Writing Update 4/20/26
Gangs of New York with Fantasy ?
I feel kind of bad that I haven't written a lot for my blog. I'm currently busy finishing my bachelor's degree at American University. That doesn't mean I haven't found time to write. I’m working on a short novel set in a secondary world. I like to call it Gangs of New York with creepy supernatural forces in the background. I’ve always been fascinated by the world of 1840s–1850s New York. A lot of it has to do with sensational stories from The Gangs of New York: an informal history of the underworld by Herbert Ashby, which entered the public domain recently. I’m using New York of that time as a petri dish to explore themes of “us versus them,” violence, and crime. I’m filing off all the names, of course, and replacing the place and character names to give them different names. I know it probably sounds lazy, but I’m the one writing the story, right? As of this writing, I’m roughly 8,000 words into the story, and I’m shooting for about 80,000 words total. It’s a good breather from my more behemoth projects like Gorehound. I made a list in my journal of all the worlds I want to eventually tackle in my writing. I call them “Playgrounds.” The city of Verdoc (a stand-in for New York) is the youngest of the worlds I want to explore at length. I’ve always been fascinated with true crime, and the 19th century was no different. The public was fascinated by sensational tales of crime and murder just as much as they are today. Okay, so I have the setting. Where is the fantasy element? The fantasy element comes in the background elements. There is a drug trade with a supernatural source that I don’t want to spoil just yet, under the story is fully told. I’ve built out most of the world in my head, even though I’m writing by the seat of my pants. I know that, in addition to the stand-in for America where the city is located (Vespulan), a riff on where the name America comes from, Amerigo Vespucci, he did not discover America but was the one who theorized that North America was there. If that makes any sense, dear reader. The other countries are the seat of the Old World the north, the country of Gauntalia to the south, and the southeastern country of Shivalia. Gauntalia is a mishmash of Latin American countries, and the country of Shivalia is India with a sort of orientalist bend to it. I know for a fact that Shivalia is colonized by the empire that colonized Vespulan, and that Gauntalia is more of a wild frontier of sorts. Vespulan is still under the rule of the Old World Empire when Shivalia was colonized. I don’t know yet if I will explore a sort of revolutionary war period between Vespulan and the Old World Empire. I do know that some kind of Civil War-style conflict happened, and I do know some of the characters that I will feature.
The Characters
I have a few characters fairly fully formed in my head
Mayor Alinar Stearns.
My favorite power player in the city of Verdoc. He is based on the craziest president ever elected Andrew Jackson. Like Jackson he is both a child of the frontier and very very aggressive. Like Jackson, he is a populist and blames the nonwhite immigrants for Verdoc’s problems and has a bit of a military history that gained him a good deal of fame among the working class common folk. He is a brawler despite his wartime injuries . He tells the story of how he beat a potential assassin to death with his cane. Andrew Jackson also did the same thing. Both characters are acomplished duelists with terrrible tempers. There is certain level of xenophobia in him but unlike Jackson, Alinar learns to have a degree of tollarance toward people different from him. He has zero tollerance for corruption and the gang culture infecting the city of Verdoc. These gangs are central to the plot of the story.
Angus Long
The current leader of the BloodKnuckle lower middle class gang.
He is not illiterate but has horrible penmanship. He thinks the Scriptoron(type writer) is a god send to him. He’s around the age of 33 at the time of the story. He has a strained relationship with Stearns and both hate the High Street Gents the uptown rival gang to the Blood Knuckle Boys.
The Man of Sable
A mysterious agent of chaos seemingly predating the rise of the Old Empire. He is very very old and one of the few fully supernatural characters in the actual story. He exists only to drive the city into chaos by feeding into the unrest of the cities underworld. He wants the city to burn and personally oversaw the rise of the cities drug trade. I don’t know his true identity but he has many names as listed above. He favors the High Street gang and supplies them with weapons in their battles against the Blood Knuckle boys. His eyes also glow in the dark.
Miss Tyla
A den mother similar in role to Fagin from Oliver Twist. She has a group of young thieves under her wing. She is also an addict to an opium like substance.
Old Thurman
An old school carrer politician on the City Government Council. This is the primary Legistative body of Verdoc.
These are the characters I plan to use througout the story. It is here that I want to state the purpose of my fiction. I don’t think there is enough traditionally published Men’s fiction these days. Written by men and not in the nonfiction vein. I’ve seen the op eds about the lack of men’s fiction and male writers. I would like to say : Challenge Accepted
