Lost Days!

Anthony Borelli knew a lot more about Renaissance Italy than did most kids his age.
He knew that it wasn’t one country but rather a whole bunch of city-states. He knew that people spoke a version of Italian back then that was different from the Italian he had learned in school. And he knew about the Gregorian calendar, Pope Gregory XIII’s attempt to wrestle holidays like Easter back to the seasons in which they belonged.

But Anthony never expected to find himself in Renaissance Italy . . . or to be fighting the kinds of bizarre, bloody monsters he had only read about in the mythologies of the ancients…or to be the linchpin in a grand, desperate scheme to save the world of Man from the beginning to the end of time.

How, he wonders, is he supposed to overcome the amassed forces of evil when he can’t even overcome the town bully?

Lost Days isn’t just about a calendar. It’s about demons. It’s about blood and death. It’s about magic, and courage, and crazy schemes . . . and in the end, the power of love. Continue reading

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree that Christendom would no longer count time according to the old Julian calendar, which–over the course of centuries–had allowed movable feasts like Easter to slip back a week and a half. From that point on, Christians would follow a new, more accurate calendar, which–because Pope Gregory was the one who made it happen–would come to be known as the Gregorian Calendar.

Oh, one other thing. To put the holidays back where they belonged, Pope Gregory eliminated ten days in October, 1582. Friday, October 5th became Friday, October 15th. This made landlords happy and tenants grumpy, but there it was.

Now, you might say the erasure of those ten days was just a clerical formality, a logistical convenience. We didn’t actually get rid of those ten days, did we?

Or…did we?

What if something happened in the course of those ten days? Something so bad, so horrifying, so breathtakingly evil that the only way the world could survive was if those two hundred and forty hours were wiped from the face of the earth? Which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, is the conceit at the center of my new young adult novel, Lost Days — which Crazy 8 Press will be releasing on August 25, 2015. Continue reading

So, you know, we’re setting out to explore this continent. This super-continent.

When you come up with an idea for a science fiction book–what promises to be a really good science fiction book–in that brief moment of birth, it’s perfect. A perfect, little gem of a reality. Later on you’ll see the flaws and the challenges, a whole bunch of them probably, but when the thing first takes shape in your head, it’s virginal, untouched. Pristine.

The question I’m asking myself and thirteen other writers, as we dip our paddles into those pristine waters, is…what if mankind had been born and developed during a period when the continents were all one? When there was no Europe, no Asia, no North or South America, but instead a single, contiguous land mass?

How might our civilization have been different?

The question is a tantalizing one. So many possibilities. So many chances to take the familiar and turn it into something intriguingly, maybe disturbingly, unfamiliar. After all, we’re still talking about our world, our people. And yet…not the people we’ve become. Continue reading