You’ve got your Tao in My Swayze. You’re Swayze’s in my Tao.
You might think a 6th century Chinese philosophy and a Hollywood star fighting cancer have nothing in common, but independent publisher, Vicious Books, is proving otherwise in their new release, Nobody Puts Swayze in the Corner: the Tao of Swayze. They’re also raising money for a good cause.
Pairing popular quotes from Swayze’s extensive film career with passages from the Tao Te Ching, Nobody Puts Swayze in the Corner both entertains and inspires, all while raising money for a worthy cause.
“It’s really amazing how this whole project fell together.” says author/publisher Marcus Eder. “The whole thing started out as a side plot for one of the characters in my novel, Rorschach’s Ribs, but events progressed in my life that ultimately pushed it out into the real world.
The novel Rorschach’s Ribs is centered around four characters recently laid off from their jobs in advertising, exploring what happens after the desk is cleaned out and they’ve been escorted to the door. One of the characters, Phil Callaway, finds himself sitting behind an old typewriter he rescued from the dumpster behind his flat attempting to write a life-changing book for generations to come. The book he writes is Nobody Puts Swayze in the Corner: the Tao of Swayze.
But this relatively minor detail of Rorschach’s Ribs was never intended to be a real book, until a series of events unfolded in Eder’s life.
“Shortly after I finished writing my book I reconnected with an old, dear friend I hadn’t seen in close to five years. I didn’t think much about her request to meet in a non-smoking environment until she arrived with a scarf on her head, looking thin and tired,” Eder reflects. “She was the first person I knew and cared about that had to fight Cancer. It broke my heart to see her feeling so sick, but it also inspired me. She was fighting. And when she wasn’t dealing with her own treatments she was mentoring troubled teens, and helping her fellow patients. She was doing good in a world that had essentially done her wrong. I wanted to do something to help, I just didn’t know what.”
Within a year of their reunion the world was shocked as Patrick Swayze announced he was fighting Pancreatic Cancer, one of the most aggressive and life threatening forms of the disease.
“We were months away from releasing Rorschach’s Ribs, when I heard the sad news. I had to go back and revise the whole Swayze subplot,” Eder said. “I was going to cut it from the book completely, but then I got an idea; rather than remove it, I decided to make it an even bigger concept. Bigger than the book itself.”
That bigger concept was a real version of a fictitious book. Eder spent months watching every Swayze movie to date and reading as many scripts from his blockbuster movies as he could find, in search of memorable and obscure quotes. He then began studying the Tao Te Ching, looking for passages with a similar sentiment.
“Point Break and Road House gave me a wealth of wisdom and sage-like colloquies. I was shocked at how much alike they were to the Tao,” Eder said. “It clicked so quickly and easily.”
Nobody Puts Swayze in the Corner: the Tao of Swayze is credited to Phil Callaway, the fictional character who originally created the book in Eder’s novel. The forward is credited to Escher Smallwater, the main protagonist in Rorschach’s Ribs.
“I thought it would be a nice nod to the book’s original conception to use the characters of my novel as pen names,” Eder said. “There’s a special note at the end of the book that explains the Tao of Swayze’s original conception.
But the book itself is just a means to an end. Vicious Books released the Tao of Swayze specifically to raise money and awareness for a good cause, the American Cancer Society.
“I’ve wanted to do something to help for a long while. This is a great chance to raise a lot of money for a cause I’m passionate about,” Eder said. “While we’re not partnered with the American Cancer Society on this project we are committed to donating 100% of the proceeds through their general donations.”
If the book is a success, Vicious Books plans to release one new Celebrity Tao each year to raise money for different charities.
“There’s a lot of potential in this idea,” said Eder. “I’m already thinking about the next superstar to quote. Kurt Russell has some good ones.”
Nobody Puts Swayze in the Corner: the Tao of Swayze, and Rorschach’s Ribs are both available from Vicious Books, and can purchased on Amazon.com or through Viciousbooks.com.
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