Covenant City - How One Novel Got Made

My upcoming book is about a boy and his dog. The boy is an orphaned teen living in a near-future Richmond, Virginia, which the White House has made the prototype for an all-white neo-nationalist society and renamed Covenant City. The dog is fluffy and the boy’s best friend. So I guess the book’s genre is speculative fiction, and maybe it’s a young adult book, too. Though the coming-of-age theme and curse words and sex might bump it up to a “new adult” or even just adult slot. Anyway.

Rather than recount the plot here, thought it might be fun to look back at the experiences that coalesced into this tale, maybe as one example of where fiction comes from. For me, in this case, mostly thievery.

In 2024, I published two books, a biographical novel called The Night Doctor of Richmond and a personal history called WWII Mortarman, about my father’s experiences in the European Theater during that war. Wondering what to do next and sickened by the Presidential election results, I first set out to attempt a political cartoon a day, posted to a BlueSky account benttrumpeter.bsky.social). I’m no artist, the sketches were primitive, but trying to satirize the Trump Administration’s atrocities proved somehow gratifying. I made it all the way to his 100^th Day on the job before giving it up under the weight of cartooning (a lot of the burden trying to come up with something original that professional cartoonists had not already claimed). Now, on that Bluesky account, I share cartoons that pop up on the web, make one myself occasionally, and that’s it. (Harrowing to scroll backwards through this past year-plus, though, a nightmarish calendar of what’s happened to the U.S. so quickly).

My wife Christine and I went to Spain last spring, our first ever visit there. We were in Madrid for their brief total power blackout and rented a car for a week touring Andalusia’s magnificent historic cities. On our return home, no longer cartooning, I fell back into my doom-scrolling habit and wondered if there was some way all that anxiety could be put to good use. I signed up to volunteer with the local chapter of the International Rescue Committee, marched in all the protests, but wanted to write something, damn it.

Here’s where the fiction spider began to spin her web. Dazzled as I was by our holiday in Spain, I checked out a ton of books from the library on the Medieval Muslim era, the Inquisition, and the Civil War. I re-read George Orwell’s droll Spanish Civil War memoir Homage to Catalonia and, recalling that Hemingway had loved Spain, re-read the Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then all of his Spanish books, including the non-fiction bullfighting tomes, along with a couple biographies focused on his experiences in Spain.

By pure dumb luck – which is always my preferred what next to read style – I moved on to a couple of the American hard-boiled detective novelists (all of whom owe their careers to cribbing Hemingway’s sparse prose and tough guy male stance) Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, burning through several of their pulp triumphs. Oh, gotta add in another key novel of last summer, Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, his style too a chip off the old Hem block. And up in the attic, I came across the paperback Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey that was assigned in college, many of its yellowed pages underlined in red ink by my 19-year old hand.

I never know where a story’s headed at the start. I’m not an outliner, like to let the characters lead me on. The unfolding of that mystery is the chief benefit of sitting on my ass and typing all morning, in case you were wondering. All summer, I’d been struck by what happened in the Spanish blackout. What do people do when the power, even the Internet, goes out? In Madrid, they went to the park and enjoyed a brief Monday off work (that gentle shrug instantly winning my heart). But what if the power stayed out, what then? Could I make something of that?

So I sort of had a clue. Here’s how all that reading went into the blender that came out as Covenant City. The notion arose of attempting a hard-boiled style swiped from MacDonald and the rest. Ditch the adjectives, first person past tense, show not tell kind of thing. Okay, that could be a fun experiment, but what’s the story? I’d been struck by the opening of Hemingway’s WWI novel A Farewell to Arms that simply describes a winding stream outside his window, the weather and trucks going by. So I thought, okay, and then on a walk with our dog Buddy, that simple page of scribble blossomed into a sketchy plot. What if a blackout signaled a new civil war? And what if I stole the plot of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which centers on a ragtag crew of rebels attempting to blow up a bridge, and framed the plot around that idea? One of the things I loved about that novel (and A Farewell to Arms, too) was how the actions of a few people on the outskirts of battle implied the whole war, just as one infers a dystopia in The Man in the High Castle through one average joe’s experience.

As Buddy lay at my feet, an orphaned late teenaged white boy (his personality a mix of my two sons) and his dear pup emerged to tell my tale, and it seemed appropriate (and easy) to set that tale right here in Richmond, the home of the Confederacy and as likely a place as any to launch what the Trump team would so dearly like to see, a homegrown white Christian nation, as J.D. Vance would put it. So there was my civil war, rebels struggling in the Chesterfield County hinterlands against the new Covenant City. I had a hard-boiled style to play with, a goofy protagonist (and his pup), a plot stolen from Hemingway (always steal from the best), a setting that I know like the back of my hand (oh, what’s that new freckle?), and the terrifying daily news about ICE assaults, AI, autonomous robots, trad wives, measles, climate change, military invasions, Trump worship, End Times and other neo-nationalist yearnings from which to speculate a near-future that some might call a utopia. And then, just for fun, chose to add a little classical spice, sprinkling updated versions of Odysseus’ many ordeals into the mix.

By Thanksgiving I was done with a readable draft. Chris and friends kindly pored through it and responded with edits that kept me busy for the past couple months, son Stephen created a cool cover, and soon – right now projecting May 1^st – I’ll hold some kind of book launch, maybe at a brewery here in town. So, that’s one way that a novel gets written, at least this novel by this writer. Believe me, I didn’t go into all this background to pretend that Covenant City is some kind of brilliant masterpiece. It’s a coming of age novel with a little romance and a noir-appropriate slam-bang ending. One more tale about a boy and his dog, set amidst an upside down America we're thisclose to already. It's been a trip.

Btw, in case you may be interested, you can pre-order the e-version on Amazon already. Paperback out soon. As our dear leader would say, thank you for your attention to this matter. Read on, friends.

The book cover my son Stephen made.