Genre: Fiction - Contemporary American Drama
Sub-genres: Literary fiction, tragicomedy
Audience: General / mass market
Word Count: ~110,000
Status: Ready for Submission

Provocative questions about radical personal freedom are at the heart of Hash 207, my novel of contemporary American drama. The characters discover the costs of exile and the benefits of belonging, as they strike personal balances of freedom and obligation…while trying to stay true to themselves. Their personal journeys unfold as they work against a common foe: the sweeping changes in a city that seems to have no place for them in its future.

The antagonists in this urban drama are nuanced and complex, maddeningly imbued with valid arguments for their treachery, and individually motivated by self-interest and civic pride. The most vexing foes are those who believe they’re the good guys.

Our tragically flawed heroes just want to pursue love and art, and figure out their lives, in peace.

Hash 207 is authentically local to its setting—Portland Maine—while exploring universal themes of identity, belonging, and the dirty underside of gentrification. It is written for a wide audience, and easily marketed to readers 18-35 years old…but not limited to that range.

As rising fortunes reinvent their city, good luck for some pushes those farthest down at heel to the streets…then into the shadows where danger and revolution lie. This common story is uniquely explored through the story of Jaimie and his friends’ guerilla campaign to defend a tavern, their home, and the city they love…while figuring out, for themselves, how to belong to competing communities.

The title is a nod to the climactic event, its setting (Maine, area code 207), and a reference to the Hash House Harriers, to which the fictional characters belong. As rendered in Hash 207, this group provides fertile ground for self-exploration through outlaw behavior, in a setting rather far removed from the norms of the society that created it—just as the loosely organized, real world HHH does in cities around the world. (A great marketing tie-in.)

There is hardly a better place to explore radical personal freedom than at the hash…

…or to explore, through fiction, what is at stake when you spend too much time beyond the margins of society.