On the Road, On the Stage

Dispatch From an Uneasy America | 5 July 2025

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Hello, all.

Greetings from southern Wisconsin, where I have parked after a brain-blistering little road trip. Barnes & Noble has made The Lies of Locke Lamora one of its monthly picks and I am trying to do my part by signing stock at multiple B&N locations as I head west to spend some time with my family. The first day of the trip was made more interesting by two thunderstorms, several accidents, and a true lunatic who did not believe in turn signals, which is not the sort of thing you want to see when the lunatic in question is hauling an entire grain silo on a flatbed. The second day was calmer, and the skies were fairer, settling into a lovely cloudless lavender and apricot as the fireworks started popping in the distance. A few notes:

• As I believe I’ve mentioned at least once before, I am going to be moving Lynchline off Substack to another platform. This involves work, and hired assistance, so my timeframe can only be “soon.” It’s very important to me to ensure that the mailing list transitions smoothly (you folks shouldn’t have to do a thing); one thing I am looking forward to will be the ability to make paid subscriptions cost less. I wish Substack’s minimum price points could be more, well, minimal.

• I have left signed stock at the following Barnes & Noble locations: Holyoke, MA - Hadley, MA - Newburgh, NY - Akron, OH - Westlake, OH - Toledo, OH - Chicago, IL - Oak Brook, IL - Geneva, IL. By the end of the weekend I’ll have added two stores in Madison, WI and one in Roseville, MN. During my return leg of this trip, I hope to hit Woodmere, OH and two more locations in Illinois (Algonquin and Rockford).

• I’m on Instagram! I discovered that I had to set the little control from “private” to “public” about, um, four days ago. Here’s me: https://www.instagram.com/scottlynchwriter/

• My promised tiny little web store has finally hatched. God, getting this thing running was a long twilight struggle. But it’s a struggle I won, if barely. It’s at

https://www.scottlynchstore.com/

…and I’ll stock it with more stuff this week and integrate it with my existing site and all that stuff I can’t really do out of hotels on the road. For now, there’s one thing for sale, which brings me to my next set of announcements:

• I will be at Readercon 34 in Burlington, Massachusetts, July 17-20. I’ll post my programming schedule this coming week. You can also dig me up on their website.

• I will be in and around Worldcon in Seattle, Washington, August 13-17. I will not be participating in programming, or signing, or doing anything else formal through the con (though I will be signing at a dealer table, and will happily sign anything brought to me in an idle moment). There are reasons for this non-participation, yes. But I do look forward to seeing people.

I am also doing something on my own time… something new. Something I would like to successfully launch and continue doing, so let me tell you about THE MYSTERIOUS SOMETHINGS. The short version is, I’m gonna be doing live performance readings. In proper black box theater-type venues.

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THE BIG IDEA: At some point during the mid-pandemic isolation I had the opportunity (as many people did) to spend a bit of time in what you might call "a gently cleansing paroxysm of dread and anxiety." I had bundles of thoughts about the state of everything, the conditions in which we try to advance our art and craft, in a landscape of media consolidation and strangling algorithms and generative AI... how the hell do we compete, as artists? What can we do that machines can't emulate, that algorithms can't strangle? What can remain so special it can never be taken from us?

Live performance, that's where I kept circling back to. Live human performance. The way the lights go down, the way the audience quiets, the chance for a mistake or an improvisation at any moment of a show... that delicious and ephemeral tension that we can only make in certain spaces at certain times. Not all of us have it in them-- many writers of absolutely exquisite prose cannot and should not step out into the light of public scrutiny. But I have been reading to audiences for years, honing my bag of tricks. My shamelessness gland is quite healthy. I began to toy with the notion of some sort of recurring live performance as more than an idle pandemic anxiety flop. For a couple years, that's all it was. A notion.

Crucially, I eventually realized that I was approaching this thing from the wrong angle, a defeatist angle. It's hard to be bold when you're in a defensive crouch. The question shouldn't be "what can we do because it's a value-add on top of our writing," but "what can we do for its own sake, because it might be fun, because it might be invigorating, because it might be fucking awesome?"

IN AND OF ITSELF: A year or two before the pandemic, my wife and I had seen Derek Delgaudio's "In And of Itself" in New York City. Although Delgaudio is a brilliant magical performer and the show contained magnificent acts of illusion, calling it a "magic show" is, without a shred of pretentious intent, just too reductionist. It was a meditation on identity and risk-taking so profound that I didn't even realize I was still pondering it years later, when some of the pieces of its puzzles exploded back into my brain and helped start the ruminations on live performance described above.

I researched Delgaudio's other work and found that he had a background not just in magic, but performance art. I devoured his book, A Secret Has Two Faces, chronicling some of the work and explorations he undertook with his partner Glenn Kaino under the collective pseudonym "A.Bandit."A Secret Has Two Faces convinced me that it was not only possible but desirable to investigate why I wanted to do certain things, as well as how I wanted to do them-- to explore the use of theatrical and magical techniques to extend my storytelling beyond simply reading, and to ask myself what sort of experience I wanted to try and move the audience to have.

I'm not a magician, and even if I was, I wouldn't be one-tenth of a Derek Delgaudio, so don't get me wrong. I'm not promising that sort of experience. But studying his work helped break something open inside me and made me feel that I was ready to tackle my own project in the way it should be tackled.

In 2024, I said to myself, "This is it. This is the year I'm gonna do it."

Well, 2024 had other plans.

In 2025, I said to myself, "This is it. This is the year I'm gonna do it."

And then I started renting theater spaces.

THE MYSTERIOUS SOMETHINGS I: THE TOWER OF THE WIZARD: I call this project THE MYSTERIOUS SOMETHINGS because while it is intended to be built around a core of performance reading (audiences in the 19th century sold out auditoriums year after year to see Charles Dickens perform his own prose-- I can't promise to be as slam-bang great as he apparently was, but hey, I'm pretty okay at this), each new thing I present will also have components added, which may be stolen from the worlds of theater, performance art, illusionism, mentalism, or all of the above, in order to create unique and special experiences.

The only thing that will be true of all the Mysterious Somethings is that they will all be pure live performance. Ephemeral. Recordings will not be allowed. These things will not be archived, they won't be on YouTube, they will be strictly the business of the people who are there, in the dark, on the night of. Furthermore, every single performance of a Mysterious Something will have some mechanism, some element, that will be completely unique to it and will not be seen or heard by audiences at other shows. Nor will a cycle of any given Mysterious Something ever be repeated.

The first Mysterious Something is called The Tower of the Wizard. It's a specially re-worked version of my novelette "The Fall and Rise of the House of the Wizard Malkuril," published in the anthology The Book of Magic. Reading from this piece at a convention years ago, I remarked: "Well, this is probably the last time I'm ever going to do these cute kobold voices." I was completely wrong- The Tower of the Wizard is the last time I'm going to do the cute kobold voices.

In this tale of a distant, distant age near the end of the universe, an age of fused science and sorcery, you'll meet the fearsomely powerful wizard Malkuril, the menace of a thousand worlds, and the enchanted fortress he built for a home and filled with thousands of magical creatures. You'll also find out what happened on the very worst day of Malkuril's life, and in the hundreds of years that followed. It's an epic story of magic, ambition, time, and tea... and I'll be reading and performing it for you in the dark, in a way no other audience will ever see.

If this intrigues you, don't tarry... grab some tickets at my brand-new and extremely tiny store, which has, as mentioned, finally launched! It's small, but it's going to grow fast now that the basics are all working.The Tower of the Wizard will ideally have five performances. The first two are secured, with three other dates hopefully to be arranged soon:

Burlington, MA - July 17, 2025
Seattle, WA - August 17, 2025
Brooklyn, NY - October TBA
Minneapolis, MN - November TBA
Portland, ME - December TBA

There are a limited number of seats for each show, and again, the only place you can get tickets is at my store. So check it out- and not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’d like to see me do this sort of thing more in the future, at a wider array of locations, the biggest solid you can do me is to plant or help plant some butts in seats for the first couple shows.

Cheers! Best wishes. Stout hearts. See some of you in Burlington or Seattle, I hope…