Spinning Karma Audiobook Cover
To celebrate the release of the audiobook version of Spinning Karma – my politically-charged Buddhist comedy novel, first published in 2020 – I’d like to take a moment to apologize to Spinning Karma’s future readers and listeners.
Which is a hell of a way to attract future readers and listeners. But hear me out.
Spinning Karma revolves around religious oppression, as evidenced by the logline:
“Desperate to rescue his failing new-age sect from obscurity, a misguided American religious leader engineers a phony repression scenario that spins out of control.”
Some folks may feel that writing a satire based on religious oppression is itself in poor taste. Which is a fair critique. But that’s not why I’m apologizing.
My apology is based on conflicted feelings at having produced a story which, upon reflection, clearly belongs to a different political era.
Spinning Karma is the story of an obscure religious group called Mind of Pure Enlightenment (based in Boulder, Colorado…because of course it is) whose leader receives divine inspiration (of sorts) to get his sect into the limelight by pretending the group is being oppressed.
The book is a comedy, so naturally the scheme simultaneously backfires and succeeds, setting in motion (among other things) a media-driven propaganda war between the USA and the People’s Republic of China, with my long-time adopted home of Taiwan acting as intermediary.
It’s here that I feel the need to clarify that no actual religious oppression occurs in any of the novel’s 227 pages (or during any of the audiobook’s five hours).
No spoiler alert needed here – the story follows its chief protagonist, the reluctant leader of a one-time free love cult that’s been forced by scandal to reform itself into a well-meaning but tepid meditation society – so the reader is in on the joke right from the start.
My intention with Spinning Karma was never to belittle the idea of religious intolerance or oppression, but instead to lampoon the way in which manufactured outrage is exploited for political gain.
And here I need to backtrack before returning to the promised mea culpa.
A couple of months back I published a travel story at Medium.com called Climbing Forbidden Mountain.
The story was about an overnight hiking trip I’d taken in the first decade of the 21st century to a wildlife preserve in Southern China where foreigners weren’t permitted.
Of course, I was able to gain access to the park, and even take pictures of some of the forbidden bits through a combination of charm and playing the “I’m a silly foreigner who doesn’t know any better” card that served me fairly well at that period in my life.
But before hitting publish, I decided to include a brief afterword to make clear that the story took place during a time of general political relaxation in China, lest travelers to Xi Jinping’s China attempt to emulate my own youthful shenanigans from a more permissive era.
And herein lies my own mea culpa for Spinning Karma, because as I edited the audiobook it became increasingly clear that I’d written a novel based on the political dynamics of a kinder, gentler world than the one we currently inhabit.
Though they seemed extreme at their time of creation (the halcyon mid twenty-teens,) ten years later these same personalities seem ridiculously moderate.
From media outlet stand-ins like fear-mongering Badger News and overtly pandering American Public Radio to the maybe overly optimistic (but still based in then-current realities) government agencies in America, China and Taiwan, Spinning Karma reads like a fable of a bygone age.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for those looking for a bit of escapism from the current zeitgeist.
Bygone age or not, I stand by the novel as being uniquely weird and funny as hell. The more of the following subjects
#Buddhism #Cults #Political Satire #Media Manufactured Outrage #Taiwan #China #American Politics
Are found on your own Venn Diagram of interests, the more you’ll find Spinning Karma to be a witty distraction from these wild times. (As one reader called it on Amazon.)
Now comes the action part.
Have a listen to a sample chapter here:
If you’d like to download the full audiobook, I’ve published it through Author’s Republic, which then distributes it through a confusing variety of third-party sites (all of which offer some sort of free trials).
So far I’ve had good luck with Audiobooks.com, BookBeat & Barnes&Noble.com.
You can buy the e-book from Amazon here. (I’ve also put it up on Kindle Unlimited, so if you’re connected to that service it’s included.)
Finally, I’m happy to back my work with a money-back guarantee, so if you purchase it directly from me ($5 in any form, with half the loot going to narrator Eryk Michael Smith) we can do an honor-system transaction.
Fill out the form below (or just leave a comment).
“Maybe it’s not surprising that I so readily fell into this story about a reluctant American cult guru who runs into unexpected complications on a trip to Taiwan, because I happen to be, in real life, a reluctant cult guru who ran into unexpected complications on a trip to China. What did surprise me was the vivid writing, so rich in detail that it caused me both kinds of flashbacks (the exquisite, and the terrifying). “
~ Rev. Ivan Stang, Sacred Scribe #273 of The Church of the SubGenius
More Words of praise from noteworthy people about Spinning Karma
