Rather than a 'Welcome to 2026' post, I'm continuing promotion of my newest novel THE WARRIORS BAUMANN, a ribald comedy set in medieval Missouri. Although this book is the latest installment in the FLU SEASON Saga, it is only tangentially connected. Our main characters are two Baumann descendants, brothers on a mission in the year 2353 - long after civilization has collapsed and then risen again but only to a medieval level, where former states are now kingdoms. The story is ripe for ruse and witty wiles, with a burly warrior, his clever brother, an out-on-his-luck actor, a girl warrior, a pouty princess, a dastardly duke, a wily wizard, a wayward traveler of the timestream, and a Waffle House waitress. Most of the action occurs along the Royal Road and its towns and in the capital city of Louis. (click to enlarge)
Even as I type this blog post, work continues on my next novel, a more serious epic titled A TIME OF KINGS which concerns the war between Chicageaux and Cinnati in 3030 AD, as told by another Baumann descendent. As I near the end of the initial draft, sitting at 165,000 words with two chapters to go, I am deepening and enriching the original story which I thought up at age 13 and typed up in a screenplay format while in college just to get the whole thing down on paper. More on this medieval story in a future blog post.
Where we left off in the previous blog post about my writing life, I'd thought my novel writing was done. I had published all of my books written prior to the ABNA competition (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (The Dream Land, Book 3: Diaspora was newer than ABNA but it piggybacked off Book 2, obviously.). I had achieved my goal and could sit back satisfied as I continued my teaching career. Then we discovered vampires. Rather, my daughter did: the Twilight series, which became her obsession - to the point of collecting everything and writing fan fiction.
I told her what I knew about vampirism, based chiefly on a TV magazine show about a poor fellow who suffered from porphyria, a hideous disease which caused many of the terrible symptoms we typically associate with vampires. Rather than glittery skin as in the Twilight books and movies, real vampires had dry, scaly skin from a lack of blood flow. They also, based on my research, tended to be from one blood type and that blood type happened to be most concentrated in a little place I like to call Transylvania. Perhaps Bram Stoker also did his research and located his famous vampire in that region. So I sought to write a medically accurate vampire novel just to show my daughter the truth.
I began with a protagonist who transforms over a short time into a vampire - unaware that his parents did the same and hid away without telling him the family curse. I lived in Oklahoma City at the time, which was 2013, and so I set the story right in my own backyard, and in the same time period as I was actually writing it. Therefore, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN was published on Halloween 2014 - at the very moment he completed his transformation in Zagreb, Croatia - while searching for a cure. It was a big hit, vampires being popular in those years. Even my own doctor deemed it medically sound and praised my research and extrapolation of the cause and effect of the syndrome.
Then life turned strange. I was invited to come and teach a summer course at a university in Beijing, China. The course I chose to teach was American Business English. The university paid for my airfare and my hotel across from the campus, and gave me a salary. When I was not in the classroom for a couple hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I was free to go sightseeing. Or stay in my hotel room and write a new novel.
The equally strange story of how I came to write A GIRL CALLED WOLF (2015) should be made into a movie. A relative of a Facebook friend saw my vampire book, read it and liked it. We "talked" online and I learned of her background, which seemed like a fascinating story. I encouraged her to write it for
Where we left off in the previous blog post about my writing life, I'd thought my novel writing was done. I had published all of my books written prior to the ABNA competition (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (The Dream Land, Book 3: Diaspora was newer than ABNA but it piggybacked off Book 2, obviously.). I had achieved my goal and could sit back satisfied as I continued my teaching career. Then we discovered vampires. Rather, my daughter did: the Twilight series, which became her obsession - to the point of collecting everything and writing fan fiction.
I told her what I knew about vampirism, based chiefly on a TV magazine show about a poor fellow who suffered from porphyria, a hideous disease which caused many of the terrible symptoms we typically associate with vampires. Rather than glittery skin as in the Twilight books and movies, real vampires had dry, scaly skin from a lack of blood flow. They also, based on my research, tended to be from one blood type and that blood type happened to be most concentrated in a little place I like to call Transylvania. Perhaps Bram Stoker also did his research and located his famous vampire in that region. So I sought to write a medically accurate vampire novel just to show my daughter the truth.
I began with a protagonist who transforms over a short time into a vampire - unaware that his parents did the same and hid away without telling him the family curse. I lived in Oklahoma City at the time, which was 2013, and so I set the story right in my own backyard, and in the same time period as I was actually writing it. Therefore, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN was published on Halloween 2014 - at the very moment he completed his transformation in Zagreb, Croatia - while searching for a cure. It was a big hit, vampires being popular in those years. Even my own doctor deemed it medically sound and praised my research and extrapolation of the cause and effect of the syndrome.
Then life turned strange. I was invited to come and teach a summer course at a university in Beijing, China. The course I chose to teach was American Business English. The university paid for my airfare and my hotel across from the campus, and gave me a salary. When I was not in the classroom for a couple hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I was free to go sightseeing. Or stay in my hotel room and write a new novel.
NaNoWRiMo (National Novel Writing Month [November]) of which I had participated as a way to push myself to write. She tried but didn't get far. So we agreed to work together because I felt her story was interesting and deserved to be told. We started a collaboration where she told me about her childhood and youth, and I wrote it as a novel - fictionalizing where necessary. What was amazing was how I packed up all my Greenland maps and books to take with me to Beijing in the heat of the summer so I could keep on writing it! I cranked down the A/C in my room to better get in the mood for writing about life in Greenland.
That semi-biographical effort was followed the next summer in Beijing (2016) teaching the same course again with EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (2017), what was to be my epic tome that said everything I wished to say about life, the universe, and dragons. Again, I toted my materials to that hotel in Beijing and wrote when not in class. The story that I'm sticking to is that my fellow authors at Myrddin Publishing, mostly of the fantasy genre, challenged me to also write a fantasy novel. I'd written sci-fi before (The Dream Land trilogy) but I knew I had to follow some tropes for my book to be fantasy. At the last moment, I was told my epic fantasy had to include dragons - so it did.
That semi-biographical effort was followed the next summer in Beijing (2016) teaching the same course again with EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (2017), what was to be my epic tome that said everything I wished to say about life, the universe, and dragons. Again, I toted my materials to that hotel in Beijing and wrote when not in class. The story that I'm sticking to is that my fellow authors at Myrddin Publishing, mostly of the fantasy genre, challenged me to also write a fantasy novel. I'd written sci-fi before (The Dream Land trilogy) but I knew I had to follow some tropes for my book to be fantasy. At the last moment, I was told my epic fantasy had to include dragons - so it did.
I took the story as a spoof of epic fantasy (think Tolkien) at first, but as I got myself into the story I became compelled to tell a deeper narrative - with dragons. I treated the dragons as real biological creatures (no talking, no hoarding of gold, no sacrificial virgins). An exiled dragonslayer is determined to locate the dragons nesting place and kill them all to be rid of the menaces once and for all - only to discover on the journey a lot of truths that make him realize things about the nature of the universe. The novel was long enough, but during that month in Beijing I also wrote a novella which I broke into chapters to insert as interludes in the novel, making the work my longest novel.
Whew! That was an effort, although I was very proud of the story I produced. I thought I really said some things that needed to be put into words. I felt satisfied with this "final" book. Again, I thought I was done writing books - and continued my teaching. But thoughts nagged me about my vampire hero. I wondered what he would be doing now. So I got back into the story - now 13 years into the future (what would be 2027-8) when he leaves his dour home in Croatia (an abandoned villa) for life as a playboy in Budapest, Hungary. In SUNRISE (Book 2, 2018), things happen, obviously, which leads to the third book, SUNSET (Book 3, 2019) in what became a trilogy. A problem which developed later was that I never described the 2020-22 pandemic when a character mentions what she has done through the years up to 2027 in the story. I learned never to give exact dates in a story and followed that advice for the FLU SEASON Saga.
Whew! That was an effort, although I was very proud of the story I produced. I thought I really said some things that needed to be put into words. I felt satisfied with this "final" book. Again, I thought I was done writing books - and continued my teaching. But thoughts nagged me about my vampire hero. I wondered what he would be doing now. So I got back into the story - now 13 years into the future (what would be 2027-8) when he leaves his dour home in Croatia (an abandoned villa) for life as a playboy in Budapest, Hungary. In SUNRISE (Book 2, 2018), things happen, obviously, which leads to the third book, SUNSET (Book 3, 2019) in what became a trilogy. A problem which developed later was that I never described the 2020-22 pandemic when a character mentions what she has done through the years up to 2027 in the story. I learned never to give exact dates in a story and followed that advice for the FLU SEASON Saga.
I completed the vampire trilogy, and felt NOW I was finished writing. But then things happened again. A couple of events came together to spark a new idea for me: a crime thriller, which would be a new genre for me to wrote. But I love a challenge (dragons, anyone?) and so I set myself up to write it - only to be stopped in the middle by falling sick with what turned out to be, named a few months later, as something called Covid-19. More on the next phase of My Writing Life in the next blog post. Next time: the covid-era novels.
Meantime, get your copies of the FLU SEASON novels + THE WARRIORS BAUMANN.
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