Places Within the Wyrdverse

From popular resorts to ghost towns and supernatural worlds, here are bits and pieces of information about the Wyrdverse and our Earth as well.

The Stevie Ray Vaugh Statue in Austin Texas

Austin and it's iconic logo of Keep Austin Weird inspired the title of Valhalla AWOL Book one, Austin Wyrd. At the same time, the Norse concept of Wyrd is that everyone has a unique and personal place in the cosmos. This can mean destiny, fate, or something much more fluid.

Austin itself serves as a backdrop, from the raucous bars on Sixth Street, to the scenic bridges over Lady Bird Lake. If you ever make the trip, set aside an evening to watch the bat colony fly out from under one of the bridges.

Another point of interest in Austin Wyrd came from an archaeological find in Leander on the city outskirts. The Leanderthal Lady turned out to be one of the oldest burials found in North America at around eleven-thousand years old. This inspired the cave near Helstyx, the bar where Magnus works.

New Orleans, The Big Easy and Mardi Gras capital!

Book three, Freke Wyrd Voodoo, takes place in and around the Big Easy. I took a few liberties with the old government installation near the end, but it does exist albeit in a modified form. Driving through the area, we saw a horse ranch or two interspersed between the various plantations, rice farms, and other less identifiable properties.

None of those were as unidentifiable as the mangrove swamps that begin the book. When masses of floating vegetation and soil mingle with actual small isles or bits of earth, paths can change in a moment. What looks like an impassable obstacle might be clean and clear a very short while later. That makes getting lost in the mangroves a real risk.

Those aren't like the risks on Bourbon street, or almost anywhere else in the French quarter. Sure there are panhandlers, pickpockets and con artist. But your much more likely to lose your savings to the merchandise in a gift shop, or over your second beer purchase, since often there's a buy-one-get-two beers free policy. It's a real danger. Trust me. I know from personal experience.

Mexico, Inhospitable Mountains, and Aztec Pyramids

Book Two, Wyrd Gere, finds Magnus carried across the southwest United States from south Texas, across New Mexico and over to Sedona Arizona. Sedona draws tourists and enthusiasts for a variety of new age and spiritual reasons. From vortices, and odd magnetic fields, to prehistoric art, dwellings, and Aboriginal American culture, there are plenty of things to feed your soul or spark your curiousity.

From Sedona, Magnus is dragged across the border to the wild and inhospitable mountains of Mexico. Fortunately, the people who left him there didn't take supernatural endurance and toughness into account. Those mountains served as a foreboding Apache fortress of natural barriers and dangers that kept the raiders safe between raids against their neighbors. Even today, the wary are careful about travel in those areas as a badly planned trip can become quite dangerous.

A meandering journey across less stark parts of Mexico even passes some of the fascinating pyramids that dot the landscape.Those Aztec pyramids feature in several theories about rewriting ancient history in the Americas. And it's possible that one of those theories played a part in some of Book Two's plot.

You can also expect appearances from new supernatural foes, and possibly some allies, or are they foes too?