The Snake Charmers

I started writing the Snake Charmers while on vacation in Morocco. Such a sensational country - the sights, sounds and tastes are wildly vibrant. It is a place of mystery and adventure for many writers, artists and musicians. So no surprise that Morocco would also move me to bring that to life.  

Watching the scooters weave serpentine patterns through the traffic of Casablanca was my first image. It made me think of snake cults, and I had the goofy idea that I just wanted to find a way to write a line like "It was the snake snake cult!" and pull it off. No joke. That's how I stared writing. While I started writing in Morocco, it would be almost a year later before I picked the story back up in, in hotel in Lisbon in Portugal during a torrential downpour.

Besides looking for a way to deliver a single, goofy line, I had long been fascinated by a theme I had found in both Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" and Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" - that by ascribing meaning to something, we may give it a meaning it didn't previously have. And once others believe in that as well, we create a new reality. Those novels, of course, are as verbose and esoteric as they are brilliant, so the fun - besides building toward a great, goofy line - was to execute a similar theme in a pulpy adventure novel. And, so, I bring you The Snake Charmers.