Tony Bowman's Page on Redbud Revue

My latest novel, Valkyrie: The Road is now available from Amazon. Just click here. Valkyrie is two-hundred thousand pounds of armor plate, a rolling fortress travelling the road from Chicago to New Orleans in a post-apocalyptic future. Trading goods between vampire controlled Chicago and a New Orleans dominated by Vodou, the human crew of Valkyrie face werewolves, ghouls, and cannibals in the ruins of the Midwest. Hidden beneath the steel deck of the trailer is Valkyrie's true purpose: a desperate underground railroad ferrying the innocent to freedom. The crew of Valkyrie have a plan. But, the rulers of Chicago have a plan as well: a powerful vampire has been added to the crew...

Wattpad is the place to go to read free fiction on the web. Check out my page to read the lead-in short story to Nine Fingers, Nine Fingers: The Tucson Ripper. You'll also find my short story, Anaphylaxis. Soon, you'll also be able to read the free lead-in to Valkyrie: The Road, Valkyrie: Rat in the Dumpster. Tony Bowman's works on Wattpad...

My grandfather, Glenn Bowman, along with my cousin Brian Bowman seated to my right. I'm the chunky kid with the bad haircut. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two emergency surgeries. This marks the first time I’ve ever been admitted to a hospital, the first time I’ve had surgery, the first time I’ve been under anesthesia – heck, the first time I’ve had an IV. At fifty, you might say my time was past due. Both my Mother and my Aunt worked for our small town hospital during my youth. During summer breaks from college, I worked there as well. So, I’m no stranger to hospitals. I just managed to avoid going under the knife myself for as long as possible. I only have one phobia – an irrational fear of hypodermic needles. I’ve had it since I was a child.  Now, let me just tell you I cannot remember a time when I was actually hurt by a needle – it’s simply the thought of a needle entering my skin that makes me want to run away screaming. In the last two weeks, I hope I’ve...

This week, we've been witness to one of the strangest, most surrealistic Internet broohaha's to date: rabid fans attacking Avengers: Age of Ultron, and, in particular, director Joss Whedon, for the on-screen romance between comic book characters Black Widow and the Hulk. When I first heard there was a war going on over this, I thought it was a joke - oh, I was so wrong. Joss Whedon has now officially left Twitter, presumably because of the neo-quasi-sortof-feminist venom being spit in his direction because - horror of horrors - a strong female character was shown to have *gasp* a love interest. And, I mean, I completely see their point: it's ridiculous to give comic book heroes and heroines the capacity to care for one another. Right? Good grief. At the heart of their argument appears to be the idea that Black Widow doesn't need a man in her life. What exactly is wrong with a highly skilled assassin (who regularly rides motorcycles out of airplanes and perf...

I've read it is impossible for a human being to imagine their own death for more than a few seconds - something about the more primitive parts of your brain flipping a switch that says, "Forget it, dude. You're gonna live forever, man." The primitive part of my brain always sounds like Tommy Chong after a pound of weed, not sure why. We can't think in detail about our own demise. ... It's a survival mechanism: quit worrying about dying and get on with living. Like most adults with the mind of a juvenile, I've always figured the game is rigged in my favor - in short, I'm immortal. A couple of weeks ago, I started getting dizzy. I mean really, really dizzy. As in, you're six years old, just ate five chili dogs and rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair ten times. That kind of dizzy. Now, I've had this before, and I just figured I had an inner ear infection. A round of antibiotics would perk me right up, so I went to the Urgent Care. My le...

Forty years ago when I was in elementary school, there was a wonderful time of year that stretched from early December through early March. Growing up in Swords Creek, Virginia, on a dirt road meant the first December snows gave us a nice, two-inch thick ice layer above the gravel and red clay. If we were fortunate, and in the mid to late seventies we often were, this ice layer would remain in place for the better part of four months. Ice meant no school. And, no school, even for a kid who loved school, was a wonderful thing. Russell County had numerous dirt roads such as the one I lived on, many of them narrow twisting things that were hard to navigate even on a good day. A school bus had no hope of delivering cargo in ice, so the students stayed home, sometimes for six weeks at a time. Snow days were filled with sledding, sometimes down mountainsides and into ravines that make the adult in me doubt the sanity of the nine-year-old. There was the time when I hit a mogul wi...