SHOELESS JOE - Book review

W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe was filmed as Field of Dreams (1989).

This fantasy story is preceded by a quotation from Bobby Kennedy: ‘Some men see things as they are, and say why, I dream of things that never were, and say why not’.

Ray Kinsella runs a corn farm in Iowa with his wife Annie; they have a five-year-old daughter Karin. Three years ago, ‘when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick’ (p3), Ray heard a voice state ‘If you build it, he will come.’

For most of his life Ray has been obsessed with the history and game of baseball, and notably the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 World Series. Eight players, including Ray’s hero Shoeless Joe Jackson, were blamed for throwing the game. Ray stopped playing baseball with his father when they fell out some years ago, and now his father was dead... Another of the players is Moonlight Graham – ‘Nicknames are funny, they just land on you, like waking up one morning with a tattoo. You don’t know how you got it, but you know it’s gonna be with you forever’ (p159).

Ray is drawn by the voice to build a baseball field in the midst of the corn crop and surprisingly Annie agrees – ‘If it makes you happy, do it’ (p4).

So the field is built – at financial risk to the already precarious state of their funds. And, eerily, one night a figure appears on that field – Shoeless Joe Jackson, a young man dressed in his old-time baseball outfit. Ray, Annie and Karin see him and speak to him. Shoeless Joe admires the field: ‘This must be heaven,’ he says. ‘No,’ Ray replies. ‘It’s Iowa’ (p19).

A fan of the writer J.D. Salinger, Ray notes some coincidences in the famous author’s books – even naming characters Kinsella. He is drawn to meet Salinger, who he believes has an interest in baseball. (Salinger was not pleased to feature in the book and the film-makers prudently decided to rename the character for the film). The Salinger character says ‘Other people get into occupations by accident or design, but writers are born. We have to write. I have to write...’ (p109) ‘I dream of things that never were’ (p253) Salinger says, echoing Bobby Kennedy.

Despite Ray’s enthusiasm – ‘I’ll pierce a vein and feed him the sounds, smells, and sights of baseball until he tingles with the same magic that enchants me’(p39) – Salinger is dubious about Ray’s ‘field of dreams’ but gradually comes round to joining him on his return journey home.

Annie’s brother Mark is big in land-deals and presses to buy the farm, even threatening to foreclose. So we have conflict as well as ghosts.

Of course this is more than a story about baseball – and indeed much of that aspect went over my head. It’s about redemption, realising dreams, love, and the poetry of the natural world. ‘The cornstalks are now toast brown in the orangeade sunshine of October, and ball-park smells of burning leaves and frost. The ever-listening corn rustles like crumpling paper in the Indian-summer breeze’ (p28).

As can be seen in these few excerpts from the text, Kinsella has a way with words. ‘You’re terrible,’ says Annie, mischief crackling like static electricity in her eyes’ (p41). ‘I lean my head against the window and look up, noticing a few lamblike clouds in a chrome-blue sky (p94).

Both the book and the film are poignant and never mawkish. Kinsella’s writing style reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s – another Ray! – in the way the author perceives the world.

I recommend you enter this ‘baseball park for a rendezvous with stalled time’ (p221).

DEATH IS A LONELY BUSINESS - book review

 

Ray Bradbury’s non-fantasy novel Death is a Lonely Business was published in 1985.

It might not be fantasy, but it’s pure Bradbury in its style, descriptions, characterisations, humour and pathos and nostalgia. The noir detective story is dedicated to the memory of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Ross MacDonald, among others.

It’s a first-person narrative by an unnamed struggling fantasy and science-fiction writer in Venice, California, in July, 1949, which seems plagued by fog at this time of year.

‘During the night, the fog thickened and way out in the bay somewhere sunk and lost, a foghorn blew and blew again. It sounded like a great sea beast long dead and heading for its own grave away from shore, mourning along the way, with no one to care or follow’ (p19). This passage alludes to one of Bradbury’s famous short stories, ‘The Fog Horn’. He returns to the fog horn beast later: ‘You are left stranded on a cold dune with an empty typewriter, an abandoned bank account, and a half-warm bed. You expect the submersible beast to rise some night while you sleep. To get rid of him you get up at three AM and write a story about him, but don’t send it out to any magazines for years because you are afraid. Not Death, but Rejection in Venice, is what Thomas Mann should have written about’ (p50).

The story begins late at night when he is travelling on public transport and a passenger breathes on his neck from behind and whispers ‘Death is a lonely business’. He is so scared he doesn’t risk looking at the owner of the voice. And then the man is gone. On his way home, our narrator discovers a dead body in the canal. At the scene he meets detective Elmo Crumley; their paths are going to cross often, in two more books, in fact. Crumley ‘tilted his head now this way to look at me, and then tiled it the other way, like a monkey in the zoo staring out through the bars and wondering what the hell that beast is here outside’ (p54). Crumley’s heart is in the right place and takes a shine to our narrator, happy to compare notes. He says, ‘You know, I wish I could bring all the rot I see every week here and use it for mulch. Boy, what roses I’d grow!’ (p84). At one point Crumley uses the phrase ‘Long after midnight’ during a hypnotising session (p192) – which just happens to be the title of a Bradbury collection of stories. Bradbury named his detective after the crime author James Crumley, in tribute.

Later, the narrator is haunted by that phrase – and decides it will make a good title for a book. To make matters worse, he has caught a cold and his sense of smell has deserted him.

He is drawn to do a little bit of investigating and enters the rooming house of the deceased. Upstairs is the ‘canaries for sale’ lady, seemingly confined to her bed – a modern Miss Havisham, who possessed a ‘tiny yellowed head’: ‘She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread’ (p27).

There is a creeping suspenseful menace about the narrative. More than one person described the sensation of a person waiting outside their bedroom door. ‘… but what if one night whoever it was came into the room?  And brought his lonely business with him?’ (p33).

We meet a number of fascinating and even eccentric characters, including Cora Smith, who called herself Fannie Florianna. Grossly overweight, she is now a retired opera singer of some renown. Then there was the old lady  ‘who spun the pink cotton candy machine and sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese food’ (p73).  And Mr Shapeshade and Mr A.L. Shrank, a strange ‘shrink’. And Cal, the atrocious demon barber: ‘…cut hair so you looked as if  you’d been blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok’ (p109). And Constance Rattigan, the movie idol in her sixties: ‘I guess I have too many producers’ fingerprints on my skin’ (p138). And the matinee idol John Wilkes Hopwood who ‘threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed sabres and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honour of the old days, before films talked’ (p160).

Bradbury makes many observations that catch the mood or the period: ‘Silence. And the sound that waiting makes on the telephone line’ (p62). Maybe that’s why we started getting plagued with canned music while we waited; silence was too terrible? Here’s another: ‘The car windshield was like a great eye, weeping and drying itself, weeping again, as the wipers shuttled and stopped, shuttled and stopped and squeaked to shuttle again’ (p113).

The narrator has a box beside his typewriter, where he keeps his ideas; ideas that spoke to him, telling him where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. ‘So my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backwards. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen…’ (p118). And he sells a tale to Bizarre Tales about a man ‘who feared the wind that had followed him around the world from the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul’ (p120).

There are a number of deaths before the end, most of them poignant and tragic.

As hinted, there is a measure of autobiography here as Bradbury lived in the area described until 1950; and this is where he wrote his early stories which began to establish his fame.

The cover is appropriate.

Two sequels follow: A Graveyard for Lunatics and Let’s All Kill Constance.

This is my review of A Graveyard for Lunatics, which clearly I read out of sequence:

WRITEALOT: Book review - A Graveyard for Lunatics (nik-writealot.blogspot.com)

Jack Higgins - Review of two early thrillers

 

HELL IS TOO CROWDED

This is an early Jack Higgins novel, originally published under his real name Harry Patterson in 1962, reprinted by Fawcett in 1976 and reissued here in 1977 with the name-change and the strap-line ‘by the author of The Eagle Has Landed’.

It’s a pot-boiler and reveals that Higgins was learning his trade.

Matt Brady was inebriated when he met the woman; he was ‘caught between the shadow lines of sleep and waking when strange things fill the mind’ (p5). One wonders if Higgins was alluding to the Joseph Conrad book The Shadow Line (1917) which depicts the threshold of a young man entering adulthood at sea. The woman was wearing a trench-coat and a scarf ‘peasant-fashion’.

‘A ship moved down the Pool of London sounding its foghorn like the last of the dinosaurs lumbering aimlessly through a primeval swamp, alone in a world that was already alien.’ (p5) Here, Higgins might be referencing Ray Bradbury’s classic short story ‘The Foghorn’ (1951).

Once in the woman’s apartment, he accepts a drink and abruptly passes out. When he comes to, the police are in the room and the woman is dead – her face brutally damaged… Brady is sent to prison for life. He must escape, however, to prove his innocence, which he does manage with some inside help. The trail leads him to several individuals, one of whom is Das who is a proud owner of a Ming vase among other items. In his desperation to get answers, Brady threatens to destroy the valuable vase. (This will be echoed in The Dark Side of the Island when the doctor Van Horn is threatened by the Nazi’s in a similar way).

Brady is befriended by Anne, a young woman, the daughter of a friend who has died. She believes in his innocence. The story behind the woman he was accused of murdering is revealed about three-quarters through the book; after which it’s a case of tracking down the real murderer.

There are several deaths before the denouement is reached.

The book was originally published in the US, I assume, since there were references to ‘color’, ‘hood’ of a car instead of ‘bonnet’, and ‘sidewalk’. Higgins may have been attempting an American point-of-view since Brady was from the States; however, there were other instances of the spelling ‘colour’. These were the days when publishers actually employed people to change the trans-Atlantic vocabulary as appropriate; now, they tend not to bother. None of this spoils the story-telling, which is page-turning.

 

THE DARK SIDE OF THE ISLAND

This is another early Jack Higgins novel, originally published under his real name Harry Patterson in 1963 and reissued here in 1989.

It’s a pot-boiler and reveals he was still learning his trade.

Seventeen years after fighting in the Second World War Hugh Lomax returns to the Greek island of Kyros. The last time he was here he’d been on a secret mission to destroy a vital Nazi radio station. Betrayal and capture followed and he barely escaped with his life. Now, he was back to find out the truth.

The Greek islanders haven’t forgotten him and indeed blame him for talking under Nazi interrogation and costing many innocent lives…

The book is split into three parts: 1) Lomax’s return and being confronted by antagonistic islanders; 2) Flashback to the actual landing on the island and the sabotage and escape and capture; 3) Lomax’s life threatened by the islanders while he seeks the truth.

There’s Katina, a local girl, who wears a scarf ‘peasant-fashion’. She’d been a teenager when they’d met in the war; now she was a mature woman who believes in Lomax’s innocence. Resident ex-pat Van Horn is a successful author and doctor; he’d been useful doctoring during the war. Van Horn was also an archaeologist and had a valuable collection, some of which was broken by the Nazi Steiner. Then there are the few Greek men who survived the Nazi depredations: Alexias, Dimitri, Nikoli, among a few others – any one of whom might have been the traitor…

The story is fast-paced, workmanlike, but the denouement is no great surprise.

Definitely, one for the Jack Higgins completists.

Editorial comments:

Some of Jack Higgins’s favourite words and phrases that are often repeated: ‘somehow’, ‘somewhere’, ‘moment’, ‘a frown on his face’. And: ‘heavy’ – ‘He pushed open the heavy glass door, crossed the heavy carpet soundlessly…’ (TDSOTI, p112).

These were early novels and his apprenticeship eventually paid off with his thirty-sixth novel, The Eagle Has Landed in 1975. The lesson here is blatantly clear: keep writing and improving.

Book review - A Graveyard for Lunatics

Ray Bradbury’s 1990 crime novel A Graveyard for Lunatics is the second in a trilogy, preceded by Death is a Lonely Business and succeeded by Let’s All Kill Constance. 

The cover depicts a detail from Goya's The Madhouse at Saragossa, 1794.

It’s 1954 and the young narrator is a scriptwriter for Maximus Films, a character that echoes Bradbury’s own worship of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Adjacent to the vast film studio complex is Green Glades Cemetery.  Here, one rain-sodden night he witnesses a revelation.

‘I heard a ghost sigh somewhere, but it was only my own lungs pumping like a bellows, trying to light some sort of fire in my chest.’ (p9)

The revelation was a lifelike dummy of the dead studio head J.C. Arbuthnot, who died twenty years ago in a car crash. He enlists his best friend Roy Holdstrom (an inventor of science fiction sets, monsters and special effects) to solve the mystery. On the way he meets wildly eccentric characters, among them a drunken ham Shakespearean actor, J.C., who states, ‘I do not dare, sir. I am.’.

It’s clear that these books are Bradbury’s reminiscences of his time when a young teenager hovering around the periphery of the movies. His early influences were King Kong and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

‘It was like having an affair with Kong, who fell on me when I was thirteen. I had never escaped from beneath his heart-beating carcass.’ (p4)

Bradbury would spend many a day in front of the studio gates of Paramount and Columbia hoping for autographs. He’d watch film stars come and go at the Brown Derby restaurant – and all these places figure in this novel. One of the tragic characters, Clarence is clearly modelled on himself, though older.

‘Instantly my soul flashed out of my body and ran back. It was 1934 and I was mulched in among the ravening crowd, waving pads and pens… pursuing Marlene Dietrich into her hairdresser’s or running after Cary Grant Friday nights…’ (p15)

This book is dedicated to a few folk of his acquaintance, among them some deceased: Fritz Lang and James Hong Howe. And his friend Ray Harryhausen, who was alive when this was written. Roy Holdstrom is modelled on Harryhausen, and the character Fritz Wong is an amalgam of Lang and Howe. The narrator’s investigator pal Crumley is named after the crime writer James Crumley. Manny Leiber (who intended cutting Judas from a Biblical film because he didn’t want to make an anti-Semitic movie!) may well be named after fellow science fiction author Fritz Leiber. There may be other allusions I’ve missed.

The tale is typical Hollywood scandal and cover-up. Nothing new there, then. Fittingly, Crumley states, ‘Sometimes dead folks in graves have more power than live folks above…’ (p186)

The beginning contains some excellent imagery and writing. It starts with the narrator observing there were two cities within a city: ‘one moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones… Maximus Films, the living, and Green Glades Cemetery, the dead…’ (p3)

‘Ten thousand deaths had happened here, and when the deaths were done, the people got up, laughing, and strolled away. Whole tenement blocks were set afire and did not burn…’ (p3)

And: ‘From here Dracula wandered as flesh to return as dust. Here also were the Stations of the Cross and a trail of ever-replenished blood as screenwriters groaned by to Calvary carrying a backbreaking load of revisions, pursued by directors with scourges and film cutters with razor-sharp knives…’ (p4)

Besides transposed reminiscences and mystery, there’s humour: they were looking at a huge display of coffins. ‘How come so many?’ I asked.

‘To bury all the turkeys the studio will make between now and Thanksgiving.’ (p37)

And when turning up at the Brown Derby, the maitre d’ accosts them:  ‘“Of course, you have no reservations?” he observed languidly.

“About this place?” said Roy. “Plenty.”’ (p59)

Lastly: The actor J.C. asks, ‘Was Christ manic-depressive? Like me?’

‘No,’ I said lamely, ‘not nuts. But you’re in the bowl with the almonds and the cashews…’ (p183)

When they confront ‘the Beast’, the lengthy description is poignant. ‘… a face in which two terribly liquid eyes drowned, swimming in delirium, could find no shore, no respite, no rescue… So the eyes floated, anchored in a red-hot lava of destroyed flesh, in a meltdown of genetics from which no soul, however brave, might survive. While all the while, the nostrils inhaled themselves and the wound of mouth cried Havoc, silently, and exhaled.’ (p63)

While Bradbury didn’t shy away from acknowledging the grim underbelly of the world in this book and others, yet he preserved an incorrigible innocence too, encapsulated by Constance, a faded movie star, telling him: ‘How lucky to be inside your skin, so goddamned naïve. Don’t ever change.’ (p131)  She also makes the observation, ‘That’s no hospital. It’s where great elephant ideas go to die. A graveyard for lunatics.’ (p140); hence the book’s title.

Whimsical and sometimes silly, with a plot that barely hangs together for all those depicted years, it’s still a worthy addition to the Bradbury collection, and as hinted at above there’s much to admire. However, if you’ve never read any Ray Bradbury, this is not the best place to start.

Ray Bradbury died 2012, aged 91.

Writing – the short story

For many years I’ve added to my home library collections of short stories. Until the advent of the e-reader, received wisdom in publishing was that short story collections ‘don’t sell’. What they meant, perhaps, was that they don’t sell in vast numbers so are not worthwhile expending effort on them. However, now any form of writing can be obtained on an e-reader, and enjoyed, and the collected works of many classic authors can be downloaded for very little financial outlay (check out the Delphi Complete Works).

A short story in its literary form is supposed to be a brief fictional prose narrative, often involving one connected episode, a concentrated form, dependent for its success on feeling and suggestion. The writer must attempt to succinctly create a fictional world in the moment. Stories attempt to reflect the life that is lived by all of us, and the short form has to do it without benefit of the depth and breadth of a novel.

And, as with the novel, a short story has the potential to invoke any number of aspects of writing.

·       The plot – the sequence of related events that shape the narrative.

·       The characters – the people who play their parts in the narrative.

·       Setting – the place and time where the story’s action unfolds.

·       Point of view - a consistent perspective on the characters and their actions.

·       Style – how the author chooses to relate the story.

·       Theme – often the submerged back-bone of the story, a unifying idea that provides insight into the human condition.

The length of the short story will be dictated by a number of factors:

·       Complexity of the plot

·       Number of characters

·       Duration of the tale

·       Intended audience

·       It doesn’t have enough content to be a longer piece

That intended audience might be a publisher, an editor, a competition, a magazine, or simply personal preference.

A short story can cover the events of a brief episode or encompass action that takes years to conclude.

The author needs to use a scalpel to excise anything that is not pertinent to the original intention.

If a short story has to fit into 2,000 words then there is little scope for detailed exposition and rising action, and so on.

The nub of the conflict – the problem to be resolved by the protagonist – must be introduced very early.

If the story is allowed more words, say 6,000, then a more leisurely pace can be adopted, though again every word has to do its job – creating the world, the atmosphere, the characterisation and the emotional journey of the protagonist.

Usually, the so-called literary short stories have more words while genre fiction writers are quite content to settle for less to do the job.

 
Regardless of length, the writer of short stories must show the reader what is important through the dramatic action of the plot and the other elements of the story, and not just explicitly tell the reader what to think.
 
The illusion of reality should always be sustained by the plot right up to the end. This reality is enhanced by character creation. Dialogue is a useful tool here, conveying mood and emotion. With the wordage permitted, the writer must suggest enough complexity in the individual to affect the reader’s emotions. Mood can be affected by time and place, and setting is important, though ideally this will be achieved with a few deft sketches rather than a full-blown travelogue. Creating a visual place enables the reader to ‘see’ the action more definitively, in effect to be part of the scene, involved in the drama.
 
Drama is perceived through the eyes of the protagonist. In short stories, it is preferable to limit the number of characters and viewpoints. The first-person narrator could be a major character or a minor character who is a good observer. The third-person narrator can be omniscient, seeing into all characters’ hearts and minds, or limited omniscient, seeing into one or, possibly, two characters.

Some novelists are not comfortable with the short story; in their case, there is not enough scope to create the world the writer perceives; only a novel will do. And the same goes for some readers: they can’t seem to get lost in a short piece while they can easily become immersed in a thick novel. To each their own.

 
Writing short fiction can help to hone your writing. You have to convey scene, character, plot, setting, and emotion within a concise form, so every word should be selected to that end. There is little room for extraneous padding or ‘fluff’. In some ways, certain short story writers are similar to poets – selecting the right word to convey the precise feeling or moment.
 
Just browsing along my bookshelves, these are some of the short story collections I can see:

Collected Stories by John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Ruth Rendell, Eudora Welty, E M Forster, O Henry, D H Lawrence, W Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Bowen, Anton Chekov, Noel Coward, Saki, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, Elizabeth Spencer; Truman Capote – A Reader; Stanley Ellin – The Speciality of the House; Leslie Charteris – Señor Saint; Willa Catha – Great short works; Frederick Forsyth – The Veteran; Ring Lardner – Best Short Stories; James Joyce – Dubliners; Hugh Garner – Best Stories; Hermann Hesse – Stories from Five Decades; Elizabeth Spencer – Stories; August Derleth – The Return of Solar Pons; Arthur Conan Doyle – The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; Ernest Hemingway – The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Jeffery Deaver – Twisted; Joseph Conrad – Typhoon and other stories; Doris Lessing – This was the Old Chief’s Country, Stephen King – Everything’s Eventual, and G K Chesterton - Father Brown.  

This limited list doesn’t touch upon the horror, fantasy and science fiction shelves; these genres have spawned many hundreds of short stories.
 
If you haven’t tackled short story writing – read a collection or two and see what can be achieved by the masters such as those mentioned above, or Margaret Atwood, Ambrose Bierce, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson to name a few more.
 
Even today, short stories definitely have a story to tell.

Loose change in the treasury of fiction

In his introduction to the volume collecting all his short stories, J.G. Ballard states, ‘Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.’

To continue yesterday’s theme about next week’s UK National Short Story Week, I thought I’d scan my book shelves for the collections by sci-fi and horror authors (a separate set of shelves).

Here I find Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Boucher, Ray Bradbury, John W. Campbell, Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, Cordwainer Smith, Philip K. Dick, Christopher Priest, Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr (Alice B. Sheldon), Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis and H.G. Wells.

 

 

Aldiss’ title story (see cover) plus two other linked tales were adapted for Spielberg’s film A.I.

 

Jack Finney’s classic novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been filmed more than once; yet it’s his beautiful short story ‘I love Galesburg in the Springtime’ that lingers in my memory.

 

 

Science fiction lends itself to the short story form because it’s often the fiction of ideas; though in truth that was in the early days; by the 1960s with the New Wave spearheaded by Moorcock and Ballard, light was shone on the inner space embedded within the human condition.

Some readers are quite insular in their taste, and eschew certain genre writing, which is a pity, because there is a richness of prose and idea within all genres; a good story, about people and emotion can be found in all genre writing; a good story is a good story.

‘I don’t read sci-fi’ is perhaps as common a statement as ‘I don’t read westerns’ or ‘I don’t read horror’. Perhaps these opinions stem from a bad experience with a poor writer within a particular genre. Yet you won’t hear anyone say ‘I don’t read novels’ (well, apart from those who prefer non-fiction!) because this statement is too broad. And that’s the point. Within any genre, there’s a very broad range of style, quality and imagination. Short story collections by an author can introduce you to his or her style, and I believe that any of the above mentioned authors have something like ‘precious metal’ to offer readers who are bold enough to mine these treasures.

 

Words, words and more words

A moderately interesting exercise; this is a word-count of the books I’ve had published under the pen-names of Nik Morton, Ross Morton, Robert Morton and Robin Moreton.

Death at Bethesda Falls – 34,500

Pain Wears No Mask * - 96,000

Last Chance Saloon – 40,000

The Prague Manuscript * - 84,000

Blind Justice at Wedlock – 38,400

The Tehran Transmission * - 90,900

The $300 Man – 40.018

Assignment Kilimanjaro – 80,900

Bullets for a Ballot – 31,900

Old Guns – 37,250

Death is Another Life * - 81,200

Odd Shoes and Medals (biog) – 38,300

Write a Western in 30 Days (nonfic) – 49,700

When the Flowers are in Bloom (anthology) * - 39,900

Blood of the Dragon Trees – 79,800

Spanish Eye - 51,900

Sudden Vengeance – 58,500

The Magnificent Mendozas – 40,500

Wings of the Overlord (due September) – 106,600

Catalyst (due December) – 54,700

  

 [* = out-of-print]

 
Total word-count, 1 million, 174 thousand, 950 words – since 2007. That’s not a lot by the standards of many prolific authors. James Reasoner usually aims to write that many words per year!

They’re my published words in book format, of course. The actual word-count of books produced (including those discarded, and those not published [yet]) will doubtless add to another million.

A writer some years back commented that you really need to write a million words before you reach competency as an author. The search for the writer who said that is an intriguing one, and may have been Ray Bradbury or John D. McDonald; see this interesting article on the subject:

http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2014/03/one-million-words-to-competency-who-said-it-first.html

Naturally, in the above list I haven’t counted A Fistful of Legends (which I edited). One day, I’ll do a word-count of the published short stories, perhaps.

For interest, the three books that are works in progress (Catacomb, To Be King and The Khyber Chronicle), they clock up another 46,900 words!