The This Absurd Place series has its roots in a notebook from the author’s college days, nearly twenty years ago.

In that notebook were scribbled the first four chapters of what became A Strange Journey through and Absurd Place, along with a few poor drawings of some of the characters.  The story included little more content than a man named Frank Benton being accidentally transubstantiated to a parallel universe where other people dressed and acted strangely.  In those notebook scribbles, Frank does get attacked by The Pink Bunny, he does witness a showdown between The Cowboy and The Sumo which involves a piece of wood, and he is then found by The Captain out in the desert, taken to the Village, and introduced to the Council.  That’s about as far as the story got.

As an aside: Frank Benton was the name that Bennett’s employer’s accountant heard him say his name was to fill out his W-4.  Tax season, that year, was interesting.  And Bennett really didn’t know that transubstantiation was a word specific to religion, and used it incorrectly in those scribbles.  He believes this a result of the time his mother tried to make him Catholic.

A few years later, Bennett graduated from college with a degree in environmental science and went to work.  He continued to write, and even tried a few times to make something more out of those pages in his old notebook, but never managed.

About 14 years later, in winter, Bennett left his lucrative and well-developed career in environmental consulting because it was making him miserable.  He lined up some part-time work for spring and told everyone he knew to leave him alone and tried to finish several ongoing, serious stories.  What happened instead was that he picked up those old notebooks and wrote Strange Journey over a period of three weeks.  The characters became Personae, their names Titles, and that piece of wood one of the Five Sacred Artifacts.  His use of capitol letters became profound.  This Place was made into a multiverse where the expectations and requirements of life didn’t occur, and everyone was just happy to be themselves.

Strange Journey was meant to be a stand-alone story.  About three-quarters of the way though writing it, Bennett discovered that it was intended to be the first in a series of stories about This Place.  Later that winter, Exploration! was written.  Over the next year, the two stories were revised, edited, mulled over, rejected by literary agents, and eventually self-published.  Tiny Bugs’ Poo came along in their wake.

The author is still trying to push those other, serious books along.  That is, at least, when he is not writing book four in the This Absurd Place series, The Good Ship Ill Repute.