I sat down with my friend Allie E. to talk about the release of “The Fields of Concorde”, excerpts of the interview below.
Allie: I think I should do a podcast and just interview you every week, we have such good conversations. “Today my guest is Ash Braley, who has just released a book.” What do you think?
Ash: I never turn down a chance to talk about writing, bring it on.
Allie: Great! So I’m holding “The Fields of Concorde”, which is a combined edition of your first two books: “An Older Kind of Justice”, and “Strange Rivers”. First off, this cover. Beautiful! You designed this yourself, didn’t you?
Ash: I’m fond of it. I love doing graphic design and I designed that cover before I had even pulled together the manuscript. Seeing it in print was part of the motivation to do all that hard work.
Allie: But this is more than a reprint of both books, right?
Ash: Yes, there are some formatting changes in Older Kind of Justice, I am now using the “dash-dash” convention for quotations marks that I used for Strange Rivers.
Allie: The way that James Joyce did it instead of the Cormac McCarthy way of just omitting them.
Ash: Yes, it’s a quirk of my minimalist brain that I don’t like to see punctation so I compromised with the dashes. But that’s just a readability thing. For Strange Rivers, I’ve actually rewritten passages of the book to make them flow better, make the dialog more authentic.
Allie: The story is not changed though. I did find with the new edition that I understood the characters in a deeper way, there was a little more intrigue throughout, and some rougher expression of emotion.
Ash: The story is not changed in any way, no. But the whole book is written as interior monologue, or most of it, so getting the particular style of a character’s thoughts is critical. It’s a strange thing, but over the past six months since finishing the first edition, when I wasn’t fingers-on-keys writing, I’ve actually gotten to understand the characters in a more dimensioned way, and I think they deserve their voices to sound true to who they are, less edited.
Allie: I had actually read both books more than once, and when I read the “Fields of Concorde” edition, I felt something entirely different. More of their personal conflicts resonated with me. I suppose we’re all conflicted, it comes of having a human mind. If my own uncensored interior monologue were in print, I think I’d be shocked by how hard I am on myself.
Ash: Exactly why I did the rewrite. Our minds jump around, our thoughts are unreasonable most of the time, if we’re honest, and they’re usually persuasive to us even when they don’t make sense.
Allie: We tend to believe our thoughts, in other words.
Ash: Why else would we be thinking them, if they weren’t true? And it can be hard to let go of our beliefs about ourselves.
Allie: To jump back to what you said a minute ago: “less edited”, talk about that.
Ash: You’ve read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, right?
Allie: Who hasn’t?
Ash: So when it was originally published, his editor made him rewrite it to be cleaner, less raw. His whole authorial voice was “spontaneous prose”, but they made him clean it up. A few years ago his original manuscript was published, I think it was called “On The Road, the Original Scroll”. And it reads completely differently. The voices of the characters are not polished, and their personalities come across as rougher – at times less likable – but the writing is very immediate and believable. My intention for this edition of Strange Rivers is that it be an unedited version of my characters’s voices. Sometimes people aren’t nice to each other or themselves. And if there is no conflict or rough edge to a book, it is forgettable.
Allie: Jake for instance, he’s rough on himself.
Ash: He is, and I like Jake, so in the first edition I kind of toned down his self-criticism to protect him from the worst of his thoughts. I had to get over that. I haven’t reached writerly perfection yet but eventually I began to let go of enough of my own anxiety to allow more honesty to come through.
Allie: Why did you decide to do this combined edition?
Ash: The two books are meant to be read as one whole narrative, it’s the way I conceived the story.
Allie: Will there be more? I always ask and you say it’s not up to you, it’s up to your Muse.
Ash: And the Muse wants to explore something deeper and darker this time around. There are little mysteries planted in Strange Rivers, questions like “but why did Cass’s mother do that?”, or ,”what else is Caitlin going to ‘see’?” She’s an unusual child and she has her own story. These aren’t “tiny house murder” stories but they emerge from the same universe. Maybe the Universe is a more fluid place than we realize. It’s a story that I particularly need to tell.
The Fields of Concorde, a combined edition of An Older Kind of Justice and Strange Rivers is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: