Fiction, Novella
Buy it, review it!
A Great African Nation Has Risen in North America. But Something Is… Wrong.
A crime and mystery story set in an alternative world
This 99 cent Kindle book is a novella and teaser for a novel I’m working on called Restive Souls, an alternative history novel that takes place in a world where the United States does not exist because the colonial rebels lost the Revolutionary War, not in small part as a result of a series of concurrent slave rebellions.
Those slaves are rewarded by the British with full emancipation at the end of the war, which, ahem, changes things a bit.
The first novel of what I hope will be a…
Restive Souls Shortie
Fiction for a Broken Country
When I went to sleep last night, everything was normal.
When I woke up, everything was different. Everything was Black. But not like, hip hop Black, really.
Just, well, Black. Black culture, everywhere. With lots of Native American culture mixed in. And people referred to Native Americans as First Settlers.
Maybe I should backtrack a little here. Because none of that was apparent to me until I had been awake for several hours.
When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. A nice little house but it wasn’t really mine. And yet, I had a sense that it…
Racism, Major League Baseball
In “The Trial of Summary James”, Joshua Gibson’s Major League status was never in doubt
In my novella, The Trial of Summary James, a bat with Josh Gibson’s signature plays a prominent role, sadly, in the death of the character that triggers the trial on which the title of the novella is based.
So I thought it was cool that Major League baseball conferred Major League status today on baseball players from the Negro Leagues. This means that their stats go into the official Major League record books.
It is estimated that Gibson hit 800 or so home runs. …
Alternative History, Fiction
The alternative history behind Restive Souls (subject to change)
This is the timeline for the Restive Souls trilogy. It is a work in progress and is subject to change as the novel and/or series develops. Let’s see if you history buffs can notice when the changes begin!
Book One of the trilogy is centered around John Honeyman and the Battle of Trenton, the Battle for Charleston (Charles Town in the novel), and the Savannah Wars of the 1820s.
April 19, 1775
British defeated at Concord.
March 1776
American rebels besiege Boston, forcing the British to withdraw.
June 28, 1776
British take Charles Town in the Battle of Fort Sullivan.
August 1776
British take New York.
December 14, 1776
Hessians arrive at Trenton.
December 18, 1776
…
Fiction — Restive Souls
These are the congregations that play key roles in the “Restive Souls” timeline.
Major congregations within the Restive Souls timeline as of this writing:
Notes
*Note: The Carolina Union Constitution requires all congregations to be Christian, but this rule is routinely ignored for Jewish congregations, as well as a number of Native American congregations.
**Historical note: The United Methodist Congregation of Christ’s Union was formed out of segregation concerns after the Savannah Wars of 1820–23 (described in the second half of the novel, Restive Souls). The congregation combined the African Methodist Congregation of Christ’s Union with the Anglican Methodist Congregation of…
Alternative History, Racism
For the novel I am working on, Restive Souls (you can get a sneak peek here), I wanted to create a world where Blacks played key roles in governing and operating the nation.
I wanted a world where Blacks in North America not only were equal partners throughout the economic, social, and jurisdictional strata of the continent but actually were central to defining the strata itself.
The only way to do that was to create an entirely different world, one where the colonies lose the Revolutionary War and the British reluctantly reward the slaves who helped them by emancipating them.
…
Restive Souls Alternative History
By Emmet Bolo
The repeal of slavery by the British Crown through the Cornwallis Code in 1778 following the end of the Colonial Rebellion initiated a mass migration to the Carolinas so that by 1800 there were roughly 450,000 people of African descent in the Christ Union environs alone. They came from the Caribbean, Africa, and the winter states of New England.
These migrants quickly spread out and overran the plantations that had dominated the Carolina provinces before the war. The skirmishes that resulted from this massive land transfer were not always bloodless, obviously. But many were, thanks to the…
Restive Souls — Historian Emmet Bolo
Just before Emmet Bolo died, he claimed to be 254 years old, which is ludicrous enough that many people have wondered how many people he actually was. Was he in truth several individuals spanning generations? The answer likely perished with Bolo, who complicated matters by producing a photograph he alleged was a self portrait taken in 1830.
Who, or what, was Emmet Bolo?
Of course, if he was one person, that brings up the question of how he managed to live 120 or so years longer than the oldest human in modern history.
The steadfast claim of his massive fan base is that he was directly…
Restive Souls — Web Story
July 4, 1777
Occramer Marycoo felt a tear fill the corner of his eye when he saw the decapitated corpse hanging from the church bell tower. The body had been burned and reduced to a torso, the limbs and head severed, before becoming this sacrilege next to the tower’s bells, which the fiends had rigged to ring in order to draw attention to their heathen act. The tower’s conjuratory, normally a place for religious observance, had become a place to observe mankind’s most ghoulish instincts.
It was particularly galling to Occramer, a man of music, whose compositions were played in…
Restive Souls — Alternative History by Emmet Bolo
by Emmet Bolo
When Ransom Cane discovered the hideous Phalaris Bull in Savannah and led the Seminole Nation to its rout of Elliot Fae and his militia during the Savannah Wars of 1820–1823, history generally records Fae’s bloody and costly defeat as the final end to slavery.
Savannah at that time was a thriving port governed by a ruthless dictator outside the law of the nation as a whole. His antics were tolerated largely because he was able to keep his thriving Savannah River basin slave economy hidden from view. Such is the story as recorded by popular history.
The…
Restive Souls
Website for the upcoming novel, Restive Souls.
