Premium Post: A Look At Patterson, N.C. (THE WALKING WORM)
The history, geography, and economics behind the third LONG WAR novel
Here’s some behind the scenes information for my current project, The Walking Worm, which I hope to finish and Kickstart production over the summer. Beware spoilers for The Atlanta Incursion, the first sequel to The Thing in the Woods and the direct predecessor to TWW.
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At the end of The Atlanta Incursion, our hero James Daly is given the chance to fulfill his childhood dream of attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his parents’ alma mater. That dream comes at a price — it’s the carrot the manipulative Thomas Bolton dangles to recruit him to MJ-12, the infamous UFO-hunting secret government agency, and gain access to his strange psychic powers.
The Walking Worm takes place around a year later, with James on the surface part of UNC Chapel Hill’s ROTC “Tarheel Battalion” and his girlfriend Amber majoring in PR and minoring in theater. What’s going on behind the scenes is that MJ-12 is studying James’ psychic abilities, training him in things like controlling small animals and out-of-body remote viewing. Amber, who frankly is a bit of an afterthought on Bolton’s part, is basically a PR intern learning how to devise plausible-sounding alternative explanations for the insane things they deal with. Although the only real problem in James’ life is that the very religious Amber won’t move in with him, that changes when a new threat emerges from the (relatively) nearby small town of Patterson, North Carolina.
(Right now I’m about 40K words out of probably around 60K, but need to plug a new character into the earlier chapters before moving forward. Now that Nerdi Gras is done and I don’t have any cons scheduled until the end of June, I can focus on this.)
Foreground L-R: MJ-12 senior agent Thomas Bolton, the titular Walking Worm, and James Daly. Everybody else is one of the Worm’s devotees.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Patterson, get a premium Substack subscription or check out my Patreon.
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