THE MESSENGER WEBISODES Episode 1.2: Tuesday, January 1,

THE MESSENGER WEBISODES

Episode 1.2: Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Well, fuck me.  There’s no way I can drive to Boston in less than six hours.

It troubles me that I’m given so little time for this assignment, particularly because driving is my preferred method of transportation.  Turns out, even in good weather, it’s a nine-hour drive, and winter on the Eastern Seaboard does not qualify as good weather.  With so little notice, this feels like an afterthought, or even as if it caught my overseers off guard.  Given my beliefs about who that is, I find myself more than a little surprised.

Fortunately, there is time for me to drive to Baltimore and catch a 2:30 p.m. flight to Boston Logan.  On the drive to the airport, I ponder the details of the assignment.  Three children, none older than ten years old, will go sledding on the frozen Charles River late this afternoon.  Frozen, but not frozen enough.  Unknown to them or to the woman watching them from the riverbank, they’ll encounter a thin spot on the ice, and they will fall through.  In the fading light of day, panic will set in, and they’ll be unable to find the opening they broke through.  Saving them isn’t an option; I have to be there in time to prevent this, or the three of them will face a cold, watery death.

This knowledge sends a chill of its own through me.  This level of gravity should make the situation easy.  What parent, faced with this knowledge, would risk letting the children go out on the river?  But always comes the complicating factor, the question I can seldom answer truthfully: How do you know this?  In fairness, it’s a reasonable question, because the world doesn’t work that way.  You know the stove is hot because you touch it, and it burns your hand.  You generally don’t know the stove is hot six hours before you turn the damn thing on.

So I’m always left with two choices: honesty or deception.  I prefer honesty, but I’ve yet to find the ideal way of telling people that I receive visions about their impending death—without sounding like an escaped mental patient.  Sometimes I have to lie; I’ll make them believe I’m in some official capacity that would give me access to knowledge about an issue of safety.  It works occasionally, lending credence to my impossible tale.  More often than not, I don’t stick around to see if they listen, to see if my warning actually saves a life.   I know I should, but I think it would dispirit me too much if people ignored my efforts and died anyway.

I don’t yet know how today will play out.  It’s always difficult when children are in the equation, especially when a parent is around.  Thanks to our understandably suspicious society, a single man coming up to a parent and saying, “Hey there, you don’t know me, but your child is going to die horribly in thirty-one minutes,” is seldom greeted with, “Thank you, kind stranger!  Here’s tuppence and a shiny apple for your efforts!”  More often, the actions (and often the words themselves) are closer to, “Get away from me and my family, crazy person, before I use this pepper spray/knife/blunt instrument/handgun to alter your physiognomy in some unpleasant way.”

Call it chapter twenty-five of “Why Altruism Sucks.”  As a species, we have become so inundated with deception and selfishness that genuine care and assistance automatically triggers people’s suspicions.  They see no way for someone to benefit from an act of kindness, so the default question becomes Why is he doing this?  Followed closely by What does he want from me?  This is magnified greatly when a child is in danger.

Which brings me to my next valid issue: children are stupid.  No offense to anyone out there who has a child or, worse, is a child, but let’s face it—most of them are pretty dumb.  It’s a wonder they survive to adulthood in the numbers that they do.  Ever see a child run forward while looking backward?  No other creature on Earth does that.  How is that a biological ticket to success and safety?  Still, my employer must have a fondness for the poor creatures, as he’s frequently sending me to get them out of one scrape or another.

The flight from Baltimore to Boston is short, less than an hour and a half, and not expensive, as I’m not concerned about business class or any such foolishness.  Yes, it’s a business trip, but for eighty minutes, I can find comfort in coach.  With no checked luggage and no carry-on, I can bypass one hassle at Boston Logan, but there’s still the fun of obtaining a rental car.  After deplaning and making my way through the terminal to Ground Transportation, I look for the first company displaying a “Cars Available” sign, and they get my business.

I ask for a compact, something small and practical.  As luck would have it, they’re out of that class of car, so for the same amount of money, I’m given a new Mercedes.  Can’t complain about that, certainly.  Our acquaintance will be brief, but in the time it takes to get me to my destination, I’ll have no shortage of comfort.

I don’t know Boston very well, but the river is hard to miss.  The area I’m looking for is in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, in a park right on the river.  In my mind, I know what the three children look like—two boys and a girl, all carrying sleds.  Proper sleds, too, wooden ones with metal rails; not these glorified plastic bin lids they’re passing off as sleds.  Kind of ironic, really.  The extra weight of the proper sleds is likely what will cause these poor souls to crash through the flimsy ice layer.

Unless I have something to say about it, that is.

Welcome to the Summer of the Messenger!

One week into the great Summer of the Messenger, marketing efforts are going well.  Thank heaven I have Dana, who has been putting an inhuman amount of effort into designing and refining the joelpierson.com website.  (Go Daddy’s website builder platform seems to be plagued by the devil himself.)  With the help of marketing and publishing experts Alan Bower and Erica Dorocke, we have some great ideas for the site, and it’s really coming together well.  My sincere thanks to everybody who’s made that happen.

I’m getting more positive feedback from readers about the books, which is always welcome.  When I was creating these novels, I had no illusions about creating works of art that would survive for centuries in the great collected works of written human endeavor.  I wanted to create books that would make people say, “I just read this, and I had a lot of fun.  You should read it.”  Every time I hear words to that effect, I feel successful.  Of course, I will admit that my main goal in life is to have a college English course named for me; a 300-level course identified only by my last name, as in: “Yeah, this semester, I’m taking English 342: Pierson.  We’re studying his later works, right before he went mad.”

What?  It’s my fantasy; I can have a mad period if I want one.  If Honey Boo Boo gets another season and my books don’t get adapted for TV, I’ll be very ready for that madness, thank you very much.

Yes, it’s true, I’m putting myself out there in the world, in the hope of a weekly dramatic series.  I’ve shared my work with a few people who might be able to make that happen.  I’m open to suggestions as to who you’d like to see portray your favorite characters.  Feel free to leave comments at the end of this entry about who might play Tristan or Rebecca, Genevieve or Ephraim.  I’ll be intrigued if anyone comes up with the same names I did in my mind.

Readers will probably notice that I don’t flood the narrative with description—either of people or places.  I prefer to be minimalist, letting people’s imaginations fill in the details.  That probably comes from my radio theatre background, where such details were always supplied by the listener’s own thoughts and ideas.  So if you want Tristan to be tall and blond, he is; if you want him to be shorter, with dark hair and a bit of middle-age spread, more power to you.  I’m much more interested in what’s in his heart than what color his eyes are.

I’m inviting my readers to “storm” Amazon.com in the next two days and see if ordering book six, The Messenger Conflicted, can lift the sales ranking into the top 1,000.  I would dance with joy if it did.  (And I could be persuaded to film that dance and post it to YouTube.)

If you haven’t read books four and five, book six might pose a few questions, but I’d like to think it’s encouragement to read the prequel trilogy.  As I mentioned, the books are fun—sometimes funny, other times dramatic.  You’ll see a lot of my personality in there (and perhaps one or two of my lifelong foes fictionalized for Tristan to battle, ha ha ha!)

If you’re absolutely new to the Messenger Series, welcome.  Thanks for checking me out.  For a limited time, you can download all of book 1, Don’t Kill the Messenger, for free in PDF form on my website, www.joelpierson.com.  Give it a read, and if you like it, the others are available to order right there on the site.

This is the part that’s been hard for me—talking business when it comes to the books.  For me, the joy has been writing them and having people read and enjoy them.  But to sell myself as author?  How do you do that?  The answer, I’m discovering, is by doing it.  By putting the word out there and presenting myself as an entertainment-generating service that people can purchase and enjoy.  I’m reading a wonderful book on that subject, by the way, Michael Hyatt’s Platform—Get Noticed in a Noisy World.  If you have something to sell—even if that something is yourself—buy this book.

But buy mine first.  (Sorry, Michael.  Just doing what you told me!)

FUN FACT: The Messenger novels contain characters from my writings of the past.  Bronwyn Kelsey and Iris Aiello (book three) are characters from my novel and audio series, French Quarter.  Bill Ferguson (an alias given by Tristan in book three) was the lead character in my audio series, Knight for a Day.  And Virgil and his dog Keesho first appeared in short stories I wrote at age four.  They’re all part of the little universe I keep in my brain.