Hello, everyone! I’m Todd Glider, the author of The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers, and this is my first newsletter on the subject!
First off, thanks for your interest. You, me, and we all have a million things going on, so the time that you’ve taken to check out Book of Glads Volume 1, and the time that you’re taking now to read this…thanks a lot!
As you know, the Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers is set in Philadelphia. So I thought I’d take time in this first salvo to explain a little bit about why that is, because some of the circumstances of the book’s setting relate to me, personally.
My wife Jeremie, our cat Sophie and I had been living in Europe for 13 years, and after a health scare for one of our parents in the summer of 2020, we thought, “this is the canary in the coal mine moment. Everyone is getting on in years. It is time to go home.”
We wanted to live closer to our respective parents—a quick plane ride or a train ride away—but in a city, a place where not only do you not need a car, you don’t want a car (there’s a huge difference between those two things).
We were, during the height of the pandemic, from our apartment in Spain, looking at Boston, New York, Atlanta, and DC. Then it expanded to include Baltimore and Philadelphia upon additional recommendations from friends back in the states.
The truth is that we had originally been thinking most seriously about DC. However, we decided against it after watching a super-insightful YouTube video courtesy of a woman who’d been living there for over a year.
DC, she explained, was unlike other U.S. cities in that it was more or less manufactured. It hadn’t benefited from generations of immigration like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston.
The more we looked into Philly, the more positives we found. It was abundantly walkable; there were community gardens, art museums, green spaces, and a ton of history and culture. We went for it, and landed in late January 2021.
Since I’d only been to Philadelphia once in my life 15 years ago for two hours and Jeremie had never been here, it was all super-new. On top of that, we arrived in the middle of a pandemic. The world, that winter and spring, was still shuttered, so it didn’t afford us a lot of time outside our new place. When summer rolled around, things opened up a bit. Being able to finally explore this new city was a revelation.
But beyond that, every time I move to a new place I have a tendency to romanticize it. I’ve lived in some cool, unique places, and Philadelphia is definitely cool and unique. Writing The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers was, in a way, an opportunity to learn about a new city that I’d immediately fallen in love with, and to gamify the learning. I was seeing and experiencing all of these new things, new people, and neighborhoods. In addition to giving me a sense of my own place within it, the city was giving me something substantive; it was helping me flesh out the world in which this novel and the series, The Book of Glads, is set.
On top of it being a great city, there are, of course, plot-specific reasons for Philly being the location for The Alpha Upgrade of HD Heathers, and indeed, for most of Book of Glads Volume 2, which I’m writing now—but I’ll get into that in another newsletter, coming to your Inbox soon!