Donar's Oak

Today's drawing is an illustration for my new short story, "Donar's Oak". I'm very proud of the drawing and even more proud of the story. Both are definitely some of my best work.  So once your eyes do scope over these lines, please take minute or two to look over my words!

"Donar's Oak" can be found here!: http://jottify.com/works/donars-oak/

"The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish."

The final author of the week is literary wild man Terry Southern (1924-1995).  Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern would serve in WWII, hit the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill, become part of the both the Greenwich scene of the 50's as well as the Swinging Sixties in London before working as a prominent screenwriter in the 70's.  I first became aware of Terry as a screenwriter, particularly with Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) (He also wrote the scripts for Easy Rider and Barbarella, among others.) The first book of Terry's that I tracked down was The Magic Christian (1959) due to my love of the uneven but wonderfully bizarre film of the same name, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.  I've since read and seen the majority of this master satirist's work.

“Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.”

Our second author for this week is Chester Himes (1909-1984).  In academia, Himes is better recognized for his works concerning social and political issues for African Americans, but I came to know him for his series of detective novels featuring Coffin Ed and Gravedigger.  Depicting Harlem in the 1950's, the novels fit in the hard-boiled style but feature outlandish characters and situations that border on the cartoonish, while also delving into the same serious racial issues that Himes other books dealt with.  For Love of Imabelle (aka. A Rage in Harlem, 1957) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) are perhaps the best known, though I enjoyed them all.  A note of caution, Himes' last Ed and Digger book, Plan B, is not the place to start. The novel was left unfinished and features an apocalyptic race revolution, not unlike Sam Greenlee's 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, that requires the context of the previous books.

"You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one."

This week's series is fellas you don't get to see all that often: authors.  I picked a few that I'm fond of who I don't really ever recall being displayed pictorially.

We kick things off with Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) whose Sam Spade became one of the most influential private detective characters in literature despite only being the protagonist of one novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), and a couple of minor short stories.  My first run-in with Dashiell was Red Harvest, a gritty crime story of racketeers and corruption that featured the surly and stocky Continental Op.  The book was one of the progenitors of the "servant of two masters" plot-line that led to such films as Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) and a Leone's Fistful of Dollars (1964).

Pulp, Glue and Words....

The time has finally come to unleash my literary...ahem...fury on an unsuspecting world.  (Unsuspecting because there were a whole lot of folks who didn't even know I'd written the damned things.)  So, I'm proud to announce that I'm releasing my first two novels via Createspace (Amazon's publishing arm.)

Book 1 - Memories of the Children of Death:

Description: God’s conscience tells him to leave. His lapses in memory make him a danger to himself and everyone else.  Kato’s faded out.  Pixie and her robot, Bill, have been attacked by roving gangs of vampires and clowns.  And Io loves him, but just wants out. The more God thinks, the fuzzier things get, and the fuzzier they get, the more it makes him sick.  On the rollercoaster of endless nightlife in this city of the future, a fuzzed out brain was the order of the day…but as the frivolity passes, the truth sneaks out of the shadows to spoil the party.

Memories of the Children of Death follows a group of friends who, as their worlds drift apart, pursue the truth behind the shadowy figures and strange occurrences that tug the  strands on the web of roads and train tracks that flow between the superstructures that truly touch the sky.

(Available Here! and on Amazon)

Book 2 - Rubber Finger #11

Description: Magnus Freelyson has problems.  Only, he didn’t used to.

Magnus had been a quiet cog in the massive machine, the Giant Rubber Monster Inc., that owned half of the world.  When the company’s head, Fred Freely, appears to have died mysteriously, Magnus suddenly finds himself in the captain’s chair. But it’s not just running things that he’s going to have to get used to.  For one, he now knows that Fred’s his father, and that’s just the start of his new family problems. Betaville, owner of the other half of the world, has already begun to clamor at the gates in search of a conquest that will end the decades old stalemate of consumption. But smack in the middle of it all is the path of red herrings, bizarre plotting and a host of clones and doubles that Magnus must unravel to find the true Fred Freely… who might not be quite as dead as everyone thinks…

(Available Here! and on Amazon)