This Blog. Writing and Publishing.

I am starting this blog to connect with others who might find what I write to be of interest when it comes to their writing and publishing and to write about experiences my wife and I have living in this or that country. We're now in Amman, Jordan, where I am a Fellow in the U.S. State Department's English Language Fellow Program, assigned to the Jordan Media Institute, which is a master's degree program for journalists.

More on living in Amman and other countries on other posts.

Patricia and James

First, about writing. My first novel, The Opium Addict, is out now for preorder on Amason. The novel will be released on June 19, 2023. I just finished correcting the proofs, which was a very tedious process but necessary. Before that, my editor, Tasha Shiedel (The Undead Reader), copy-edited the MS, which took more than a month, mostly because I kept making changes. I wrote The Opium Addict back in 2018, put it away, then revised it during the pandemic, when I was in Zimbabwe and South Africa. I had been a Fellow at African University in Zimbabwe when the pandemic came along, shutting down the university.

It's because Steve Carr, who has, regrettably, since passed away, published a story of mine, “Ladyboy,” which takes place during the Vietnam War but has little to do with war—more to do with loneliness—accepted that story and had confidence in me that The Opium Addict found a home. He had a collection of stories out on Hear Our Voice. I sent Stacy, the publisher at Hear Our Voice, a synopsis of The Opium Addict, and she sent me a contract. That simple. So it is important to get short stories and essays published in order to have some writing credits and make contacts. This has happened more than once. I have had editors ask me for work, and that's not going to happen if a person doesn't publish, mostly online these days.

The pandemic gave me the opportunity to do what I had always wanted to do: write. And so I did. I had written many short stories, and quite a lot of nonfiction, which was posted on now-defunct websites, mostly. I was living in Japan then, writing about Japanese and Asian culture.

The Opium Addict is an intentional commercial novel, but with, I believe, literary style in the tradition of Capote, who wrote in the preface to Handcaved Coffins that most writers—and he included himself in this—overwrite. That was a very profound statement that changed me, and so I tried to develop a stripped-down but compelling writing style. I believe I have achieved this.

During the pandemic, I sent out a story of mine that I had written maybe twenty years ago, “Manta Rays, a Massage Lady, and Love,” to The Bombay Review. To my delight, it was accepted. It had been rejected a few times before this, but I had confidence in the story, so I persisted. A poet who published in The New Yorker had a poem in the same issue, something that is meaningful to me, to be in the company of others who have prestigious writing credits, because, well, there are now so many online literary magazines out there that just having one's work on one may not mean much.

To get publicity for The Opium Addict, I sent the first chapter to a few magazines, and Nancy Kay Clark, the editor of CommuterLit, liked it. I always had confidence in the book, but less confidence in the publishing world. There is writing and there is publishing. If the two were represented by a Venn diagram, the only intersecting point would be that the writer has to have something to submit. Before coming to Amman, I finished the first draft of a second novel, A Prayer for My Daughter, a modern-day detective/love story, set in Tokyo. Most of my work takes place in Asia, some in Zimbabwe. This novel is more to my liking. The characters have depth to them. The narrator, a Tokyo detective nearing retirement, is reflective of the circumstances of his life and marriage.

My stories are plot-driven, which isn't to say character isn't important. Of course it is. But plot and character are intertwined. One doesn't exist independently of the other. It's because of character that a certain decision is made when there is a conflict, and it is because of that decision that there are consequences. One person would make a decision that is entirely different from another. Macbeth makes a decision to be king because of who he is, and that drives the plot and his downfall.

I tend to be a traditionalist, though I look forward to writing fiction that has a shuffling of time, in the tradition of Faulkner. These strung-out family sagas are not for me. A sentence, “A year later,” is where I stop reading. What happened in the meantime? Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, though the prose is sometimes impenetrable, has a lot of plot. Time is compressed, though; otherwise, the novel would be one thousand pages.

Other influences are Jane Eyre, some Dickens, Stephen Crane, Fitzgerald (Gatsby), stories by Hemingway (he can be a parody of himself later on), Joyce “The Dead,” Capote, as I said, Chekhov's “The Lady and the Dog,” and, as far as modern writers go, the only one that comes to mind is Andre Dubus, who wrote short stories, often in a Faulknerian style, and one short novel. I don't much care for Raymond Carver's work, because I'm not interested in down-and-out losers who don't reflect on the mess they have brought on themselves. There is a prevailing idea in American literature, it seems to me, that the only interesting characters to write about are drunks and drug addicts, and while The Opium Addict clearly has that motif, it doesn't dominate. As Henry James said, there should be a moral consciousness in the work, someone who understands what the hell is happening, or at least thinks they understand.

Unreliable narrators? All narrators are unreliable. They all have an agenda.

I am more influenced by movies than fiction, when it comes to plot, particularly classic noir. Youtube has many noir movies on it, including D.O.A., “No Time for Tears,” and two favorite James Mason movies of mine, Reckless Moment, which can be a bit dated in places but has a good plot, and “One Way Street,” in which he plays the cynical personal doctor of a mobster, runs off with his money and woman, and comes to an end because of love. Other good noir movies that are plotted well are “Out of the Past,” “Nightmare Alley,” though the happy ending ruins it, and “Chinatown,” one of my favorites. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Can't go wrong there. “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” are also impressive, so inventive and contrary to convention. A writer needs to know what the conventions of the story are and alter

them. I strive to do that.

A recent article in The Hershey Press describes the sorry state of publishing in the U.S. today. It's not the story, but who you are, and is the story culturally acceptable. 

Have an interest in me, my writing, my expatriate life? Go to my website, www.jamesroth.org . I also have an author's page on Amazon. This is the part of writing that I suppose is necessary but which takes up the time that I would like to put into writing, either nonfiction or fiction. Writing and publishing. Two different worlds. Contact information is on my website.