(By
American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari and
Welcome Back to Pottersville.)
It
hasn't been decided yet whether I'm a figment of Robert Crawford's
imagination or his alter ego or vice versa. Either way, it could safely
be said that I'm the author of
American Zen,
the story of an epic road trip that took place during a week of my and
my friends' lives exactly four years ago. As I'd subsequently described
our trip up and down the northern eastern seaboard across four different
states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York), it was
like a "Flomax/Viagra/Grecian Formula commercial gone hideously over
budget."
And, starting the summer the first draft was
completed (2008), I'd made Robert's acquaintance and began blogging part
time at Pottersville starting with my thoughts on the Democratic and
Republican national conventions. Robert (better known to you as
Jurassicpork) figured, as long as my editor in chief Ari Goldstein and
the liberal magazine that for legal reasons can't be named sent me to
both cities on someone else's dime, he'd asked me to weigh in with some
impressions. I don't like the idea of writing for nothing (One of my few
personal axioms is "Pay the f**king writer!") but in JP's case I'd
decided to make an exception.
Then he asked me to write something for his new blog,
Kindle in the Wind,
one dedicated exclusively to his writing and the art of writing in
general. If I was more like Billy Frazee, my old drummer, I would've
told him to take a long walk off a short pier and not to push it.
Fortunately for JP, I'm not like Billy and I promised to get something
off to him in the next few days. "What do you want me to write?" I'd
asked him. JP said, "Just be yourself and tell whoever's out there about
the 2008 trip and your appearance in my other novels."
So that seems like a logical place to start.
Yeah, to the dozen or few initiated who'd actually bought
American Zen, it may come as a bit of a surprise
to you that I don't just appear in that particular book but several.
Whenever Rob needs an authoritative journalist figure to handle
backstory, exposition or whatever, he usually turns to me (and, in one
notable instance, my EIC Ari Goldstein in an upcoming novel). Not including
American Zen and the sequel,
American Zen II: Rock of Ages
(begun years before that execrable Tom Cruise movie), I've actually
appeared either in print or over the telephone in three other of
Robert's novels.
His other Kindle novel,
The Toy Cop, you know about.
In the older drafts, I didn't actually make an appearance until Robert
was doing the final revision and thought it would be a good idea to
write an Op-ed I'd "written" for the
New York Times about capital
punishment. Since I have some small fame (alright, infamy would be more
the word), I agreed to let JP use my name for the sake of authenticity
and, for someone who isn't a real journalist, he did a pretty creditable
job in not only penning a fictional article but even in coming close to
reproducing my voice. I thought that would be the extent of my
involvement with his novels.
But then JP got an idea
and he ran it by me a couple of years ago. He began by asking me, "Mike,
have you read any Isaac Asimov?" I told him I had, at least back in my
callow youth that stubbornly refused to end until I hit 35-40. Robert
reminded me that toward the last decade or so of his life when he was
writing faster and faster, Asimov attempted to tie together his three
great series, the
Robot,
Empire and
Foundation
novels, into one gigantic cycle. One way to keep all those novels and
short stories in the same universe was to use common characters and
reference historical events of one series that would actually impact,
however incrementally, on others.
I immediately saw, sort of, what he was getting at. His idea was to use me in several series that he's planning, which would be the proposed
American Zen series,
The Toy Cop
(he'd begun a sequel over ten years ago before the first one was even
finished) and his new series (a trilogy of novels that are each well
underway) of a Russian/American ex cop named Joe Roman. That way, all
the protagonists, through me, would inhabit a common universe and his
dream was to one day, if his writing career ever took off (are we
listening, lit agents?), to write one epic adventure involving yours
truly, Penny "The Toy Cop" Gallagher and that semi-benevolent psychopath
known as Joe Roman.
I said, "Sure, go for it. You
can't sully my reputation any more than I and the sociopaths in the
Republican Party already have," and the rest is becoming history.
With
money worries and the pressure of finding that ever-elusive job after
nearly four years of unemployment, plus all those other duties we all
have to meet to sustain human life, it can't be easy for poor Rob and I
can only imagine what he's going through just maintaining his household
and keeping body and soul together, let alone cobbling together a
massive cycle of novels in his spare time (not to mention his noted work
at Pottersville).
Although it takes six weeks to two
months for him to get from Amazon his piddling royalties (if at all. He
can't publicize them on Amazon's website because the good sons and
daughters of Jeff Bezos effectively muzzled Rob for life almost a year
and a half ago because he tried to sell his Kindle novels on the biggest
book selling site on earth. Go figure how that's a violation of their
TOS), you'd be helping out my buddy Rob and would certainly boost his
always flagging self-esteem if you would buy either novel (both of which
providing links to his product pages) and to start frequenting this
fledgling blog and his
dedicated Twitter account.
Because
we writers have to stick together and it can't be said that a lot of
established writers have gone out of their way to help out poor ole JP,
who's a talented scribe (and a formerly agented one in a slightly less competitive and media-consolidated day and age) in his own right.