Thoughts From Chuck

"The books are never about what you think they are about. Survivor is really about our education system because I feel, more often than not, kids are sort of taught or trained to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine. They're not really taught in an empowered way that they can start their own company so that they can create and run their own lives. They are sort of taught to be just good employees, to just fit in."

For Mike Keefe and Mike Smith For Shawn Grant and Heidi Weeden and Matt Palahniuk

The agent in this book is not Edward Hibbert, who represents my work with all his humor, energy, and skill.

No one in this book is as clever as my editor, Gerry Howard. No one anywhere is as relentless and helpful as Lois Rosenthal.

This book would not exist without the Tuesday Night Writers' Workshop at Suzy's house.

Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. One, two, three.

Maybe this is working. I don't know. If you can even hear me, I don't know.

But if you can hear me, listen. And if you're listening, then what you've found is the story of everything that went wrong. This is what you'd call the flight recorder of Flight 2039. The black box, people call it, even though it's orange, and on the inside is a loop of wire that's the permanent record of all that's left. What you've found is the story of what happened.

And go ahead.

You can heat this wire to white-hot, and it will still tell you the exact same story.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

And if you're listening, you should know right off the bat the passengers are at home, safe. The passengers, they did what you'd call I their deplaning in the New Hebrides Islands. Then, after it was just him and me back in the air, the pilot parachuted out over somewhere. Some kind of water. What