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The one telling the story gets to write history. Best get it straight.
Born into an Inner Party family, becoming the fourth child. Exhibited extraordinary intelligence and creative drive early on. Wrote short stories. Gave parties as a professional magician, The Magic Man. (See advertising card.) Attended Philips Exeter Academy in an attempt to reach escape velocity out of his alcoholic father’s orbit. Tragic event: a few weeks before freshman year graduation, he was expelled from Phillips Exeter Academy for smoking dope. Rebooted to a small rural prep school in Maine. Thrived. Achieved a series of awards, academic and athletic. Again, did not finish the semester due to a psychotic episode requiring hospitalization in the nation’s foremost mental hospital, Mclain. (get real name).
From there some unimpressive years in high school and college. A somewhat inspired student in writing and zoology, average at most other subjects. Dad dies early in his second year, triggering a series of unexplainable depressions. A favorite sister commits suicide and you’ve to the pressure cooker that could’ve destroyed him. His mom, also a survivor, gave him this mantra, “Turning Xs into pluses.”
Marriage, two kids, divorce. Interleaved depression, hypomania, blah zeas, and bounce. Fifteen years of journalistic writing about his divorce, single parenting, dating, health. And three years ago a series of events pushed McElhenney into a new phase of his growth. His son’s spiral into addiction, depression, and drug abuse crashed into John’s outward meditation of prose and a new form of writing, Hyperfiction.
Fiction that moves beyond the written page. eBooks, images, sounds, 3D, video snippets, social media conversations, chatrooms, and AI-produced podcasts. Blurring the lines of the novel and electronic entertainment. The idea is to make reading, hyperfiction reading, into something that can grab and hold the imagination of future writers and creatives. Threads of world-building, stream of consciousness rants, poems, songs, design planning, graphic posters, video grabs.
His first hyperfiction novel, The One and the Zero, was published by Norton in 2026 and the rocket ride began. The New Beginning followed less than six months later. A movie was being made, “Never Let You Go,” focusing on his relationship with his son, her girlfriend, and the car crash that was going to change all of their lives. Next came “Fear*God” where spiritual contemplation and criticism entered the conversation, moving us into the metaphysical connections between a man and woman and god. “Exodus” followed soon afterward, and brought the father and son story to a climax.
Now, McElhenney is working on his fifth hyperfiction novel, “ESC_KEY.” You are in possession of that book now.
Welcome and goodnight.
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