Coming of age ...

"Combustible is a wonderful story ... The author did a great job of bringing each character to life ... I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a light read with a satisfying plot and interesting characters." 

— Kristi Elizabeth, San Francisco Book Review

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Three in One

This three-in-one volume, now available on Amazon, contains the following novels by yours truly:

Sabrina's Window 
On a chilly morning in Taos, New Mexico, a 17-year-old paperboy breaks the window of a 31-year-old hair stylist — an accident that marks the beginning of an instant, inexplicable bond between them. In the course of one high-desert summer, Joshua and Sabrina share confidences, intercede in each other’s love lives, go on a date that scandalizes the town, and confront questions of fidelity, desire, and the nature of love. 

The Possibility of Snow 
This story traces a once promising friendship between college roommates in New England. Steve is eccentric, slightly paranoid, and too perceptive for his own good. He knows the difference between what people say and what they do. Neil is reflective, sincere, and not as together as he seems. There’s not much he’s sure of anymore. They know each other very well and understand each other not at all. 

Then We’d Be Happy 
In this Silicon Valley tale, lower middle-class friends try to fashion futures out of whatever opportunities they can find. Opportunities to make money. Opportunities to be together. Opportunities that fall apart. Opportunities that must be put back together, no matter what.

Rave on, James Frey

I was hoping that Katerina would mark a return to form for James Frey, whose books had, in my estimation, gone steadily downhill since A Million Little Pieces. I started reading and I thought it was, wasn't, was, wasn't, was.

As I turned the pages, the narrator's bad-boy bravado quickly wore thin. Likewise his distain for ordinary workaday life and his burn-it-down posturing. Through it all, his insecurity and self-loathing came shining through. He couldn't hide it and didn't try.

Even as he worshiped excess, intensity, and passion, he yearned for peace. His grandiose ambitions belied his longing for domestic bliss.

Of course Katerina, a novel named for a woman, is at its core a love story. Both Frey and his narrator (who he pointedly intertwines) are romantics. But then so am I, and it's the love story that makes the book, despite its many glaring faults, worth reading.

I both loved and hated it.

End of an Era

Sadly, Luminis Books is no more. The publisher of "Meaningful Books that Entertain" has closed up shop. This was the outfit that brought you Precarious, Sabrina's Window, The Possibility of Snow, and Then We'd Be Happy. It was, I think, a bold and noble venture, and I will always be grateful to Luminis for making my writing available to readers across the country and beyond.

No Matter What

When Characters Come Alive

I had more fun writing Then We'd Be Happy than anything I've done before. The characters came alive for me and now seem like real friends. They are energetic, funny, insightful, and face life's challenges with the same confusion and frustration we all feel. They have their faults, as you will see, but I can't help loving them all.

Refreshingly Unorthodox

The first review of my new novel, Then We'd Be Happy, is outstanding:

“A refreshingly unorthodox tale of the challenges facing modern, lower-middle-class 20-somethings.” 
— Kirkus Reviews

Preorder now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound.

Fasten Your Seatbelt

Greg Bardsley's new novel is a madcap race against time and conflicting priorities in California's go-go Silicon Valley—a raucous parody of the valley's twisted family and corporate values.

I'm telling you, this guy has style. And a wicked imagination. And nobody has more fun with a story than Greg does.

Blog Tour: The Possibility of Snow

The Possibility of Snow has been making the rounds. Here's what book bloggers are saying:

“In the end, you may feel both a sense of loss and peace, but also anger. Whatever your reaction to this work, it will be visceral.” 

— Naomi Leadbeater, Naimeless

“I loved the story and the way it was handled ... this was an honest, real, emotional and very well written book.” 

— Bri Wignall, NaturalBri

“The Possibility of Snow reminds us what it is like to develop a new relationship and all of the emotions involved. [It] keeps you turning the pages as Al Riske pushes the limits with the friendship of these two characters.” 

— Rachel Rennie, Rachel's Blog

“The author does a great job of showing the boundaries of new friendships and what happens when those boundaries are crossed.” 

— K.M. Hodge, In Review

“The ending blew me away! This book will challenge the way you think.”

— Avid book reader, Granny Loves to Read

The Limits of Belief and Forgiveness

As I look back, I see that I've often written about missteps and misunderstands, crossed signals and bad timing, usually between men and women. In The Possibility of Snow, it's two guys. 

They become friends and then, well, not.

Big deal, right? Guys tend to become friends almost by accident—some combination of shared circumstances and sensibilities—and drift apart as easily as they came together.

The central characters in The Possibility of Snow, Steve and Neil, meet in college, where, away from home for the first time, guys find themselves in need of new friends as never before (and perhaps never again, not with the same urgency).

It's also the place and time in which we are all looking to define ourselves, to decide what and who we want to be.

The combination of similarities and differences that bring Steve and Neil together makes it hard for them to either stay friends or simply go their separate ways. Each is unlike anyone the other has ever known. 

To me, that dynamic proved fascinating, mystifying, and ultimately unsettling.

Through their story, I found myself exploring the limits of loyalty, compassion, belief, and forgiveness. 

See what you think.

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | INDIEBOUND

Dust-jacket Preview

Totally thrilled with the design of the dust jacket to my first hardcover novel, coming May 1 from Luminis Books. Click to enlarge.

A Moveable Feast

I've been reading the Additional Paris Sketches in the restored edition and the Forward and the Introduction by Hemingway's son and grandson, Patrick and Sean, respectively.

It's easy to see why the additional sketches were not included before. They're not very good. It's also easy to see why they are included now. They're still pretty interesting even if they're not very good. The really interesting part, though, is comparing edited stories with restored versions: what was gained or lost or regained.

Usually both versions are good in different ways and it's hard to say which is better.

The Fragments included at the end are quite sad, showing Hemingway's repeated attempts to write an introduction to the book. (The previously published introduction was apparently fabricated by Mary Hemingway, his wife at the time.) Though each attempt contains some spark, all in the end fail miserably.

Though people persist in referring to A Moveable Feast as a memoir, Hemingway clearly considered it a work of fiction, saying: "All remembrance of things past is fiction."

Perhaps it should go without saying that memoir is simply a genre of fiction.

Publishing History

My first story was published when I was in the fourth grade. (Mrs. Hughes ran it off on her mimeograph machine and gave a copy to everyone in the class.)

Encouraged, I decided I would become the best writer who ever lived.

I had never heard of Shakespeare.

In the years that have followed, I've toiled as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, copywriter, and ghostwriter.

Now, if enough of you buy my books—Sabrina's Window and Precarious—I promise to leave all that behind and focus on making stuff up for your entertainment.

How I came to write Sabrina's Window

Sabrina's Window is still a mystery to me, even though I wrote it.

I wrote the first few pages years ago, set them aside, and forgot about them. I can't recall how I came across them again, but I picked up the story where I had left off.

I never knew where I was going with it, but scenes came to me one by one in random order. Often I'd wake up early in the morning with a bit of dialogue in my head. I'd play the lines over and over again because I didn't want to get out of bed and I didn't want to forget. Then more lines would come and I'd have to get up and write them down.

Later I decided the story was taking place in Taos, New Mexico, because I've always liked it there. I surrounded myself with postcards, brochures and magazines that my wife and I had collected on our trips there. And I had an evocative water color by Greg Moon, "La Loma II," hanging in the studio where I write.

My soundtrack was The Wheel, a deeply moving album by Rosanne Cash.

At first I thought I was writing a short story, but it just kept getting longer. It took me about a year to write the first draft, and two more years to flesh the whole thing out.

I have always been fascinated by the conflicts that come up between the sexes. The mystery of attraction. Gender roles. Power struggles. Trying to find the right balance. Those are the things I tend to come back to again and again in my writing.

Those are the obsessions I explore through Sabrina's Window.

Sabrina's Window

The boy who broke Sabrina's window stood on the stoop, shivering. This early in the morning it was still chilly here in the high desert, but he seemed scared, too—like he couldn't imagine anything worse than being right where he was, having done what he did.

Those are the opening lines of my novel, Sabrina's Window, which will make its debut in February.

The contract with my publisher, Luminis Books, has been signed and executed, and what makes it all the more real is that I've already seen numerous potential cover designs by the brilliant artist/photographer who did the cover of my story collection.

That would be none other than Joanne Riske.

Quite a coincidence that we share the same last name, eh?

Reader, Interrupted

I recently had the opportunity to read one of my stories, "Skittish," as part of the Peninsula Literary Series.

I was especially glad to be asked because the first time I read the story out loud, in the basement of a small bar in San Francisco, it was a disaster. Live band upstairs. No microphone downstairs.

This would be different. This would be in a quiet art gallery in Palo Alto. Nothing to it.

But noooo ...

I was interrupted, time and again, by someone with a dry hacking cough—a cough that kept getting worse.

I swear I could barely get through three paragraphs before it would start up again ...

HACK! HACK!

The fact that the person coughing was me only made matters worse.

Story Behind the Story: "Men Are Such Boys"

This one is a story about an older woman dating a younger man. "Men Are Such Boys" was written before the term cougar became popular, and I don't think of the woman, Deirdre, as a cougar, which has taken on a derogatory connotation.

This is simply a story about a woman who thinks of all men as boys. Boys in bigger bodies.

In the first few drafts, I cut back and forth between Deirdre's point of view and that of the young man, Randy.

I was quite fond of the story then, but it wasn't getting the response I wanted from readers. Nobody really liked it, and I didn't know why.

I needed to do something, but what?

Then, I don't know why, I decided to present almost the entire story from Deirdre's point of view, then again from Randy's, finally bringing the two viewpoints together for the ending.

That did the trick.

Readers started saying it was my best story yet.

As I told the astute interviewer from Book Club Queen (who got me thinking about this story), I believe it's because you get more uninterrupted time with each character, enough time to bond. And you naturally buy into the first point of view before finding out there's more to the story. That change in perception makes it more interesting, I think.

The Precarious Writing Process

For the most part, the writing process remains a mystery to me, even though I've been doing this for a long time now. My first story was published when I was 10 years old. On a mimeograph machine. By my fourth-grade teacher. (Everyone in the class got a copy, and I signed each one.) I've written a lot of stories since then, including the fifteen in Precarious, but the process is never the same.

That first story was in response to an assignment: Write a story about anything you like. I wrote about a baseball game with an unlikely ending. (I had cast my two best friends as the captains of opposing teams and couldn't decide which should win, so I had an escaped elephant interrupt the proceedings.)

Much later, when I started to get serious about writing, stories came to me in different ways. I didn't have to write them, and yet I did. Looking back, it seems almost as if I had no choice. The ideas never came easily to me. Well, never and always. I couldn't turn out a story at will. I couldn't just decide to write one. But then a story, or the beginnings of a story, would suddenly take shape in my mind. It was easy if I wasn't trying. The story might be inspired by a photograph in a magazine, a song on the radio, a snippet of conversation overhead at lunch. Or it could come, seemingly out of nowhere, in the form of a first sentence.

I almost never know where I’m going with a story. In fact, most of the time, I’m not even conscious of why I’m writing it, unless it's simply to find out what will happen. Invariably I get stuck and don't know. Have no clue. Can't figure it out. The remedy is usually a long walk, a hot bath, or a good night's sleep. In extreme cases I've been forced to leave a story half finished for years, as was the case with both "Taken," which was inspired by a photograph, and "Dance Naked," which was inspired by a true story.

The phrase “inspired by a true story” should always be regarded with suspicion because you never know how much is true. Very little, in this case. But years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I had the chance to cover a murder trial and that’s where I got the idea for “Dance Naked” — two guys fighting over one woman and how ugly that can get. But it’s a much different story than the one I covered. I made up 99.9% of it. And it doesn’t end the way I thought it would.

In some ways, I think, my process is probably similar to what an actor goes through to get into character, drawing upon his own memories and emotions in order to empathize with the person he's portraying—only I get to play all the parts: The hero, the villain, the man, the woman, the faithful friend. On the page, I get to act out lives unlike my own. Not that I consciously think of it as acting. My process is largely unconscious, and a lot of my best stuff comes to me as I'm waking up in the morning, as if from a dream. It's just there and I don't know where it came from.

Originally posted on TSP.

What Does the Word "Story" Mean to You?

I did an interview recently in The Short Review (which also featured A.J. Kirby's insightful review of my story collection, Precarious).

I tried to keep my answers short because that's my strategy to avoid boring people. It's been my strategy since I was in the first grade, but that's another story.

No, that's not fair. I'll tell you.

A classmate asked me what I got for Christmas and I started with the mundane stuff like new pajamas and socks. The kid turned away before I got to the really cool thing, a slot-car set, probably the best present a boy could get back then.

So, lesson learned.

Back here in the future I was asked, “What does the word 'story' mean to you?”

Good question. I had never been asked that before. Never really thought about, either.

I said, “I guess a story is what we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. The stories may not be factual but they are as true as we can make them … or as true as we can stand to make them.”

I left it at that because shorter is always better and because I couldn't remember all the stuff I'd heard about memory not being reliable so we fill in the blanks with whatever makes the most sense and over time that becomes part of our so-called memory.

I also meant to imply that we sometimes make up stories to fool ourselves, but you got that, right?

At a party once, someone asked me, "How many of your stories are based on your own life?"

"Three," I said.

I wouldn't say which three.

The truth is I would have a hard time separating fact from fiction in those stories. Did that happen to me or did I make it up? I'm not sure.

“But,” as Ken Kesey wrote, “it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

Behind the Story: "Just Admit It"

"Just Admit It" is another one of my earliest stories. The first draft was written for a creative writing class when I was in college.

To this day, more than 30 years later, I remember the instructor telling me where the story picked up interest for him, which was about a third of the way into what was then called "The Sinner and the Would-Be Savior."

It was a painful but important lesson that helped to shape everything I've written since then.

In the years that followed, I rewrote the story several times, in the first person, third person, first person, third person. I could never seem to make up my mind which would be better.

As I began to gather my stories into a collection, "Just Admit It" was in, then out, then in again after one final round of changes.

In Precarious, the final version of "Just Admit It" is in the first person, but I suppose I could change it in a future edition. I could even go back to the original title, which I still like, even if it is a bit long.

Then again ...

It's a wonder I finished any of these stories.