For years, I've wanted to share on this blog The Story Plague, a feature I wrote back in 2000 for The Alliance Review, my local newspaper. This summer, I've finally made time to do it.
Around 1996, my wife and I read Stephen King's The Green Mile, a novel originally published in six parts, released roughly one month apart. King suggested that reading each installment aloud would be a good way to experience the story, so Holly and I took him up on it. (We have continued the practice through the years and often read books together instead of watching TV. But I digress.)
King's book and its unique publishing cycle* must've been on my mind when I pitched an idea to Sarah Reed Gold, the Newspaper in Education coordinator for The Alliance Review. At the time, I was an advertising account executive for the paper—a fancy way of saying "salesperson"—but I had trouble staying in my lane.
I told Sarah I wanted to tell a twelve-part story, in installments one week apart, about two Alliance kids dealing with famous literary characters who had come to life and were wreaking havoc around the city. One kid would be a bibliophile and the other one a non-reader. All the literary characters would be from public-domain works to avoid copyright problems. I'd work in some municipal landmarks like Glamorgan Castle and Silver Park, too. It would be like a love letter to all the books I'd devoured as a kid.
Sarah loved the idea. It wasn't long before she had the publisher sold on it, too.
And very quickly my colleague and friend Steve Wiandt —reporter, photographer, artist, page designer, a true renaissance man of the newspaper biz — agreed to illustrate each chapter.
I wore two hats. I wrote the thing and had to sell advertising at the bottom of each week's page to make it profitable. I leaned pretty hard on my established customers and on my sales colleagues to make it happen. Sarah, meanwhile, shopped the story around to other papers in the chain (The Review at the time was owned by Dix Communications, which also owned several other papers). Steve drew and drew, flexing his artistic chops on characters as diverse as Alice in Wonderland and the Headless Horseman.
The feature ran on consecutive Tuesdays starting on June 6, 2000. It was billed as a "12-Part Read Aloud Adventure for Children & Adults." When it was all over, The Review collected it as a special tabloid edition bundled with the Monday, Oct. 2, 2020 newspaper.
The project was a lot of fun and must have been moderately successful since the paper published two more serials by Steve and me — Dog Daze and Sixty-Second Solutions. I liked them both, but not as much as The Story Plague.
My goal is to run one installment a day here on the blog, complete with Steve's illustrations, starting Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023. Other than correcting a few typos, I won't change a thing.
This current endeavor makes me nostalgic for the days when a local paper could pull off something like this, creating content that couldn't be found elsewhere and providing enough space—a whole page each week!—for the feature to be enjoyed.
It also makes me miss Steve, who passed away far too young in 2019. I am so glad I knew him. He loved newspapers, comics, old movies and TV shows, Mad magazine, and TV Guide. We could talk pop culture for hours and often did.
I was happy at the turn of the millennium when readers told me they were reading The Story Plague with their kids and grandkids. It would be great to know if anybody enjoys it this time, too.
And feel free to share the link!
CS 😀
*Coincidentally, it was another King novel, Fairy Tale, which Holly and I read earlier this summer, that finally spurred me to find my old copies of The Story Plague and post them here.