Conversations - John Shirley - Paperback Warrior

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:19):
Hello, Hello, this is Eric with a Paperback Warrior blog,
podcast and YouTube channel. You can find hundreds and hundreds
of vintage fiction reviews at Paperbackwarrior dot com and check
out over one hundred episodes of this very podcast. Visit
YouTube for hundreds of video shorts chronicling book, pulp and
comic history, as well as exclusive book shopping videos and
numerous conversations with book authors at book tubers. So you're

(00:42):
probably asking why this particular conversations episode has an introduction
like this, Well, I thought it deserved a little something special.
I had the opportunity to interview an iconic author that's
been writing published stories and novels for over five decades.
That author is John Shirley. What you're about to hear
in this now I naim in an interview delves into
Shirley's career, his newest novel, and his experiences writing for

(01:05):
television media, Italian novels and albums for one of rock
and Roll's most enduring bands, Blue Oyster Cult. You can
listen to the audio right here on this podcast, or
if you'd like, you can watch the video discussion, along
with plenty of book covers and movie covers and all
the things that John Shirley has worked on in his
career kind of sprinkled into that video interview. I want

(01:26):
to thank author David Atgranoff for connecting me with John Shirley.
Without him, I don't feel this would have been possible.
I hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did.
All right, welcome back to the podcast the YouTube channel.
This is Paperback Warrior. My name's Eric, I'm your host,

(01:47):
and I've got a guest on with me today. I've
got Bram Stoker Award winning author John Shirley. He needs
no introduction, but John Shirley's a science fiction writer who
many consider to be the pioneer of paborpunk fiction. He
writes westerns, he writes crime fiction, horror, and really a
plethora of media Italian novels in the gaming and film industry.

(02:09):
Surely also has a robust resume within Hollywood, writing scripts
and treatments for movies, television shows, animation. Welcome to Paperback Warrior,
mister Shirley.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, glad to be here.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Well. One of the reasons why I've got you out
to this week anyway on the show is because you
have a brand new novel out now. You can see
it right behind me here, the Silver Revolver. It's published
by Rough Edges Press, which is an imprint of Wolfpack Publishing.
I read and reviewed it for Paperback Warrior and I
posted my positive review on Amazon and a Paperback Warrior

(02:43):
as well, So congratulations on those release. I'm really anxious
to talk with you about it. It just knocked my
socks off. So tell me a little bit about what
brought this book to fruition.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Well, I've been thinking about it for years.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
There was a obscurely printed novella that was kind of
the core of it many years ago, and I always
wanted to expand it into a full book.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
And it's now and rewrite it.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
And it was rewritten a lot, and then new things added,
and it's now three times longer, and.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
And it's the full It's the full book I had envisioned.
And it's years ago, long decades ago.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
I was struggling with going in and out of drug addiction,
something I fell into mostly when I was in New
York and the rock scene, as one does, but also
in the San Francisco area, and I met a lot
of people on the street. I wasn't living on the street,

(03:48):
but when I was out there getting in trouble, I
was meeting all kinds of people, and it was very
much walking the wild side. And I encountered several of
the people in this novel, for one thing, given different names,

(04:11):
of course, and they really stuck with me, and.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
I just wanted to keep them alive in some way
in my writing.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
There was that, and also the whole thing with the
fentanyl explosion, because a lot of the story is about
a dad whose son was killed by ventanyl, and it
happens that right now they're not only just selling it
as that they're mixing it in with other things.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Sometimes you find drugs that are supposedly.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
It's just some ordinary tranquilizer, let's say, and they've mixed
in fentanyl or a couple of drugs they're calling this tranquilizer,
including fantil And the thing with fentanyl is it's really
tricky about how you do the dosage because it's very
intense stuff and it can easily kill somebody.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Even a couple of pills can are commonly lethal.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
And if you don't know that that's what you're taking,
very high risks that you don't even know you taking.
The best thing is to stay away from street drugs
entirely if you're going to use drugs and people you
don't know and so on. I mean, I don't take
drugs at all for many decades, but people who do
be extremely cautious about what people say is, for example,

(05:44):
molly or ecstasy. The boy, the teenager in this novel
who died thought he was taking ecstasy, thought it was X,
and there was a little of that and some toil,
which dealers will use to kind of stretch the impact
of a thing. And also it X is not addictive.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Fentanyl is.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
So if if you get them taken the pill more
than once and they survive, they come back and say
and they just are addicted. Yeah, now because to the
fentanyl part of it. And so it's kind of a
way to spread it out as an addictive drug without
people knowing that's what they're taking, and people.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Are dying from it.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, there was a famous wrapper and Los Angeles a
bunch of other people who died from fentanyl mixed in
with what they thought were.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
X M D M A pills, but they weren't.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
Just that it's it is A And then of course,
there are fentanyl addicts on the streets who are just
taking it straight. There's a lot of it, and they
really haven't got handle on it yet. And people are
dying every day in large numbers, and if they're not dying,
then their lives are being destroyed in other ways. I

(07:09):
describe what they're like in the book, and it's not
without sympathy. The people, you know, don't understand what they're
getting into with addictive drugs. There being lied to, or
they're they're motivated to get into them because because they're
in a lot of emotional pain, things have happened in
their lives, so they get sucked in. And all of

(07:30):
these things trouble me, you know, partly because not only
because of my own addiction issues with a totally different drug,
but also the people I saw out there and also
my own well.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
A relative, a close relative, had.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
Become addicted to heroin and it, you know, ruined his
life for four years. It took us a long time
to arranged to get him into a real rehab. There
are a lot of false rehabs out there.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
By the way.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
That's another scary thing. Very careful which one you pick.
Some of them are just total scams. It took him
a while to get him into one we knew was
good and that he was willing to go to. And
he's fine now, I said, years clean.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
But in the.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
Meantime, struggling with that what a nightmare. And it leaves
an impact on your life when you know somebody of
your own blood, someone close to you, has been.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
And so has lost so much because of this.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
And he had friends die, you know, two of his
friends died, and he almost died once in himself. So
it was really important for me to take up this
story and make it come alive. And I was really
quite motivated and quite angry about a drug dealers as

(09:02):
as you can tell as you read the book, because
there is there is a kind of vigilante justice thing
going on, but it's from from a very dark angle,
and there's all kinds of interesting psychological things happening with
the character that.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
That takes the place as most stories like that don't go.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, the book for me, it really took me on
a roller coaster of emotions. Starting out with the first
two chapters. I had texted a couple of friends of
mine that that love books and like reading, and I
was like, man, these first two chapters of this book,
there's nothing quite like it, because in the first two
chapters we experience just anguish and heartbreak from what Slim,

(09:50):
the main character is experiencing with his son write in
the first chapter, and then right into that second chapter
is something that really just smacks you right in the face.
And that's the the mass shooter aspect of what our
society has come to.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
He's our hero, is not the mass shooter.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
But no, no, he's not, but he is.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
He's kind of had he has a run in with one,
just as he is, you know, struggling with what to
accept what's happened to his son, and it pushes him
over the edge.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, Slim's having the worst day any of us could
possibly imagine. And and you have a lot to say
in this book. You've got a lot of social commentary
on drugs, like you mentioned, street street crime, but also
something really interesting to me. There's a scene in the
very beginning of the book where Slim, who he works

(10:43):
as a book editor for this publisher, and this publisher
has gone through a an ownership change and they've got
a different set of publishing guru so to speak. That
are in the room with him, and they've brought him
in for this interview, and he's told that his job
is basically, it's going to be some sort of subservient
to AI writing. A lot of the books and writing

(11:06):
are doing the editing. And I thought to myself, I
wonder if if you John have if that was written
from a place of realism, where you've been in a
room with some of these publishing gurus, where they're telling
you things that you don't necessarily want to hear, and
you're trying to process that, and it didn't happen.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
That didn't happen to me.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
After all, he's an editor of this character, yes, and
which fact which freaked some of the editors out who
considered the book.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Imagine.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
But I do see happening a greater and greater cynicism
amongst publishers about the whole process. And for one thing,
they're getting bought by these huge companies that are run
the the encounters are at the top instead of just
several levels down. And they're not really interested middless novels.

(12:00):
Are not interested in literary works, you know, they're only
interested in things that are.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Punching right.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
For what they supposed to be what everybody wants. Often
that they're totally wrong about that. But and it's very
frustrating to writers. Now the whole middle list is sort
of disappearing in the conventional sense of publishing. And then
that the aa I thing is horrifying. Their publishers of

(12:32):
magazines who had to stop publishing their magazine for a
while because of their their inbox was was flooded with
AI manuscripts, which are not real writing at all. There's
no actual author, it's just a guy open to make
some money from something he didn't write, she didn't write.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
And yeah, you know there is.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
It is a very disruptive to the industry into culture.
And you know about the Anthropic lawsuit lawsuit against the
the AI sort of branch of the AI industry, Anthropic,
which you know there, that's one of the companies that
that would go out there and scrape all these books,

(13:21):
take material from all these books through an AI program
and just kind of consume everything that was in it
and then and then make it applicable to a writing
programs and chat GPT and so on. And it was
doing that, and it was and this was in violation
of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copyrights, and so

(13:45):
they were sued by the Author's Guild of America and
other other author organizations, even the Horror Writers of America.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
For doing that, and they.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Settled for a billion and a half dollars to be
distributed to lots and lots of writers, including me. I'm
one of the authors that. I mean, my share would
be very small, I suppose most. I'm not sure any
individual writer will will get any more than anybody else.
And we're talking about thousands of people, I think. And
then out of a billion and a half. That's not

(14:20):
really the point, though. The point was making them stop
doing that.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, and uh, it's it not only uh.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
It not only invades you know, a writer's intellectual property rights,
but it but it also diminishes the whole culture the right,
you know, the culture of writing, the esthetics of writing.
It just it turns everything into sort of intellectual gray

(14:56):
goose at best, you know. And yeah, so yeah, it's
really deporable. And I couldn't help making fun of it
for a paragraph or two in the book. His day
job was at a small publisher in San Francisco. But
you know, yeah, I'm concerned about it. Big time and

(15:17):
and I even joined a lawsuit. That should tell you something.
I don't know any writers who aren't concerned about it.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yeah, it was. It was interesting that you had you
kind of thrust the reader into the world of publishing
in a way with those first first chapter. And the
other thing that was I found was interesting about this
book when I saw the title. You've you've been really writing,
you know, Westerns of late, You've got the trilogy of
Westerns that you wrote, and then you've also been writing,

(15:46):
as you know, with Ralph Compton franchise. But I saw
the Silver Revolver and I thought, Okay, this is another Western,
but it's not. It's not, but it it kind of
is sort of a throwback to that style because he's
got the main character has a silver Revolver and he's
using that to, uh, to sort of thwart the bad guys,

(16:06):
which I thought was kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
And also he came he comes from the heart of
Texas and he was a competitor in fast draw Championships
and targeting Championships with pistol traditional gunfighter type pistols. It's
a it is these are real competitions and you know
they still do go on.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Their fast draws.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
They pull from there, uh, their their holsters really fast,
and then they have to shoot accurately. They actually shoot
wax bullets, but they but they're propelled by by a
real gunpowder.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Oh I see, okay, yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, but the the you can use the skill for anything,
not just for shooting with wax bullets.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
At a target.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, and he does use it in real in his life.
But see it's also the ah, the revenge element, the
fact that he in fact dresses a bit like you know,
the classic Western hero a little you know, in his
own personal style. I mean, I know guys like that.

(17:14):
And I'm also a member of the Western Writers of
America and when I go to I went to one
of their conventions and they were all dressed right.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
So, and there's a whole sub genre that is modern Western.
Uh you see movies that are categorized as modern Westerns.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
So it is a kind of Western, but it is
also very much of our age.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
I try to make it a perfect fusing of a
kind of contemporary noir thriller with some you know, with
the Western mythos and elements.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yeahs of Paperwreck Warrior that really like eighties men's action
adventure with you know, larger than life heroes. I think
that they will find this book very, very I think
they'll be drawn to this book. And the other part
of it is also the crime fiction aspect of it,
where he's teaming up with you have some downright dirty scoundrels,

(18:21):
and I thought that was really cool and almost kind
of a throwback to the old mid mid twentieth century
crime to our feel to it with that kind of aspect.
But it's a great It's just a great book, and
I want to ask you the end. It kind of
led me to believe that maybe there would be a sequel?
Is there any hope of that.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
I've written outlines for two sequels, and I had I
had it there. The book went to several publishers before
it found this.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
One, and at each one there was division within the
the editorial department about the book because some people thought.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
It was too too uh, too raw, to kind of.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
Uh look, you know, like to too urban intensive or something.
And also the character is a kind of anti hero,
even though he's I think most people will find it
would be a good guy, but he's he can there's
a side of him that will seem like an anti

(19:27):
hero because he's struggling with the whole morality of himself.
And so, uh, you know, there was there was this
conflict in these one company was going to bring it
out and they and they had accepted it, and uh,

(19:49):
they asked for outlines for sequels.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
And I was not a verse to that. I like
to write a trilogy.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
So I wrote these outlines and and then just as
we were about to sign the deal, they said, I'm sorry,
the deal is canceled. The owner of the company started
reading the book and then he was like kind of
went white or something that he kind of like blanched
in all of the the street level imagery that he

(20:18):
found offensive in some way. It wasn't any kind of
a there was nothing racist or anything. It wasn't like that.
It was all just it was just he didn't think
people wanted to hear about the realities out there something
and have this guy involved via hero. He wanted to
hear there was like more of just really black and

(20:40):
white with no gray, I guess. And so you know
that that ended. I took it uh to the publisher.
It now has Wolfpack. But you see what happened, So
I I, you know, uh just has to stand on

(21:01):
its own merits, and I believe it will.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, it's a great novel. You can pick it up now.
It's out along with another a brand new release for
you this month is your twenty twelve novel Everything Is Broken,
is being published in a new edition by Rough Edges
Press as well. It's available in digital and physical copies
as of November fourth. I haven't read this book, but

(21:25):
it's described as a coming of age story with a
natural disaster feel to it. What can you tell us
about that?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
What to do with it?

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Well, there's an imaginary town called Freedom, California, And I
think there is a town called that, which I didn't
know at the time, but mine is imaginary, okay. And
in the imaginary one, the guy who sort of takes
over the town, he's very influential, powerful guy in the
town and becomes the mayor, decides to get rid of

(21:55):
the police department, rid of the fire department because he's
a sort of a libertarian and feels that we'll just
do all that stuff by some kind of contract and
it'll be it'll be all privatized in some way. But
he never makes that work, and and then suddenly that

(22:19):
there are a natural phenomenon arising from the extreme weather
that we've been having, and this giant tsunami hits the
town and it's crushed by the tsunami, and that.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Leaves it unable to really.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
Pick up the pieces because he's he's taken away.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
The mechanisms for doing that.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
You know, he's gotten rid of the emergency workers and
a lot of the health workers and the police department
that would keep order afterwards. So suddenly this isolated town
is capsule post apocalyptic situation. And uh, and our young
hero is was there visiting his dad and then this

(23:16):
and then the tsunami struck while he was there, and
he was plunged into the middle of all this chaos.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
And so it's a kind of.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
It's a kind of parable of what happens if you
if you don't have a community working to keep everybody
safe and and to have safety nets and have cooperation
within the community to put out fires and to and
to save people in emergency situations, and to deal with

(23:48):
bad guys who will take advantage of an emergency situation,
which is an important part of the story.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
And he has to face.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Off with these bad guys too Oka, and so there's
romance that's in the story. There's all kinds of things happening,
but that's the essence of it, and it's the dramatization
of the tsunami is a big part of the first
section of the book on it's pretty exciting stuff.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah, and it's interesting when you talk a little bit
about I guess, you know, lawlessess, lawless society, I guess
for lack of a better term, but you've got a
history of writing unique stories and conceptual ideas about characters
that are deposited in a type of into a type
of lawless society. I think you captured that with BioShock Rapture,

(24:37):
and then also with a novel that just kind of
blew me away that I read recently over the last
couple of years, is The Brigade from nineteen eighty one.
You were kind of ahead of the idea of defunding
the police in a way. You've got these interesting ideas
where characters are kind of thrust into this situation where
there are no rules.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
And in case of there were places in in Oregon
where I lived then that had kind of replaced the
police with vigilantism. Mm and uh they were an Oregon's
relationship to that also had attachments in the old days

(25:18):
in the nineteenth century to the ku Klex Klan.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
So a town with that kind of uh subculture going.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
On in the background decides that it's it's going to
defend itself with vigilantes and and that's the Brigade of
the Vigilantes.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
And it just happens that there's a psycho.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Killer in the town that there do not seem able
to catch. U. It's it all relates to that.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
But yeah, you know, it's uh it it is.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Like this this theme of civilization, civilization's vulnerbility, and things
being more fragile than we know they are.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
And I do return to that because I observe it.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah with uh yeah, with the brigade.
I think I read it maybe in twenty twenty or
twenty twenty one, when there was a lot of that
stuff in the in the news, you know towns. No.
I read the original Oh yeah, the original paper back.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Oh really, I realized it. I revised it's Oh.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
I didn't know. That's an interesting.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
I'm glad that you enjoyed the book anyway.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, it's it's a really good one. I didn't know
it was not an ebook I got in the old paperback.
Yeah that's cool. Yeah, I think I heard you. You
had mentioned when you were talking about that subject in
an interview. You said something like, you know, baseball isn't
fun without rules. You know, you don't want the batter
to rush at the picture with bat. Yeah. Oh, yeah,

(27:01):
that's it's interesting that you have a few stories like
that though. I find that that really interesting.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
And it's been I've been, you know, since I was
a young man.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
I've been right on the edge of some pretty chaotic scenes.
I mean I've seen anarchism on the streets, not just
in in drug scenes, but just places where mhm that
were kind of abandoned to the worst sort of people.
I was there, And then I've read about Somalia places
like that where you know, they had they they and

(27:35):
and whole sections of Haiti now and where there.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
It is just like a post apocalyptics situation. Uh.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
And it's like just on the other side, man, you know,
it's like the old Rolling Stones song, it's just a
shot away.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah. Yeah, it's so it's scary times. It really is.
You you know we're talking about the you know, the
Tsaunamian in the book we were to talk about that's
out now everything is broken. But you you have a
I guess, really a kind of a successful book, really Stormland,
which also deals with natural disasters, but they occur every

(28:18):
day right in that situation, that world that you created
with storm Land.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Yeah, it's probably my most successful book since Demons. It's
one book that was pretty successful into number printings and
BioShock Rapture.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
It's a best seller.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yes, Stormland is a near future science fiction story, and
it even also has some Western elements. If if you
read it, you'll find that the guy who's well, the
premise is that there's a part of America in the
future that has storms twenty four seven, three hundred and

(28:55):
sixty five days a year, and it's it's in the
I put it on the the southeast American coast centered
around uh, the Carolinas, and it's it's all storms, all hurricanes,
all the time, or hurricanes, and then it may be

(29:16):
slowed down to a lower level hurricane or other kinds
of extreme weather situations. But there's this regular beating drum
of hurricanes and and recent discoveries suggest that it's the
risk of that is happening because we are accelerating the

(29:38):
atmospheric rivers overhead and the and the and the ones
and the currents in the oceans like the El Ninum,
and we're accelerating them with the greenhouse effects is driving
them to go faster and straighter so that they carry

(29:59):
more energy, and this leads to a build up of
energy it has to be released, and in some places
it will be released in uh a sort of pockets
that that form on different shores often, and so that's
that's kind.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Of the premise blind it.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
And so there's almost no one living in that in
the town except some people. And why are they there?
That's part of the story. What are they doing? And
and there's things happening behind the scenes that kind of
dramatize some sick things certain people with too much power
and money are prone to perhaps doing in the future.

(30:39):
So I don't want to give away too much, but
there there are murders to be uh solved. It's a
kind of mystery in a science fiction setting with a
with a Western flavor, because the guy who is a
former US marshall and he kind of comes into the town,
not wanting to be there and ends up having to

(31:00):
be the town marshal.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Essentially to this.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
This this practically drowned, half destroyed city.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Has the Stormlin Stirmlin been optioned for film or a series?

Speaker 3 (31:14):
There there was has come really close several times, but no,
not yet.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Not yet. Well, one that you shared with me when
we were sitting at this interview was some news. I
don't know if we can talk about it or not,
but The Specialist has been optioned for TV series.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Well, yeah, I have written under the pen name John Cutter,
and uh that goes way back, and so uh, I
wrote like eleven John Cutter novels.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
There there are.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Action novels simply yep, and John Cutter recently in the
last few years wrote a few more with a different character.
But the Specialist is a guy who specializes in getting
revenge for people who can't do it themselves when it's
in a good cause. In the very first one, it's

(32:10):
someone who he's going after DM men, but not d
me in himself from history. Someone based on it like
it is a dictator who has been excruciatingly brutal to people.
So the Specialist is hired to take him down and
how the hell.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Does he do that? Well?

Speaker 3 (32:32):
That it's one of the things that's liable to be
explored in this new television series too. It has been
optioned and is being developed, and I'm being consulted on it.
I've been paid somewhat, so that means they're pretty serious
about it. Recently, I was told that they're looking for

(32:56):
a showrunner now for this thing, and it is it is.
It is more up to date than the Specialist novels
in a certain way. Is that one of his specialties
is the use of drones. That that that can be
kind of an extension of.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
You know, a man going against these.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Overwhelmingly powerful forces when he's only one man. So he
extends his abilities through drones used in a very comprehensive,
detailed in and advanced sort of way and uses a conventional.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Military style action.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Also, Oh interesting, it's a neat way to modernize that
with the with the drones. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, you you wrote the Specialist for Signet between eighty
four and eighty five, or going back a little ways.
I know it was adapted originally by by a company
that puts Sylvester Saloon in as the main character and
uh started sharing the stone as well. Didn't didn't really
take off, but it was it was uh, it was good.

(34:07):
But I liked I liked the specialists. I wanted to
ask you a specialist series. It kind of starts off
with a trilogy, uh, with a with a through story
through those first three books. Did you originally mean it
to just be a trilogy and then you were offered
the ability to write more of them or.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, that's kind of what happened. Okay they were doing okay.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
So yeah, I sense that that you almost had a completed,
uh trilogy after the third book, and then it kind
of just keeps going. So yeah, it's really cool. Let
me ask you something that's maybe a little bit controversial,
and you can you could just say pass if you want.
But I know, with some of the authors that have
talked to in the past, like Joe Lansdale for example,

(34:46):
as they got further into their career and they started writing,
you know, you different types of books, different types of fiction.
Not that they wanted to disown their back catalog, but
they were like kind of not an embarrassed, but they
just kind kind of like said, well, I just did
that for money. It wasn't it wasn't something that I
put all my effort into. I just wrote it for money.
Did you ever feel that way about writing The Specialist

(35:08):
or the Traveler? Well, respectfully, but you know.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
You do write for money something like that. They were
sort of really energetic but still essentially a pulp novel.
But that but what what one does, and what I did,
what I've always tried to do, is to make them

(35:34):
as good as I could in the time and within
the limitations I had, And so.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
I wanted them to be something I could be proud
of that.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
You know, you think about Elmore Leonard, you know, the
famous writer of so many things, you know, Get Shorty
many other things became that movie. And Elmore Leonard started
out writing westerns mostly and some pull detective.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
Novels, and.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Those, you know, they were still they were rapidly written,
but they still had something special about them.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Elmer Leonard, I mean, he's a really good writer.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
So even even those stay in print and are often
adapted as movies. So there there was more to them
that there might originally appear to be. And he went
out of his trouble to out of his way to
take the trouble to to find some kind of depth

(36:46):
for the characters in those books. And that's and he
was sort of my model, I guess, nice okay, what
I tried to do.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
It's similar in a way with with the eighties. You
had wrote the Traveler installments number two through six, and
then I think he wrote number eight, I think, but
you wrote these for Dell, But I was kind of
interested about the process that you use for that because
you had to share those with ed Neaha as well.

(37:17):
Only at first I think.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
He only wrote the first one, see okay, and then
he wrote like a little short outline this big for
the second one, and I kind of followed that, and
then I wrote everything.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Else on my own, okay. But yeah, that was.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Yeah, Yeah, he did fine and created this cool character,
and then I ran with it as under a different
pen name entirely.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
So yeah, I really liked that whole world, post apocalyptic world,
and the things that that main character was able to do.
It's a really interesting series, and it, you know, it
was interesting because it kind of falls in line with
all the nineteen eighties post apocalyptic series. There were so
many at the time, especially fueled by Mad Max and
Road Warrior. That's that The Traveler is one of the

(38:06):
better ones that were out there. So I really like that.
I wanted to ask you about some of the well,
I mean going back to the nineteen eighties for a second,
you know, kind of looking at what you did with
a Specialist and then also with Traveler. I don't want
to say you were a hard gun, but were you

(38:27):
ever approached to do a mac bolan book or a
Nick Carter book?

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Well?

Speaker 3 (38:32):
Those were my mac Bolan books, they were you know,
that's what the publisher was thinking. Yeah, and so my
agent said, would you like to write a book like along,
you know, along the lines of the mac bolan books,
but give it your own twists? And I tried to
make mine original to me as much as I could

(38:54):
make it a fairly original concept.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yes, were you ever did that ever come a aust
your radar that you would write for a mac Bolan
book or maybe a Nick Carter kill Master book or
any of those that.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
I would write When it could have happened, I suppose,
you know, because they did get up.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
There were more than one writer.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Right, Uh. Yeah, mac Bollan had probably twenty twenty five
different writers.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Oh my god, yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
There was a book every month.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
The same was like a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah, yeah, the same with Nick Carter kill Master. There
were just revolving doors.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
It could have happened if I was, you know, depending
where I was in my life that time, and which
wife I was trying to support, how much she wanted something. U, Okay,
I'll write another book this month.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
But that's great.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Tell me if I didn't do it, yeah, yeah, but
I would have considered it.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Yeah. I was surprised when I you know, I thumbed
through the the Nick Carter kill Master authors and and
the Mack Bolan authors and it's like a who's who
of of of the eighties, right, you know, action adventure writers.
But I never saw your name, and I was always curious.
I was like, why, I wonder why you never? You
never did that?

Speaker 3 (40:06):
But it didn't happen. But you know what, I was
always looking anyway too. I was still writing science fiction.
I had been writing science fiction all along, and I
wanted to jump into his stuff.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
I'm under my own.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Name, and and I had the opportunity to do it
with the Eclipse books. But uh, you know, you remember
the novel Gorky Park at all it became a movie
and really good, really good book.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Who was the author of that?

Speaker 3 (40:34):
He started out writing pulp novels, and it wouldn't surprise
me if he was one of the guys who wrote
something like that that was under some other name, under
some other character in print or something. So, but then
he became accepted as as pretty much a literary novel

(40:54):
at least on the level of of novelist, on the level.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Of Channeler or someone like that.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Right, and yeah, So the thing to remember is that
you can learn things from writing books like this, and
then you kind of and then you you get you
developed various skills, and then you want to refine them
and you want to add more to them. And you
don't necessarily use the same kind of stories. But something
you write, you learn from them, especially pacing, probably carried forward.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Whatever you choose to do later.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
So every so, even a guy like the author of
Gorky Park had still had one foot in the old
pulp scene.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
You have mentioned your love of Elmore Leonard and when
did you start writing westerns? How did the how did westerns?
How did you gravitate to westerns?

Speaker 3 (41:48):
I always loved westerns and it was just a part
of my My, my youth, you know, I was.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
I loved the escape into another world of Westerns.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
There was almost like science fiction is an escape to
another world, but so is Western You escaped to a
sort of romanticized Old West. And it could be some
of those were pretty dark stories, and some were more
realistic than others, like gun Smoke could be kind of
realistic about the travails of people at those days.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
It was, it was.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
It was almost almost a cinema verite in some scenes
and the way they made it.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
So. But also Western heroes appealed to me because.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Things were always endangered as I looked around, and here
was a guy who would come into town and and
and do and do the high noon thing and stand
up when no one else would and risk his life,
and it was it was exciting, but also there's something

(42:58):
touched me about it. I think also I related my
mind to the old Arthurian stories of of the uh
Right Knights of the Roundtable. To me, is a Western
hero of that kind, is is a knight of the
other of another sort. Yeah, and My and My, the

(43:21):
hero on my trilogy is one of those, although he
has you know, he's very humanized he has PTSD from
the Civil War. He was a Union officer and through
terrible things. He uh a very lonely man. At first
in the trilogy. He's an educated man, which although there

(43:44):
were quite a few educated people in the in the
wild West, he was they were not that common. So
and so all these things separated him and made him different,
and that and that kind of somehow resonated with the
Arthurian hero.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah. Uh, yeah, you're referring to your trilogy that's starting
Cleave a true true uh.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
A former major in the Union Army. He becomes a
uh he does some lawing here and there in Denver
and places like that, and gives that up and and
h wanders the West and then becomes a law man
in an imaginary town I made up called Axlebust. Yeah,
axle Bust, Axlebust, uh Nevada, and it's he he h yeah,

(44:43):
he's he's he's trying to find himself and he doesn't
really want to get involved in in being a law man,
but circumstances drive him to it. And there's a There
are some very unusual characters in that trilogy, unusual for
the Western milieu that you usually find it's It is

(45:07):
a classic Western in most ways.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
But there are some elements that are that are unusual.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Like you have a woman who is a suffragette who
becomes his sweetheart, and she's she's an intellectual of the
nineteenth century. These women were out there, they were real,
and she's an interest in the sciences, and how does
that come into the story. That's that's difference right there.
But I wanted to show that there were powerful women

(45:33):
who are not in the in the mold of Annie
Oakley or whatever, or or Calamity Jane.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
They they there were.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
There were women who were extraordinary and had to deal
with the.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
The patriarchal society they were living in and.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Still try and and and do and be themselves free thinkers.
You know, they were there, and why not bring that
into a Western two? Right, But there are plenty of
gunfights in the in this in these novels as well.
So it is a classic Western and one of them
one Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. That's

(46:16):
the award given by the Western Writers of America, one
for best Novel.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Oh that's that's great. Yeah, it's amazing, And you know,
correct me if I'm wrong. But writing westerns. Was is
this something you've recently done, like the last five six years? Right,
did you write westerns?

Speaker 3 (46:32):
I wrote one called Wyatt and Wichita about twelve years
ago and I was published by Sky Horrison. Got some
good reviews and it's going to be repolished by this company.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Also, Oh okay, it will be.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
Coming out soon.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
It's about Whyater in which tak and part of it's
true and part.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Of its fiction.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
I mean he meets Billy the Kid before Billy the
Kid was a known person, when he's just like an
adolescent really for example, and that's he's part of the
story because it happens that in real life Wider and
the young Henry McCarty who was later to become known
as Billy the Kid, we're in real life in Wichita.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
At the same time.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
Oh interesting, And yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
I'm a I'm a wild West I wouldn't go so
far as historian, but an amateur wild West historian. I
do lots of research and I've been members I've been
a member of the wild West Historicalist Association.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
So I try to.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Make my things feel very authentic as well as having
a strong driving story. And Wichita and then and then
the trilogy about Cleeve True.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
I'll follow that form well.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Talking about Westerns, how did you get involved with the
Ralph Compton books.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (47:54):
I when I decided I wanted to write, you know,
commercial westerns for the major publishers, I felt I had
to get some kind of practice and get my name
out there as being a you know, a writer who's
showing you can do this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
And so I asked my agent about it.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
She asked around, and they were doing these Ralph Compton books,
which is in the style of a best selling Western
writer named Ralph Compton, and so they.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Put across I wrote three of those, and they wrote it.

Speaker 3 (48:26):
They put across the front cover Ralph Compton down below
as written by John Shirley, and everything is. I wrote
the entire novel, using none of his characters, but I
tried to write away that his fans would like. And
they were actually very popular books. They're still in print. Yeah,

(48:47):
they were the They were minor best sellers in that field,
and so then I was able to jump from there
into doing completely my own thing under my own name.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
What I like about that publisher, and I guess literary estate,
is the fact that they do put your name on
the cover, unlike the the William Johnstone Empire that hides
the real author and you never know who actually wrote
the book, and they have it's like a covert deal
there where they hide the author. So I really like
that they have your name on the cover.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
Some of these publishing deals where they have you know,
it'll say it'll say, uh, Tom Clancy, and then it
says as written by some guy, and it's and then
you read it, it's nothing really like Tom Clancy.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
They just it's just all about selling the name. I mean,
it's sort of.

Speaker 3 (49:39):
Like him, but not really very much, or especially the
ones supposedly like Robert B.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Parker.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
There's another guy I'm a fan of, the guy who
did the Spencer novels which became adapted and and he's
written a lot of stuff that was adapted. He and
he wrote some Westerns too, and so I tried reading
some books that were like, you know, it said Robert

(50:05):
Parker's Spencer character or whatever, nothing like him, nothing like
Robert It really it kind of annoys me when they
do that, and the people and the writers do not
make an effort to really write like the person that
they're representing it and and try and if you're going
to write about a specific existing character, try and make

(50:27):
it like his work.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
You know, yeah, get a get a feeling for that.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah. I just read your Batman novel, uh, Batman Dead White,
and I really liked it. It showed a different kind
of Batman to me. And I really like the the
men's action adventure formula that you have for Batman. I
thought it was amazing. I wanted to ask, though, did

(50:56):
that novel did you have maybe an out line or
an idea on that novel that didn't feature Batman, maybe
some other hero?

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (51:05):
Why did read like it?

Speaker 1 (51:07):
It was kind of like it was sort of in
the vein of like a specialist or Mac mac bollan
type of adventure, you know, Batman fight fights white supremacist
in rural upstate New York. But it's I just brought
my own thing to it, okay.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
Although although I may have used ideas from from uh
some particular novels somewhere in it, okay, and that I
if it was a novel I didn't complete or something,
but I didn't like take pages from it, right, I
may have used I may have used some plot elements
from some other book that so you might have seen

(51:43):
something there from that.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
Well, Batman Dead White, Yeah, it's about a guy. Uh.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
The bad guy is a white supremacist and he's on
some super steroids so that he almost seems like a
super villain.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
And I want, you know, I wanted to write a
novel that was sympathetic to people who are struggling with
the fact that racism still exerts its influence in our society.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
You know.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
I feel that that Batman would be against it. I
feel like he would have he would he would be
to me that it's not a case of it being
liberal or something. It's a case of being adhering to justice,
justice for people that doesn't have to be liberal. It's
not conservative, it's just it's just the rightness of it.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:40):
And I felt that Batman should take them on at
some point, and he did in my in Batman, Dead White.
And he also befriended a young man who was being
endangered by these people, and this young man was gay.

(53:00):
I just made it like like, here's.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
A gay young man in a Batman novel.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Uh, and and treated you know, decently, like he's a
like just another human being who needs your help.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
And and Bruce Wayne Batman accepted him.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
And just for what he is, and he was he
wasn't gonna, you know, come at him like you're gonna
have to go to the uh the special camp to
to get rid of your gayness or something. Kid, you know,
he just like whatever. He's just another citizen that is
in danger. And but something about the kid's dilemma in

(53:39):
in our modern society and came up in the story.
And so I get into all this a little bit
because there was some pushback on Amazon from some people
writing in and it turned out that the that the
right wingers from the Deep South were angry about the novel,

(54:00):
and they said it was propaganda trying to try and
to say that, you know, there's something wrong with standing
up for our race, and and why is Batman against
our race?

Speaker 2 (54:10):
And Batman's white himself? Dude, what you're talking about? Uh,
but you know he's.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
And also this guy, this character is gay, so obviously
John Shirley must be gay. And and no, I've got
I've been married five times.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Uh and and uh, they were just going after me.
And in the novel they kind of had a little
cable of people doing it, and and they were, and
then other people rose up to defend it.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
But it just, uh, you just you have to you have.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
To think, if you're writing about socially uh powerful themes,
you you're kind of like you're taking risks. There are
people out there who will to it, some will object
to it in person, and perhaps so there those are
risks and and it takes some guts.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
To do it.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
The only uh, the only negative things that I I
remember reading about, uh about that book was the fact
that some Batman enthusiasts found that it was kind of
odd that Batman condoned some of the violence that were,
you know, some of the bad guys were being killed
and Batman was condoning. But I didn't really see it
that way.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
He didn't kill anybody that I can recall.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
No, he didn't, But they were like, well, Batman wouldn't
allow those people to kill the bad guys. I'm thinking,
I think there in some comics he has he's not
doing it.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
And in and in the movies, I think it's come
up with time or two, yeah, or he you know,
you just get a sense that that bad guys will
sometimes kill bad guys and so on.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
But yeah, what what I liked about that book also
was the fact that we were deep in Gotham, but
then you took us out of Gotham to this rural
area of New York. But you also took us to
I think San Diego or San Francisco, I can't remember which,
when we follow the the former Gotham homicide detective or

(56:15):
police officer who's looking for his son. So it was
interesting to have Batman but not in Gotham. I thought
that was really cool.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
That's another thing. Yeah, I wanted to I wanted to
have fun with that.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Yes, and you really did. And it's a really fun book.
I encourage people to read it. I wanted to ask you,
and you can stop me at any time, because I
know I can sit here and talk all night. So
he told me to shut up whenever you want. You
want to get out of here. My friend Frank Hill,
he's a big Constantine fan, and he texted me a

(56:46):
couple of questions for you. Go ahead, So Frank asked,
or he says, you wrote hell Blazer novels, Warlord and Subterranean,
and you also wrote the the Constantine movie adaptation In
two thousand and five. Were you already familiar with the
John Constantine character from the comics, Yes, and I.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
And I had kind of a preference for that character,
the interpretation of the comics of John Constantine over the
movies interpretation. M It wasn't even British in the movie,
but you know, it was an enjoyable movie. And I

(57:29):
and I got the script. They and they this is
how they do these things. They literally send you the
script and they ask you to adapt it. But they
know that you're going to have to fill out things
in the writing of the novel that are not in
the script, otherwise you would have a really short novel, right, And.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
They're pretty legnient about that. So I put in all the.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
Things that I felt were kind of should have been
in the movie. So to me, it was to me
it was sort of a correction of the movie. I
tried to make give it more continuity.

Speaker 2 (58:06):
And and.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
Internal logic than I felt the movie had, and give
it a little more backstory to justify things happening in
the movie.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
With your with your original books, did did DC Comics
give you like some leeway on what you can do
with those books? Did you ever follow like a certain Timeline.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
No.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
No, they just wanted a novel about Constantine, and it
should resemble the one in there. He should resemble the
John constantinau of the comics, and that's what I gave him. Yeah,
but you know, I made things up as I went
along and freely extemporized. But I didn't change his history

(58:52):
or anything. And I tried to bring his character alive
as I understood it from the comics. And I really
enjoyed writing always because you can have such fun with
that character and with a and with the wild places
you can take.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Him, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
With the Helblazer comics, I know they've had a lot
of writers over the years. Is there any particular writer
that you felt that Helpblazer better than the others?

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (59:18):
You know, I can't remember the names of them, I'm afraid,
but I think the guy who originated it was the best.
And and and Frank would know who that is.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Yeah. The last one he asked, did you fill any
affinity with the John Constantine character having also had a
punk band in your younger years.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
Yes, I do feel some affinity and and and I
even wore trench coats in my band, and not John Constantine.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
I was in a lot of bands.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
Actually, I I it was an avocation and I made records, but.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
I finally gave it up last year.

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
I was playing it at major clubs in Portland about
five six years ago, and I opened for the Blue
Oyster Cold at the Roseland Theater. And at this point
it it evolved from punk rock into just a sort
of distinctive hard rock. And I'm a big fan of
the Blue Yster Cold, so I was really thrilled to

(01:00:29):
be asked to open for them. But then that band
dissolved because you know, they had the players felt they
weren't making enough money, and so they went and joined
the bar bands who were playing covers of Van Halen.
And I also kind of am you know, I'm probably
too old to to really reach out to the actual

(01:00:56):
current young rock and roll fans terribly well so, but
I I you know, I always loved being in bands
and I always identified with it, and yeah, I felt
that that's something me and John Constantine.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
Have in common. I love it. I do want to
talk to you about Bluish Deicult because it's one of
my favorite bands, but I wanted to ask you some
other quick things about writing. How hard is it to
write novels and ject stories into existing canon? Because I
know you've done that with Predator and Borderlands and BioShock.

(01:01:33):
How hard is it to to still have your identity,
still have your own creativity, but also in a way
still have to be a yes man to intellectual progressy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Yeah, well I kind of got used to that when
I was writing for television.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
You know, I wrote for Deep Space nine for a while,
I wrote, well, I wrote co wrote the movie The Crow.
But even there in The Crow, there was a lot
of working with producers and uh, and I was adapting
a comic book to James so Bars Great the Crow
comic series, So there was something you had to get

(01:02:10):
used to. In in Hollywood.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I wrote.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Poltergeist, the Legacy episodes and so on, and there was
there's always some there's always canon to think about. And
also you just have to filter yourself through so many
people that have their own interpretations and ideas and you
just have to live with that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
And and it's so you one makes it a kind
of game.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
Or a little bit of an exercise in in in
fun and trying to get your own ideas into the thing. Uh,
and and get the opportunity to bring out new ideas,
like when I recently wrote, uh, some of the the
a Halo novel.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
For example, based on.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
The the Halo video game. That well, it wasn't that reason.
I guess it was like six seven years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
But it's.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
That that really has a solid can and they're really
very hands on about it. So I had to find
ways to bring ideas, my own ideas into it. And
and I put it and I managed to get it
put in a settings where they were not that familiar
to the settings of Halo. Still all in the Halo universe,

(01:03:38):
but it contradicted none of the Halo universe, but and
it used the aliens from that universe, but some of
the settings were very distinct. So that way I could
bring in my own ideas, science fiction ideas about what
can happen there.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Yeah, have you find it?

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
I find ways.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Have you ever had a situation where you just had
to walk away from a project because you're just butting heads?

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
Oh? You know, I like to be professional, and when
you're doing something like that, butting heads, it's just, uh,
it's you know, something you have to accept.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
But I think yeah, there was at least one there
was at.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
Least one some video game where I just thought, oh,
this is just getting too stupid, and they hadn't signed
me yet, and so I didn't go through with it.
But if once I've signed a contract, I want to
be professional, and I've signed, I've promised to do something
in a contract, and by god, I'm going to find
a way to do it in accordance with with my

(01:04:47):
self respect. So I do I. You know, I some
and some have more lenience than others. BioShock was was
rough to do, uh, because they halfway through writing the book,
they released the second BioShock game and they said, suddenly,

(01:05:07):
we want you to incorporate this stuff in this game
into the novel, which and so that's a whole different thing.
I had to kind of almost start over again. I
could have said no, then I would have butted heads
with them and they would have got another writer and
put in, you know, maybe put them up beside what

(01:05:27):
I'd already written. But no, I just I just adapted,
and I grumbled a lot as I adapted, but when
I eventually it came out, well, I was really happy,
and in fact that people really liked that novel.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
BioShock Rapture I get fan mail from that all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
Yeah, I found ways to bring my own ideas into it,
and also especially ways to develop characters, because in a
video game you can't develop them all that much.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
They do some.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
You worked on. He worked on the Spawn animated show,
and I've heard people say that that could be difficult
because Todd McFarlane is such a parachute parent when it
comes to his property. With the Spawn character.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
He's right there and he I, Yeah, I got credits
for some of those, and I gave him ideas, but
he felt that I was coming up with too many
ideas at one point. That's the impression I got, Todd.
If you're listening, it's just the impression I got. Yeah,
I'm not throwing shade. But I felt that he seemed

(01:06:39):
a little like, no, this guy's gonna take it in
his own direction too much. I don't want I want
to keep this my own baby much more than that.
And you know what, it is his own baby. Yeah,
and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate that, and
so it didn't bother me when Okay, that's enough for
surely after a few episodes, I wasn't really part of
the staff away.

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
Okay, I just I was.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
A pre lancer involved in development of this of this.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
I was listening to an interview here recently. I can't
remember who it was. Who you were talking to was
a few years ago. But it was interesting to hear
you talk about the corporate job that you had there
for a short period of time where you reported to
an actual cubicle at a video game company and you
had a cubicle and you were a consultant there, and
you just had like a nine to five job. And

(01:07:27):
I was like, that's really interesting to hear you say that.
How was that working in the corporate world.

Speaker 3 (01:07:33):
Well, it wasn't exactly how it sounds, because I was
a consultant. But I was a consultant they wanted on
the property and I lived near by, you know, as happened,
it was in this Bay area. And so also I
was interested in getting into that field a.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
Little more and having more avenues for work in that field.

Speaker 3 (01:07:57):
So I sprang for it, and they gave me a
set fee for a certain amount of time as a
consultant on a new version of the Borderlands video game stories. Okay,
And and the people who I probably shouldn't talk about it,
but there were some people who seemed a bit like,

(01:08:20):
is this guy going to come and take our jobs?
And I didn't get that much cooperation, but I had,
you know, really interesting experience. And I wrote something every
day and gave it to them every day and they
and they worked with it or not, you know, they

(01:08:41):
they probably took some things from it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
I don't know how deeply they used it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
I didn't check, but it was and it was very corporate,
and it was I had not had that kind of
experience before of being actually there and having these mid
level corporate persons like coming and looking over your shoulder
and and and security people even wondering who this guy was.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Right, yeah, okay, but.

Speaker 3 (01:09:10):
It was It was not It was not a you know,
too hard for me, because I'm not being contracted as
a as an actual employee per se rather than a subtractor.
I didn't have all this distresses that the other employees
would naturally have.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
Yeah, well, yes, switch gears to uh to blueister cult.
I do want to ask you a little bit about that.
And I'm a little bit jealous because you you are
a blueish or cult fan and contributor, but you were
a fan like from the get go, like very first album, right, well, yeah,
I was.

Speaker 3 (01:09:51):
I was a youngster then, but I just happened to
catch them at Central Park and one of their first
large shows.

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
It was an outdoor a show where part.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Of a free rock show put on by the City
h and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
I don't even remember who else played, but they.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
I was really struck by them. I was struck by
the intelligence of the music. Is the intelligent man's hard
rock band.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (01:10:26):
Also the guitar player Buck Dharma is real name, Donald
Rosser was striking from the get go. So I was
caught up and I immediately got their albums when they
became available, and you could get you could get the
lyrics and the early use of computer printouts and they

(01:10:51):
would send them to you in a big envelope computer printouts.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
I had. They were in like a role and you
and I would I would unroll that and listen to
the albums and read the lyrics. Oh god, is that
what he's saying.

Speaker 3 (01:11:06):
That is bizarre And it was really imaginative bizarre stuff
and yeah, and sometimes very.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Touching, you know, Last Days of May and so on.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Oh Yeah, yeah, that's a yeah, that's certainly a sad one. Uh, yes,
when you saw them, when you first saw them in
h in Central Park where they soft white underbelly at
the time, or they okay, I got you as Yeah,

(01:11:40):
how did you? How did you become involved with them?
And for listeners there that maybe aren't familiar with Bluish
or cult h John is he wrote lyrics for their
Heaven Forbid album Curse of the Hidden Mirror. You've wrote
lyrics for their Bad Channels album and then also the
Symbol Remains. I think he wrote maybe half of that,

(01:12:00):
or at least four or five songs. How did you
get involved with.

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):
Well, my first novel was called Transminiacon, which is a
song from the Blue Book, their first album, and so
they knew of me.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
And I was a fan of Patti Smith too.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
I'm really pretty influenced by her, and I dedicated that
book to her and the Blue Extracle.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
But also.

Speaker 3 (01:12:31):
There's a kind of Patty Smith character in my science
fiction novel City Come and Walk Them. A very influential book,
I will dare to say.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
William Gibson, author of New Romance, who.

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):
Wrote forward to the book for its later printings and
talked about how influential it was and on the cyberpunk scene,
and this book.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
Caught Patty Smith's attention and mhm.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
Then her guitar player I read her, and so there
I was kind of like an off screen name that
they knew. And then I had a mutual friend connected
to the Mondo two thousand scene, which was sort of
the well, if you don't know what that is hard

(01:13:30):
to describe, but it's it was very cyberpunk early use
of of like using computer uh technology to to think
about transhumanism and using it to meditate with and so on.

(01:13:50):
And we were also all about sexual freedom and all
kinds of border borderline edgy things going on the forefront
of wild stuff in those days in technology. And they
were also friends for the Blue ystercle because several of

(01:14:11):
their members of the Mondo two thousand.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
Team, there was a magazine called them, were friends with them, and.

Speaker 3 (01:14:20):
So they heard that they were looking for a lyricist
and and one of the one of the Mondo two
thousand people said, well, how about John Shirley, And they said, oh, he's.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
That guy that wrote the novel, and.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
So yeah, tell him, Can you tell him for us
and put him in touch with this here, And I
sent him a big pile of lyrics, having already been
writing lyrics for my own stuff, but I wrote new stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
For them, sent it to them.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
I didn't hear from them for two years, and then
suddenly and I thought they'd passed and everything, and theuddenly
this Heaven Forbid album was about to come out, and
they said, they wrote to me and said, so.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
What do you want to do about this?

Speaker 3 (01:15:11):
Got to join ask cap or b M I and
because you we're using a whole bunch of your lyrics
in this album. And I was like, oh my god,
you could have told me about.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
Two years ago, dude, but.

Speaker 3 (01:15:25):
They just sprang it on me and and I was
very happy. It's just thrill to hear, you know, the
guy who who sang Don't Fear the Reaper and Burning
for you these hit songs, and to hear him sing
words that I wrote. I was.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
Really moved by that. And and I was like their
slave forever after that. Yeah, there, and the symbol remains.

Speaker 3 (01:15:55):
Let me just say it's their first new studio album
in eighteen years. When it came out a few years ago,
MM and I got great reviews, selling well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
Still.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
I wrote five of the songs but in the early
albums I did for them, I wrote most of the
most of the lyrics for.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
Most of the songs.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
Yeah. One of my favorite bluish ocult songs, and I
think a lot of people share the same opinion is
Live for Me, which has a great, great melody from
Bacha's guitarist. It's just amazing and it's got a reaper
kind of feel to it in the in the vocal texture.
And you wrote that song, yes for me? Yeah, what

(01:16:39):
was some of the influences on that song? Obviously it's
it's a little bit of a darker song, but kind
of brings a little bit of a hope as well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Well. I think I swiped the line and lived for
Me from a movie.

Speaker 3 (01:16:49):
I don't recall which one, but somebody was dying and
they said to somebody else, lived for me.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
And I was really struck by that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:56):
I thought, well, that's a great sentiment from a dying person.

Speaker 2 (01:17:02):
That inspired me to write these lyrics.

Speaker 3 (01:17:06):
And it's about it this this guy loses his brother
to a you know, a drug. It's it's his brother's car,
and his brother lived for a little while afterward, and
then as he was dying, he said that too, his
surviving brother, and it's from the surviving brother's viewpoint, and

(01:17:26):
you get a sense that that that the that the
ghost of the brother who's past is in the background,
you know, enjoying the fact that this his brother is
living life for him in a sense, and and and
kind of cheering him on.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
But it's also very melancholy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
Yeah. Uh, it should have been. It should have been
the single in my opinion of that album, but it
never got released.

Speaker 3 (01:17:54):
Well, I don't know that it was released as a single.
There was a single release from it. Yeah, I'd like
to see you. I think it was. I think it was.
Wasn't that Harvest Moon, which is a very good song.
But you know that Donald wrote himself.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
Yeah, I've always been curious about that song and what
influence did he I think he's he told uh Canadian
music journalist Martin Popoff wrote a couple of Bluister Coult books.
But I think he told him it was based on
like old Stephen King writings.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
But but yeah, it's quite possible.

Speaker 3 (01:18:30):
He he you know, it does read or does Donald
and Donald browser.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
And and.

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
Uh, he's always he's always loved the eerie Yeah, and
his guitar playing can sound quite eerie sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
Yeah, Bleister Cold is a very moody band, and you
can you can just kind of fall into those those
lyrics and those melodies, and they're hypnotic and they're dark
and they're enchanting. So yeah, it's really interesting. Do you
have any do you have any insight on on those
two albums? Haven't Forbid and Curse the Hidden Mirror have

(01:19:09):
no digital rights. You can't stream them. The only two
albums that I know of the catalog you can't stream.
What's going on with that? They were released by CMC International,
and a lot of the albums that came out on
that label in the nineties are no digital rights at.

Speaker 3 (01:19:25):
All, well stream in much sense. I mean they're on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Well, you can't listen to them on Spotify, you can't
listen to them on Amazon Music or Title or anything
like that. So yeah, you're you're basically you're not making
any money as a songwriter because it's not being able
to be streamed anywhere. Yeah, just like I do.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
Get there's a little bit that comes through YouTube.

Speaker 3 (01:19:48):
You'd be surprised because I'm a member of Aska, but
not making as much because of that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
I think it has to do with some deal they
made at some.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
Point with the rights to those although I will ask
Eric and see if he wants to tell me.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
Yeah, I'm dying to know. And a lot of Lewista
cult fans the same way. They're like, why why can't
we stream these albums on Spotify? I mean, that's what
most of America listens to these days, is Spotify or
Amazon Music, and the percentage of that music the royalties
go back to the band or the or the record label.
But in this case, those two albums you can't stream
at all.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
Well, I'm very sure you can do.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
You can do.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
The symbol remains on there there.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
Yeah, those two of the nineties albums are.

Speaker 3 (01:20:35):
Probably has something to do with the deal they had
with the original distributor, Yea, restricting it to him.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
I think they may have. They may be changing that
now because I know that that.

Speaker 3 (01:20:50):
I think that the the Frontier.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
Music that did.

Speaker 3 (01:20:59):
The Remains is releasing at least one of those albums again,
I believe, So maybe that's loosened up some.

Speaker 2 (01:21:07):
But I'm gonna I'm gonna ask Eric or Donald about it.
I get a chance.

Speaker 1 (01:21:11):
Yeah, that would be great. I'd love to know.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
Them not long ago at on a tour. They're slowing
down a lot, and I'm not sure if they're gonna
do tours again for a long time. But there after
this one, Yeah, they're on a long one now.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Last I knew they were in Europe.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
I've yet to yet to see them live. I've I've
always missed them when they come here to Florida, and
just weird timing, it's never been able to.

Speaker 3 (01:21:38):
There are some good videos of them live, some are
not not so good, some are good, so you can
listen to if you listen to on your feet or
on your knees. You know that album, Yeah, that album
is captured their live presence during that great period when
they were really rising, and they were and people were

(01:21:58):
going crazy for them as a hard rock band. And
that album, in my opinion, also basically created Mega Death
and Metallica the the kind of convergence of guitars sound
that they did in uh in the in that album

(01:22:20):
was copied by bands after that, a lot of bands,
but especially Mega Death and Metallica and Metallica, you know
those guys are fans of BOC. They did a cover
of the song Astronomy. Yeah, it's very good.

Speaker 1 (01:22:32):
Yeah, that's a I'll say that's probably paid off books
mortgage a couple of times with the money off that
off that album. Uh, yes, some thing for that. Yeah,
is uh you know, is there anything you want to
to talk about, anything you want to tell people, all
your fans, readers, anything in particular.

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
Well, there is.

Speaker 3 (01:22:53):
A book by me that might interest science fiction people
and also in just people interested in thrillers. It is
techno thriller, but it's set in the near future, and
it's called Suborbital seven. And it is also in development.
But I can't say anymore than that. I'm not allowed
to yet. Uh, we'll see if it gets made. And

(01:23:18):
Suborbital seven is the it's basically about new technologies that
enable us to get in and out of orbit faster,
and then also those used in a military context in orbit.
So there's there are battles between the Russians and the

(01:23:38):
Americans in orbit in this very particular way.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
And it's it's pretty Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:23:46):
I think it will be it will be found to
be prescient at some point.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
Did you get me the uh? When you I've read
about that book. I haven't read it, but I thought
the synopsis was really interesting it. It's kind of reminded
me a little bit of when we saw the guy
I don't know, maybe ten fifteen years ago that did
the spacewalk where he was way up in orbit and
he fell parachuted down to Earth, and I thought, wow,

(01:24:12):
that's taking it to a whole different extreme like that. Yeah,
it kind of reminded me a little bit of that.
So I was like, man, that's so awesome to see
that in a military standpoint. It's really cool. But I
need to read it. I need to say I need
to say it. I can't say the title very well.
Orbital seven sub orbital seven, which is the.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
Name of a specific spacecraft.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
Okay, yeah, Unfortunately the title makes the book sound like
it's like number seven.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Of a series, but it's not.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
It's just it's a standalone book, Suborbital seven.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
You're a Bram Stoker of award winning novel Black Butterflies.

Speaker 2 (01:24:48):
That story collection?

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
Story collection? Is that still in print?

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):
Yeah, it's in print.

Speaker 3 (01:24:54):
It's not the same publisher, but yeah, it's in print.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
You can get that. You can get that online.

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):
Uh, you can get it as a print on demand
or uh E book.

Speaker 2 (01:25:08):
Uh, I forget which publisher has I think Nightshade has it,
as I recall, and it's.

Speaker 1 (01:25:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:17):
And also I'm doing a new collection. Well see, I've
had eleven story collections, and my most recent one do
I have it here?

Speaker 2 (01:25:26):
The most recent one is uh called The Feverish Stars,
and uh it is.

Speaker 3 (01:25:39):
Uh, it's it's like it's got a forward by Richard
Christian Mathieson and who is the son of Richard Methis
and RC Mathieson is like also a television writer and
a and a horror writer in his own rights, and
and well what a.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
What an introduction he gave it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:00):
And there are stories in that that people are talking
about optioning.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
In uh the Feverish Stars. So anyway, that's my most
recent one. And I am coming up with a.

Speaker 3 (01:26:17):
Best Story Short Stories of John Shirley collection, and I'm
going to be using a lot of those are going
to be from Black Butterflies.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Okay, uh, but there'll be there'll be a.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
Pile of others and and it's and it's torturing me
to put together this collection.

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
I don't know who will publish it, but I'll find somebody.

Speaker 1 (01:26:38):
You know, back in the day, you know, I kind
of missed back in the day when we had you know,
Alph Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and we had Mike Shane Mystery Magazine.
And also back when you had magazines like Playboy and
Cavalcade that you could breathe, you know, original stories in.
But it's the short story market seems to have kind

(01:26:58):
of died out in terms of writing new stories because
they's no.

Speaker 2 (01:27:00):
Hard to find a market.

Speaker 3 (01:27:02):
We have a visitor here, this is Patchie, and he
thinks he's a tiny little lap dog.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
Hey, but he's not a tiny little lap dog. He's
a big lug. Yeah, I I.

Speaker 3 (01:27:17):
And like there's a problem now with the the premiere
science fiction magazines Asimov's Analog and Fantasy and science Fiction. Uh,
they were they were all bought by this company that
was going to take them all three over. And there

(01:27:38):
had been publication problems with fantasy and science fiction and
this is supposed to straighten it all out. And and
now it's one one more once more, everything is unknown.
We're not sure where they're going with it, and they're
they're laid on the latest issues of things. And so
then this is these were the three main science fiction
short story publications, and you know, standards and there's not

(01:28:04):
really anything to replace them.

Speaker 2 (01:28:07):
Playboy is not there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:09):
That was a place you could write science fiction and
Ray Bradbury and people like that used to write for it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
And uh yeah, I don't know where that would be.

Speaker 3 (01:28:21):
There's not a magazine exactly for that I know of
for westerns Western short stories.

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
There used to be in the old days.

Speaker 3 (01:28:30):
Yeah, so it's yeah, it's it's The whole publishing industry
is in an uproar anyway, because of the takeover of
things like you know, ebooks getting a bigger and bigger profile. Uh,
the issues of how to distribute an age of AI,
God help us.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
And so who knows where that's going to go there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:55):
There are also fewer places to submit fiction for or
short fiction for horror.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
There used to be horror magazines and I can't find
any now.

Speaker 3 (01:29:06):
Well, there are some, but they're very rather obscure, I mean,
really professional ones. Surelybure ones are cool, but but the
you know, truly professional ones. There used to be Twilight
Zone magazine, for example, at one time, and there isn't now.
So uh yeah, short story writers are having a hard

(01:29:26):
time unless they're unless they're writing maybe romance. There's probably
some romance place there. Romance never seems to falter.

Speaker 1 (01:29:39):
Typically romance, you know, yeah, great, Well, well, don't go anywhere.
I'm gonna sign us off here. But I'm gonna right
from the video. But I'm gonna sign us off now
and then i'll come back to you in just a
second because I don't I don't want you to lose
our recording, so I'll sign us off. But all right, John,

(01:29:59):
we'll think. Thanks so much for spending some time with me.
Your new book is out right now, the Silver Revolver.
It's out on Rough Edges Press. I encourage everyone to
check it out. You can get it in an ebook, you
can get it in physical copies. It's probably my book
of the year. It's it's fantastic. I think you will
love it. But John, thanks so much for having uh
taking the time to talk with me, and I wish
you the very best.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.

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