Getting Conked: Part I

Most scholars are familiar with the tragic Greek characters of Sisyphus, Tantalus and Narcissus. Fewer are familiar with Conklinus, whose particular failed act of blind repetition was continually believing that he had come up with a truly original creation.

It started in South Bend, Indiana, when young Conklinus was a 13-year-old adolescent teaching himself how to play guitar. One day in his parents' basement, he invented a riff on the bass string. Later that day, he played it for his older brother: "Ted Nugent!" the elder said. Conklinus had never heard "Hey Baby."

Conklinus tried again, inventing a more complicated riff involving four strings, some of them open, others playing a melody in octaves. "Jimi Hendrix!" the elder exclaimed. Conklinus was then treated to his first listen of "Third Stone from the Sun."

And so the pattern continued. In college, Conklinus traveled the European continent and thought, "You know, the one consistent thing from Dublin to Budapest is the Big Mac. Economists should invent The Big Mac Index as a way to compare currencies." He did nothing about it, but, years later, The Economist did.

After college, Conklinus started writing screenplays. He penned a script based on a friend's idea about a couple giving birth to a baby that could already speak. Conklinus made the baby sound like Shakespeare. The story editor at DreamWorks liked it, until a producer pointed out that the baby character was obviously stolen from The Family Guy. Conklinus had never seen an episode.

Conklinus forged ahead. He wrote his first original screenplay, "Fake Your Own Death, Inc.," in which a madman kidnaps an artist and a priest and fakes their deaths to force society to value their genius and martyrdom. He recently learned of an obscure Mark Twain play called "Is He Dead?" from 1898, in which an entrepreneur conspires with an artist to fake his death and raise the value of his work. The play is now being performed for the first time in history in Manhattan, and today, the Wall Street Journal wrote about "The Death Effect."

Undaunted, Conklinus finally developed an idea for an original dark comedic novel, told entirely in suicide notes, in which it slowly becomes clear that the depressed hero can't even find the time or privacy to commit his final act of despair. At work one day, while directing a photo shoot for a writer about his age, he inquired about the man's recently completed novel. "It's a story told in suicide notes," he said. "It comes out in April."

And the story has recently continued. But more on that later.