Behind the Story

Where Does the Story Come From?

When I was sixteen or seventeen, that was when I wrote my first science fiction story. But the process of being a storyteller is something I cannot explain in a logical way, nor do I fully understand why I tell the stories that I do. My stories come from somewhere, but I am not conscious of where that place, if it is a place, may be. My storytelling happens by itself, even if that may sound mysterious or strange.

At some point, I decided I was going to create a world in which being gay was the focus. And I originally when I was writing what was, I used to jokingly think of it as “the great American novel.” And I didn’t you know, it was going to be novel length. I don’t know how “great” it was. But it was a pretty much straight–linear, I mean, beginning, middle, end type story about a guy who leaves his ex-wife. He divorces her. She stays in New England. He moves out west. And he ends up in Arizona, Northern Arizona, joins a gym, and, becomes interested in bodybuilding. He takes sports performance enhancing drugs like all the men did in those days in the gym.

And I thought, well, you know, here’s a setting. It’s real. It really did happen. The drugs, the gym, the guys. So I thought, well, let’s make it fictional instead of a first-person narrative about myself, the narrator. So I created this world that became a basis on which the entire story is told in the novel. And it’s set in the future, but there’s a lot of time spent in Northern Arizona and in Southern Nevada in the twentieth century and in the first part of the twenty- first. So all of that was based on my experiences having lived there. And so I thought, well, I’m just gonna turn it into gay men living in that part of the world–I mean, they lived on the moon, but they came to work in the past in the twentieth century and the twenty-first in Arizona and Nevada. And that became that was the focal point. That is the focal point of Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside–Northern Arizona, Southern Nevada.

Bullhead

How I found Bullhead was I knew some people in my hometown who had settled in Arizona along the Colorado River. There were at that time hopes that that whole area would become a resort that would be very successful, and it would attract a lot of California and Nevada tourism. And they named it Arizona’s West Coast. The hope was to make it a resort area for people who wanted outdoor recreation like the Colorado River provides and that they would travel there and make it would become a venue for tourism.

You arrive in Northern Arizona and you see Bullhead and you say to yourself, what? What is this place and why does anyone live here?

So I moved to Bullhead, and I got a job really quickly. I was very surprised. I went from being unemployed for many, many, many months to suddenly I was a country radio sales guy, and I was very happy about that. It was when I lived in Bullhead that I began to discover who I really was.

Giving Back

And that experience of living there was an eye opener for me, and I wasn’t expecting that. And I feel like, well, okay. Now I have to give something back. And that led to me writing what became Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside.

So I found a gym and bought a membership, and I started working out at a gym in Bullhead. And it was because of that choice that I met several guys who were into the Bullhead gym scene, where it was primarily unmarried guys who spent excessive amount of time at the gym thinking about attaining physical perfection or something close to it. At the Bullhead Gym, I met this person who became a friend of mine, a guy, and he became my personal trainer as well. So I had a friend that I met and I signed up as a client of his.

He was a personal trainer. He was very different from the other guys. He was interested in exploring life and had been in the marine corps. And he had he wasn’t from Bullhead. He was born in New York City but had lived in Phoenix and ended up in Bullhead as a personal trainer.

Gay?

We started hanging out together. And I don’t know there were people who thought we were gay. I don’t know, honestly, what we looked like to the rest of the world, but his mother used to say that she thought we were gay. I don’t know if we were touchy with each other, you know, men touching men, or that his mother had just seen us together a lot. We ended up moving to Phoenix from Bullhead. So people thought we were gay. It wasn’t just his mother. It was other people that we knew in Phoenix.

To guys who go to gyms, can they be gay? Well, yeah. I mean, where else can you be naked with other men and be interested in bodies of men talking about, oh, I worked on my pectorals today. You know, that kind of where else could you have that kind of ready access to masculine men except in a gym So yeah, it’s easy and it happens all the time. There are gay men who are members of gyms. Just accept that.

Not Pornography

After I left Arizona and moved to Washington, DC, and I did have sex with men–in the Washington, D. C. Area. And, actually, that was still the twentieth century. But I would say there is a twenty-first century sensibility, if you will, to the gay sexuality that I depict. And I think I think I’m more or less happy with how the sexual stuff in my storytelling turned out.

It wasn’t ever my intent to write pornography. You know, I think people that write the literary sense, they put together short stories or novellas or even novels that are meant as pornography–to get people off sexually. That was never my intent with my storytelling in Baja Clavius, Moon Men Deep Inside. I needed to and wanted to tell sexual stories about or the things that happened sexually between the men in the stories, but it was never intended to be pornography. It was never intended for prurient. Is that the way you pronounce it? Prurient reasons. It wasn’t self-pleasure while you’re reading. It never was that at all. So I think that I brought storytelling first to the mix and then blended in the time travel stuff, the technology stuff, and the sex–the gay sex between characters in the storytelling.

If you look at my work as an illustrator, a 3D artist, however you want to refer to my work, and you look at I have said that I was never intending, and I did not intend, to write a story that had pornography as its purpose.

However, when you look at the images, illustrations, the artwork that I do, it is a whole different thing. I depict naked men, frontal nudity, men engaged in sex with other men. And when a person chooses to do that, as I have chosen, I guess the question needs to be asked, why are you doing that? Why did you choose to have naked men, frontal nudity, men having sex with men, and so forth? Well, I don’t think I ever sat down and said, today, I’m going to do naked men, frontal nudity, men having sex with men.

It just–it sounds kind of bizarre, but it just turns out that way. The inspiration for the images, my images, my art, the characters I create, all of that comes from somewhere. And as I have said elsewhere, I don’t know where that comes from. It’s not a sit down and let’s be conscious thing. So I have to also say that I am not intending when I do illustrations, digital art, frontal nudity, men having sex with men–I don’t do that to get people off sexually. That is not what I think about when I create in the visual sense as opposed to writing text. I am as I have said, I don’t consider what I wrote Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside is intended to be pornography. And, I would have to say, the art or illustrations–whatever you call it, that is also not intended to be pornographic. It disturbs some viewers, but it was never my intent. Even today, I do not intend to get people off sexually with my artistic, my creativity in the visual sense.

Atheism

If there is a philosophy or a way of thinking or a belief system that can be in Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside it would be something like this: I, as the writer, as the author, as the illustrator, I have an atheistic view.

In the imaginary world that I created in the future two hundred something years from today, the agency, the time travel agency that the story is about and the agents who work for the agency all understand that there is no interventionist deity. There is no God. It’s an atheistic world.

And that the most powerful thing in human culture and human civilization, the most powerful thing is time travel. But time travel is not a religion.

You don’t need any belief systems to support time travel. And in my telling of the stories involving the adventures that these agents from the future get involved with in the past, it is not a belief system. They just routinely and, as a matter of fact, accept that there is no God, and that it is just the work that they do is the most powerful thing that has ever been found in in human civilization on Earth and on the moon. But time travel, not religion.

You know, you don’t become an atheist because you want to be part of a minority. You don’t become an atheist. I don’t think there’s a choice. I think in my case, I just arrived at atheism. To any person who believes in a deity, who believes in the particular organized religion known as the Roman Catholic Church, who believes in Judaism or Islam and so forth, I have no disrespect at all. But as a person, I believe, and as a writer, I believe that if you look honestly at life on our planet that the conclusion you will arrive at, if you’re honest, is that God was invented by man, not the other way around.

That also is not an original thought. You have seen it many times in science fiction. For me, anyway, it’s common and mundane. It may seem blasphemous, but I hope a person can’t be “accidentally blasphemous.” I think it requires intent, malice, or forethought, as they say in the legal sense of libel and slander. I think I just wrote a story that I thought was good. It happens to be about a life in an imaginary universe where there is no God and time travel is the most important and most powerful thing that humans have ever done.

So what about the morality? That, I’m sure, will be a question some would have. How can you have moral people if they don’t have a religious basis for their morality? Well, I believe that you don’t need religion, you don’t need God to be moral. You can choose to be a good person as opposed to a bad person, with or without God.

You don’t need a God to tell you to be good. You can choose to be good because you choose to be good. That’s my belief. Again, not terribly original, but that’s my belief. So the morality, if you look at the morality of the world that I depict in Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside, I address the morality of taking lives because they do, the agents, and this is not a spoiler, but the agents make choices and the agents make decisions that lead to the deaths of others.

And, sometimes, that moral question comes up in the stories that I tell. Are you, should you, feel responsible for the deaths of others is the way I phrase it. And, if you don’t have a god, right, you have no religion, you have no god, how are you going to what is going to be your moral core? What is going to be your moral center? So that you’re not out just killing people because it’s fun to kill people or whatever other reasons there are for killing people? These are things that I explore in my storytelling.

Religion

In Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside, near the end of the novel, I report, or as the writer, I report on the creation of a religion that is connected to time travel. So, and that’s kind of a spoiler, but I’m sorry I had to lay that out there.

So, how do I feel about creating I mean, I didn’t create the religion based on time travel, but I report on it as the author. There isn’t really an established–I never took the time to write out belief systems. Do they have angels, apostles, and so forth? I don’t know.

I just reported on creating the religion based on time travel. And I think when you get to the end of the novel, that you’ll find that’s a credible thing. My doing so was meant to be kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. In real life, I don’t think I would believe in a religion based on time travel any more than I would believe in L. Ron Hubbard’s religion based on science fiction or in the Abrahamic God of Islam and Catholicism and Judaism.

You know, to me, it’s pretty much in the same direction. It’s created by humanity for many, many, many purposes but it’s still created by humanity. It isn’t something that exists out there in the universe on its own. It was wholly invented here on planet Earth a long time ago.

Time Travel

I’m aware that the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, did not believe that faster than light travel was possible. And yet, he created the starship Enterprise, and all those wonderful characters. And the people visited faraway planets that they could never get to unless faster than light travel were possible. So it was Roddenberry’s own suspension of disbelief when he created faster than light starships for Star Trek.

So you can ask how do I feel about time travel? Do I think time travel is ever going to be accomplished? And I don’t know. It seems like a pretty unusual thing. In my knowledge of science and in my knowledge of physics, it seems that time travel is a theoretical possibility. But will humanity ever have the wherewithal in the intellectual sense, the smarts, or the power of the technology that’s required that would be required for time travel. I don’t know. So I’ll just leave it to you.

I think the story that I tell about an agency, a time travel agency is certainly interesting and fun. Whether it actually will come about a couple of hundred years from now? I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. But thank you for reading this today, and I hope you will enjoy reading and looking at the illustrations that I created for Baja Clavius: Moon Men Deep Inside.