The Origin Story of A TIME OF KINGS

Greetings and Salutations, my dear Readers! Have I got a story for you. (Unless you want to go for the usual March events and selected commentary - in which case, please go here: March blog post, where you will fine all you want to know about Pi Day and St. Patrick's Day.) Otherwise, let us move on into the future.

March used to be a time of Spring Break, a week of merriment and mirth serving as not only a transition between winter and spring but between the hard work of a school semester and the slow slide into summer vacation. The last time I experienced this Spring Break was in 2020, oddly when we started our famous pandemic. I've told the tale before and lived to tell it. The administrators at my university instructed us to complete the semester exclusively online once we "returned" from our week off. I did that as best I could while being caught unprepared (no camera, no mic).

Then I retired and now I cannot keep track of the days of the week, all rushing together like a rollercoaster. In my idle time, I started writing a pandemic-focused novel - but I started further along on a more extensive crisis. One book became a trilogy, extending our story a couple generations into the future. I thought I was done but new ideas pestered me into writing a "sequel" and then another "sequel" and then, yes, a so-called "conclusion" to the series. The conclusion had barely launched when I was hard at work again on a new novel set much further into the future - a future that saw further degradation of civilization to a medieval society - and it was a ribald comedy, too! 

So now that 7 books have been written on this one timeline (trying to connect them with my previously published fantasy novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (2017) or at least provide crucial background for it), I thought I was done. But those of you who know me know I'm never done. 

I had one more book in me - saved from my adolescence for a time when I could do it justice. Given the massive story and the vast scope of the drama, I had to wait until I was an experienced novelist with life maturity to bring to the epic. 

That book, as I introduced in my previous blog post, is A TIME OF KINGS.

There are two things you must know before anything else:

1. The narrator/protagonist is a Baumann descendant - although it isn't revealed until later. A hint is given at the beginning but you will forget it until later.

2. Because the story is set even further down the timeline from the FLU SEASON Saga than even THE WARRIORS BAUMANN (2025) - and given its origin story from back in my sordid youth - I will not tie it to the series in an obvious way. It is, but it isn't (wink). But it would be Book 8 if you still want to keep counting them.

The origin story of a story, hmm?

Back in my 7th grade days I tried writing stories. Stupid stories little more than copies of the sci-fi stories I read voraciously at the time. It was true for me: write the stories you want to read. And yet, somehow, an idea came to me that was so huge, so complex, I could not write it. Not at that time. It overwhelmed me. I pledged to write it later, when I retired and had the time to devote to it. And so I have. And so I did: it is finished now.

What's A TIME OF KINGS about?

Back in 7th grade, I suffered from teen angst. The world was against me. So were some other guys in my school. I transformed all of that reality into a fantasy I could control. I saw myself as the good prince beset by evil doers bent on my demise. You could fashion a book out of such themes. I scribbled a few scenes in a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen, often during classes. I thought it through. Had the whole story in my head from start to finish. But I couldn't do much with only a manual typewriter. An electric typewriter I got later did not make it easier.

Later, in college, I took a screenwriting class and I finally got the whole story down from start to finish - albeit as film instructions plus dialogue. Getting all of what I could think up into the movie made it 3 hours long. Of course, I thought that would be worth it. We see several 3-hour movies these days and nobody seems to mind. Then, from that screenplay, I tried to novelize it. But I started at the wrong place and got stuck, put it away. I tried a different novelization attempt later but again got stymied soon into the story. The problem, as I now understand, was that I started with history, too much backstory, and written in a droll voice of a minor scribe who seemed less interested in what was about to happen.

Problem solved. After writing 7 books with mostly 1st-person narration, I found the way into the epic novel. (Read it for yourself: an exciting prologue that introduces the setting and the situation of the novel.) I tried to keep to the flaneur narrator (one who describes what is seen, what happens, without being a part of it) but couldn't keep it going after a while, so gradually our narrator becomes aware to us (who he is). As the epic goes on we get to know our narrator better and gradually follow his own actions and motivations and regrets within the greater story.

So what is this greater story?

In the far future, after civilization has collapsed and survivors have rebuilt up to the level of a medieval society, we find the states of America have become kingdoms with walled cities and  armies to protect them and wage war against other "city-states". Pressures from north and south help unite the states of "the Americus" (roughly Missouri across to Ohio). Our story begins in a battlefield where a lost boy becomes the ward of the young King of Louis (St. Louis). Named Jack by this King, he grows up at Court as the adopted brother to the prince and princess only to be sent away for training as a physician so he can be useful. 

Thus begins the true story. Eventually the princess runs away with the rugged prince of the Illini who now resides in New Cago (the new city built next to the ruins of old Chicageaux). Being about to give birth, the princess insists on physician Jack accompanying them on their flight to New Cago, pursued by her angry grandfather and his regiment. They must stop, the birth imminent, as fighting ensues at a small village. The princess gives birth to twin sons - the princes who will eventually tear apart the Realm. Later two other sons and a daughter are born and the rugged prince who becomes King of the Realm tries to teach them how to be leaders. 

As boys will be boys, they pass through adolescence, youth, and young adulthood with its many trials and ladies to woo. Which brings us to the insult and the revenge at the core of the story. Justice must prevail!

A medieval society with Court intrigue and palace drama, with armies clashing in the field and a siege of the walled city of Cinnati, the aftermath of the war and all that follows and how it greatly impacts our narrator in his own personal life, as he is tasked with monitoring the King and managing the Court into his elderly years.

I have avoided almost all possible spoilers. This is a rough outline only. The enjoyment in reading is in the details. The how and why of the plot points, the turn of the story, the thoughts and feelings, motivations and regrets of our major players. I have crafted a rich story using a large cast and a fertile setting. I'm certain you will enjoy it. I will say about the conclusion of this epic drama that it is satisfying - neither a happy ending nor a tragic ending. As is usual for a book written by me, life is not so tidy. Endings are merely the end of the story, while life for the characters may continue beyond the final page. It is best, therefore, to provide an end which is perfect in its conclusive form.

A TIME OF KINGS is not a Game of Thrones clone (my idea came in 1973) nor does it draw anything from current medieval dramas (which I have not seen). It is medieval in setting but everything happens in the middle states of America. And in the future, say 3000 AD. It features a Baumann descendant as narrator/protagonist who observes, analyzes, comments on what these twin princes do in trying to destroy each other. It has romance (young princes wooing their ladies) but also warfare (a few grisly scenes). Court intrigue (ministers scheming) and palace drama (the staff and their quirks, the Royals and their proclivities). There are strong female characters: princesses, the Queen, barmaids, the doula, various wives and daughters with strong personalities. And guiding us is a youth trained as a physician becoming Chief Medical Officer in the prince's army, becoming palace doctor to the King while trying to live his own life full of regrets as the Realm crumbles around him and he is helpless to stop the fall.

A TIME OF KINGS launches later this year (2026). Perhaps as early as summer but definitely by September. And, let me whisper this, I already have ideas for the next novel.... 

More story details in the next blog post.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2026 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

THE WARRIORS BAUMANN & The Writing Life, part 3

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 

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. 

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.

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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(C) Copyright 2010-2026 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

We've got you covered!

I've been thinking of this topic for a while. Now that my forthcoming book THE WARRIORS BAUMANN is awaiting its cover art, it seems even more appropriate to offer you a discussion on book covers.

They say the cover is the first marketing tool, and I would agree. You see it on the shelf (or on a website page) and the image catches your eye, draws your attention. For me, that's as far as it goes. Once in my hand I turn the book over and read the blurb - What's this book about? But it was that cover art that first got me to grab the book in order to see more.

I am not a book cover art aficionado; I care less about the art itself than that the cover represents the genre and hints at the particular story. Personally I prefer a simpler design, but I recognize that genre such as fantasy, science fiction, and romance tend to require elaborate cover art. Crime thrillers and literary fiction usually have a more toned-down cover, often symbolic rather than pictorial.

[click on covers to see larger image]

In my career, the first novel I had to arrange cover art for was AFTER ILIUM, a lusty tale of a young man who meets an older woman on a cruise to and tour of the ruins of ancient Troy, also known as Ilium. I tried and tried to think of what would be a compelling scene for the cover. Thankfully, another author offered an idea and then the cover, which I quickly approved. The design gives us three elements: the colors (red for blood), the wall (ruins of Ilium), and the big horse head (representing the gift horse the Greeks used to get into the city; hence, an icon of deception). I think it works very well. The only "flaw" might be that readers picking the book off a shelf may assume it is an ancient tale, a version of the Iliad story (it is, but set in the modern landscape). Thanks, Ceri Clark!

After that, I thought I knew what to do, cover-wise. Think through the story: what are the main elements I wished to get across? For my interdimensional steampunk trilogy, THE DREAM LAND, I had a whole new world to draw from. I also had amateur skills. The first book featured the discovery of a portal to the other world, which is a physical planet having a greenish sky. So I tried to create the effect: two explorers traversing into a greenish something. Not so great. The second book focuses on the evil queen but back when she was young and innocent. Again, the results were not the best. With the third book, which in part deals with a comet's approach, I got better: the cover does reflect the arrival of a comet. But does that draw a reader's attention enough to get the back cover blurb read?

Sometimes the idea is simple yet effective. For my contemporary intercultural romance novel, AIKO, it had to have a Japanesque image. I combined three elements: the child's face (a child is central to the story), the famous woodblock printing of the big wave (The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai) as the sea features significantly in the story, and the Japanese characters incorporated into the title letters (a purely aesthetic touch which emphasizes the Japanese aspect of the story). With a lot of tweaking it came together beautifully and I felt proud of it.

When I accepted the dare of my fellow fantasy authors to write an epic fantasy - and told it must include dragons - I looked for dragon images. I kept in mind the issues of using art for book covers, artist rights, and so on. I didn't find a good dragon image that I would be able to use without a lot of hassle obtaining the rights or worrying about those rights in the future.  Eventually I discovered artwork by a famous painter (Dragon Awakens, by Theodor Kittelsen) which was in the public domain and incorporated it into the cover for EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS. Although it may seem dull by fantasy book cover standards, I liked it: subtle yet ominous: the dragon emerging from the clouds, ready to attack. One "flaw" is that the artwork has been used for other covers.

One cover I am particularly proud of is my contemporary crime thriller, EXCHANGE, which is about the aftermath of a horrendous crime crossed with the arrival of an exchange student. I had the idea immediately. As I write about all of the gray areas of the gun control issue, I envisioned a cover which would have a band of white and a band of black with the gray in the middle. I found (and bought) a stock photo of a girl resembling the character in the story and positioned her in that gray area. The image continued onto the back cover where a "tattoo" of the sign commonly found at schools ("gun free zone") is placed. The front cover suggests a crime thriller while the back cover gives the blurb in a more intense font style appropriate for a crime thriller.

I work with an artist friend for most of my book covers. We discuss ideas when I don't have one right away and she offers suggestions. I've relied on her for several of my covers and sought her again for what I thought would be a one-off stand-alone novel about the effects of a pandemic on a single mother and her teenage son. That stand-alone became THE BOOK OF MOM, which itself became the first of a trilogy, then another trilogy, then a couple of spin-offs - all part of my FLU SEASON SAGA. For the first book, I imagined the mom's face, in a mask like we were wearing in that early stage of the pandemic, with lockdowns, shortages of everything, and so on. I expected a city in ruins as a background. Manipulation of stock photos.

The second book's concept shows the ghostly image of the Mom (from the first book's cover) as the Son goes off on his own into the woods - highly metaphorical! The third book features four of the daughters of the title, as the next generation takes over the story. 

I thought I was done then, but a story nagged at me, so I wrote Book 4 as a sequel - but it became a main line story, following a grown son into the rebuilding of a new but tyrannical  America - so the cover doesn't show any person, only the banner of the regime (more metaphor). Individuals don't matter in this new society.

But life gets easier for THE GRANDDAUGHTER, an idealistic young woman who starts a kids' band in the western town she and her mother and brothers have escaped to.

However, my artist friend suffered a family tragedy and it would not have been possible for her to devote time to my project. So I tried another artist I found through mutual writer friends on social media. He sent me mock-ups which I thought matched closely my vision. In the end I chose not to use his cover; he did the work so he got paid. I hired an art company, let them give it a try, but their covers turned out to be different from what I wanted - perhaps the first inkling of AI-manipulated art. I said thanks but no thanks. 

By then it was months later and the book was finished, just awaiting a cover. As a sci-fi story, it needed something that showed the general setting of the story (a city in chaos); couldn't avoid it. I was able to return to my artist friend and she produced the cover I liked. She went on to create the other covers in the series - or we agreed on something as a compromise. For example, after working on a more elaborate cover for the latest novel THE GRANDSONS, we switched gears and went with the simpler silhouette image using a stock photo from her collection. This cover image matches some elements in the story: the persistent glow from the east plus the riders on horses (definitely a Western).

Now I have another book ready to go: THE WARRIORS BAUMANN. As a ribald comedy (you read that right!) set 200 years after THE GRANDSONS, it should be sci-fi but civilization has further regressed so we find our main characters in a medieval setting, on a journey across the Ozarks to the capital of Louis (St. Louis) so one of them can wed the princess. It smacks of epic fantasy, so it needs a cover that matches the genre. I have sent my ideas to an artist professional whose work I've seen and like. My artist friend agrees that what I'm asking for is more than she could do effectively to the degree the story deserves.

Now we await the amazing result! THE WARRIORS BAUMANN launches December 1, 2025. 

Meantime, the next book, A TIME OF KINGS, originally conceived in a spiral notebook during social studies class when I was 13 and subsequently put off for years (despite a college screenplay version and two post-college attempts at novelizing the screenplay) is well-underway and should be finished in the foreseeable decade. An elaborate medieval-esque cover shall definitely be required.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2025 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Great Summer Road trip

Irony never escapes me. I look for it or often see at random a convergence of patterns in time and space. That helps a lot when writing a grand story captured in novel form. So it is that while I wrote my newest novel, THE WARRIORS BAUMANN, essentially a journey to a destination with much importance, so too did I travel to a destination of importance. I have also returned to tell you the tale.

I had known from late spring that a trip would likely be called sometime in July or August, and so I prepared myself. This effort would be assigned to relocating the daughter to a new city in a far away state for the grand purpose of reuniting with the boyfriend. I had driven the route previously and longed to return, although not quite as far as we found necessary. While she was widely-traveled in summers with Dad and in many years since gaining adulthood, she hadn't driven such a long route.

Therefore, I suggested we each drive our vehicles, each loaded up, and use the "POD" method to send the bulk of her worldly possessions to her new home. Her car would also contain her two dogs. I calculated the route, the gas stops, the hotels along the way only to find she had done so already. I guess I  taught her well. She also was a user of GPS tracking while I had a bevy of paper maps judiciously folded to display the portions I needed to see.

Setting out one morning, with delays for last minute packing and other errands, we finally got on the highway and headed north then west to Colorado. In my previous passage through the Denver to Cheyenne segment in 2019, I was harried at every turn by extensive road construction and no rooms at the inns. This time we passed successfully through the evening rush hour traffic and found our hotel for the night.

The next day was a little shorter: all the way to Sheridan, Wyoming. The stop was a chance to again dine at a Taco John's, but she chose a sushi restaurant, which was adequate yet expensive. Next day, we carried on, north into Montana and west across southern Montana to Bozeman. Originally intended to be only a gas stop with Missoula the hotel stop, she learned that her Air Force pilot boyfriend was stuck on base so there was less need to rush there. So we stopped in Bozeman for what turned out to be 2 nights.

I enjoyed my stay in Bozeman in 2023 and welcomed the opportunity to return. I took her to the Montana State U campus and got a new Bobcat shirt, then to Barnes & Noble at the mall to gather maps, then to Qdoba even though Bozeman also has a Taco John's. The boyfriend still delayed on base, we elected to spend the next day touring Yellowstone National Park, 90 minutes' drive south of Bozeman. At her direction we went to different areas than I visited in 2023. When we returned to Bozeman the air was cool and rained overnight, so no need for A/C.

The next morning we headed out to Missoula and points beyond. In my 2023 travels, I had considered driving further west from Missoula but after a day in Glacier National Park and traversing the valley west of the mountains I was too tired and so turned east a bit to Missoula. So we would both be driving new pavement:  into the mountains, up and down and curving sharply this way and that with big trucks passing in the next lane. It was harrowing, but we survived to enter Idaho, the narrow part of the state, and onward to Coeur-d'Alene, then into Washington state and the Spokane metroplex.

We arrived in late afternoon, with me following her through the city at the rush hour, and immediately upon entering the apartment complex, the boyfriend flagged us down, pointing to parking spaces. Expecting they would appreciate the chance to reunite, I put myself in a nearby hotel, the idea being to rest before the return drive. The following day the couple escorted me around the city, having brunch in a refurbished train car, and sailing in a pod over the rapids that run through the city center. The next day, Sunday, I did some writing in my hotel room, then did my own car tour of the area and got supplies for the return trip. Later, I met them at the apartment for dinner.

As I mentioned at the start, I had just finished the draft of my new novel about two brothers on a journey to the capital in future-medieval Missouri. While I drove I listened to music I'd compiled as a soundtrack. As I listened to the music, I planned the story - even though it already exists in screenplay form and two attempts at novelization (more next blog post). Thus, as I went on an amazing journey, so too did my heroes in the novel. As I drove back to my home, I repeated the music and the novel planning. It was a win and also a win!

I had ideas of taking another route back, seeing new places, but I have this strange fixation: when I reach my destination, no matter how long it takes or what I experience on the way, I seem to want to return home as quickly as possible. I told myself it was better to plan a separate trip to see those other areas I was skipping this time. So I repeated the route exactly but in reverse, skipping Yellowstone. I stopped in Bozeman again and got to meet my book cover artist to discuss THE WARRIORS BAUMANN cover ideas. Then I faced the same hassle going south as in 2019.

Driving from Bozeman to Sheridan, stopping for lunch at the Taco John's, I proceeded on across Wyoming with the expectation of stopping for the night in Cheyenne. When I got to Cheyenne, looking for a good gas stop, I decided I could go on to the same hotel we stayed at on the north side of Denver. But it was rush hour and I couldn't make it over to exit and so I continued on, got caught up in the traffic flow but found the way to I-70 eastbound. I decided I could stop for the night at one of the towns along the way. One problem: road construction. It wasn't so much the barrels and one-lanes but the occupancy of the hotels along the way, full of the workers. As night settled around me - much as it had in my 2019 trip - I drove on, weak and weary, feeling dreary, until I landed in Colby, Kansas and got a room. The next morning I timed my checkout to meet the opening of the Taco John's next door.

The remainder of the drive home was a constant battle between my gas mileage and the fierce plains wind, dropping the rate below what it would be for city stop-and-go driving. But I made it home eventually. I unloaded the car and took a nap, then got up and, having no food, ordered a pizza to be delivered. Later, I booted up my desktop machine and copied over my notes from my traveling laptop, ready to write the following morning. With THE WARRIORS BAUMANN on hiatus pending a fresh read-&-revise project, I started in on the next novel, a future-medieval epic titled A TIME OF KINGS (more in a future blog post): think of a war between Midwest city-states c. 3000. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2025 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.