I have been sent a few photos from the Urbantasm tour to Hyde Park, Chicago in December 2018. It seems a bit surreal, revisiting a time less than four years ago, before Covid and insurrection and all of the other tumult of our times. This was a fun week, during which I made two trips to …
Map for Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road
NEIGHBORHOODS 1. Ashburn Heights 2. Cartierul 3. The Cellarway 4. Downtown 5. Hastings Corridor 6. Downtown Akawe 7. The Os 8. Anderson Park 9. Arlington 10. Bellwood 11. The East Side 12. Olanville 13. The Old River District 14. South Village 15. South Branch 16. The Palisades 17. Werewolf Town 18. Lestrade 19. Maplewood LANDMARKS …
2019-2020 Book Tour!
I am very pleased to announce that after taking a month off, the Urbantasm production team has made arrangements for additional touring in support of Urbantasm, Book Two: The Empty Room, scheduled for publication this September. Tour dates in 2019 and 2020 will include stops in: ILLINOIS MICHIGAN MINNESOTA OHIO PENNSYLVANIA TENNESSEE WISCONSIN And hopefully …
2018-2019 Tour Postmortem: The Wisdom of the Cities
The 2018-2019 Urbantasm book tour, planned last summer, has finally come to a close. During the last seven months of touring my novel around the country, I have had the great opportunity to visit thirteen cities in eight different states. It looks as though there will be a Phase Two of this book tour, concentrating …
Cover Reveal, Urbantasm, Book 2: The Empty Room
The cover was designed by Sam Perkins-Harbin of Forge22 Design, and is an evolution of the themes and styles revealed in the cover for Urbantasm, Book 1: The Dying City (http://tinyurl.com/urbantasmamazon). The Empty Room will be published this May and follows the continuing adventures and struggles of John, his friends, and his family in the struggling auto town …
A 26-year journey…
In 1995, I was seventeen and an 11th grader at Flushing High School in a suburb of Flint, Michigan. Most of my friends went to the Flint public schools and Powers Catholic high school, and I was always startled by the gap between those of us who benefited from basically stable homes and those who …
About Maps…
When I first started to read novels as a kid, many of my favorites were big, quest-driven, fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Dragonlance Saga. One of my favorite things about these stories were their use of maps. As a young reader, nothing quite kindled a sense …
Tenth Town and the Vehicle City
Although Urbantasm is inspired by Flint, Michigan the story takes place in the fictitious city of Akawe. Over the years, I’ve been asked a few times why not simply set the story in Flint. After all, the choice to go with a fictional setting automatically imposes an additional barrier. When I tell a reader that …
Urbantasm: A Romance of Industrial America. Book Cover (Late 1996)
Another item from the 1996 file (and probably about the last thing I’ll share from it). I drew this “cover” for Urbantasm in my Pre-Calculus class sometime in late ’96. At this point, a lot had changed since I had drafted the play An Urbantasm. Now it was going a novel divided into eight parts featuring a …
An Urbantasm, A Play (Early 1996)
If I am going to be adding one item about the novel a week for the next year, some of them are likely to be pretty obscure, and many of them will be of limited interest to most of you. It still is kind of strange and surreal, in a naval-gazey way, to dig back …