors as an important guideline, but it occurred to me that it would be impossible to accommodate every opinion received in terms of reworking. When the same story was rejected by two different markets for precisely opposite reasons it became clear that editorial opinion is entirely flexible and random, and that rewriting to accommodate any one opinion may in fact be installing the very reason for the next rejection. This is not an easy situation, and now I look for commonality of reaction. If I get the same reaction from more than one market then it carries weight and is worth a rewrite. Otherwise, I simply persist in submission in the belief that sooner or later any particular story will cross the desks of first readers and editors who see my point and appreciate my telling, and this seems to hold true quite often. An early story one market considered unpublishable was later picked up by an another and printed with bare-minimum edits, which rather makes my case.
Yes, I recently passed three thousand submissions since I began to keep records at the beginning of 2016. I had four placements in the previous few years which convinced me that I could do this, and a few test submissions late in 2015 to get the hang of online engines like Moksha, but they don’t feature in my official list. My record for submissions is ten in one day, and for rejections, six. It’s a high-volume situation and is essentially a seven-day-a-week job, in which I check emails four times a day, and do most of my redirection of rejections each morning. Writing falls usually in the afternoon, though if I have the bit in my teeth on a new project I may do some composition at any available time.
Ideas flow at different rates, and my total number of new stories per year has been falling. In 2017 I churned out 62 pieces, a figure I have never approached since. I tend to write to prompts now, and could as easily be working on a flash as a novelette. I have sometimes written two flash pieces in one day. I have files of story ideas going back years and when I’m at a loss for an inspiration I look back over notes to see if anything grabs me. It’s a little mechanistic in that sense, but one must treat writing as a job, and producing new material is very important, given the generally low pay rates for reprints. That said, I have had a reprint or two which actually earned more than the original placement, so go figure!
P.S.: You’ve written a number of stories in a series you call Tales of the Middle Stars. What ties that series together? Which stories are published, and what are your plans for the series?
M.A.: Tales of the Middle Stars is an arc against a common background of the exploration and settlement of the stellar neighborhood in the centuries ahead. It describes a period of human colonial expansion and peaceful coexistence with several alien races. The basic idea postulates that current work on FTL flight by spacial warping pays off and that by the early 23rd Century our first vessels of exploration are examining the nearby stars. The discovery of planets requiring only minimal terraforming spurs a wave of colonization that extends into the 26th Century and beyond. The “Near Heavens” was the navigator’s name for the region closest to Earth, settled first, and the “Middle Stars” is the next region, beyond which of course lies the “Deep Sky.” I got the nomenclature from a starmap used as an on-set prop for the original Alien movie in the late Seventies, which was titled “The Middle Heavens.” That always stuck in my mind, and adapted easily.
The first story I placed, back in 2016, “Lo, These Many Gods,” in SQ Mag #28, was a Middle Stars piece, and since then I have completed fifty-five more, with thirty-nine published to date. My chapbook The Salamandrion, in the “Short Reads” series from Black Hare Press, is also a Middle Stars outing—actually the third story I wrote. Others have appeared in venues as varied as Andromeda Spaceways (twice), Stupefying Stories (forthcoming), Spring Into SciFi, Shelter of Daylight, Etherea, Phantaxis, and a host of anthologies.
The series begins early in the 23rd Century, when, in my timeline, Earth has turned the corner from absolute climate catastrophe and has been resettled from a chain of space cities. Most of the 22nd Century was occupied with global terraforming measures to turn back from that nadir, but during this time the FTL project matured on drawing boards out at the cities. The era of stellar exploration ushered in a whole new identity for humankind as not simply spacefarers, but members of a community of races, and all that that implies.
I have, or will have, stories ranging from those early voyages over a period of some three hundred years, with the densest accumulation to date ranging between AD 2480 or so to 2510. Between 2496 and 2501 humanity is embroiled in its first alien war, whose effects are felt over the following generations. And in the decade after that, a new and terrifying presence begins to be sensed among the worlds of the Middle Stars…
I would estimate there are a couple of dozen stories to go to fill in the chronology, sometimes revisiting characters, often moving among familiar worlds, and there will always be the opportunity for new outings in future. My hope is to collect the stories into anthologies with a publisher at some point, but what form that would take is as yet an open question. There are likely enough stories for four or five volumes, and the intention is to move into novels in due course, beginning with an epic answering the question of that “terrifying presence.” It’s a matter of finding the right publisher to take on such a project, and do it justice—this might be a project to undertake in cooperation with an agent. Until then, I’ll continue to produce the material for the short story market.
P.S.: A few of your stories involve climate change and take place in a post-habitable Earth. Tell us about these stories, and do you plan to write more in that vein?
M.A.: The climate crisis has been at the back of the scientific mind since I was a child—acid rain had already signaled that industry could affect nature, for instance. I remember a story in Science Fiction Monthly, in 1974, “Dancing in the Hour of Not-Quite-Rain,” in which people sheltered from acid rain in bunkers, and, finding they were over the maximum safe occupancy, threw out an old man, to burn, because it was his generation that allowed industry to break the world… Fifty years later, the problems are more fundamental, and industrial bloody-mindedness and a lack of political will smacking of universal corruption continue to drive us toward catastrophe.
This came to shape my thinking about the next centuries, and what unfolded was a narrative line which always featured the climate crisis in the background, regardless of the foreground characters or events. The remainder of the 21st Century, in this timeline, features worsening climate effects until, about 80 years from now, the planet becomes untenable for higher life forms. I pray this will never happen—but it makes for a good story! The “Post-Habitable Earth” tales occupy the 22nd Century and follow a number of scientists in their efforts to address the crisis, working from a chain of space cities at the L5 position, built in the later part of the current century by industrialists seeking a lifeboat from their own mess.
A number of stories look at what life has become for those left behind in underground redoubts and habitat cities (for instance “Rats,” which appeared in Andromeda Spaceways #76, October, 2019), how some genetically engineered themselves to live in the new environment, while other pieces look at the great project to restore the old climate, to cool the planet and reseed life, rebuilding the ecosystem from the ground up. “Flight of the Storm God” looks at that reseeding enterprise, and appeared in the Flame Tree collection Endless Apocalypse (March, 2018), then subsequently on the Little Blue Marble website, and was featured in their 2021 annual print collection.
The initiative turns the clock back to a planet cool enough and with enough oxygen to support higher life by the last decades of the 22nd Century—maybe too compressed a timeline, I admit, but I didn’t want to be unpalatably pessimistic in how long I extended the planet’s agony. And, with resettlement and recreation of the world from its own ashes, as it were, the stage is set for the Middle Stars stories to follow on.
Stories in this arc have appeared in Ecotastrophe II, Little Blue Marble, Compelling Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways and others; one was a finalist in the 2021 Gravity Awards. I have several more to write, bringing the “Post-Habitable Earth” arc up to book length, which obviously invites a collection under one cover at some point.
In this way, viewed at a global level, a great many of my science fiction stories form a contiguous series from the present day to some five centuries in the future. Many years ago I had a vision of an artbook chronicling the history of the next thousand years, and while that project never developed, thematic material of the sort it might have contained certainly has evolved in literary form.
P.S.: Your story, “The Silent Agenda,” appears in the 20,000 Leagues Remembered anthology. To most people, a contract discussion about translating novels wouldn’t seem interesting enough to write about, yet you turned that into a dramatic story. What prompted that story?
M.A.: Back in the 1980s I came cross Walter James Miller’s 1976 fresh translation of 20,000 Leagues, but the volume was packed away and forgotten until comparatively recently. I studied with interest his extensive introductory essay, both on Verne’s life and his treatment at the hands of translators. In the jacket blurb he described Lewis Page Mercier’s 1871 translation as a “literary hatchet job.” The revelation that as much as 23% of the original French novel had been excised I found both outrageous (for obvious reasons) and intriguing, as it meant there was actually much more to be enjoyed than I’d ever read before!
Mercier removed maritime and scientific material, references to French scientists, and indeed scrambled some of Verne’s technical material, so that Verne was dismissed by later English-speaking critics as not in fact knowing his own subject, when the errors were entirely in translation. In 1874 the American translator Edward Roth made the same observations (while unfortunately also perpetuating the problem by taking the extreme liberty of adding scenes in his own versions of some works!) This is blatant enough, but given Mercier’s other cuts I found myself wondering, as Roth had, if Mercier was not deliberately undermining Verne’s credibility. Indeed, it’s contrary to the translator’s role as the invisible intermediary (Mercier is not usually even given a credit in standard English editions), and of a scope which to me suggests a specific policy direction which could only have come from the publisher.
The political motivations behind these cuts run rather deep—specific mention of Nemo’s revolutionary inclinations, for instance. We knew he supported anti-establishmental activities, even the Ward Lock 1964 illustrated children’s edition features Nemo delivering gold to fund such groups. I found it highly significant that Verne’s intentions were interfered with. The cuts largely muzzled his political statement, shifting emphasis firmly onto adventure at the expense of anything critical of the establishments of his day. This enabled the English-speaking world to assign Verne the status of a children’s writer, and thus more easily dismiss him, while in the Francophone world Verne was a respected literary giant taken seriously by all ages. This smacks of a very British kind of sour grapes, and that deserved to be explored in detail.
Drama proceeded from the very outrage of the notion that a best-seller could be eviscerated, turned into something quite different as it crossed the language barrier, to serve the political and social interests of another part of the world, while cashing in royally on its established success. Before reading Miller’s work I had no idea there was such a story behind the novel but when 20,000 Leagues Remembered came along it presented itself to me four-square and clamored to be written.
M.A.: “The Highest Loyalty” was a most interesting exercise as it explored a diversion from Nemo’s scientific cruising for reasons very much to do with the outside world. Verne tells us he supported those who fought to make a difference against corrupt establishments, and it struck me that a submarine would have made the perfect “underground railroad” for snatching souls from jeopardy during the American Civil War.
Given the chronology of events—that Nemo, Prince Dakkar of Bundelkund, was set upon his life’s course by the events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and that he escaped with his followers to build the Nautilus in the years after, it follows that Nemo was free and at liberty beneath the sea during the war. Given his conflict with the Western colonial powers, and his commitment to taking no sides, it seems clear he would be a wholehearted supporter of the Abolitionist cause. If this was the case, the Nautilus probably carried many a party of escapees from the South to safety in Union territory, and I revisit this situation at a later date as Nemo comes to the rescue of an Abolitionist agent in jeopardy from the spate of reprisals following the conflict.
Nemo is a fabulously complex character, a man of admirable qualities yet who stands apart from civilization as we know it and will wage war if need be. This makes him eternally attractive to explore, and pastiches provide the opportunity to do so, remaining within Verne’s own timeline (troubled is it is with the Mysterious Island contradictions). Here I had the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of his convictions, that he would place his life on the line to serve a fellow freedom fighter. I have always believed that Nemo was more hero than villain, and exploring this in new prose is a delight.
I have other tales of Nemo and the Nautilus on paper and many more I would like to pursue, so am watching with keen interest for appropriate future calls for submission as might eventuate!
P.S.: What are your current works in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about them?
M.A.: I have a number of projects in hand at this point, each with an eye on a wider marketplace. Hiraeth Books have commissioned two, possibly three anthologies from me. One is a collection of my vampire short stories, the saga of changeling Lucinda Crane, a vampire whose allegiances still lie with the humans among whom she was born and on whose behalf she battles all manner of supernatural foes. I’ve written eight stories to date, the first of which appeared in an anthology from Spectral Visions Press (University of Sunderland) way back in 2014, one of those pioneering pieces that got me started on this course. Hiraeth have picked up others, as did Bards & Sages, for various volumes, and are collecting them all under one cover. This calls for a fresh polish of the whole saga.
Also forthcoming from Hiraeth will be one or possibly two fantasy volumes. “A Triptych of Swords” is my working title, being novella-length pieces in the historical fantasy vein, though with a venture into a full fantasy world as well. I have one piece left to finish for this one, and we’ll see how the project shakes down in the next year or so.
Also on the table is an urban fantasy novel, Venatrix, which mixes a climate-ravaged near future with an enclave of witches who fight catastrophe with chaos magic. Set in Venice and many other Italian beauty spots such as Tuscany, Genoa and Verona, it combines hard-hitting action with modern neopaganism in a blend which I’m hoping will be fresh and engaging. I have a few chapters to go, then will be looking for a small press to take it on.
Also on the horizon for this year will be to assemble that Sherlock Holmes anthology from my previously published material, which will be a most vicarious pleasure!
And lastly, I’m working on the textual material for a dedicated author website, which will feature essays, chronologies and purchase links for all my areas of creative work, with Sherlock Holmes and “Tales of the Middle Stars” in a fairly advanced state of writing.
Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring writers?
Mike Adamson: The best advice I can offer to a writer hoping to break into the modern short story market, let alone novels, besides the persistence discussed above, is patience. Understandably, every writer hopes that things will gel in a year or two and he or she will start making some useful income from pro market: that a dozen placements, or two dozen, at the low end will bring you to the attention of the top. This might be the case if the writer is well-connected, schmoozes the book fairs, left university with a first class arts degree in writing, is a graduate of Clarion West or another recognized academy, but for most of us the reality will be a long, slow burn.
Assuming that the writer has wrestled down the particulars of the craft—can use the language effectively, distinguish between forms and styles and know which is appropriate for what market, has the services of a good beta reader or editor to provide a mirror to the writer’s own point of view—then patience is the best tool in the kit, along with self-confidence. Rejection is part of the landscape and learning to not take it personally is a major hurdle. Comparatively few rejections are a measure of the worth of the material: many are based on length or how closely your piece matches a theme, or even—and this is a bitter pill—how well a story a magazine is happy to take “fits” with all the other stories they would like to include in a particular issue. Or they might have accepted something similar recently, or it’s on a theme they’ve visited frequently before…
Taking all figures collectively, since the beginning of 2016 I’ve received over 2700 rejections, most of them of the form type. At all costs, one cannot afford to take it as rejection of oneself. The golden truth is that the very next editor might think differently, so rejection becomes acceptance. That’s the vindication of your work in every sense, and it does happen. Yes, the wider marketplace really is this subjective! Editors are human and they are independent of each other, running their own enterprises, each with his own her own literary agenda, which makes for the wide variety of styles and tastes of magazine out there. This also ties in with learning which markets are a match for the kind of thing you produce, and which never will be. Magazines have target audiences who expect a particular kind of material, and many markets may be plugged into particular niches, not genres per se, but orientations and outlooks, specific even to kinds of narratives or levels of surreality, and you need to be well clued-in to join those clubs. That comes under research your markets, of course, which is imperative.
Then there’s read till your cup runneth over. One should not write in a vacuum, one should know what one’s peers are writing, as well as have a good knowledge of the history of one’s field. And I’ve found, the more you pour in, the more likely it is to run out again, through a keyboard as fresh work—your own. This is not thieving ideas or narrative lines: I liken it more to putting fuel in your literary tank to run the engine of inspiration.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thanks, Mike. I think your answers revved up my engine of inspiration, and those of others as well.
Readers seeking more information about Mike Adamson can visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Amazon, and Goodreads. He’s been interviewed before, and you can read those here and here.
The anthology Extraordinary Visions: Stories Inspired by Jules Verne brought together authors of varied backgrounds and interests. Today I present an interview with Joel Allegretti, but—as you’ll find out—he writes in many formats beyond the short story form.
Joel Allegretti is the author of, most recently, Platypus (NYQ Books, 2017), a collection of poems, prose, and performance texts, and Our Dolphin (Thrice Publishing, 2016), a novella. His second book of poems, Father Silicon (The Poet’s Press, 2006), was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006.
He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). The Boston Globe called Rabbit Ears “cleverly edited” and “a smart exploration of the many, many meanings of TV.” Rain Taxi said, “With its diversity of content and poetic form, Rabbit Ears feels more rich and eclectic than any other poetry anthology on the market.”
Allegretti has published his poems in The New York Quarterly, Barrow Street, Smartish Pace, PANK, and many other national journals, as well as in journals published in Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and India.
His short stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, The Adroit Journal, and Pennsylvania Literary Journal, among others. His musical compositions have appeared in Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing & Art and in anthologies from great weather for MEDIA and Thrice Publishing. His performance texts and theater pieces have been staged at La MaMa, Medicine Show Theatre, the Cornelia Street Café, and the Sidewalk Café, all in New York.
Allegretti is represented in more than thirty anthologies. He supplied the texts for three song cycles by the late Frank Ezra Levy, whose recorded work is available in the Naxos American Classics series.
Allegretti is a member of the Academy of American Poets and ASCAP.
Let’s get to the interview:
Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?
Joel Allegretti: When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I said to my father one day, “I want to write a book.” He thought it was a good idea.
I was a fan of Greek and Roman mythology in my younger years. I wrote a little story called “The Flaming Sword.” I think it took place in Roman times. It was about a soldier who had a sword encased in fire, but that’s all I remember. I cut up pieces of paper, stapled them into a booklet, and wrote and illustrated my story.
I wonder if I created an ancient-world prototype of the Jedi lightsaber.
P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?
J.A.: My earliest influences were Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. Then came Ray Bradbury, Leonard Cohen, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges. A big influence on my short stories isn’t a literary figure, though, but a TV series: The Twilight Zone, the original series hosted by Rod Serling, whom I still admire. I like to conclude a short story with a surprise ending. The Twilight Zone is all about surprise endings.
A few favorite books are Selected Poems: 1956 – 1968 by Leonard Cohen; One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez; The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux; Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams; The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century, edited by Hayden Curruth;and Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman. I find myself re-reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells every few years. Ditto Jean Genet in Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles.
One Hundred Years of Solitude had a monumental impact on my reading tastes for a few years. It opened me up not only to the author’s others works, but to the rich world of Latin American literature as a whole. Unfortunately, I don’t know Spanish or, in the case of Brazilian writers, Portuguese, so I had to read the books in English translation.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac affected me when I read it at nineteen. The closing paragraph influenced the last stanza of a poem I published five years ago, “The Day after the Night John Lennon Died.”
I was captivated by Jack London’s Martin Eden when I read it in the ‘80s and dove into other London works, both famous ones, like The Call of the Wild, and lesser-known ones, like Before Adam. In 1990 I traveled to San Francisco for work and made a special trip to Jack London’s Wolf House in Glen Ellen.
It was also in the ‘80s that I discovered Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham and read book after book after book by both writers. I go back to Maugham’s short story “Faith” from time to time.
P.S.: You’ve written poems, short stories, a novella, theater works, and musical compositions. Is there anything you can’t write?
J.A.: I think the full-length novel is beyond my natural abilities. My novella, Our Dolphin(Thrice Publishing, 2016), runs 19,000 words. It ran 46,000 words before I took an editorial flail to it. “This can go. This can go. This adds nothing.” Now, 46,000 words is a substantial word count for me, but it’s too short for the novel market, which generally requires a minimum word count of 65,000.
I remember talking on the phone with a late poet friend over a dozen years ago. She told me she was writing a prose book and had written 800 pages. I said, “I wouldn’t know how to fill 800 pages.”
P.S.: You’ve stated that your novella, Our Dolphin, is an example of magic realism. What drew you to that style, and in what ways does your novella exemplify it?
J.A.: Magic realism influenced Our Dolphin. I wouldn’t have conceived it had I not read Latin American writers, but I can’t say it is magic realism.
The first part of the book takes place in a little Italian fishing village. The main character, Emilio Giovanni Canto, is the deformed adolescent son of a fisherman. One night he hears commotion coming from the beach and goes out to investigate. He discovers a small dolphin stranded on the shore. Emilio helps the creature back in the water. Emilio later meets it again and discovers it has the power of human speech, but only he can hear it.
Certain phrases in that part of the book, like “a gull of mythological proportions” and “the face that brought her infinite despair,” show the influence of García Márquez, or of García Márquez as translated into English by Gregory Rabassa (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, et al.) and Edith Grossman (Love in the Time of Cholera).
Other literary influences are at play in Our Dolphin. The main character, Emilio, was inspired by my favorite literary character, Erik, whom everybody knows as the Phantom of the Opera.
The second part of the book takes place in Tangier. The scenes were influenced by the writings of Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs, who’s my favorite Beat writer. In fact, one of the characters in Our Dolphin, a man known only as Moore (not his real name), is based on Burroughs. I took a day trip to the city in 1990 and drew on my memories when I was writing that section of the novella, but ultimately, the Tangier of Our Dolphin is a Tangier of my imagination.
P.S.: Though you’ve written many forms of poetry and prose, is there one or more common attributes that tie your written works together (genre, character types, settings, themes)?
J.A.: I like to investigate the ordinary in the out of the ordinary and the out of the ordinary in the ordinary.
P.S.: Your book Platypus (NYQ Books, 2017) contains poems, short stories, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and text art. Does it defy categorization as much as a platypus does, or is there some common theme tying the parts together?
J.A.: Platypus has thematic sections, but as you point out, the book contains a little bit of everything, so I named it after an animal that has a little bit of everything.
P.S.: What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?
J.A.: The easiest aspect? Coming up with an idea. Ideas pop into my head all the time. though I don’t follow through on all of them. I’m always jotting down ideas and potential titles, as I guess most writers do. This goes for both prose and poetry, my primary genre.
The most difficult aspects? Bringing an idea to fruition and getting the work right. Here’s an example. I spent several hours a day for six days in a row revising a 5,200-word short story that had gone through multiple iterations and larger word counts. I wound up cutting it down to 4,700-plus words. Every time I thought I was done, I found something else I wanted to change. My instincts with respect to this particular story worked out in my favor. I submitted it to a magazine one morning and received an acceptance that evening. How often does that happen?
P.S.: The anthology you edited, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems(NYQ Books. 2015), includes a large number of poetic tributes to television. What or who inspired this idea, and would the book induce a reader to watch more TV, or turn it off forever?
J.A.: This is where my professional background comes in. I spent my career in the business world, specifically, in public relations. My last position before retirement was Director – Media Relations for a national not-for-profit financial-services organization. I prepared the CEO, the vice presidents, and other spokespeople for press interviews. I dealt with 60 Minutes, Nightly Business Report, and producers at local TV stations around the country. I was inside TV studios. I was well aware of television’s power.
Without that experience, I doubt an anthology of TV poetry would have occurred to me.
In 2012 I was reading Dear Prudence, the selected poems of David Trinidad. One of the poems is “The Ten Best Episodes of The Patty Duke Show.” My favorite sit-com from that time period is The Dick Van Dyke Show. I wrote a poem called “The Dick Van Dyke Show: The Unaired Episodes.” Here’s an excerpt: “1966. Sally’s boyfriend, Herman Glimscher, confesses to everyone that he and his mother are really husband and wife.”
A couple of months later I wrote a poem about Bob Crane, he of Hogan’s Heroes and seedy extracurricular activities. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t seen an anthology of poetry about a medium that had influenced our language, politics, and lifestyles.
Rabbit Ears is a celebration of TV. The 130 contributors reveal an abiding interest in and affection for the subjects they cover, from Rod Serling to Gilligan’s Island to the Emergency Broadcast System to the Miss America pageant to American Idol to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc., etc., etc.
Incidentally, Rabbit Ears serves a charitable function. All contributor royalties earned on sales go to City Harvest, a New York food-rescue organization.
P.S.: In what way is your fiction distinctive, different from that of other authors?
J.A.: I have to be careful how I answer this question lest I come across as unconvincingly humble or as somebody with an ego the size of Brooklyn. I’ll say my fiction is different from other authors’ fiction because I’m the one who writes it.
P.S.: I think every Jules Verne fan would love to attend the carnival you describe in “Gabriel at the Jules Verne Traveling Adventure Show,” your story in Extraordinary Visions. Where did you get the idea for that story?
J.A.: I certainly would enjoy a night at the Jules Verne Traveling Adventure Show.
When I saw the call for submissions on the North American Jules Verne Society website, I got excited, since I grew up reading Verne and watching films like Journey to the Center of the Earth, with James Mason and Pat Boone, on TV. I made it my personal mission to write a short story to submit.
The inspiration for “Gabriel at the Jules Verne Traveling Adventure Show” was Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I read when I was thirteen and again maybe fifteen years later. It’s about a demonic carnival that sets up shop in a small Illinois town. It gave me the idea for a World’s Fair-type of show featuring amazing Verne vehicles like the Nautilus, Robur the Conqueror’s Albatross, and the mechanical elephant in The Steam House.
I consider my status as a contributor to Extraordinary Visions to be an important accomplishment. I see myself as having come full circle.
P.S.: Since both the “Gabriel” story and Our Dolphin feature young boys, could you compare and contrast Gabriel Henderson and Emilio Canto, the respective protagonists?
J.A.: There’s some of me in Gabriel Henderson. I drew on my boyhood memories of reading Verne to create him. There’s a scene in which Gabriel goes to his local library to find books by Verne. Whenever I went to a library, I walked straight to the V section in Fiction. Gabriel, by the way, is my Confirmation name. It was also Verne’s middle name, but I didn’t know that when I chose it. I took the name of an Italian saint, St. Gabriel Possenti.
Emilio Canto, a deformed boy, is another matter entirely. The inspiration for him was purely literary: the Phantom of the Opera.
P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?
J.A.: I’m working on placing a short (41,100+ words) novel, Vera Peru, Euro-Siren of the ‘60s, a blend of pulp fiction and imaginary music biography. The inspiration for the title character was the Velvet Underground’s Nico, who has fascinated me for decades.
The novel opens in 1984 in New York’s East Village. A dissipated wreck of a middle-aged junkie from Alphabet City is arrested for shooting up her grandson with heroin. She gives Detective Dominic Andante her vital information: name, age, address, nationality (French). She says at one point, “It’s obvious you don’t know who I am. I’m Vera Peru. I’m an international celebrity.” She mentions being late for a recording session and having to face her producer’s wrath. Andante thinks she’s drug-crazy. He starts investigating and discovers she was telling the truth; she was an important person in France and England in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
For Detective Andante, Vera Peru’s offense isn’t just another heinous crime. It has a parallel to a decade-old tragedy in his personal life. As a result, he becomes obsessed with Peru and determined to learn what could have motivated this once-glamorous woman, who had achieved European stardom, to descend into narcotic degradation and commit such an unspeakable act on her own blood. But there’s more at play than even he, an experienced New York police detective, expected. As I write in the final chapter, “He hadn’t seen this.”
Vera Peru, Euro-Siren of the ‘60s comprises alternating chapters that cover Andante’s investigation and the title character’s life and career, from modeling in Paris to stardom in French cinema to hit singles in England to a disappointing entry into the American market and, finally, to her fall. There are cameo appearances by George Harrison, Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, the Ramones, and Jean Genet.
As coincidence would have it, Jules Verne makes an appearance. During her acting career, Vera Peru works with a Greek-French director, who considers making a film of Verne’s novel about the Greek War of Independence, The Archipelago on Fire.
In addition, I completed a new poetry manuscript, Concrete Gehenna. The 60 poems cover a wide range of subjects, including classical, rock, and avant-garde music; film; the visual arts; New York City; members of the Warhol Factory; mortality; and religion.
The influences, likewise, are varied. Individual poems were inspired by, among others, Asian and Native-American forms, Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens, Weldon Kees, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, and Yoko Ono’s Fluxus-era instruction pieces.
Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring writers?
Joel Allegretti: Regard yourself as your primary competition. Look at what you’re writing now and compare it to what you’ve written. Are you writing the same work over and over? Are you absorbing new influences? Are you stretching yourself?
Moreover, I advise that you put effort into developing your own voice.
Poseidon’s Scribe: Thanks, Joel. You caused me to look up ‘Fluxus.’ Best of luck with the novel!
