Category: Blog Entry

They might not exactly resemble each other but they may be on the same note there in the cold plains of Mongolia.

Making a trip back to Kansas City soon, on the train, in a sleeper — the most luxurious way to travel ever. If you have the time. Searching out the flashpoints for all three books, all of which happen in the future Kansas City. My future city seems to cover half of several states, until it runs into St. Louis on one side and Omaha on the other. Depressing? But think of the fun of lively neighborhoods and the legendary heroes of the slums!

 

Merry Christmas to you and yours. Hope you are singing, celebrating and being with ones you love.  Snowstorms are hitting Midwest, and the East.

 

Working on Book IV of the 88.3 series is absorbing; speaking of singing. It’s about a quartet of young men and one older leader singing their way into the apocalypse.  They are street-wise and know how to handle themselves in a fight, and they sing like angels. Hats off, hats out, beg your listeners to throw in a few pennies and try to stay away from the gunfire in the streets of the city-world.

And also, try your best to stay away from the Resistance, even though they appear to be the good guys. Most of them don’t read music or understand why five guys are harmonizing on a street corner in the middle of gunfire. The Resistance, in short, is completely at a loss.

 

‘Basilica’ Jeffbrowngraphics.com

To concoct things that  never existed and never will; that are beyond existence. A future world, a dystopia, inhabited planets, civilizations at the center of the earth or 20,000 leagues under the sea. We do not go to The Martian Chronicles to tell us what Mars is like, but for the power of Bradbury’s imagination and his eloquence. Those series of stories exist quite comfortably alongside the science-based, factual The Martian. But at the deepest part of The Martian, it is about a struggle of a lone man to survive.

Same as ‘The Weaponsmaker’. A rich young man thrown out into the hot and dangerous street without the slightest idea of what kind of people lived down there. Archetypes, deep plot lines scored in our heads.

 

I ran into this image through Bing, and I knew it was exactly the right one to use for Bude Rundel, but running down the source of the image was a bit of work. However, this got me in contact with Nuclear Snail studios in Germany and I have had a long and interesting e-mail correspondence with Dimitri Zaitsev, the designer. He designs post-apocalyptic/dystopian costuming for various film studios and CosPlay.  He’s very good. Thought I would give him a plug here on the blog.

In the 88.3 series it was a challenge to show the sudden climate change from a hot-dry world to catastrophic storms and flooding. This picture is interesting; what appears to be natural formations in the foreground are actually habitations. Kansas City is at the meeting-point of three major rivers; the Kaw, the Blue and the Missouri. The big Platte, draining an enormous expanse of prairie country in Nebraska, Kansas and even Wyoming, empties into the Missouri just north of Kansas City. In this over-urbanized world of the future, human beings in general and the controlling class in particular would have forgotten entirely about things like drainages and riverbeds.  They are all covered over in slum apartments, shebangs,  unauthorized shacks, shanty-towns and streets.

Even the maps of the rivers and their drainage patterns have been lost. Except to a few. Thus the devastation is unmeasureable.

He used to live among the elite, in the high places, where there were fountains and cooled air and the days went by smoothly, at ease, one after another.

Then the ban order came and he was thrown out, into the lower slum streets.

That’s when the story begins.

Welcome to my new website.