I'm getting scooped left and right! It's really getting frustrating.
Maybe I shouldn't write books that take place just a few years in the future based on plausible but disasterous world events...Because they keep coming true before my book is ready! E-Pocalypse is supposed to be a fictional dystopian thriller, not a non-fiction recounting of global news. Ugh. First a Maine-crewed vessel was lost at sea, then we begin facing off with the Chinese in the South China Sea and now this.
I guess I shouldn't complain because this BBC News story only mentions the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas getting hacked and my book features the Palo Verde plant in Arizona.
Can we at least not have power plants hacked and shut down during a record heat wave? That's my entire premise, not to mention that doing so causes people to die and would be awful. This book is supposed to be a grim warning, a meditation on modern vulnerabilities and hubris, not a digest of events come and gone.
I had already been mumbling and grumbling when the Russian hacking story gained prominence. After all, they have been my fictional bad guy hackers since 2012. Do I now change my hacker villains to North Koreans, Chinese or Estonians just to avoid imitating life? Blah again.
I guess the only good news about E-Pocalypse about imitating life is that the second draft is now DONE and in the hands of my beloved Advance Readers. I hope to arrange for publication by year's end. Want to be an advance reader and receive a free copy and thank you in the acknowledgments? Just drop me a line. Edits due August 30.
-Dave Holman
Maine