(For All Annals)
While preparing to write a novel about a torrid love triangle he'd stumbled into in his early twenties, the author G.P. Sandefjord conjures up a bold new prose style for his first-person narrator in the novel -- a younger version of himself. This new style, which the author dubs, half seriously and half not, "jyze," rapidly grows -- or better to say bursts -- into an entirely serious literary form all its own.
Meanwhile a crisis arises concerning the author's day job and he decides to suspend work temporarily on the novel and take jyze out for a kind of shakedown cruise focusing on the job crisis. And...a dozen jyze-obsessed years later the cruise returns to port with the completed draft of an eight-volume, 4,000-page series called Annals of the Jyze Age, of which Jyzeburst is Annal 1.
With the Year 2000 Millennium at their center, all eight annals proceed chronologically and build on their predecessors. But each is also designed to -- and does! -- stand alone as a novel. And all are set in a single U.S. West Coast metro area at the heart of which rises Jyze City.
Right at the start, then -- spoiler alert for this and the following paragraph -- a digital disruption torpedo (Annal 1). Not too long after that a wrenching death in the family and an almost simultaneous breakup of a longtime "zen marriage" (Annal 2). Next a couple of unforeseen plot shifts causing plenty of confusion and anguish (Annal 3) (also there and elsewhere: Grunge! New World Order! Global roasting!). And (Annal 4), the jyzer whiffs again and again back in the romance bazaar but then a blast of a love mash-up -- something astoundingly new -- but not without a glitch or two. (Jyze always growing and changing and begetting new glitches.)
Then an official domestic partnership (Annal 5) as all glitches miracuously clear at least for a moment. Followed by (Annal 6) a wingding of a wedding, a ribald honeymoon, a world-rocking globalization protest, a thousand-year celebration with real terror mixed in -- and then three months later arrives the True Millennium. (Erotic explicitness warnings on Annals 4, 5, and 6.) A brief respite of sorts follows and then 9/11 hits and a couple of mad wars launch (Annal 7) just as a landmark yearlong lunar birthday rolls around and a long-lost prodigal son shows up in J-town. And then finally (Annal 8), condo life looms (oh no!) not to mention surefire domestic bliss (could it be?), but first jyze must stick the landing -- and does!