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LITERATURE
Rick Alan Rice (RAR) Novels -
Serialized
Cowboy Town*
Adult
Contemporary - 450 pages
Ex-con
seeks redemption and the start of a new life through a love affair carried out
on a struggling Colorado cattle ranch. This was always a love letter to my
wife Joanne. It was intended to have the feel of the Classic Movie Channel
black & white films she loves so well. It is in that popular noir vein of Eisenhower-era
cattle ranching stories. It owes a lot to Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass
By and the movie that was made from that work, "Hud," a
personal favorite. I feel a strong connection to all of the people in this
book because I know these guys. It's tough being any thing but a tough guy in
a cowboy town. Their behavior does have an undeniable effect on women. Maybe that's why things get
so hot there under the dust and sun. I wrote virtually
the entire thing by hand while sitting in a cubicle in the Vallejo, California
Public Library. Couldn't go home, the Mrs. was upset. This manuscript survives in hard copy.
*Opens in a series of HTML files online. Use the
arrow keys at the bottom of each page to move through the book
chapter-by-chapter.
______________________
Works
by Rick Alan Rice
In
some respects, this site is a direct result of a nasty event that took place in
February 2005. My family was awakened one Friday morning by the sound of a smoke
alarm and the sight of an orange glow that should never be seen within walls. We
mercifully escaped harm, but within minutes most everything we had ever owned
was gone. That included a
considerable amount of my 30-plus years of creative writing.
This
site is both a naked exercise in self publishing, and a
mechanism for securing my recovered oeuvre. I have learned in a direct way that
what you put out does come back to you. Most
of the stuff on this page is still available because it has been floating around the universe of family, friends,
publishers and agents for years, and as pieces are reassembled,
and as new material is developed, this page and the links on this page are updated.
Included with the
synopses below are links you can click to read
excerpts from the listed works.
NOVELS
Adult
Contemporary - current project
Following
the suicide of his son, a seminal author of "the California school of
design" contemplates the end of his own
life, and the legacy of his struggling firm. I have spent enough years with environmental
design firms that judgments in architecture have started to feel personal to me,
as if this stuff matters. It is a personal chaos we create. We live in bubbles of
alternative reality, designing as we go, planting more of what we've got. Sometimes it is good. We make public spaces. We contribute to conducive public
interactions. Then other times it is individual vanity and greed, or just
mimicry of some current idea. We let fields
grow wild and don't do enough. We encroach upon neighbors and
issue guidelines. We restore and honor. We lose our way and stay lost for
years. Conscious or not, we are creating a landscape architecture... This is a wistful,
sometimes funny, romantic end piece. While
working on it I have often thought what a
great final movie it would make for Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In fact, I've worked a
bit on the screenplay.
Fact-Based
Adult Contemporary - current project
Epic
family drama played out on Nebraska homesteads of the late 1800s and into the
20th Century. This is the book I was focused on at the time of our 2005 fire
-- the one based on the homestead diaries of my paternal great-grandfather and
interviews with my paternal grandfather. This is a romance. Almost all of the
work done to date on this project was lost, but rebuilding it is one of my
highest priorities. This book and Landscape Architecture mark departures for
me in that both are attempts at that most futile of all pursuits: literary
fiction.
Adult
Contemporary - 350 pages
A
group of marginally employed tradesmen carries out escalating acts of aggression
against corporate leaders. I put this project on hold in 2001 after the
World Trade Center attacks took place, because the atmosphere seemed a little raw,
though the tone of this book is more comedy than drama. I wrote it thinking
about a
period when I was around a lot of handy men, and it occurred to me that some
of them were pretty under employed. Never a good idea to under engage active,
disgruntled minds. My Jihadists are red-blooded American public policy wonks
pissed at the real devils in our society -- the consultants!
Adult
Contemporary - 450 pages
Ex-con
seeks redemption and the start of a new life through a love affair carried out
on a struggling Colorado cattle ranch. This was always a love letter to my
wife Joanne. It was intended to have the feel of the Classic Movie Channel
black & white films she loves so well. It is in that popular noir vein of Eisenhower-era
cattle ranching stories. It owes a lot to Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass
By and the movie that was made from that work, "Hud," a
personal favorite. I feel a strong connection to all of the people in this
book because I know these guys. It's tough being any thing but a tough guy in
a cowboy town. Their behavior does have an undeniable effect on women. Maybe that's why things get
so hot there under the dust and sun. I wrote virtually
the entire thing by hand while sitting in a cubicle in the Vallejo, California
Public Library. Couldn't go home, the Mrs. was upset. This manuscript survives in hard copy.
The
life cycle of a Kansas community from its homesteading roots in the 1870s
through its development as a resort community and its eventual decline. The
stories are based on stories I heard about the community my family moved into
in 1965. Population never larger than 2,000, it was the historical home base for my mother's divorce-fractured family. All seven
of the siblings had lived there at one time or another, though seldom
at the same time, and they knew the characters within the community -- and
what characters there were! The place was rich with public eccentrics. The town had a
conveyed history, a charmed quality, and it had its local legends. The
rest took seed in my mind while I was a teenager there, and I lived in those
odd places, put it on paper and embellished it to seem comical and dangerous and doomed -- scary sometimes, in a sad way. These wonderfully odd, vulnerable people are all
we, really.
They pin their hopes on faith and slim promise. They suffer highs and crushing
sorrow. They drown in their first overwhelming love and lose their
innocence. They give into their worst instincts and falter and sometimes
rebound. Then they just
keep living.
Fantasy
- in progress
A
pioneering community's desperate prayers are answered, but not by the entity
intended. Eerie happenings in a nascent 19th century Kansas community. This
is the foundation of the three Kansas books. If there were such a category as
historical satire, this would be that. It is a frontal attack on religiosity.
Adult
Contemporary - 350 pages
Two
aging hotel residents struggle against their separate demons of alcohol and
mental illness. This is another personal story inspired by the characters in the small Kansas farm town where I went to
high school. All of the three Kansas books share a werewolf and a fantasy
horror element. In the Marion Hotel, it is mental illness. In the first book
it is religious delirium. In the third it is decay. Much of this book
survived the fire as a singed manuscript, and it will be resurrected.
Adult
Contemporary - 450 pages
A
family attempts to survive in a declining Kansas farm community buffeted by
change, supernatural forces, and murder. Part William Inge drama, part
horror-fantasy, I think of this as my boyhood book, because it is populated
with the images of my adolescent years. I started writing it in college and
to me it will always be the best I've done. It is random and episodic and to
date utterly un-publishable. Reading this recalls
for me how I thought at a certain charmed, naive time in my life. Most of this
manuscript survived the fire in hard copy and it will be resurrected. It
wouldn't open any doors, but would make a great third novel.
Adult
Contemporary - 250 pages
I
love this idea, though it isn't incredibly original. Certainly it was
influenced by the Herbert Lieberman novel "Crawl Space," which I was
introduced to through a 1971 TV-movie adaptation. In the 1980s there was an
awful Klaus Kinski movie called "Crawl Space" that had nothing to do
with the Lieberman story beyond having a weirdo in (or under) the house. My
story is about a disturbed young man named Jimmy Cork who escapes the
Vacaville mental corrections facility, where he has been sentenced for the
homicide of his mother and her boyfriend. The fugitive Cork crawls under the home of a
young Marin County couple and takes up refuge within the walls of the house.
Things go terribly wrong for Jimmy, and for the host couple, from that point
on. I wrote this around 1987, when my wife and I first moved to Marin County
just after we were married. Interesting story, poor writing effort. It was
lost in our house fire and may not be resurrected. The screenplay, on the
other hand...
Eco-Thriller
- 250 pages (not available)
A
real amateur effort about a Greenpeace-type group that works to undermine an international whaling
company. Around 1978 I took this manuscript to a Boulder, Colorado lawyer who
was presenting himself as a literary agent on the side. He read it and thought
he could sell it, which I found suspicious and a little nauseating. Was it
that easy to sell crap? Naively, foolishly, I decided then and there to pull
it back and never go the route of success ever again. A starving artist,
that's what I'd be! That's right -- a nut. The one copy of this manuscript was lost to fire
and the book will not be available.
SCREENPLAYS
Screenplay:
Adult Contemporary Thriller - 90 minutes
Screenplay
version of my novel "Cork," about a murderer who escapes from a mental corrections facility and takes refuge within the walls of a
young couple's home. The screenplay is considerably better than the novel. Odd
settings and visual set pieces make it a potentially avante garde visual work.
Screenplay:
Political Satire - 120 minutes
Charlie
meets Being There meets Wag the Dog. A junior White House policy
advisor gains special insight for an administration in desperate need.
NON-FICTION
Non-Fiction:
- abandoned work
I
started this work to capture my impressions of what it is to experience a
total loss fire, and to share our experience of the aftermath. That was to
include our interactions with our insurance company. The link below provides
an account of the fire event, but the work didn't go far beyond that. Part of
the reason was that my wife and I were overwhelmed with insurance-related
work, trying to prove and evaluate our losses. I fully expected to have a
cautionary tale to tell, and some good advice for the next disaster victim who
goes up against his insurer. It was tough dealing with claims adjusters and
their sometimes-threatening minion, but in the end our insurer did well by us,
much to my surprise. And in doing so, they stole my book! Still, if you wonder
what it feels like to be awakened at dawn to the sound of a smoke alarm, here
it is. This book was to be captured in this unctuous line repeated by our
insurance agent and his doleful secretary whenever we would call their office
after the fire, asking for help they were not prepared to render: "Go home -- and be with your family."
Non-Fiction:
- 200 pages (not available)
This
was a book that I co-authored in the late 1970s with a sociology professor at
the University of Colorado. He used it in a class he taught called something like "Magic, Mysticism and Power."
Our effort provided a cursory
overview of the spiritual/human potential movements of the time, and offered
exercises designed to demonstrate and entice the extraordinary human living within us all.
We signed a publishing contract with a small Seattle publisher who went out of
business or returned to his home planet just after the deal was inked.
Mercifully my only copy of this book was lost in our house fire. This
will not be available.
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©Rick
Alan Rice (RAR),
October, 2011
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