Johnny Rocket & Those Bustling '20s ... Finding Marble for Mr. Zelensky

WHAT DOES THIS NOVEL MEAN?

As quagmires unfold, ripples splash even the calmest shores. It’s Summer 2028. Those Bustling ’20s. Four graduates now face their own quagmire, as they celebrate their biggest choices in a tiny town, as flames rise and neighbors must stand together.

AND FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE....

Because this book is written in “real time,” the author includes the press release which announced that the first half was done, and, like life, it got tweaked and morphed by the fluid nature of reality.

NOVELIST FINISHES HALF A BOOK AS CRITIQUE OF RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE

(Long Beach, CA) – April 8, 2022 – An obscure novelist who struggled for six years after a massive stroke to finish his fourth novel has managed in the first six weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to crank out 20,000 words on the rippling effects of Mr. Putin’s quagmire.

Set in June 2028, the opening seven chapters of “Johnny Rocket & Those Bustling ’20s... Finding Marble for Mr. Zelensky” tells of four high school graduates facing their own quagmire, as impacts of a new Cold War reach the calm waters of Maine.

“I couldn’t just do nothing,” said Billy Orton, who finished three novels by 2015, when a stroke and brain surgery kept him at St. Mary’s Medical Center, in Long Beach, for a month.

Calling 2016 his hardest year, the former press secretary and PR hack counted himself as the “luckiest soul in America” that year, for while everyone else had to endure the “most miserable awful terrible election in history,” he simply had to learn to walk and talk and reach again.

Incredibly lucky in physical recovery, his hardest challenge proved writing. After starting several novels, it wasn’t until 2022 that he proved able to produce “No One Cries for Monå Lizé,” a romantic comedy of two women who win an essay contest and must drive across the country during the outbreak of COVID to take the keys of a dilapidated hotel in a tiny town in Maine.

A couple weeks after finishing the book, Orton turned to fiction as his tool to confront the Russia invasion of Ukraine. Starting February 24th, he produced 7,000 words in days, to observe that the war’s impacts will ripple across time to change everything, from life in small towns to Republican candidates running for president.

Part One of the novel starts in Maine, using characters from Orton’s fourth book, and includes one teen wishing to enlist in the Army while another wants to attend Columbia University.

Weaving military numbers and strategic changes of the war, the first half wraps up in Manhattan, where the teenagers get drawn into a showdown by two Republicans – Governor DeSantis, of Florida, and Ivanka, the former First Daughter – fighting for the 2028 nomination.

But even fiction cannot be written in “real time” without being fundamentally impacted – to quote Winston Churchill – “because of the extreme urgency and rigor of events.”

When the author began work for chapter six – on March 26th – he intended to put the two Republicans into an epic debate at Madison Square Gardens, but everything got tweaked when the real president delivered a major address in Warsaw on the arrival of a new Cold War. The chapter instead morphed into an address to the nation by President Gavin Newsom.

“I created an international incident on the Danube,” said Orton, who invented a crisis, with a Russian warship ramming into an American destroyer in the river that feeds into the Black Sea. Now, rather than a showdown debate, the GOP contenders play political patty cake and plan to flip a coin on who will face President Newsom. “History is not static.”

Now done with the first half of the novel, Orton aims to finish the book by Election Day 2022.