Welcome, travelers. We have an incredible trip into the Otherworld that you are no doubt going to have a great time with today. We’re going to be talking to a multi-hyphenate creator today, and while we’ll likely most notably be talking about a spectacular sci-fi that he’s worked on, I’m sure we’ll touch on everything—though maybe not! Clark Thomas Carlton certainly has a tremendous backlog of interesting things to discuss, and we may have to save something for a future part two. In any case, let’s dive in!
Tellest: Greetings Clark! Let me start off by expressing my gratitude that you’re sharing your time with this interview. In doing some preliminary research on you, I’ve come to learn that you have got a whole lot of vast talents, and there’s no doubt in my mind that you’re quite busy because of finding ways to express yourself. I’m excited to learn more about you, your books about ants, and the way you’ve had fun telling stories over the years.
Clark Thomas Carlton: Mike, thanks so much for the opportunity. And nothing’s more fun than a good story.
T: I tend to lead these interviews with a question that will help readers envision what it was that helped you take the first steps in your creative journey. Now, you’ve got an interesting one, in that you’ve done so many different things. Where would you say you started amongst all these creative pursuits, and what do you think was the reason that you wanted to explore that space?
CTC: I had a typical suburban, American childhood—nothing unusual about it. Both my parents were from rural, southern backgrounds that seem exotic now, from another era. My mother’s father had multiple businesses and one of them was growing cotton with the work done by sharecroppers—yikes! My father’s father was an illiterate cattle rancher who signed his name with an ‘x’, stuffed his money under a mattress and went barefoot. My father did not wear shoes until he was eight years old, when he was forced by a truant officer to finally get to school. Both my parents made it to college where they married then fell into a typical American Midcentury existence. Dad worked for an insurance company in Manhattan and Mom was a housewife. They bought a tract house in a New Jersey suburb where their kids would be safe, have a yard to play in and we would always have shoes.
The suburbs were never enough for me. I wanted to live in Manhattan, go to Broadway shows, museums and travel the world. New York City was so exciting and stimulating and I always wanted to be there, always pushed my parents to take us there. The best part of grammar school was that there were books, stories, plays, music and art class—things that took you away. I was obsessed with comics, movies and television. In fourth grade, I read my first sci-fi book and was hooked. My teachers encouraged my own creativity: my writing, music and artwork as well as my curiosity. Even as a kid I knew I had to lead a creative life. It wasn’t a choice but a calling.
T: When you first heard that calling, what was one of the first creative things you can remember getting into? Did you write a story, play make-believe with a camera, or something completely different?
CTC: In second grade, our teacher had us write an essay on what we would do if we were given a million dollars. I wrote mine as a poem and it was about rejecting the money. It rhymed and had solid meter and two of the lines were something like “I already have so many toys and would rather be like other boys.” The teacher was taken with it, and she had it published in the PTA newspaper—my first ink! But what was I thinking? Of course, I’d take the million dollars—and use it to make art!
At Boy Scout camp, I was the one who wrote and directed the campfire skits. In the third grade, I wrote a play based on the book Road Race Around the World, about a race from New York to Paris in the early 1900s in what were then called motorcars. My teacher said it was too adult for us to perform, and we’d have a problem getting the antique cars. She was right, but even then, I was thinking in epic terms.
T: While we’ll get to the Antasy series, I am still interested in trying to learn more about the foundational steps you took to get to where you are. You took English and Film studies in college, and I’m assuming that helped introduce you to working on script work for television and movies. What was it like walking into that world after sort of studying the theoretical aspects of it in school? When was the first time you started to realize you nailed down something you were good at?
CTC: One of my favorite fairy tales is Thumbelina by Hans Christian Anderson, and spoiler alert, it ends with Thumbelina finding the place she belongs, where there are others like her. For me, that was film school, finally finding my own people who were as different from each other as they were alike. All of us who took that path were gamblers rolling the dice, who felt we had no other choice in life, who did not consider dentistry or accounting as an option. In order to get into film school, we had to submit an essay about why we were qualified. Every film student I spoke with wrote a similar essay: about our love for literature, the visual arts and music, and how all of that was combined in filmmaking.
And leaving film school was like leaving paradise. In film school, you were a filmmaker and there was nothing more joyful than writing, shooting, editing and screening your own movie. After you leave film school, you might be lucky enough to get into the film business, which is not a paradise, but one of the most competitive businesses in the world, where just a few achieve their dreams. Like everyone in film school, I wanted to be that hyphenate, the writer-director—an auteur. As I was not independently wealthy, I was not able to fund my career as an indie filmmaker, but I did think I could write screenplays.
I was always a reader of novels and short stories, and I love a good narrative. I read books about screenwriting and learned that commercial films were structured something like a sonnet: three quatrains or acts and then a couplet or coda. My first screenplay was a big, splashy fantasy, a kind of male Wizard of Oz in which a suburban teenager is recruited by a princess from another dimension to help her defeat a cannibalistic society based on the Aztecs. It was tongue-in-cheek funny and would have been extremely expensive to make but it opened doors for me and got me assignments. I never sold any of my “spec” or original screenplays, but I made something of a living writing up other people’s concepts. I was hired to work on over twenty screenplays as a script doctor, rewrite man, and ghost writer. I also did adaptations of novels. Very few of these projects made it to screen and the ones that did are so awful they deserve their obscurity.
T: When I was originally scoping you out, I was looking at your Amazon catalog, and I saw that the novelization of Face/Off was attributed to you. Is that accurate? If so, could you elaborate on what it is like to take a story that’s been established in a new direction like that?
CTC: Yes, I went to film school with Mike Werb and Michael Colleary who are the screenwriters of Face/Off. They knew my screenplays and had seen my play Self Help and had read some of my fiction. I was really taken with their premise and loved the earliest drafts of their screenplay which were set in the near future and had more of a sci-fi bent, some brilliant imaginative moments. The film is an unqualified success, but it would have been even better if it had stayed with its original setting in about the year 2050. The Mikes wanted me to restore some of the best aspects of the early drafts in the novelization, including a futuristic prison where instead of solitary confinement, prisoners were adhered to a ceiling and got their water and nutrients from inserted tubes. The nickname was “the Jerky Ward” because it dried out the prisoners and when one of them fell during the riot, he “broke apart like a broasted chicken.” I was also given the task of making the transformation of the hero and the villain more believable, in coming up with a technology that would make the face switch more credible. It was tremendous fun to write the novelization and an immersion into Jungian psychology. The idea that there is a thin line between a cop and a criminal is a trope that’s been done before but in Face/Off, the Mikes took it to new heights.
T: You’ve also pivoted and done the more intimate work of theater, and you’ve created an original play called Self Help or the Tower of Psychobabble. What was it like bringing your work to life in a format that is so much rawer and more personal?
CTC: I had written a few original screenplays which were the big fishes that got away, the things that almost happened. I poured myself into these screenplays— they had themes that were important to me, and I believe they would have been good movies. But decades later, those screenplays are homes to silverfish on a dusty shelf I never clean. One of them was remarkably similar to Harry Potter, the story of a boy wizard. It was an updating of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice but set in an American suburb. The boy’s father, also a wizard, had been killed by an evil sorcerer who breaks from a spell-prison to wreak havoc and release the other evil wizards. My agent told me that everyone “loved the writing but in Hollywood there’s no market for fantasy.” At that time, fantasy was still the “F word” following a string of bombs like Legend and Labyrinth. It was a few years later that Werb and Colleary told me they were up for adapting the screenplay to a book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and it was the Next Big Thing. They told me “It’s so much like that screenplay you wrote. You gotta keep going, Clark!”
Sigh.
In my personal life at that time, I was going through a bad breakup and working as a chef for a non-profit organization that fed people who were homebound with life threatening illnesses. It was a very chaotic organization nominally run by a controversial New Age guru. I finally had some actual drama in my own life, a unique situation, and most importantly, I had something to say—a confession! It was a story I knew was best suited as a play since it was more about ideas than events. Nearly everyone who read my play was taken with it and when a well-known stage director found it, it happened in a matter of months. That is the opposite of filmmaking, a process that can take years before something goes into production. I loved the immediacy of theater, the chance to meet people who saw my play, enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. Staging a play isn’t about money, which few plays manage to make. It’s about connecting, the pleasures of putting on a good show. I loved hearing the laughter each night it was performed. Self-Help was a satire about the abuses and excesses of the psychotherapy industry with characters who took themselves way too seriously. Each laugh was, well, very therapeutic.
The other thing about plays is that not a word of one can be changed by anyone other than the playwright. I had been rewritten by people whose talents I did not appreciate. I was also the guy who destroyed other people’s words with my rewrites. And my rewrites would be destroyed by the writer who came after me.
I had an equally positive experience with my editors at Harper Collins for the Antasy series. They never told me to change a thing but offered their nearly always good suggestions—my novels are intact and maintain their integrity. That’s what I love about novel writing — it’s my work alone, a pure thing.
T: I like to think that a lot of people who are creative types have the bottle, but just not the lightning. In a world where your book could have been discovered by some Hollywood executive and spun off into the kind of craziness that Harry Potter did, everything would have changed for you. Do you think that it really is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time?
And a follow-up question: how has having a book that has that remarkable similarity affected the way you think about things? Do you feel let down by the industry for not having recognized what was in front of them? Or have you made peace with that sort of happenstance, and looked for the next best story to tell?
CTC: Yes, 100% on being in the right place at the right time. More than a few times, development executives would send me or my agent the very flattering coverages my work received at the studios from readers, reports that said my stuff was “ahead of the curve” or “years ahead of its time” or “almost too creative.” I’ve also heard that about my novel series, that I’ve created a new genre of sci-fi/fantasy that readers aren’t ready for. Making it in Hollywood is a matter of luck, a matter of persistence, and a matter of relationships and timing. It also helps to be talented. A friend of mine, a director with a couple of credits, used to teach a film class at USC in which he asked his students to raise their hands if they had parents or relatives that worked in the industry. Then he would say to those who didn’t raise their hands, “The rest of you—you need to be friends with those people, you need to have sex with them, to marry them, and find out who else they know. Network, network, network.”
More than a few times, people have asked me to read their screenplay or proposal for a TV series and want to know how to get it made, to get past “the wall.” I give them all the same advice: make it yourself. Raise the money, hire a crew, pay people to get involved—be like the Cohen brothers and ask 10 dentists to invest in a risky enterprise. One friend of mine literally sold the family farm in order to finally make and direct his dream project a few years before he died from an illness. It was money well spent since he and his wife did not have children. I should also add that getting a movie made is in no way a guarantee that your completed work will garner much attention or launch your career into the cosmos. When I was a story analyst for the studios, part of my job was to attend screenings of indie movies looking for distribution. I saw hundreds of unwatchable movies and was given permission to leave after ten minutes if it was bad, and they were nearly all bad. I saw exactly two films that I thought should be considered—they were subpar, but professionally made and got past the ten-minute mark.
I would be lying if I said I was not disappointed by the big fishes that got away, by what might have been, because I put so much time and effort into these screenplays, and more importantly, I believed in these projects. It’s one thing to be brushed off or rejected out of hand but another to make it to the top rung of a ladder and then get kicked to the ground and have your bones shattered. These disappointments are nothing to dwell on and it would be counterproductive to do so—I’m getting a little depressed just talking about it again. It’s better to pick up the paintbrush, the guitar, or get to the keyboard and make the next thing. No one held a gun to my head and told me to write. Any suffering from career frustrations is self-inflicted. It’s not like I was a tortured prisoner in Assad’s Syria. And nothing is more unattractive than self-pity.
T: Okay, now it’s time to get to the big stuff by going little. We’re going to be spending a good deal of time across this interview discussing your books in the Antasy series. Some folks might think that’s a typo, but it’s just a lovely play on words in your trilogy of sci-fi books about ants and the miniature warriors that ride them into battle. You were inspired to write the books when you saw a pair of ant colonies doing battle over a salty treat, but what was it like conceptualizing the makings of the story. Were you lying awake at night, or having fever dreams where everything started to come together?
CTC: As a kid I was obsessed with ants. There was a strip of bright orange sand in back of our house where there was an abundance of ant mounds in summer. I remember when a black ant colony started building their mound near a red ant colony and a couple of days later, I saw these two tribes were at war. I used a magnifying glass to watch them as they tore each other apart. Black ants would converge on red ants and grab them by their legs to rip them out or snip off their heads.
When I was in college, I began reading the work of the first sociobiologists, what we now call evolutionary biology. The first book was titled The Imperial Animal and made the strong case that our behavior is an outcome of our evolution as a species, a reminder that we are animals who inherit an inclination to war and territorial expansion and to the creation of hierarchical social organizations. The most famous evolutionary biologist was Dr. Edward O. Wilson, the Second Darwin, who was also the world’s foremost authority on ants. Another is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene.
Some time in the 90s, I was vacationing in the Yucatan, touring pre-Columbian ruins and enjoying some Spanish peanuts when one of them fell and rolled under my lounge chair. A short time later, I noticed two different kinds of ants were warring over the peanut, attempting to roll it towards their own nests and murdering each other in the process. The following morning, I woke from a dream in which I imagined myself as being just a tenth of an inch tall and riding on the back of a black ant. At my sides were thousands of other tiny soldiers on black ants and we were riding into battle against an army of tiny men on the backs of red ants. I wrote it all down and knew this was the seed of a book series.
I read everything I could find about ants, including Dr. Wilson’s magnum opus, The Ants. I also read about the nature of human hierarchies as well as the histories of India and Mexico which are two nations that have elaborate caste systems based on skin color and ethnicity. I have always been a student of religion and was fascinated by its use as a means of reinforcing hierarchies, of justifying the privileges of the few over the many and as a pretext for going to war which is ultimately about territorial expansion. Wars are not fought over religion, but religious beliefs are used as an argument for taking other people’s territories and subjugating their inhabitants.
We should never be surprised when tribes or nations go to war, even in modern times—this is what we are as humans: war makers. This makes us like ants, one of just a few species that also go to war, which invade others’ territories and will kill to take them over. World War I is now regarded as a “pointless” war, but it was one in which colonial powers fought to extend or preserve their empires. World War II was Germany’s assertion of its former boundaries as well as the subjugation of nations that had defeated it in World War I. The U.S. war in Iraq was not over weapons of mass destruction, but was a colonial expedition, the attempt to subdue and settle a region with a desirable resource: oil. Dick Cheney, one of the architects of that war even had a map of Iraq that partitioned its regions as domains for different oil companies.
I was ready to write Ghost Ants after participating in my first Burning Man Festival, on the night when the effigy is burned. I received something like a secular version of a prophetic vision as I wandered the different camps of the festival, which was like traveling through different, exotic nations. I was, quite frankly, blitzed on an overdose of LSD and had to wander away from the noisy chaos of that immense and intense party. I wandered out to one of the bleakest deserts on the planet, sat on the salt flat, looked up in the sky and saw my novel as a film. It took a couple of years of unraveling that vision as I wrote it down and shaped it into a narrative.
T: Thank you for the very comprehensive journey through how your Antasy came to be. I find it interesting that there were multiple components in the creative process that coalesced in order to bring it to life.
I don’t think many people venture to say just about officially that they were tripping out to make the magic happen, so I’m interested to press on you a bit more there. Since you had that first vision of your story, have you ever gone back to that state of mind to see what else shakes loose? Was it (or would you expect it to be) a continuation of that concept, or a brand new one?
CTC: I will not lie and say that hallucinogenics have not been a part of my process with a few of my different projects including the two sequels to Book 1 of Antasy. I do like micro-dosing. But the ideas, the passion, the intent of my novels do not come from taking drugs. I think most great art, especially narrative art, comes from feelings. The great artists, the ones I admire, are people of strong emotions and are very empathetic. They aren’t looking for something to write or paint or film, they have something inside that must be expressed, a story that compels them that they have to tell, or an image or composition they need to share. Whenever anybody tells me that they want to write, I ask them what it is they want to express. You have to have something you want to say—even if it’s just the fun of a damn good story with a lot of twists and turns. I think the people who write good horror love a good scare and the people who write good romance are enamored with falling in love. Some authors only write one or two books because they’ve said all they wanted to say and writing one more would be inauthentic.
I never pursued songwriting professionally, but I always wanted to know what it would be like to write songs and record an album and so I did—a simple bare bones record. I would play my songs at open mic nights around town and get to know other singer/songwriters. It was one of the best creative experiences of my life. It was during a time in which I was single and on the emotional roller coaster of being lonely and then falling in love and then breaking up again and then starting it all over. I didn’t need to look for songs or their lyrics—music would come to me while playing guitar and then the words would pour out. All that urge to write songs disappeared when I met the partner I have now—there were some happy songs about finding the right one and then nothing once I was happily married. I was off the roller coaster and had no need to write about the ups and downs of dating. But I had plenty of strong feelings about the world and what made me sad and angry about it. And when I paint, I paint my astonishment and admiration for the world in all its endless beauty. My joy goes into my paintings.
Various substances have influenced artists over the years. Freud, as much an artist as a scientist, wrote while using cocaine. Hemingway and Fitzgerald drank alcohol when they wrote. Absinthe, the Green Fairy, was drunk by impressionist painters and writers and composers in the 19th century. The art and music of the Sixties was absolutely altered by the use of LSD and other hallucinogenics. A strong case can be made that Frank Herbert grew and used his own psilocybin to heighten his imagination and apparently the worms of Dune were inspired by the moth larvae that rummaged through his stash. Taking drugs cannot turn someone into an artist or give them a brilliant idea, but it can heighten or alter their work. An excess of hallucinogenics can also result in work that is incomprehensible, harsh and useless.
I am sure that Adderall and Ritalin are a part of many writers’ diets and definitely have an effect on their writing. The novel I am working on now is a reworking of a fairy tale by Charles Perrault. Through it I am dealing with my frustrations and sadness over the last election and I’m examining the nature of mischief. Other than caffeine, it’s been a drug-free experience, but its visuals are still pretty druggy. I think people who are drawn to hallucinogenics are already people of imagination and a psychedelic experience is about the enhancement of their imaginings.
T: Your story deals with taking characters with big personalities and shrinks them down to experience the world in much bigger ways. How do you tell a story of diminutiveness in a way that doesn’t feel reductive or derivative? How does embracing science and science fiction help you to accomplish something that dazzles an audience?
CTC: When my book was being considered by publishers, it was derided by one for having a preposterous premise: that human beings could evolve to ten millimeters tall. I wasn’t the first author to shrink humans—Asimov did it in Fantastic Voyage, Crichton did it in Micro, and Scalzi has tiny humanoids in Old Man’s War etcetera. But I’m sad to say as someone who always wanted to be a crew member of the Starship Enterprise that the notion of interstellar travel is just as farfetched as my premise of extreme human shrinkage. Scientists have yet to come up with a plausible theory that would allow for interstellar travel. The same goes for time travel, and let’s add in zombies, vampires etc. People accept time and space travel as a premise, but some won’t accept the idea of tiny humans entwined with insects. My sister is one of those— she’s never read my books because she thinks bugs are “icky.”
My books are staked in the camp of Science Fantasy—they are ‘sciencey’ in that the behavior of the insects is credible and researched and they are fantasy in that the humans are so small. But I believe I have created a world where the behavior of the humans who have intertwined with different ants and other insects is believable. It’s history repeating millions of years later—humans being humans are still at war, still racist, still sexist, still greedy and domineering and still believing in gods that come from their own imaginations. I’m not asking readers to believe that this is a possible reality but to consider some greater, universal truth about our nature as human beings.
T: We’re back to the lighting in a bottle scenario, but in this case, it looks like you did indeed catch the lightning! Was there any desire to sort of dance and point fingers at the publisher that initially snubbed you?
CTC: No, not really. I liked him when I met him, a kindred spirit who liked good food, good wine and a good party. He’s successful, but when I went through his roster of published writers, I found only a couple that I liked and respected. I thought a few of his authors were absolutely terrible and were very lucky to get published…or they were very well connected. I suppose connections matter in publishing too. One of the things he admitted to me was that most of the books he published did not make back their advances, that it was the star writers who made the money, and the rest were tax write-offs.
T: With all the experience you’ve had, do you ever wonder if you’ll be able to take the written word you’ve created for your novels, and spin them off into the film you saw in your hallucinogen-fueled dreams?
CTC: Oh yeah. Of course I would love to see screen versions of my books. Three movies based on the three books would be fantastic but so would a TV series for Max or Apple + with ten episodes for each book like Game of Thrones. That would be the thrill of a lifetime, the fulfillment of all my dreams and I could die happy. But I’m sorry to say that this is one more of those big fish that got away. Prophets of the Ghost Ants was developed as a screen project by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, the Face-Off guys, with Lawrence Bender, the Oscar-winning producer of so many successful films. We had the interest of director Michael Bay who thought the project might be “my own Avatar” as well as a commitment from the animator Conrad Vernon. We met with one of the producers of Avatar, Jon Landau, who had read Prophets of the Ghost Ants and told us it was “the best novel I have ever read.” Wow!!!
I also knew I’d written something good when we received the coverages from the film studios, the written analyses of the book, and they were very gratifying. It gives you a chill down your spine when you get compared with Tolkien, Jean Auel and Frank Herbert. But the screen version was not to be—not yet and likely never. I learned my lesson a long time ago about writing for the screen—the odds are almost never in your favor. My books are standalone works. I never wrote them as “proof of concepts” for the screen. And maybe they are not for a mass audience but a more select one that doesn’t think bugs are icky.
T: The world that we live in now has certain rules and structures, but we’re always evolving. What do you think you would need from the industry in order to see lightning caught one more time, and seeing your book envisioned on a screen—big or small?
CTC: Maybe I will have to die first to get famous, like Van Gogh or John Kennedy Toole, LOL.
Seriously, the thing that would get a development executive’s attention would be book sales. It’s true that there have been some successful screen adaptations of books that were plucked from obscurity but for the most part, it is best sellers that get to the screen. The first book of my series was a successful indie book, and I got an offer to publish it through Amazon’s sci-fi imprint, N47, as well as the offer to turn it into an audio book. A former editor at N47 knew of my book and left for Harper Collins Voyager to become their editor and when I approached him about it, he offered to acquire it and commission the sequels. Unfortunately, it was for an imprint that was coming to an end, and my book was the last acquired for it. Although my books are still available from HC Voyager, they got almost zero publicity and have never gotten beyond cult status. ByteDance tried to buy my books and translate them into Chinese and other languages—that Chinese market of a billion people is definitely one you want in on—but Harper showed no interest in a co-publishing deal.
In my private moments, I dance like no one’s watching and I write like everyone’s reading. I write novels that I would like to read, and it’s my sincere wish that they entertain everyone who picks them up, that we can journey together. Of course, I’d love to see them realized as a movie or television show because I love great movies and television. It also means I would have enough money to make art all day instead of making a living.
T: If you were able to make art the way you like it, without an unlimited budget—we’ll assume in this case that the Antasy trilogy were what got you the hefty payday when they were made into a movie trilogy or TV show—what would your next project be that you would want to bring to life? Something with epic scope and plenty of grandeur? Or something altogether different?
CTC: I know that the Antasy books could be the basis for a fantastic film or television series, something so completely different with astonishing visuals and the exciting story of a poor boy’s rise from the trash heap to the pinnacle of power. It could be a world as startlingly beautiful as that of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dune or GOT. Of course, some people who don’t like insects would find it to be “icky.” But there is one more thing I’d like to see realized: a stage show, and eventually a film of a synth-pop opera that I wrote titled Gardens of Babylon. It’s set in ancient Babylon, in 580 B.C., and its music is Eighties inspired: synth-pop, late-stage Disco, House music, New Wave, old school Rap, Hair Metal and some Bollywood.
The story is based on the legend of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Great Wonders of the ancient world. The legend is a romantic one, of King Nebuchadnezzar falling in love with a young and beautiful princess, Amyitis, who he married for a political alliance. She is from a green, mountainous region and hates Babylon and suffers there because it’s flat and hot. To please her, Nebuchadnezzar builds the Hanging Gardens, an artificial mountain covered with trees and waterfalls. But no good drama is without conflict—Amyitis comes to detest Nebuchadnezzar for what he is: a ruthless, murderous conqueror who leaves her to destroy Jerusalem and enslave the Jews. While the king is away at another war, Amyitis meets and falls in love with Diocles, the man hired to build and plant the Hanging Gardens. He’s a young and handsome Greek who longs for his own mountain homeland. Their romance risks their deaths.
It’s a fun, colorful idea for an opera, maybe a quick 80 minutes, with singing fruit trees, dancing sheep and eunuch priests who read livers to divine the future. The setting would be something like Venice since ancient Babylon was a city of waterways with ziggurats and temples to Ishtar. I loved writing and recording the demo with musician Mike Dobson, a TV composer. We made it essentially for an audience of a few people which would be ourselves, the singers we used and some friends and family. I loved listening to it, had fun writing and making the demo, and I still think it would make a great show. But I have no idea how to get it made. If had that one million dollars, I would invest it in making an off-Broadway show, even if it was for one night only.
T: You are certainly working on a lot of things, and it is likely that once fans find their way to you, they’ll be interested in figuring out where they can learn more. Do you have a website that you would direct people to in order to stay up to date with you and your projects?
CTC: Thanks for asking, Mike! My website features some brilliant illustrations for the Antasy series from an artist named Mozchops whose own gorgeous work I have called “The Sistine Chapel of Insect Art.” You can also see some of my own paintings—neo-psychedelic landscapes. A friend of mine calls me “Grandma Moses on acid” which I take as the highest compliment. And my latest book is not sci-fi/fantasy, but is titled A Bitch for God. It’s a dark satire of the New Age movement and set in the late Eighties, early Nineties, “when hopelessness and desperation were exploited by charlatans for their own ambitions.”
https://clarkthomascarlton.com
T: Clark, I want to thank you for spending your time journeying into all the things that you’ve been doing across your life so far. I know you’re likely always working hard, so to have shared your time feels like its us catching lightning! I’m looking forward to keeping up with you, and discovering more about the adventures you’ve gone on, and the ones you invite readers to take with you.
CTC: Mike, the pleasure was mine, thank you. And my thanks to everyone who read this and indulged me.
T: Folks, I’d like to once again thank Clark Thomas Carlton for sparing some of his time between working on his many projects. It’s always a joy to be able to see someone’s passion so clearly, and you can be certain that Carlton is the kind of person who eats, breathes and dreams about his art. If you’re interested in his work, be sure to check out his website. You can also check out our recent promotion for Prophets of the Ghost Ants. And do be sure to check out Prophets of the Ghost Ants (The Antasy Series Book 1) on Amazon today!
Michael DeAngelo
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