About

The Twisted Trips of Anthony Taylor is an absurd middle grade novel. Absurd novels are a hard sell, but this is one of my favorite things that I have ever written.

It was inspired by the book Dead Eye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut. It was nothing in the plot, characters, or setting, or anything else you might think of that inspired my book. It was the structure. Vonnegut’s book was full of bizarre asides, flashbacks, digressions. I enjoyed that. I decided to write a book using that technique.

Funny thing about inspiration, though. Once I finished the book, I realized that Vonnegut’s technique does not work for my book. I took it out. I made my book more straightforward, more traditional in structure. It might just be that absurdity needs to be anchored by tradition and normalcy for it to work. Otherwise, for most readers, they have nothing to hold onto while they take your ride.

So, enjoy, and let me know what you think.

And check out all my other blogs in the blog roll.

 

Why post a blog in this format?

A blog is not normally posted all at once in its entirety. Normally a blogger posts at regular intervals–daily, weekly, monthly–or at random intervals. One problem, however, that you run across in this form of posting is that if you’re posting a sequence of articles, to read the articles in the sequence in which they are posted, you must go to the first article, and then go backwards to the second article. It is not the way we are used to reading. We are used to starting at the beginning, and reading until we get to the end. We are not used to having to jump around.

So when I decided to post this book as a blog, I decided to do something different. I posted the whole thing in one day, last chapter first, so when all the chapters were posted, they could be read in a logical order.

 

Rick Walton (that’s me) is the author of over 80 books for kids. He is also involved in far too many projects to describe here, of such a variety that he is going crazy. If you read around on my blogs, you will discover what some of those projects are. They are pretty interesting. If you are an editor and would like to acquire this book, let me know. There are also sequel possibilities.

I can be reached at rick@RickWalton.com.