Second Wave

Hey kids, it's another Call to Action from I'm Just Sayin'.

James' group novel The Wave Organ has made it to the second round in the first chapters contest over at Gather dot com. I asked for your help in reading and rating the first chapter, and am now asking you to check in on the second chapter, or at least visit the page and give them a high rating. This work is a group effort with different writers assuming different chartacters.

From the James:

That's right, the little Wave Organ that could has made the second round of Gather.com's First Chapters Contest. Of over 2600 entries, we made the final cut of 20. Good lord. The entire gather.com community is voting and we're getting all sorts of wonderfully disparaging commentary. If you have a moment at work I recommend perusing what has been said. It's...entertaining. And plenty of it even helpful, but it's the cranky ones that particularly shine.

Here's the link to Chapter Two of the Wave Organ. To vote, click the stars at the bottom of the chapter, right before the comments begin. That is, if you still have your gather.com account. (It's free and quick and just make up and ID and password and go vote. It takes less than two minutes. The reading time, however will take longer and will vary.)

Here's the link to the announcement of the winners. And here's the link to the San Francisco Chronicle's note about the contest (scroll to the bottom of the page).



From the James, here's a synopsis of the novel:

The Wave Organ

During a week like any other, in separate corners of contemporary San Francisco, five strangers open five fortune cookies received in the most ordinary of ways. Inside they find a handwritten note: "You are pursuing essential beauty. 5:30 am, June 15th. The Wave Organ." They are not the only ones to have received this fortune, but they are the sole respondents to its enigmatic invitation.

The five protagonists go to the Wave Organ, an out-of-the-way environmental art installation jutting out into the San Francisco Bay, for reasons as varied as their lives. They are: Charlie Lienhart, 14-year-old boy genius; Amanda Klein, rich girl with a drug problem and a poetic soul; Rodolfo Quinn, mysterious hand model who does what he must to make ends meet; Frank Hyde, paranoid parking lot attendant with heroic fantasies; and Meriwether Shackleton, uptight librarian with a secret past.

The dim light of dawn finds this group of strangers milling about the odd stone structure. To their left is the iconic span of the Golden Gate Bridge; to the right the city. A light flashes from the bridge, drawing their attention. A hidden speaker begins playing new age music and a powerful telescope seems placed there just for them. When Frank Hyde looks through the telescope, he views a lone figure leaping from the bridge.

"By now you have seen me die." says a disembodied voice from the still hidden speaker. And so they are introduced to Richard Pratt Jr., the scion of a wealthy California industrialist, and are invited to embark on an outlandish journey to fulfill the dead man's dream of revenge, hubris and ultimately, philanthropy. If they agree to his terms, beginning with a trip to an abandoned tunnel to retrieve his formal suicide note (and the grisly "proof" that he is who he says he is), they will be generously rewarded.

Over the next several weeks the five social misfits are asked to perform a series of tasks culminating in a scheme to trick Richard's father, a selfish, dangerously controlling old man, out of his vast wealth. Through the adventure they come to understand the dead man's motives, and begin to appreciate the man himself.

Richard Pratt Jr. was inherently disinclined to be groomed as his father's protégé. Always a creative, sensitive type, he was encouraged by his Chinese born mother -- a former torch singer -- in the pursuit of contemporary culture, music, and the companionship of artists and eccentrics. This bohemian lifestyle was in direct opposition to the capitalist empire created by his father, Pratt the elder. The disappearance of Pratt Junior's beloved mother, for which he blamed his father, serves as the impetus for Junior's swan song -- an exquisitely complicated work of living art.

A stoned soup of compelling weirdness, The Wave Organ is flavored with two gentleman lawyers, one rotting liver, a duo of Sicilian thugs, one mysterious hairball, a singing dragon, some crooked fingers, an x-rated marching band, and more. The final reward for these five fortune seekers is less about money and more about the nature upon which true character is formed.