Click on a link below to find out more about the novel.
What Other People are Saying
What It's About
A Lengthy Teaser
How It Came to be Published
What Other People are Saying
"A cyber-gaming novel that even a Luddite can love, World Leader Pretend deftly navigates its reader in and out of the riveting virtual world of a 60,000-player fantasy computer game, while simultaneously following a disparate group of players through their brick-and-mortar lives offline. First time novelist Frost offers us a collection of richly drawn characters whose reasons for escape are as different from one another as their real-life stories, but who at their core, ache in chorus for community, friendship and human interaction. A powerfully moving story of what it means to be human."
--Mark Dunn, award-winning author of Ella Minnow Pea
"Store your copies of Infinite Jest in the basement. World Leader Pretend is this generation's Bible-slash-novel. Thomas Pynchon watch your back. William Gaddis is smiling in his grave. James Bernard Frost is the real thing."
--David Bowman, author of Bunny Modern
What It's About
Xerxes Meticula is playing a game. He plays this game 24/7 while a) his schizophrenic twin sister Gabriella tries, several times, to kill herself; while b) his best friend Zahn, riddled with a cocaine addiction, steals his girlfriend; and while c) the company, maximuminventory.com, that he co-founded with the aforementioned best friend, goes bankrupt.Xerxes is only mildly troubled by these Real Life (RL) disturbances. He is, after all, The Queen Peace & Love but Mostly Love, and the queen's primary concern is the growth of her kingdom and their status in the online fantasy world of The Realm. Xerxes has been randomly teamed up with a number of other misfits: Edward Calvin Rawlings, a paralytic; Dietrich Bjornson, a welder wintering at the South Pole; Gek-Lin Troung, a fourteen-year old Thai orphan; and Uncle Charley, her pimp. Success in The Realm depends on how well they can work together, and how well they can keep their RL's at bay to focus on the game.
Needless to say, RL impinges on both Xerxes and his ragtag group of gamers, and eventually they're forced to make a decision. Which game is more important: The Realm or RL?
Although the book is about gamers, it is by no means written only for them. It is, instead, a heartfelt novel about love, family, friendship and community; and the ways in which all of us, no matter how hard we try to hide, can never quite be alone.
A Lengthy Teaser
Edward Calvin Rawlings III is not a crier. He has, in fact, only cried a few times in his adult life.The first time that he cried was after the accident, not right after the accident, not after he had caught an edge at 73.2 m.p.h.; had caught an edge after coming off a 100-foot precipice during the preliminaries of the European Championships; had caught an edge right before the famous Chamonix left; had caught an edge and gone over; had gone right through the course lining that read Pepsi Cola, Pepsi Cola, Pepsi Cola; had gone through the course lining and over a rock-strewn cliff and landed in soft snow, soft snow that although it was soft still twisted his left leg in such a way that it still, to this day, points upward with his knee inverted, inverted the wrong way. The fall also snapped his spine, snapped it irreparably and irrevocably, so that since the age of nineteen, since January 23rd, 1997, since his last day as a budding star, England’s best hope for its first downhill skiing winter Olympics medal, he has been immobile in his wheelchair, immobile from the neck down, actually even worse than that, immobile from the upper jaw down, immobile in such a way that he has not spoken since he was nineteen, immobile so that his saliva must be sucked from a tube that enters his mouth in the right corner, from a tube that circles around his right cheek to the back of his neck, where it attaches to other tubes. Edward Calvin Rawlings III, known to his friends and family as Trés, pronounced Trace, all one syllable, did not cry then. He hadn’t cried then because he had blacked out in mid-air.
He also hadn’t cried when he regained consciousness in a hospital in Geneva, Switzerland in a full body cast. He hadn’t cried when, before anyone had realized that he had finally regained consciousness and needed to be told what had happened, on the T.V. that was located ten feet over his head and angled down at him, on an American station, on ABC, they were replaying it, they were replaying him with the #78 on his back and the skin-tight bodysuit with the Union Jack imprinted on both the front and the back going through the course lining with Pepsi Cola, Pepsi Cola, Pepsi Cola on it. It was just like on The Wide World of Sports when the skier broke through a similar sheet of plastic, spinning, and crashed pell-mell into a crowd of spectators, while a dramatic male voice said: and the agony of defeat.
They replayed Trés dropping over the cliff and landing in the soft snow with a thud. He hadn’t wanted to watch it. He had wanted to be told by someone else, someone other than two smarmy sportscasters wearing yellow blazers and big smiles and talking into microphones that looked like snow cones. But he couldn’t move. He was physically unable to turn away or reduce the volume. And so he heard from two sportscasters, "Let us take a short break from our regularly scheduled program to have a moment of silence for Trés Rawlings, the talented young English skier who will never walk again."
Still, this didn’t make him cry. What made him cry was when his father, when Edward Calvin Rawlings Jr., had come into his Geneva hospital room and called him Eddie. When his father, sighing heavily, on his breath a hint of Macallan, which he had sucked out of a small plastic bottle on the way to Geneva, said, "Eddie, you’re awake! Bloody Christ! I was in Lili and Carpenter’s when it happened. I saw the whole thing on the telie. Eric and I were drinking pints. You missed your turn or something and you went through the railings and over the cliff. When they showed the stretcher, you didn’t move. We couldn’t believe it. And then, just like that, they switched over to Colin Montgomery putting for birdie at the Scottish Open."
Edward, Trés’s father, went on, went on to explain how quickly he and Tilda had hopped on a plane from London, how quickly they had got to Geneva, how distraught his mother was, but Trés couldn’t listen. Edward was calling him Eddie. His father was calling him Eddie. His father had never called him Eddie. His name was Trés. He was the third. Uno. Dos. Trés. His father called him Trés because he was his namesake, the third in a proud lineage, and now, suddenly, his father was calling him Eddie. He wanted to communicate this, to tell his father not to call him Eddie. But he couldn’t. His mouth wouldn’t move. His fingers wouldn’t move. His father was calling him Eddie.
The tears that were in Eddie’s eyes built up for an hour. He didn’t cry in the hospital room while he was forced to watch the finals of the European Downhill Championships, while is father rambled on, soused on whiskey, oblivious to the fact that his son Trés, his son Eddie, was facing the telie and wasn’t listening to what his father was saying. He didn’t cry when Pierre Foucault, Trés’s arch-enemy, that irritating Frenchman who had pumped himself so full of steroids that there wasn’t a square inch of his brain remaining for higher thought, appeared on the T.V., appeared in front of reporters after standing atop the podium and listening to La Marseillaise with tears in his eyes, tears that Trés knew had been induced by a pearl onion that Pierre attached with a safety pin to the underside of his collar for such occasions, tears that Pierre had bragged before the competition would win him another night with some Swiss hottie, tears that Pierre claimed made this Swiss hottie say, "Pierre it makes me purr when you cry," something that Trés could never actually see anyone saying; Trés still wasn’t sobbing, although his eyes certainly contained moisture, when Pierre, a big bulge under his collar and a bloody torrent of onion-induced tears dripping down his face, said, "Trés Rawlings was a good friend. Let us not think of victory. Let us pray for Trés."
Trés wouldn’t let his father see. He could hold this back. His eyes were clouding though and would have teared over if the nurses had double-pillowed behind his head, but they hadn’t, they had single-pillowed him, so the tears just sat there, a lake of tears in his eye sat there clouding his vision while his father waved good-bye to him, waved good-bye curling his fingers to his palm, waved good-bye like you would wave good-bye to a 3-year-old, waved good-bye and said dramatically, "adieu Eddie, adieu."
When Edward the Second left, Edward the Third cried, cried for the first time in his adult life. He was crying because his father was calling him Eddie and would call him Eddie from that day forward. While Eddie cried that Pepsi commercial came on the telie with the supermodels that are drinking Pepsi and tickling a baby, a baby who is so pleased that supermodels are tickling his belly that he will be a "Pepsi drinker for life."
While Trés cried, a single thought formed in his mind. I will never drink Pepsi again.
The second time that E.C.R. III cried was eight months later. This spout of tears was much more unprompted and surprised Trés with its force. That morning he had arrived at Heathrow Airport after a Swissair Flight from Geneva. He had flown first class. They had removed seats 2C and 2D and inserted his wheelchair into two grooves. The stewardess that had inserted his wheelchair into the grooves had smiled at him and then told him that she was going to strap him in. She had leaned all the way over him, so that her breasts rested on his right leg, so that her short, pleated skirt stuck up behind her at a perfect right angle to her long legs. When she did this Trés had an unspeakable urge to reach his hands up those legs, to slide his hands under that skirt, to squeeze that firm ass. Not that he would have if he could have, but that was the urge he had. That was the urge that a nineteen-year-old boy, recently paralyzed from the upper jaw down, naturally had. Trés had wanted to get under that skirt, and he had fantasized about this for a good two minutes, a two minutes that would have given him, just eight months prior, a full-mast hard-on. Now, it gave him nothing.
When his plane arrived in Heathrow he had been wheeled by a custom officer through customs, and then wheeled by a porter to the baggage claim. His parents had met him there, smiling big smiles. His father was dressed in his finest pinstriped suit, and Tilda was wearing a tangerine dress that Trés had never seen before. Trés supposed that they had expected cameras, had expected the paparazzi to have turned out in droves. But there was no one; there was just a bored porter and a drooling Eddie. The news was over, and they already had a celebrity paralytic in Christopher Reeves. They didn’t need Trés. Edward and Tilda still smiled though--just in case.
Tilda was exuberant, "My God, Eddie. Eddie. We’re so happy to see you. Oh Eddie, you’re a star. The parliament wrote us a check and the bloody queen signed it. They were so proud of you. So proud of what you were going to do for the country. You are going to be happy. We got a van with a hydraulic lift. And we’ve redone the house with ramps. All in three weeks! And your bedroom is nice. I put up pictures of California. You like the ocean. I remember. You said you wanted to go to California some day and learn to surf. Oh you’re going to love it Eddie. You’re going to love it."
Tilda had said this and Edward had gotten behind him and they had wheeled him out of the airport and into their new white van with the hydraulic lift. Edward strapped Trés down and they had left, making semi-circles around several roundabouts before heading down the familiar cobblestone of his street. Trés couldn’t see any of this from his vantage point. His chair was set too low to see anything at ground level. But he could see up. Trés could see the billboards that they were passing. They drove by a Calvin Klein billboard. It was Kate Moss wearing a pair of jeans, an unbuttoned white blouse, and a red tie that was tied unusually short so that it didn’t cover her navel. Kate was not wearing a bra and Trés could just make out the outline of the insides of her breasts.
Breasts. Edward and Tilda parked their car in front of 8 Sussex Rd., in front of the family’s four-story Georgian home. They wheeled Trés out. They wheeled him up a freshly cemented ramp that some neighborhood kid had scrawled in with a finger, or possibly a knife, a cemented ramp that had a heart scrawled in it with letters and symbols inside that read P.F. + T.H. = LOVE. They wheeled him up the ramp, onto a sidewalk, and between two rows of well-trimmed hedges.
Breasts. Edward and Tilda wheeled Trés underneath the awning that covered the front porch and turned right instead of going through the front door. They wheeled him around a porch swing, a porch swing which Edward couldn’t remember ever having swung in. They wheeled him around to the side of the house, the side of the house which now had an elevator attached to it, an elevator which was painted primary blue, an elevator which his parents tell him was specially designed for Eddie by Sir Norman Foster, the famous English architect. (A knight!) They wheeled him to the elevator, an elevator with no walls, an elevator that was designed so that its inhabitant could look out, could look out at rows of Tudor mansions spiraling down a serpentine drive, could look out at mansions and then smokestacks, and then the moors beyond. It was an open-air elevator. It was also designed, Trés thought, so that outsiders could look in. So that the inhabitants of Tudor mansions spiraling down a serpentine drive could see the tremendous loss contained within.
Breasts. Trés’s parents had stuck him in the elevator and pushed the 3 button. Tilda had said, still cheery, still with her prepared-for-paparazzi smile, "We’re going around to get you, but soon we won’t have to. They said that they can attach sensors to your brain that will help you work the elevator. Oh, Eddie! They said that you can still do just about anything. They’re going to attach a metal cage to your head. It’ll be right stunning. They said they can even make it look good, that all the wires and sensors will be inside the metal cage so no one can see them. They’re going to attach sensors to your brain and you’ll be able to control things on your own: your bed, your elevator, your wheelchair, even a computer! The doctors said that your brain is still intact Eddie. Don’t forget, Eddie, you still have your brain!"
There were no doors in the elevator, so they did not close. The elevator simply started going up. While the elevator went up Trés thought, Yes, I still have my brain, but my hair, my jet black hair they will have to shave. I’ll lose my hair and my head will look like an Airstream. Like an Airstream or a toaster.
Breasts. When the elevator reached the 3rd floor Trés’s parents were waiting for him. Edward said to Trés, "Did you see the pulleys on that thing, Eddie? The engineering is amazing." Edward removed him from the elevator and wheeled him down the hall to his room, the room that he had lived in the first eighteen years of his life, all the years of his life except this last. He opened Trés’s bedroom door in front of him and then wheeled him in. Trés was surprised. He had assumed that his mother had taken down his skiing posters, some of which were actually of him--posters of him making perfect open parallel turns down a steep section at St. Moritz decked out in all white on a pair of K2 Extreme FX 204cms. He was OK with his mother removing these posters; he didn’t really need to see himself, full of health, on his bedroom walls. But these weren’t the posters that his mother had removed. The posters that she had taken down were his posters of Tyra Banks and Rebecca Romijn, and an old poster of Kathy Ireland riding a bicycle in a bikini.
Breasts. Edward and Tilda had left him there in his newly redecorated room, a newly redecorated room that had in it, instead of posters of supermodels, posters of the lonely, rocky shores and cypress trees of Big Sur, California, a place Trés had never been, and probably never would go.
As soon as his parents left the room, Trés started to cry, rivulets that because of his new handicap he couldn’t feel going over his cheekbones. As soon as his parents left the room, Trés realized that he would be a virgin until the day he died.
***
Today, more than five years after his accident, Edward Calvin Rawlings III is crying for the third time. Unlike the first two times, though, the tears in his eyes are not there to mourn what he has lost, but rather, they are there to celebrate what he has gained. Today, staring wide-eyed at four computer screens placed strategically above him, Trés is not a young man paralyzed from the jaw line down, forgotten by friends, teammates, and parents; he is, instead, a king. On each of the four screens above Trés is the following text, white on a field of cornflower blue:The Lords of the Realm have awarded you 200 acres of land and 250,000 gold coins to build your province. You have been assigned to Kingdom 47, Continent 20. The name you have chosen for your province is The Two-Headed Boy. The persona you have chosen is the King of Carrot Flowers. Welcome to The Realm.
Today is the first day of the new age.
How It Came to be Published
I started writing World Leader Pretend (its original title was The Strangely Peaceful Citadel of Blue Orcs) in the summer of 2000. At the age of 31, I quit my lucrative, but soul-sapping job as a technical writer; moved from San Francisco to my parents' home in a retirement community in Prescott, Arizona; and began writing--1,000 grueling words a day, 5 days a week.The work was hard, and seemingly pointless. Were it not for the support of Lewis Buzbee, my mentor, and the University of San Francisco's MFA in Creative Writing program, which allowed me to stay in the program despite the inconvenience of shipping manuscripts back and forth, I very likely would have hung it up.
Instead, I continued this painstaking 1,000 words-a-day of writing over the course of a year and a half. While the novel was originally intended to be a reasonably-sized master's thesis, it took a life (and a size!) of its own, and in March of 2003, I finished a version of the novel that was 160,000 words in length.
Having decided that the novel was good enough to attempt to publish, I began seeking an agent or a publisher for the work.
There was much rejection.
As many novelist wannabes have undoubtedly discovered, it is extremely difficult being a West Coaster without publishing world connections to get information about what agents and publishers are looking for. You can't send an experimental literary novel about online gamers to just anybody. And while books like Writer's Market do help with selecting places for submission, their broad categorization of 'literary fiction' yields hundreds of agents and publishers whose concept of literary fiction doesn't necessarily include books about internet geeks
I ended up relying heavily on a database generated by Publishers Marketplace, which tracks recent sales made by agents to publishing houses. The database is particularly useful in that it gives short descriptions of what the book is about that was purchased. So for example, I'd find an agent who had sold a book about the rock band, Belle & Sebastian, I would assume that they were cool, and I would put them on my list of people to submit to.
Of course, by the time I'd found Publishers Marketplace, I'd already done my first round of submissions, and gotten a big O-fer. It's an excruciating process--agents and publishers have no obligation to you whatsoever, and you often wait four months only to get a form rejection.
My second round of submissions, once I gotten the targeting down, yielded more positive results. I managed to find two agents who wanted to see more of the material, and although both ultimately rejected the novel, I learned a great deal from the experience. First off, brevity is absolutely essential. If an agent asks to see thirty pages, send them ten. Agents get an ungodly number of blind inquiries (like mine) and a short excerpt is like a breath of fresh air.
I ended up actually rearranging the novel in order to make this work. I added a ten-page preface to the novel--a fast-paced rush that introduced a character--before the slower-paced original opening to the book.
The second thing I learned was that cover letters without some material are absolutely useless. If you're a no-name like me, you've got absolutely no chance selling a work of fiction through your cover letter. Send along a short excerpt even if they don't ask for it--it can't hurt.
By the time I'd gotten to my third round, I was submitting somewhat blindly. I had this spreadsheet of agents and smaller publishers that I'd culled from various sources, and since it had been nearly eight months since my first round of submissions, I no longer knew where I'd gotten the list from. One of my submissions was to an agency called the Jennie Dunham Literary Agency.
It turns out that the Jennie Dunham Literary Agency was a bad place to send my novel, since Ms. Dunham represents largely genre and children's fiction, but an assistant who was more interested in literary fiction happened to pick up my submission. She read it, despite the fact that Dunham Literary doesn't accept excerpts with cover letters, and decided she wanted to see more.
So that was that. I sent the manuscript to her; she loved it, and agreed to represent it. I was flying high. We did some minor editing and then sent the manuscript to all the top editors and all the top publishing houses.
And of course they rejected it, one after another, and then nine months later she left Dunham Literary, and then, a year and a half after I'd completed the book, I was back to square one, or actually, a little further back of square one, since most agents consider books that have already gone out and been rejected dead in the water.
Fortunately for me, the agent did me the courtesy of passing the book onto another editor at Picador. He also loved the book, and made an attempt to convince Picador to purchase it, but after three months of waiting on the doorstep, Picador said no, too.
As you can imagine, after two years of this, I'd moved onto other projects, and had less invested in the fate of World Leader Pretend. So when the Picador editor emailed to tell me that he'd passed the book onto an editor at St. Martin's Press, I'd lost some of my earlier enthusiasm. The editor at St. Martin's, like the agent and editor before her, felt strongly about the book. She tried to find an agent to represent me, but ran into some really busy people. After more waiting, I suggested to her that she take the book directly to St. Martin's board.
She was nervous about doing so, as she felt that having an agent would present a stronger front; however, Warcraft, the latest in a line of extremely popular online games had just come out, so online gaming was all over the news, and she felt that maybe, just maybe, they'd go for it.
And they did. I ended up doing the thing that everybody wants to do: I sold a book to a major publisher without an agent.
My editor wanted me to add here that these were extenuating circumstances, and that SMP doesn't normally accept manuscripts not attached to an agent. (e.g. she's busy editing my manuscript so don't suddenly flood St. Martin's with unsolicited 600-word novels ;) )I am currently editing World Leader Pretend, a process you can read about in this blog. The book is tentatively scheduled to be released by St. Martin's Press in the Summer of 2006.