matthew and epp

In 2 Days: It’s Open Season

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Jack Davies brings us this piece. I don’t know that this needs any explaining. I do feel obligated to point out that these works are only inspired by my books. Which is to say that this never actually appears anywhere in Persistent Illusions. Jack and I were just kicking ideas around on email when this came up and it clicked instantly for both of us, but it’s not in the book. And frankly that’s probably a mistake on my part as I love this image.

Oh well. Come on back tomorrow for a new painting.

Book Two: Persistent Illusions is coming in 2 days.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

In 3 Days: Your Call Will Be Answered in the Order it was Recieved

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Victoria Spurling again with this split screen. Communication and information exchange has always been one of my favorite aspects of Matthew and Epp’s world. But when you throw in a zombie uprising, well, everything must adapt. Here we have Matthew trying to get through to newcomer Pintar and learning that, even in the afterlife, hold music sucks. Come on back tomorrow for a new painting.

Book Two: Persistent Illusions is coming in 3 days.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

In 6(ish) Days: Your Safety Is Job Number One

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Jack Davies brings us this shot. Which is…woah. Who are the Guardathings? What is that sign written with? What’s up with the icy blue background? Possibly there are some answers to come in Persistent Illusions. Possibly. I mean I only wrote the thing, what do I know?

Oh, and no more art until Monday, hence the “6(ish)” title of this post. You might be here on Sunday and this will still be up.

Book Two: Persistent Illusions is coming in 6(ish) days.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

In 7 Days: Long Time. No See.

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Ben Peng brings us this picture from <UNDISCLOSED LOCATION>. This guy looks a little worse for wear and tear. The suit, broad shoulders and mirrored sunglasses are a dead giveaway, but something about his ensemble is new. Hmmmm….

Come on back tomorrow for a new painting.

Book Two: Persistent Illusions is coming in 7 days.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

In 8 Days: Matthew is Back in Training

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Last year’s winner of the Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest, Victoria Spurling, gives us this painting. Here we visit with Matthew trying to get back into his groove after the whole zombie uprising thing has settled down to a manageable level. As Victoria said, “Trying to paint everything as pieces of energy was harder than I expected.” I don’t doubt that but I think she did an admirable job just the same. Come on back tomorrow for a new painting.

Book Two: Persistent Illusions is coming in 8 days.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

In 9 Days: Everest Gets a Night Light

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PIC FOR FULL SIZE.

Jack Davies, whose work you will see more of, brings us a shot from Mount Everest where newcomer Filip chills out at his desk while some of the new surveillance features are at work in the background. Come on back tomorrow for a new painting.

Nine days till the official publication of Persistent Illusions, people.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on Book One: Probability Angels.

Want an early start? Don’t mind eye strain? Persistent Illusions is available as a Word Doc right here. AND it’s open for The Great Typo Hunt. So you can help me stomp out those last few typos while winning fabulous prizes.

And keep in mind the prestigious Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest is underway!

Popularity: 5% [?]

matthew and epp

2nd Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest

So the contest is in full swing. Though I haven’t really given it a “launch” so to speak. I’ve sort of mentioned it here and there but being busy with the new book I didn’t get a chance to do all the fireworks and marching bands and dancing hippos that normally accompany a major announcement from Joseph Devon Industries.

But The Second Annual Joseph Devon Fan Art Contest *is* live.

More details are at that link, but basically: create a work of art based on one of the Matthew and Epp books and you could win a fabulous prize.

One note, though. I am reserving the right to push the deadline back by a month to July 15th. Last year I had a lot of people write in saying that they wanted to enter but that they were in the middle of finals and didn’t have the time. I tried to accommodate that with the June deadline but if I find that more time is needed for a lot of my readers I will push the deadline back a month.

Just one month and only that one time.

I don’t want people thinking I’m some unscrupulous ogre who will keep pushing the deadline back while collecting free art in some devious scheme to own all the world’s art.

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

Seriously. How cool is the internet?

Over at Wordle you can create word clouds using any text you want.  I cut and pasted all 26 stories in to make this.

Or here is the entire Matthew and Epp saga in word cloud form:

SO cool.

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

Moment 1: Matthew Makes His Second Choice

It’s hard to explain where a story comes from. Caffeine has something to do with it. So does lots of upbeat music played over and over again very loudly. The events in my life have something to do with it, although there rarely seems to be a direct, “I once skinned my knee so now this character will skin his knee,” correlation. What sort of story my brain is in the mood to create certainly comes into play. And then there’s everything else.

Which of course explains nothing.

I had a guy, he was at a wedding, he was wearing a tuxedo. That was how this all started. It was my third story and I was fresh out of ideas. The first two stories were things I had wanted to write for years. They were fleshed out to some degree. This was to be my first outing of the project with no real foundation to build on. And I had nothing but the image of said guy at a wedding. So I got playful. I started wondering if I could make it into a Twilight Zone sort of thing where this guy makes a deal with the devil and there’s some sort of ironic ending where he gets what he wants only to discover that this is a bad thing not a good thing.

Then I decided that was boring and started wondering why the devil always gets such a bad rap. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were rooting for the guy who brings pain into this world? If he was actually the good guy?

Suddenly all sorts of things started clicking and over the course of a few subway rides larger and larger chunks began fitting together. I can distinctly remember worrying this over in my head, standing there on my ride home, and suddenly understanding how the choices worked. This was possibly the only time I completely understood the choices. They’re rather confusing. I prefer Epp’s explanation where he brushes aside explanations and just says that there is, “an odd little hiccup in the universe.” How the choices work isn’t really important, only that a choice exists. At least that was what I told myself every time I screwed up the choices and had to go back and rewrite a scene.

But back during that subway ride I understood, and I knew that this “Matthew” character would have made one choice back when his wife died, only he didn’t understand that situation fully, because really he had two choices to make. A second choice was coming. The first was to give his life to begin with, the second revolved around who it was, exactly, that he was giving his life for and whether he would continue on in this world when those he continued to love moved on. And at the center of it all was a discarded home pregnancy test.

And then I was off, branching out and discovering one of the most interesting worlds I have ever visited as a writer. Coming up with new stories for Matthew and Epp became one of the best parts of this project. They gave me a canvas where everything could be played with.

On the other hand they also became the biggest stress inducer of this project, because as more and more stories piled up, more and more pressure to carry on this tale in the expected fashion began to pile up as well. I never want to write a book in that way again. That was terrifying.

So Matthew and the choice that set everything off gets the top slot. His encounter with the daughter he’s been unknowingly following for her whole life never fails to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the moment he decides she’ll be okay if he lets go sends me all over the place emotionally. It is the single most important brick in this building. Despite the zombie knife fights and trips back in time, it is Matthew’s struggle to accept his second choice that is really what this is all about. It is Matthew, after all, who brings Epp back around at the end. And it is Matthew, in a mirror image of the scene below, who signs off on Gus’s last push and all that it involved by letting himself believe that Zach will turn out all right, leaving a little message for the mortal in the meantime.

At the beginning of “26 Stories” weaving a book into it was certainly not the plan. Now, though, I have a hard time imagining what this would have been like without a visit with Matthew and Epp every third story.

I’ll visit with them again I’m pretty certain. Their world strikes me as way too rich for me to stay away from for long. I did mention a few months ago, though, that there are no plans to go back at the moment. And that remains true. The doors are currently closed and I will not force them open without an actual story in mind. But I get the feeling that one will fall into my lap eventually.

I’ll be working over a scene in my head or something, and it won’t sit right. I’ll be unable to put the camera in the right place, so to speak, and the characters will all be acting off and I’ll run it over and over in my mind trying to figure out what’s going on. And then I’ll take a step back to regroup and I’ll notice, there in the background behind the trees, a man in an immaculate suit resting his weight on a cane, or the girl on the blind date will suddenly turn blond and the patrons around her will walk right through her, or the man holding up the liquor store will have a big blind man with mirrored sunglasses breathing down his neck…and I’ll know.

But for now that hasn’t happend. For now I leave you with my favorite moment from this project.

Matthew Huntington of Brooklyn making his second choice:

The hallway Matthew entered was dark, but he had the feel of high ceilings and dusty white walls. He walked, his feet noticing the occasional warped slat of wood under his feet. He walked past a semicircle arch that led to a cramped kitchen, past a closed door, then around a corner to a bedroom. There was a fluffy comforter, rumpled and bright like starched snow, an end table with a clock radio and a lamp, a small desk cluttered with books and a laptop. He stared around; everything looked generic enough on its own, but combined there was a personality here.

Epp stood at a tree, his hands passing around and around it as he unwrapped loop after loop of tape until he finally reached the end. He walked around the tree, gathering handful after handful of tape as he went, the light on his left shifting from dusk into darkness now, and two figures ran towards him, one of them tossing a knife into the bushes before they reached the barrier where the tape had been and they disappeared to catch up with their present selves.

Matthew heard a door slam and he spun around to see a woman standing in the hallway, sleepy eyed, wearing a large t-shirt, reaching a hand through the doorway he had passed to flip off the bathroom light. He breathed in, and in, and in, seemingly unable to exhale any as his blood beat warm in his ears. “Christ, you look like your mother,” he said as his daughter walked past him. And her face, on top of the resemblance to his wife, was somehow so familiar, and he remember in rapid succession, a child’s laugh at the corner of a room he was working, a little girl in pigtails who had watched as he caused a fight on a street corner, the glimpse he caught in the shop window of a teenager walking past as he looked over the clientele, her face at a thousand different moments in his past appearing again and again as he floated through his work and it was like an optical illusion that he had only seen one way until just this moment when it became so clear how close he had been to her this whole time, how much of her life he had witnessed.

Epp wound his way around the third corner of the square he had marked out, tugging the tape off a tree branch. Inside the square the light rain that had passed through earlier that night began to fall, the raindrops tapping soothingly against the treetops.

Matthew watched her climb into bed, roll around a few times trying to get the comforter right on her body. She settled down onto her back, her face up at the ceiling. He watched and could tell that she was debating whether she should go back to sleep or not. She reached a hand up, scratched her forehead, half rolled over and looked at the clock radio, then rolled back. She clasped her hands behind her head, wriggled back onto the pillow, and smiled as she looked up at the ceiling. One thought went through Matthew’s head as he watched her and it shocked him with its certainty, but as a lifetime of watching his daughter grow up flooded through his memory he knew it was true.

“She’ll be okay,” he thought.

Popularity: 1% [?]

matthew and epp

Moment 2: Epp Decries Modern Telecommunications

What to say about Epp? Most likely not a lot. The guy was everywhere, was arguably the main driving force behind these tales, influenced every character and became the center of, if not the reason for, the entire third act. He was a character who was so powerful that scenes he wasn’t anywhere near changed course simply because his name was spoken out loud. He was a character so cool that he made britches and a waistcoat seem stylish.

Picking one moment to capture Epp, I realize as I write this, is completely out of the question. It just isn’t going to happen. He’s here, obviously very high up on the list, but the moment I’m going to choose isn’t any grand Epictetus moment. If you’ve come this far then you know all the grand Epictetus moments yourself and probably have a few stuck in your memory that are being trotted out right now: the cathedral; Newtonian Physics; pounding the bar at the Port Authority and turning a stack of hundred dollar bills into a brief history of currency. I’m not about to go picking and choosing amongst those to try and capture everything about him in one little scene.

He also has a number of rather wonderful lines:

Smooth – “Even for the immortal, Benjamin, life is too short to drink bad scotch.”

Touching – “Two thousand years and the power of a god and there’s no end to how much I’d give up to be able to talk through some of my problems with you. You were always so good at helping me notice what I was thinking too hard to see.”

When asked why you would buy the cow when you can get the milk for free – “One would purchase the cow if the future value of all milk after deducting for risk was greater than the asking price plus the value of the amount of expected free milk, assuming a cow that provided no benefits other than milk.”

But, no, none of these are my favorite moment. My favorite moment is nothing but a little throwaway line that comes in the middle of “Three Lessons.” It’s just something that Epp mutters while waiting for a text message.

Why choose this moment? Because it’s something that any of us might mutter while waiting for a text message (I mean, not me because I love texting, but other people). My favorite moments for Epp, in fact my favorite moments in these stories, are the moments when these keepers of strength and defenders of inspiration, when these century old demi-gods and masters of quantum particles, when these embodiments of the “whatever” in “whatever doesn’t kill you”, when these testers and pushers act undeniably human. Because that was the best part about these tales for me.

Despite all the bells and whistles and craziness happening, these characters came out as some of the more human characters I’ve ever written. That’s really all I want to say about that as far as the deep end of the pool goes, that statement is surely up for debate, but in the shallow end of things there are hundreds of moments where these characters become perfectly accessible because they do things like mess up math in their head, fumble with metaphors, screw up times zones, forget appointments. That aspect of things was a huge part of the world-building that went on for these stories. I didn’t want larger than life immortals gnashing their teeth and causing giant earthquakes and speaking in booming voices. I wanted their roots, their beginnings, who they were to start with to always shine through. I wanted them wonderfully and at times woefully human. Human but with the ability to turn mass into energy at will or quantum tunnel their way through a car roof.

So Epp at slot number two speaks for itself as far as Epp the character goes. The moment is irrelevant, so say I, allowing me to pick a moment that has nothing to do with anything except that it continues to make me smile when I think about it. Just one line when Epp is sitting alone in Sophie Loughton’s bedroom while Matthew is making his first push. Epp is contacting two strangers who turn out to be Mary and Bartleby, and in the silence of the gathering storm outside his phone continues to beep softly, and he continues to clack the keys in reply, and he utters to no one a very simple human sentiment:

Nobody talks on the phone anymore.

I always loved that line.

Of course, here we are with Epp and it’s only moment number two.

Surprised? Wondering what moment one is? It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. After all, this never really was Epp’s story, now was it?

(thanks to Reza Vaziri for the photo)

Popularity: 1% [?]

« Previous Page — Next Page »