Authorpreneur Dashboard – L H Draken
The Year of the Rabid Dragon: A Beijing Thriller
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
A deadly virus is on the loose in Beijing, the government is covering it up and no one is asking why. Nathan Troy, an American freelance journalist, realizes he’s the only person willing to confront the dark side of the epidemic and the secrets that the government will do anything to keep under their control. He discovers is a conspiracy of mad scientists, a plot to 'deal' with China's problem minorities, and a diabolical scheme that will change the face of humanity as we know it. Will Nathan reveal the truth before the Chinese government catches up to him?
Book Bubbles from The Year of the Rabid Dragon: A Beijing Thriller
CRISPR - tool for good and evil
I wrote the first draft of this book book in 2012-- when editing embryos with CRISPR was only just becoming a possibility for the future. Last November Chinese scientist He Jiankui did just that. I'm very much pro technology and don't believe it is possible to stop the development of new tools, even if someone has the desire to do so. Time moves forward and innovation expands. Which is a good thing. But every tool has possibilities for evil, and the more powerful the tool, the more potential for misuse. Unfortunately. This is why I think it's imperative that we understand CRISPR technology and engage ourselves with the conversation about how it is used and how we plan to participate it is development.
What's at stake for me as a writer
My sanity. I've found that when I don't spend some significant portion of my week in creative production, my moot starts to plummet and I get grouchy to people I love. I've learned to take this as an indicator that my physical body is telling me I'm neglecting something important. I have work to do besides caring for my family and the rest of my 'normal' work. I need to also be creating something--I need to be pulling more of my written world into existence. When I neglect that I start to lose small parts of my sanity. -- This excerpt comes from a scene I wrote where my lead, Nathan Troy, and a supporting character, Helene Laroque, have a conversation over dinner. I felt a little indulgent putting this in the book as it wasn't absolutely necessary to the forwarding of hte crime portion of the plot, but it was integral to get a picture of the characters. I love character development and loved this chance to see into their own life. My book is a story of a freelance jouranlist, Nathan, working and living in Beijing. He puts into words much of how I felt while living in China. He's an outsider, but feels more at home than he has anywhere else for a very long time.
The Opening Hook
One of the greatest compliments I’ve received on the first chapter of my book was by an EMS professional who said that when she read this first chapter, she felt like she’d seen this scene before, because she’d lived it and responded to calls just like this. Her only question was how I’d been able to create such an authentic image having never worked in the field. I’ve gotten lots of positive feedback from readers saying they are drawn right into the book because of this scene, but that was the best response. The first chapter of my book describes one possible progression-route of rabies -- via oral ingestion (food infected with the virus, which then transmitted to the character, an old man, through his tonsils). The virus itself is never mentioned, and the reader is left to figure out, through the development of the story, what actually happened to my poor old man who dies in the first chapter. To me it's a rather sad chapter -- it's the exposé of an old man who is aging by himself. His daughter already died (one is left to imply by some accident in childhood), his wife is already dead, and he's passing most of his days in his apartment because he's too old to make it to the park.
Time capsules of Beijing
Beijing evolves so fast. A dip in the economy of the last year or so seem to have slowed the motion for a moment, but even so, the city I lived in for five years is already very different from the Beijing that exists now. Even on the daily level. The shop that I used as the steady meeting place of my lead, Nathan Troy, and his mentor, a retired German, no longer exists. There have been moves by the government, especially in Beijing, to 'clean up' the image of the city. One way they have decided to do this is to close many of the tiny shops that had popped up in less-than-official locations. The shop I feature in my story seemed official enough, has been boarded up and emptied out. I have photos of the little hole-in-the-wall shop, The Beijing Golden Fortune, from when I lived there and used to have a running tab with the owner. A friend sent a photo of the boarded up space. The little all-purpose convenience store no longer exists. I suppose the rest of my tab which I let on the books and never settled before leaving China (perhaps hoping I might come back in sometime) has evaporated also. This book is a time capsule of Beijing, 2012.
"The German"
This chapter introduces 'The German' to the reader, a retired German banker from Bavaria, who spends his summers in Beijing visiting his sons family. Originally, I'd written the book narrated by this character. I always loved stories narrated by a wiser voice - a narrator that knows the wisdom of age. But after much back and forth, my editor convinced me that the story was better with the German simply being a mentor to Nathan, not the narrator. My knowledge of a retired German didn't seem deep enough at the time to make the voice strong enough. I know I made the right decision, but I'm hoping sometime I'll be able to write a story from this same characters perspective. Now that I'm living in Germany, I'm making plenty of notes to flesh him out to be his own lead in a future book.
A Real Bike Accident
This bit of story, where Nathan rips his foot out of his clipped in bike peddle is also part of my own true story in Beijng. In the story, Nathan ends up ripping the cleat out of the bike shoe instead of unhooking, in an attempt to avoid a possibly deathly collision with a car. One evening, when my husband was biking home from work, he escaped a possibly deathly collision by yanking his foot so hard off the peddle that the cleat broke. He walked into our apartment, limping from uneven bike shoes. Both my husband and I biked more often than we did anything else. The subways were so crowded and uncomfortable, taxis seemed a death trap and were subject to the terrible traffic of the mega city, and walking wasn't always possible when the destination was too far. I got hit by a car twice, once when my son was in the back carrier seat, and my husband at least three times. It was perhaps not the safest mode of transport.
First date with my husband
This scene, where the lead character, Nathan Troy, takes the W.H.O doctor out to dinner to discuss the mysterious rabies cases, is based on the first date I had with my husband in Beijing. We were walking around downtown, after having visited the Temple of Heaven Park, and were trying to find someplace to eat. Beijing is something of a working mans city in that after normal business hours, shops close up and people go home to sleep. Except for some specific party and bar areas, the city has a bedtime. We were out after that bedtime but still hadn't had any dinner. When we found a place that looked like it was still opened, we walked in and took a table. Instead of telling us the kitchen was closed, the waitress came to take our order, but kept telling us 'no' to basically every dish we requested. The Sweet potato with sprinkles, as is described in the scene, and moldy chopsticks were straight from that night. As is most of the description of the restaurant and scene. I loved using bits of my own experience in Beijing for this book. This is just one special example, since it was the first dinner I ate with my now husband.
