“Write a Pangaea story . . . and, GO!”

That was pretty much all the direction Mike gave for the anthology. Which, sometimes, is a good thing, and sometimes makes it a little . . . tough. After all, Pangaea is HUGE! I mean, it’s the supercontinent, after all—the one and only landmass in the entire world, as big as all of our modern continents put together.

That’s a lot of space in which to find a story.

So what do you do when you’re presented with such a dizzying array of possibilities?

You narrow it down.

For me, that meant reading through the small Pangaea bible Mike had written up, giving a few basic details about the world, and looking for any details that jumped out at me.

Fortunately, there were a few:

• Geothermal energy
• The “coastal” states involved in a technological arms race over building hydroponics
• The plains, with their rougher, looser structure and wilder, freer ways

I considered those elements again, separately and together. Volcanoes, hydroponics, scientists, arms races, the coastal states and the plains.

And then I had an image appear in my head of a mad scientist laughing maniacally from within a city—built inside a live volcano.

I had my story.

Mike liked the idea, fortunately. With one reservation. “This sounds awfully pulpy,” he told me. “I’m not sure it’s going to fit the tone of the rest of the book.”

“Tell you what,” I replied. “If you’re really worried about it, I can preface it with a ‘torn from the pages of Lurid Tales of Mad Science!’ sort of header, set it up as being a story told in a Pangaea pulp. How’s that?”

He thought that sounded fine, and I got to work. The story wrote itself, as is often the case when you get a good strong narrative voice going—In this case, all of four lines and Hank Land had taken form (“How do you steal a scientist? It’s not like you can just stuff ’em in a sack! And what would someone be doing with them? Mounting them on a board like so many butterflies? ‘Look, I just added a botanist to my collection!’?”) and I was just along for the ride.

By the time I was done and had turned in “Up in Smoke,” Mike had already received several of the other stories. And, after he’d had a chance to read them over, he told me “you know what? Don’t worry about that header. Your story’s going to fit in just fine.”

I’m glad it did. Because I really like thinking that, in this world of Pangaea, Hank Land isn’t just some character on a page—he’s real, and live, and ready to roll, eager to chase down some bad guys and stop some crimes.

Fortunately, with all that space on the supercontinent, I have the feeling he’ll find plenty more cases to keep him busy.

I just hope he lets me tag along on them as well.

Pangaea is now available in digital and print editions.

By Geoffrey Thorne

I’ve always been an outsider. Not by intention, of course, but by circumstance. I find myself often at the edges of crowds or alone in giant social gatherings. I don’t mind it. It allows me to observe and to listen and, i think, sometimes to see things people caught up in the swim of the social dance miss. I tend to write outsiders as well so when I was asked to join the PANGAEA crew I was thrilled to see how they planned to play their neanderthal population. For whatever reason they punched all my buttons hard.

According to canon, the world was made in six days. In retrospect, the work does come off as kind of rushed, but seeing as it was the first time anyone had tried creating a whole new world from scratch, any defects can be excused. Well, some of them. But that’s neither here nor there.

In the span of the relatively small sliver of time that we’ve been around, many others have gone on to create universes of their own, sub-realities to real reality—Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained, Burroughs’ jungles and hollow Earth, Howard’s Hyborian Age, Asimov’s Foundation, George R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones—to name a few. In my own humble way, I’ve patched together a few worlds myself over the years, most extensively in the early to mid-‘80s in the Arion, Lord of Atlantis comic book series for DC Comics (which I’ve extended into a pair of short stories and a novella in the works—with names and incidents suitably altered to protect myself from any corporately copyrighted reprisal—to be published in 2016 by Crazy 8 Press as Three Tales of Atlantis) and Crazy 8’s own ReDeus trilogy, whose deity infested world was built by Bob Greenberger, Aaron Rosenberg, and myself (long before Crazy 8, in fact, back when we were calling ourselves 3 Mountains or something like that…’cause (Fun Fact®) the “berg” in all our names is German for “mountain.”

I also had a hand in building the world of Pangaea. Well, maybe it was more like a finger…a part of a finger, really. A fingernail. Okay, it was all Mike Friedman’s idea and I kibitzed a bissel (that’s Yiddish for “I put in my 2¢”), reading a few drafts and tossing out a few suggestions, comments, and ideas. This wasn’t my and Mike’s first collaborative effort; I’d been his editor for several years at DC Comics on Darkstars and other titles so we’re comfortable working together.

The strange thing about world building is that even as its creator, you never know everything about it. In my ReDeus stories (available by clicking here…I’ll wait while you go order them), set in a world in which every pantheon that ever existed returns at the same time and forces the world into worshipping them again as they had in the days of old while the Judeo-Christian deity remains silent and removed from the proceedings. There came a point in one of my stories where my protagonist, a Jewish-by-culture but otherwise atheist middle-age FBI agent is investigating a Catholic relic and, as he goes about his business, I realized I didn’t know what had happened to the Catholic Church, the institution if not the religion itself. I had to sit back and, within the parameters of the ReDeus bible and in consultation with my fellow world builders, come up with a plausible back story and resultant church structure. (It’s easier if you just read the stories for yourself, honest, so just click here…)

Kibitzing aside, I was a guest in Mike’s world of Pangaea, so I tried very hard not to spill anything on the rugs or break the furniture, sequestering myself to a single corporate farm somewhere out in the vast plains of Earth’s single mega-continent…with a side trip to the other side of the world. Even there, I found one hundred and one little details of everyday life that I had to invent on the spot, from what to call things, the slang used by the migrant farm workers, the politics of company and workers, as well as the politics of a most literal form of corporate warfare. Since no one else had beat me to the punch on establishing some of these details, Mike awarded me dibs and let them stand; other things, like the slang term used by the Homo sapien majority for Neanderthals were already set so the one I dreamed up was changed. On the other hand, my term for Homo sapiens used by my Neanderthal character was left as I wrote it.

(Oh, and Mike also chopped about fifteen hundred or two thousand words from my draft that really tightened the story up something fierce. Thank you, doctor!)

So, just six days to create a whole world? Not nearly enough time to do the job right. But it does explain the Kardashians.

Pangaea is now available in digital and print editions.

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.

And starting today, you can find Lost Days for yourself–either at Amazon.com (paperback or Kindle) or BN.com (paperback). So step right up, my friends…the Renaissance awaits!

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.

Of course, Lost Days isn’t only about a papal decree in 1582. It’s about monsters and demons and blood and death, and magic, and courage, and crazy schemes…and even love.