Interview with Paul Clayton, author of Strange Worlds.

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Paul Clayton, author of Strange Worlds, and many more.

You have written both nonfiction and lit-fic novels. What led you to speculative fiction?

Before I was a writer, I was a reader. My high school gave us a reading list for the summer vacations. A lot of students were not happy about that; they’d buy the CliffsNotes. Being somewhat of a depressive and a loner, I loved it. And the assignments were great - The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, stuff like that. After high school and before college (I was in Vietnam in between) I read a lot of sci-fi - Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and others. But I was still a reader and not a writer. 

My experience in Vietnam changed that. I wanted everyone who sent me to Vietnam and everyone who did not go, to know what it was like. That yearning to convey the horror of modern warfare to those who blithely advocate for it or are okay with it… that became my goal. So, in 1972, I enrolled at Philadelphia City College, majoring in General Studies, but taking literature and writing courses. I especially loved the latter. Although my main desire was to write the 'Great American Novel', and a war novel at that, I learned to write by penning short stories and many of them were sci-fi or speculative fiction based on my reading history.

To talk about your early books, can you tell us about your fictionalised autobiography Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, based on your own experiences in the Vietnam War? 

I began processing my Vietnam experience (I was there 1968-69) in 1972. I started reading a lot of war fiction and settled on James Jones’ From Here to Eternity as a great example. Then I started Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, originally titled Where the Shadows Run from Themselves, a line from the Cream song, White Room. It seemed the perfect title, descriptive of the handful of times I and others found ourselves in the anaemic green light beneath the triple-canopy jungle, trying our best to kill each other and somehow survive. 

At first I thought of doing a straight memoir. Then I thought… I’m not a General or a war hero. I’m just a common person. Who would want to read my story? (In the world I grew up in, not everyone was thought of as special. In high school there was the class valedictorian, the football and basketball heroes, the scholarship winners, and everyone else, including me.) I felt that I could better convey my Vietnam war experience not as my story, but as an everyman’s story. So I fictionalized the book. One other thing about this process. All during this time I did not read any novels about the Vietnam war. When Platoon hit the movie theatres and friends wanted me to go see it with them, I declined, not wanting anyone else’s take on the war to color my own.

What was your experience finding an agent and a publisher for that book?

It was more of a quest than an experience. In the early nineties I was still working on my Vietnam memoir and attempting to interest a publisher. I had moved to San Francisco (from the East Coast, Philly) and was newly married and still querying agents, but no one was interested. They said that people wanted to forget about Vietnam, that it was unsaleable. I was faced with a choice: give up writing and that book or write something else. I moved on and began work on what I had titled Cacique, a historical novel about the Conquest of what would become the Southeast coast of the United States. I work-shopped that book in James Fry’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel class at UC Berkeley. 

(During this time, I was working full time as a technical writer, and my wife and I had bought a house and adopted a little boy. A year later she became pregnant with our daughter). 

In 1991 I finished my historical novel and started submitting to agents. One responded positively: Richard Curtis, president of the Literary Agents of America. He sent the manuscript out to about ten ‘houses’ and only one responded positively, but they wanted me to pare away a big chunk of the book written from the POV of the Spanish Colonials. I did and Putnam/Berkley took on the book and changed the title to Calling Crow. It took some time before it hit the shelves… 1995. A couple months after the book was published my editor suggested I do a sequel. I sent them outlines for two more books, a trilogy, and they sent me a contract to sign. I was now a published writer. But I still had not published my first novel, my Nam novel.

I went back to trying to find a publisher for Carl Melcher… (Richard Curtis declined the book, believing that interest in that war had waned). I became a member of the James Jones Literary Society and wrote Willie Morris for help. Willie, a member of the society, had been the youngest editor of Harper's Magazine. He wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, including his seminal book North Toward Home, as well as My Dog Skip. He had been a friend of James Jones, and when Jones was on his deathbed, Willie took down the outline for the final chapters of Whistle, the third and final book in Jones’ great WWII trilogy. Willie had also been a mentor and patron to several young authors, among them, Winston Groom. 

In early 1999 Willie offered to send my novel out under his letterhead to some publishing houses. The first one, Milkweed, I believe, passed on it and Willie told me he would try others. He died a week or so after that and I was again alone in my efforts. Willie’s widow, JoAnne Prichard, suggested I try Theron Raines, Willie’s agent. I sent him the manuscript and he wanted some changes but was willing to work with me. He suggested the new title, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam. A couple months into the process Theron wrote me that he had become too busy and could no longer help me. Alone again. 

Your first book, Carl Melcher… was an eBook in the days before Kindle burst upon the world. Can you tell us more about that?

Yes. After years of trying, I just gave up querying traditional publishers. At that time, eBooks had started to become a thing. There were a few clunky dedicated eBook readers - one was known as the Rocket Ereader - but most eBooks were simply pdf files (Adobe was a big sponsor of the Frankfurt eBook Awards) with a cover graphic. 

I published the book with Electric eBook Publishing in 2001. I had modest expectations, and I was not told by the publisher that they had submitted the eBook to the Frankfurt eBook Awards. Then we had the world-changing attack on 9/1/2001 known as 9/11. A couple weeks later my eBook was named a finalist at the Frankfurt eBook Awards. On a dreary overcast Sunday in San Francisco, October 7th, at 2:20pm, I boarded a huge, almost empty DC-10 for Frankfurt. 

You’ve told us of your experience publishing your three-book historical series on the Spanish Conquest of the Floridas - Calling Crow, Flight of the Crow, and Calling Crow Nation (Putnam/Berkley), and your fictional account of the first Virginia colony, White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What led to your interest in them and how did you go about researching them?

After I had participated in Jim Frey’s workshop, my employer sent me on a job assignment to the Georgia coast. I stayed on Amelia Island, a beautiful, semi-tropical resort with white sand beaches and ocean views. I visited a local museum and there was a lot of information about the people native to the area, the Muskogee. There was also information about pirates and the exploratory forays of the Spanish colonials from Hispaniola. 

I’d read somewhere that the earliest encounters between the indigenous people and the technologically advanced Spanish Colonials might have been akin to what a modern person might experience when suddenly coming upon a UFO landing. People in these situations can become paralyzed with fear. So, during my walks on the beach, I began to imagine an encounter, local natives seeing a great ship just off the coast. I imagined they’d refer to it as a ‘cloudboat.’ That scene of initial contact lived in my head for weeks. Then I started my research - visiting museums again, both in Georgia and Florida, the Castillo de San Marcos, and the missions in California where I lived. I studied up a lot on Hispanic America. Along with that I learned a lot about plotting, ‘maximum capacity,’ pace and characterization from Jim Frey’s workshop.

Are there any particular challenges in writing about your own experience, in contrast with that of imaginary characters?

One challenge in memoir might be being honest, while not exposing or hurting others. I always change the names and other details to protect the guilty. And a little of that is sometimes required with ‘imaginary’ characters as sometimes I have drawn them from people I know. Some are purely imaginary and that is more fun than challenge, as they often have a will of their own, and they also occasionally deal with things very differently than I would have.

In 2001, Wired magazine published an article about your book being named a finalist at the Frankfurt eBook awards, titled: Eight Copies Sold Is Enough. “Along with the likes of best-selling authors Joyce Carol Oates and David McCullough - whose works were nominated for Wednesday's Frankfurt eBook Awards - is an author who's only sold eight copies.” Can you talk to us more about what happened, and how it has affected you?

When I was named a finalist by the Frankfurt eBook Awards committee, the book had only sold eight copies… And yes, they were friends and relatives. I suppose one could argue that that headline was a bit snarky… ‘how could a book that only sold eight copies be nominated for the award, when the other eleven nominees were ‘best-selling authors?’ 

To expand on this a little, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam was the Cinderella finalist, the only one not published by a major NYC house. The big houses simply took one of their heavy hitter books that were already in print and converted them to eBook format. Carl Melcher… was not published in print. The publisher, Electric eBook Publishing, was literally a ‘Mom and Pop’ operation, a couple from Canada. In my opinion, this is what made Carl Melcher’s selection newsworthy. The headline could have been, ‘Interloper Shows Up Among Frankfurt eBook Award Contenders!’ 

So how did that happen? The answer lies in Peter Mollman’s - director of judging for the awards - words. He said he was surprised to discover the background behind Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam. "This really does illustrate how carefully and fairly each title was evaluated. And that’s part of the beauty of judging e-books -- you are just looking at the screen and on that screen is the quality of the writing and nothing else." To my way of thinking, this is like the established practice of symphonies auditioning musicians from behind a curtain. The sex, appearance, age or bona fides of the musician is not known, only the quality of the music comes through.

My experience at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards was ephemeral, almost an out-of-body experience. None of the big names came - David McCullough, Joyce Carol Oates, Alan Furst - evidently not daring to fly so soon after 9/11. Those who did come were provided airfare, hotel accommodations. A limo picked us up at our hotels and took us to the Frankfurt Opera House. There was even a red carpet and photographers as we stepped out. I don’t remember most of the ceremony - just sitting in my seat, praying silently. I didn’t win and then it was over. I was again, just a face in the crowd, no reporters looking to interview me. They were all queuing up at the buffet table, as I was; it was first-rate. If I had won, wow, what a coup that would have been. But c’est la vie. 

The high point of the experience was when I and a couple of other folks - publishing house representatives for the big stars that did not show up - had dinner with the winner in the non-fiction category, Eric Nisenson, author of The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece, St. Martin’s Press. Eric was very gracious and warm, and shared lots of anecdotes about his interviews with Miles Davis and Davis’s life. 

Some might think that having been named a finalist, I would have no trouble finding a traditional ‘paper’ book publisher. I know I did. Sadly, that was not the case. Nobody was interested. 

A quick postscript about that. One day I read an article by Colonel David Hackworth, aka, Hack. Hack was the most highly decorated living soldier. He had committed career-soldier suicide by calling a press conference and declaring that the way the government was conducting the war in Vietnam made it unwinnable, and they were just sacrificing American soldiers. He was forced to resign and became a war correspondent. I found his email, wrote him, and told him about my book, wondering if he knew anyone who might help me find a publisher. He sent me his agent’s email address. I sent the agent the manuscript. About two weeks later St. Martin’s Press sent me a contract. The book was published in hardback in 2004. 

How do you think publishing and indie publishing have changed since you started in the biz? What would you say to writers starting now?

When I started writing, Indie publishing was known as ‘self-publishing,’ and had a cheesy image - someone who could not make the grade, and so fills his garage with books and tries to sell them to all his friends, relatives, the mailman, his barber, the local library. But being published out of New York by one of the big houses imparted celebrity status, at least among people who read, and garnered you respect. The only problem with that was the numbers. Your chances of getting published out of NYC were one in a million, maybe ten million. Then along came the Kindle. 

Amazon needed ‘product,’ that is, books, lots of them… to make the Kindle a success. They tried to get the big publishing conglomerates to make their midlist ‘product’ available in eBook form, but Big Publishing would have none of it. They were worried about the competition that Amazon and eBooks would bring. So that was why, in my opinion, Amazon ‘courted’ un-published writers and their works along with ‘out-of-print’ mid-list authors and their works. These books were the fuel for the new Rocket, the Kindle, to take off. And it did. 

Authors who had been shut of NYC Publishing had a market and they sold well. Not only that, but they also remade their own image, ignoring the ‘self-published’ descriptor and declaring themselves ‘Indie.’ I sold a lot more books in the first five or so years of the Kindle than I did when I was published by Big Publishing.

Today NYC Big Publishing seems less inclined to take on new authors of traditional works or mid-list authors. They are publishing books with controversial or ‘edgy’ themes, following sociological trends. Or perhaps attempting to create them. Anyway, it took me a decade to find a publisher for Carl Melcher. It took about three years to find a publisher for Calling Crow. Then three more years from when I signed the contract until the book finally appeared on the shelves. It might take longer now. If your subject is timely, after your book finally reaches the shelves, the parade might have moved on. That’s unacceptable. 

Your speculative fiction works are a new departure. Your last collection, Talk to a Real, Live Girl, won the science fiction category in the Los Angeles Book Festival. Tell us about the collection and what inspired it.

Talk to a Real, Live Girl tells the story of a future society where, due to the politicization of every human endeavour, relations between men and women have become so caustic that love is rare and marriage, even more so. Along with this new reality, the robotic companion has progressed to the point where they are virtually indistinguishable from humans. 

An eccentric billionaire who bought a far-flung mining planet, Kratos, employs an exclusively male workforce and has a casino-like pleasure dome for them with bars, gambling, video games, mechanical bull riding machines and robot ‘companions.’ Alex is a thoughtful man and not satisfied with the fawning attention of the sexbots. He yearns for more… a real, live girl, not just for sex, but for love. Tracy is one of only three on Kratos and Alex finds himself in competition with a dangerous foe for her affection. I think people will either love or hate this book because it wades into one of the most contentious subjects of our time. But at its heart, it’s all about how decent, reasonable people accommodate to their surroundings in order to find happiness.

Your other books in the genre are In the Shape of a Man, which you describe as literary or mainstream, with hints of horror, and your short story collection, Strange Worlds, which is traditional sci-fi/fantasy. You have also written a speculative fiction novel, Van Ripplewink: You Can’t Go Home Again, which you describe as a mashup - time travel and dystopia with hints of realism. And your novella, The Blue World, Anunnaki Advent, is a fictional telling of the Sumerian Creation Myths, an homage to the work of Zacharia Sitchins. Tell us some more about these works. 

A reader described In the Shape of a Man as ‘Rosemary’s Baby meets Revolutionary Road.’ The novel follows two families in turn of the century (1999) San Francisco Peninsula. The story is about evil. Is it real, an antique concept, or just a relative sociological construct? What happens when evil happens, and good people look the other way? What happens when modern people, stressed with the pace of life and the responsibilities of relationships, ‘act out’ on those around them? What happens to people who do evil? Do they just go on their way unpunished? Is justice sometimes meted out by evil people? Like most of what I write, there is a moral element to the book. Yes, it is entertaining (I hope), but not simply that. 

Out of all my books, Strange Worlds gets the highest ratings on Amazon and elsewhere. It’s a collection of stories, speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. I think in any collection, there will be stories that you like and some you don’t. Each story is indeed a different, strange world, and some seem to be becoming more recognizable by the day... Stories about the amoral component of some scientific research, about the value of all human life, especially the defenceless among us, about how far we would or should go to keep living. About the importance of memories and how they sustain us. About bullying, loneliness, big oppressive government. 

Like Talk to a Real, Live Girl, Van Ripplewink: You Can’t Go Home Again delves into another modern taboo, a place most writers fear to go-- race-relations in America. Van Ripplewink is just a normal, perhaps naïve, American boy of 17 in the year 1968, who is coming back from a party when he is struck by a car and dies. Van ‘wakens’ in 2015 when a bulldozer uncovers his coffin. He does not really understand what has happened to him and attempts to make his way back home to his mom and dad. On the way he encounters a gang of toughs who beat him but is rescued by a kindly man named Charles. Van stays in a homeless camp and meets Honest John who mentors him in the new realities of the time. Honest John, Charles, and his beautiful daughter, Mignon, all help Van adjust to his new reality, because, truly, time is a river, and you can’t go home again. 

The Blue World: Anunnaki Advent is the story of the Anunnaki who 'from Heaven to earth came.' It is a homage to the work of Zacharia Sitchins, author of The Earth Chronicles series. Sitchins was born in the Soviet Union, raised in Palestine, then moved to New York City. An economist, he taught himself how to read Sumerian cuneiform writing. His interpretation of the Sumerian creation myths was that they were not really myths, but the ‘history’ of ancient Sumer, the first civilization, that seemingly rose up with no precedent almost overnight in the fertile crescent. 

The Sumerian creation tablets tell the story of the Anunnaki, who genetically engineered ‘the human,’ (those who work) in their own image. Those familiar with the Ancient Aliens TV series have likely heard of Sitchins’ work. While I’m not an ancient alien fanatic, I think there is much to the theory that cannot be denied - ancient monoliths that cannot be built with today’s technology, and much anecdotal evidence in ancient Jewish, Sanskrit and biblical writings. 

Your bio states that you live in the Nevada desert and are still writing. What are you working on at the moment?

I’m writing two story collections. One is science fiction/fantasy and the other mainstream. These two, if published, will give me a baker’s dozen of books. Maybe I’ll stop there, but probably not. 

You have travelled widely, both as a young man and later. Have those experiences influenced your writing?

Yeah. I think traveling has a big influence on writers. Writers are keen observers. I have a theory about writers. They are not the ones who hit the homeruns of your youth or throw the winning football pass. They are in the stands, observing. Travel is like cold water in one’s face. The change in scenery, weather, smells, and sounds enhance the sense of observation and trigger ‘living in the moment.’ Just taking an unplanned day off from work and going somewhere local we’ve never been before can provide a shot of that. For me, being drafted and sent to Vietnam was that… on steroids. I believe that experience made me a writer. It was life-changing and, I believe, worthy of being published and shared with the world, or a tiny portion of it. 

Has the pandemic had an impact on your writing, either good or bad?

Before the pandemic came, I was already retired and had plenty of time to read and write. After it got here, I had more. I did catch the Covid in June of 2020 and required a visit to the emergency ward. The experience made me more comfortable about my eventual demise. I’m not as afraid of what waits on the other side; I’m only queasy about the transition. Like Woody Allen famously said, “I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” 

To wrap up, thank you very much, Jessica, for giving me an opportunity to share my writing journey. To the young writers here who live, think and dream about writing that big important book that defines the times - Don Quixote, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, From Here to Eternity, Invisible Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, Silent Spring, Beloved - all I can say, really, is good luck, and never give up. I haven’t.

Thank you!

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About Paul Clayton:

Paul Clayton has been writing fiction since his college days in the mid-1970’s. He is the author of a three-book historical series on the Spanish Conquest of the Floridas-- Calling Crow, Flight of the Crow, and Calling Crow Nation (Putnam/Berkley).

His fictionalized memoir, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam (St. Martin's Press), based on his own experiences in that war, was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, along with works by Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless) and David McCullough (John Adams). Clayton’s last historical is White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. 

His novel, In the Shape of a Man, is literary or mainstream, with hints of horror, and his short story collection, Strange Worlds, is traditional sci-fi/fantasy. His speculative fiction novel, Van Ripplewink: You Can’t Go Home Again, is a mashup—time travel and dystopia with hints of realism. His last collection, Talk to a Real, Live Girl, is speculative fiction or science fiction. It won the science fiction category in the Los Angeles Book Festival. His novella, The Blue World, Anunnaki Advent, is a fictional telling of the Sumerian Creation Myths, a homage to the work of Zacharia Sitchins.

Paul is currently writing another science fiction collection, as yet untitled, and a mainstream/aspires-to-literary ‘novel in short stories’ tentatively titled, Worlds in Collision.

Paul currently lives in the Nevada desert and is still writing.