About three years ago I published my first novel, This Is Rage. It’s been an amazing journey, including creative development and four public readings of my stage adaptation. Now we have something additionally exciting to announce: the first three episodes of a podcast adaptation.
We made it easy for you to find at the online home that saved Kimo Balthazer from irrelevance and started his movement:
ThisIsRage.com
Who is Kimo Balthazer, you may be asking? Well, if you haven’t read the book, I would hate to spoil it for you. Let me say in the form of a teaser that he is a 20th century old-school radio talk show host lost in a world of 21st century digital communications. Although he has lost everything, and that’s largely his own unrestrained shock-jock fault, he still has a few things to say about how the business workplace is no longer the same for the everyday hardworking person.
Kimo’s anger is his listeners’ anger, and when that anger collides with a nasty bit of corporate insider deal-making that is going to eliminate thousands of great jobs for no good reason except increased profits, he takes his tirade to the Internet. Pretty much all hell breaks loose.
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I kept notes for this novel for over a decade, wrote it over a two-year period beginning in 2011, and then published it with The Story Plant in 2013. At that time, the social climate of the Occupy Wall Street movement was opening the dialogue around the 1% and the 99%, and the voices around me eerily echoed the voices in my story.
The political reception to my book was as heated as it was overwhelming. I began hearing from readers all over the world who had suffered personal losses similar to the employees of the fictional EnvisionInk Systems and Atom Heart Entertainment. They recognized the roaring rage of the main characters in the book plotting against and outmaneuvering each other, while also empathizing with the quiet rage they felt in themselves as victims of an economic system they no longer recognized. They didn’t recognize Kimo, he was purely fictional, but what he was shouting rang true. They were playing by the rules, and the rules were failing them. Income inequality was becoming much more than a story.
Then something happened that surprised me. The novel was optioned for the professional theater so it’s echoing story could be experienced live and in person. I worked with the producer, Mitchell Maxwell, and my editor/publisher, Lou Aronica, for two years delivering four different drafts, each culminating in a public reading that drew equal laughs and tears. It was an unpredictable experiment that often left me drained, but each time I listened to the audience dialogue following the show, I knew the seeds had been planted for something good to come of this, if only people saw themselves in the mirror of drama and refused to let it stand as the status quo.
Then something else happened that surprised me again. The Story Plant Media team called and asked how I felt about adapting the stage version to a podcast. In facing this challenge, I reminded myself of the daunting task of writing the novel, followed by the daunting task of the four stage drafts. With the podcast, the true voices of the characters could resonate in the listener’s imagination, much as Kimo’s voice resonated with his audience. An old-fashioned radio treatment for an ironic tale of Internet radio seemed like the prefect path to firing up the voices all around us.
Those voices now belong to you.
How about that; old-fashioned serialized radio drama, all new for the digital age? There are twists in this version of the story I am exploring anew, many quite different, and dare I suggest, the romantic elements have come a little forward. Of course since we are talking the immensely flawed Kimo Balthazer, we are talking a dysfunctional romance. Perhaps it’s even hard to call it that. War of the broken-hearted might be closer. It goes to some strangely dark places of the soul.
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If you read the book, you might remember the hint at the end that Kimo asked for coffee with corporate attorney Sylvia Normandy? In this adaptation of This Is Rage, Kimo and Sylvia go way back. I mean WAY BACK, as in a personal history together. Sylvia is the narrator of the podcast. She is the storyteller. It’s told through her eyes, her point of view, her play-by-play commentary. I told you it was different.
Why revisit Rage now? If you’ve been following my blog, you won’t be surprised that certain candidates in this year’s elections have stirred raging emotions in me. Throughout the past year, we’ve seen all kinds of signs that Occupy was not an isolated affair, and the People’s Revolt is showing signs of resilience everywhere. We live in difficult times, and sometimes we forget we always have choices.
It’s been said by many that change happens when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. The pain around us is not sustainable. Change has to happen. It remains my hope that this story of an amateur kidnapping in corporate America elevated out of control by thundering voices can be part of the narrative that leads us together toward change.
I’d like your voice to be a part of that change. I’d like my characters’ voices to be in your heads, and I think the actors in this podcast have delivered on that front. I want to keep hearing the voices of post-show conversation, and I’d like our collective voice to reach up and grab the attention of those in power not listening. Our shared voices can bring reform, human innovation, and make change happen.
A story is one voice. When we read and listen and hear and react, it can become way more than a manuscript. My voice is meant to be a catalyst. Yours is a conduit. Let’s put them together and share a little podcast drama, shall we?
You can download or stream the podcast, and it’s free. You can also use the social media buttons to “Forward to a Friend.” That would give Kimo great satisfaction. Me, too.
The post The Rage Podcast: Voices All Around Us appeared first on The Good Men Project.