Old Dog, New Tricks

Last week, after having had a lot of time at home due to flu, I finally got around to finishing something I had been working on for some time.

Last Friday saw the release of two new effects of mine to the world’s magic community.

Nobody gets rich from selling the secrets of their magic tricks, but it’s nice to know I’ve contributed something to the field of entertainment which got me interested in performing in the first place.

The first effect, “Judge Jury and Executioner” uses five old photographs with a prediction and is described as follows:

What can you tell about a person just by looking at a photograph?

Aside from gender, race, age and social standing, is there some other message which is subconsciously communicated to us?
Is there something more sinister lurking behind the eyes that stare back at us?

Could you separate the guilty from the innocent or even divine a murderer from his victims?

A well thought out, flexible, easy to perform, yet effective illusion with a dark, dramatic and memorable outcome.

The ebook contains a detailed explanation of the basic effect and five variations (including two by Andrew Brown) to suit any performer or situation. No sleights and minimal skill required.

The second one, “BackTrack!” is a little harder to describe without giving too much away.

When I first thought of it, during a conversation with my daughter Phoebe, who was six at the time, I started to scribble down some notes and began to get quite excited.

I wondered if anyone else had thought of the same idea before. A brand new principle in magic really is quite a big deal.
If what I had in front of me was indeed original, then I had an idea upon which an infinite number of future tricks could be based on.

I sent my notes to a few respected Mentalists and Banachek immediately emailed me back and confirmed its originality, at least as far as he was aware.

It seems nobody had thought of it before!

For the last few months, I’ve been working on two example tricks which use the system to demonstrate how it could be used.

Once the manuscript was finally finished, I sent it to Magic retailer Chris Wasshuber of http://www.lybrary.com/ and his response was exactly what I’d hoped for:

“This is cool. I have never seen this method anywhere. I think this is very good and I would certainly retail it. For the thoughtful performer this opens up all kinds of possibilities and further avenues to pursue. It is an entirely new tool and I can see volumes of new effects based on this idea.”

I call it a Pseudo-subliminal Influence System and you can see the full description and Chris’ official review here:
http://www.lybrary.com/backtrack-p-77973.html

As you can see, both ebooks are currently being retailed by Chris Wasshuber here: http://www.lybrary.com/reg-blackwood-m-59245.html and will soon be available via my own site too.

I look forward to seeing what other tricks people come up with, based on my system!