Meet James F. Mueller

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful James F. Mueller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

James F. , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Once upon a time, a vice president was asked, “What do you do?” His reply: nothing, but I do it well.

There was a time in my life, like Solomon, I wanted to experience everything “til I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.” – including doing nothing but to indulge my every whim. There are words for such people. The more euphemistic ones were sybarite, dilettante, or “gentleman” as they were called in aristocratic circles in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century. Fortunately, that was short-lived, just out of sheer boredom, since my goal was just the opposite. I wanted to live a life more intense than anyone I ever knew. But like Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad’s novel, reality can get in the way if you don’t have a Walter Mitty imagination to fill in the boring parts, and that’s where I thrived!

Drawings, paintings, stories, and entire novels and movies I could see in the most dreary environments, from first through twelfth grade, then college, and eventually the army. Ironically, in the summer of ’65, while waiting to be shipped overseas to the DMZ in the northernmost camp in South Korea, I read “Catcher in the Rye,” and my life changed. No more the campus dilettante who could AND WOULD write comedy, plays, skits,  and create political cartoons for mere laughs to fill in the boredom of the classes I rarely attended, except for the finals to get a good enough grade to get the credit. No, overnight, I knew my life’s calling: TO WRITE THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, and from that point on, everything I would do would have to further that cause. I succumbed to the world of literature and read all the world’s greatest novels, plays, and poetry. I fought in the Napoleonic Wars, sailed the Seven Seas, and explored the Amazon – nothing was beyond my reach. If I didn’t read it, I’d write it; if I didn’t see it, I’d paint it. My mission was clear: write the novel you always wanted to read, paint the paintings you wanted to see, and then put’m all together, and MY LIFE WAS LITERALLY FOREVER CHANGED. From an idle dilettante to the most driven person I ever knew or read!

How long did James Joyce take to write Ulysses? Or Proust, his Remembrance of Things Past? Or Dante’s Divine Comedy? Three authors – three works? Answer? Seven to thirteen years. Joyce seven. Proust and Dante thirteen. Me? You can more than triple that. Forty years to write a trilogy that encapsulated all their themes and far more, including hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings that not ONLY ALL had to tie together – like one long Homeric poem – but they ALL had to accomplish my goal in the first place! TO LIVE A LIFE (and now write about it) MORE INTENSE THAN ANYONE I EVER KNEW!

Question is would it work? And was it worth it? The former is yes if you’re just asking me. But if you’re asking more than just my cult followers, the answer is yet to be determined. But to answer the latter: was it worth it?

Yes.

But from God’s perspective? I’ll have to wait and see.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

One hundred years from now, I want my novel to be regarded as the greatest novel of the 21st Century. In the meantime, however, I’ll settle for that cult-like following that generated the kind of response that classics like The Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Catch-22 generated – the kind of novel that not only spoke to a whole generation – but the kind of novel that changed a whole generation – and since I’m already getting responses from readers of every persuasion from every major continent* listing it on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere as one of their all-time favorite novels along with the greatest novels of all-time, including the greatest novel of the 20th Century, ULYSSES! The real question now is – where do I go from here? And that’s where my promoter, Grayce McCormick, par excellence, comes in. Because it’s obvious, the one thing I lack (besides modesty) is a good marketer. In the meantime, you can check it out on Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

* – No buyers from Antarctica yet.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1 – The knowledge will come if you have the drive. 2 – But no amount of drive or knowledge will accomplish some goals if you’re taking the wrong path. 3 – Some journeys are subjective, not objective (like math or science). However, that doesn’t mean your vision is less valid if no one else sees it. Good artists stick to their genre; great artists transform it. Great artists lead, not follow. Sometimes posthumously: Van Gogh, Kafka, Mozart, the list is endless. But you have to ask yourself: would I rather be a Van Gogh, Kafka, or a Mozart? or a Robert Kincaid, Jacqueline Susann, or a Liberace? (Kincaid, by the way, made more money in his lifetime than Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso put together. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime for twelve bucks, and we know how he died. Kafka told his brother before he died to burn all his works. Mozart was buried in an unmarked plot, broke.)

It all comes down to how much do YOU want it? And how much are you willing to give up to get it.

And for the answer to THAT question in MY life? Read the book: Confessions of St. Augustine.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The Bible which I read daily and all the top 100 and plus greatest novels ever written that I have read and literally committed to memory like a chemist knows his elements, yes, even in the order they are ranked by concensus of the most credible critics out there – the top 100 plus greatest plays (same standard of judgment) – top 100 plus greatest poems plus and last but not least the works of the top 125 plus most influential novelists, playwrights, and poets EVER! ALL of which form my thinking and outlook on life.

Most valuable and impactful nuggets of wisdom?

Glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

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James F. Mueller

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