Following in my great-great-grandfather’s footsteps

I mentioned in a previous blog post about how I was working on a sequel to my serial novel, The Magician (which if you haven’t read it, you should.) I also mentioned that I was using the city of Philadelphia as the inspiration for this sequel, creating the fictional urban city of Lefteria.

In doing so, I also started to look through photographs I had taken and photos I had been given over the years from that city. A series of them in particular stood out to me, since they were from a trip I took in 2017 to the City of Brotherly Love to visit family and work on some genealogy research I wanted to get done.

I had walked through the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia, the neighborhood in which my maternal grandfather was born and a couple generations of my ancestors lived.

My great-great-grandfather, William John Vautier, rented a row home on this street (that was torn down before 1920, when the current rowhouses were built). He had a number of jobs, which you can read about in the article I wrote about him (hint, click his name above).

I got to walk down the streets he walked. I visited some of the places he visited. And while history has changed them a bit, like the house being torn down, and the neighborhood has been updated a bit, the stories are still there.

As are the photos of the past and the present…. all from my collection.

And I want to bring both to life.

Thus, I write.

yes, there is going to be some magic. There is going to be some fantastical stuff and some liberties taken with placements of landmarks and the like. But that’s what a good storyteller will do with a fiction story.

Hopefully, it will be great.

Until then, there is always The Magician to read. There’s also my Portals Series to enjoy. If you haven’t checked them out… you should. You really should.

Stay magical, friends.

Keep on with that idea that we all should write our own story.

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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