The person responsible for lettering the book kept telling me that he was on top of it, but I never saw any pages. He swore that he had finished “about thirty”, which made me suspicious because he should have known exactly how many pages he had lettered. Anyway, I never saw any pages from him, so I guess I’ll never know. Christmas came and went as did New Years and I realized that I was never going to see the pages from this guy ever. Luckily, Ryan English, who had done some extra layouts for the artwork to help get the art finished in time to premiere the show, offered to help with the lettering. He jumped on it and finished all the lettering in about a month.

Then, we had a personnel shakeup in my office, so the person who was supposed to have gotten the artwork to the graphic designer to convert to PDFs never took care of that process. I realized this about two weeks later and got on top of it. Thankfully, we had a printer lined up, but they ended up finishing the job about 10 days after they said they would. The shipping took two days longer than I was told. But, finally, on April 16, nearly a year after the books were supposed to be ready, I finally got them!

I shipped them immediately most of the folks who pre-ordered them. And then one of the people who received the book discovered a major misprint! One of the pages had been printed twice and the page that was supposed to come after it wasn’t printed at all. He emailed me last night. The problem was my fault. I hadn’t proofed the final PDFs carefully enough. Between sending my original pages and the creation of the PDFs, the job got messed up. I freaked. My first thought was that we’d have to reprint ALL of the books, which would be totally horrible for me. Then it hit me that maybe we could just paste in the missing page. A lot of work, but way less money than a total reprint.

I contacted my friend Gerald Hanrihan over at Austin Digital Printing and he let me know that, in fact, there was sticker paper for just this purpose. As he pointed out, I wasn’t the first person ever to have this issue come up.

So, this morning I’m dropping Gerald a PDF of that page and hopefully will have the remaining books fixed and ready to ship by the end of next week.

Meanwhile, if you’ve received a flawed copy of the book, click on this link download and print it yourself: Twin_Infinity_print_correction_6.6×10. Or, if you want the sticker version of the missing page, shoot me an email and I’ll send it free of charge.

As I wrap up my own crime novel (formerly entitled SALT, now I’m not totally sure what the title is going to be), I’ve been reading a bunch of crime novels. One completely sticks out for me: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

I’ll start by saying that I really love Charles Dickens. Like pretty much everyone, I was forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school. Didn’t like that experience so much (didn’t like reading any books for class in high school). But I re-discovered Charles Dickens about 10 years ago by reading David Copperfield, a fantastic book. Then read Nicholas Nickleby, which I liked even better. Then read A Tale of Two Cities, which made me cry in the end. Then read Great Expectations, which became one of my all-time favorites by any writer.

Fingersmith owes a big debt to Dickens. And the book acknowledges as much in the very first scene, when its protagonist, a young pickpocket, goes to see a play version of Oliver Twist. Waters sets her book in Dickensian England and you really get a sense of the grossness of London at that time for sure. But this is a crime novel, not a serialized melodrama, so here’s where Fingersmith really stands out.

The plotting in this book is simply incredible. I’m going to say pretty much nothing about the plot because to say much would give too much away. But the setup is that this young fingersmith, Susan Trinder, takes part in a plot to steal the inheritance from a young woman who lives in the country. And that setup forms the basis for the crime of this novel. But the plot–yikes!–it’s just fantastic. You have to trust me on this.

More than the plot, though, are the characters. The book is told in first-person narrative and Waters does an amazing job of getting into Susan Trinder’s head. The ingenious construction of the book sets up some pretty great dramatic irony (where the reader knows more than the characters) for a totally on-the-edge-of-your-seat effect.

Bottom line, this book delivers to the very, very end.

If you’re looking for something unusual to read and you like that queasy feeling of great suspense, then you’ll really like this book. If you’re also a fan of being immersed another place and time, you’re going to love this book. If, on top of that, you dig surprises, well, my friend, this book will blow you away.

Fingersmith was published in 2002. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. I had never heard of it, stumbled upon it when I was doing a google search for crime novels. So glad I did. And if you read it now, you’ll be glad I did, too.

Onto the book of the week. The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White.

Let’s start with the fact that Disney completely botched this book as a movie. So if you’re thinking about seeing the movie version instead of reading the book (or you saw it and now have no interest in the book), skip the movie and get to this masterpiece.

I’ve read this book three times. Once when I was a kid, then again about seven years ago aloud to my older daughter, and then again just last month, again aloud, to my younger daughter. It is such a beautiful telling of the King Arthur legend, from the perspective of a young squire-to-be nicknamed Wart. It just so happens that Wart’s tutor is a guy named Merlin. The book is told in a series of episodes having to do with Wart’s education by Merlin alongside his friend Kay. Kay is the son of an English nobleman, Wart is an orphan adopted by said nobleman. But throughout the book you’re made keenly aware that when the boys grow up, Wart will serve Kay as his squire while Kay gets to become a knight.

What makes this book so completely great is its characters. Each character is so fully realized both in action and in voice and most of them (including Merlin) are pretty hilarious. Merlin himself is something of a bumbler. There’s one great scene in which the entire castle has gone on a hunt and Merlin, who lives backwards through time, is wearing running shorts. The shorts rip and he spends the rest of the hunt trying (and failing) to mend them through magic. In another scene, a character named King Pellinore jousts with Sir Grummore. Their armor is so heavy and their visors provide such a poor view that they mostly stumble around and bump into trees. My descriptions of these things are just terrible. In the book, they are laugh-out-loud funny.

In this last reading, Scarlett, my daughter, kept asking when we were going to see the sword in the stone, which doesn’t come until the very end. When we finally got there, both she and I were rapt. The way this part of the myth plays out in the book is just astounding. Tear jerking, really.

One side note: White wrote some followups to The Sword in the Stone, but they don’t have the perfect mix of wonder and humor of the original, so I can’t say that I really recommend them.

That said, (and I don’t use this word to describe much), The Sword in the Stone really is magic.

Well, I’m a very fast reader and the book was a thick trade paperback. Nothing unsurmountable. So I completely blew off the assignment for weeks and weeks. It was never again brought up in class and I didn’t think about it at all. Then one day the teacher handed out the essay assignments. I figured I should probably crack the book, but I didn’t even look past the cover for another week.

About three days before the paper was due, I figured it was time to read the thing. I could usually read a book in a day if I put my mind to it so I opened it up. The print was tiny. The names of the characters were in another language (Russian, duh!). How many pages was this thing anyway? Holy shit. Seven hundred pages. Then I looked at the five possible paper topics. They were incomprehensible. There would be no way for me to BS my way to anything resembling a passing grade. I was totally up the creek.

I spent the next two days paralyzed. Finally, the day before the paper was due I went to the library and started digging through the card catalogue (yes, this was when there were card catalogues). I thought I remembered that you could search the card catalogue for topics by subject and I just started with the teacher’s first paper topic. It had to do with how Dostoevsky’s novel correlated to the Book of Revelations in the Bible. So I decided to look for the subject “Dostoevsky” in the hopes that I would see something having to do with religion.

My fingers ran through the cards in the little drawer. D. D. Donkeys. Here we go. Dostoevsky. Wait. What? “Dostoevsky, Revelations”? No way. I snagged the Dewey decimal number and ran into the stacks and found a book of essays about the works of Dostoevsky. One of the chapters was entitled something like “The Devils and Revelations”. I knew that The Possessed was sometimes translated as The Devils. Could it be possible that this essay might address one of the topics I needed to write about? Indeed, yes.

Somehow in the public library of the little town of Montvale, New Jersey, there was a book of essays about Dostoevsky. This would be remarkable in and of itself, but in that book of essays was a long chapter that directly answered the question posed by the teacher! I could not believe my luck!

In the interest of a good grade, I threw scruples to the wind. I sat down at my computer (an Apple Macintosh Plus) and copied the essay, changing big words for words I would more likely use myself. I typed as fast as I could. I couldn’t tell you what I was even typing about. I typed until I got to the tenth page of my paper, then wrote a conclusion paragraph that said something like “and that’s why The Possessed is like the Book of Revelations.”

The next day, convinced that the teacher must have read the same essay, meaning that I would get caught cheating, I handed in my paper.

Now, I’m pretty sure that many of the kids blew off the paper in a similar way to me. When the graded papers were handed back a week or two later, I could see a bunch of “C”s in red on the front page. But everyone knew that the girl who sat at the desk in front of me, Meg McDonald, had worked her ass of on this one. She had read the book. She had done the research. She spent weeks and weeks on her paper. And when she got it back, she got a “B-plus.”

The teacher handed me my paper face down. I braced myself for the “F” that would say I had cheated. I turned my paper over.

“A”

I blinked. The “A” didn’t change. I laughed aloud. Meg turned around. She saw the red letter on my paper. And in that moment I knew. I knew that she knew. I knew that she knew that I had cheated. The reason I knew this was because she started to cry.

Did I do the right thing? Did I apologize to her? Did I give my paper back to the teacher and tell him I had plagiarized the whole thing? Did I announce to the class that Meg was the one who deserved the “A”, the only “A” paper in the class at all? No, I did not.

Flash forward about ten years.

I’m in the Austin public library looking through the stacks for something to read. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was letting my eyes wander over the spines. Something caught my eye. A thick black hardcover spine with six large letters spelling “DEMONS” and an author’s name. Fyodor Dostoevsky.

DEMONS.

How likely was it that Dostoevsky wrote a book called DEMONS and also a book sometimes called The Devils?

I pulled the book from the shelf and looked at the cover. Under the title were the words “Formerly translated as The Possessed“. It was a brand-new translation that had only come out in the past month. Then and there I knew what book I was taking home from the library. I owed it to Meg McDonald. By God, I was going to redeem myself. I would be the only other kid in our AP World History class to read this book.

And boy and I glad I did! This book is AMAZING!

In DEMONS Dostoevsky takes a real-life murder by political activists of a Russian student mashes it up with certain details of the Book of Revelations and sets this apocalypse in a small rural Russian town. The Antichrist is represented by a character named Pyotr Verkhovensky. The character of the Beast is represented by a young man named Nicolai Stavrogin, one of the best, most enigmatic, characters in all of literature. The story builds to an explosive conclusion. It’s steeped in a fog not unlike some of the best Expressionist cinema–dark, mysterious, creepy. The book is not an easy read per se (quite a shift from my post about The Shining a couple of weeks ago), but the real surprise of it, at least for me when I first read it, was just how hilariously funny it was. The activists in the book, whom Dostoevsky is not shy about judging, are a bunch of clowns. So are the members of the aristocracy that they hope to overthrow. But the anarchists are led by–and the aristocrats are deceived by–a terrifying conniver, Pyotr, who also happens to be very funny and charming. Pyotr is convinced he won’t succeed in his nefarious plan (to do what exactly?) unless he enlists the help of Nicolai. And therein lies the rub.

I love this book so much that I’ve read it three times over the years. Moreover, it’s gotten me on a classics run that led me to reading all kinds of great books, from many by Dickens to Dumas to Stevenson and beyond.

One of the things I find fascinating about the book is how much it reveals about the Russian character. Dostoevsky had a real love-hate relationship with the West. He seems drawn to the appeal of European intellectualism of the time and recognizes the suffering of his own people under the rule of the Tsar. But he also despises the West, seeing its secularism as a direct threat to what he sees as the core of the true Russian, the Orthodox church. I think you can read this book in the context of today’s Russia and the actions of Putin and gain a real understanding of why things have unfolded the way they have over the past few years, going back over centuries, really, to when Peter the Great made the Russian aristocrats shave their beards and speak in French (something the aristocrats still do in DEMONS).

But also, I think you can read the book in the context of terrorism. You can understand why Dostoevsky was so afraid of these so-called anarchists. Look what happens when you let the clowns take over.

I highly recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of the book, which is the one I’ve read. Their introduction gives great historical context for the work if you don’t know much about the history of Russia.

Boy, writing this has gotten me so fired up that I think I’m gonna re-read it after I finish the book I’m reading now.

Since then, I’ve read quite a bit of John Le Carré. And I’m just going to say this right at the top: I think he’s a literary genius. Not just a great teller of tales, but a great stylist as well (or at least he was while the cold war was still around).

How’s this for an opening sentence: “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.”

Who the heck is Major Dover? Who is this Jim? What’s Thursgood’s? Don’t tell me you don’t already want to keep reading!

One great example of his genius and influence is the use of the word “mole” to represent a double-agent within the offices of a spy agency. This is the first known use of that term. There are a bunch of other made-up jargony terms in the book that have found there way into contemporary language as well. Who else was able to do that? Well, Shakespeare. So, there, I’ve now compared Le Carré to Shakespeare.

One of the things I really love about this particular book is that while it purports to be a spy novel, it’s really about something else entirely, which is kind of what the movie totally missed. It’s about a man at the tail end of his career looking back and wondering what the heck was it all for, anyway. It’s about the sense of loss that inevitably happens at some point in middle age when you wonder if you’ve been squandering your time on this earth. It’s about betrayal, both personal and professional, which only adds to the sense of sadness that maybe life isn’t so full of purpose and meaning after all. Depressing stuff.

But where the new movie also completely missed was the fact that this book is both fun and funny. Le Carré is a great entertainer. George Smiley, the central character, is an unlikely hero. Short, overweight, continually needing to clean his glasses and using the end of his tie to do it (which I can attest is a great way to smudge your glasses even more). He’s soft spoken, but incredibly smart. He’s modest, but he’s the hero. Do you get this at all from Oldman’s performance? Nope. But it’s there in the book. And there’s a sense of optimism, too, in the character of Bill Roach, a boy who clearly has a bright future ahead of him. Maybe he (and his country) won’t make the same mistakes as his elders.

Because Le Carré is so great at getting into his hero’s head, Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy becomes so much more than the whodunnit that it could be. Sure, there’s a parlor-mystery element to the storytelling, but in my reading that’s kind of the least of it. There is such an incredibly real sense of loss in this book. The events as they unfold are personal. This aspect of the book is magnified even more by the story that frames the main story, the coming-of-age of schoolboy Bill Roach, who is a stand-in for a young Le Carre in the way that Smiley is a stand-in for the older one. Turns out, maybe that the qualities it takes to be a great spy can also be applied to the art of writing.

From a more global perspective, it’s not just that someone has betrayed Great Britain, but that Britannia itself is crumbling. Its power is being rapidly ceded to the United States, its spy system is practically purposeless anyway.

Which brings me around to James Bond. Ian Fleming, like Le Carré, was a former spy who hit gold with his books. In the James Bond books, yes Britain is crumbling, but it’s not its own fault. No. It’s the fault of the shifty Orientals (Dr. No), the horrific Rastafarians (The Man With The Golden Gun), and the Nazis cum Jews (how this is exactly possible, I’m not sure) )(On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, Thunderball). In Fleming’s view, England just needs a cocktail-drinking English super-spy to cut down these foreign forces and bring the Empire back to its former glory. Sure, England can partner with the US if necessary, but, really, aren’t the Americans really just Englishman with funny accents anyway? Don’t get me wrong, the Bond books are great fun, but they’re laced with a paternalistic racism and a little more than creepy when you realize that Fleming probably drank as much as Bond did himself (in one of the books Bond drinks 21 martinis in a single day–shaken not stirred) and kinda clearly saw James Bond as his more athletic alter ego.

But this is a far cry from the far more introspective and much better writing of Le Carré, where good and evil only exist in shades of gray (in fact, unlike Fleming, Le Carre pretty much completely debunks the idea of a British Empire being a force of good at all), and where spies are simply a literary substitute for the complex relationships we all have with each other.

By the way, the two followup novels that fill out the Karla trilogy–The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People–are as good if not better than TTSS. Read all three!

I’ve always been an avid consumer of novels, ever since I was in elementary school and stumbled upon The Hobbit in the library there. I was that kid who deciphered the runes on the cover. And looking back over the last 35 years or so, I can safely say that I consume many, many more books than I do any other medium. So, of course I should be writing fiction. That’s a medium I love!

I wouldn’t be writing SALT with confidence if I didn’t feel like I had a ton of books to fall back on for inspiration. And I love these books, but often when I talk about them with other people, even other writers, I’m surprised to discover that I’m often the only person in the room whose read many of them. Since I love to share the things I love, it seemed perfectly logical to start posting about those books. So here’s my first attempt at sharing a book I love (hopefully without ruining the joy of discovery for anyone who hasn’t yet read it). Please do comment if you’ve read any of the books I post about. And please let me know if I’ve inspired you to discover something new!

THE SHINING

We’ve all seen the movie, no doubt, and even if we haven’t seen the movie we all can imagine a little boy making a funny voice while bending his index finger to the syllables RED-RUM. We all know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, over and over and over and over again. We all know that the Overlook Hotel has a hedge maze that’s scarily easy to get lost in. We all know that there are twin girls in green dresses living at the hotel who look remarkably like a famous Diane Arbus photograph. We all know that the elevators at the Overlook are overflowing with blood.  What most people don’t know is that NONE of these things are in the book. Which in and of itself is a great reason to read the book–the analysis of how the adaptation process of book to film works.

What IS in the book, though, in my opinion, blows the movie completely out of the water. Stephen King is able to get into the heads of his three main characters (Danny, Wendy, and Jack) in a way that is both utterly believable and under-your-skin terrifying at the same time. More than anything else, the book THE SHINING is a study in character and, man, what characters!

Danny is a boy with the power to see visions of the future (the Shining of the title), Wendy is his mom, still married to Jack through a process of inertia more than anything, and Jack Torrence is a fired high-school teacher with aspirations of becoming a famous writer. He also happens to be a recovering alcoholic with a very occasional and violent temper. What King is able to do in a way that actually reminds me of Tolstoy (yes, I’m comparing Stephen King to Leo Tolstoy) is dive into the stream-of-consciousness of these characters that makes you feel like you’re living in their heads. In particular, the thought-process of Jack as he embraces his role of off-season hotel caretaker is just amazing. We all know someone like this–the alcoholic who on the one hand knows that he’s responsible for his own actions, but who on the other hand can’t help but blame everyone else for his problems. When five-year-old Danny falls under this particular scrutiny, that’s when things get harrowing.

I just reread this book for the first time since I was a teenager and I think I liked it even better this time. I followed up that book with King’s ON WRITING, his memoir. In that book he talks about how he, himself, was an alcoholic, but didn’t see himself in Jack until his wife pointed it out to him. Just this morning I was thinking about what a fantastic metaphor for the mind of an alcoholic the Overlook Hotel is in the book and how the mind of an alcoholic can be so completely destructive not just to him or herself but to his or her family as well.

But best of all, the book is a rollicking page-turning roller coaster ride. It keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

Dare I say it, but I think THE SHINING is a work of pure genius.

You think you know THE SHINING through the movie? Read the book!

For starters, the Twin Infinity premiere went just amazingly well. More than 2,000 people came out to the two performances and the response was everything I could hope for. Could not be prouder of the show and just can’t wait to share it with the world. It’s got a handful of venues this season, but it’s looking like that will only expand over the next few years as more venues come on board. It was so great to hear thousands of people laughing at all the right moments and on the edge of their seats at all the right moments, too. I’m particularly proud of how well all the flashback scenes went (a major change from the radio version). Can’t say thanks enough to all the folks who came out and made it such a great weekend. And an extra shout-out to Tim League and the management team at the Highball for hosting our opening night party!

The KLRU/PBS YouTube series is just humming along at this point. I’ve seen rough-cuts of every episode except the last one. Wish we had a few more views on the later episodes that are live, but I’m planning to promote the hell out of it once the series is complete. Binge-watching will only take a couple of hours, so it’s a much easier commitment than, say, an entire season of House of Cards. Eve Tarlo and the gang at KLRU are just killing it. Fingers crossed, we’ll schedule shoots of the sequels soon for two more seasons!

Finally, I’m getting back into the writing of SALT today. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet listened to SALT, I highly encourage you to do so. Click HERE to start. Couldn’t be more happy with what Buzz Moran has done with my words and voice. And Adrian Quesada‘s music is simply perfect. Each episode really does take you to a place you’ve never been before. One of the really fun parts of writing it has been incorporating my research of actual Haitian vodou rituals into the storytelling. What happens as a result of those rituals is fiction, but the rituals themselves are true to life. Turns out there’s a fan of the project living in Haiti who just messaged me about it on Facebook. Kinda can’t wait to hear her response to what we’ve done once she’s listened to all of it.

And the tour keeps rolling along. We’ve just wrapped up a series of gigs in Virginia and parts midwest. As usual, the response has been just great and most of the venues are saying they’re going to have us back. Next up, a mini-tour of Florida, then up to the Northeast. Our first out-of-town performances of Twin Infinity happen in this next round at one of our favorite venues, Proctors in Schenectady. Click HERE for the complete tour.

Well, not over exactly, because it’s going to tour the world, come out in print, be available as an audio drama, roll out on comiXology, and become serialized through a KLRU/PBS Digital Studios YouTube series. But the heavy lifting is over.

Tomorrow night, the Live-Action Graphic Novel version of Twin Infinity receives its world premiere at the Long Center. And the Intergalactic Nemesis trilogy will be complete. Tickets HERE.

I have been so incredibly lucky to work with some of the most talented and friendliest people on this project over the years. In particular, in the past five years, since launching the Live-Action Graphic Novel format, the folks I’ve worked with have been tireless collaborators and uplifting spirits, even at times when things were feeling like they were going nowhere.

For starters, thanks a ton to Julia Edwards, Lisa D’Amour, and Jessica Reisman for taking a chance back in 1996 by writing those quick-and-dirty episodes for our Little City recordings. This project wouldn’t exist without you.

I need to shout out to the artists who made the comic-books come to life: Tim Doyle, Paul Hanley, David Hutchison, and Lee Duhig. Without you guys, the “Live-Action Graphic Novel” format would all still just be a concept in my head.

Huge thanks to Cliff Redd, former Executive Director of the Long Center, who invited me to bring the radio plays to his hall and in whose office I came up with the concept for what became the Live-Action Graphic Novel. And huge shout out to the current team at the Long Center for carrying on this project, in particular David Wyatt, who came up with the words “Live-Action Graphic Novel” and who has been a tireless cheerleader for the past five years.

The Intergalactic Nemesis would have stalled out if it weren’t for my investors. Can’t say thanks enough to them: Marc Seriff, Scott Reichardt, and Cord Shiflet.

Then there’s the past and present cast and crew of the touring productions of this comic-book-meets-audio-drama: Danu Uribe, David Higgins, Jason Phelps, Shannon McCormick, Shana Merlin, Mical Trejo, Hildreth England, Brock England, Julie Linnard, Jose Villareal, Jeff Mills, Cami Alys, Kenny Redding, Rachel Landon, Kelly Matthews, Harlan Hodges, Agustin Frederic, George Stumberg, Oliver Freeman, and Chris Gibson.

The recent digital expansion of the project would simply not have been possible without the back-office support of Mission Control at the Robot Planet in the form of Rachel Kelmenson.

Our continued touring wouldn’t be happening either, if it weren’t for the incredible team at David Lieberman/Artists’ Representatives. Huge thanks to all of them, and particularly Allen Moon and Mr. Lieberman himself.

We probably never would have continued this project for so long without the continual support from KUT-FM, which broadcast every version of the radio play since 1997. In particular, thanks to Mike Lee, Hawk Mendenhall, and Rebecca McInroy.

The future of the project would be extremely uncertain if it weren’t for the vision of the folks at KLRU, in particular Eve Tarlo and Sara Robertson.

And now we’re down to the big guns. I get to work with my very best friends. These guys have made me a better artist and a better person. Buzz Moran, sound-effects genius, thank God Tony flaked out all those years ago! Graham Reynolds, it goes beyond music to having a peer who is just so damn smart and sensible. Chad Nichols, my co-author on all three of these shows, you make me a better writer by calling me on my bullshit.

Finally, the two people without whom this project wouldn’t exist and even if it did, it would have gone nowhere. Ray Colgan, thanks for suggesting we create a sci-fi radio play to be performed and recorded at Little City all those years ago. And thanks for being an essential part of the team in so many ways today. And Jessie Douglas, I don’t know what I’d do without you. So lucky that our paths crossed. You completely rock.

Okay. Break legs, everyone! Can’t friggin wait for the show!