I have a thing about unpublished books. I mean… I have written a lot of them. And I have a few books that were published and now are unpublished. One, in particular, was published, is now unpublished, but I hope to re-publish it again. This isn’t confusing until you hear all the details. To murky up the waters even more, the details of that time of my life (speaking of 2013) in which I wrote a book, published it, and had it subsequently unpublished, are all written as a roman à clef in another unpublished book I’ve almost finished entitled Hell and the Sea. You haven’t even begun to be confused.
A roman à clef is a novel of true things that happened that is in the guise of a fictional story. The names are changed to protect the guilty. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is an example of a roman à clef novel. You still with me?
Ok, we’ll move on. It gets confusinger. In 2013 Amazon contacted me and asked me to write a fan fiction novel in the fictional world of the novel of a guy who was a friend of mine at the time. They sent me a contract promising to pay me a good sum of money to write this novel. They would release the novel in serial format through an imprint they owned. I signed the contract and took the money (Thanks Amazon!)
Then it got fun. The guy who was once a friend of mine decided he didn’t want anyone getting paid to write books in his world, so he squashed the deal. The thing was, though, that Amazon had already paid me, and they weren’t getting the money back. There were negotiations. They said, “Ok, so write a book for us in the world of some other author who will let us serialize the rights. Preferably someone who is dead so we can have the rights from their estate.” There are quote marks around that statement, but that isn’t exactly how they said it. They say things nicer than that, even if that is what they mean.
I said, “I want to write a sequel to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.” (One of the coolest books ever.)
“Cool,” they said. “Go write it. We already paid you. Stop procrastinating.”
Assuming they acquired the writes from the Vonnegut estate (they did,) and knowing that I’d already been paid and could do whatever I want, I wrote a crazy-fun-weird-time-travel book entitled Osage Two Diamonds. To this day it is my wife’s favorite book of mine. But ponder that for a minute… I got to write the sequel to a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, approved by his estate, and I got paid to write it!
But… here is the weird part. You can’t read the book right now. Because it is unpublished. (Hint for unconfusing you: If you aren’t getting how meta this is, perhaps you aren’t paying attention. The publication and unpublication of this book is like the book itself. Cat’s Cradle -spoiler alert- is the story narrated by a writer who is investigating a mystery. It is a morality tale about how the world is ended via the mechanism of a manufactured water molecule called ICE NINE. And at the end of the book, the world is ended by ICE NINE. You can’t write a sequel to a novel where the end of the book is the destruction of the whole world. Or can you? I did. My book is about a writer investigating the end of the world… a world that was subsequently unended somehow. And my book, which was published, was subsequently unpublished. Do you get it? You’re caught up now… Proceed…)
Amazon eventually closed the imprint that published my book. The subsidiary went out of business. My book was unpublished. But, I eventually regained rights to the book.
My intention is to republish the book under the new title ICE NEON. The book is fun, crazy, philosophical, and goofy. But in it, I discuss a lot of theories about time travel and life and free will and such. Here are just some of the chapter headings of the book:
I Find Out that God UnEnded the World
Polly Cline, Roscoe, Mary, and a Shih Tzu get Killed
A Man in a Diaper Tells a Tale
A Methodist Shoots Me in the Face
I Am Somewhat Introduced to the Deceased Woman who would Become My Wife
I’m No Coincidence Theorist
Figuring Out Time is Problematic
Time Traveling Elevators Use a Lot of Steam
Dr. J. Tries to Stop Oswald
Everyone Underestimated Grover Cleveland
Apparently Archimedes Had an Elevator
Who Wouldn’t Want a Rambler?
No Aspirin For Old Men
Wheelbarrow Smuggling
Everyone Likes Cherry Pies… Even Mussolini
Anyway, you get the point. This book should be published. And I hope it will be once I get it re-edited and write a new forward to it. In my next column, I will share an excerpt. Or will I? Maybe I did already and someone went back and unshared it.
You are not wasting your time reading me. Mysteries will be revealed!
I will know you read this article if you come up to me this week and say something like “When are you going to publish the book wherein it is revealed Dr. J. and Stephen King killed Kennedy?”
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
