Whale Fire

Proposed program for event at The Mysterious Bookshop, March 28, 6:30 PM

2012-02-26T07:44:00.005-08:00

Working on the program for my March 28 reading and book signing at The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY.

I've never done this before so I've identified the following possible activities:
1. Introductions - I will present myself and my immediate family, pets and entourage.
2. Bob for apples - I'm all for 'em!
3. How I got here - with maps and detailed subway directions
4. Exchange of rare gifts - bring a small item.
5. Feats of strength - it's not just for Festivus anymore
6. Annoying reading from Executive Severance - I intend to use a high, whinny voice
7. Ritual animal slaughter - to propitiate the Gods
8. Q&Q - I will answer any questions with another question
9. Closing - we should leave the Mysterious Bookshop before we're shut in for the night.

Any suggestions?

Poster for Executive Severance Book Launch Party!

2012-02-23T07:18:00.001-08:00

Proposed poster for my March 28 appearance at The Mysterious Bookshop in 58 Warren St. New York City.

What do you think?

Being a published author is an ego trip.

2012-02-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1 - The Twitstery BeginsEnter a comment to win a free signed copy!

2012-01-31T00:30:00.000-08:00

Willum Mortimus Granger was beside himself. In fact when his body was found the top half was right next to the bottom.

Granger's body was split in two. "Well, we can rule out suicide" said the coroner. "I rule out NOTHING!" I replied.

Self bisection was not at the top of my list of likely solutions. I hate ceding any ground when it comes to crime deduction.

"Maybe this was self inflicted. Then how do you explain the 3 1/2 other victims just like this I have at the morgue?"

So Granger wasn't the only one cut down in his prime. "You said 3 1/2 victims. You have half a body?" "No. Siamese twins."

Willum Mortimus Granger and 3 1/2 others (as per the coroner) were dead, their bodies sliced in half.

I stared at Granger's lower torso. Marshall McLuhan famously claimed that the wheel was an extension of our feet. Now I got it!

Granger had owned a perfume concern, a blue coal mine and two pickle factories. His company was called Lavender Blue Dilly Dilly.

Hit hard by the economic downturn, LBDD failed the smell test, couldn't sink to new depths and finally everything didn't go sour.

A cloning pioneer, Granger had replaced every part of his body. Calling his lab ‘Body Parts R Us’, he was literally a self made man.

If the economic downturn had hit Granger's cloning lab, Body Parts R Us, like it did at LBDD, he could have lost an arm and a leg.

I knew a lot about Granger. By chance I'd just read his NY Times best-seller "100 Things You Need To Know About Me Before I Die"

"I was born at a very young age." begins Granger's autobiography, 100 Things..., "I was very close to my mother at the time."

Born to a family of neo-vegans, Granger ate only oats ‘til age 17 when he became the first entrant to win the Kentucky Derby without a horse.

A self-taught fly fisher, when Granger discovered the sport's purpose was to catch fish, he released the flies back into the wild.

I looked at Granger's severed torso. Here... and here lay the remains of an entrepreneur, athlete, scientist and podcast mime.

Sure he was a failed entrepreneur, uncertain athlete, questionable scientist. But he was undeniably a world class podcast mime.

Who can forget Granger's podcast masterpiece, "Man Walking Against the Wind"? Or "Man Trapped in an Invisible Cube"?

Now he was ready to perform his final mime podcast "Man Silent as the Grave." Placing my cell next to his torso, I ...

pressed RECORD. Willum Granger was dead because, despite all his advantages, he couldn't be in two places at the same time.

We stood a moment in a respectful silence which the doctor broke asking "How can you do mime in a podcast?" Just then my cell rang.

Granger's last podcast would be ruined! I scooped up my cell wondering when I uploaded "Torn Between Two Lovers" as a ringtone.

My own phone was strangely silent. By the time I pried the other cell phone from Granger's cold dead hand, the music had stopped.

Looking for Caller ID I saw two things: Granger had been on Twitter at the moment of his death and the battery was almost dead.

Granger had been Tweeting when he died! This phone was the Holy Grail, the Rosetta Stone, the Jeopardy Daily Double of this case.

If Granger tweeted his assailant's name, or some clue, I'd wrap up this case and tackle those 3 1/2 other victims at the morgue.

If Granger wrote "Hey, Larry from LBDD! What are you doing here?" Or "Saw Vince from the lab" Those would be a definite leads.

Granger had married twice, divorced 3 times. His last wife had been really, really mad at him. Perhaps she would be fingered in a Tweet.

I needed to know three things. What was the motive for the murder? What was the method? What was this stuff I just stepped into?

"What is this stuff, tapioca?" "No," said the coroner "That's his spleen." "It looks just like tapioca." "Believe me, its not."

Doc's words reassured me. Tapioca always turns my stomach. Wiping my shoe on Granger's shirt, I tapped the phone on with my pen.

As the phone came to life the coroner scoffed "Do you seriously believe you can solve this case by following Granger on Twitter?"

"I won't follow his tweets to learn where he'll be. I already know with grave certainty where he's going to be from now on."

"I'll solve this murder not by tweeting forward, but by retweeting backward," I hit ENTER and Granger's final Tweet appeared:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaa

Either Granger wanted his followers to know he suffered an extremely slow, painful death, or his finger got stuck on the "a" key.

"aaaaaaaa...?" said the coroner. "That's it?" "It may be a code of some kind." I replied "All I have to do is figure out the key"

The coroner continued, "Facing imminent death, as a final act Granger logs onto Twitter and tweets 'aaaaaaa…' to his followers?"

"Does that description do justice to the scenario you're painting here?" "Maybe we should look at his next-to-last tweet."

The coroner was getting on my nerves. I should put him on my suspects list. Once again I tapped the cell to view Granger's tweet:

"Stomach unsettled" Granger had tweeted, "I guess that tapioca didn't go down well." I glared at the coroner. He just shrugged.

The lab team was done and wanted to put Granger into body bags. His phone too. There wouldn't be another tweet out of either.

Confessions of a Would-be Twitter Novelist

2011-12-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

“What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy?” (169 characters) -Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

According to Wikipedia, the Twitter network began is 2006 and as of this writing in 2010 is approaching 200 million users worldwide. (133 characters) By 2009 I realized Twitter was a happening thing and if I didn’t jump on the bandwagon I’d be left behind with my ocarina and tambourine. (137 characters) But how to proceed? I had dabbled in Facebook and MySpace, but this Twitter thing was different. (136 characters) Limited to 140 characters (or less), with no photos, videos or extended links, Twitter conveyed the brief, the inconsequential, the trivial. (140 characters) In other words, the Twitter medium was a perfect vehicle for my literary aspirations. (85 characters)

I conceived a literary experiment: Was it possible to maintain a narrative structure and attract a reading public 140 characters at a time? (139 characters) After 15 months and the more than 800 tweets that make up this Twitter novel, I can say confidently that the answer is “no.” (125 characters)

Why a detective story? McLuhan noted that (41 characters)

I adopted the detective genre as the driver for my story because the brevity enforced by the Twitter medium of necessity requires that much be left out of the narrative. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan said:

"Likewise, in reading the detective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much has been left out of the narrative."

Twitter as a medium forces the reader to fill in many of the blanks, so the detective genre mirrors the biases of the Twitter medium. Would my hero solve the crime? Would he undergo physical and mental trials? Would he get the girl? Would he spawn a publishing franchish? I soon realized that Twitter forced me to adopt the serial techniques of newspaper comic page story telling. To succeed I needed to learn and adopt the narrative strategies of Al Capp (creator of L'il Abner) or Chester Gould (Creator of Dick Tracy) as well as Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane. How did comic strip authors hold their readers’ attention each day and tell a joke while moving the story forward? How did mystery writers plant clues to direct or misdirect their readers while inexorably leading to the revelatory climax?

Like advertising, I had concerns about reach, frequency and repetition. I didn’t have the advantage of artwork, so I had to duplicate the effect with words alone. I spent a lot of time in the New York Public Library reading archives of newspaper daily comic strips. Comic strip artists can’t assume that their readers will see every issue published, so story telling in the funny pages involved a lot of repetition. The last panel of the Friday strip was often the first panel of Monday’s entry so readers who missed last week would see it again this week. Since my Twitter history was readily available to my followers I decided that I wouldn’t do a lot of repeating.

So the Twitter environment forces storytelling considerations similar to advertising, and also similar to daily comic strips. There has been some concern about the negative influence of Twitter on spelling, grammar and punctuation. I suggest that Twitter detractors consider the gold in the Twitter stream, not just the dross.

I created a new Twitter account “RKBs_Twitstery” as a container for my novel and coined a new term for the Twitter mystery genre. (129 characters) Starting on May 6, 2009 I posted a new Executive Severance tweet twice a day every day for 15 months, never missing a deadline. (127 characters) The 140 character limit required intensive wordsmithing, creative editing, the omission of punctuation in some cases and a lot of counting. (139 characters). I cultivated brevity, concision and obsessive-compulsion. Fortunately, once I completed my writing I was able to leave these habits behind. (139 characters) The cumulative result of my Twitter efforts is collected in Executive Severance. (80 characters).

Executive Severance Reviews

2011-12-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

"A He Dunit. Sometimes a little verbose, but OMG this is the best twitstery I ever read. It's got everything: narrative drive, mystery, comedy, thrills, tension, laughs. Blechman is on to something, a genre as important to literature as the invention of haiku in rhyme. ..."
- Marvin Kitman, author of The Man Who Would Not Shut Up - The Rise of Bill O’Reilly

"A delightful 'twitstery' - a mystery written in real time Tweets - that is compelling, entertaining, and shows off what can be done in the 140-character form with style and mastery. Blechman's delight in the language shows in every tweet - that is to say, every thread of the story. His plot is tight, tingling, and diverting. Poe would have been proud of the new form Blechman has given to the mystery story."
- Paul Levinson, author of New New Media and The Plot to Save Socrates

"Embracing the challenges found in publishing via the medium Twitter, Bob Blechman’s super silly story Executive Severance is stuffed with punny dialogue, clever character conditions, and a total lack of adherence to the old “rules” of storytelling. It’s a meaty tale told in deliciously rare, bite-sized chunks that I’d recommend for consumption to anyone hungering for fiction that satisfies. Well-done, Bob!"
- Michelle Anderson, author of The Miracle in July - a digital love story.

"Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery--engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form."
-Marleen S. Barr, author of Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium

"Executive Severance" has been compared to Shakespeare, Proust and Joyce in that it is a tragedy they'd rather not remember that has driven them to drink. One review called it riveting in the sense of nine inch nails being driven into your skull.

Summary: Limited to 140 characters to confess his sins and meet his Maker, "tweeting" may not have been the best use of Willum Granger's final moments.