If You Write It, It Will Happen

Yeah, I know, this sounds like a sci-fi or fantasy logline. Especially since I write fiction.

But, don’t turn away yet. I have a story to tell and I think you might find it fascinating.

When I started writing the Spies Lie series, the first book was based on a news story I saw on television. After the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Mafiya sold old cold war weapons to terrorists. This became the backstory to Bloodridge. Nothing forward looking here, just another bank that resembled the Bank of Credit and Commerce International gone amok and a surplus of weapons. Remember Clive Owen in the movie The International? Remember Nickolas Cage in Lord of War? Well, that’s Bloodridge’s backstory. The protagonist is a much better story and one I am intimately familiar with in a non-fiction setting. It made for a good read.

Then I wrote DeathByte, about nano-tech development. A microscopic device that can be swallowed and transmits what you see and what you hear. I made it up, although I have some contacts who stated that someday this weapon would become real. Just after the book was published, I learned that the weapon might already exist. It disturbed me that I might have actually divulged a tech being used in the field, but it was too late to unwrite the book.

Swiftshadow was about a spy whose identity was divulged by a mole from her own agency. After I finished the book but before it was published, Valerie Plame had her career as a spy blown to bits by a member of the Bush administration. I began to wonder it I was writing things before they actually happened.

GrayNet is just a good story about a spy who attempts to leave the business. Very hard to do, but no blowback from this book on reality as we know it. I relaxed, thinking it was just my imagination that I was prescient.

But, Baksheesh (Bribes) was about a religious fundamentalist who becomes President and decides to eliminate all Muslims and Jews by starting a war. I wrote it several years ago, and it was released last November. If you read it, Baksheesh may very well have you waking up in the middle of the night screaming. Trump? Cruz?

The most current book in the series is ProxyWar, about Russia and China’s reactions when the US Congress renegs on all our foreign debt. The result is a planned invasion of the United States. Sheesh, I hope I’m not writing the future before it happens.

The book I’m writing now is about a war between our government and hackers. Already happening.

The one thing that makes this a bit less scary is that the political and technological land I depict is designed to be similar to the real world we all live in, so maybe the similarities can be excused as plot points. Then again, maybe not.