Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Michele Drier: SNAP - When The News Changes Your Narrative

Why did I subscribe to Reuters and the BBC to write a novel?

In 2011 I was euphoric. I’d just sold my first book, a mystery, to a small press and felt I was on the road to being a novelist—a long-held aspiration.

My daughter and her husband took me out to dinner, and he asked, “Why don’t you write vampire novels?”

I thought he must be crazy. I’d never even read a vampire novel.

Flash forward to 2021. I now had sixteen books published—five mysteries, a stand-alone thriller and ten, count ‘em ten, books in The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles. And soon the world was in the grip of a pandemic disease.

Yes, I took his advice and began what was intended to be a trilogy of stories about 21st Century Southern California career women getting involved with 500-year-old Hungarian vampires. The Kandeskys were alluring and stunning, both the men and women. Their looks mesmerized and drew people to them, a tactic they used to hunt prey until they discovered making money was easier. They established a cadre of donors who provided blood, built their businesses and never looked back.

Now the family is one of the richest in the world and their flagship business is SNAP, an international celebrity gossip empire with nightly TV shows and a weekly magazine. And to keep this empire alive and growing, they need peace in the world. Peace to give people time for earning and spending money. Peace to report on celebrities having affairs, buying houses, getting messy divorces, suing one another.

Two of the senior members of the family live in Kyiv, where they hoped to expand their Eastern European influence. This stopped in 2014 when Russia attacked and took control of Crimea, an area of Ukraine the Kandeskys considered their own backyard, forcing the family to align itself with the West. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and people began sequestering themselves, the coverage of celebrities began to dry up. Countries were pointing fingers at each other as the cause of the virus and the basis of its spread. The first reported cases were in China, and research labs around the world geared up to develop and produce vaccines. Russia, China, India, the EU nations and the US all rushed vaccines onto the market, competing with one another to make windfall profits.

I was on the cusp of writing the 11th book in the Kandesky saga and decided I’d have SNAP begin a disinformation campaign, pointing a finger at Russia for developing the virus, then trying to sell its own vaccine as a way to make hard currency.

Even though my novels are fiction, they all have an undercurrent of reality, so I began to follow both the pandemic’s and Russia’s movements. Putin began massing troops on the border with Ukraine, and this was a direct threat to the Kandeskys' empire.

Two years before, in the tenth Kandesky book, SNAP: Red Bear Rising, I followed the Russian incursion into the Sea of Azov, the border between Crimea and Russia and now I was back, reading daily news stories about the world’s reactions to further Russian aggression.

The EU countries and NATO were understandably nervous and  upset, the US was still trying to figure out what role Russia played in the election of 2016 and the balance of power in the world, always on a hair-breadth basis, was threatening to roll over into World War III.

How would this play out? How much factual information should I, could I include? Although Jean-Louis Kandesky, half-a-millennium-old Hungarian vampire and Maxie, his 21st Century SoCal wife, set up shop in Brussels to meet with the EU and NATO, what influence could they possibly have?

I generally write two books a year, but I’ve been working on SNAP: Pandemic Games for almost a year now. Every time I feel I’m close to wrapping up the story something new happens with the pandemic or with Putin’s push against Ukraine.

One week I read comments from Polish representatives and had to go back and rewrite a chapter to include their concerns and their strong plea to NATO to take action. Both NATO and the EU are pulled into the news and the plot  because Putin’s topmost demand is that NATO refuse Ukraine’s membership.

Watching the slow and steady build-up of Russian troops, the actions of Belarus, Russia’s only European ally, and crack-down on dissidents has stopped me. What should I include? What is going to sound believable? What are the motivations?

In the end, I’m finishing the book and it will end before the actual invasion of Ukraine, but week by week, as I read the stories from across Europe, I stopped writing to assess the plot.

My critique group believes I’m prescient, predicting the ultimate events, including the invasion.

In truth, I’m just a storyteller, concocting how far I can go to stretch the fiction before reality overtakes it.


Michele Drier is a fifth generation Californian. She is the past president of Capitol Crimes, a Sisters in Crime chapter, the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime, and co-chaired Bouchercon 2020. Michele Drier spent better than 20 years as a reporter and editor at California daily newspapers. She writes traditional mysteries (two series) and paranormal romance (a 10-book series, The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles) as well as a medical thriller, Ashes of Memories. Her website is micheledrier.me .

Side note from Sarah: I have a review of SNAP: The World Unfolds for the interested.

2 comments:

judyalter said...

Interesting stuff, Michele. Since vampires are far from my mind, I always wondered how you came to write a series about them. Now I know it was a casual remark--funny how those can change your entire life. I admire the research you talk about here and the complexity of what you are trying to capture. Obviously, there's got to be a twelfth book. We all hope the war will play out soon. Among other things, that might give you more solid material. Meantime, I hope you don't forget the stained glass artist--has she been left in limbo in an unfinished novel? Me? I think culinary novels are a lot easier!

Michele Drier said...

Thank you Sarah for hosting me...it's hard to pull myself away from the news these days long enough to write!
And thank you Judy for your comments. It's been an interesting research project, and I've learned more about Central and Eastern Europe than I ever thought I'd want to.
I did leave Roz hanging a bit in Paris keynoting a Medieval stained glass seminar, but she hasn't been forgotten and Resurrection of the Roses will see the light of day this year!

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