Gary Paul Corcoran

A: It certainly wasn’t the way I had planned my life. My dream had been to become a foreign correspondent so I took typing, journalism and French in high school, among my other studies. Then the Vietnam War intruded. I will admit to being rash about the whole thing, but my draft number came up low in the lottery, I received a notice of induction two weeks after my nineteenth birthday and that was that. Most people went to Canada. I went to Hawaii, a lovely, yearlong sojourn that led to an acquaintance with a fellow rebel, a return to Tucson, where he grew up, and our smuggling misadventures. In my defense, the allure of great fortunes to a man on the run cannot be overstated. My partner and I had plans to start a restaurant and bar down on the Pacific coast of Mexico and live like kings. Instead we ended up in a Mexican prison. When I returned to the States, the ‘Vietnamization’ of the war had begun, along with a lowering of the associated paranoia, but it wasn’t until President Carter issued his blanket pardon that I finally felt like I could walk down the streets of America without looking over my shoulder. Suffice it to say, it altered the course of my life.

A: Oh, sure. Throughout my twenties, I took classes at this and that junior college, probably enough to have earned an associate’s degree, but I was simply too restless a soul back then to sit in a classroom for long. As to education in general, I have come to conclude over the years that my extensive reading and life experiences are at minimum equivalent to a master’s degree. I base that on the people I meet with college degrees. Most of them with bachelor’s degrees, you wouldn’t know they had been to college, whereas, with a master’s degree, you begin to see how a clear worldview has taken shape. That to me is the whole point of learning. To get grounded in both this universe and your particular place in it.

A: Ever the rebel and iconoclast at heart. I say that with all due seriousness. I forever find myself outside the herd and looking in. Which is a healthy place to be, at least for this writer. If you remain in lockstep with prevailing views, you really have nothing to offer the rest of the herd. It’s the mythic journey. If no one ever goes off to have the ‘other’ experiences, the communal wisdom is just on loop.

A: From a very early age I was attracted to adventure stories. Stevenson. Kipling. Jack London. One thing London said stuck with me. Read history and science. Learn about the world and it will enrich your writing. Sage advice. In the sixties, I fell into a lot of the pop culture stuff of my generation. Tolkien, Vonnegut. Themes meant more to me than the actual craft. Then I went back to read some of it again after I began to write seriously and it did not hold up well. Tom Robbins in particular really seemed to stink with age. It was great on drugs, not so much without them. Somewhere in my youth, I got turned on to Raymond Chandler and spent a year reading everything he and Hammett and Ross McDonald had written. I did a search once for the 100 greatest novels of all time and found most of it bored me. Things like Stendhal’s The Black And The Red. It’s just not my cup of tea. I’m here to tell stories, not offer dissertations. Ultimately, I read Hemingway, which I had not done beyond The Old Man And The Sea for a book report in high school. I found absorbing his work very useful, before the booze took over. And that led me to reading the Russians. You can follow a thread from there right up through Hemingway and the rest. You throw too many words at the reader and you get in the way of the imagination. A map should not be mistaken for the terrain, and words should not be mistaken for reality. They are there to suggest and stir up the imagination. I would be remiss if I failed to mention Bukowski. You can say he was a horrid man in many ways, but I’ve never known a more honest writer. Early on in my own efforts as an author, I read Ham On Rye and the man became my touchstone to honesty forever after. It is a great long struggle for anyone to become a good wordsmith, but if you don’t arrive at some point where you realize, writing is just a truth serum, then I think you have missed the point.

A: Well, going back to those early years, bumming around Europe, living in Hawaii and crisscrossing the States, I had earned my way as a cook and chef’s helper. When I got back from that sojourn in the Mexican prison, I fell into a cottage business with an old friend from high school, making hippie leather goods. Then I was back on the road for several years, during which time I fell into another business, that of taking down old barns and selling the wood to homeowners and businesses. And that led me to learning the craft of carpentry. Which I truly enjoyed for a number of years. The working outside, the rough and tumble camaraderie amongst men, the sense of pride that came from building up something from scratch. All that together had led me to buying a home up in the Pacific Northwest, and it was while driving back down to California one year that I had a burning bush moment. ‘What would I be doing, if I was doing what I really, really wanted to do?’ And there was never a moment’s hesitation as to the answer. Why, I’d be writing, of course. And so the journey began.

A: Well, I’d like to say that it was a straight line from there, but there don’t appear to be any straight lines in my life, including my journey as a writer. My first impulse was to write a screenplay so I started blocking out the story scene by scene on 3X5 cards and pinning them in a line around my office walls. You could spin around in your chair in the center of the room and see the whole movie. It was an historical saga that I ultimately dragged around with me in manuscript form for two years, and that went absolutely nowhere. It was three years from that original burning bush moment to when I finally settled down to write my first novel. The important thing was, the passion for writing had gotten its claws into me and I’ve never lost that passion since.

A: Because it was a great story to tell. By this point, I had divested myself of virtually all my earthly belongings and was living in a 3rd story flat in an old historical building in Bellingham, Washington. Lovely place to write. A view of Mt. Baker and the San Juan Islands, with a commercial harbor in the near distance and a train switching station right across the street. The engineers would start banging box cars around about four in the afternoon, and literally shake the walls in doing so. Then, as night settled in, the train would head south and you’d hear that lonesome whistle blow far off in the distance as the train made its way over Chuckanut Mountain. It was there in Bellingham that I met an older gentleman and fellow writer who told me to write what I was enthusiastic about. And of course that story about my incarceration came to mind. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that I had the Mexican version of The Midnight Express on my hands. Mind you, I was learning to write prose, learning to write a novel and figuring out how to write that particular book. But the natural storyteller in me soon came out and the story evolved into an epic, coming of age saga set in the sixties, with the prison experience as a crucible through which the protagonist passes from youth into manhood. I should mention. There was a moment, maybe two, three weeks into writing that novel, when I felt a spectral light in the room around me, and it came with a profound sense of realization. I’m finally doing what I’m supposed to be doing in this world.

A: Oh, that’s another saga, but an illuminating one. I had received an offer of publication in 2004 for Milky Way, and of course it came with the commensurate shout heard across the world. I had enough rejection letters on hand by this point to cover a wall, so when someone calls you out of the blue and says they’d like to publish your novel, you’re walking on air. Then I began to see what happens when someone else takes control of your intellectual property. From the end of 2004, when I received that offer, to when the novel was finally published in January, 2007 two, long excruciating years of frustration passed by, in which someone else now had editorial discretion over my work. Plus, it was a small imprint without the wherewithal to really promote the book properly. No book tours. No book signings and virtually no promotion. I spent more on publicity than the owner did. So lesson learned. Unless someone is ready to hit you with a six figure advance, you may as well publish it yourself. Or so I feel.

A: Okay, in order, The Last Love Of Eleanor Sands was based on a love affair I had with one of my college professors. It is set in the early ‘70s and is a bittersweet tale of love undone by the vagaries of time. South On Pacific Coast Highway is my loving ode to the hardboiled detective writers of my youth, like Raymond Chandler, and a romp through the Southern California landscape, with a haunting love story and a handful of dead bodies thrown in for good measure. The Tribe was my answer to the unending barrage of requests I had been receiving at the time, wanting to know if I could write a ‘billionaire’ love story like Fifty Shades of Grey. I thought, really? Someone hands you a billion dollars and that’s all you can make of it? The Tribe became my perhaps misguided imagining of a man’s perhaps misguided effort to save the world with the billions of dollars he has inherited from his father. It’s Always Christmastime In Cratchitville is a fairytale about life’s illusions. Postmark: Paris ─ Destination: Unknown was based on my adventures vagabonding about Europe as a young man. Love In A Dying World is my sequel to South On Pacific Coast Highway, with more dead bodies and another romp across the Southern California landscape. The Twelve Commandment is the story of retired special forces op who becomes obsessed with exacting revenge on an ISIS warlord for beheading someone dear to him. And my most recent title, Afghan’s Lipstick Warriors: First Chronicle, tells the story of a band of women who decide to take up arms against the Taliban, rather than submit to their tyranny. It is told in the 3^rd person and incorporates several points of view, from these women warriors to the US forces to CIA and State and the Afghan government.

A: After finishing Lipstick Warriors, I went back to read through the fifteen or so novels I had started over the years and settled on finishing one I will call The Death Of A Ghostwriter. Per the title, it’s a thriller based on my many experiences in that field. I was confronted with everything from the hilarious to the absurd to clients actually warning me that my life would be in danger if I got involved in their project. I already had over 50,000 words in the manuscript and had quickly added another 10,000 or so when another thought struck me. What I really need to do right now is write a sequel to Lipstick Warriors. The fate of the Afghan women truly has its claws in me. And with events evolving so quickly over there, all you have to do is let the daily news write the story for you. With the collapse of the Afghan government seemingly imminent, the current working title is Afghan’s Lipstick Warriors: Darkness Falls. Anyway, I’m hard at it and shooting for a December, 2021 publication date.