Family of Geniuses

Whenever I'm pressed to name my all-time favorite film, my usual response is Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. There are many reasons why I select this particular movie, too many to cite in this entry. But I will mention two things I really like about the film: firstly, I like how the three gifted Tenenbaum children (Chas, Margot and Richie) remind me of myself and my brothers, and secondly, I like the fact that most of the characters in the film are writers of some sort or another, many of whom have at least one book published to their credit.

In this blog so far I've mostly written about my own writing projects and looked back at many of my old books, but today I'd like to briefly focus my attention on the work of my younger brothers. I have three younger brothers: Tom, who was born in 1982 (and who was named after the Who's rock opera Tommy), then Bill (who I think was named after Prince William), who was born in 1984, and finally Andrew, who was born in 1986 (for those curious, I was named after James Taylor). Of the four of us, only Bill isn't a writer in the traditional sense, though being a gifted composer of music, you could call him a writer in that regard. But this entry deals with the novels written by Tom and Andrew.

Here's a picture of Tom, Andrew and I taken, I believe, by our mother outside our house in April or May of 2004. Later on that night our punk rock band, the Mute Ants, played a gig, a sort of "Battle of the Bands" at Woonsocket High School, which I graduated from all the way back in 1998 and Tom graduated from in 2000 (at the time this picture was taken, the only one of my brothers who was still a student there was Andrew). I'm the one in the Poison t-shirt, Tom is wearing the Transplants t-shirt and holding the blue bass guitar, and Andrew is clad in the Clash t-shirt and holding the red electric guitar. Despite the fact he's holding a guitar (which is his own), he actually played drums that night, while I "played" guitar and keyboards and Tom handled bass and vocal duties. And even though he's wearing sunglasses in the photos, I was the only one who actually wore shades when we performed. But I digress.



Since the year 2002, Andrew, the youngest of us, has written six books. Here they are:



In the year 2002 he wrote his first novel, All I do in Love, which was a little over 200 pages long, and dealt with a college rock band that ends in bloodshed and tragedy. That same year he started work on a fantasy trilogy, which he completed in 2005 or so. I forget the names of these books (as I never actually read them), but I think one of them was entitled The Imperfection of Creation. The three books as a whole were well over 1000 pages total. After that, Andrew began typing out books as opposed to writing them by hand. In 2008 he completed In November We'll Burn, a novel about a lobster-loving young woman (who resembles the singer/actress Mandy Moore) who gets involved with a group of anarchists, and the novelist who is in love with her. This book (which was inspired by Stephen King's novel Hearts in Atlantis and the music of Rilo Kiley) was over 500 pages long and written in a non-linear format, its chapters being structured after the 14 Stations of the Cross. I read it last year... it's pretty good. In 2010, Andrew typed out a second novel, Brigit, which I think is also over 500 pages. It's a post-apocalyptic novel with religious overtones inspired by, among other things, the film Cloverfield and the music of Paramore. I haven't read it yet but hope to in 2011... my dad is reading it right now and likes it so far.

At the moment, Andrew is working on a new novel that I think is to be around 700 or 800 pages long, and will be his homage to Stephen King's It (one of his all-time favorite novels). After that he wants to write a 1,000 page book about a woman who keeps being reincarnated, which will be his attempt to write "The Great American Novel." Perhaps needless to say, Andrew's favorite writers are Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, and because he likes their long books it inspires him to write his own long novels (he somewhat arrogantly dismisses 300 page novels as being "short novels"). Of the three of us, he focuses the most on story and plot.

Of course, when it comes to sheer prolific writing amongst us, it's impossible to surpass Tom, who from the year 1995 to around 2006-2007 wrote out, by hand, a staggering 23 novels. Here they all are, in all their glory (and I've read almost all of them):



Words cannot express the true strangeness of some of Tom's books. Because he's not exactly a big reader himself, his books thus bear little resemblance to any book that you would encounter in a bookstore. When I wrote the first book of my "Magic Fantasy" trilogy in 1995 (Janine and the Jedbeast), and our father liked it, Tom, jealous, decided to write his own fantasy trilogy, "The Magical Fantasy" trilogy. Later on, when I began writing basketball thrillers, Tom started doing the same. But eventually, around 1997 or so, he started branching off into new areas, such as his book Rachel, about a female convict on death row who gets a second chance at life when she agrees to take part in a bizarre quest to find organs for people who need organ replacements. Then there was The Rascal King, about a serial killer who was inspired by the career of Boston politician James Michael Curley and the music of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.



By far Tom's most ambitious project is his Magical Fantasy series, which so far is up to 8 titles. The first three books of the trilogy (The Fight for the Jetbeast, The Search for the Jetbeast, and The World of the Jetbeast) were, like my first trilogy, heavily inspired by the Star Wars films and the Final Fantasy video game series (they were also, to some extent, rip-offs of my own trilogy, ironically enough). But whereas I stopped after three books, Tom kept going. He eventually did a fourth book, The Eternal War, which was completed in 1997, then a fifth book, Shadows of Time , which was finished the following year. After that he took a break from fantasy for awhile, to focus on his "Kremlin" books (see below) but around 2002 or 2003 he began a further addition to the series, a new trilogy: The Mages' Holiday, The Garden of Mercedes, and My Only One. This new trilogy was over 1,600 pages long (The Garden of Mercedes alone was over 700 pages).



Another of his more ambitious works is his "Kremlin" series. These books were set in Philadelphia and revolved around Tom's most well-known character, the real estate mogul Todd Kremlin, owner of Kremlin Industries. The first book in the series, Payday (1998) was essentially a crime novel inspired by the films of Quentin Tarantino, but as the series went along the Mafia plotline of the first book was slowly phased out and the books focused more on Kremlin's romantic feelings for Jill, his CEO (who was in her twenties in terms of age, while Kremlin was in his fifties). The books that followed included Money for Nothing in 1998, A Penny Earned in 1998, Cash in 1999, and Pocket Change in 1999 (that final one was the largest book in the series, being 616 pages in lenght). In the year 2000 Tom wrote a sixth book in the series, My Best Friend, which at 516 pages was also pretty long.

However, by far Tom's biggest achievement was his book Following an Angel, which he began in the year 2000 and completed (I believe) in the year 2002. This book, at 1,016 pages, is the longest book that any of us has ever written:



Following an Angel is set in a sort of alternate universe version of the Kremlin series. Again set in Philadelphia, it stars Tom Kremlin, the 27 year old CEO of Kremlin Industries. Tom falls in love with Jill, who is the CEO of a rival real estate company. Later on he falls in love with another woman, Heidi, a supermodel who collects basketball cards. Eventually Kremlin has to chose between the two women. That's basically all the book has in the way of a "plot." What's most notable about its size is how little actually happens in it. I'd like to write some more about this book one day because I really do think it almost borders on "outsider art" but for the moment, this is all I have to say about it: it truly is an epic, at least in terms of size.

Ever since finishing up the new trilogy for his fantasy series Tom hasn't done much writing. However, next year he plans on finally typing out a novel on his computer (he's never typed out a full-length novel on a computer before) and he plans to self-publish it in 2012, I believe. I don't know much of what it's about, but I do know that Todd Kremlin will be returning as a character.

So, amongst Tom, Andrew, and myself, from the year 1995 we've completed a total of 41 books. Of those 41 books, only one is actually set to be published. But I'm sure that both Tom and Andrew will be published one day. As it is, I find their unpublished work to be a thousand times more interesting and unique than most of the books being put out by mainstream publishers today.