Ryan Boudinot is the author of the novel Misconception and the short story collection The Littlest Hitler, which was named Book of the Year (2006) by Publisher's Weekly. The pitch for his next novel, Blueprints Of The Afterlife, sounds like it has a bit of the Synecdoches about it:
[The novel is] set in a full-size replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound that alternates between a richly imagined future in which the apocalypse is a distant, hazy memory, and a present in which a man recounts his search for a secret organization bent on harnessing the brightest minds to control human destiny and life on earth.
io9.com interviewed Boudinot and mentioned the Synecdoche, New York similarities. Says Boudinot:
I was well into the novel when I learned about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. I sort of threw up my hands and thought, great, now everyone's going to think I copied Kaufman. I've watched that film four times and love it more every time. I love everything he does. And he's doing something different with his replication of New York City in Synecdoche than I'm doing with mine. (Source)
When Synecdoche came out, some people on the internets (who mostly hadn't seen the film) prematurely called it a rip-off of everything from a Bjork music video to Fellini. These people are crazy. Different artists get similar ideas all the time - but the idea isn't the important thing; the important thing is how you execute it. (I'm not slamming io9, by the way. Their question was totally valid.)
Not sure when Blueprints is due for release - he's only recently sold the book to Grove/Atlantic.
Short Boudinot bio from The Rumpus, where Boudinot blogs and reviews DVDs:
Ryan Boudinot is the author of the short story collection The Littlest Hitler (2006) and the novel Misconception. He was a DVD Editor at Amazon.com from 2003 to 2007. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at Goddard College's Port Townsend MFA program.
He actually reviewed the Synecdoche, New York DVD, and the review is really good. Here's an excerpt and a link to the whole article:
The movie has lost money in the box office and is likely considered a failure by the people at Sony Pictures Classics whose job it is to count beans. A creative writing student of mine who is a movie producer once said that the only reason good movies get made is that there are still people in Hollywood who have both money and good taste. I can only hope that Kaufman has the backing he needs to keep giving us these generous, hard-won gifts that we'll be watching a hundred years from now. (Source)
