HE WROTE: Lost

No, not that kind of lost. Although I do tend to get lost in cities a lot which bodes well for this weekend since I’m supposed to pick up a car at LaGuardia and then retrieve Jenny and Krissie from the Algonquin and take them to Jersey. Then return to the city on Sunday until we fly to Ohio on Wednesday. Jenny and I were lost in Yonkers on the book tour. Kim Cardascia gave us like seven bookstores to do stock signings in on the way from New York City to Boston because we asked. We left New York in a snow storm (Jenny was sleeping while I was driving). We get up to Yonkers. Well, I used to run around Yonkers as a young hooligan from the Bronx but we had a street number not a name and we wandered aimlessly with a terrible map for hours before I woke Jenny up and she called the store and finally found it. Well, hell, if I’d have had an idea I coulda found it as we used to go there when I was a kid and, well, anyway. We were lost in Yonkers.

Anyway. I’m talking about the tv show LOST. Jenny’s already rolling her eyes. But here’s the thing. After the last season final, a reporter said that if he had fifteen minutes to look at JJ Abrams bookshelf he could probably figure out what was going on with LOST. Well, I can tell you what I think are some of the books on Abrams’ bookshelves. There’s a series called ATLANTIS written by this brilliant guy called Greg Donegan. Who happens to be: moi. Now I cannot prove this and you actually can’t protect intellectual property and blah blah blah, I don’t care. What I do care about is reversing the publicity and since I have the rights back to my books, doing something with the damn things. Like setting them up for electronic download, if not bringing them back into print, so all these millions of LOST fans who are looking for ‘clues’ can buy my books and enjoy them.

1. The first episode and premise of LOST features a plane crash in a remote jungle area. The first book in the series features a plane crash in a remote jungle area. Both planes lose radio contact before crashing. The crashes are such that no one should have survived, yet most on board do. Both crashes result in the survivors getting only enough information about their location to realize they’re all ‘lost’. When some of the survivors enter the plane’s cockpit, they find the top of it ripped open. As they check it, someone is immediately pulled from the torn cockpit and killed by an unknown force. The sound of something large moving outside is heard and the survivors flee the cockpit. (The motif of something large and unseen moving through the jungle re-occurs in Lost and in the books).
2. In the second season finale it’s discovered that the island is part of some strange system of planet-wide powerful electromagnetic anomalies. In the book series the gates are part of a system of planet-wide powerful electromagnetic anomalies.
3. Both feature a radio message replaying a cryptic message that in both cases have no apparent power source. The message is thirty years old in the books and sixteen years old in the series.
4. A character hearing voices (Locke) in the series is very similar to a character in the series (Dane) who also hears voices.
5. The survivors in Lost encounter people who should not be there and were not part of the crash—the Others. The survivors in the book encounter people called the Others, who should not be there and were not part of the crash. Both groups of the Others seem to have a strange agenda, not yet spelled out in Lost, but both battling some other unknown force.
6. The survivors on Lost encounter a polar bear on a jungle island. The premise of the books is that there are a series of gates around the world that connect to each other as well as parallel worlds. In all the books there are numerous examples of creatures being where they shouldn’t be.
7. Central to the entire first season has been the discovery of a ‘hatch’. In the books, inside the area where the plane crashes (an ‘island’ of strange activity) there is a ‘gate’.
8. On the island two bodies are found, referred to as the island’s Adam and Eve: in reality they are Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. Both characters play a role in the books.
9. One of the survivors in the series turns out to be an undercover CIA plant. One of the characters in the book turns out to be a CIA undercover plant.
10. Some of the survivors spot the remains of a statue as do some of the survivors in the book. The remains of planes, balloons, ships, etc. have also been found through the show, as in the books.
11. In LOST a mysterious black cloud plays a role. In ATLANTIS, the portals in the gates are marked by a black cloud.
12. There are additional ‘clues’ and similarities as one goes through the books, which translate directly to the initial seasons of LOST and more that will undoubtedly come up as LOST continues on through future seasons.

The millions of fans of LOST have been scouring every little clue desperate to try to speculate on the mystery of what JJ Abrams is laying out. This series of books, which predates LOST, has already laid out an almost identical mystery, using many of the exact same elements in an eerily similar fashion, down to the same terms in cases and the same events. It would seem there is a large fan base waiting to snatch it up.
At least it does to me.
It would seem like a smart publisher would be very interested in these titles and using the built in marketing success that LOST has already generated.

And did you see the sort of slam on Stephen King last night? That wasn’t nice. I kind of agree with him, though: more story, less back-story. I only watched the first 40 minutes and there was a grand total of about four minutes of forward story and the rest was back-story.

Anyway. I think I have to fly somewhere tomorrow. Need to find my plane ticket and stuff.
And finish writing Agnes' climactic scene so we can argue about it in NY. Jenny sent me a draft of her version of it and it had lots of people standing around chatting.