Last year, over the Labor Day weekend, my wife and I drove down to California to visit my much-neglected sailboat. I normally drove down I5 for this trip, but on this occurrence I decided to take a different route and drove through Klamath Falls. Driving Highway 97 routes you around Mt. Shasta. I’ve driven by Mt. Shasta probably well over one hundred times in my life, but rarely on Highway 97, which gives you a much different perspective.
I’m not sure why, but something about the view of that magnificent mountain struck a chord with me. I asked my wife to Google Mt. Shasta’s history out of a combination of curiosity and boredom of the long drive. The first thing she told me was Mt Shasta has some of the highest UFO sightings of any place in the world! Whoa! Fascinating. My brain kicks into creative story mode.
On I5 now, just south of Weed, I pass a couple pulling over on the side of the freeway. I look at them. Interesting looking couple, perhaps a bit strange, but what caught my eye was the expression on their faces. Kind of blank, borderline hypnotic. Weird. My brain’s creative mode kicks into overdrive, and a new book begins to take shape.
I’d finished ten books in my Utopia series at this point and was in the final stages of getting Adam’s Quest published. During this stage, the operant word is edit, edit, and more edit. Its not my favorite thing to do, but still very necessary if you want to write good books, and I am determined to do that. I needed a break and had been thinking about what I would write next. A new book or book eleven in the Utopia series. My heart was telling me to do something different, give the Utopia series time to age, and settle into the marketing phase. I was good with that. So, something new was needed. Exactly what, I didn’t know. Definitely something different, though.
Boom! Mt. Shasta just hit me right between the eyes. The strange-looking couple pulling over to the side of the freeway whetted my appetite. The answer to my prayers was born man-eating lizards and UFOs! Wahoo.
Now my brain is into creative overdrive mode, and I first focus on this couple and a UFO, but that track ultimately got edited out and maybe I’ll use it later or in a short story. The UFO thingy grew in its place, and then the Delphinians took refuge in the caverns under Mt. Shasta from those horrible man-eating lizards. Oh my, this is fun.
Then the dialog between the horny teenage alien girl and her father sprung up, and I felt I was on a roll. The book took on its own life as they usually do in my mind. When I’m creating a new book I never do an outline. I just go with the Story and see what happens. Frequently, I dream about my storylines, and new ideas pop up. Sometimes, when I’m writing I enter a self-hypnotic state. A byproduct of my shrinking days when I used hypnosis quite a bit when treating patients with dissociative disorders. In that state, it’s kind of like I’m reading the book as I type, my own dissociative state, perhaps. Enough shrink talk.
When ‘A Family Affair’ lands at Groom Lake, the idea came to me, our dear corrupted government might not like the idea of these Aliens living among us and might be mistrusting because, after all, no cash to line politicians pockets is ever offered. That grew into the need to replace the government and more good vs evil scenarios, so the book grew some more. At that point, I thought introducing more identifiable characters might be fun until my editor freaked and demanded I change the names. I guess he was right in the long term.
The scene of Marian losing her arm to a Lizard’s bite came to me in a dream. I liked that scene and still do. The horny teenage alien girl finding Duke seemed apropos, and that storyline grew. And so it went. Along the way I decided the Story was too big for one book and made the decision to turn it into another series. I’m very happy with that decision, and I hope you are too.
Where will this lead? I have no idea, but I’m a prolific dreamer, so I’m pretty sure it will come to me in a dream at some point in the future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my stories and remember to beware of Lizards!