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.
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