Free KINDLE version of "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!"

As a special holiday gift to my constant readers, for five days I am offering "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" as a FREE Kindle giveaway on Amazon. If you read it and appreciate it - please consider liking it, sharing the link with friends, and reviewing it on GoodReads, or Amazon, or Barnes & Noble - or even your local newspaper!

It's strange - when I have done this for my other books, it has actually increased paid sales afterwords. The record thus far has been 436 free reads for "The Missionary and the Brute," let's see if we can get even more for this one! Thanks so much!

J.

The Best Laid Plans...

Oops!
Okay, in the first cipher of the first puzzle in the "silent words..." book, there is an error. The appropriate cipher text at the bottom of the introduction should have been:

"umrqibtoayvmfohvjpozccfwrrrbngaygpxgrrwgddyjginaoognkrdljgqidqiukiuwvlgjtxdknpkvumohzjtjjyonkjpnszoijinvzdjlzjnfamafpykootbnhjvtozkmetjwhpyiluoijsrisadftzsrbbxmctwxnpkcjmocivuaejfyejtdxuifnfuydmtsyhpxgjvfpjlgcvrouiutzsypsjzjcbyvazoijenwjpxwejvfenvfcyatbumvbcpwcsbzbqeneeayayxfwanhujvlljsrroeugcsyipyoniovcmyfjsq"

If you use this, you will get the correct response. Honestly, most folks recognized the surrounding text by context anyway, so it should not be an issue.

The alternative method for solving the existing text as printed is to SUBTRACT ONE from the third position in the key. That will do it too.

Thanks to Molnar on www.tweleve.org for pointing this out. He is the first person to not only solve the first puzzle completely but to articulate the methodology around it. Other folks came up with the solution but machine-forced it. Great job! Anyone solve Puzzle two?

Because the book is an energy-saving POD paperback, the corrections are now made and all books ordered starting tomorrow will reflect the change in text.

Thanks!
J.

Opening chapter - The Death of O'Ryan Ross!

For your reading pleasure, the opening chapter of "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" available now on Amazon in paperback ($6.99) or Kindle ($1.99) formats. Enjoy! As you read, consider this question - why do we as readers like dark work? What is it about the writing of Sylvia Plath, JD Salinger, and me that touches a chord within you. Send me your comments and I'll post a few of those responses as my next blog entry - the role of literary darkness.

Chapter One: 

During a break in classes at Daybreak College in the theater wing of the Schall Performing Arts Center a group of Theater majors lounged casually in the green room, where their discussions revolved around the recent production of Tennessee Williams’ one-act play “The Confessional.”

Antony Fedora coldly bemoaned that he found it to be too symbolic and contrived for his taste, Isaac Gore argued precisely the contrary, while Peter Ivanovich, having acted the role of bartender in the play felt obliged to remain aloof from the discussion even though he agreed with Antony’s position and instead was thumbing through the campus newspaper, the Daybreak Sunrise, which he had just retrieved from his mailbox in the student center.

Opening Chapter of "silent words..."

As a treat to my constant readers - I am letting you view the opening chapter of "silent words..." one of two books published this week. "silent words..." is a companion book to "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" and yet it is more than that. It is also an armchair treasure hunt.

What does that mean?

It means that by observing some clues and solving some puzzles (ciphers/codes) in the story, the astute reader may be lead to a prize of sorts at the end. Some armchair treasure hunts have had physical prizes located where you need to go dig them up; some are online only; others have cash rewards; others yet have philosophical and/or emotional treasure.

This may be one of the above. That too must be solved!

See if you can discern anything in this opening chapter. What is there? What is different? What is missing? And how can it be used to solve the cipher at the end? (In the physical book, the cipher at the end uses a specific font that helps single out a theme for this chapter. It is not necessary for the solution, only fun as an add-on.)

The game is a-foot!

How animation legend Chuck Jones influenced "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!"

I've spoken before about the rules legendary animator Chuck Jones established for his Roadrunner cartoons. He insisted that the roadrunner not speak - only Meep; the roadrunner had to stay on the road; the coyote would always fall the same number of frames. To Chuck those strictures freed the creativity of the artists within that context. It was very structured.

Some would say rigid.

But it worked. The Roadrunner - (And Pepe Le Pew, which was similar) is extremely popular. When I interviewed him for "The Hand Behind the Mouse" he reaffirmed those rules as a creativity-enhancing device. For me, that's what my little experiment with Tolstoy was all about - working within a structure.

Each line for me was like one of Chuck's rules. It may have limited my options, but it also forced all of my thought processes to be concentrated on the content and the story - instead of rhythms, parts of speech or anything of the sort. All of that was already done for me. The process was enabled in some ways by the choice I made to have O'Ryan be integral to every chapter. With the exception of the opening chapter at his funeral - and the final scene in the hospital - the viewpoint is limited omniscient. I write from his perspective, feeling his pain.

So knowing the subject was O'Ryan, and the sentence structure I needed, I merely had to fill in action verbs and pretty it up with the filigree of adjectives and adverbs as prescribed by Tolstoy's word choices.

"Merely," the man said. "Merely!" Hah! Darned hard work actually. But that hard work was between the lines. Not external. Everything that suffered my restless nights was what was truly important - the story itself.

Not that I would do it again. But it was certainly an interesting process.

Creating the Unexpected when so much is Known...

One of the immense challenges with writing "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" - aside from the Tolstoy sentence structure - was in creating a narrative that was somehow interesting when so much was known from the start. Heavens, the very title tells you all you need to know, doesn't it?

Or does it?

If that were the case, why write the story at all? Indeed. O'Ryan Ross lived; then he died. Big surprise.

But it is that journey from A to B that is revelatory. How and (more importantly) why did he die? Part of that is explained away in the opening scene which takes place at O'Ryan's funeral. We know he committed suicide, we know he used a gun, we know he's dead. Done, done, and done...!

But despite that fore-knowledge, there is much we don't know as well. We are given some hints in that opening scene, and the stage is certainly set, but with a work that is so dogmatic as is this - it is so very important to add surprises where possible, just to maintain the reader interest. Even up to the final line, I have tried to do that.

One thing I have attempted to do is to slightly skew events by having unreliable narrators at times. It is more fun if even I don't know precisely what is happening and when. By having characters be self-delusional (O'Ryan Ross, Jadwin Ross) or simply mistaken (Peter Ivanovich, Alwyn Ross, Professor Hays), we are able to keep that suspense evident along the way.

Or so I hope.

By writing with this in mind, I feel I have veered a couple of times from where I thought the story was going. Several of the twists were un-explored when I began and only revealed themselves with the writing of each scene. What made this interesting was that I did not write "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" in sequence - but rather, I wrote Chapter One, Twelve, Nine, Two, Three, Eleven, Four, Five, Ten, Six, Seven, Eight. So surprises had to be consistent with the continuity without mucking up something already written. Fortunately there were few instances where I had to rewrite an existing section of an existing chapter.

Adding to this continuity challenge was that at about Chapter Six in my writing, I began to work on "silent words..." which added a layer. That companion book didn't really alter the original concepts of "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" which is a much more vital book in my mind (right up there with "The Missionary and the Brute" for me) - but it did add some nuance and a sense of symbiosis. In a way, "silent words..." is a parasite-pecking bird on the back of the crusty-backed rhinoceros that is "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!", but the relationship hopefully benefits both works.

Coming soon: How animation legend Chuck Jones influenced "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!"

Tolstoy

With "The Death of O'Ryan Ross!" set to be published this week (I expect to see it on Amazon by Friday, and it can be pre-ordered here directly more quickly) I have been thinking a lot about the source material of this little work. As I have said, it is based on a sentence-by-sentence exploration of Tolstoy's novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilych."

Now I've never really been a Russian Literature buff, bigger on American Lit actually. But there are a lot of folks whom I admire that rave over Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and of course - Leo Tolstoy. So I figured that I had to read me some Tolstoy. My cocky, confident side thought I should tackle "War and Peace," but good common sense prevailed and I chose "Ivan Ilych" instead. It was the smallest Tolstoy in the bookstore!

Even though it was small, I found the concepts and the writing to be quite large. Ambitious, dense, huge. The sentence structure was amazing to me - and I wasn't certain if it was the translator or Leo that had made it so. I tend to give Tolstoy the credit.

No writing I have ever encountered has featured such convoluted run-on sentences within sentences within parenthetical phrases within asides and lists and more lists. Being almost dialogue-free, it practically scared me off. I was tentative of digging in, but it was ultimately well worth it. I felt it was almost precisely opposite of my usual way of writing. I tend to truncate. Eliminate articles, subjects, predicates.

So I started dissecting it clinically. Then it hit me. To take that structure, but me-ify it. It was some of the most tedious writing that I've yet encountered. But still I feel that I found my voice within it, and began to feel that rhythm strike me. It fit the tone of the story I wanted to tell, and it fit me. Fantastic exercise, and an incredible experience all the way around.

It isn't a perfect mirror of the original by any means, but then again it was never meant to be. Ultimately, it was meant to be book that I hope you will all want to read. I know it is the book I wanted to write.