XaW Files: Beyond Humanity (Fantasy Travel by Google Maps)

Did blogging the start of this book resuscitate the X Files franchise, and renewed interest in UFOs? I can't answer that, but the series did reawaken from thirteen years of slumber after this book's start was previewed on the greenYgrey world blog, which had developed a comedy fantasy werewolf theme. Our Andy Warhol-inspired head honcho of creation, Andy Wolfhol, disappeared in March, 2013. Over the next year, parody postcards were received in the greenYgrey world and posted on the blog bearing his unmistakable and seemingly unforgeable aW signature. He had started naming himself the ex-Andy Wolfhol, shortened by us to XaW.Just over a year later, the greenYgrey set off on this epic travel quest to try and find our Andy Warhol. Its action-packed emotional rollercoaster ride across Europe is told here in its XaW Files.It flew over North America, scene of its first comedy fantasy www ramble, mostly by Google Maps and Wikipedia. How To Remember North America was a freewheeling fun ride compared to this third complex case for the greenYgrey.Our werewolf protagonist had awoken with amnesia in British Columbia before travelling to all areas of North America, creating memorable acronyms to remember the states and territories.The D2KNOT of North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas tying the USA together at its centre was the pick of the bunch.The second of the trilogy featured Grey solo travelling around all areas of Australia to a Wizard of Oz theme, after Green and Grey had been divided by the evil Grand Council, and Grey deported to the land down under.Green and Grey were now reunited... as one were. Moreover, they had found their Y, which had grown to prominence in the middle of the greenYgrey name. The Y letter has many uses, such as being a symbol of yellow or why, and it's wordplay versatility meant it lived up to its new star status within the greenYgrey word world.For example, in Vienna we discovered that one of the main psychological streams of thought from the classic era was that humanity's spirit can survive anything as long as they think they have a reason to live: a why.This was one of many coincidences found on the travel quest to find our Andy Warhol, which itself developed a double meaning wordplay element, as more and more was learnt about POP art and its origins in Marcel Duchamp's disposable art, which developed fully exactly a century ago in 1915 according to Wikipedia. The comedy fantasy wordplay, anagrammatically starring Love the mixed-up vole, and a supporting cast of werewolfised celebrities, inspired by The Simpsons idea, share the book with writer insights, as the author describes his usually coffee-fuelled philosophy-searching process he names coffilosophy.

Punk and New Wave preceded Heavy Metal, and the rest is history. Heavy Metal music and magazines inspired me to trace rock's origins back to the 1950s, along with the youth culture movements of those times. Having a desire to see the world, and giving up on a football career to take me there, I found Jack Kerouac and the Beats' idea of hitch-hiking and hobo-living inspiring. So in 1987-88 I hitched around Europe, and used that experience to help me write this Eurotrip comedy fantasy using Google Maps and Wikipedia to inspire fictional stories involving many of the greats in European culture and philosophy. I was 11 months on the real road, while this book has taken 18 months to write, edit and publish. Between 1988 and 2014 I travelled more, gained a PhD after returning to further education and spent a decade creative writing. The first book I had published was a memoir of that first year travelling, achieving my original ambition. XaW Files is the completion of another chapter in my life: trying to help save the world while writing my life's mythology, which was another idea I borrowed from Kerouac.