Tales From A Writer’s Life..
Not too many years ago the late great C.J. Henderson and I co-wrote a short story Prequel to Roger Zelazny’s novel, DAMNATION ALLEY titled “The Only Place To Go.” It tells of an adventure a 19-year-old Hell Tanner went on, leading his local branch of The Hell’s Angels biker gang on a hellacious and terrifying run from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, across a nightmarish post-nuclear-war landscape.
One of C.J.’s major contributions to this story is he changed my original 3rd-person POV to 1st person POV… that of a grizzled, middle-aged biker filled with a lot of hard-earned biker wisdom (a character that I quickly realized was a strong reflection of C.J. himself).
Unfortunately, our story did Not make the cut for the Roger Zelazny tribute anthology SHADOWS & REFLECTIONS (edited by Trent Zelazny and Warren Lapine).
Shortly after the rejection and just a couple of weeks before he passed away, C.J. gave me his approval to do a rewrite, changing the names of the characters, and altering a couple of important story elements to take it out of Zelazny’s Hell Tanner universe, and the result eventually was accepted into the shared-world anthology SHA’DAA INKED.
If you read the “The Only Place To Go” you should definitely recognize some familiar DNA, both C.J.’s Voice, and Roger’s conceit of post-apocalypse bikers. 🏍
C.J., you are missed old friend….
Michael H. Hanson
