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.

 

 

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.