almost done with another!

I'm coming to the final pages of my epidemic thriller, a long novel that probably will see publication in December. It has been a lot of fun to write, and I've learned a lot about communicable diseases, none of it comforting. I hope to turn some of that research into blog posts over the next few months so you can be frightened by it too. ;)

Next comes a short break to catch up on reading. (Well, no, that was a lie. I never catch up on reading and certainly can't in less than a week!) And then by mid-August, I'll be revising the stand-alone post-apoc novel that's coming out in September.

I'm losing count, but I think this is the fifteenth full novel I can claim to have written. Two petered out at about 200 pages before I learned an outline was not optional for me. My first novel existed in paper form only for years, and I eventually lost it. On the computer, I have one that was drafted in 2011, and two that are new this year; all three need a revision before anyone else can see them. And eleven are published (two under a pen name), so I think that comes to fifteen full novels and two first halves. (Those partials, I'm sure, are lost to the reality of changing computer tech, but I sense that is no great loss.) I have also written well over 100 short stories, most of them ~5,000 words, a non-fiction book, and more articles for magazines and newspapers than I can remember. It feels like a lot but at the same time not enough. I wasted some years when I had given up on the NY publishing industry, and now I know I could have been writing two books a year anyway. Ah well, I didn't have a crystal ball back then, I'm sorry to say.

Which brings me back to my recurring feeling of gratitude. Thank you, Amazon, for the technology of ereaders and for giving me the right to publish and to find an audience! It's fun to connect with readers who like my kind of stories. I write the sorts of books I enjoy and wish there were more of. There aren't...so I write them!

Catching up on disaster movies

I enjoy writing my disaster novels, but while I was doing that, I avoided seeing new disaster movies so I wouldn't be contaminated by any ideas in them. For now, I'm on hiatus from writing them (though I have three more I'd like to write one day), so I ordered from my library a bunch of disaster films about topics I've already covered or never will and settled down with a bowl of olives (no popcorn) the other day, after I'd written a couple thousand new words, to have a movie marathon.

I began by re-watching the classic The Poseidon Adventure. This movie holds up in a lot of ways. The writer was a notch above most action writers, and the characters are often interesting. Oh, sure, the depiction of women is dated, and Ernest Borgnine yelled and chewed the scenery badly. But the practical special effects are cool, and isn't the Shelley Winters character wonderful? Films like this, Towering Inferno, and Airport (also a terrific book!) helped create my love of the disaster tale and probably influence me still in ways too subtle for me to be aware of.

I next watched Into the Storm, a tornado movie. As anyone who reads my novels knows, getting the science right is a top priority for me. While I understand Hollywood won't, and I don't expect much of these films, there were inaccuracies here that bothered me. They probably wouldn't have bothered me as much were I not so bored with characters and story, though. The tornadoes looked cool enough, and there was sufficient debris, but there isn't a single character to root for in the movie. It was hard for me to work up a connection to the film. Also, the "found footage" device, like shaky cam, never was any good, and it's over with, directors. Move on. The whole experience felt flat to me.

With much worse science and inaccuracies about rescue workers, who (luckily for you and me) do not steal helicopters and fail to do their jobs in order to rescue their own families, San Andreas ranked even lower on my accuracy scale, but I liked it a good deal better than Into the Storm. Admittedly, the character story was schmaltzy, but it's a disaster film. It's supposed to be! And yes, the third act dragged. But the special effects were cool, and the acting was better than it might have been, and the score helped heighten the tension. (Scores can make or break a big budget action film, I think.) I was bothered by the idea that, if you were trying to rescue your kid from Coit Tower, you'd parachute in all the way down at the baseball stadium, but I'm sure that people who have never lived in San Francisco didn't have that thought. While by no means a good movie, it was to me a painless popcorn (or, in my case, olive) movie, pure entertainment of the sort I'll entirely have forgotten in a week.

Research on emerging epidemic diseases

I am writing a novel about a pandemic, and the research for it has been fascinating and terrifying.

As people continue to overpopulate the Earth, we come into contact with animals who have been harboring diseases for possibly thousands of years, but those diseases might do the hosts no or little harm. But when we catch these diseases, they can kill us. (In a few cases, like cholera, what we see as a pathogen had a beneficial effect to its host.) People are afraid of bioterrorism...but the truth is, we don't need to be afraid of a "them" giving us diseases, for we are doing pretty darned well at doing that to ourselves.

For instance, with Machupo, a South American hemorrhagic fever, it was cutting down forests to plant monoculture farms (monoculture, the planting of a single crop, exacerbates this problem everywhere) to sell in town, when the traditional ways they made a living were taken from them. This put people in contact with mice who carried the disease and who found their way into villages they'd never before visited. The act of the morning sweeping of the home, which sends pulverized mouse droppings into the air, can infect people.With some diseases, when that infected person goes to town, he passes it on to a dozen other people, and eventually an infected person will get on an airplane, and the disease can move around the globe in a day.

It's happening in the U.S. and Australia too, so we can't think it's some sort of thing that only occurs in South America or Africa. Our own overpopulation is putting us close to animals that carry "new" diseases. (New to us, at least.) As we drive more delicate birds to extinction, opportunist birds like crows, robins, pigeons (here in North America) take over, and their droppings or saliva get on our things. We might wash our car or mow our yard and get the disease. Or a mosquito might bite a crow and bite us, and now we're ill. West Nile Virus is such a disease, carried in some crows.

You hear people sneering and saying, "Why should I care about the extinction of some damned owl?" So here's another reason to care. Because we're finding out more and more that some of these endangered animals controlled a pest, or kept an infected species in balance. So for those who can only think selfishly, that's why you'd care. Because you don't want to die by drowning in your own fluids, or crapping yourself to the point of dehydrating yourself to death, or by bleeding out of your eyeballs, which could well be the eventual punishment for such a cavalier attitude about the balance of nature.

Why should you care about saving the wetlands? Same reason. It provides a home for species that might be controlling a disease we don't even yet know is out there. When you're watching a grandchild die of one of those diseases, and you learn this is the case, might you not feel ashamed of your sneering about "save the wetlands" campaigns? (Probably not, I fear. People who do a lot of sneering at good works tend to never look in the mirror and admit wrongdoing and responsibility for their own tragedies.)

Mother Nature is full of dangers, but that's no reason to hate Nature and try to wreck eons-long balances she has developed. To save ourselves, and our children, we need to tread more carefully. We need to begin by practicing zero population growth, personally. For those who can afford to eat organic, local food grown at farms that produce several crops, that ameliorates the problem, too. Factory and feedlot meats, with the antibiotic overuse, contribute to antibiotic resistance to bacterial disease, so if you can afford antibiotic-free meat, buy that.

And when the day comes--and I guarantee you it will--that a killer pandemic is sweeping across the land, and the CDC (or the equivalent in your nation) says, "Stay home. Wear a mask. Wash your hands," do that, and without whining.

And think long and hard before you get on an airplane. If it's for a vacation, I'll bet you there are pleasant places to visit within driving distance, where the only diseases you are breathing in are the ones your family might already have.