“It’s Always 9/11” struck me as a good title for a book. Perhaps it was some odd manifestation of my subconscious attention, but every time I glanced at the clock it read 9:11. While contemplating this, I envisioned a woman emerging from a backpacking trip on the pure and wild Northern California coast, readjusting to the degraded civilized world. Sitting in a motel breakfast room, surrounded by industrial food she does not want to eat, she sees a report of a terrorist attack (again!) in New York City.
I like to establish a slow burn with my writing, so that by the time the narrative explodes, the reader is deeply immersed in the fictional dream (or nightmare). I am not a planner, in real life or in fiction. I set parameters and see how they develop.
When I began writing in 2017, Trump was already president. But I did not want the president in my fictional universe to be Trump-like...