The Imaginary Lover #1

Chapter 1. The players. George Hermann bats in the bottom of the ninth with the Series on the line. Bob Whelan buys a gun.

Well, here we are again, folks. I'm Warren Bluhm serving as the voice of the very shy B.W. Richardson, author of The Imaginary Bomb and now its sequel, The Imaginary Lover. I have two interesting and potentially exciting facts to share with you before we leap into the action.

First, this sequel was begun shortly after The I-Bomb was completed back in the late 1980s. If you've joined us before, you know that B.W. shopped the book around a little bit and then put it in a box for about 18 years. Only with the advent of the Internet and podcasting, which allowed us to tell the story without convincing a publisher to print it first, did the world of imaginary physics finally see the light of day.

But because the sequel was only half-completed, that means the finished story will bear the distinctive mark of present-day B.W. Richardson. His modesty prevents me from suggesting what that means, but at the very least it means we might expect a bit of a statement about liberty, and courage in the face of tyranny, themes that The Imaginary Bomb only hinted at.

The other interesting and potentially exciting fact to share is that, as we begin the podcast, The Imaginary Lover is not complete. He's been working on and off all summer, but B.W. is still moving through the middle and late chapters as of the start of recording. That very likely means there will be some revisions of the early chapters when the story makes it into print someday, to smooth out continuity and insert some foreshadowing. It also means this will be a fresh and somewhat raw experience - I half suspect that B.W. will be ripping pages off the printer and handing them to me as we record Chapters 11 and beyond. But we'll cross those bridges when we get to them.