Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve got two novel manuscripts I’m getting into a shape I’d show an agent—my aim for the fiction is traditional publishing. For non-fiction, I’m self-publishing and have one book out and several coming. I’m writing short stories now and then when some nagging idea comes out of the dream world.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The Guitar Decoder Ring. I’m a guitar player (amateur) and have been having a bang-up time with it, but some of the geeky diagrams, that I’ll call the multiplication tables of music theory, seem overwrought and turn music study into more of a science experiment in a lab than art. I was convinced there was a simpler, more unified way to approach the instrument, using only the instrument, and I noticed two things: consistent patterns in theoretically separate domains of study and the earmarks of language, the roots of a kind of musical phoneme.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I dream first. It’s essential. If nothing comes out of the traditional dreaming of the night, I dream in the day with my eyes open. Time to explore the alternate universes of the mind, time to reflect, is essential. The other things I do are 1) focus on getting a plot – something has to happen – no mood pieces and 2) get there, to that ‘what’, by starting with ‘why’ (what’s motivating the characters) and then deal with ‘how’ (what does a person like this do, given the why that drives them, that constitutes who they are existentially?). That generates the what.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Countless, but Stephen King, Ayn Rand, Tolkien, and Kafka come to mind immediately. King for his understanding of humanity – finding consistently the venality and vice in the good people and the light and goodness in the venal. Rand, because she describes in illustratively stark contrast the stakes in any conflict and the subtlety in human impulses. Tolkien because, you know, Tolkien. With no poetry in life, there’s no life. Kafka because he embraces the absurd by satirizing it. He acknowledges things aren’t right, they don’t go right, and that’s essential for a story. Ordinary people can’t write effective stories, because ordinary people want to believe that things basically working as they should is ordinary. Authors know almost nothing works out as it should. You don’t get a story from: “I wanted to go to the store, so I did. It all worked out.” You get it from: “I wanted to go to the store, but when I stepped outside I tripped over the corpse of my own doppleganger” or whatever.
What are you working on now?
Getting ready two novels, one a work of hard-boiled action fiction, another a literary fiction work—a coming of age tale. Also getting a hard-boiled short story ready to send out, and writing a couple of non-fic books to come out soon.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Goodreads is great: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41039416.Asher_Black
Do you have any advice for new authors?
I’m a new author, though I worked on it thirty years before I had a breakthrough. The breakthrough is the one I think any author really needs, and it’s one we all need to be truly effective at anything that requires substantial commitment from our emotional center. That’s this: figure out what you’re about. Accept nothing less. If you’re not about anything, you’re out of luck. You don’t have what it takes. I don’t mean your ideology or beliefs. That’s tacked on, no matter how much you’re sure it’s essential. What’s really you is your answer to the three questions that drive all human creation: Who am I? What is the world (and my relationship to it)? What do I do now? All human beings quest for these answers all their lives ’til they die. When they get the first answers to some of it, those answers will change, evolve, gain clarity, sometimes be missteps, but staying on the journey is essential—not because it’s the journey that matters. People who say that shouldn’t fly passenger planes or write books. I actually want to arrive somewhere; so does your passenger, your character, and your reader. Destination counts. You stay on the journey because you must arrive at least some tentative answers to be truly effective at anything – effective in a way that relies on the deepest part of you, the distinct impulses that are neither the basic instincts of all apes nor the content of your intellect. Your own personal driver and engine. The answers fuel those things.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Orson Scott Card: Only accept 3 kinds of feedback on your work: Oh yeah? So what? and Huh? In other words, someone marks up your manuscript, the only thing of value, truly, is points where I don’t believe you (Oh yeah?), parts where I don’t care and am bored or just don’t need it (“So what?”), and parts where I am confused, stumbling over it, don’t get your point or the what or why of what’s happening (“Huh?”). I’ve stuck to that. Unless I ask someone a specific question, I don’t need their suggestions about whether they like the metaphor of water. I need the gut responses readers are going to feel if they’ve already agreed to accept my alternate reality in the form of a novel. Readers don’t think, maybe Kyle would be a better name than Xavier. They either DON’T think – they either read and stay in your world, letting you fly that plane – or they stumble because of huh, so what, or oh yeah.
What are you reading now?
Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald. Religiously.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Butt in chair. No matter what. Butt in chair.
What is your favorite book of all time?
No favorites – that’s like having favorite kids. But certainly some that are iconic. It might sound cliche’ but nothing will ever touch The Lord of the Rings for me. Not only was it seminal in my youth, it was the first adult novel(s) I ever read and it kicked off my reading career and therefore the thought that I might express some of my own inner world in writing.
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