Saturnus speaking.

My name is Mark Jeffrey, and I play Saturnus in The Continual Return of Doctor Ordinaire. I also wrote many of the spoken word bits.

I am also the author of The Name and the Shadow: An Armand Ptolemy Novel. This is my tenth book, and it was written in parallel to Continual Return and is in many ways a companion piece: it deals with many of the same themes: synchronicity, karma, archetypes, pyramids, and continually returning.

The Continual Return album is actually mentioned directly in the novel — a key character, Varinder Rahan, cites it as a personal favorite:

Together with a book marketing firm, we created several book trailers, using Midjourney to make AI images from passages in the text, and then assembling these stills into a short one-minute video … which uses a track from Continual Return as the backing music:

So the book is marketed using an album that is in the book, while the author of the book plays on the album that is in the book that is marketed using the album. Yes, it is a bit recursive, which seems appropriate, don’t you think?

The novel released on June 16, 2023. As I write this, it’s been out for a little under one month, and there’s about one thousand copies out there now. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive so far with five-star reviews (both from professionals and readers). My hope is that a ‘book / album’ flywheel can boot up — I do think the audience for both works largely overlaps.

So this is Saturnus signing off — for now. I hope you’ll check out both the book and the album together!