This week’s free poetry collection celebrating National Poetry Month is Soliloquies & other poems. As I note within the text following the title poem, I got the phrase “I am but a poor player” lodged squarely in my head.
Which, of course, set me in pursuit of the Bard.
At the time of this writing, The Prodigal Hour is free on Kindle and has, in a day and a half, been downloaded more than 2000 times, and it currently ranks alongside George R.R. Martin’s latest novel atop Kindle’s list of top science fiction.
And me? I’m stunned.
Hey, right now, my pre-/post-9/11 time-travel novel, The Prodigal Hour is free for Kindle.
I have to be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea how to feel about that.
I’m interested to see what will happen with a novel.
For anyone new (as I’m hoping such a promotion will attract), The Prodigal Hour might well be the world’s only pre-/post-9/11 novel. It’s about time travel and alternate histories and trying to change the world one moment at a time.
For anyone not new who hasn’t yet picked it up, now’s the time. Hope you enjoy it.
Titles seem to be one of the elements of writing writers fret over most, and justifiably so. Chances are, titles are the first thing readers see, so they take on a lot of importance. Under ideal circumstances, they somehow carry the whole theme and story all in a quick phrase. My favorites include Needful Things, American Gods, Peace Like a River, and The Silence of the Lambs. All are not just effective but evocative; Stephen King’s Needful Things, in fact, begins with a character discussing the name of the new shop in town, which happens to be Needful Things–“What do you suppose something like that means? Why, a store like that might carry anything. Anything at all.”
And indeed it does. It’s where you can buy anything your heart desires–or at least the fantasy of it. For a price.
Knowing how important a title can be, I always fret over them. Which was why I was relieved when The Prodigal Hour finally came to me.
“It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.”
-Ernst Mach
“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
-Traditional Gaelic prayer
“The sole purpose of history is to be rewritten.”
-Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying”
“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty.”
-John D. Rockefeller
Every hair on Chance’s body had tensed as if it planned to jump from its follicle, and goosebumps singed up his back and around his arms and legs. Even his lips tingled.
The lightning blazed the sky around it electrostatic blue-white, which faded first to purple, then indigo, and then finally into darkness. Raindrops like crystal pebbles filled the air, and a giant smoke cloud, highlighted by orange flame, smudged the night where Chance’s house had been.
Hanley, Geisel, and Nazor all stood paused in the street like mannequins, pointing their guns at each like characters in comic-book panels, their faces stunned, angry. A tiny burst of white clung to the muzzle of Hanley’s gun, and a thin curlicue of smoke like a prehensile tail trailed upwards from it without ever moving at all.
Chance took everything in without ever moving his head. His gut had clenched, his hands bunched into frightened fists, and his whole body had locked up tight, not like it couldn’t move but rather like he was too petrified.
“What’d you do?” he whispered. He barely moved his lips when he did so, and he didn’t turn his head to look at her.
When she spoke, her voice shook between awed, desperate, defensive, and apologetic. “I had to. Everything you said would happen was—I needed to think.”
“So what, you paused time?” His attention focused on the millions of frozen raindrops, each like a glass bead. “Can we move? Is it safe?”
“Should be.”
Things in the story are heating up while at the same time standing utterly still. Cassie just started up the time machine. Meanwhile, at CIRTN, Leonard and Race watched the September 11th terrorist attacks occur.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the next installment, Chapter 11, begins our second act, which is about as it should be; while a first act is about set-up, the second act is complication (and the third is resolution). I feel like there’s an ‘-ion’ word for the first act, but for the moment it eludes me.
I’m not sure I’ve mentioned I intend to post the first twenty or so chapters here, on this site, and only those chapters, which bring the novel up to the midpoint of the second act.
So we’re about halfway there.
And here we are, at the end of summer, autumn in the near-distance already making her presence known. The air here in Pittsburgh is turning more mild. There’s a lot of autumn in The Prodigal Hour; it is–at least partly–set on October 31st, 2001. Only “at least partly” because, of course, it’s also set–
Well. Spoilers, as River Song would tell the Doctor.
But it’s worth noting that when I say The Prodigal Hour is a pre-/post-9/11 novel, I don’t just mean that it begins both afterward and in Elizabethan England. I mean “pre-/post-9/11” in a very literal way, as we discovered last installment, when Leonard requested to travel to September 10th, 2001.
One of the major reasons I chose to publish The Prodigal Hour independently was that I wanted it to be available right now, so close to the tenth anniversary of that day. For me, personally, that felt important. Probably because of my experiences that day. I’m not sure, to be candid.
I’m also not sure, precisely, why it feels right to offer the novel on sale for the next two weeks, but it does. So I’m going to. For a limited time–probably the next two weeks–you can pick up The Prodigal Hour for just 99 cents on Kindle.
Hundreds of meters below the Operations Center, Leonard strode across the Schrodinger Chamber at the core of the Large Hadron Collider. Behind him, the Safe looked like a gunmetal cigar resting on its unlit tip, rising twenty feet before its tapered top intersected with the bottom of a down-pointing, porcelain white cone. Because the entire room was brilliant white as a laser-treated smile, its exact dimensions were elusive; its only visible feature besides the semi-cylindrical chamber was a small, dark-glassed screen next to a large door.
Leonard placed his palm on the screen, and a bright blue laser scanned his palm. It sped his fingerprints through CIRTN’s electronic databases before the door next to it whirred open. Leonard stepped through, into a long, white corridor where a man wearing the CIRTN uniform, khaki fatigues and dark shoes, waited.
The man half-raised his arm to salute, but paused at Leonard’s outfit. “Lieutenant Kensington,” he said, with an accent Leonard couldn’t identify.
“At ease,” Leonard said as he strode past.
The man fell into step behind him. “Grand Marshall Atropos asked me to brief you,” he said. “I’m Private Madison—.”
Leonard nodded. “There’s a problem.”
Chance awoke to bumps and shudders, a wailing, backward-rushing cacophony and the furtive rustle of crinkling plastic. Something clung over his nose and mouth, and pain throbbed in his head. His first thought was of his father and the gunman. His first emotion was panic. His first action was to sit up as he reached toward his face, where his fingertips brushed a mask.
Quick movement. A man to his left crouched over him. He wore a crisp, white shirt with a gold-and-black patch and put a latex-gloved hand on Chance’s chest. “Take it easy.”
“My dad.” Chance’s breath fogged the mask. His voice didn’t make it past the plastic.
“We’re taking you to County.”
Chance tried to rise, but the man pressed back against his chest, whispered something about sedation if necessary, and then, when Chance wouldn’t calm down, when Chance couldn’t calm down, made good on the warning. Chance felt a pinch near his elbow, looked down to see a clear plastic syringe with numbers on its side jammed to its hilt into his arm. He didn’t see the man depress the plunger, only felt calm, warm indifference spread like infection through his body before he sank slowly again into the darkness.
The Globe Theater was exactly as Leonard Kensington had expected: an open-air amphitheatre with three levels of gallery seats looming up and over him. Crushed hazelnut shells on the ground didn’t quite mask the body odor of 2,000 people who lived in a society that hadn’t yet discovered underarm deodorant.
Onstage, Richard Burbage, as Macbeth, began the fifth act to conclude the play. “Hang out our banners on the outward walls,” he pointed out over the audience as if he were seeing Inverness, and so the Globe pretended it was a centuries-old castle in Scotland, the river Thames pretended it was Ness. “The cry is still, ‘They come.’ Our castle’s strength will laugh a siege to scorn. Here let them lie till famine and the ague eat them up. Were they not forced with those that should be ours, we might have met them dareful, beard to beard, and beat them backward home.”
The quantum implant in Leonard’s temporal lobe began to buzz. He squeezed his earlobe, quietly cleared his throat, which meant: wait. He looked around at the people standing beside him, all of whom were enthralled by that big man on the stage and his words.
Backstage, and so in the bowels of Castle Inverness, several women screamed. Macbeth turned toward the sound. “What is that noise?”
“It is the cry of women, my good lord,” Will Shakespeare, playing Macbeth’s attendant, Seyton, answered. Shakespeare was a small, pale man with fine features and quick, lively eyes. He hurried offstage to investigate.
The Prodigal Hour has gotten its first blurb. It’s from Elizabeth Eslami, author of Bone Worship: A Novel, who said:
The Prodigal Hour, the audacious genre-bending novel by author Will Entrekin, is a Rubik’s cube of delights. Equal parts sci-fi, thriller, coming-of-age, and love story, the novel hurtles readers along protagonist Chance Sowin’s intriguingly unpredictable journey – forward, backward, and inward. A thrilling head rush of a book.
Which . . . well, I can’t really adequately describe what it means to me. I honestly couldn’t have gotten a better one if I’d written it myself. And a big thank you to Elizabeth for both reading and the kind words. I really enjoy her writing, and I liked Bone Worship a lot.
“It is not unknown to me that many have been and still are of the opinion that the affairs of this world are so under the direction of Fortune and of God that man’s prudence cannot control them; in fact that man has no resource against them. For this reason, many think there is no use in sweating much over such matters, but that one might as well let Chance take control.”
-Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Prince
“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute, there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
-T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Chance Sowin hoped only for a new beginning.
Halloween 2001 found Chance driving the narrow streets of the development in which he’d grown up, headed home. Six weeks before, he’d hustled out the main entrance of the World Trade Center only an hour before it fell, taking all that business and life, along with Chance’s temp job at a law firm, down with it.
Chance hadn’t been sure what to do next. His father, Dennis, had suggested he come home. “Take some time,” his father had said. “Sort yourself out. All the time you need.”
Chance had been uncertain about it until he’d realized there was no longer anything keeping him in Manhattan, and familiar sounded good. Familiar sounded just about right. And so he’d packed everything he owned into a compact rental car and taken the Jersey Turnpike south, and now he pulled that car to the curb in front of his childhood home, a long, flat rancher. He squeezed the steering wheel as he took a deep breath, as if to steel himself, though for what he didn’t know, and then he got out of the car and stepped up the curb and was struck by déjà vu like sudden density goose-prickling up his neck: You’ve been here before.
Of course he had: he’d grown up here, after all, played stickball at the foot of the cul-de-sac, even tripped and busted his baby teeth on the very same curb he stepped up, but what crawled his skin was not simple familiarity. It was stronger, stranger, and it made the world seem hyper-intense, the October leaves speckling the lawn more vibrant, the afternoon light more glaring. It persisted as Chance crossed his lawn, until he saw the front door: brief space between the edge of the door and its jamb, wood splintered where the deadbolt had broken. Chance felt two simultaneous emotions collide.
First: uncanny familiarity—of infinite broken doors on infinite splintered days, over and over again—followed then, as lightning by thunder, by cold, brutal fear.
Continue reading
(besides time travel)
I thought I’d share the as-it-stands cover copy:
“Chance Sowin hoped only for a new beginning.”
On October 31, 2001, six weeks after escaping the World Trade Center attacks, Chance Sowin moves back home, hoping for familiarity and security. Instead, he interrupts a burglary as his father, Dennis, is shot and killed.
What begins as a homicide investigation escalates when the Joint Terrorism Task Force arrrives. Where he hoped for solutions, Chance finds only more questions: who killed his father, and why? Was his father—a physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study—working on dangerous research? Why did Dennis build a secret laboratory in his basement?
Chance might not know the answers, but Cassie Lackesis, Dennis’ research assistant, thinks she does. She isn’t certain that Dennis discovered a way to time travel, but she knows who told her: Chance.
Together with Cassie, Chance will go on a journey across time and space that will challenge his every notion of ideas like “right” and “good.” One young man’s desire to make a difference will become, instead, a race against time as he tries to prevent forces he could never understand from not just destroying the universe but rendering it nonexistent.
When every action has a reaction, every force its counter, Chance will find that the truest measure of his character is not what he wants but what he will do when the prodigal hour returns.”
My aim was concise, elegant, and hook-y. My aim was those people who, inspired by the WTC-Light tribute that is the cover, flipped over the book to scope the back cover.
What do you think? It’s not final, yet, after all. Still a month before it’s available.
Are you excited?
Because if you’re not, you’re gonna be.
About a week ago, I got the final edits of The Prodigal Hour from my editrix. Though her education and training are as an editor, her current job is unrelated, so this most recent round of edits took a little longer than before. I think she turned Meets Girl around in about a week, give or take.
There are reasons unrelated to work that this particular edit took longer.
The Prodigal Hour is her favorite novel. It’s the project I was working on when we met at USC, and I think my first work she ever saw. In a way, that made it as personal a project for her as it always has been for me, and that made her want to be really careful and make it ever better.
Now that I’ve gotten the edits back and finalized a revision, I think she’s right.
Yesterday, just the day after my birthday, I got the copy-edited manuscript of The Prodigal Hour back from my editrix.
She had let me see some of the pages before she’d finished, so I’ve already started the final polish–which is basically what this is. A couple outright grammatical errors–I think every manuscript has a few, and Gaiman’s law, of course, states that the first time you open your newly published novel you will do so to the page that contains the most egregious type–but otherwise it’s a fairly clean edit.
Makes sense, of course.
The Prodigal Hour was originally called A Different Tomorrow, and then All Our Yesterdays (which is referenced in Meets Girl) before I went to LA and USC and the title finally came to me. Up until then, I’d been working on a draft of it for several years, but it was only when I got into workshops and began adapting the novel into a screenplay that I really started to make headway on it and improve it.
Kersh helped me reduce the technical gobbledygook, which can become a problem when one is dealing with time travel and attempting to be, if not scientific, at least credible about it. My adviser, Sid Stebel, helped me figure out structure and beats and really carry it off, hewing closely to genre while at the same time allowing breathing room beyond it. It’s always tough when a project outright refuses a simple genre and starts crossing them and uncrossing them and meeting them back around again.
So this week, I’ll be revising, and then I’ll code the book for Kindle for proofreading.
And advanced copies.
Stay tuned for some news on that, and details on how you can get your very own Kindle copy of The Prodigal Hour weeks ahead of its release date.
You’ve known it’s coming.
I hope you’ve prepared.
I just went over the proof myself, and just handed it to my editrix, who’s informed me she’s attacked it with her red pen.
This summer, I’ll be releasing it to you.
I plan on a similar schedule as with Meets Girl, with some differences, the most notable being that The Prodigal Hour is a vastly different book with a vastly different structure, and I intend to post through to the end of the second act. That’ll be 30 chapters.
You won’t have to wait for each one, though.
I’m aiming to make it available in time for July 4th weekend. The Prodigal Hour has always been my huge, mainstream, uber-commercial, blockbuster of a time-travel novel, and with that in mind, at what better time to make it available than over a big summer weekend?
And for an independent author like myself, what better big summer weekend to do so than the one that celebrates independence?
To celebrate, I’m releasing the first teaser today:
So, how about Monday’s final chapter of Meets Girl? With the kissing and all? I don’t think I’m spoiling too much if I tell you that chapter thirteen is actually “Kissing Veronica Sawyer,” because how could our young hero narrator resist rhapsodizing about said making out?
Of course, if you want to read it, you’ll have to pick it up here. It’s still only $2.99. I’m keeping it there for the time being. I figure anyone who buys it right now has been following along, and keeping it inexpensive is my way of saying thanks for keeping up.
At this point, it doesn’t look like I’ll be posting any more of the story online. I mean, I won’t rule it out, if someone asks to run an excerpt or something, but here and now I like the cliffhanger, and really, three bucks for the rest of the story–which is really picking up–is a total bargain.
Already, it’s been a solidly positive experience. Reviews are good: Shannon Yarbrough of The LL Book Review said “So it’s romance and fairy tales. But it’s magic and whimsy too. It’s a writer’s lament and a coming-of-age tale (for lack of a better cliché.) It’s experimentation and taking chances. It’s poetry and music. It’s love and art. Boy says so himself…”
Which I thought was great. I liked that Shannon called it a coming-of-age tale, because while the hero-narrator of the story is in his mid-twenties, he still seems pretty immature, for the most part, for most of the story.
And there is a solid chunk left. Somewhere around twenty thousand words.
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