Return to podcasting

You may or may not have stumbled onto Uncle Warren's Attic #53, now available in a podcatcher near you. But he made an announcement that I'm kind of pleased about, in that OMG-what-am-I-getting-myself-into kind of way.

UW, who launched into the podcasting world with his reading of my first tome, The Imaginary Bomb, will be doing the same for my novel under construction, The Imaginary Revolution. We have worked out a weekly schedule where he will read three chapters a week for eight weeks, beginning Aug. 10 with UWA #54 and concluding with a gangbusters UWA #61 on Sept. 28.

This is partly a shameless marketing exercise and partly an incentive to keep me writing the remarkable story of Raymond Kaliber and independent Sirius IV, which I plan to inflict on the world around mid-October. As such, it may remind longtime readers of the debacle that was The Imaginary Lover. The difference between that uncompleted novel and this one is that, unlike that one, I know how this one ends. In fact, I have the final chapter mostly written already. This puppy is coming. The only wild cards that could throw off the schedule are the day-job factor and unexpected life events.

Uncle Warren's technology has advanced a bit since he bragged about the wonderful analog system he used to record the I-Bomb. That iMac of his has capabilities to do things that would have been pretty unwieldy to accomplish with the old stuff alone — but the old stuff is still part of his system. So the new novel may sound, shall we say, different from the I-Bomb.

And it is different. It's not a sequel in the sense that the I-Lover was, although it does take place in the same future universe as the I-Bomb, and there will be some references to the events of the first novel, as the time lines of the two books intersect at one point. In the first book, the declaration of independence by the encampment at Sirius IV was a subplot that partially drove the action. In this book, that declaration is the main plot.

Alas, I have not figured out a way to bring Bob Whelan, Pete Wong and Baxter Hetznecker into this story, so this is not a continuation of their story. Do you have to have read The Imaginary Bomb to fully grok The Imaginary Revolution? Probably not — but if you want to buy The I-Bomb anyway, I ain't stoppin' ya.

I heartily suggest you visit or subscribe to Uncle Warren's Attic over the next couple of months if you haven't made it a habit already. The geniuses at Richardson & Bluhm are working hard to make it worth your while. OK, we're playing hard, actually, but the result is very similar.