I’ve written a few (I dunno, maybe ten? A couple more?) stories in the same “swamp gangster” setting that I first posted here back in February of 2016, a post I just called “fiction experiments”at the time. I used that swamp gangster setting to support me through multiple flash fic challenges that year. Those additional stories changed the world a bit from that first post. It has grown more since then.

Despite the fact that the setting is fueled by my own read on a world that’s deep into the suffering imposed by a climate crisis, something about the stories I’ve written for that setting usually gives me hope. I think it comes back to how characters stand up for each other, and how they treat those who would try to screw others over. That social dynamic is, in some ways, fueled by my experience of growing up in Vermont.

These swamp gangsters are pro-social, even when they’re in the business of selling drugs to the community (cue Black Dynamite). They take care of others. They protect their community members (form each other and from the larger world). They lend a helping hand. Why?

I don’t have a good explanation, beyond “anything else would depress me too much” or maybe “I grew up in Vermont.”

The first seems pretty clear, but for the second… let’s go on a side jaunt, for context: