Family history becomes stories

If you follow my blog or any of my social media stuff, you’ll note that this past Saturday, I posted the final chapter of the serial novel I had been working on since November of 2022. The Magician is a twenty-five chapter urban fantasy serialization about an enslaved magician named Ignace Godding and a spirited postgraduate student named Vanessa Rankin who come to find out they share a connection…. and some secrets. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s free, and it’s all here on this blog – oh hey, here’s the link to it a second time.

Even if you aren’t into fantasy, give it a shot. After all… it’s free. It’s all on this blog. And I wrote it. And it would mean the world to me to have people read stuff that I wrote. And did I mention it’s entirely free? I don’t get a dime for it. So come on, give it a shot.

What more do you want?

Anywho…. That’s not the point of this blog post.

The point of this blog post is that I’m writing a sequel to that novel now. It was supposed to be NaNoWriMo 2023’s work in progress, but life happened. And there were some scandals with NaNoWriMo HQ going on in the fall that made me kind of want to distance myself from the whole group. And then, well, life continued to happen.

But the sequel is titled The Trickster and I am about halfway done with writing the first draft (along with the next three works in the Portals Series AND doing geocaching stuff, house stuff, and working full time, but who’s keeping track of all that!) It takes place in the fictionalized city of Lefteria, which is based on the real city of Philadelphia and follows the story of a young man named Remy Sheets, a charlatan hustler who lives in a working-class neighborhood with his grandaunt Roxane who discovers there might be something better than what he’s been doing.

At the same time, Ignace Godding has taken to performing in charity shows as needed, since he no longer is forced to perform. Asked to help out an old friend, he travels to Lefteria for one last set of performances. But while he’s there, weird things begin to happen.

But things aren’t as they appear….. and when certain magical and historical mysteries being to come to light, the Department of Magical Mysteries in Lefteria call in someone well versed in both rare magics and history to help….. Vanessa Rankin of Allium.

**If you weren’t already aware, Allium is based on Chicago, which is part of my other half’s family history.**

Old faces make appearances of course…. Freddy, Thora, Jenkins, Maria, Evelyn all have their roles to play. But there are new faces as well…. Neil and Anne Marie, Ed and Ellerslie, Annie and of course Roxy and Remy. Woven into the story is another family curse…. and some old histories, including a train wreck that causes a chain of events.

That train wreck was inspired by my own family stories.

It was 2 September 1900 and one Florian Waldspurger had caught the early morning milk train at Soudertown, Pennsylvania to head into Philadelphia for a day. He was heading in to town to see his eldest son, Edward. But he never made it. He was killed when a second trail barreled through the milk train at the station in Hatfield. I wrote a whole article on this story years ago under my “real” name if you are interested in reading it….. but it left an dent in my family history ever since.

I had toyed for years with writing a story about the train wreck. I even had a name picked out for the protagonist. But the story never developed in my head aside from a few lines. So I dropped it. But as I was finishing up the story of Ignace and Vanessa and everything that happened to them, I knew another story was brewing. Remington Sheets was kind of running his mouth in my head, talking in the vernacular that my mother’s family is known for (she grew up in da burbs of Philly). It was then that I knew another story was born, this one taking place in a city that some of my ancestors founded and some of my family STILL live in to this day. Hence, Lefteria was created in my head and the train wreck story I grew up hearing about and wanted to write about plays a central role in the history of it.

But I’m not going to give away too much more. I have to write the rest of the tale. And like The Magician, I’ll eventually post it here on this blog. It just feels right.

Family history sometimes gets woven into my stories. After all, like Vanessa, history is my first love. It’s what I studied in college. And it’s something that remains, even as I tell other stories. And those stories I grew up hearing… they inspire me. And now, I’ll let them inspire you too.

Stay magical, friends.

Write your own story.

And keep pushing me to write mine!

And if I didn’t mention it already…. read my serial novel!

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If you wanted to see some of the fantasy books I have written, check out my Portals Series. My serial novel is available for free on this blog here.

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And as always, #writeyourownstory