Children of Woodvale
Taking place in the fictional town of Woodvale, New Jersey, this series chronicles the lives and adventures of teenagers growing up surrounded by periods of intermittent warfare between gangs and vigilantes, driven by powerful technology of dubious origin. Different books visit the Woodvale Universe at two general points in time: the start of the vigilante lineage (1997) and the end (2029), with more coverage currently falling into the latter timeframe. Children of Woodvale basically asks the question: what if your high-school social drama had real feudal stakes? What if all your video-game-inspired math class daydreams came true and the implications played out to their logical conclusions?
I was a nine-year-old fourth-grader when I wrote the first of these stories. At its inception, the series was generically called School Kids, and it was partly written on lined paper and partly typed in a kid’s version of Microsoft Word that started up with an animation of a purple cartoon man crashing off an unfinished roller coaster. I made heavy use of pictures and glittery text, but underneath the gimmicks, I saw myself crafting a more interesting version of my own life, where my classmates (it would be inaccurate to call them my friends) and I unraveled local mysteries and traveled to fantastic places. It was only much later, looking back over everything in my adulthood, that I started to dig past the real-world names and references I’d grafted onto my story visions and ask myself who these people I’d been writing about really were, in their own right and their own context. Part of what’s made Children of Woodvale so much fun for me has been that process of discovery, and the realization that Woodvale and its inhabitants were never very much like anything in my world at all, give or take a few similarly laid-out roads.
As I graduated from elementary school to junior high, then high school, the characters in the Woodvale Universe aged with me, and every time my interests and perspective changed enough, I’d fork off into a new set of stories. I put School Kids aside in 8th grade to write about the vigilante Crimson Twig, and then, I put the Crimson Twig stories on hold in 10th grade to write New School Kids, a continuation of the original School Kids after a two-year time skip. The second School Kids iteration turned into four more sequential books, with a fifth most of the way drafted and plenty more stories planned. I was able to square both eras of School Kids with the Crimson Twig series, keeping everything canon, when I examined the conceptual overlap between them and it dawned on me that I hadn’t just been trying and retrying plot elements from different angles while I developed as a writer: I’d been setting one continuity up as the other’s past. Thus, the Crimson Twig stories came to anchor 1997 Woodvale, and the later School Kids stories formed the core of 2029 Woodvale, with the first run of School Kids slotting in as references to the characters’ childhoods.
But I still wasn’t satisfied. From 2006 to 2016, every time I wrote a new Woodvale Universe book, I’d end up going back to edit all the previous ones because of new angles and truths I only came to see from the vantage point of the latest story. Eventually, that made me stop and ask myself: have I not really been writing four or five separate books all this time? Does the way I’ve been working, with no element of any existing text necessarily set, suggest that I’ve actually been thinking of the series to date as one huge book? Taking that idea and running with it, in 2017, I pulled all four of the second iteration School Kids volumes offline and combined them, letting them change each other out of chronological order as much as they wanted, following plot arcs and threads forwards, backwards, and sideways to put the stories into a kind of multi-way conversation with themselves. Finally, with so much connectivity I’d never have found using any other method laid out before me, I rode the momentum into what was once the unfinished fifth individual volume of the series, and the result was The Epiphany of Mark Daley: a collection of ten revamped and smoothed-out stories, the first true cornerstone of the Woodvale Universe. In 2019, I also launched a recontextualized but otherwise unchanged version of Night of the Crimson Twig (together with its even more bizarre prequel, Day of Freedom, also preserved in junior high glory as the canonical work of its own main character), and all four individual School Kids books will be available again, plus the previously unseen fifth, alongside Epiphany in September 2024. One of the beauties of being a self-publisher is that I can give myself and my readers the option of seeing a series of spines on the bookshelf, or one giant tome on the coffee table.
As long as I’m alive, I expect there will be more books added to the Woodvale Universe, and I already know what two of them are (possibly three), but that’s all I’ll say for now.