Oh, the Saga of Me continues… wait, don’t sagas usually have a dramatic grand finale? Uh oh…
So, in the meanwhile that I’ve been re-working the half-maligned-yet-quite-ballyhhoed rewrite of a previously published novel, I happened to mention to my OWN lovely sister that I was rewriting a book.
My sister the psychologist! I’d written much of Droppington Place with her in mind! How did I not send her a copy?
She asked to read all three novels (Sawdust Man, Droppington Place, and Marigold’s End), and I apologetically sent them along.
What a knockhead was I to have excluded her from my reader’s list in the first place. But now all was fixed.
She picked out precisely the themes I’d intended in the first two novels, but get this… Ready?
Okay, a touch of backstory:
Droppington Place is the story of a twelve-year-old kid who gets trapped inside a magical realm made entirely of paper, overseen by a silly-yet-kinda-maniacal Elizabethan playwright overlord made of sawdust. What? It could happen.
Sawdust Man makes the playwright a sympathetic lead character in a bittersweet love story that takes a thousand years to tell. Same guy, different story.
So, here’s the really cool twist:
My sister the psychologist saw that Sawdust Man was actually a SEQUEL to Dropington Place!
Holy cats! Do you see what this means? My sawdust playwright just might be a recurring figure in any number of magical realism stories!
Why had I not seen this before? Many, many thanks are owed to you, dear writer friend, for riding with me on this crazy adventure, and certainly to my lovely sister the psychologist for her unflinching support and her crazy, zany, utterly brilliant idea!
It’s the Founding of an Empire!
John D Reinhart 