The Mope, coming soon

2011-04-02T03:46:00.000-07:00

Having gotten permission to publish The Mope, a splendid story by the late John Haag, a professor at Penn State, Proofmark Publishing looks forward to the opportunity to offer it to the public, complete with illustrations by Kelley, one of his former students. Check back later for a link to it on Amazon.

Payback

2009-11-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

A novel of industrial espionage, set in Silicon Valley and Brazil, Payback is the next in the continuing Jack Hayes saga, begun in The Hero Business. Available from Amazon. Attempts were made to interest Tom Selleck in this book, as well; he'd've been perfect as Jack Hayes. Now we're going after Russell Crowe.

At All Hazards

2008-05-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

A novel about the last days of Saigon, available from Amazon.

Embassy Down

2008-05-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

A novel of the attack on and deliverance of an American embassy in a small sandy country, available from Amazon.

The Hero Business

2008-05-30T10:43:00.001-07:00

A novel of intrigue and the yakuza, available from Amazon.
Attempts have been made to interest Tom Selleck in this book, thus far unsuccessful; he'd be perfect as Jack Hayes.

Skeleton Cay

2008-05-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

A novel of piracy and retribution in Caribbean waters, available from Amazon.

Transit of Venus

2008-05-30T10:38:00.001-07:00

A collection of stories, erotic and otherwise, available from Amazon.

Memoir by Mark Seymour & Christine Castellano

2008-05-30T10:37:00.001-07:00

Since I Was Dead, the story of his brain injury and recovery. Now available here.

Books by his father

2008-05-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

A novel about the early days of the space program, and an unusual group of astronauts going to the Moon. Available from Amazon.

Unfinished books

2008-04-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

These will come, in time:

I drove into Dead Fred’s driveway early on Sunday morning, as usual. We were headed for our weekly cowboy shoot, and I knew he liked to get there well before the start time. Not that we were going to shoot cowboys, of course; the event is actually referred to as Cowboy Action Shooting, thus you merely suit up like cowboys (or other typical ne’er-do-wells of the Old West), wear cowboy-era revolvers in holsters, carry cowboy-era rifles and shotguns, and shoot a lot of steel and sheetrock targets, but you shoot no cowboys. At least you try not to, as it’s frowned upon.
My spurs jingled as I stepped up on the porch, and the thud of my boots was loud on the wooden planks. That’s one of the downsides of playing cowboy; it’s hard to be quiet. You’re always making noise with something, long before you start making booms on the line. But Fred’s wife, Sally, was used to it, and occasionally said she’d damn near miss our incessant clanging and jingling. When I knocked, quietly, it being early of a Sunday, she came to the door.
“Mornin’, Rico.” She smiled when she opened the door.
“Mornin’, Miz Lynch.” It was a standing joke, among the cowboys, Fred’s last name being Lynch. But one didn’t laugh when you saw his wife. Middling height, she was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, if a brick shithouse had great tits and a narrow waist above long lean legs that she displayed by wearing, this morning, only one of her husband’s shirts, which ended well above a thick pair of socks.
“Fred’s still getting dressed.” That was another standing cowboy joke; Fred was numbingly plain and boring in real life, what with being an accountant and all, yet he insisted on appearing resplendant when he turned into a cowboy, once a month. His outfits were not the gaudy B-movie rigs that some wore, neither, he was too much a historical stickler for that, but he always came up with historically-accurate clothes and leather that put the rest of us to shame. “Want some coffee, or some breakfast?”
Coffee sounded good. “Believe I will, ma’m.”

(Rico says that this, from an article in The New York Times, is germane: "To William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University, fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls altruistic punishers, people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. 'We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.'”)

An excerpt from Haj Ali © 2009 Mark Seymour

It was amazing that deserts should look so similar, though they were thousands of miles apart. The desert of his birth, in the coastal city of Smyrna in Turkey, had been a white beach that fringed low hills covered in scrubby bushes. The desert here, in the American Southwest, was largely the same sort of scrub brush, but on low hills between high stony mountains. Both deserts were exceedingly dry, of course, thus the camels.
He and seven others had been selected by officers of the American ship, the Supply, to come with them and the camels to America: Yiorgos Caralambo, known as George; Mimico Teodora, known as Mico; Hadjiatis Yannaco, known as Long Tom; Anastasio Coralli, known as Short Tom; Michelo Georgios; Yanni IIIato; and Giorgios Costi. He, of course, was called Philip Tedro, though he had taken the name Haj Ali after his obligatory trip to Mecca.
The ship had picked up three camels in Tunis, nine in Egypt, and finally twenty-one in Smyrna. After a long and arduous sea journey, one the men liked no better than the camels, they arrived at Indianola, on the coast of the state of Texas, on the tenth of February, 1856. He was twenty-eight years old, and it was the first time he had traveled outside the Turkish Empire.
The beach in Texas, while of a white sand similar to that of Smyrna, was flat and featureless, with only rolling ground of no interest inland. The waters were warm and calm, however, and the camels and the camel drivers had both been relieved to be taken off the ship. While the camels were content to sit on the beach and chew their cuds, the men had taken the opportunity to bathe in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, happy to wash off the weeks at sea. With the streams coming down to the ocean, they were even able to wash off, for the first time in months, the salt crusted on their skins and in their clothes.
But their time of rest in Texas was all too short. Their backers wanted to prove, as quickly as possible, that their investment had been a wise one, so he and the others were urged to get the camels ready for an expedition to the West. They had no idea of what lay to the West, other than that it was said it was a thousand miles of desert, so they prepared as if for the journey of a lifetime. Everything was different here, of course, but they found items in the Mexican stores that at least looked similar to those they’d used at home: water containers the locals called cantinas, knives and forks and cooking pans, and many unfamiliar but lethal-looking weapons they’d need against the bandits and los Indios they’d been told they would surely meet on their journey. The food was completely different, and he was glad they were not restricted to halal food; the cuisine on the ship had been bad enough, but here on land they looked to eat beans and freshly-slain beef, unless it was beef in one of the new-fangled cans. The struggle by Short Tom to open one of the unfamiliar containers had been good for nearly an hour of laughter, interspersed with long strings of curse words and imprecations by Anastasio as he hacked at the tin with his knife.
Anastasio got the can open, finally, in time to assuage their hunger. The men were politely astonished at the oddly-tasty beef he decanted from it onto their tin plates. By the stamp on the mangled cover, the beef had been put into the can some years before, but it did not have the slightest foul smell or taste, even given the heat of Texas. It was merely one of the first amazing things they’d discovered in their new home.

I got the call just after I woke up. It was her, all the way from the next room. "Are you awake yet?"
Looking down at the rapidly falling tent in the sheets, left over from a dream about some lucious blonde whose name I couldn't remember, I nodded. "I am now."
"I need to ask you a favor..."
She sounded hestitant. Knowing what I didn't know about her and her condition, whatever this was about, it wasn't going to be easy for her. "At your service, ma'am."
"Did your mother teach you to talk like that?"
"Yes, ma'am." I chuckled. "And Gunnery Sergeant Fitzgerald."
"Well, did your sergeant ever teach you how to take a shower?"

I shrugged. This conversation was getting weirder by the minute. "Even taught me how to wash behind my ears."
"Good." I heard a big inhale through the phone; this was the hard part, whatever it was. "Then could you come help me take a shower?" When I hesitated she jumped right into the silence, talking fast. "Look, I know this is not what you thought I hired you to do but my friend, the one you're taking me to in New Mexico, well, she's been helping me for a long time, so I'd normally have her around to help but since she's there and not here I can't do this on my own and, even with the air conditioning, a couple days without a shower and I..."
I only yelled to get her to shut up, then spoke softly to get that panicked edge out of her voice. "No problem. I'll be there in a bit, and we'll work this out."
The long silence worried me, but when she spoke her voice was almost normal again. "Thank you." Another big inhale, followed by a really big exhale of relief. "When this is all over, I hope we can still be friends." The phone click was almost imperceptible.
Hell, when this was over, we'd probably have to get engaged. And her parents weren't liable to like what she brought home, either. Rolling out of bed, I headed into the bathroom and, while pissing away what little was left of my hard-on, had a long talk with myself in the mirror, starting with What have you got yourself into now? and ending up with And what are your going to do about it?
When I walked up to the connecting door, I still didn't know for sure.
...
Max Boudreaux is my doppelganger, that evil twin everyone has somewhere. Mine is from New Orleans. Over an omelette, Max smiled that twisted grin of his, reminiscing. "I took this jeune fille home from Bourbon Street late one Friday night... Ah, Lord, we did ever' thin' a man an' a woman can do, in ever' place a man can put it, all the weekend. But come Sunday mornin' she got me up powerful early, insistin' I take her home right then, you see. Didn't want to be late to church, that girl. Had to clear her conscience wit' God, I suppose. But I know I was featured in her confession, ohhh, I tell you me."
Max had been running a bait shop, down to Key West, the last time I'd seen him. There he'd also been in what the locals, referred to as conchs, called the 'square grouper' trade, running bales of marijuana in at night from the big boats offshore. Just driving the hellishly-fast cigarette boats over the reefs, loaded with illegal cargo, was dangerous enough, but he'd had to get out of it, he said, when the Columbians moved in. Columbians would kill people over the most trivial things, or sometimes for no reason at all. A lot of them'd floated ashore amidst shoals of square grouper, after bad nights out in the channel.
But his gallery seemed to be doing well. Santa Fe operated, best I could tell, as one huge money extraction machine, funneling the tourists in one side of the Plaza, running them through the various parts of the machine, and sending them out the other side loaded down with trinkets and gewgaws, lighter by a few hundred or a few thousand dollars each, letting the Native Americans lined up under the eaves of the Palace across the way take the last of their money for handmade silver necklaces and earrings. Max was good at the process, able to keep up the right patter in his soft New Orleans accent for hours at a stretch, sweet-talking the women until they turned to their husbands with their hands out for the cash, or the traveller's checks, or the MasterCard. Because Max didn't take American Express, just like the ads said. They wanted too big a cut, he felt, and anyone who carried the green card almost always had a walletful of alternatives.
...
"Nice tits, eh, Jack?" Max eyed the good-looking blonde trapped in the chair, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like she'd never notice. "Would you ever fuck a woman in a wheelchair?" I shook my head. "Me neither." He shuddered. "Gives me the cold willies just thinkin' about it."
"I didn't say that."
He turned, surprised. "Didn't say what?"
"I didn't say I wouldn't fuck her. I just said I wouldn't fuck her in the chair."
"What're you sayin'?"
I smiled. "I fuck women in bed, Max. The only problem I can foresee is figuring some elegant way to get her out of the chair and into the bed."
He stared at me a long time. "You are one weird motherfucker, you know that?"
I nodded. "Coming from you, Max, that's a compliment. Now, would you like to buy the pretty lady a drink, or shall I?"
...
"What's happ'nin'?" Billy's grin, a line of white that seemed to stretch from ear to ear, appeared around the curtain.
Preroccupied with pulling my boot on, I jumped, then winced with the sudden pain. "Nothing much."
"Nothing much, the man says." Black Feather laughed. "I've seen you suit up in pain before, my white brother, and it was never for nothing much."
I nodded, caught out again. "Okay, it's party time."
"Really?" His face grew serious. "Is this a private party, or can anyone come?"
I shook my head, gently, for fear it would fall off. "It's not your fight, Billy."
"So?" His grin was back. "When was that ever a consideration?"
I thought back to innumerable nights on the border when we needed extra bodies, when the coyotes were flooding the line with illegals, and William Black had always been there, time after time, the same grin on his wide brown face. But I'd always felt there was more than simple devotion to duty hiding behind that smile. I nodded. "You know, I worked with this Samoan once..." I watched Billy's raven eyebrow ratchet upwards. "Yeah, a real Samoan, big as the side of a barn, and every Monday morning he'd come to work and tell these stories about how he'd gone over to one or another cousin's house and they, or their friends, or all of them and just some guys from down the street, they'd gotten into a fight." I shook my head. "Finally I had to ask him what the hell was going on. You know what he said?" Billy shrugged. "He said: 'Don't you know, brah? Samoans, they just love to fight.' And I wonder, my friend..." My eyebrow went up this time. "...is that how it is with you?"
"No." The famous Black Feather smile went pensive. "Let's just say that, deep down inside, I'm an Apache, one from the old days, and let it go at that."
I remembered why they called the desert below the Mescalero reservation the Jornada del Muerto. It wasn't just because of the harsh ecology; some of it was due to the welcome given to the Spanish by the original inhabitants. "Sure, as long as you remember that it was a different Jack Hayes, one from the old days, that was the Texas Ranger."
His laughter got us all the way out to the truck.

The Holocaust Book

2008-03-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is a self-publishing book.
It is a tool for comprehending the enormity of events of the Twentieth Century like the Holocaust.
One factor in our inability to understand these occurances is that we only dimly grasp the true horror of millions of deaths.
We can feel the loss when a family member dies, or a friend, or someone down the street, but as the numbers grow larger and the events more remote, we begin to lose touch with their reality.
This is what a thousand people look like:

To create your book, estimate the number of pages based on the thousands of people involved [a sample list is below, though it is hardly comprehensive; there have been other genocides, and there will be more in the future].
Copy this image into your document and print that number of pages.
Be sure to display your book in a prominent place; a few million dead surely deserve it. Take it out at gatherings. Invite people to flip through it. Ask them to guess how many people it represents. Have a conversation about genocide. Try and prevent another one.

In order to create a book of appropriate size, use the chart below:
Genocide.............................Period...........Pages
North American Indians......1800s............1,000
Armenia .............................1917..............1,000
Stalinist purges in Russia.....1925-1950.....10,000
European Holocaust.............1938-1945.....8,000
Cambodia............................1975-1985.....1,000
Rwanda...............................1990s............800
World Trade Center...............2001.............3

All numbers are approximate; no one ever truly knows the enormity of genocide.

When you create a Holocaust Book, please let me know by emailing me.
I will keep a registry of all created books at this URL, for others to visit or correspond as you might wish.

Books by Mark Wilson Seymour