Obama Assassination Novel Wins National Writing Award

Nov. 29, 2008 - PRLog -- Coppell, TX – Texas writer Mark Leach has earned the National Novel Writing Month award for a 2.5 million-word sci-fi epic about an intergalactic conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama.

“The President Who Exploded” is the story of a covert government assassin who pursues the President through the space-time continuum to the 41st century, where humans have evolved into super-intelligent insects who live on Uranus and worship Obama as their Messiah. Leach describes it as a sequel to his 17-million-word “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s longest novel.

“I resurrected the protagonist of ‘Marienbad My Love’ to serve as a sort of psychic body guard for the President,” Leach said. “When I entered the National Novel Writing Month contest on Nov. 1, the story concept had no body guard. I pictured the new President – either McCain or Obama, we didn’t know yet who – on a mission to establish diplomatic relations with the Land of the Dead.  But soon after the election I read that ‘Obama’s Assassination’ had become the most searched phrase on Google. How could I pass up a huge current event hook like that?”

National Novel Writing Month is an annual creative writing contest in which participants try to write an entire novel (at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Leach finished “The President Who Exploded” on Nov. 28, two days before the end of the month-long contest.

“I can confidently say that out of the thousands of winning contestants in 2008, no one exceeded my official word count,” Leach said. “The contest’s online counter topped out at 999,999 words – less than half my 2.5 million-word total.”

In order to compile so many words in such a short time, Leach leaned heavily on the Internet. He generated what he calls a “non-linear literary collage” by mining various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites, grabbing whatever words caught his eye.

“The talk pages of Wikipedia and the reader comments on io9.com were my absolute favorites,” he said. “These are my people. I shamelessly plagiarized their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- at every opportunity, combining the anonymous messages with recycled content from ‘Marienbad My Love’ and entries from my dream journal. I repeatedly cut and pasted and searched and replaced, transforming the various writings into a completely new and unique literary work.”  


About "The President Who Exploded"

"The President Who Exploded" by Mark Leach is the story of an intergalactic conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama. It is a sequel to “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s longest novel. A free ebook download of "The President Who Exploded" is available at http://marienbadmylove.com/thepresidentwhoexploded.aspx