Three distinct urges, ranging from Bardolatry to calculating commercialism to sheer naughtiness, led me to write MY NAME IS WILL.

First, I had been writing squeaky-clean Saturday morning cartoons for Disney for ten years, and desperately needed to write not only a novel, but a novel where even the good guys occasionally lie, cheat, break the law, and have sex.

Second, as a Shakespeare junkie, I have always been fascinated by my surmise of the Bard's life in the year 1582.  Put yourself in his breeches.  You’re eighteen years old, ambitious, monstrously talented.  Your friends have all gone off to further their careers, studying for either the priesthood in Rome or France or the arts and letters at Cambridge or Oxford. But you're stuck in provincial Stratford-upon-Avon, instructing six-year-olds in the basics of Latin.  It doesn’t look like it can get much worse… until you knock up a local old-maid farmer’s daughter and get dragged into a shotgun wedding.  Among the miasma of facts and legends about Shakespeare’s life, this period has always struck me as the most human and compelling, and probably the most formative.

But with my first novel, I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a writer of historical fiction. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)  So the third challenge I set myself was to create something contemporary, relevant, and political.  I began to think about my own late teens, kicking around a famously alternative-lifestyle college in the mists of Northern California, and how that experience – the insights gained while “abusing” drugs along the beautiful wooded paths of the campus while studying Latin, classical literature, Greek myth and philosophy – helped shaped me into the writer I am.  I particularly wondered whether today's youth are allowed the same opportunities for intellectual and spiritual experimentation.

During the depths of my disillusionment about the 2004 reelection of George Bush and the worldwide realignment of religious dogma and state power, I came across Shadowplay, the fascinating book by Claire Asquith, in which she posits that Shakespeare was a dissident Catholic, using his works to send coded messages of hope and support to England's oppressed Catholic minority.  What a perfect theme for my book: Shakespeare's emergence as a political playwright. 

But then, how to bring in the contemporary element?  The answer occurred to me while watching the director's cut of Richard Kelly’s brilliant time-travel movie, Donnie Darko.  I would do two parallel stories, one of the young Bard, one of a would-be scholar at an equally tenuous moment in his development, and play with the parallels and contrasts of Elizabethan vs. modern American politics and justice.  

Finally, there had to be an element that would bind the two stories together.  I recalled the single most extraordinary event of my brief time at UC Santa Cruz. 

There was this mushroom. 

A single, thirty-five gram psilocybin mushroom that a friend in my dorm had shared among ten people one memorable night, cutting it into wedges like an apple pie.  Eureka!  That was how the two stories could merge... the mushroom would be an organic version of the "artifact" that is (in Donnie Darko's universe, at least) both a cause of and a necessity for time travel.
From there, the story took on a life of its own.  My stumbling upon the historical playwright/spy Anthony Munday and the exorcist Jesuit Robert Debdale was a boon.  One or two characters, meant to be the passing objects of a young poet's lust, became, for me, living, breathing individuals whose needs and reproaches demanded attention and respect.  As I typed, I refused to think about how it would end… the story had begun to tell itself, and I wanted it to be a surprise.

Although the novel is meant above all else to be ripping good fun, I also hope it reminds us (in this election year) that while Christian family values are fine and dandy for Christian families, what we call civilization –
literature, philosophy, ethics, the arts, – is often driven forward by fools and madmen, addicts and fornicators – the heathen worshipers of lost civilizations, potent medicines, and dead playwrights.