The Page Skipper: A Surreal Tale with Interruptions

By Mike Abadi

"The Page Skipper" is a meta-fantasy about Will, Skylar, and Alto, three friends whose actions are frozen mid-story because the Reader set the book aside. Without a storyline to play out, they're protagonists without a purpose. But only till they meet Skip, a villain who moves backward through the pages. Using a weapon that can reposition and even add words, he revises key passages to reverse his fate. After escaping from several bizarre predicaments, our heroes turn to the elements of the printed page to save themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990377202

Mike Abadi

A writer from the Advertising world, Mike's mind is in a constant state of motion. "The Page Skipper" is where it went in the middle of the night, when a vivid dream sent him scrambling to his keyboard.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A Reader goes AWOL

Seventeen months. That’s how long it’s been since The Reader cracked open The Last Word.

Not that he lost interest. Far from it. He couldn’t wait to return to the fictional world of jet pack Olympics, kale superstores, and a villain best described as a sentence deconstructionist.

But his life had other plans. He called it the perfect storm of interruptions. First, half the condo board resigned over a cruel assessment. Then the new business pitch detoured him from his daily responsibilities, much less his leisure reading. To top it off, he was blindsided by a new allergy.

Together, they conspired to keep The Reader from returning to his typographic friends. By friends, we of course are referring to the characters that inhabited this vintage, dog-eared paperback. With each day The Reader didn’t return to their story (they were very possessive about it), their characters grew more anxious, more isolated, more combustible.

You see, Will, Skylar, and Alto had never been treated this way before. Usually, their readers couldn’t put their story down—couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. So there was no precedent to how they’d react to being abandoned mid-story, mid-chapter, mid-paragraph, mid-wherever-the-story-was-going.

Will was the protagonist, the big wheel on which the tale turned. He was also the testiest of the bunch. At the one-year mark, he started picking fights with all the verbs on the page. Then he bullied the little prepositions. Lastly, he went after the adjectives.

Skylar feigned indifference to The Reader’s absence, although everyone knew that her sudden lack of purpose affected her deeply.

Alto was the most methodical of the three, planning everything down to a T. But without The Reader to follow his story, he couldn’t even go from A to B.

The trouble began nearly a year and a half earlier, on page 72—at the precise point in the story where a ferocious current sent the three of them careening toward the 120-foot drop at Metta Medda Falls. That’s when without warning...WHAM!—The Last Word was slammed shut and placed on the night table.

Suddenly they were three characters without an audience.

At first, they shrugged it off. After all, books often get read in fits and starts—rarely in one sitting. Depending on who was reading it, finishing a book could take quite a while. But seventeen months without so much as a glance inside? That was a bit much.

Their insecurities were now coming to the surface.

Would their fictional world still exist without The Reader to follow it? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does the tree even exist?

Will was the first to say what they were all thinking.

"So, where is he already? I’m ready for my big scene, the moment that will define the rest of my fictional life, not