J.S. Clark is the creative mind behind the Evangeline series. Writing since he was a child, J.S. now owns his own farm but has still found the time to pump out Evangeline’s sequel, Stardust & Mirrors, the cover of which he designed himself. What We Reading sat down with J.S. to talk about everything from his writing journey, the influences on his work, designing his own book cover, to the role of AI in the literary world.
Thanks for speaking with us, J.S.! First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.
Well, I’m a 41-year-old, husband, and father of the-internet-doesn’t-need-to-know-the-number of children, who are all super awesome. When I’m not writing, I’m expanding our own market garden (a multi-crop mini-farm), delivering products for another farm, or driving a school bus. I’ve been to Iraq as a Marine NCO and been a small-town cop in two Ohio villages, yet have oddly few exciting stories from either experience. At least, my travels have helped me figure out that I am definitely a country mouse, though I do make it into the city to visit synagogue a couple of times a month.
As for my writing occupation, I’ve been known to give the “hot take” (as I sling my cool kids’ lingo) that it’s okay to be a writer who doesn’t read much. It’s not that I’m a snob. Just if you caught the word “farm” above, you know time is a scarce commodity. Still, I probably did get started because of HG Wells and War of the Worlds. To this day, I maintain that novel has the best opening prose I have ever read.
My writing began as really, childish, derivative stuff—I was probably about nine or ten. I got sidetracked with making movies for a bit, but since I couldn’t do the kind of effects my stories wanted, I turned to writing. At about eleven, I got 120 pages into a story that blended War of the Worlds, the Borg, the T-1000, and maybe a little bit of a Tailspin. In my late teens to earliest twenties, I finally completed a novel and then three more in a series: this was my Dragonball Z meets Lord of the Rings meets Narnia-style allegory phase. I rewrote that series a time or two, but eventually realized it was rubbish. My next was actually pretty decent, but too dark for me: a vampire-werewolf-dragon story.
The Marine Corps came after that, and I didn’t write for a bit. Too busy? Too distracted? No story idea? Something. Then one night on barracks watch, it came to me . . . what if trees attacked? That became New Arbor Day, my first self-published novel. It’s not terrible, but I did unpublish it as I began my journey to Judaism. But what a shocker on that story; A month or so back, I had the idea for the sequel I had always wanted to write for NAD. Think: post-apocalyptic gangster horror with superheroes. I’m pretty stoked. But obviously, I have to retcon and republish the prequel, and I have about eight other projects vying for attention.
Most recently – not counting my non-fiction, memoir about coming to Judaism – came my story I remain proud of years after it’s been a freebird, Evangeline.
Talk to us about Stardust & Mirrors. It’s the follow-up to your previous work, Evangeline, right?
I have to keep asking my readers for forgiveness as it’s been eight years since Evangeline. I’m just a slow writer. The farm certainly didn’t make things easier, but please believe me, I have found a rhythm that seems to be accelerating my process.
Evangeline follows the young lady of the title, pushed out of her depth when her father, the Emperor Reynaud dies unexpectedly from an alien virus. The throne goes to Evangeline’s beloved brother, only for him to be assassinated before his coronation. The organization behind the killing wants her on the throne, believing her controllable. Meanwhile, the empire’s enemy of the last three hundred years is showing fresh belligerence. Into this storm of intrigue and her own frayed emotions, arrives her new guardian, a genetically engineered, cybernetically enhanced, tactician and walking lie detector. Also, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order. Without giving away too much, plasma and bullets will fly, worlds will be threatened, and subtle tender hopes will be hinted at.
Stardust & Mirrors takes place around two years after Evangeline. The situation with the Bellanois, that old enemy, has deteriorated to the point of open war. The supremacy of the empire’s fleet is threatened by a new generation of ships and weapons. Diplomatic channels have been shut. Evangeline must turn to someone who can track down Hekelen of Dafare and bring him back to the table: Duncan Blackburn, a human that someone has taken pains to erase from imperial records, possessor of technology that makes imperial and confederate power look rustic, and someone with a deep loathing of the empire.
She would never trust the man, except that for all his flaws, he won’t leave millions to die in a war between the galaxy’s two great powers. He takes up the mantle of back channels negotiator – on his own terms, of course – but he’ll need some help from the dismissed, persona non grata, Evangeline’s former guardian. And wouldn’t you know it, along with the clone, comes the sometimes-blond, mercenary with a target on her back who once hunted Duncan—but that was old times, right? This may be more adventure than even he can handle.
We saw you have been on a bit of a creative journey doing the artwork for the book too? Talk to us about that experience.
It has been fascinating! It started because my old cover designer was unable to take a new commission (though she is helping me around the edges). I firmly believe that every person has a much higher capacity to learn and to do than they estimate for themselves. You can teach yourself new things. There was a time before I wrote and a time before I wrote well. Now, I do both. I didn’t know how to milk a goat before about a year ago. I had never built a barn. I never did police work before. I had to self-teach Hebrew. We all have first times and we have tremendous ability to cultivate new knowledge and skills.
So, why not learn how to make my own covers? Starting by painting with acrylic for the first time ever. It’ll be finnnneee. I asked around a bit, and I watched some YouTube’s, but the best thing I learned was to lean on experience. Many of us never took a photography course or a real art course, but we know a good photo when we see one. We know a rockin’ poster when we see it. Tastes vary, but we know there’s something there.
The key is to unlock the why. My first couple drafts of Stardust’s cover fell flat. I had sketched a scene from the book (or close to it). I wasn’t expecting a finished product like a seasoned artist (I am confident, not flaming arrogant), so I felt the sketch was good enough. But when I showed it around people kept asking about the moth. Which was strange as there was no moth. The ship was their moth.
I thought of making it bigger, big enough to show people in the cockpit—how else do you show that it’s a ship? But I didn’t have the skill to make that work and preserve other important elements. Learning to self-teach is learning to study. I went to the shelf and pulled down Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Children of the Mind. How did Orson Scott Card’s illustrator make a ship be a ship? Duh! Make it fly! How do you know it’s flying? It casts a shadow! Other observations: use of complementary colours to make them really pop, and use light to divide the page and to draw the eye.
These aren’t particularly brilliant, but I realized that in the process of making the artwork I was learning to dissect what I was seeing: why did this do what it did? Notice how light doesn’t reflect across a whole surface but in a swatch toward the POV? Do things in the distance darken or rather dissolve to grey? We do this as writers: if I change the paragraph size, I change the pace. Make voices differ by word choice. If I put the chapter break, here, it urges the reader to keep going. The same type of mental processes that we use to analyse what works or doesn’t in writing can be applied to any art or really anything.
I think this is one of the biggest dangers of AI. In the process of creating, we are actually practising the art of observation and analysis. If you let the AI make a picture or a piece of a story, you short-circuit your learning to observe and analyse.
“I firmly believe that every person has a much higher capacity to learn and to do than they estimate for themselves. You can teach yourself new things.”
What is the number one goal you want Stardust & Mirrors to hit with readers?
I thought of something lofty, but I called BS on myself. I do want the reader to feel the world of Evangeline grew intelligently and compellingly and that it inspires them to want to be a better person.
But really at my gut level, I want something much simpler and basic: I want them to read a story that is smart and substantive and that makes them want more from me. Because if that doesn’t happen, they’re not going to tell their friends. I just want to be a good part of their reading lives, all the rest will depend on that.
If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?
At the moment, Jurassic Park. I feel like it was over my head. I was reading it just to be grown up (and earlier episode of this phenomenon was me reading The Three Musketeers. All I remember was that it was not like the Disney version.) But the movie is so intelligent – well, at least contemplative.
I mean, there are some great questions that are being wrestled with, juxtaposed with wouldn’t Muldoon know that bullets travel over distance? You blow the one raptor away and then you don’t send Elly off alone. You go with her. You don’t have to bring the gun to the target. That’s not how guns work. Which is sad because of all the characters in the movie, Muldoon has his priorities straight from scene one. Next, he offs the second raptor that tries to come through the conduits. With Elly, he makes it back into the bunker, he then waxes the two other raptors as they try to enter the control room or in the close confines of the hallways. Easy peasy.
Of course . . . then there wouldn’t be any chew toys for the T-Rex when the five-ton beast stealthily sneaky sneaks into the open lobby. And of course, after the storm, we wonder why no one radios the chopper pilot that’s sitting there at the end of the movie to “Please, search the island and pick up the kids, bring them over here, and then air-evac us, too. Thank you, kindly.”
Where was I . . . oh, yes, intelligent story. So, I want to go back and re-read the book. Then the sequel (it can’t be as bad as the movie, can it?). And then more Crichton in general.
What do you think is the biggest obstacle facing independent and aspiring authors these days?
Well, AI would be the easy answer, but that’s a distraction. AI is just the next level of the Industrial Revolution. The pursuit of ease and convenience. Writers are abuzz with the idea that easy and convenient should be locked (for our convenience, HAHA!) at the place where we can publish our books with the click of a mouse to anyone in the world. That easy = good. And it should not go beyond, to where writers and artists skip the work of writing tedious or difficult scenes and risk poor craftsmanship (if you don’t want to write it, why are you putting it in the book) by having a machine do that heavy work. That easy = bad.
This is no different than the farmer who relies on a mass-manufactured tool for his small farm and then complains that industrial farming goes too far. They are just different stages of the same thing: the pursuit of less work.
When the topic comes up, I suggest what we need to do is cultivate our personal selling game. Go to local bookstores, fairs, festivals. If the other farmer is going industrial, become a community-supported agricultural provider: become a market gardener (of books).
I’m told this is too much work. You see the problem? The very philosophy that drives AI is the very thing we are doing. We just don’t want to work. And we just think we should all be able to sit in our coffee shops spinning tales with our keyboards and money just flows into our bank account without ever having to break a sweat. I’m told it’s not fair to say that artists have always been starving and therefore, they will keep on starving because that’s the nature of the artist. It’s not fair to tell someone that this is 99 out of 100 times going to be a side job, a work that you love, but you’ll have to keep your day job. Too much work.
But intelligent stories is my brand. So let me corrupt you with a little logic. If there are millions of writers, now, who all have access (even without AI) to an easy click-make-money publishing, then how many books do you think each can sell? You got 8 billion people. Suppose a quarter of them can and do actually read for fun: 2 billion. Maybe 75% read in your language if it’s English: 1.5 billion.
A tenth of those are actually in your demographic: 150 million. There are a gazillion books already out there and a gazillion more on the way. You’ve got classics. Big name authors. Books with AI art. Books with just a name on a spine. Books that are in front of you in the social media ad queue. On and on. You think each of those millions of aspiring artists is going to sell enough to cover a full-time job? Then you just might be the demographic for the movie: The Lost World.
The truth is. This is a side job. It’s one of many income streams that you’ll have. It will require work to be successful, and in the age of AI, it’s the human connections that are going to make your book stand out from someone else’s. Go to fairs. Hawk your wares. Make them associate a book with a person and shared humanity. You’ll be happier if you accept that, like everyone else on the planet, you have to work.
On the plus side. I think the drive to write is so strong that most will keep typing away despite bleak “odds”. Just trying to tie off the needless frustration.
“When the topic comes up, I suggest what we need to do is cultivate our personal selling game. Go to local bookstores, fairs, festivals. If the other farmer is going industrial, become a community-supported agricultural provider: become a market gardener (of books).”
If you could go back in time and give your younger self one tip, what would it be?
Leave no white space. During, WWII, paper was so rationed that C.S. Lewis would tear off margins, scraps, tear up envelopes, whatever to have something to write on. Applied to my younger self-life, I would spend less time hanging out, channel surfing, and chasing my collection of Toho Godzilla movies and anime. I had certain ideas about how my life was going to be. I imagined that my good friends and I would all arrange to live in the same town and always be friends. Then, one by one, everyone went off chasing careers. What was I supposed to do? Chase them all? I couldn’t think of a career that I wanted to do more than have the company of friends. So, I wasted time not knowing what to do, what path to pursue.
But, I feel like if I had kept my foot on the gas, I would have found out more quickly what I was supposed to do. Instead, I watched movies and played games. I don’t think entertainment was the problem (obviously, I want my own stories to be entertaining), but most of it is empty distraction that doesn’t cultivate deeper thoughts. It’s not that entertainment or frivolity is always bad, but it’s like it numbs you to the fact that you are wasting potential.
Like Shaun of the Dead. Honestly, that movie so resonates with me. Here’s a guy who’s just not using his life. He’s just directionless. Idling. Lots of white paper on the page. It’s as if entertainment can be so “entertaining” that you stop stretching yourself. Not using muscles makes them weak. Using them makes them strong so the heavy becomes light. It’s like that with life. Frivolity/entertainment is just consumerism applied to experience. Just taking in, never learning how great you could become. Grow yourself. Use yourself. Do everything for intention.
And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?
Well, I’ve got a lot more books in me. There’s the end of the Evangeline trilogy, probably a dark spinoff, and possibly another trilogy.
Then I’ve got a really exciting dystopian novel whose sequel is a Robinson Crusoe in space with Greek monsters, whose sequel is a claustrophobic horror with romance, whose sequel is a completely banana pants Mission: Impossible meets Scanners, whose sequel is a less banana pants Mission: Impossible plus love story, whose sequel is a broken home love story set in the wintery end of the Earth, whose sequel is It’s a Wonderful Life meets the Abyss, whose sequel is unknown.
Meanwhile, I started a YA fantasy series because of my undisclosed number of children. Super stoked. It’s kind of based on the idea that for most of the world, for most of history, teenagers were treated as actual young adults. I mean, Old Yeller, the term “infant-ry”, Treasure Island… The residuals are all around us. Bar Mitzvahs are at 13. We have a special term “teenager” that says they’re no longer just a child. So, my teenage main characters are definitely capable young adults.
They make bad decisions but for reasons of inexperience and that they’ve got character to grow, but not because they’re just going through an elastic childhood. They’ll face questions of responsibility, consequences for stupidity and character flaws, monsters will be fought, goats will be milked, bread will be baked, dishes will be done, chickens will be smashed. Knife fights, travels, young women who want to be wives and mothers, young men who want to be husbands and fathers, how to improvise soap, haggling, This story has it all.
But true to my own view. I work a farm and writing is my side work. Winter is my “writing season”, but it’s a lot easier to borrow time from the family when I can make some honest coin for the effort. So, I hope to sell more books online, but also to appear at GalaxyCon Columbus with Stardust & Mirrors, and any other fair or festival that looks like I could make some ROI for the family (so long as it’s not on Shabbos).
All the best, to you and your readers!
Check out all of J.S.’ work at his website or on Twitter/X
Check out our interview with author Paul R Somerville
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
