Author Archives: Josh

Life is largely about trade-offs. Take the metal shop I work in, for example: Sure it’s heavy, dirty, sweaty manual labor without air conditioning (and my coworkers tell me that I haven’t even experienced a truly hot day there yet), but on the flipside, I can listen to my MP3 player all day. This means I listen to a lot of music, of course, but even moreso that I can seriously crank through some audiobooks during my workdays. My reading tastes are pretty eclectic, but mostly these days I’m leaning toward a lot of old public domain books these days– some merely for my own enjoyment (pulp sci-fi and gothic horror like Uller Uprising and Carmilla, children’s fantasy like The Princess and The Goblin and Pinocchio, and sweeping literary epics like David Copperfield), but some that I feel like I should read simply because they’re good for me, regardless of whether or not I find them entertaining. While running a saw, I’m a pretty captive audience, and have managed over the past several months to get through several long classics that I may not have had the patience for had I been simply reading them (The Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy are a couple of examples). Over the past week or so I’ve been listening to The Federalist Papers, which definitely fall into the latter of these two categories.

If you’re not familiar with The Federalist Papers, they were a series of essays written primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison which provided a logical foundation and defense of the original United States constitution. My feelings while reading these were a little mixed– On one hand I feel like I have at least a little better appreciation for the work America’s founding fathers did to get this nation started up, but on the other hand, let’s be honest, they weren’t exactly a thrill a minute. Loaded with important but boring details on various aspects of taxation, foreign and domestic policy, this was definitely a “eat my vegetables” kind of book. Attempting to come up with a comprehensive review of all the content covered would be difficult, but I would like to share a few of my reactions which, while probably not earth-shattering, are worth mentioning here.

1. The USA is a pretty incredible thing.

As a guy who’s grown up under the red, white, and blue, it’s easy to often take America and our way of doing things as kind of a given. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case– that in fact, in the scheme of world history, the American experiment is still relatively young. A large portion of The Federalist Papers is spent essentially arguing in this manner (paraphrase) “We have this idea for a thing we’ll call America. Here’s a few reasons people say it won’t work, and here’s why they’re wrong.” The mere idea that the constitution, and, for that matter, the union itself, had such fierce dissenters in the early post-revolution days was surprising to me, and showed me afresh how cool it is that our country was even founded at all.

2. The founding fathers were men of both forethought and gutsy action.

This is related, I suppose, to my first thought, but it’s worth elaborating on here. These essays are full of well-reasoned arguments on all sorts of subjects. The forefathers strike me as both optimists and realists; they expected to see the best from the people of America, but specifically set up systems to guard against the pitfalls of human nature. At the same time, though, they recognized that they were starting something new and that there would inevitably be kinks to work out along the way, but, rather than waiting till everything was perfect (which would be never) they saw value in stepping out boldly. That took courage.

3. In general, people are dumber today (?)

If I’ve not made it clear by this point, The Federalist Papers were not an easy read. I struggled through portions of them, and I like to consider myself pretty astute when it comes to literary matters. However, these essays, initially printed in Newspapers, were initially intended for an audience of average New York farmers. I wonder how well the average U.S. citizen today would do at reading through this material.

4. America has come a long way… but not all necessarily good.

Obviously, this country has grown and evolved since these papers were written. While our constitution remains, our government and population have changed. Some of these changes are great… some not so great. I won’t elaborate too much on this (I’ve already gone on too long and I generally find political debates distasteful), but I do wonder what the founding fathers would think if they were to see the way American government is run today. Would they even recognize it? Sometimes I wonder, and never more than as I read (listened) through their initial plans.

Publias.

I’m trying to devise a good method for linking to Pantheon reviews from my web site—something easy and unobtrusive that wouldn’t clutter things up. In the mean time, I suppose it’s enough to state I’ve been honored by a very positive response to the book thus far (if you’ve not checked it out yet, there’s no time like the present). It makes me glad to see that people are enjoying the story and able to connect with its larger themes in a meaningful way.

The real reason I bring all this up, though, is to draw your attention to one specific review, posted on the Black Gate Fantasy blog (here). The opening words of reviewer Michaele Jordan made me laugh because, although we’ve never met, she seems to understand at least a part of my personality in a pretty fundamental way. “Josh Strnad does not look like a horror writer,” she writes. “He’s not dark and brooding, or dressed in black leather. Rather, he’s young and blond, fresh faced and apple-cheeked. He looks like he just came straight from a Wisconsin dairy farm. (And for all I know, he did.) Yet he writes horror. It says so right there on his website.”

She’s right, of course. Although Pantheon is fantasy, not horror, a good deal of my writing (especially in regards to my short fiction) does tend to lean toward darker subject matter… which is weird because I’m not a particularly dark person. In fact, if you had told me as recently as four or five years ago that I would cut my writing teeth (or fangs, if you prefer) crafting stories for horror markets, I may not have believed you. Unlike the popular image conjured when one thinks of the horror genre, I’m not big on gory movies (I’m more a fan of Pixar), I’ve never dabbled in the occult (I’m a committed Christian), and I don’t spend large portions of my time brooding over the subject of death (despair for its own sake doesn’t do a lot for me). I don’t even actively celebrate Halloween, for crying out loud. I am as unlikely a candidate for horror fiction as they come.

And yet… this is the genre that I’ve chosen, or perhaps the one that has chosen me. I love speculative fiction in all its many stripes, sci-fi, fantasy, and, yes, horror. Something about it speaks to me in a special way—I love the ability to look at reality and deeply human truths through the lens of the fantastic, to strip away the commonplace associations in order to see things, perhaps, as they really are. The truth of the matter is that I do enjoy a good creepy story, and, furthermore, that horror seems to have a way of tackling interesting philosophical issues that other genres may not be as good at. In fact, I find horror fiction at its best to be a profoundly moral genre (I’ll probably write more on this subject at a later date). On that note, my experiences with the indie horror writing community have been overwhelmingly positive—there are many remarkable, kind, friendly, funny, intelligent people who, like me, enjoy and participate in the creation of dark fiction.

So here I am: a country boy who is also an unapologetic geek, a blue-collar worker with a 4.0 gpa in his Masters-level classes, a man who teaches children and writes for an adult audience, a Christian who is comfortable to be associated with dark fiction. I suppose this makes me a walking contradiction, but I’ve long since made my peace with that. I’m convinced that nobody is just one thing—there is much more to each of us than meets the eye. Let’s have a conversation and get to know each other. Just don’t put me in a box, because you’ll most likely be surprised.

Well, school’s finally out—if not forever as Alice Cooper famously claimed (next fall I’ll be starting it all again), then at least for the summer. While high school kids and teachers still have a few more weeks left, I’m glad to have turned my final projects in and am looking forward to a couple of months of relative rest. This’ll be the first summer since I started grad school where I won’t be taking any summer classes, so I ought to (ahem) have more chances to update this blog regularly.

The past semester was a doozey, not in terms of my school workload per-say (which was heavy, but pretty standard for grad school) but in the combination of full-time school, more-or-less full-time work at the metal shop, and in the editing and publication of Pantheon. (Which, by the bye, if you haven’t bought it yet, you should. Click the link up near the top of this page. All the cool kids are doing it.) I’ve been running on pretty much all cylinders since early January, so having my commitments drop away one by one has been pretty satisfying. Work at the shop even came to a screeching halt this week (due to a broken welding gun) which has left me with essentially no responsibilities for the past several days. I’ve actually had time to read some things just for fun (a big deal for a student), play some computer games (unheard of when there’s homework to be done), begin exercising again, fiddle with my keytar, tidy up my desk area, and resume work on my children’s book illustration project (10 pictures completed, 6 more to go). In short, I’m breathing a lot easier these days.

Next step: get a teaching job for the fall. I’m sure that I’ll find one (I’m fully qualified now that my license has come in), but I’m not entirely sure where yet. Most schools are just now beginning to post their upcoming openings to the internet, so as they appear I’m applying to them. As I said, I’m not certain where I’ll wind up, but I’m confident that God will place me in the school where He wants me to be. I’m looking forward to having a classroom of my own at last.

Also, over the summer, I intend to work more on personal writing projects (another luxury I can’t allow myself when I have papers and forum posts to write for school). This blog will be an iteration of that, of course, but I also intend to crank out a few new short stories and put some serious hours into my next novel. More on that in the future.

It’s nice to have the chance to dig into those kinds of things again.

Whew. It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. Between full-time work, full-time grad school, and editing my novel, I haven’t had a lot of time for things like blogging. If I eat, sleep, and shower within a 24 hour period these days, I count that as a pretty good day.

Even this isn’t a proper blog post, but I had to get on here and share this because it’s too much fun to keep to myself. It’s the BRAND NEW COVER ART FOR PANTHEON! Feast your eyes upon the graphic design work of Kelly Shorten:

Cool, huh? I think so too. The ebook launches April eleventh. Time to start getting excited!