C. Michael Byrne

I created a second edition of my first novel, The Return Trip, because I couldn’t let it go. Not like that. I decided to tell the story better, informed by friendly critics who helped me see where the story fell off, or didn’t get through. It was also a chance to cast off a company that overcharged for bad editing and poor advice on my first self-publishing venture. As a longtime writer-editor who specialized in news and commentary, I discovered The Return Trip to be a master lesson in literary fiction writing, and the craft of getting it to page and digital screens. The excitement of creating this new edition has spurred on the writing of my next novel, Hard Times on Choctaw Creek, nearly 40 years in the making and set to publish later this year.

My initial vision of The Return Trip was drawn from characters in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, and involved other features of the Beat literary oeuvre, especially the work of Kerouac and the poet Gary Snyder. The impetus for the story, chronicled in my long-running blog, The New Dharma Bums, was a month-long six-state trip to visit Tai Chi and qigong instructors I’d met online. On the second leg of that trip, the night I arrived in Kansas City, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The shock waves from that event followed me all the way back home to the D.C. suburbs. The protagonist in The Return Trip would be cast to deal with this startling new political reality. New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, even Norman Mailer, stylized an evolving Beat form in covering current events, and served as models for my new road writer: Ray Smith of Dharma Bums became Ray James of The Return Trip, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. The new Ray was older, about the same age as Kerouac when he drank himself to death, literally, at 47. He would have a drinking and drug problem, and failing health, but with a guardian angel, Dr. Ramona James, his daughter. Kerouac had rejected his own daughter and old Beat friends as he faded away in Florida in 1969. Reading his brutally honest autobiographical novel, Big Sur, you feel the sadness as Kerouac previewed his end of days, grappling with alcoholism and the nature of friendships and relationships, and the constant party of his life. Now, he was wallowing in his loneliness, there at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wilderness along California’s rugged Pacific coast.

Like Ray Smith, Ray James is the singular voice and point of view, an unreliable narrator, in literary parlance. Telling the story in first person, present tense, Ray explains himself as he goes along, giving the reader a chance to see him varnished by his own impressions of himself and his world. I added other voices from people close to him, in third person, and I extend these objective views substantially with the second edition. These viewpoints from people around Ray who loved him, or abided him, provide a fuller picture of the man, and the road we’re traveling today. New and improved, The Return Trip is available on Amazon for eBook readers. The paperback is available through IngramSpark here, and the hardcover here.