Part I of the interview and my mini-review of Vin’s new book, The Testament of James is here.
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Q. I found the resolution of TToJ more interesting, and certainly more relevant, than the resolution of The DaVinci Code, but surely some readers will see similarities. Were you in any way inspired by that book?
A. I have to be careful not to seem scornful of Mr. Brown and his books, or Steve Berry or whoever. Here are these guys who have sold millions of books and entertained a lot of people and made a fortune, and I’m some little guy selling books in the thousands. Nor do I have the excuse that my stuff is meant to be “academic,” because it’s not — frankly, I hope to entertain, as well. So I don’t want to sound like the midget razzing the elephants. But no, honestly, these books that read a lot like film treatments, a couple of paragraphs of dialogue about the secrets of the Knights Templar and then “What’s that?! Flashing red lights, Oh No, the police are coming! Quick, let’s escape through my secret underground tunnel to the secret hangar where my secret helicopter waits to waft us away in just such an emergency as this!” aren’t quite what I’m trying for.
Yes, I get the fact that The Testament of James discusses Jesus and so does The Da Vinci Code. But frankly I find these scenarios designed to enhance the mythical bloodlines of the kings of France to be a bit labored. Do we really care about the legitimacy of the Bourbon bloodline? Are they planning to re-assume the throne? Whereas I get VERY interested when Hugh Schonfield asks, and here I paraphrase, “Wait a minute, Jesus was this brilliant dynamic fellow, always calculating the effect of his actions, and then suddenly he gets arrested and he just sits there like a mope, like some sad sack, he stumbles into Jerusalem with no idea that’s likely to get him arrested and he’s got no PLAN? That makes no sense! Especially when the gospels indicate he clearly had some specific reason for wanting to be arrested on a Thursday night, he turns to Judas, the most trusted disciple, late on Thursday evening, and says “What you have to do, go now and do quickly.”
Q. It’s pretty clear you’re planning sequels. How’s the next one coming along and any idea when we can expect to see it? (Yeah, yeah, I know; you’re barely recovered from writing this one … )
A. I don’t write from outlines, as I’ve said. I put myself in a zone where scenes can come to me, they’re largely aural, I hear them and I write them down. Not in any particular order. Then the last stage is consolidating, streamlining, weaving the fabric together so it looks relatively seamless. So I can’t set an exact schedule. I may be a quarter of the way into “The Miskatonic Manuscript.” It’s going to have a somewhat larger scope.
The germ of the idea is very simple. These days, people with cheap electronic cameras -– the cheap ones are often best because their lenses don’t have a lot of fancy coatings designed to block “flare” and “diffraction,” light effects that Aunt Mimi objects to when she takes snapshots of her cat Fluffie who happens to be backlit by the sun; I’m told you can test for this with a laser pointer — people can go outside in the evening and aim up at the treetops and flash their strobes and capture images of things you can’t see with the naked eye, colorful orbs and veils and vortexes, lots of stuff. Not every time, but fairly frequently.
The response of supposed “scientists” to these images is very interesting. They remind me of Galileo’s contemporaries, refusing to look through his telescope. You’d think they’d be going, “Wow! What are these things?! They appear to have an internal structure kind of like amoebae and they appear to be about the size of softballs and they seem to have some means of propulsion and staying up in the air, they can move up as well as down, they can move against the wind. Why can’t we see them within the visible spectrum? Do they have mass? Can we calculate their maximum speed? Can we characterize their behaviors; what attracts or repels them?” Instead they all yawn: “Obviously dust particles on your lens; water droplets on your lens; you need your camera repaired; maybe you need cataract surgery,” if pressed they’ll threaten psychiatric intervention. That works, that makes the problem go away. They lump these phenomena in with crop circles, whatever, “Another loony on the phone, must be a full moon, ho ho.”
Well, back in 1920 H.P. Lovecraft wrote a short story about a scientist who developed a resonator that could activate the pineal gland and allow people to see things not normally visible, including creatures swimming or floating in the air. Now go look up recent studies of the effects of activating the pineal gland through the use of chanting or other sonic stimuli at certain frequencies, and the relationship of the pineal gland with the optic nerve, and the growing consensus that one of the functions of the long human childhood is teaching children how to SHUT OUT a lot of their sensory input in order to concentrate just on what we need to gather food and avoid predators and jump to our feet when the bell rings in the government youth propaganda camp, which is why people consuming psychoactive plant sacraments talk of being “re-awakened,” seeing the world in a way that can make our workaday drudgery, fighting our way up the corporate ladder, going into debt to buy a better Entertainment Center, seem downright silly. Which is what really frightens the dominator culture, of course, the idea that we might stop this race to borrow and spend and “consume” — that people might wake up, look around, escape their control.
Instead of consuming these sacraments to see what it’s all about, far too many of your anthropologists write about how the indigenous tribesmen light the fire and where they sit and the fact they chant for hours, but they never grasp what the chanting is about, that we’re a thin-skulled species and our brains and our pineal glands can respond to musical vibrations at certain frequencies, which is why Tibet is full of temple bells. Read Terrence McKenna.
Well, I asked myself, what if there really was a resonator? What if Lovecraft left a notebook telling where it could be found and re-activated? What if it revealed something about the 31 parallel dimensions that quantum physicists now tell us may be layered like ribbons all around us? Do the creatures there love us just the way we are, or would they prefer us with a little ketchup?
Q. You’ve been relatively quiet the last few years. Even before your departure from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, you seemed to have switched to a focus on Nevada issues more than national ones (not that Nevada hasn’t had a big national issue or three with Cliven Bundy!). Was this by choice? A regrouping, a desire to be less in the fray? Or was it something else?
A. Recruiting and motivating young Libertarians is easy in a way but you start to wonder if you’re actually helping, or if you’re diverting them from more useful pursuits. Young people come to the movement when they realize government screws up everything it touches, that freedom is the answer. As Ernie Hancock says down in Phoenix, “Freedom is the answer; what’s your question?” Government “health care” isn’t about allowing you choices over your own body or even saving money, it’s about state power over a vast new constituency that can’t escape because, after all, everyone wants “free health care.”
Eager young Libertarians are convinced if we just find the right candidate, the right slogan, paint enough yard signs, the American people will hear the message of less government and more freedom and we’re going to turn this thing around. But of course the great strategy of the socialists to see to it the majority of Americans either receive government benefits or get paid more than $100,000 a year to ADMINISTER government benefits has finally succeeded, so it’s now true that if voting could change anything they’d ban it. Election night comes and everybody votes AGAINST the guy they’re more afraid of, AGAINST Republican Tweedle-Dumb but FOR interchangeable Democrat Tweedle-Dumber, and meantime they’re telling you “I can’t vote for someone as different as a Libertarian because you guys can’t win so I’d be throwing away my vote, and besides, you want to legalize drugs.” And our guy gets 2 percent of the vote, and at the next party meeting 90 percent of your gung ho young campaigners are gone, gone for good.
So you’ve got a movement that has to grow by a factor of ten every four years to remain the same size. You’re not just running up the “down” escalator, in the rigged game of American electoral politics you’re trying to run up a “down” elevator shaft.
To sell 5,000 or 8,000 copies of a trade paperback on our issues you’ve got to hit the road, travel all across the country, speaking and signing books at conventions of Libertarians and gun owners, “Yay, Vin, you’re great, why don’t you run for office?” Right, run for office and come home two years later and tell them, “We’re going to get around to those good Libertarian issues, trust me, we’re going to legalize drugs and machine guns and get rid of the income tax and the Federal Reserve, but you’ve got to understand how the political process works, first I’ve got to accrue some seniority . . .” Insert masturbatory gesture here. It eats up your time and your energy, it’s pretty exhausting and meantime the blue-gloved goons are groping you coming and going, it starts to feel like a bit of a treadmill. You’re the paid entertainment, really, not so much different from the guys who set up down at the local Holiday Inn on Saturday night and play “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl.” They enjoy it, the fans enjoy it, it’s groceries on the table, but pretty soon you realize the world is moving on without you.
And of course my day job WAS at a daily newspaper and the Internet started to destroy the daily newspapers, which they probably deserve for becoming so calcified. Especially after 2006 they all down-sized. Some closed and the rest retrenched, increasingly their mantra was “Concentrate on local. They can get their national news from TV and the Internet for free; all we’ve got left to sell that they can’t get anywhere else is local high-school sports and the local water board rate-hike hearing. So you try to be loyal employee, you try to pitch in and help out, though I did draw the line at “Stop writing this radical stuff that offends all those new Obama voters out there,” and of course the whole effort was doomed, anyway. They put the ad guys in charge and their idea of editorial content is some gray stuff in between the ads that won’t offend anyone. But advertisers aren’t going to pay higher rates for fewer readers reading a shrinking newspaper full of oatmeal with no raisins. Before long they’ll all be free twice-a-week tabloids that they throw in your driveway; some ads and the TV listings and Mrs. Smith’s Sixth Grade class taking a field trip to the Alamo or the local sewage treatment plant.
And the paper where I was employed happened to be the Las Vegas Review-Journal and that particular newspaper made a unique and very bad strategic decision in 2010 to hire this outfit called Righthaven to sue people for using their content online without permission, a decision I had nothing to do with, by the way. Their corporate counsel assured me it wouldn’t affect people who ran my syndicated column but a lot of Web sites including the Lew Rockwell site dropped me like a hot potato, they figured “Why take a chance on getting sued?” so years of gradual progress in getting my Libertarian stuff out there to a wider readership was gone, just like that, within a month or two, in the year 2010. My attitude has been “It happened; move on,” while Cat feels it was huge.
But mostly I think it goes back to that not wanting to be Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits singing oldies at the senior center. I hope I don’t get hate mail from Herman’s Hermits and their fans, that music was a lot of fun in 1966, OK? I also loved Edison Lighthouse and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Tommy James and the Shondells, “I Think We’re Alone Now,” OK? Love it, really. But I wanted to break out and use whatever talent I’ve been given as a writer to go a little further. After 20 years it started to feel like I could dig out an old column, graft this week’s news peg on the top, run it out there, all the regulars would say, “Yay, Vin, that’s the stuff!” So if anything I probably stayed in daily newspapering too long. They whined my columns were too long when they hit a thousand words but it’s like being the guy who serves up the little Vienna sausages and shrimp on toothpicks and you never get to cook the entree, the main course.
Q. Writing books is hard, often unrewarding work. TToJ is good, but you’re likely to face an uphill battle, first to get it noticed by readers who don’t know your work and second to get it accepted by those who do know your work but don’t want you going in a new direction. What keeps you going in the face of all that inertia?
Q. The work is its own reward. I suppose those not lucky enough to ever feel a call think we’re making it up, but I pretty much have to write these books, it’s a calling. What’s important is to get centered, to get clear, whatever the trendy term might be now, to listen closely to that inner tone or voice and write what I’m supposed to write. Then the stuff flows, it’s not a battle, because you’re doing what comes naturally. Parts of it are what they call automatic writing, it comes in bursts. No outlines, outlines are deadly.
Where did they get this “outline” idea? I think the faculty advisors who supervise people trying to get their Masters in English literature teach them to present an outline because that makes the advisor’s job simpler, instead of slogging through pages of drivel you spend 60 seconds looking at the outline and you tell them “OK, your thesis is that Emily Bronte was left-handed, that’s good. All this stuff about how learning-disabled children were mistreated in Victorian England takes you too far afield, the faculty committee won’t be comfortable with that because they won’t be familiar with your source material, leave that to the History Department; just stick with the left-handed stuff and you’ll be fine.”
So all our English teachers teach all the kids to write from outlines and where does that leave you? It’s time to write Chapter Four and your outline says you have to pick up your characters who are starting to look like dead cockroaches tied to marionette strings and dance them from Point D to Point E, where the outline says they have to end up 20 pages later, and they damned well better not “come to life” and say or do anything unplanned or unexpected because it’ll knock the whole outline for a loop, and you’re no longer a writer, you’re a mortician trying to pose the embalmed corpses in realistic tableaux mordant. Is that French or did I just make that up?
I had a literary agent, years ago, signed a contract and everything. He later got famous, wrote some book about how to write a blockbuster novel, said the most important thing was to work from an outline, of course. He’d have lunch with someone from a publishing house, get in touch with me and say, “They want a fictionalized biography of David Bowie; right up your alley given that you play in that rock band and you’ve got that part-time radio show and the way you know pop music and all; send me an outline.”
So I’d do some research on Davy Jones, which was Bowie’s real name long before they cast a really short kid from the chorus line in the Broadway Show “Oliver!” to be one of the Monkees and kind of tied up that “Davy Jones” name. Then I’d agonize over what I could bring, what part of my personal vision could somehow be made to intersect with this assignment, so I wouldn’t be a candidate for the loony bin, suicidal with frustration if I spent the next nine months working on this project that some editor dreamed up over a corned beef sandwich on 23rd Street. Finally I’d send in the outline and Al’s response would be, “That was weeks ago! That train left the station! They were looking for a quickie paperback but now they’ve changed their minds! Can you do me some kind of horror thing that involves plastic surgery? Need an outline; tomorrow would be good.”
Only years later did another author point out to me that, since this guy never sent me any reports from publishing houses on the actual manuscripts I sent him, on my own writings, he wasn’t really circulating my stuff at all, he just had me as part of this bevy of hip young hopefuls who he was going to try and pair up with the right story idea until something clicked.
And of course they ALSO love to work from outlines because when you’re pitching a concept at a story meeting it’s got to be quick, between the pickle and the coffee.
So eventually you have to make a decision, are you going to schmooze up to the right people and hope you can convince them you’re fast enough and cynical enough to grind out this formulaic crap, or not? They’re always looking for last year’s hit, only slightly different. If last year’s hit was a cop buddy movie with a white cop and a black cop, this time let’s try a straight cop and a queer cop, or a male chauvinist cop who gets assigned a feminist lady partner who should look a lot like Tyne Daly. Of course it always leaves them behind the curve when something really new comes along, then they go chasing after spinoffs of THAT big hit; if “Andy Griffith” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” struck gold, let’s try “Petticoat Junction” or “Green Acres” or “Gomer Pyle.”
I used to try and play the game, we printed up softbound Advance Review Copies of “The Black Arrow” at least 90 days before the official release date and shipped them off to Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly and a hundred other trade publications and book review editors who set up all these complicated rules for how to get a book reviewed, but it’s a rigged game. If you’re not Doubleday or HarperCollins, if you don’t already have a contract with Baker & Taylor to get your books into Barnes & Noble, none of those people are going to review a book from a small publishing house. Why should they bother? Their whole protection racket fortunately appears to be collapsing now, a lot of them are going bankrupt and being bought out by the Germans and they all richly deserve it, calcified dinosaurs thudding to the ground left and right.
The time is right for these books about Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens and the gang at Books on Benefit and their unusual friends. The re-awakening of interest in these psychoactive agents, these entheogens, is huge, thanks to the Internet. It’s amazing to me that it’s been almost 50 years since Frank Herbert dealt with some of these same themes in “Dune,” which was hugely popular, it resonated with a generation. There should be a whole literature on this topic by now, but where is it?
It’s Online, for the most part. Readers can find a lot of interesting information on this stuff at sites like Maps.org or Erowid.org or The-Nexian. But fiction can bring new people to the discussion, and the fiction has been lacking. We hope to kick-start that, Cat and I are hoping we’ll generate a little discussion on our Web site, VinSuprynowicz.com.
The book will be there for those who are ready for it, who are supposed to find it. As the first in the series, I wanted it to be compact, accessible, something people could enjoy and easily follow. Not a sprawling epic, we may head more in that direction with the next one, but “Testament” has a limited cast of characters operating in a limited setting over a period of a few successive days. It’s complete in itself and only you and the readers can tell me if it’s potent enough, if it’s satisfying. But it also says, “OK, did you get that? Are you with me so far? Good. Now hang onto your hats, kids, because here comes ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript,’ the road signs warn there may be dinosaurs, and we’re not going to be slowing down to go back over the introductory material; no one allowed on this ride who’s not at least THIS tall.” 🙂
Just wonderful, Vin. I majored in English literature in high school, took a number of “creative writing” courses, and though I loved the classics I was thoroughly turned off by the idea of writing fiction for most of my life. I had started putting down my little stories at the age of nine, and “education” mostly killed the urge. I wrote a lot of technical stuff during my long nursing career, but I didn’t even get a chance to read much fiction then.
When I retired, I began to read fiction, and then to write it. I still have all my pencil scrawls from third grade on and enjoy very much reading them after all these years. I write just as you describe and I love it. Just glad I don’t have to attempt doing so for a living. So, I write for my own amusement, and am glad to share with those who are interested.
I truly hope your series of stories can take off… and I will do everything I can to promote it.
Wow. Short question, looooong reply. Each reply an essay in itself.
I had a few good loud laughs reading this. From sheer recognition, so magnificently voiced.
Being a board member of the Dutch Libertarian Party, this passage really got me thinking, again:
“So you’ve got a movement that has to grow by a factor of ten every four years to remain the same size. You’re not just running up the “down” escalator, in the rigged game of American electoral politics you’re trying to run up a “down” elevator shaft.”
It, and the preceding paragraph, addresses something I’ve already put a lot of thought into. I just haven’t figured it out, yet, but I have a feeling that I will, this year. This is not something that only applies to America. A main part of it is what I call ‘the debilitation of society’, a process started in the public schools but supported by the media by showing low-life ‘entertainment’ (like drunk people on holiday, raising (…) the drunks to ‘society heroes’), a process I think Vin refers to as the ‘deliberate dumbing down’ of new generations, for which TV is ‘gefundenes fressen’.
Most people these days have the attention span of a drunk prawn and, as long as they can still go on holiday (preferably twice a year), they don’t care what’s really happening and they’ll buy anything corporate media wants to sell them. They don’t or, worse, won’t see who is really running their lives, even while complaining when they encounter the associated infringements first hand.
Fighting for liberty really is an uphill battle, on a well-oiled slippery slope. I guess it indeed is a calling. Interest in the Liberty Movement is driven mainly by discontentment, and if instant results can not be shown, people move on.
There’s no sense of principle anymore to be found, and liberty can only be re-conquered by principle. Discontentment is prey to anyone promising a free lunch; there is no such thing, but it takes them time to find that out, again and again. In the mean time, you’ve lost them and, like Vin says, probably for good.
Like I wrote yesterday: GOOD decision not to cut!
Thanks for this, Claire.
R. … I’ve really appreciated your comments and agree with so much of what you’ve said. Once upon a time, I was one of those “eager young Libertarians” Vin describes — it took me about two years to burn out. Helped mail out flyers, made phone calls in the evening, delivered yard signs, attended conventions, the whole shebang. In retrospect, I feel like I was a true “believer” … and I don’t think it’s an accident that politics and religion get grouped into the “do not discuss at the dinner table” category. Both subjects tend to divide participants into groups, and sabotage any sense of conviviality between individuals regardless of differing opinions. (Shared opinions aren’t necessarily superior, but they do make for more relaxed dinner conversation!)
But, “liberty can only be re-conquered by principle” sounds exactly — if not verbatim — like what eager young recruits hear over and over again. Is that really so? Why not: liberty can only be regained through creativity? Or be re-conceived via new (visionary, or otherwise) ways of perceiving the world and one’s place in and/or relationship to it? I think that’s a big part of where Vin’s going with TTOJ.
I’m strongly moved to share this lovely inscription (won’t name the book title or author, as Vin’s been unable to contact him) from a review copy of a work cited in the reference section of TTOJ:
“Children of a future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time,
A path to God was thought a crime.
(After William Blake)”
I find that passage painfully beautiful … right up there with the best stuff that William Blake ever wrote … reliably brings tears to my eyes every time. Tears of joy, I think, and a world of hurt too. For whatever it’s worth. 🙂
I’m actually starting to feel optimistic. People got turned off Republicans, now they’re turned off of Democrats, and the reelected Republicans re fixing to double down on what turned everyone off last time they were in power.
If enough people can say, “You know, I read this book…”
Brunette —
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
“But, “liberty can only be re-conquered by principle” sounds exactly — if not verbatim — like what eager young recruits hear over and over again. Is that really so?”
Yes, I think it is. The alternatives you voice are valid indeed, but more as vehicles to get people to think about their lives and who’s actually running it, which will hopefully lead to the return of principle. Without principle, people just will keep doing what suits them best, with full disregard of consequences to others, or even to themselves, as they never even think about it.
Maybe ‘principle’ is not the word I should’ve used. What I meant to express is that people need to take responsibility for their own actions again, responsibility that is structurally being taken away from them by the welfare state, without them even noticing it. Allow me to give a brief example:
Last week, I got a phone call from a newspaper lady, trying to get me to agree to a trial subscription. I decline, stating that no newspaper today is critical of government, which to me is their only raison d’ètre. She goes: “Oh, but we’ve changed our format'”, so I go “Did you really sack and replace at least half of your editorial staff and journalists?” and she goes quiet. Then the conversation ends, and she goes “If you stay on the line, you will receive a message on how to register to not be called again”, a mandatory mantra all tele-sales people must supply.
I break her off, saying that I know all that and there’s no need for her to tell me again. Her response: “But I’m compelled by law to read this to you, not doing that could have consequences for me” and I go “I know that, and here’s a thought experiment: Doesn’t the simple fact that we’re two adults, who cannot agree to skip this message as it is already familiar because you will get punished if you do, mean that something is terribly wrong? That you cannot be trusted to be responsible enough to decide for yourself if your prospect indicates your action is unnecessary, even undesired? Will you please think about that?”
Of course, I told her I would let her make the announcement (and I did), so she would not get into trouble, but it was clear that never before she had even thought about questioning her instructions; she never noticed that she was being treated as an irresponsible child by her government (and, by extension, her employer), and that her (or anybody else’s) newspaper will never write about it.
I feel that with the return of personal responsibility, principle will return as well. So I probably should have written: “liberty can only be re-conquered by returning the sense for individual responsibility to society”. Since as long as people can keep delegating their responsibility to the state and thus onto society as a whole, the state will keep on growing, getting more and more collectivist, and further and further eroding our liberty.
In my defense, I did follow up my statement with a reference to how mere discontentment with government actions will not provide any meaningful change. It often makes things even worse, as will be clear from when people not so much voted FOR Obama, but AGAINST Bush, as Vin also notices. But had people used their brain instead of their emotions, they would’ve known that electing a communist activist was not the smartest move to make. Not that the ‘opposition’ was any better, but ‘None of the Above’ is unfortunately not on the ballot. The same happened in 2012 here in The Netherlands; ‘the left’ didn’t want (perceived) ‘right’ in power, and ‘the right’ didn’t want ‘left’ in power, so we got them both and have been made to pay for it. But nobody is prepared to take responsibility for their actions in the voting booth and learn from it. They’ll just do it again next time. “I have to vote otherwise I cannot complain, and voting Libertarian is a lost vote.” Huh? You see where my ‘sheer recognition’ came from?
I hope I made myself a bit clearer now and that you can see what I intended to express.
Your quoted passage is indeed beautiful, but it also shows a certain mindset. Because today it is equally valid to state ‘A path FROM God was thought a crime’; apostasy from islam is punishable by death. To me both notions are abject; people should be free to believe what they want, as long as they do not force their beliefs onto others.
I’ll have to free up some hours so I can read at least a substantial part of TToJ in one go, instead of reading a couple of pages at a time, but I’m kinda busy at the moment. Can’t wait, though ;-).
Years ago I read an interview featuring the guitar player from the jam band Phish. He was relating a conversation he had with one of the Dead (Jerry?) in which the older hippie asked if he had ever ‘seen notes as colors’ while playing. It was several years later, and that dude from Phish was relaying to the interviewer that during a recent live show, he had finally experienced assorted beams of color emanating from his guitar while he played. No mention of drug use was made, so I was left to presume that he just finally was able see things which before had remained unseen.
Interesting about those bells.
“Interesting about those bells.”
And about those colored musical tones. 🙂 I can actually see how someone deeply “in the flow” of music might perceive something like that, even without chemical assistance. Though I’m also sure that in the case of members of the Dead, there was chemical assistance aplenty. 🙂
Back in the day, I definitely had a few experiences seeing sounds, smelling feelings, and perceiving realities beyond the realities. Unfortunately, those experiences could be both powerfully good and powerfully terrifying. Life changing, but not always in the way one might hope. Now I’m getting curious again. I think it’s very important to be in the right place and in the right state of mind to venture into such realms.
I took a break from all of my online reading to catch up on actual books, actual real-life and voilà! Look at all of the greatness when I checked back in!
I’m excited for the new book. The story-line sounds right up my alley.
That will up my total to 4 of Mr. Suprynowicz signed books. Of course another author will still hold the title of “most autographed books in Ragnar’s collection” but they will share the same glass shelf. And being a hardcover will be a bonus, the rest in that spot are of softcovers.
I’m already regretting my cheapness for not spending the extra for priority… but in the meantime, at least I found this interview. Now I need to go test out my cheap camera utilizing a laser pointer. It gives me an idea…Maybe I’ll get to be a real “lighmaker” when I grow up after all.