10:34 PM


....

I'm going to be stunned a second longer, if that's okay with you.

Ready?

Allan Weisbecker has a website.

Don't recognize the name? Okay. Lemme explain why I'm so stunned. Before tonight, I never knew his first name. I knew him as "A.C. Weisbecker", the author of Cosmic Banditos.

Banditos (along with "Surely You're Joking, Mister Feynman!") was the book that made me decide to study physics in college.

Banditos was the book I checked out my sophomore year in high school, and about once every three months thereafter, compelled to reread it.

Banditos was the book I checked out from the Hastings Public Library the night before it burned to the ground.

Banditos was the battered trade paperback that, when I returned it to the new library, was placed into a book sale to raise funds for a new building. Banditos is the book I immediately bought.

I have a lot of books. But there's only one shelf--one side of one shelf--reserved for books that shaped me toward the person I am today. Cosmic Banditos is on that shelf. I still reread it every now and again. I occasionally wondered why the author had never published another book (as with another novel and author on the shelf, Memoir of an Invisible Man's H.F. Saint.) Whatever the unknown story, I always hoped that the books I enjoyed so much had happy authors out there somewhere.

Today, in a Metafilter post, I suddenly had my answer. A.C. Weisbecker has a website. For all the Google searching I do, I'd never thought to punch his name in. If I had, I would have read about Weisbecker's past--like just how autobiographical Banditos truly is, and that he used his past to make a career for himself as a staff writer for Miami Vice. I would have seen he has another book that I've never read. And I would have discovered that he is quite happy indeed, living in somewhere that appears to be quite close to paradise. I rarely (read:never) give out my true email address for mailing lists. But I coughed up for Weisbecker's mailing list almost reflexively. Even before I've received the first installment, it's already worth it--his beautiful site has a 'members only' archive of his magazine writing that I'm enjoying tonight while I pass time here at work. His screenwriting article in particular is a lot of fun.

Sorry to prattle on. I'm just stunned. Stunned and excited.

When I get home tonight, there's a particular book waiting for me on a particular shelf...