Hark, readers of Contract City!

I am very pleased to announce that my next book, The Late Bloomer, will be published by Rare Bird Books imprint California Coldblood in Los Angeles. 

Here’s some super-early dust jacket copy:

In THE LATE BLOOMER, the world experiences an abrupt and unthinkable cataclysm on the morning of October 29, 2018. Kevin March, high school band trombonist and want-to-be writer playing early morning hooky, is witness to its beginning, though he isn’t as shocked by it as he thinks he should be or wishes he could be—these dreams he’s been having; this story that he wrote; his little brother’s night terrors and sleepwalking. Surprised or not, Kevin now not only finds himself pitted against forces these changes have wrought in order to survive, but soon discovers that he may have a crucial role in this new world, one that he is reluctant to play.

To stay alive, Kevin embarks on a journey that promises to change everything yet again. On his journey, into a digital recorder he chronicles his experiences at the end of his world.
This book is a transcript of that recording.

Depicting an unspeakable apocalypse unlike any seen in fiction—there are no zombies, viruses or virals, no doomsday asteroid, no aliens, no environmental cataclysm, no nuclear holocaust—with a Holden Caulfieldesque protagonist at his world’s end, The Late Bloomer is both a companion piece to Lord of the Flies and a Bradburyian Halloween tale. And though young adult-oriented and delivering genre-novel fear, The Late Bloomer is harrowing, grim and poignant in the way of McCarthy’s The Road. Told in Kevin March’s singular and unforgettable voice, delivering a gripping narrative with an unsparing climax as moving as it is terrifying, The Late Bloomer defies expectations of the genre and
will haunt those who read it.

COMING HALLOWEEN 2018

:: Rare Bird Books/California Cold Blood ::

http://writingontheair.com/Podcast/WOTA-03.09.16.MarkFalkin.mp3
​

What will pop it? A sharp, pointy thing called real life.

If young adult novels, and their filmic progeny, had been resting on a pop-cult bubble in 2014, this is the year that bubble pops. Its residue will vanish in the summer haze faster than you can say Chick-Lit.

Though the box office success of Insurgent may still be blowing some overheated air into the bubble (or is the bubble really a dome? . . . and we’re all living under it, and . . . it will never pop because it’s made of a polymer only producible by the screams of fighting children and the sighs of star-crossed young lovers), it may be the last infusion of air the genre sees before it grows too taut and explodes.    

As we veer headlong into the summer reading season, you may find yourself reaching for a book you’ve heard too much about but not read. This is because you have refused to. It’s one of those books your kids have read. They’ve seen the movies too. So have your adult friends. You’ve been left out of many a conversation yet felt smugly okay with that. You’ve been meaning to, just to see what the hubbub is about, reading with a superciliously arched brow like an aloof anthropologist. It’s one of those books that involves a love triangle among distressed and warring children—whether they be wielders of bows and arrows, or they run through mazes, or whatever happens in Divergent. But it’s been awhile now. Maybe it’s safe. You’ve thought maybe you were being elitist or nonconformist or just plain old contrarian. One of those. Basically, you’ve been a book snob. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And now, just when you figure you’ll swallow your pride and run with the lemmings through the mazes and through the arena to the capital city, to give yourself a little guilty pleasure and to be somewhat in the know, somewhat conversant, you find yourself alone. It’s over. It’s gone. Pop.

You knew you should have trusted your gut. You’re a little angry with yourself for capitulating. Look where it got you.

Why has the young adult dystopian genre in books and films gone—or about to go—pop? Fickleness, the far future fanciful thing grown stale? Cultural saturation point? Shark jumped? It could be those things. It likely is those things, but it’s something else too. The real culprit is that there are more exciting stories in the news these days. We don’t need to make up fanciful dystopic stories taking place in an improbable far seeming time. We’ve got real dystopic problems brewing right here, right now. It’s not the far future we need to worry about. It’s the near future.

Consider:  

Our military uses drones in faraway wars. But the FBI uses them in domestic surveillance too. That Pandora’s Box is way open, and isn’t likely to close.

The National Security Agency has cast a dragnet over all communications coming and going. Each email you send overseas, the NSA makes a copy and sniffs it for malfeasance. It doesn’t matter to whom your email is sent. If the NSA finds your email at all germane to national security, it may keep it for years.

In other areas of society, the future is starting to look a lot like the past. Clearly, we don’t live in a post-racial world. We live in hyper-racial times.* Seven years into the Obama administration and the violence and societal Sturm und Drang over race is arguably more pervasive and intense than it has been in this country since the 1970s—race riots in the heartland of Ferguson, Missouri; serious racial tension in wake of the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island. Let’s not forget the Trayvon Martin case which culminated just the summer before last. Still buzzing in our heads are the catchphrases: “Hands up, don’t shoot”, “I can’t breathe”, and Hoodie.

Wall Street is no longer occupied by anyone other than the power-suited usual suspects. Whether you agreed with the voices of the Occupy movement or not, those voices were tolerated for only so long before being summarily quashed. Those voices are now distant echoes, if that.

Resurgent insurgents and terrorists are cutting off heads on YouTube and kidnapping school girls while rattling their sabers on Twitter. And now we are all Charlie.

School shootings are so prevalent that it feels like background noise. Unless it directly affects us, we tend to just glance up at the cable news crawler and collectively shrug.

This is to name but a few items from the headlines that make fanciful far future dystopias seem not so gripping. What grips us are the near-future ones. The closer, truer ones. The ones reflecting that general societal unease and disquiet. You can just feel it, right? The economy is on the mend and employment numbers have clawed their way back to an acceptable range. We haven’t shocked and awed anyone lately (well, ask a victim of a drone attack), and there have been no major terrorist attacks on our soil in quite some time. And yet, and yet . . .  

Of course, one could argue that these books and films are merely entertainments. Divergent is a mere diversion, nothing more. These sorts of fictions hardly fall under the rubric of important Art, possessing as it does, that mirror that reflects society back at itself. And, yes, one can surely argue that what we are experiencing now is nothing compared to the sentiments of the 1850s and 1860s, nothing compared to the Sixties.

But, dystopian stories are different, aren’t they? They have always existed to point the finger at things that may go terribly wrong, or they are allegories attempting to name truths about a present full of lies. The problem is, things are wrong right now. It’s really a matter of measuring how worse will it get if we aren’t able to shuck off our complacency, isn’t it? It’s all percolating under the surface like that caldera we call Yellowstone. Pretty, awe-inspiring on the outside with its vistas, waterfalls, all that destiny manifested. But deathly just below.

Sorry, Katniss. It’s been fun. But we’ve got too much to worry about right now. By the glowering, withering look you’re giving me, I’m sure you’re okay with that. Truth really is stranger than fiction. You just can’t make this stuff up.

-- Mark Falkin is the author of the forthcoming novel, Contract City

* As of this writing, which was late March 2015, the church massacre in South Carolina, the DuBose shooting in Cincinnati, and the arrest and death of Sandra Bland had yet to occur. 

Watch : Good Day Tulsa
Air date, Live, May 28, 2015

Q&A With Writer Mark Falkin“Words let people in, to interact and commune with the writer so as to create a singular work. Readers work right along with writers. There’s an elegance and profundity to that. Words matter.”

1. Why do words matter? Why do you write?

All stories come from words. The stories we hear from our parents as children are made up of words. Screenplays are made of words. Video game copy is made of words. While a picture may be worth one thousand, only with words can what is in that picture be truly and fully expressed. A book was the first, and is still, the ultimate interactive experience. Writers provide swiggly black lines on paper, and readers encode and synthesize those swiggles into meaning, then conjure entire worlds. No other art form simply supplies you data with which you, the reader, then create your own totally unique experience. Words let people in, to interact and commune with the writer so as to create a singular work. Readers work right along with writers. There’s an elegance and profundity to that. Words matter.  

On why I write, I have to steal Bernard Malamud’s answer to that exact question: “I’d be too moved to say.” But to try to say: It’s a compulsion. Naively, I think maybe it’s an attempt to explain life to myself. I don’t get any real solid answers, but sometimes I feel maybe I’ve got it cornered, this explanation. And on those exceedingly rare occasions when I actually find I possess the hubris to cry out, gotcha!, it evaporates in a flash and I am left even more dumbfounded than before. 


2. What are you working on right now?

A story pregnant with doom and overly concerned with stones. I say it’s a terror novel (not horror). The Marketing Dept. will declare it a (young adult) apocalyptic novel. But if you demand that your apocalypse contain killer disease, bacteria, viruses, virals, zombies, doomsday asteroids, nuclear holocaust of the mutually assured destruction kind, environmental catastrophe, tornadically-propelled sharks, or space aliens, you might not like it because there’s none of that.

3. What do you find most challenging about writing?

Sex scenes.

Seriously, though (sex scenes), knowing how to not say too much. Knowing how to say just the right amount. 


4. What do you listen to while you write?


I almost always do listen to something. It depends on what I’m writing, but what I listen to remains static for the whole project. Drum ‘n bass house music. The sound of rain, hours and hours, months and months of rain. Bernard Hermann film scores for Hitchcock. A one-minute long film score track from a David Lynch short, looped over and over and over. That one’s grafted onto my DNA now.

5. What’s your writing process or routine like?

Early morning at the office or at home or at the home office until I get 1000-plus words in. I reread some of yesterday’s work, maybe tinker-edit a bit, and then start in. I don’t work from a formal outline. A rough outline emerges after I’ve started from the nebulous beginnings of circumstance, key characters and what-ifs. The impetus to begin to write a story is powerful and emotional, so I just go with it until something resembling clarity and structure arrives. Sometimes that takes a while.  

About Mark Falkin
Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mark Falkin graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and then the University of Oklahoma College of Law. By day he is a literary agent and recovering music attorney. He is the author of Days of Grace which was optioned for a film, and nominated for a literary award, The Needle Award, at POD-dy Mouth blog, where the reviewer said, “This is literature at its best … Falkin could easily be likened to the aforementioned Lethem or to Augusten Burroughs or even J.D. Salinger.” Bookpeople, said “Here’s more proof that Austin is home to some of the best new writers around … Falkin’s novel is reminiscent of the writing style found in Lethem, Sedaris, Coupland, and Kerouac, with his sharp wit and journalistic style.” He hopes to set the “YA Dystopian” genre on its ear with his new novel, Contract City.

- See more at: http://w3sidecar.tumblr.com/post/114551582445/mark-falkin#sthash.mQwXCJQI.nTiZTMX5.dpuf

By Mark Falkin | on April 23, 2015 

I am not the writer whose backstory includes always having my nose in a book. Most author interviews include a bit about how they were reading in the crib, by flashlight at night under covers, voracious, unstoppable, unflappable readers. They loved bookstores, the smell of a mass of book paper, and got off sniffing binding glue from the library air. They were reading Dubliners and The Idiot for fun when they were twelve. They’d go on to work in book stores, teach English or go into advertising.

Not me. I ran and jumped and climbed trees and played sports and played dry-wit class clown. And though I did get a degree in advertising (marrying art and business, you see), I ended up going to law school and practicing on my own for fifteen years. Intellectual property and entertainment law (marrying art and law, you see).

And I’ve still not read Dubliners or The Idiot.

Though I attended a fine school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I did not grow up in a bookish or otherwise intellectual household. My folks weren’t boors nor bores, not at all. They were supportive and involved parents in just about every way. They just weren’t prolific readers. Some, but not a lot of books on shelves. I’m fairly certain I never saw my dad even read a book. He had a Master’s Degree and said he was finished reading.

No matter the writer’s background, no matter whether or not the writer was raised on books or not, all who become writers get bit. The insect finds us, bites us, we turn a different color, and then we fall hard. An intoxicant, an ecstasy entered our blood stream and all we want to do is feel that feeling again. To feed it. Like a drug, any addiction, our brains scream for a fix and if we don’t get it we don’t feel so well. Ask my wife.

Though I could reach back to Madeleine L’ Engle; The Phantom Tollbooth; Old Yeller; Are You There God, It’s Me, Margret; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and proclaim that was when it started for me, I don’t think that’s true. I wasn’t yet bitten.

All punning aside, what bit me was Stephen King. His books were my gateway substance. He wasn’t assigned in school (though Dolores Claiborne should be mandatory reading in any Fem Lit class) and so it was a revelation to read just for the pleasure of it, tossing theme, symbolism and structure—all that academic fussiness—out the window and to simply hang on for dear life to find out what happens next. I am still a Constant Reader of King and I happen to think he’s the Dickens of our time. So there. The Shining is not only one of the best horror books ever written, it’s one of the best books on my shelf period.

Because of the King awakening, I started to appreciate school assigned fiction. Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies. Catcher in the Rye. To Kill a Mockingbird. The short story A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Hemingway made me see him and highly revered work in a different way. Then poetry (poetry!) started to dazzle. I’m looking at you, e.e. cummings. My AP English teacher, Ms. Irvine, read us one of her poems in class that had a line: spring is like a perhaps flower. This floored me, this word play that made so much sense though nonsensical on the surface, the playfulness of it (years later I'd write a poem cribbing this idea with the line winter is like a perhaps fist​). That you could play . . . that this was about playing. That was big revelation for me. Even Hamlet resonated now—the intrigue, the sex and death! Books had become fun. Books had become entertaining. Books had become vital.

I started mainlining in college once I read Generation X by Douglas Coupland. That book spoke to me and made me actually say to myself out loud in my apartment bedroom while people were playing beer quarters loudly in the next room on a college night Thursday, “I want to write something like this. I think I can do this.” You see, usually I was in there bouncing coins and chugging suds with Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence as background. But that night I was so engaged in Coupland’s novel that I found myself in a bubble of my own silence, enjoying it, because all I heard were the words and my heartbeat.

Soon, I was strung out on the Beats. On the Road, Dharma Bums, Howl. You know, the coolness, the blow-man-blow, the ebullient angst. These books taught me freedom.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest made me see how street vernacular and high art and erudition can go together and work. Well, maybe it was a little long. I’ve never laughed at footnotes before. DFW taught me to laugh out loud at arch filmic footnotes.

Stewart O’Nan’s oeuvre, especially the first I read, A Prayer for the Dying, changed the way I saw fiction as a reader and a writer. Similarly, Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. These books were high Art, capital ‘L’ Literary yet so immersive and so impossible to put down. These books taught me the marriage of great story and elegantly pyrotechnic prose can be a lasting and profound one.

Now, in mid-life, I am the writer whose story includes always having my nose in a book. I love bookstores, the smell of book paper, get high on binding glue.

I’m going to go read Dubliners and The Idiot now. But, if I get bored, I’ll pick up Coupland or King and get bit once again.
---

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mark Falkin graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and then the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

By day he is a literary agent and recovering music attorney. He is the author of, Days of Grace, which was optioned for a film, and nominated for a literary award, The Needle Award, at POD-dy Mouth blog, where the reviewer said, “This is literature at its best . . . Falkin could easily be likened to the aforementioned Lethem or to Augusten Burroughs or even J.D. Salinger.” Bookpeople, said “Here’s more proof that Austin is home to some of the best new writers around . . . Falkin’s novel is reminiscent of the writing style found in Lethem, Sedaris, Coupland, and Kerouac, with his sharp wit and journalistic style.” He hopes to set the “YA Dystopian” genre on its ear with his new novel, Contract City.

Visit his website at http://www.markfalkin.com.

Follow him on Twitter @MarkFalkin.

An Interview with Mark Falkin 
Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of  Contract City, available this month from Bancroft Press. Iced in with my kids for three days, this book was my salvation against the insanity of endless games of Candyland and prattle of a desperate “Magic Schoolbus” binge. Entering into the Contract City world, via protagonist Sara, was a welcome and thrilling respite. Today I am ecstatic to present an interview with this talented writer,Mark Falkin.

What was the inspiration behind Contract City? What compelled you to tell this particular story?

 I knew for a couple of years before starting to write this book—which was written mostly in 2009-2010—that I wanted to write about something that truly scared me and that the reason it scared me is because it does happen, has happened and could happen again. Massive social upheaval is real and scary. Riots are scary. I wanted to tell a story of a middle America family caught in such times in a not too distant, recognizable, and most frightening of all, possible, future. I saw a family, particularly a girl and her dad. The girl was a filmmaker. The dad was a disgruntled policeman. Their worlds were going to collide.

 I am usually critical of how people write teenage girls. One of the novel’s strengths is the narrative voice of Sara. How did you develop her? What were the struggles of writing her?

 Sara just came. From the get-go, I got her point-of-view and the essence of who she was. Initially, I thought the book would toggle back and forth between her father’s POV and hers. Writing his . . . felt stale and wrong. I moved to hers and that was it. The story would be told through her eyes, her lens.

 Contract City succeeds in being both literary and genre. How do you achieve that balance?

 Hey, thanks. I write what I would want to read. Long form fiction, novels that take many hours of my life to read–I don’t just want to finish it; I want to be gripped, by the heart and the head. The narrative must be compelling so that you bemoan having to put it down and rejoin the world. But for me, a story can only really be gripping if the prose is elevated to the point of intoxicating you. I think fiction works best when the reader is under a spell. If the prose doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi—call it tone, voice, lyricism, elegance—it won’t mesmerize. If it doesn’t do that, it’s kind of dead. If that balance was achieved in Contract City, it’s simply because I was mesmerized in the writing of it. Mesmerism comes from language. I like putting sentences together. 

 What is your writing process?

 Morning, coffee, intuitively, from the hip, every workday whether I feel like it or not. I try to get in 1000 words a day when I’m in that raw first-drafting phase. I don’t do much editing or rewriting on the first draft. I just throw down that wet clay on the potter’s wheel and see what I’ve got to work with. I don’t write at night and I don’t outline in the formal sense. As things develop from that nebulous cloud of beginnings, then I start to create a rough outline. But nothing ever stays locked in. It’s like you’re throwing the cement in front of you as you move forward down the road. I have a general idea where I’m going, but there are always moments where things change, sometimes dramatically.

 What do you read?

I’m a literary agent, so I read a lot of pitches and queries during the day. For my own fun, I tend to read so-called literary novels that have driving, kinetic stories, e.g., in the last year I was blown away by Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz,The Goldfinch, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Love Stewart O’Nan. Love Daniel Woodrell. Love Karen Russell. Love (most of) The Cormac. All of Gillian Flynn’s books. Brett Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk. And I’m a Constant Reader (Mr. King). I try to read unputdownable stories written artfully. I cannot stand self-important, dull “Literary” work that looks down its nose at you.

 What is the most valuable piece of writing advice you have received?

 Easy reading is damn hard writing. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

 You have self-published and worked with a publisher–how do those experiences differ?

 While it may not be fair, the realities of the marketplace dictate that self-published books aren’t worthy of attention. When a publisher acquires your book, you’ve got people behind you who believe in it on some level. The editorial direction you get working with a publisher is a collegially adversarial yet exciting process.

 Setting of Contract City in Tulsa is a particularly effective choice. Why did you feel that was the place to set your story?

I grew up there, so I know it on a visceral level. Tulsa is smack dab in the middle of the country, the Heartland, the real America we’ve heard so much about. Tulsa is a very religious town—more churches per capita than anywhere. Oklahoma is a politically and culturally conservative state of this union. The historical reality of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots provided even more incentive to set it there. Tulsa is a test-market town. Why not try out full-blown privatization there? If it were attempted, wouldn’t that be exactly the place?

 What role does research play into your writing?

 I do just enough to achieve a semblance of verisimilitude and to move the story forward. I do not try to become an expert in a given subject matter. I find research, even a little, tends to propel a story into exciting directions. The context research provides is critical. It creates the aperture through which the story can be viewed. That’s been my experience so far anyway. I can see how research could be stultifying, though.

What is your biggest challenge as a working writer?

 Post-writing: in a world of screens and “content”, getting people to believe in the work enough to somehow compete with that. And then developing a readership.

A huge thank you to Mark for gifting me Contract City and taking the time to share such insightful, thought-provoking answers. Order Contract City* today. Go ahead. Do it. I’ll wait . . .

Did you do it?

Excellent decision.

--


*Mark sayz: Go to Amazon button on Home page herein 

But you can pre-order now online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, Target, Bookpeople (Austin), Tattered Cover (Denver), Brazos Bookstore (Houston), The Twig Book Shop (San Antonio).