The novel that escaped.

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

Why my first novel isn’t my novel number one.

I planned to write a series of posts about the various books I have written and published. Starting this required me to look at when I first started work on my various books and how long it took me to complete them. There were many twists and turns in this process, and it’s not surprising that my memory has erased a few of those sudden turns of direction.

My first try at writing a novel happened in 2007.

I began experimenting with the idea of writing a novel in 2007. But then my life took a sudden detour when I started a new job, and writing that novel had to be put on hold. Eventually, I did finish that book, but through the years, that book has sat on my computer, lapsing into oblivion.

When I started writing this post, I was going to tell you about the first novel I published. But as I looked through my file folders, I discovered that more than one book had been started only to reach a certain number of words and then languish in the file folder forever.

Eventually, I’ll get around to writing a post about the first book I published, but I think it might be worth mentioning the first novel I wrote, which still hasn’t been published.

Writing the book “After the Sickness.”

My first effort at novel writing was a book with the working title “After the Sickness.” In high school, I was a big fan of dystopian novels, so it made sense to try to write a book with a different twist on dystopian novels. I came up with an idea that I thought was rather fantastic and probably difficult to believe, but because of my life experiences, I didn’t think it was that far-fetched.

Like most of my books, this book included a lot of knowledge and experience from my own life. I’ve worked in pet shops, raised various animals, and been a lifelong pet owner. I had seen several outbreaks of avian diseases in flocks of pet birds. There was a time when the Newcastle virus was in the news repeatedly.

The premise I came up with was a “what if?” question. What would happen if a bird disease found in flocks of birds mutated to the point that it began to infect other species of animals? In my novel, wild birds started dying at a horrendous rate. That led scavengers such as mice and rats to feed on these carcasses. Eventually, the disease spread to humans, and people began to die so quickly that medical services and emergency responses broke down.

In my version of the disaster, people had to escape the cities and large concentrations of population, so the heroes and heroines in the book flee into the desert Southwest and live in old, abandoned Anastasi and Pueblo structures.

Part of me wishes I had published “After the Sickness.”

Maybe it’s too late now for that dystopian scenario to be scary. This may be another time when the boundary between fact and fiction becomes blurry. I had completely forgotten about that first dystopian novel until the outbreak of avian influenza, and then its migration from cows to humans began appearing on the nightly news.

My second attempt at a dystopian novel.

While that first dystopian novel never got published, in 2019, I finally published another dystopian scenario. That second book, “Story Bureau,” seemed farther from fact and more clearly fictional when I wrote and published it in 2019.

Story Bureau tells the details of a society in which a part of the government takes control of all news distribution and is tasked with ensuring that all the news published is favorable towards the government. In this tale, the Story Bureau receives initial news reports and converts fake news into true news stories, which are then fed through a government-controlled communication system.

I found writing Story Bureau much easier than writing After the Sickness. It’s fairly easy to believe a disease that starts in animals might spread to humans and kill millions of people. Still, I think it’s harder to believe that anyone in the government could try to control and slant news so that only stories that made them look good would reach the public.

On second thought, maybe the idea that a disease that originates in animals and then spreads to man and results in widespread human deaths may not have been too fanciful to be believed. Now, I’m wondering if I should try to salvage that story.

Those are my only two efforts at writing dystopian stories. I’ll tell you a little more about my other writing and learning to write, adventures in future posts.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

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