When I see this …
… I think of this.
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ROLLERS IN THE MILL CEILING
Tag: Fantasy
WHERE THE ANDROSCOGGIN MEETS THE TIDE
HERE COMES THE TRAIN
Think of passenger rails and unless you’re a rare daily commuter, you’re likely to envision earlier eras. Steam powered locomotives, for starters.
And then great journeys across the landscape.
Now keep going. Deeper into history. Trips onto the frontiers of knowledge. The edge of the known world.
You might run into genius in the most unanticipated haven.
Like this.
~*~
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RAILSCAPES
From the rails, the landscape threads together quite differently than it does from a highway or water passage.
The tracks pass sidings, graffiti-tagged warehouses and low factories, storage yards of all varieties, rundown housing, apartment clusters – and once out into the farmlands, grain elevators as well.
Clicking along, you can’t help but wonder how many of the enterprises are legit or how many, in their decrepitude, cover questionable activities.
For a maverick intellectual gone incognito, they might even be an ideal location to go underground for a while – a place to work uninterrupted.
In my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses, English Bible translator John Wycliffe shows up in a railroad crossing on the American Great Plains, where he’s soon joined by Hieronymus Bosch.
As they discover, once you’re lost in time and space, anything just might happen.
~*~
For more of the fantasy, click here.
FROM SCRATCH WITHOUT A RECIPE
Here’s a novel that could never have been written from an outline. I had to pour all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and start cooking.
No outline? No recipe! And no formula, either. Here are the ingredients, what are you gonna do with ’em? In this case, it starts out fantasy, of a sort, goes through steampunk, of a sort, and ends up dystopian, of a sort. Or somewhere close with a happier end?
The framework’s simple enough. Daily coded electronic dispatches between Bill, in the field, and his boss, in corporate headquarters – back in the days just prior to emails and the Internet – are soon augmented by a few trusted colleagues as Bill infiltrates the once bustling town of yrubBury. The goal is to covertly buy up the decaying riverside mills and, under the pretext of historic preservation, transform them into maximum security high-tech manufacturing.
For the record, I pursued the renovation angle from the earliest drafts of the novel, long before savvy investors bought up similar sites for small-business launch pads. In that regard, I feel vindicated by developments – including those where I now live.
As the conversations that shape the novel evolved, however, the conflict between small-is-beautiful and international conglomerates came into the fray.
When I first envisioned Big Inca, I was covering 14 states as a field representative for a Fortune 500 company. Or at least one of its subsidiaries. And I’d already been involved in management politics and thinking. Memos and checking in from the boondocks were already part of my repertoire. So all of that went into the stew.
There are other conflicts, of course, to contribute.
In the story, Bill’s a generalist in an age of specialists and fresh out of college when he’s sent into the field as a kind of entrepreneurial anthropologist. He’ll need detailed help along the way. He definitely can’t do it alone.
The town itself is populated with ancient ethnic rivalries – as well as some new ones, as Big Inca will demonstrate. The Old World and the New World are bound to collide, as they always have, especially in the most unanticipated places.
There’s even what’s legal and what’s shady to confront.
We have basic issues of making a living and making a difference and romance and intrigue to deal with. All thrown into the steaming cauldron.
Over the course of the novel, give them three years to simmer and boil.
Even if it took three decades to come together.
~*~
The novel is available here.
A MILL RACE FOR SURVIVAL OR ELSE
Water-powered mills, once the backbone of American industrial might, run as an emblem throughout Big Inca versus a New Pony Express Rider. The novel overlaps layers of history and ambition, geography and resettled ethnicity, growth and decay as they center in the once bustling town of yrubBury, where Bill is dispatched fresh out of college.
His mission is vague, misty, constantly shifting – and highly lucrative – even when he has no clue where it’s going. His coded messages to and from his boss in corporate HQ are his lifeline to the outside world.
It’s exciting, of course, to see preservation take shape. As what’s old becomes new again when his international conglomerate starts recasting a backwater town for its own ends, however clandestine. As we discover, behind the renovation of the decaying mills is a design for an isolated facility for a military-industrial behemoth.
At the heart of it all, Bill’s a solitary innocent puppet at the bidding of a distant boss pulling the strings from afar – a station agent out on the frontier. And then, running frantically along it.
Will he survive? And what of the mills?
Everything depends on the confrontation with the rival Big Inca.
~*~
The novel is available here.
BEFORE THE INTERNET, THERE WAS THE TELETYPE
Well, we also had the telephone – and memos, sometimes delivered by a mailman and sometimes by an office courier and sometimes, gasp, in person by the boss himself. Or maybe just his secretary.
But when I began drafting Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, the Internet was somewhere over the horizon. Yes, online communications did exist in what we now consider some crude form. That’s progress for you, I suppose.
Still, in developing the story, I wanted some kind of encrypted exchange between the distant handler and young Bill in the field, and that led to the technical arrangement described in the novel.
Thus the events could be disclosed in a series of memos covering a three-year period. It’s almost like playing cards, one at a time.
To tap into their exchange, just click here.
FESTERING ETHNIC TENSIONS
With America’s reputation as a melting pot, it’s surprising to see how long some ethnic tensions continue – often for generations.
Sometimes it’s simply in the ways values differ – the extent to which cunning is admired or detested, for instance, or how the family is expected to behave at the dining table.
Sometimes these erupt in a marriage of spouses from different backgrounds.
And sometimes the conflicts arise in the Old World the family fled in the first place. Think of the Balkans or Middle East, for example.
In Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, these come to the fore in mysterious ways in the isolated community of yrUBbury, especially once Bill puts the Company agenda into motion.
That is, once Big Inca also begins moving mysteriously in the background, drawing and redrawing the battle lines, largely along ethnic identities.
It’s a wilder fantasy, after all, than Wall Street. To continue, just click here.
LIVING IN A TOWER OVERLOOKING THE ACTION
Somewhere along the way of drafting Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, I began imagining living in the top of a traditional textiles mill tower. Once I moved to New England, where the 19th century mills had proliferated, I soon discovered that the towers basically housed worker stairwells, even when topped with a big bell, elaborate clocks, or impressive weather vanes. Even so, my fantasy of dwelling with a view over the millyard and its surroundings kept growing.
You should realize I’m something of an ascetic – and I like open views, rather than curtains – so the idea of living in a small space such as that holds a romantic appeal. It’s rather like a forest lookout, actually – the kind Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, Welch, and other writers once occupied. Naturally, it’s not the kind of bedroom where you’d do elaborate entertaining, either. Anything would have to be intimate.
But what happens through the nights in the empty rooms below? To follow the developments, click here.
ABANDONED MILLWORKS AND REDEVELOPMENT
In many communities across the Northeast, the once neglected mills along the running waters have found new life as commercial real estate. Often, high-tech firms and other startups find them to be flexible incubators. Other times, floors are occupied by stylish residential condos or office suites.
The small city where I live proves that, three decades after the boarded up windows were once again open the light and the spaces within refurbished. The new tenants were the key to a revitalized downtown, especially.
Before relocating to New Hampshire, though, I envisioned something similar while drafting my novel, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider. Actually, I had no idea that was about the same time the mills were being restored one by one by developers like Joseph Sawtelle. Not that he was anything like Bill’s mysterious Boss.
Oh, how I love the mills – even before we get to the intrigue in my novel.
Jnana's Red Barn 