More details on "The Marble Index"

From the back cover description:

"James Champagne returns to the exotic and decadent world of Trinity in The Marble Index, the long-awaited sequel to the story he began in Illuminated Shadows. In this volume, rebel girl Karen Blaise and her best friend Poison Flower (the beautiful leader of the Pagans) set out in search of a legendary book known as the Marble Index, in the hope that it will tell them where to find the Griffin, a mythological beast that is the only being on the planet who can restore Karen's atrophied magical powers. Meanwhile the Shadows, an anarchistic terrorist secret society, begin a recruitment drive led by their leader, the charismatic woman known as Jerina Markay. Jerina and her friends will travel all around Trinity, from the depths of the Dwarf Kingdom to the heights of the Karnark Imperium, in the quest to gain new allies in their battle against the oppressive Kingdom. And in the steampunk metropolis of Zone, glam assassin Sypha Nadon plans to break out of jail to clear his name of a crime he didn't commit, and uncover the secrets of the mysterious Dr. Oment, the mastermind behind all of Trinity's recent woes. These various storylines eventually intertwine and build up to a shattering, apocalyptic conclusion, in which nothing will ever be the same again. All of this sets the stage for what will no doubt be a pulse-pounding final volume."

Main cast:

Adam Lambert: Sypha Nadon
Kristen Stewart: Karen Blaise
Melanie Laurent: Jerina Markay
Katy Perry: Poison Flower
Christina Hendricks: Marilyn Curtis
Stephen Rea: Cole Galdur
Christoph Waltz: Dr. Oment Nerrod
Ian McKellen: Arthur Trevador
Christian Bale: Steve Hunter
Jeff Bridges: Bemos Sherwin
Owen Wilson: Peter Miller
Michael Clarke Duncan: Kain Setter
Rosario Dawson: Pamelon Giry
Cillian Murphy: Egon Jordan
Rowan Atkinson: Catno Catoni (voice)
????: Sophia Thaig

Secondary cast:

Lady Gaga: Isabelle DeVando
John Turturro: Victor DaScar
John O'Hurley: Duane DaTes
Grant Morrison: Oswald Wirth
Ted Levine: Donald Dubwa
????: Eom Fairhaven
Blixa Bargeld: The Crimson King
Siouxsie Sioux: The Oracle
Brendan Gleeson: Dr. Vastarien
????: King Virago
Reginald VelJohnson: Harv Durrell
Rupert Boneham: King Ian Isrengard
Willem Dafoe: Skenlark (voice)
Stephen Russell: Syd Muller
????: Oscar Twist
Brent Corrigan: Paul
Sean Bean: Jarvis Sena
David Tibet: The Griffin (voice)

soundtrack:

Nico: Nibelungen (opening credits)
Nine Inch Nails: Happiness in Slavery
The Beatles: Nowhere Man
Nine Inch Nails: Ringfinger
Nico: Frozen Warnings
Switchblade Symphony: Doll House
Nine Inch Nails: Into the Void
Kate Bush: Wow
The Beatles: Come Together
My Chemical Romance: Planetary (Go!)
Pink Floyd: Us and Them
Nine Inch Nails: We're in This Together
Ke$ha: Cannibal
Siouxsie & the Banshees: Hybrid
No Doubt: Home Now
Genesis: The Last Domino
Lady Gaga: Teeth
Marilyn Manson: The Reflecting God
Nine Inch Nails: Ripe (With Decay) (end credits 1)
Coil: The First Five Minutes After Death (end credits 2)

Table of contents:

1. Marilyn Visits the Bonehoard
2. Karen and Ivy
3. A Conference of Shadows
4. Sypha in the Underworld
5. St. Bloch's Keys All Bloody
6. Ringfinger
7. The Hole in THings
8. Isrengard Redux
9. A Bond of Blood
10. Breakout at Blusterford Prison
11. En Route
12. Back From the Dead
13. Frozen Warnings
14. Conspiracy Theory
15. Amongst the Dwarves
16. Dr. Vastarien's Mannikin Masquerade
17. Dark Revelations
18. Into the Void
19. Wow
20. Strangers in the Night
21. Come Together
22. Us and Them
23. Kitty Empire
24. Hybrid
25. The Last Supper
26. Cross-Check
27. The Triumph of Death

influences:

Nico's The Marble Index album
The Thief computer game series
Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels
Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin comic book
Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins computer game
The music of Nine Inch Nails, Switchblade Symphony, and Pink Floyd
Nine Inch Nails music videos
the short horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti
Edward Gorey's art
China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station
the films of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay

The Marble Index is complete

Sometime in October of 2000 I finished writing a book called Illuminated Shadows, which was the first book of what was intended to be a six book fantasy series. I started work on a second book shortly afterwards, but ended up quitting it at around 15 pages. In the year 2005, I started from scratch again, with the intention of calling it The Marble Index and making it the central volume of a trilogy (as opposed to six books). From January of 2005 to late April of 2009 I wrote around 84 pages before quitting again.

On August 4th of 2010 I once again began work on The Marble Index, again starting from scratch. I highly doubted I'd finish this attempt either. But I guess that the third time's the charm, because this afternoon, at 12:41 pm on January 2nd, 2011, I wrote out the final page. The book ended up being 278 pages total, bringing the two books to slightly under the 600 page mark. This is the first book I've written out entirely by hand since Illuminated Shadows a decade ago. All in all, it took around 88 days of actual writing (as I barely wrote anything at all in September and the first half of January).

Even though I wrote this book mainly for my own personal satisfaction, to prove that I could still write out a whole book by hand if I wanted to, and have no intention of ever trying to get it published, it's still an accomplishment, in my eyes, to complete a book I thought would never exist anywhere but inside my own head.

I guess this means I'll be completing The Age of Nothing (the third and final book of the trilogy) in 2021!

Writing Update

I'm finally almost done writing out the first draft of "The Yellow Notebook." Hopefully I'll finish that one this year. Then it's just a matter of typing it out, then submitting it to the usual genre magazines. One of my goals for 2011 is to try to write at least one short story a month, and to try to get some of those short stories published. As it is, I have plenty of ideas for stories at the moment, though some of those ideas consist mainly of titles that I think sound cool (such as "The Evil Animators").

On the novel writing front... when I initially found out that Grimoire was going to be published, I decided that I wouldn't start any other major projects until it was actually released, aside from working on the occasional short story. So it's my hope to start work on a new novel next year. In the meantime, to keep from getting rusty, I've been working on The Marble Index, which is book two of my Trinity fantasy trilogy. It's been nearly a decade since I finished book one, so I figured this one's time had come. I started work on it on August 4th of this year and now I'm nearly 240 pages into it, with only about 40 pages to go, so I hope to finish it in January. It's been hard work because I've been writing it all out by hand, in the fashion that I wrote all those old books back in high school and college (see my earlier Previous Works/Juvenilia entry). But it's satisfying to me to finally be finishing book two, and even though I have no intentions of publishing this one it's a nice way to remind myself that I can still write novels when I put my mind to it (ever since I finished Confusion in 2006 I've been kind of lax on the novel writing front, though I did have some failed attempts, such as a novel set at Warhol's Silver Factory during the 1960's, or a short novel about a retail worker employed at a bookstore job he hated). I'm just not sure what my next "official" novel is going to be about.