Have you ever had a weird experience that led to an improvement in your work? (like something came up at an event or on tv that was oddly timely.)
Rules:
1. Link your blog to this hop.
2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.
<!– start InLinkz code –>
<div class=”inlinkz-widget” data-uuid=”8ac58cfb578f40db912c49b841fbddee” style=”width:100%;margin:30px 0;background-color:#eceff1;border-radius:7px;text-align:center;font-size:16px;font-family:’Helvetica Neue’,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif”>
<div style=”padding:8px;”><p style=”margin-bottom:15px;”>You are invited to the <strong>Inlinkz</strong> link party!</p>
<a href=”https://fresh.inlinkz.com/p/8ac58cfb578f40db912c49b841fbddee” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” style=”padding:5px 20px;background:#209cee;text-decoration:none;color:#efefef;border-radius:4px;”>Click here to enter</a></div></div>
<span style=”display: none;”>http://a%20href=</span>
<!– end InLinkz code –>
WordPress Shortcode
[fresh_inlinkz_code id=”8ac58cfb578f40db912c49b841fbddee”]
Unique URL
https://fresh.inlinkz.com/p/8ac58cfb578f40db912c49b841fbddee
Answering the Question
Absolutely, I’ve had weird experiences where my books have coincided with reality as expressed in the news.
Transformation Project, my apocalyptic series, was and (kind of) continues to be based on front-page news. At the start of Life As We Knew It, I had Shane aware that there were riots in some part of the United States. In 2014 when I was writing LAWKI, I looked at the news and there were no riots right then, but it was only a few years after the attacks on the Teaparty and after a half-decade of the Obama administration that caused soaring food, fuel and medical insurance costs, constantly ramping up regulation, four additional wars (and two expanded) and a constant attack on the values of the middle class, so I found myself asking “Why aren’t there riots?” Well, there were riots a few months later when Michael Brown assaulted a police officer, who shot him in defense of his own life. I didn’t foresee racial-motivated riots and I still don’t know why we didn’t have riots over food and poliltics until President Trump was elected, but when his haters were setting cars on fire outside of his 2016 inauguration (so before he was even president), I felt vindicated. I’d seen a glimpse of the future and written about it.
Then I tried to shut out Trump’s influence on the country because I’d already destroyed the United States of America and he was nowhere in view. My final president of the United States was supposed to a corrupt man in thrall to corporations and foreign countries….
A Series of Weird Coincidents
Wait! Wow, another eerie coincidence that looks maybe a little Biden like…but my President Dodson is dead, so I haven’t really delved into it. Maybe I should.
About the time Trump became president, I was floating the idea of a flu virus with serious post-infection autoimmune consequences. I’d been kicking that around since the swine flu fizzle that happened during the Obama administration — actually before I started writing the series. Way back when The Walking Dead visited the CDC (2010), I had begun to play with a connection to the CDC for any one of my stories.
I’m not psychic so obviously I didn’t foresee Covid, but looking at the world through the media lens, it seemed likely that a virus that had been supercharged by the government would show up eventually and I made the virus have an autoimmune feature because one of my cousins is a neurologist who works with autoimmune patients. It just seemed like a good idea to pursue in writing. But when Covid happened, I did have people emailing me asking me how I knew that was coming. I didn’t. I just future-guessed and, like a lot of famous writers (Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell did it so much better than I have), I got lucky in my fictional spitballing.
An Improvement in My Work
Apocalyptic, a form of science fiction, often looks at the present news and asks “what-if?”. It’s where our stories come from. You can get really dark writing this stuff, so I had to “white pill” it a little. I made Shane (and Jazz later on) O-negative blood type just because having a universal donor in the apocalypse seems like a good idea and it humanized “the hero” when he fainted after giving blood, but then I decided he would have a treatment in his blood for the autoimmune consequences of the flu. I was spitballing, which can be really dangerous when you’re dealing with science, but just the other day, I was watching a documentary on YouTube that focused on how O-negative blood has immune-protective characteristics that seems to prevent autoimmune disorders in people with O-negative blood type.
Maybe I learned something about that in my research, but I don’t remember encountering it, so again — sometimes you just get lucky…and now I am doing some research to further that idea…coz, you know, I don’t want to end the series with no hope.
Don’t worry. The series has a couple more books to wind things down and maybe it doesn’t have an end…yet.
aurorawatcherak 