I’ve spent much of the last six months promoting Greg Scarpa, Legendary Evil, my first work of nonfiction. So far, so good. Sales have been steady, the book was a 2025 Independent Author Network Book of the Year finalist, and the detailed reviews of the book have been solid. From time to time during those six months I’ve posted links to some of my eleven pieces of fiction too. I suppose most if not all authors experience varying degrees of attachment to their works. I know that I do. Selecting one or more as the work I’m most fond of feels a bit like choosing a favorite child. Fortunately, unlike children, books can’t take my greater attachment for one or more over the others personally. In my case, two are more important to me than the other nine. Judging Paradise and A String of Beads. They are my most serious works of fiction. By that I mean I worked harder on the two than I did on any others. And I consider both of them to be as close as I’ve come to literature.
Judging Paradise started as an enormous, rambling, self-conscious, undisciplined tale based on my having lived for six months on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was the first book I’d ever written and I considered that, in and of itself, an accomplishment. It took years to get it into its current shape. One of the best pieces of advice I received on what was probably the fifth or sixth draft was, “Less Faulkner, more Hemingway.” Eventually, I pared the book down to its current novella size. The result is a good deal of the best writing I have ever managed. It’s not an easy read. It’s admittedly dense, a result of my quest to eliminate fluff where I found it no matter how enamored I was of it.
A String of Beads is a different animal. It started out as my attempt to write a murder mystery. When I finally reconciled myself to the fact that I lacked the skillset for such a book, I set what I’d written aside thinking I’d never return to it. When I did go back to it I realized that instead of writing a cohesive book, I’d been writing loosely related short stories. I dove back into the work, adding stories that came to me as I worked through it, discarding others. The result is my only effort at producing such a collection. I explain in the book’s preface that the stories do not constitute a comprehensive tale, that they each stand alone although they can also be read with reference, and no more, to each other. I realized too late that few people read a book’s preface. The result has been confusion for some readers. They view the stories instead as chapters and are put off when there are gaps in what they view to be the emerging story or when the details from one story to the next seem inconsistent to them. That result notwithstanding, I have an enormous affection for the stories in A Sting of Beads. They each spring from a deeply personal and often jarring view of the world articulated through fiction.
Both books were hiding in earlier poorly executed attempts. They were both encrusted gems, obscured by mistaken impulses of ill-fitting creativity. And they have both delighted me for years since their final form was realized. I suspect they will continue to do so for years to come. Finally, as to both books, I am thoroughly satisfied with my efforts, a stunning admission given my relentless anxiety about my abilities.
