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Along the slopes of the ancient mountain range of the Appalachian plateau that spills down toward the Great Lakes, is a twisting series of Hollows and a gentle plain of vineyards that cloisters hushed 19th-century towns. Further along that plain, the Niagara River begins where the Erie Canal ended at the docks of Buffalo. From there one looks West to the inland seas-the Great Lakes- and North into the Canadian Shield, the edge of the whole of the continent… fanning out through Chautauqua...Niagara....New York… Ontario. The New World.
Growing up and studying Art and Architecture there, a mirror of such epic geographies and frontiers grew in me, like an alternate timeline or dimension, and from there the bits and pieces of the eight novels I came to call "The Pandoran Age Chronicles" grew, fermented and blossomed in my mind over years and varied places… almost as if they had a life of their own.
As a boy in the Hollows at the edge of the vineyards and the great landlocked sea, I would pick up fossils of 400-million-year-old Devonian and Silurian shale. Deep-time glimmered over long ago reefs once teeming with giant prehistoric sea scorpions. As teens, my friends and I would climb the abandoned giant grain elevators at the Buffalo Waterfront and swan-dive in the dark, lit only by the far-off inferno glares emanating from arc furnaces at the steel plants across the wharves where Great Lake ships like the Edmund Fitzgerald once berthed. Like the eons and eras passed, the mirrors of ages and timelines grew, and the Pandoran Age tales, adventures, and characters began to whisper to me.
Later, from Fort Benning training as an anti-tank gunner to Miami creating galactic-size murals of historic conquerors and Bacchanalia celebrations in the art deco hotels along the ocean, with the deep sea and earthy port town smell of Moqueca stew and the seductive rhythms and effortless harmonies of Samba music in the air, a tapestry began to form in my subconscious, of epic eons and far-future places… of great glory, great glamour, and equal tragedy. Gallant men and women emerged out of the mist, filled with a treasure house of pride, courage, cosmic skills, and iconic individualism, yet mixed with dark spices of secret fears and insecurities. Brilliant and beautiful. Both heroes and fallen angels, and yet somewhere in the trick of the tale: redemption.
I hope that the stunning quality of deep-time, mixed with equal portions of the incredible ingenuity and jubilation of the human spirit; with all its equal folly will enthrall you as it has for me through all these years of shepherding it to life.
In each of these stories the tales are even larger narratives, windows into worlds beyond our grasp, and bursting through our imagination, like a bird dashing from a deep night, through a bright banquet hall celebration, and then into the night again.
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