Jeff Miller's Blog, page 4

100 Free Copies of BORDERLINE INSANITY

My publisher is giving away 100 kindle copies of BORDERLINE INSANITY on Goodreads.  Anyone interested can enter here.  Please feel free to share this.

This is the prologue for Borderline Insanity, performed by...

This is the prologue for Borderline Insanity, performed by Angela Dawe.  During various rounds of edits, some people questioned whether we needed it.  It doesn’t have anything to do with Dagny Gray, and it takes place 35 years before the story really starts.  Prologues are generally disfavored in the industry, and I’m usually against them.  But I kept this prologue because it’s as simple a distillation of the theme of the book that I could imagine. 

Discovery and Obsession

More than ten years ago, I had the good fortune to stumble into a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City.  It was as entertaining an hour as I have ever spent.  Very quick, very smart people developed a highly-entertaining, hyper-witty story on a stage in real time.  It felt like I was watching a mental-Olympics.  I returned to the theater on a subsequent trip to New York, and that show was equally impressive.  (I remember a performer announced he was leaving New York to move to California and begin writing for an upcoming television show then-known only as The Office-spinoff, so maybe this was 2008 or so.)

Although I haven’t been able to return to the UCB theater since then, I’ve followed the careers of various UCB performers through web videos and podcasts.  One of my favorite performers is Connor Ratliff, who ran for president in 2012 on the basis that he was Constitutionally-qualified to do so, as he was over 35 years old.  His pollster was fellow-UCB actor, Will Hines, who you can see running a focus group for the Ratliff campaign here.  I had the honor of serving as the Ohio-chair for that campaign, for what it’s worth.

Following Hines’ career led me to Don’t Get Me Started, a podcast he co-hosts with another UCB performer, Anthony King.  On DGMS, guests are invited to talk, not about what they do, but about what they love.  I love this idea so much I’d like to franchise it and start local chapters.  Imagine something like a book club, but each month a different member would talk for an hour about something they are obsessed with, providing an entry for the others into a world they might not have known.  (If it were socially-acceptable to replace small-talk with “Tell me the latest thing you love,” I’d do far better socially).

DGMS guests have talked about people and things like Bob Fosse, General Aviation, ASMR, Furniture Rehabbing, and Kanye West, who I knew only vaguely, despite his fame.  A two-part episode introduced me to the world of Stephen Sondheim, about whom I knew very little.  I remember seeing a version of Sweeney Todd on cable in the 1980s, but that was about it.

Sondheim took for me in part because I had been listening non-stop to the original cast recording of Hamilton for several months.  I was ready to appreciate musical theater in a way I hadn’t before.  My wife and I plunged into the recordings of several Sondheim shows, like Company, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along.  We watched productions on Netflix and YouTube and Amazon.  I read Sondheim interviews and essays, and Sondheim’s own Finishing the Hat.

Riding the crest of the Sondheim wave, we sent our kids to my parents for the night and took in a local production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, The Last Five Years, and then we listened to various cast recordings of the musical for the next several weeks.

Meanwhile, my Hamilton obsession led me to read Ron Chernow’s biography, which inspired the musical.  It led me to read Gore Vidal’s Burr, and Duel With the Devil, which is the true story of the murder trial that Burr and Hamilton defended together.  And all of this led me to Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I’m reading now, and Team of Rivals, which I’ve been listening to in the car during my commute each day.

There are two things I want to say about all of this.  The first is that almost all of these things I’ve found and loved in these past few months are not new.  They existed for many years, and I was simply ignorant of them.  And by ignorant, I don’t mean that I was unaware that they existed.  I mean that I had not paid them enough notice to see that I would enjoy them.  How frustrating is this?  Right now there is probably a book that would be your favorite book in the whole world–a book that would resonate with you at the deepest levels of your soul–and you just haven’t found it yet.  Maybe you picked the book next to it at the library.  Maybe you even held it in your hands, but put it back.  Maybe it would have changed your life.  So much of human happiness depends upon us keeping our eyes open.  So much depends upon the willingness to try something new.

The second thing I want to say is:  How random and wonderful is the art of discovery?  I went to The Last Five Years because I was interested in musicals as a result of Sondheim, who I found from DGMS, which I listen to because Will Hines was pollster for Connor Ratliff, whose career I follow because I stumbled into the UCB theater over a decade ago.  If I had gone to another show that evening, I wonder what I’d be enjoying now.

Obsession

More than ten years ago, I had the good fortune to stumble into a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City.  It was as entertaining an hour as I have ever spent.  Very quick, very smart people developed a highly-entertaining, hyper-witty story on a stage in real time.  It felt like I was watching a mental-Olympics.  I returned to the theater on a subsequent trip to New York, and that show was equally impressive.  (I remember a performer announced he was leaving New York to move to California and begin writing for an upcoming television show then-known only as The Office-spinoff, so maybe this was 2008 or so.)

Although I haven’t been able to return to the UCB theater since then, I’ve followed the careers of various UCB performers through web videos and podcasts.  One of my favorite performers is Connor Ratliff, who ran for president in 2012 on the basis that he was Constitutionally-qualified to do so, as he was over 35 years old.  His pollster was fellow-UCB actor, Will Hines, who you can see running a focus group for the Ratliff campaign here.  I had the honor of serving as the Ohio-chair for that campaign, for what it’s worth.

Following Hines’ career led me to Don’t Get Me Started, a podcast he co-hosts with another UCB performer, Anthony King.  On DGMS, guests are invited to talk, not about what they do, but about what they love.  I love this idea so much I’d like to franchise it and start local chapters.  Imagine something like a book club, but each month a different member would talk for an hour about something they are obsessed with, providing an entry for the others into a world they might not have known.  (If it were socially-acceptable to replace small-talk with “Tell me the latest thing you love,” I’d do far better socially).

DGMS guests have talked about people and things like Bob Fosse, General Aviation, ASMR, Furniture Rehabbing, and Kanye West, who I knew only vaguely, despite his fame.  A two-part episode introduced me to the world of Stephen Sondheim, about whom I knew very little.  I remember seeing a version of Sweeney Todd on cable in the 1980s, but that was about it.

Sondheim took for me in part because I had been listening non-stop to the original cast recording of Hamilton for several months.  I was ready to appreciate musical theater in a way I hadn’t before.  My wife and I plunged into the recordings of several Sondheim shows, like Company, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along.  We watched productions on Netflix and YouTube and Amazon.  I read Sondheim interviews and essays, and Sondheim’s own Finishing the Hat.

Riding the crest of the Sondheim wave, we sent our kids to my parents for the night and took in a local production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, The Last Five Years, and then we listened to various cast recordings of the musical for the next several weeks.

Meanwhile, my Hamilton obsession led me to read Ron Chernow’s biography, which inspired the musical.  It led me to read Gore Vidal’s Burr, and Duel With the Devil, which is the true story of the murder trial that Burr and Hamilton defended together.  And all of this led me to Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I’m reading now, and Team of Rivals, which I’ve been listening to in the car during my commute each day.

There are two things I want to say about all of this.  The first is that almost all of these things I’ve found and loved in these past few months are not new.  They existed for many years, and I was simply ignorant of them.  And by ignorant, I don’t mean that I was unaware that they existed.  I mean that I had not paid them enough notice to see that I would enjoy them.  How frustrating is this?  Right now there is probably a book that would be your favorite book in the whole world–a book that would resonate with you at the deepest levels of your soul–and you just haven’t found it yet.  Maybe you picked the book next to it at the library.  Maybe you even held it in your hands, but put it back.  Maybe it would have changed your life.  So much of human happiness depends upon us keeping our eyes open.  So much depends upon the willingness to try something new.

The second thing I want to say is:  How random and wonderful is the art of discovery?  I went to The Last Five Years because I was interested in musicals as a result of Sondheim, who I found from DGMS, which I listen to because Will Hines was pollster for Connor Ratliff, whose career I follow because I stumbled into the UCB theater over a decade ago.  If I had gone to another show that evening, I wonder what I’d be enjoying now.

When you have a book coming out, certain things happen that make...

When you have a book coming out, certain things happen that make you feel like a real writer.  Someone sends you edits.  You get a cover.  And if you’re lucky, someone records an audio version of what you’ve written.  I’m really, really lucky, because Angela Dawe is narrating BORDERLINE INSANITY.  She’s recorded books by Harlan Coben, Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, and others who are much better and more accomplished than me.  I can’t wait to hear the recording.

The prologue in Borderline Insanity takes place along the Rio...

The prologue in Borderline Insanity takes place along the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park.  I know a little bit about this area because I spent three days rafting down the river with Butch Hancock, my friend Brad, and a guy named Catfish back in 1998 or so.  We’d ride the (gentle) rapids by day, and then camp by the side of the river at night.  Every evening, Catfish would fire up a gas grill and cook something delicious.  Butch would pull out his guitar and play some of his amazing songs, and they would echo between the sixteen-hundred foot canyon walls.  (I jotted the songs down when I retired to my tent–see the last picture for the list).  

The canyons were amazing.  One wall was Mexico, and the other was the United States.  We were wedged in the cracks between the countries.  It was quiet.  We went two days without seeing another person. There was no border wall; no border patrols. No checkpoints.  It sometimes felt like being on another planet.  

I was still just a kid then, really.  Butch was a hero of mine, and I’m sure everything I said to him was strange and awkward.  Who am I kidding … I talked to Butch at a show last summer and I was still strange and awkward.  

I’m pretty sure that Borderline Insanity wouldn’t be what it is if I hadn’t gone on this trip.  I really need to go back.

Here’s what it will look like with the back cover.

Here’s what it will look like with the back cover.

Here’s the cover for Borderline Insanity, which will be out July...

Here’s the cover for Borderline Insanity, which will be out July 5.

When I named my protagonist Dagny, I liked that her name was...

When I named my protagonist Dagny, I liked that her name was obscure.  A young Norwegian pop star named Dagny might change that, and I’m rooting for her.

Latest News

Borderline Insanity is available for pre-order here.  I’m through the developmental and line edit stages of the book.  Next up, working with Thomas & Mercer on copy editing, reviewing cover concepts, and drawing up promotional text.  The book is due to come out on July 5, 2016; I’m set to attend Thrillerfest in New York City later that week.