Cover by Jon Hunsinger

This was my first big foray into a non-fantasy genre.  I’d dabbled in a few others, but this was the one I published.  Crossing Bedlam was originally going to be a one-shot until I came up with other ideas that could work with the characters and world.  Sadly, it never sold enough for me to warrant publishing more than the first 2 books.  I did 2 others on my blog, but have had to make them private due to work.

So, what was Crossing Bedlam about?  The world was fed up with the United States and doesn’t to cut it off.  Walls were erected on the northern and southern borders while fleets took over the oceans.  The country was locked down with violence then someone nuked DC, which caused the whole place to implode.  Many years later, survivors have created various societies across the broken country, which is now called the Shattered States.  It is a crazy place where every state has it’s own myriad of dangers.  Nobody knows what caused all of the previous events to occur though . . . And the protagonists don’t really care because this is an R-Rated adventure buddy comedy.

The main characters are Cassidy, who is a young woman with a goal of spreading her mother’s ashes off the Golden Gate Bridge.  Only problem is that she’s on Long Island, NY and will need to get across the Shattered States.  Her only companion is a serial killer she broke out of the prison he had been in prior to the collapse.  His name is Lloyd Tenay and he is crazy, mouthy, violent, and just wanting to enjoy the lawless landscape.  The third member of the team is Cassidy’s precious jeep, which is outfitted with various weapons and armor.  Along the way, they run into a variety of challenges and threats, which are handled in over-the-top fashion.

Some extra background is that the ‘Shattered States’ concept was put down in notes during 2014.  It was for a different story, but I revived it for this when I watched ‘Deadpool’ and ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ on the same day.  It was going to be a bigger group helping Cassidy reach her goal with her being defenseless.  Then, I could only come up with ideas for Lloyd Tenay the serial killer and thought a duo would be better.  Their personalities and abilities just blossomed from there.  It took me one week to do the research and maybe a little more than a month to write the first draft.  Finished it in 2015 . . . 2 days before Donald Trump’s first ‘Mexico will pay for the wall’ speech.  Given the setting, I ended up shelving Crossing Bedlam until the election was over.  I’d already had a few friends think I was making political commentary with this idea, so I wanted to wait for things to settle before publishing.

Not sure if Crossing Bedlam still suffered from that, but I do know that it took some hits from the people who were used to my cleaner stories.  There was a lot of violence, nudity, mention of sex, and cursing.  I really leaned into the cursing, which turned a lot of people off.  Not that it should have been a surprise since I was saying it was Rated-R and a hard one at that during the hyping stage.  Didn’t hide that I was inspired by the previously mentioned movies and put up teasers with cursing.  Yet, many people didn’t like the story and refused to review it because cursing or high levels of violence wasn’t their thing.  This meant I couldn’t garner a lot of word of mouth either.  I never figured out how to properly market the book, which might be the one thing I regret.

Something that will always stand out is how I prepared for these stories.  For the first time, I was working within Earth instead of Windemere.  I wanted to use real locations, so I used Google Maps.  I would use the initial route I was given to judge the states I would have to work with.  Typically, I would have one chapter/encounter per state with a few having 2 for bigger events.  Many times, I wouldn’t bother with large cities and zoom into the map to find smaller towns with a quirk.  This became more prominent in the sequels though.  Each location would help me flush out the world, so I didn’t even have a lot of stuff planned until I began writing.

Crossing Bedlam really did become a favorite of mine, which is why it hurt to shelve it once I ran out of time.  It was clear that this was a series I was writing only for myself and publishing it wasn’t worth the money I had to spend.  This was done because I had limited funds and time, so I wanted to use that towards the stories I had spent years developing.  The outlines for future ‘Bedlam’ adventures are still around and a sudden change of my life could result in me publishing the ones I had on my blog.  Although, I definitely take a clear political stance with one of them, which I’m surprised didn’t garner more hatred than it did.  Anyway, I never know if I’ll reach a point in my life when I can go back to writing all day.  Be nice if I could because that would revive ‘Bedlam’ and ‘Ichabod Brooks’, who will get a post later this month.

Things to ponder:

1. What would be your weapon of choice in a lawless land of survival?
2. Would you be a loner or join a new society?
3. Do you think dealing with cannibals or radioactive, super strong zombies would be worse?