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As you can imagine, I’m always working on something. I’m an author, a podcaster, a thinker of big thoughts about fiction and mythology. I’m always plotting something. And I’ll be putting all the various links, seminars, and podcasts here as I go forward. But I wanted my first post on the brand new blog to be about my favorite new project and the one that’s soaking up the vast majority of my energies.

That project is a little place I like to call Empire City.

It’s a sort of 1930s Super New York that could have been but our world just wasn’t cool enough. Or maybe it wasn’t terrifying enough. Either way, Empire City was cooked up by myself and my great friend and fantastic author, Daniel Swensen. Dan and I have dreamed of working on something together for awhile, and Empire City is what happened. It’s a city so rotten that you can’t believe anybody would ever live there yet protected by men and women who are so virtuous they have to wear masks to do the right thing.

What’s more, we’re trying to diversify the kinds of characters that got to appear in Mystery Man stories of the actual pulp magazines. We’ve got women, African Americans, homosexuals, and more, all of whom go by a colorful moniker and fight crime from the shadows of this terrible metropolis.

We’re serializing the stories just like they used to do back in the day. You can find all the issues and more information at Empire City Adventures.

But we didn’t just want to diversify our characters. We want to diversify the credits too! Right now, we want to be the ones writing the stories, but we need pictures to go with those words! But art is expensive! So we started a Patreon to help us fund work for artists from communities that may not get enough work because of who they are. We don’t think that’s right, so we’re trying to put our money where our mouths are. Our patrons help us do that.

You can learn more about that here, including how you can support us and what goodies you get for doing so. I hope you’ll consider it. We look forward to seeing you walk down these mean streets, whether that’s as reader or patron. See you in Empire City.