A life unexamined is a life unlived …

My life path has been a meander, following interests and seeking that which really satisfies. (Money has never been much of a goal, a good thing since not a lot has come my way.) Partly, this is due to my keen curiosity about almost everything, and partly because I don’t tend to conform well to professional boxes.

I took formal training first in the physical sciences, to understand how the objective world around us works, and then in the social sciences, to understand how we experience the world subjectively. The mystery and wonder of both these aspects of existence remain part of my personal core enjoyment in life, and though neither provided long-term professional employment, I regret not a single moment of my studies.

Fascinated with how things work, I eschewed the field of art, which I early on dismissed as unimportant. In time, however, I came to see how wrong I was! Art, it seems to me now, lies at the central question of human existence — good art, that is.

Literature — i.e., reading — was the single artistic field that captured my youthful ardor. The worlds that arose from reading fiction — in particular, speculative fiction — were far richer, it seemed to me, and more meaningful, than the more mundane experience of daily life, where “adventures” tended to be merely unpleasant occurrences of things going wrong.

Speculative fiction typically yields more wonder than the realistic sort, and that emotion was always catnip for me, both in literature and in the exploration of the physical and mental worlds. And wonder is connected with the heart, through which things are given their value, while the head gives only being.

As well as avid reading, I have always written, both fiction and non-fiction, some of it published, most of it not. (I am better at starting writing projects than at completing them; my cache of pieces in various stages of completion or polishing comprises several hundred pieces.)

Like Tolkien, I have always preferred happy endings, and as a part of that is often a romance, I like stories that include romance as well as adventure. (In my opinion, Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, a horror/sci-fi classic is one of the best examples of this because the hero and heroine save the world but also fall in love too; and delightfully, the heroine is as capable at the rough stuff as is the hero.)

So, one of the things I write is gay romance adventures, among other genres, because I happen to be gay. But I also like horror, and the shiver allied with wonder that creates the horror response — horror being defined as both “fear and loathing.”

Some of my favorite works of fiction in the various genres are:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, is to my mind, possibly the greatest novel in the English language, including as it does a magnificent romance and a study of the nature of human existence, of people’s different ways of coping with life’s limitations and challenges. And it invokes true wonder.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium is for me the most magnificent creation in literature. I prefer the darker, more intense, and interwoven stories of The Silmarillion in their full versions — not those in the published work of that name, but which appear in the various volumes of the History of Middle Earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien.

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling are a very different, but also truly magnificent creation, written on a more human level, with less grandeur than Tolkien’s works. Their degree of detail — in terms of world creation — the complex interweaving of stories, the brilliant characterizations (Luna Lovegood and Professor Horace Slughorn being my favorites), but most of all the intense vitality and tangible realism in the writing (even though the author shot rather wide in depicting realistic teenage sexuality), is unmatched anywhere in literature.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad represents for me the best in the adventure novel. But again it is the clarity of both characterization and situation that brings the story to life. (And it has the most chilling, and at the same time most useful in everyday humor, phrase where Kurtz’s dying words are: “The horror! The horror!”)

In comedy, P.G. Wodehouse stands alone in his ability to create tempests in every sort of teapot, while making exquisite use of language. For example: “It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.” Having a true comedic nature, when Wodehouse was interned by the Nazis during World War Two as an “alien” (he was living in France when Germany invaded, in 1940), after he was shipped off to an internment camp in Upper Silesia, his ability to turn quite literally everything to humor allowed him to comment: “If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?”

I came to love mysteries rather later than my other favorites. I remember reading Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, and Cat Among the Pigeons when in college, and found them disturbing rather than enjoyable. They seemed inhuman, because they focused not on the lives of the characters per se, but only on those aspects that related to the crime. Some years later I stumbled across an Ian Rankin mystery short story, and liked it. I went through his entire oeuvre with increasing pleasure. Then I encountered P.D. James, and was blown away, convinced that I had found the great mystery writer.

Recently, however, I read James’ book on mystery writing, in which she was somewhat dismissive of Agatha Christie. Between my discovery of P.D. James and reading her non-fiction book, I had also tried Agatha Christie again—and this time, I completely fell in love with her writing. It now seems to me to be truer art than of the other mystery writers. Now, I truly admire Agatha Christie’s mysteries and her two marvelous sleuths: Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple. And, even her non-mystery novels (written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott) I appreciate as powerful and deep probings of human nature and the human condition.

In terms of horror, a good old-fashioned ghost story does it for me, but also the more bizarre areas of horror, such as Edgar Allan Poe wrote (his masterpiece, to my mind, is his: “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", in which the reader is literally taken beyond the veil of existence into death itself). In terms of ghost stories (I have written an essay on this elsewhere in this website), my favorites tend to be spread out among different writers, each providing generally only one example that does it for me — where they hit the sweet spot of a truly horrific thrill of a ghost story. For example, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is perhaps the best novel-length ghost story, while Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby is my favorite non-ghost horror story, in which the true horror lies in the betrayal of a young woman by her shallow and ruthless husband.

Finally, in the science fiction/fantasy genre my three favorite writers are: Douglas Adams, whose masterpiece Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency still blows my mind when I re-read it; Ursula K. Leguin, especially her powerful epic—it is quite short, but still an epic—Rocannon’s Planet, her deep and poetically beautiful Earthsea trilogy (which is actually high fantasy), and her truly mind-blowing, love-against-reality novel, The Lathe of Heaven. My third favorite is Robert A. Heinlein, who could write the most nuts-and-bolts “hard” sci-fi (he was trained as an engineer) as well as surreal fantasies about the nature of existence itself. His masterpieces of the latter type being: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoeg and Job: A Comedy of Justice.

My writing and my skill in writing, being something that I have always been eager to develop and improve, I always enjoy feedback, positive and negative. It continues to amaze me how a chance word or two, from a friend or acquaintance, can change my path and illuminate something, some bit of good or bad writing, that I had before failed to perceive.