New Book – Lake Dungeoneva
How It All Started…,
Glad you asked. Over the next few weeks I’m going to start posting on Lake Dungeoneva. Insights, inspirations, everything to give you, the reader, a better idea of what the book is about. It begins here. If you read the first post for ‘Roswell: Book Of The Dead‘ – and I hope you did – you’re already one step ahead here.
Lake Dungeoneva was inspired by a trip my wife and I took in the fall of 2021. I’m originally from Belvidere, Illinois, but now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We try to visit northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin at least once a year, time permitting.
On this particular trip, we flew into Chicago, drove to Freeport, Illinois, to visit family, and then continued north into Wisconsin, exploring Milwaukee, Madison, the Wisconsin Dells, Lake Geneva, and everywhere in between.
We typically follow our usual routine: hitting as many destinations as possible during our limited time, cramming everything in, and then flying back to Albuquerque. This time, however, something about the Wisconsin Dells and surrounding area—especially Lake Geneva—sparked my imagination.
Lake Geneva holds a special place in the wargaming and tabletop RPG community as the birthplace of wargaming and Dungeons & Dragons, which I’ve been playing since around 1979. One of the first things I did as a teenager with a driver’s license was make the pilgrimage to Lake Geneva to spend my hard-earned McDonald’s paycheck on games and miniatures at the world-famous Dungeon Hobby Shop. I still game to this day, and I still have everything in my collection that I bought from that shop.
For me, this was more than a trip to a store in some city — it was a pilgrimage, a spiritual experience. This was ground zero for gaming, and I respected it as such, even as a kid.
I remember one trip in particular…,
I arrived at Lake Geneva, parked, and walked to the shop. Taped to the door was a xeroxed piece of paper advertising a cat for adoption—Ernie Gygax’s cat! I spent a good deal of time perusing all the store had to offer, walked up to the counter with a handful of gaming booty, and inquired about the cat.
“Is the cat still available?” I asked the cashier.
“Uh, alas, no, she’s been adopted. But Ernie’s upstairs—Gary might be too.”
Honestly, I don’t know what I would’ve done if the cat was available. I’m sure I would’ve taken her, I was that kind of guy, still am, I love animals. My parents wouldn’t have been happy but, hell, I would’ve had a Gygax pet!
This was during a time when, if I remember correctly, the TSR offices were located above the shop.
The cashier looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to ask about Gary and Ernie — the equivalent of Zeus and Apollo in the gaming world. I was sixteen, maybe seventeen, a small-town kid who was naive and shy.
I never asked to meet them, though I should have, that I regret not doing. Both men have passed away. Knowing how friendly and down to Earth they were, especially with fans and fellow gamers, I have no doubt they would’ve taken a break from work and come downstairs to meet me.
I eventually met Gary Gygax in the late ’80s at a bookstore/gaming store in Rockford. He was signing autographs, and I was the only person there. My father and I spent about half an hour with him, just shooting the breeze about everything from games to books to movies. Gary was amazing.
In 2022, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ernie Gygax for a series of articles I wrote about the intersection of music and gaming for New Noise Magazine. I consider that series among the best work I’ve done to date.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the book, Lake Dungeoneva.
During our 2021 trip, I stood looking out at Geneva Lake and wondered what secrets might lie beneath its surface — secrets no one knows about, secrets that were deliberately hidden away from prying eyes. What if they were arcane and eldritch in origin?
Lining the shores on both sides of the lake are mansions owned by the famous and mega-wealthy. I thought to myself, “what kind of secrets did they harbor? What if past owners conducted occult rituals inside them or had powerful connections to government and military entities, both foreign and domestic?”
That thought alone was it, that’s all I needed to begin another book.
When our vacation ended and we returned home, I started writing. My head was filled with ideas. Roswell: Book Of The Dead was still very much a work in progress—I wasn’t even close to finishing it—and yet here I was, writing something new. I still wasn’t sure what it would become.
That’s how Lake Dungeoneva began. About eighteen months later, I took the book’s creative direction in a new direction and decided to tie it together with Roswell: Book Of The Dead. Until then, it had been a standalone project.
In the coming weeks, I’ll discuss how I developed some of the stories within Lake Dungeoneva, how I decided to include some of my own personal paranormal experiences in the book, and how music and movies (‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Late Night with the Devil,’ for example) provided inspiration as well.
