If you prefer paper and want to try your luck, 10 autographed copies of the trade paperback version are being given away through Goodreads.com.

Enjoy… and remember.

Lots of great thinking about what makes ideas memorable. A must for the digital age, in which we are flooded with new ideas every day.

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When the JCFFbFP hits the 100 mark, I will open up my geek toolkit, remove two 10-sided dice, and toll up a number between 1 and 100. The corresponding person on the listing of Likes will receive his or her choice of the Beautiful Trade Paperback Edition of either A Death of Honor or The Mushroom Shift, personally autographed by yours truly and shipped with loving care by the United States Postal Service.

In addition, as a JCFFbFP liker, you will get JCF news first! The order things are usually announced is: 1) Facebook Fan Page; 2) this blog right here and my regular Facebook page, usually a week or two later; and 3), my wife, usually when she says, “And when did you plan to tell me about this?”

So click through and Like today! Hey, the odds are better than buying a lottery ticket!

And don’t forget, copies of The Mushroom Shift are also up for grabs in paper and Kindle editions as outlined here.

One of the better 33 1/3 books, although the “historical context” kind of gets left behind at the end.

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“This novel is based on things I saw during 4 1/2 years of working as a Sheriff’s dispatcher,” Faust said. “I saw quite a bit during my time there, from the hilarious to the utterly terrifying, including the loss of officers. Nothing I can do can make up for the sacrifice these men make, but I hope that this effort makes people more aware of the importance of May 15th.”

The Mushroom Shift tells the story of Clarence Raymond Monmouth, a deputy in a small town in Wyoming, who is finishing his third year on the despised Mushroom Shift – midnight to eight a.m. – in the final weeks of 1985. As the year draws to a close, Monmouth comes to realize that the county’s aging Sheriff will soon be succeeded by the political enemy who marooned him on that shift. Survival mode kicks in and he begins to consider his options, interrupted by his crumbling marriage, his drinking, and the never-ending parade of drunk drivers, family fights and perverts that make up small town police work.

The novel is a snapshot of a different world that is not that far in the past, in a time before political correctness. Its theme of men struggling to hang on to their jobs is universal.

Joe Clifford Faust was born in North Dakota, raised in Alberta and Wyoming, went to college in Oklahoma, and now lives in Ohio. He has been married for more than thirty years, has two adult children, and has worked at a local advertising agency since 1997. Besides The Mushroom Shift, he is also reissuing his critically acclaimed science fiction novels under his own imprint, Thief Media.

Faust may be contacted at thiefmedia at gmail dot com for interviews and guest blog posts, and is available to speak to writer’s groups or other organizations live or via Skype.

The Mushroom Shift Links
Amazon Kindle Version (non-affilliate)
Goodreads contest
Facebook Fan Page

Great fun with Leonard’s larger-than-life hero Carl Webster. Ends abruptly, but it still works.

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And he wanted me to write the opening story for the series.

Why me?

Open Space, Issue #1. Lead story by yours truly, set in a bleak near-future.

By that point in my career I had published A Death of Honor and The Company Man, both of which posited rather gloomy near futures and skated near the thin ice that could plunge one into cyberpunk (although I never considered them that, many readers did – after I thought about it, I suppose they were pre-cyberpunk in a way).

So over the ensuing years, you might wonder how some of my near-future predictions came out, seeing as how we just passed the 25th anniversary of the publication of Honor. Answer is, there were some things here and there in both books that kind of hit near some marks if you stretched it a bit.

But nothing like what has been happening in the past few months with the Pembroke Hall novels.

It all started in December, when an article appeared in Forbes online, accompanied by a couple of remarkable videos. The title was “Nanotechnology May Lead To The End Of Laundry“, and I’m certain that a lot of people thought it was gosh-wow — except for the people who had read Ferman’s Devils and/or Boddekker’s Demons during the fifteen minutes they were in print.

One of the conceits in those novels was a laundry soap that used nanotechnology to not just ultra-clean clothing, but actually repaired it as well. It seems that by the time the author was writing those novels in the mid-1990s, he had seen a lot of preachifying about how nanotech was going to save the world by disassembling toxic chemicals at the molecular level and save lives by repairing heart valves without surgery, and so on. He realized these things were noble indeed, but that somebody was going to figure out how to make big bucks with the technology by making it do something mundane. And here we are:

And…

Now I had a friend who really needed a new heart valve a couple of years ago, and when local hospitals gave him the kiss off because he was self-insured, he went to India to have the retread work done. And I was left wondering, where was his nano-laced pill that would take care of that? Hmmm, seems the nano folks got to the making a buck part of the program before nobility could rear its head.

But I digress.

Back to the point. That was pretty strange, to see something like that happen, nearly a dozen years after the book came out. But then something else caught my eye yesterday – a story from the London Telegraph saying that Paul McCartney’s son James is mulling over putting a band together with the sons of the other Beatles. Hey, I can’t make this stuff up.

Nanos that do laundry, Beatles: The Next Generation, and a crumbling culture - they're all here.

Was I trying to wishfully think when I wrote that into the novel? No. I was making fun of our popular culture. It was, after all, the beginning of an era when artists began keeping their moribund careers alive by releasing sequels to hit albums of the past (the latest? Ian Anderson’s Thick as a Brick 2. Seriously.). Maybe in retrospect I shouldn’t have done it. Pop culture is just too easy of a target. I don’t know.

Whether Beatles 2.0 comes off or not remains to be seen, but these things have made for a weird couple of months for me. Before you go calling me Nostradamus or anything like that, remember that there’s lots of other stuff in those two novels that hasn’t happened, like thugs becoming media stars. Everyone knows that commercial actors aren’t thugs. Those are all found in the NFL and NBA.

Seriously again, I don’t know what to make of this. They say things happen in threes, so maybe I will ignore this trend until one more thing like this pops up – when and if. So I guess I’ll try not to be too unnerved until the other other shoe drops.

Meantime, if you want to catch up on this tale, I’m scheduled to have the Author’s Intended Version of Ferman’s Devils – ready for release just over a year from now. Maybe sooner if I can get those pesky Angel’s Luck books out of the way. If you want to check them out sooner, check the used section of Amazon or on eBay.

And for you few who read the book, here’s something that may keep you up at night: According to my calculations, Boddekker is now an eight year-old.

A good thing I didn’t fix all of the posts that had the glitch.

Now that I know about the issue, when I have time to sit down and fix it, I will turn off RSS for the duration and keep your news feeds clear of re-runs.

In the meantime, the Kindle version of The Company Man has completed the coding process and is undergoing the first wave of corrections and proofing. Look for it and a trade paperback version of same sometime later this month, hopefully.

And look for a preview of the cover art in these pages soon.

Interesting look at the history of Free in merchandising and its implementation in the information age. Take heed!

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