When Fiction Becomes Fact

Back in 2015, I published a book... Project Hermes.  (First published as Bloodflow.)  

It's the little things that kill

The highest levels of the government believe Project Hermes is the best way to control America’s immigration problem. A simple microchip carrying a citizen’s information will allow officials to sort out who belongs—and who doesn’t. Harmless.

Unless the chip carries more than just information.

Agent Miranda Kruz of the Terrorism Task Force has reason to believe something is very wrong with Project Hermes. People are dying and the clues all point to a microchip implant. But Randi’s superiors don’t want anything or anyone interfering with their pet project. They’re threatening her job, her loved ones, and her life to keep her from revealing their secret. With the help of medical examiner, Vic Hammond, and electronics engineer, Jack Davis, Randi has to uncover the truth and make it public before anyone else is targeted for death.

Locating the madmen behind these executions will be hard enough—stopping them might just be impossible.

Today, I saw this headline about a Swedish company that's developed a microchip to prove your vaccine passport status.  Umm, not only no, but hell no.  That's some scary shit right there, folks.

Microchipping people.  Not just fiction anymore.  Of course, I couldn't have conceived of this pandemic and the lengths certain people would go to with it six years ago, so the chip I came up with is designed to hold your citizenship status... and so much more... but the idea's the same.  

By the way, Project Hermes will be available in Kindle Unlimited for another month.  After that, it'll go wide.  Read it for free with your KU subscription today.  Or pick up a Kindle copy.  Or, if you're anti-Amazon, keep an eye out for when it goes live everywhere else.

Profanity in Fiction? Hell, Yeah.

The other day I was getting ready to leave a review on Amazon when another review caught my eye.  It was a one-star and it went kinda like this:  'Littered with profanity.  I won't read any author who isn't intelligent enough to write without profanity.'

My first thought was 'well, honey, you read this one'.

My second thought was 'aren't you precious?'

My third thought?  'Who in their right mind read the blurb for this book and thought there would be no profanity?'

I mean, it was a suspense with a gritty, take no shit from anyone, hardass main character - which was pretty obvious from the blurb.  He had to deal with lowlifes and gangbangers and scum.  And she (I assume it was a she) thought there would be no swearing?  Oh, for pity's sake.

Personally, I didn't notice an overly large amount of profanity in the book.  It didn't stand out to me.  Which is how you should have swearing in your work.  It should flow naturally.  If you're throwing naughty words into your work for effect, it won't flow right and readers can tell. 

And if you're writing about life and reality and bad things happening, your work should probably have profanity.  Because, let's face it, people swear.  A lot. 

Of course, it should fit with the book you're writing.  I mean, if your book is set in Amish country and the characters are Amish, then profanity wouldn't fit.  Derp.  And if you're writing a fantasy or SF or something, you may have to make up swearwords to fit the world.  (DJ Salisbury - our very own Deb - does a most excellent job of this in her fantasy world.) 

Thinking about it now, the person who left that review probably read two pages, found an f-bomb, and got up on her high horse.  Wrote a one-star review to show how virtuous she was and went about her day patting herself on the back for her good works.  Bleh.

I hope she doesn't pick up my books.  Especially Sleeping Ugly - which is probably the most profanity-laced of my books.  But yeah, there's profanity in most of them.  Naturally.

They're Just Stories

I read something yesterday that had me kinda sitting here with my jaw dropped.  Apparently some anonymous romance writer had sent Dear Abby a letter asking for advice about her husband.  You see, he reads her books and then thinks she's writing about her own experiences... I guess ones not with him. 

Too bad for her.  Lucky for me, my husband doesn't harbor the same lunacies, or he'd be sleeping with one eye open for the rest of his life.  LOL

We write fiction.  Sure, there are real things that happened to me woven into the threads of all my stories.  But that's just it - they're woven in until no one but me knows what was real and what was imaginary, and sometimes I can't remember where one ends and the other begins.  I take a bit from here and a bit from there and I make a whole new thing.

It's like painting.  Artists use a variety of colors to make something new.  A green they brush on next to a blue with a little black and maybe some yellow, and you've got a tree.  All the individual paints are still there, but they don't look like themselves anymore. 

Or it's like creating a tapestry.  Different color threads come together under the weaver's hand to make a picture in cloth.

I make pictures in words.  And that's all they are.  Pictures.  Hubs realizes this.  Thank goodness for that.  I'm truly sorry for any writers out there whose family members don't understand.  I'm also sorry for the readers who think they see reality in the stories we create.  They're just stories. 

I hope you enjoy them.

Character Profile: Meet Ezekiel ben Aron

Ezekiel ben Aron

born: before Atlantis sunk beneath the waves, an original Israelite

Hair: curly black
Eyes: brown
Height: 6'
Weight: slim

Year of changing: I'm not sure they had calendars back then
Creator: Unknown

Marital status: currently unmarried
Djinn status: Free
Reason for status: He's says 'it's a long story', but I think he'd just prefer not to say.

Current residence: Mansion, south of Denver, CO
Current employment: Owner and proprietor, B.A. Security

Known associates: Hans and Frank (his bodyguards), Mary Killigrew, Jo Mayweather

Pets: After what he's seen and what he knows, he prefers not to have pets.

Write What You Know, But...

In the writing world, there's this simple statement we're all supposed to follow:

Write What You Know

So, since what I know from personal experience is probably pretty boring to the rest of the world, I took what I knew and I embellished it, added to it, and fictionalized it.  What came out became Accidental Death.

I took the wild imaginings of the wife of a city manager and put them on paper. And I had some wild imaginings. Especially after one of Hubs' acquaintances died of a heart attack.  Thus Jillian and Scott's backstory came to life. 

When a local man was found dead in his garage from an apparent suicide, I began to wonder how easy it would be to commit a murder in a town where the police weren't that well trained and weren't exactly inclined to investigate crimes.  And thus the plot was born.

When my own neighbor almost accidentally killed me, my daughter, and Kira cat, by allowing her guests to run their RV all morning next to my house where the tailpipe was pointed toward my less-than-sealed laundry room - a piece of the pie fell into place.  (Fun day.  Lucky for me, I noticed I was getting woozy and that the house stank of exhaust.)

And the book that would eventually become Accidental Death was born.  

This is the book that comes closest to 'write what you know', but...

Everything I knew has been changed to suit the fiction.  None of the residents of Serenity are based on the residents of the town where I lived.  I took pieces from all the people I've ever met where their pieces might fit into this scenario.  I used snatches from this person and bits from that, added some stuff, twisted some stuff, and created the characters that populate my book.

Because that's what writing fiction is.  It's making stuff up in your head and putting it down.  Otherwise it's memoir.  Or loosely veiled non-fiction - which is totally not my style.  (Despite the one agent who wrote across a rejection letter years ago - for a totally different book - that I ought to write non-fiction and if I did he'd be happy to look at it.)

Oh, and Jillian is not me.  And Scott is not Hubs.  I played with real bits from us to make them more real, but in the end, they're their own people and so are we.

How much of your favorite writers do you suspect is in their writing?  Or do you think it's like Alfred Hitchcock, who had cameos in the movies he made?  (Stephen King does it, too, but Hitchcock did it first.)

Making a Few Things Clear

I got into an interesting discussion with a reader the other day that showed I should probably make a few things clear for the reading public.

1)  Dying Embers is entirely a work of fiction.  I made all this shit up in my head and while I may have borrowed a few minor character traits from people I've met in my life-travels, they're scattered throughout and no one character has any resemblance as a whole to anyone I've ever met.

2)  I have never been cheated on.  I've only been married once, and my husband is so totally faithful that even when some ass started a rumor, I laughed my ass off.  The only cheating I ever encountered was that one dude in college who slept with a chick at a party when he was supposed to be my boyfriend.  I dropped him like the sack of dirt he was, but I never cared enough about him to even wish him dead.

3)  I have never killed anyone.  Not that I haven't thought about it, and my imagination does run wild, but I do know right from wrong, and no matter how much some people may deserve a little payback, I would never follow through.  Hell, people, I swerve to avoid running over frogs.  The only thing I kill with any amount of glee are brown recluse spiders.  Those suckers deserve to die.  And venomous snakes. 

4)  Neither Jace nor Emma is modeled after me, or anyone else I know. 

If the story you read makes it seem like I've been there, then thank you.  That means I've done my job as a writer.  And yes, while the common mantra in the writing community is 'Write what you know', it isn't the case here.  I make shit up and write it down.

I hope you all enjoy the shit I've made up.  I'm having a blast letting my imagination run wild and then sharing the stories with you.

Oh, and I almost totally forgot!  Deb Salisbury and DL Hammons need to email me (besanderson at gmail dot com) your snail mail addresses so I can send you both bookmarks - just cuz.  =o)

True Crime Friday - Fictional Crime

As you all know, or certainly suspect, I am a fan of true crime shows.  I like figuring out who committed the crime.  I love seeing them face justice.  I really love all the forensics and the investigation and the personalities involved in catching a killer.

But does this translate to fictional crime dramas?

Well, yes and no.  Certain shows I love, and others I can't tolerate.  It's a personal preference thing, so I'm not going to get into which shows are which.  I do love the ones that tend to stick closer to the reality of crime fighting.  And I'll drop a show if they stray too far from that, or the ones that smush the investigation into a tiny part of the show so they can focus on the drama going on in the lives of the characters. 

I don't watch shows like that for the interpersonal drama.  I used to watch soap operas for that, and I'm over it.

There were a couple shows I really loved that went off the air years ago: Homicide: Life on the Street and Under Suspicion.  The latter didn't last long, but I thought it was the best thing on TV.  And despite the write up at IMDB there, I didn't get the whole "...the unending prejudice faced by the only female detective in a male-dominated police squad..."  She was just a tough chick doing her damnedest to catch criminals.  The former was just gritty and felt 'real' to me. 

After all the true crime I've watched, though, I don't know if either show would hold the same appeal.  It seems true crime has kind of ruined fictional crime show for me.  (Not fictional crime books, though.  If that makes any sense.  Maybe the fictional crime writers try harder to get it right.  Or maybe I get sucked into the story and don't pay as much attention to whether all the procedures are as correct as they should be. :shrug:)

How about you?  Do you watch both fictional and true crime television?  Can you separate the two?  And finally, how do you feel if a writer doesn't get it exactly right?