A Season Without Rain
Author: Joe Schwartz
Genre: General FictionLength: 348 pagesRelease Date: November 2013ISBN-13: 978-1493513390Imprint: Enigma Press
SYNOPSIS:
Jacob Miller is angry with himself, the world, and God. Life seems so unfair, so cruel, that he can’t imagine why anyone even tries. After having a nervous breakdown, selling his business, filing for bankruptcy, having a baby, and finding out he owes over twenty grand in taxes, he is hardly happy to be alive.
In the span of a year, Jacob will discover three very important things about life. Things can always be worse. There really is a God. And if you wait long enough anything can change.
A Season Without Rain explores that gray area between poverty and middle class life, the struggling underclass for whom there are no advocates. A powerful story told in a modern, everyday voice that will entrench readers in Jacob Miller’s black world of anger, hate, resentment, lies, and violence.
A Season Without Rain is Joe Schwartz’s first novel. His previous short story collections Joe’s Black T-Shirt, The Games Men Play, and The Veiled Prophet of St. Louis have been acclaimed vulgar as Bukowski and visceral as Carver. Joe lives and works in St. Louis happily writing stories exclusively about the Gateway City.
AUTHOR
A St. Louis native, I write exclusively about the Gateway City. I prefer the style of fiction deemed transgressive fiction. That is my stories protagonists generally find a solution to their problems through either illicit or illegal means. I personally prefer stories told through a criminal's point-of-view. It is never the crime that fascinates me so much as the motivation to do it and the terrible, almost predictable outcomes to such actions. Just as I have an expectation of writing to be read I believe that it is as important, if not more so, that you as a reader should have the expectation of being entertained as you read. Anything less is such a disappointment.
Life is short. Stories are forever. -Joe
Writers, by nature, are lay philosophers mining their own lives looking for some kind of universal truth.
The old saying write what you know is exactly what every writer is hoping for no matter what it is they’re trying to accomplish. As a writer I know this: The more truthful I can be, the more honest and emotionally open I am willing to expose myself, the better my writing will be to read and consequently the better I will feel to have purged my subconscious.
It never occurred to me how cathartic writing could be until I stopped trying to write for the entertainment of others and finally began to write for myself. In ‘Joe’s Black T-Shirt’ I first discovered my words could heal me. Six years ago as I struggled with sobriety I realized I had never written a story for myself.
I began innocently enough to write a short story called Father’s Day in which a man coincidentally enough called Joe is attending the funeral of his long time absentee father. In it this Joe receives an inheritance in the form of a letter from his deceased father briefly explaining why he left and that he has never forgotten him.
After I wrote that letter, which was really to myself, I did something sober that I thought impossible, I cried. That letter, those simple words on a page, healed a pain in me I’d been carrying around since I was eight years old. Truth, I discovered, was the most important and powerful ingredient any author could possess in creating good fiction. It occurred to me immediately that what I had done for myself, maybe I could do for others.
That is why I now realize I wrote A SEASON WITHOUT RAIN. Dudes don’t talk. We are taught as boys not to cry. As men we learn to turn off our emotions. This is where women are a thousand times better off than men. If you see two women embrace, you think nothing of it. But if you see one man kiss another man, I promise you one of those men are about to die. It is rare we men can be emotionally honest.
We have this tendency to stuff our feelings down using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain. It becomes so habitual to the process it eventually comes to the point we no longer realize we’re even doing it. As men we wear our pain as a badge of honor. Scars and tattoos are merely skin deep compared to the pain they represent, reminders of how much we need to keep it to ourselves. As I wrote this novel it occurred to me wouldn’t it be nice, refreshing even, to write something that revealed all that manly bullshit for what it really is? A devil’s mask men wear to protect themselves, men who are scared to death to let anyone see the real fragile person hiding inside.
As a writer, I am fascinated by stories: These simple devices through which we can see society as a whole. A story can simply entertain its reader or be something bigger. The one thing we all occasionally think about but rarely talk in depth about is death. It is like to talk about it is to jinx ourselves; even worse than that is that we never discuss suicide. I have never owned a gun because I believe if I had one, I most likely would kill myself with it. Say something like that in a casual conversation at the next family bar-be-que and I promise you will instantly know the definition of silence. Ten seconds later it will be like you never said it.
No one likes to acknowledge mortality or the fact it is truly a choice to live. In lieu of death; that final, permanent, irreversible step men choose self-destruction. If some guy deliberately jumps off a bridge and lives to tell about it, nobody is going to casually dismiss it, but consistently getting blind drunk, fighting with your friends, pissing in public, driving home drunk or high and living to tell about it and your considered a warrior, mildly courageous, likely to be praised by your friends for such asinine exploits. Take a bottle of pills, get rushed to the hospital and have your stomach pumped – pussy. Drink a liter of whiskey, smash your truck into a tree or a fence or your own goddamn house and live to laugh about it – hero. It’s a completely fucked up sense of machismo we dudes have invented to erase the shame we feel no matter how ridiculous or disingenuous the source.
I invented Jacob initially as a key to get to the source of my own bullshit. A device to excommunicate a lifetime of self-loathing for things that were absolutely not my fault like my father and eventually my step-father leaving and no matter how much biochemical crazy glue I poured inside my body that old familiar pain kept returning as senseless and stupidly as someone hitting themselves in the head with a hammer then having the balls to bitch about having a headache.
I hope this book, this story, can do for dudes reading it what it did for me writing it, that is explain to them they can change, that there really is a God, that things can get better but it is up to them. If a dude can learn to embrace the possibility of living and quit trying to prove how brave he is by confronting death, exploring self-destruction until it eventually, almost shockingly works, then there is an amazing gift waiting for him called peace which is as immeasurable and precious as life itself.
A SEASON WITHOUT RAIN is that story about a young man, who if you were to know him, be a friend to him, you would think has a good life. As amazing as how false that assumption is in reality, it is more potent when revealed in fiction. As a reader you are allowed to follow Jacob into his darkest depths hoping he will eventually change. If some dude reading this story sees some of his own story inside this one and decides not to get divorced, or put a shotgun in his mouth, or simply give up on himself then I will be deeply satisfied. That is what I hope anyway, that by sharing a story, by reaching out to a fellow dude in pain, he will be able to do likewise and maybe that is the beginning of the end for a million others.
“Are You A Writer?”
There are probably a million good reasons to write. Could be the next Gone with the Wind is burning inside you or simply a story that you want to preserve for your children i.e., The Shack. To write a novel, something so good that it lives on to become something of a symbol, is a long and winding road. Only time will tell if you did it. In the meantime you should do your best and let it rest.
Not everybody will write something great, but rest assured that there is no deeper satisfaction than having written a novel, to have put your hand to the plow and done something equal in accomplishment to single handedly building a home or assembling a race car.
This is a task for those with both talent and skill. A book, start to finish, could take years to write up to a lifetime. This is not a something you do casually on weekends in between going to the beach and watching TV sports. It is something that robs you of your sleep without mercy or remorse. But what is the acid test? How can you unequivocally know if you got ‘it’ whatever it is? I offer you the following three points to ponder.1. There is only one you.
This is self-evident yet it is the most under rated quality that popular writers fully understand. The trick is to find your niche, that quality of writing that first entertains you as creator and then organically finds an audience. Mark Twain and Stephen King couldn’t be two more different writers. While Twain is a snake charmer with words and Uncle Stevie is doing his damndest to scare the bejesus out you the thing they have in common is that they both have their own, unique writing voice. There are many imitators but there is only one original.
2. You can speak English.
I didn’t know I was writer until someone finally told me, explained it to me. My theory was anybody could write. You can speak English, so why can’t you write it? The thing is writing is like dancing, or acting, or singing – everybody thinks they can do it. That is why I subscribe to the theory that a writer without readers is worthless. You must open yourself up to the world that is criticism by the most important, valuable critics a writer can ever have, readers. The greatest novel ever written will perish with its author if he fails to publish it. With a few clicks of a mouse anyone’s work can be in print today. The question is, do you have the guts to do it?
3. A story can change the world.
Sounds so simple, that it is almost cliché, but it is the truth. Revolutions have begun and wars have ended because writers have dared to put down their thoughts, an explanation of the world as they see it without trying to condone or excuse the conditions. I think immediately of George Orwell, a writer with unmatched vision penning manifestos like Animal Farm and 1984, that still reach into our social consciousness as a guide post warning of what is all too possible when, as Edmund Burke said, “Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.”When I was a boy my mother used to tell me the bedtime story of Georgie the Monkey, in hindsight a blatant rip-off of Margret and H.A. Rey’s beloved Curious George. Still, it was the best thing my five-year-old mind had ever heard. To this day she laughs that I remember it, but despite its obvious foolishness, she can recall it word for word. The thing is her story lit the fire in me that burns today, to tell a story that will never be forgotten. And isn’t that what every writer wants, not to be a celebrity, but to be remembered always for writing one hell of a story?
Quit thinking & start writing
I have known several writers who suffer from the imaginary disease ‘writers block.’ This crippling condition is caused by a lack of experience. So many new writers have been writing one story for so long that when they finally finish it they have a hell of a time writing anything new. It’s no wonder that each book sounds like any other they have written and that their audience eventually stalls out at a certain point as readers will not tolerate a boring, repetitive storyteller. Or they have written so few stories that they have no idea what to do when the story falls apart. Then again, some people are so terrified of failure that they are doomed before they finish their first sentence. This is not to say I haven’t had my share of frustrated days and nights wrestling with a story. The thing is I’ve been there enough, had my faith shattered and restored more times than I can count, any fear I may have once harbored has been utterly shattered. Just as the marathon runner must train continually learning to run longer and longer distances, the seasoned writer must put inhibitions aside and write until the good stuff comes.
Of course, to get from here to there, I know of only two ways. The first, most important, absolutely mandate path is education. What I’m talking about, though, doesn’t necessarily happen in a classroom. The best place to learn anything yet require serious motivation is a public library. Although the shelves are flooded with information, it is truly a seek and ye shall find environment. The good news is if you want to write then you should surely be a good reader already. That helps.
My two best recommendations to help the serious writer both feature Christopher Vogler. He and Michael Hauge made a terrific video called The Hero’s 2 Journeys that is an excellent starting point for anyone. In twelve plain steps they explain exactly how to tell a story and couldn’t be more right. Alone, Vogler has written the bible for masters and novices alike, The Writer’s Journey. But it’s not like he invented these ideas. Joseph Campbell said all these things and more in The Hero with a Thousand Faces from which Vogler readily acknowledges learning all he knows. The thing he did that Campbell could not was make extraordinary, complex ideas easy to understand. Make no mistake; it still takes a massive effort to get good at it and that brings me to my second point. There are no short cuts. Even if you are the reincarnated spirit of Hemingway come back to Earth, you need to write often if you expect to get any good at this. The biggest shock to anybody gets when they first sit down to write is that it’s hard. People often ask me, how long does it take to write a book? I usually answer about a year, but what I rather tell them is that it is somewhere around three-four hundred hours of writing, re-writing, re-reading , re-writing, and not to mention thinking about writing. Still I am not dissuaded by this fact that no matter how good I think my work is it can always be better.
Eventually, inevitably you must let it go. Publish and let the chips fall where they may or shove it in a drawer, forget about it and write something new. Either choice is damn hard to accept. On the one hand you have worked your guts out on a project and now it is up to the world to find it or you have come to the conclusion what you have written isn’t fit for the light of day.
That’s okay, though, because the next great idea for an incredible, epic story just appeared in your mind and now all you have to do now is quit thinking and start writing. Who knows, you may write the next Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye. There’s only one way to find out.Rock Star 101
The challenges to becoming a professional fiction writer, an entertainer, are no different or less difficult than trying to become a rock star. Sitting in with a band for the first time I think it is damn near impossible not to have a sudden rush of blood to the ego filled with delusions of grandeur. I, like countless others, once was fueled by the same dreams. Now a bit wiser, and certainly much older, I have found that writing a book isn’t all that different from recording an album except I don’t have to worry if the drummer might die in an alcohol fueled car crash or the guitar player overdosing on a Dimetapp and Xanax cocktail or about a Yoko ruining the band’s karma. Still, there are some strange, wonderful, beautiful similarities to be considered.
1. Listen to the bands they listened to.Everybody starts somewhere. There would be no Metallica without Black Sabbath just as Kiss and Marilyn Manson owe their careers to Alice Cooper’s crazy ass. We all stand on the shoulders of giants as artists. The best thing is to know this, acknowledge it, embrace the fact that you can only be so original and, believe it or not, people will respect you for the fact you are carrying on a proud tradition of stealing fire from the gods.
2. Being a one hit wonder is nothing to be ashamed of.I know guys who would punch their mother in the face for such success. There is nothing worse than toiling away year after year and having nothing to show for it. The whole idea of starting a band is to get rich and famous! A popular song is a pop song forever. The same can be said of a good book. To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and Wuthering Heights are all going to be read forever. Even the big guys rarely have more than one big hit novel. Stephen King may have over fifty books in print but he would dig up the corpse of Chaucer and make love to it for an over-the-top success like Fifty Shades of Gray.
3. Sound the same, but different.Nobody will deny that every AC/DC song is absolutely formulaic or that Nickelback is completely forgettable yet instantly recognizable to devotees of FM radio. Personally, I don’t care if somebody compares my work to Don DeLillo or James Patterson. As long as whomever they are lumping me in with has done what I hope to do: sell a heap of books. As long as you’re being compared to something good it’s all good. It is when your work is referred to a unique or avant-garde, God help you. Yngwie Malmsteen might have been arguably one of the best electric guitar players ever to shred but he couldn’t buy a hit song. The thing he forgot, the thing I think many writers do as well, is that you can be arguably the best at something and still nobody will give a shit if you are boring.
4. Everybody is going to fuck you.No one is ever going to be this blatant about it, but it is as true as fat kids will always love ice cream and cake. Money breeds greed, fame magnifies neediness. You ever wonder how somebody like an M.C. Hammer went from multi-millionaire to filing for bankruptcy: He needed something that fame doesn’t offer, friends. That is not something you’re going to find after the spotlight comes on. When the money is gone so is the entourage. Of course, they will pop up here and there as they “write” tell-all books about how they helped to destroy someone’s career and make it sound like they had it coming. The people who cared about you before your ship came in are the only ones you should ever trust with your love or your ATM card.
5. There’s no business like show (snow) business.Musicians and writers seem to both love drugs and booze in excess. The damndest thing is that these lunatics do some of their best work zonked out of their skulls. I look at The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan like I do at Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. They drank like fish, fucked like sailors, and smoked dope by the pound all because they could. Say what you will about them, their music and books will still be being appreciated long after we’re all dead. They all have one magic ingredient in common that you can’t buy, steal, borrow, or beg – talent. Without it you’re just another doomed contestant on ‘American Idol’ certain to be forgotten next season, or worse, sardonically remembered for how awful you truly were. But I say so what, cash the checks and never look back with an ounce of regret.
Twenty Questions With Joe Schwar
1) A Season without Rain is your first novel, how would you classify your writing style?
Transgressive fiction is what I’ve been calling it. I prefer to think of it as story telling for men. I hope to get guys reading again. Bartenders, mechanics, and cops are some of my biggest fans.
2) Where did the idea come from for the book?
I’ve worked more jobs than I can count. However, the story is based on a dark period of my life when I felt hopeless and deeply morbid regarding my future. When it was all over, years later, and I was now officially a writer it occurred to me I had lived one hell of a story. It was a wonderful thing to write about it knowing that my experiences could possibly offer hope to others.
3) In fifty words or less, what is the plot of your novel?
Jacob Miller is angry with himself, the world, and God. After having a nervous breakdown, selling his business, filing for bankruptcy, having a baby, and finding out he owes over twenty grand in taxes, he is hardly happy to be alive.
4) What inspired you to write this story?
Believe it or not, my kids. I’ve often told my friends that I don’t have much to offer my children in the way of an inheritance except when it comes to advice. I’ve been hustled by the best and have lived to tell about it. I figured this could be something I could share with them someday. Hopefully, they’ll read it and remember their old man loves them very much and once had to crawl through hell to save himself.
5) If you could tell other writers only one thing, what would it be?
Damn the cost, get an editor. Nobody likes a sloppily written book. It’s your name on the front cover not an editors’ so don’t be afraid to get second, even third opinions. Once it is in print there is no taking anything back.
6) Describe your protagonist Jacob Miller?
He’s in his early thirties and just becoming aware how hard life can be, that it isn’t fair not only for him, but for everybody. He no longer knows what is important and is simply going through the motions of living trying to numb himself through smoking weed. In a sense, he is hopeless and all but completely convinced that life is pointless. Jacob is looking for a miracle, but until he discovers how to forgive himself, nothing can save him.
7) There is no real defined antagonist in the novel although Jacob has so much to overcome. Who or what would you say is his biggest obstacle to overcome?
Himself. All his problems are because of his tremendously poor choices. Although there are certainly are those who undeniably dislike, even loathe him, the only one who can solve Jacob’s problems is Jacob except he is scared to be vulnerable again after so thoroughly having his ass kicked by the world. Until he can find the courage to try again he will be caught in an infinite loop of regret.
8) This novel seems based on real events. Would you consider this an autobiographical fiction?
Only in the lightest sense. Hemingway said an author’s first novel would always be his most biographical work. Everyone’s life is interesting except to the person living it. I prefer to think of it more as a way that I took to heal after having to live through such a long and terrible nightmare. But those are the most interesting stories, that demand to be told, and which will make any of us stop to think because in a sense, we’ve all been there in the dark wondering how in the hell would the sun ever rise again.
9) Who is your favorite author?
Without a doubt, John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men is the gold standard to me. I first read it when I was thirteen and I still remember how deeply his work touched me. I want to do that to others, draw them in to my private world, share it and affect readers viscerally on a deep, emotional level. I want my work, like Steinbeck’s, to be something more than casual entertainment.
10) Do you have a best time of day to write?
I used to prefer the early morning, like three or four a.m. That was back when I was recently sober and sleep was hard to come by. Nowadays I can write whenever. What I crave though is a quiet place with windows, a pot of fresh coffee, and a trusty Internet connection.
11) What do you hope readers get from this book?
Three things: 1) Things can always be worse. 2) There really is a God. 3) If you wait long enough anything can change.
12) Who are you’re biggest influences?
First and foremost, Steinbeck but a damn close second is Stephen King when he was writing using the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The Bachman books were something as a reader I’m yet to feel as urgent and compelling from any other writer. My two favorites being The Running Man and The Walk. Both are stories of an alternate dystopian society where reality television and horrible game shows have merged into desperate last-man-standing entertainment. They were damn near prophetic and I’m still in awe of them!
13) How do bad reviews affect you as an artist?
It is extraordinarily tempting to take them personal when you’re first starting out. Words can cut deeper than razors, but over time you must develop a thick skin simply to survive. When the bad reviews come, and they will, I take it with a grain of salt knowing I’ve done my best and not everybody is going to like you even if you win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
14) As a writer do you have any rituals that either put you in the mood or help you think better when writing?
My favorite thing to do is actually the night before, just before I’m about to nod off, I start thinking about what I’m going to write in the morning. Especially when I’m feeling like I’m not sure of what happens next in the story. I start running all these scenarios, watching the characters, in the theatre of my mind as I put them through dozens of set ups. By the next day I’ve usually figured it out, but I don’t worry if the answer still hasn’t come. It will. It always does.
15) What do you hope to accomplish as a writer professionally as well as personally?
Professionally speaking, I want to make a living doing this stuff; making up stories and having people enjoy them enough to pay me to write them down. Personally, I want what I think all writers want, to write well every time I sit down to do it and always enjoy it while the process is happening to me, through me.
16) To date, what is your greatest accomplishment as a writer?
Everyday something new and wonderful happens to me as a writer. I remember seeing my first collection of short stories in print and thinking this is amazing. That is until a gleeful stranger told me after buying two copies from me at a book fair they were going to give the extra copy to a friend for Christmas. That is about as good as it gets.
17) Why did you start writing?
I used to be a musician. When that ended, I really didn’t know what the hell to do with my time so I thought I’d give writing a shot. A friend of mine had a website and I did music reviews for a while. That led to a few screenplays, which eventually led to my first attempts at the Great American Novel. The thing is I can’t remember ever not writing my own original stories down, if for no better reason than being bored and wanting to entertain myself.
18) In ten words or less, describe your writing style.
Visceral, dark, gritty, vulgar, funny, horrible, wonderful, impatient, and intelligently profane.
19) If trapped on a deserted island, what book could you read over and over until rescued?
That’s tougher than it sounds. On one hand I would say The Grapes of Wrath for its amazing use of description but then again there is The Stand, a story that seemingly goes on forever. Then again, you can’t go wrong with anything by the juggernaut Kurt Vonnegut.
20) How do you decide on a character’s name?
Weird as it sounds, they tell me their names. Either it comes to me in a flash as I’m describing them or as I’m writing dialogue they simply say it. When I try and force it the names never sound quite right. Then again, like Gertrude Stein said, a rose is a rose is a rose, or conversely like Hemingway once telegrammed the grand dame, a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.
Hi Joe, I am so glade to have you on my blog...
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