Tag Archives: horror

Crossroad Press, my new publisher…

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As some of you may know, my prior publisher, DarkFuse, shut down last year.  I will always be grateful to them for taking me on, publishing my debut novel, as well as several other novels and novellas while I was with them.

Crossroad Press picked me up last summer.  Since then, they have re-released all my prior DarkFuse titles, as well as released two new novels that I’d completed for DarkFuse, but which didn’t get released before the shutdown.  They’ve even published an audiobook of THE GENESIS CODE!

I just wanted to share some Crossroad Press links.  I have an author page there, with all my books listed.  They have their own store–plus you can purchase the titles at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and more.

As always, thanks for reading!

The Crossroad Press Store

My Crossroad Press Author Page

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“The making of”…SKINSHIFT

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This is a little piece I wrote about how my novella SKINSHIFT came to be.  It’s actually a rather creepy story unto itself.   This piece was published in DarkFuse magazine at SKINSHIFT’s original launch.  SKINSHIFT was recently re-released by Crossroad Press and is available in ebook form at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and more.

INSPIRATION STRIKES IN THE STRANGEST PLACES

What would you do?  Would you stay—or would you be too scared?

Forget cruises, fancy destinations, and anything involving a commercial airplane.  Give me a good road trip any day!  My boyfriend and I have driven through quite a lot of the Lower 48 over the years, with a ton of pictures to prove it.  We love to hit the back roads, to find the unusual and the weird.  The weirder, the better.

In the summer of 2013, we were roaming through the middle of nowhere (Middle of Nowhere being one of our favorite spots), hunting for a campsite we’d seen on our map app—when we had cell reception, that is.  By this point, there was no signal to be had, so we were off the grid, incommunicado, and hoping for the best.

After heading down a lonely dirt road for a while with nothing at all on either side, we saw what looked like a site amongst some trees and turned toward it.  The remains of what appeared to be a cow skeleton lay scattered right at the turnoff.  We pulled in farther, and lo and behold, there was a weathered old picnic table.  And not another soul in sight.  Not a vehicle.  Not nothing.  We’d found our place to stay for the night.

We started unloading the camping gear and getting the feel of the place.  There were some menacing-looking biting flies around, but nothing too bad.  We had a table (albeit a little the worse for wear), a fire ring, a nearby stream, trees surrounding the site, and what appeared to be an ancient wooden outhouse a short distance away at the end of a narrow path.  And we had it all to ourselves.  Cool.

Then we noticed the bonus feature:  skulls.  Skulls of all kinds.  In all sorts of places.

There was one on the picnic table that appeared to be from a deer-like creature.  Just sitting there on the far end, facing us, as if it’d been expecting guests.  There was what appeared to be a horse skull and another sheep- or elk-like creature’s skull fastened to the birch next to the site.  A bovine-looking skull lay on the ground on the other side of the picnic table.  Hung on another tree were more elongated skulls, like wolf or fox.  All the skulls were well-cleaned and in excellent condition.

While we were standing there trying to make sense of what we were seeing, something made a loud bang.  I nearly jumped out of my skin before realizing it was just the outhouse door slamming.  I hoped it was just due to wind.

But there wasn’t any wind.

Never did figure out why it picked right then to bang like that.

We stood very still and listened as hard as we could for sounds of humans, animals, anything.  What if some survivalist type had taken over the site and we’d walked into what he considered home?  We didn’t see any other sites nearby.  This certainly wasn’t an organized and patrolled campground by any stretch of the imagination.  But there was nothing more.  Nothing but the buzz of some big black flies and the sound of the nearby creek coursing over stones and logs.

When had these skulls been left there?  By whom?  And why?  We stalked around, looking for answers and finding none.  Eventually, we decided whoever’d left them wasn’t going to join us—or at least we hoped not.  So, after watching some bats flit around for a while, we settled in for the night.  Nothing bad happened, and we left everything as we found it when we left the next day.

Of course, now a seed was planted in my head.  How could I not use this as the germ for a new tale?  At the time, I was still in the midst of writing BLOCKBUSTER, so I had to set the idea aside for a while.  When I wrapped BLOCKBUSTER up in early 2014, I decided I wanted to do something shorter—a novella—and I just had to use the skulls in there somehow.  And so began the concept for SKINSHIFT.

The skulls made an inspiring image, a great start, but they were only that:  a start.  How to build a story around them?  What characters would I create, and what role would the skulls play?  As I noodled it around in my head, a character came to mind.  Dominic Donato.  He’s not a good man.  In fact, he’s a rather evil man.  He begins the story alone, injured and abandoned in the Mojave Desert, seething with rage and hell-bent on revenge.

Dominic learns some powerful new skills, skills that enable him to survive his ordeal, to convert his rage into action, and the skulls figure into this.  And that’s as much of a spoiler as you’re going to get out of me.  I hope you enjoy SKINSHIFT, and that it makes you think twice the next time you’re driving along a desolate desert road and you see a vulture circling high in the air.  You’d better watch out.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As always, thank you for your support and thanks for reading!

Pleasant dreams—or not,

Lisa von Biela

A little bit on how ASH AND BONE came to be…

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This is a little intro piece I wrote that was published by DarkFuse as bonus material at ASH AND BONE’s original launch.  Thought I’d share it here, since Crossroad Press just re-released that creepy little novella.  Enjoy!

FIRESTARTERS

Often I will encounter some odd little thing that triggers a story idea, especially for my shorter work.  Almost anything might strike me.  For example, a little coin-operated clock I saw in a museum inspired my short story Caught in Time (published as bonus material with my novel THE JANUS LEGACY).

It can be a turn of phrase.  Once on a road trip, we stopped for gas in Iowa.  We happened to pump $6.66 worth.  When we went inside to pay, the clerk took one look at the amount and declared to my boyfriend, “That’s a bad number, Mister.”  That sentence was too good to ignore.  I used it in a short story entitled Hunting with the Boys, in which the protagonist stops for gas on his way to a rather ill-fated hunting trip involving some deer bent on revenge.

More recently, a wonderfully photographed scene from an old movie struck me so strongly, I remember sitting there and thinking I just had to use it in a short story or novella.  ASH AND BONE opens with this dark, foggy noirish waterfront scene.  I started drafting the novella with that scene, but still had to decide (and I went back and forth on this!) who would be in that scene, what that person would be doing there, how that scene would tie into the remainder of the story, and so on.

Mere words on a sign can spawn a story, too.  When we lived in Minnesota, there was a small office building not far from home.  On one side were the words “Control House.”  Well, if those words don’t burst with potential, I don’t know what does.  I thought about it for a while, and eventually came up with my short story, Control House.

Ash and Bone, Skinshift Re-released!

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My two novellas previously published by DarkFuse, ASH AND BONE and SKINSHIFT, have been re-released by Crossroad Press with great new cover art!  They can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and more…

Thanks for reading!

Product Details  Product Details

Ash and Bone at Amazon

Skinshift at Amazon

My Author Page at Crossroad Press

Greetings, 2018!

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Well, here it is.  2018.  I always try to imagine what every new year will hold.  And let’s just say, I’m no oracle!  2017 had its surprises–good, bad, and in between.

On the publishing front, I kicked off 2017 by self-pubbing a novella that I’d originally written at a particular market’s invitation.  They declined the final product, so I took the bull by the horns and published it last New Year’s Day.  That’s my little thriller, Moon Over Ruin.  It’s set (mainly) in an abandoned resort we ran across on a trip to Canada a couple of years ago that got caught in my mind.

Then, around the beginning of summer, my long-time publisher, DarkFuse, closed down.  They reverted rights to me, but this of course meant my titles went off-market.  I had 6 titles with them at the time, and 2 completed manuscripts that had not yet been published.  I was very fortunate to join up with Crossroad Press soon afterward.  So far, they’ve republished my 4 novel-length works (with new cover art) and one of my previously unpublished titles (Down the Brink).  And, they published an audiobook of The Genesis Code!  The 2 novellas (Ash and Bone and Skinshift) and the other previously unpublished work (Incidental Findings) are in the works and will be out soon.  Meanwhile, I’m in the second draft of a novel-in-progress that concerns a drought of historical proportions and a young family’s desperate escape from a mega-fire into…even worse things.

This has been a big year for my artwork, too.  I picked up some cheap watercolors a couple of years ago and started dabbling around (I hadn’t painted/drawn in some years).  One thing led to another, and I also got involved with colored pencils about a year ago.  My skills have noticeably progressed, and I’ve posted work on RedBubble and Pixels.  Made a couple of small sales, too.  I also drew a blue and gold macaw with colored pencils and donated the image to Zazu’s House Parrot Sanctuary for use on their Pixels site.  I hope it’s sold a lot for them!

On the travel front, I’ve had some mighty interesting/contrasting trips!  In the summer, we returned to Canada, and took a flight to the icefields in Kluane National Park.  We actually landed on a huge icefield (see the picture below) in a Helio Courier.  Awesome!  Then in November, we visited Death Valley National Park, parts of which are well below sea level.  So from high-altitude snow to low-altitude desert, all in the same year.  Not sure how to top that!

So, a big thank you to my readers and those who have purchased my art, and to everyone reading this, best wishes for 2018!

Greetings 2018

The Making of: Broken Chain

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This is a piece I wrote for Broken Chain’s original launch in 2015.  It appeared in DarkFuse’s online magazine at the time.  I’m reposting here as a companion to the novel’s relaunch–a little glimpse inside what went into the novel!  Thanks for reading…

BROKEN CHAIN: HUNTING DOWN THE LINKS

by

Lisa von Biela

You are what you eat.

How many times have you heard that old saying? What if it’s true on a much more fundamental level than you’ve ever imagined? What if something went so horribly wrong with our food supply that this simple admonition to eat properly took on a far more sinister meaning?

You’d have the world I present in BROKEN CHAIN, that’s what.

And it’s not pretty.

Here’s a little peek into what went into writing BROKEN CHAIN…

#

While all my novel-length works to date have involved some degree of medical and/or technical research, BROKEN CHAIN by far required the most research before I could even draft the outline. (Yes, for those of you who don’t already know, I am an outliner, not a pantster!) In fact, it required so much research I had to exercise tremendous self-control to avoid outlining/drafting prematurely. Looking back, I’m glad I did. I would have created a messy tangle of inconsistencies had I not taken that time up front to build a cohesive chain of causation for the food supply disaster and its effects on people and livestock.

In my novels, I always base as much of the science as I can in reality before I go forth and take liberties. So, for starters, I needed to know what sort of feed is used in high-volume beef production. What commodities are used to produce that feed? I had to refresh myself on which amino acids belong to the group of “essential” amino acids, those that will become part of the bodily proteins of those consuming them. This research informed my chain of causation for the physical effects that occur in people and livestock in the story.

Recent real-world research has been showing a linkage between mood/behavior and the flora in your intestines. I took this a step further in the story. Frankly, the leap I made doesn’t seem all that implausible, and makes me wonder if I might be onto something that is happening in the world today. I’ll stop there, lest I let out a spoiler!

Given the nature of what happens to the food chain in the story, I also needed to research alternative nutritional sources—food substitutes, if you will. There are liquid diets out there that purport to replace traditional food. Delicious, I’m sure. I also investigated current technology in the production of lab-based meat. Yep, they’re doing it, but a simple hamburger patty costs a not-so-small fortune right now. Not ready for prime time. Of course, the joy of writing fiction is making up your own world. In the book, I improved that technology to allow the production of more sophisticated lab meat products. Yum.

Oh, and this may sound like only meat-eaters are affected. Hell, no. Not even the vegetarians escape the consequences!

The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) referenced in the book is a real part of the CDC. Members of the EIS are “disease detectives” who assist with emergency responses, and investigate infectious and environmental disease outbreaks. As the story opens, Dr. Kyle Sommers has just been accepted into the program, and is a member of the team the CDC dispatches throughout the country to figure out what’s causing an apparent epidemic of extremely violent behavior. This is Kyle’s first assignment, and it will cost him dearly.

As far as setting, rural Minnesota seemed the perfect spot, so I created a fictional town in which most of the book’s action takes place. While others of his team are stationed elsewhere around the country, Kyle is sent to fictional St. Joe, Minnesota, near where he grew up and attended medical school. He brings his pregnant wife Gretchen and their precocious young daughter Lara with him and begins what at first appears to be the impossible task of unraveling the mystery. The pressure for an answer builds as the epidemic spreads and people and livestock continue to die.

The agricultural element of BROKEN CHAIN was fun to research and envision. True story: back in high school, we took some standardized career aptitude test. I got my results back and was stunned to see that I scored far, far higher in agriculture than in anything else. A city girl from LA scoring like that, can you imagine? Maybe there really is an alternate universe.

I admit I do enjoy being out in ag territory. We were having dinner at my favorite place for prime rib—The Cattleman’s Club in Pierre, South Dakota—while on a road trip last summer. It’s the sort of place with sawdust on the floor and the best damned prime rib you can get anywhere. You’d better be prepared to wait on a Saturday night. They don’t take reservations and the locals love this place. Farmers and ranchers. I remember sitting there this particular time, watching them all, trying to absorb their mannerisms and imagine their lives to make sure I fashioned my characters properly in the book.

On that same trip, I was enjoying, um, more prime rib in my second favorite prime rib place in Hamilton, Montana. A little girl sat with her family at the table next to us. I took one look at her and nearly freaked out. As I was writing the book, I had a particular mental image of the daughter, Lara. The little girl at that table looked exactly—and I mean exactly—as I’d pictured her. Same age, build, general attitude, hair, everything. Bizarre and disturbing, considering what happens to poor Lara.

So, next time you take a bite of a nice, juicy steak, or chomp into that soy burger, think about what’s in it—or what might be in it. You are what you eat, you know.

As always, thank you for your support and thanks for reading!

 

Pleasant dreams—or not,

Lisa von Biela

 

Broken Chain re-released by Crossroad Press!

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Now that DarkFuse has shuttered, Crossroad Press has been re-releasing my prior titles as well as all-new titles.  They have re-released Broken Chain, my BigAg thriller!  It can be found all over the place:

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

Smashwords

And more…

Thanks for reading!

Lisa

 

Flash Fiction: Stilettos, Take Me Home*

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Stella squinted through the smoky haze.  Damn if her drink wasn’t empty again.  She leaned forward and signaled Kevin the bartender to hit her up again.

He cast her an appraising look as he dried a beer mug.  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough tonight?”

“No.  Not hardly.”

“Well, I do.  Go on home, Stella.”

This wasn’t the first time Kevin had cut her off.  Knowing there was no use arguing with him, Stella slapped down a few bills and nearly knocked over the bar stool as she stood to leave.  She glanced around to make sure no one noticed, then straightened her dress and slung her purse onto her shoulder.

Stilettos clattering, she tottered out of the bar and took a moment to steady herself against the building.  Stood up again.  She checked her watch.  One in the morning.  Bastard was supposed to meet up with her hours ago.  Fortunately, she only had to negotiate a few blocks in her treacherous heels and she’d be home.

Late at night, this old neighborhood cleared right out.  She suspected that’s why her dates stood her up so often.  The buildings were tired and run down, so the area just didn’t look like a party mecca.  Even her old girlfriends had deserted her.  They didn’t feel safe coming here, they said.

Well, fuck them.  Rent was cheap, and she could walk to whatever she needed—the corner grocery, the salon.  The bar.  She never had any problems.

She sighed and started walking home.  It wasn’t all that far, but she wondered if she shouldn’t bring flat shoes with her next time.  The cracks in the sidewalk were pure hell on her favorite stilettos.

Stella hardly noticed the flutter of soft wings as, one by one, they gathered, clinging to the eaves and awnings along her way.  She left the spill of blue neon from the bar and ventured into the night, punctuated by the occasional street lamp.  As she turned right at the corner, she saw a couple of the lights on that side had been smashed into oblivion.

The increased darkness made it harder to see the cracks in the sidewalk.  Stella slowed her pace to avoid catching her heel in one.  She had trouble focusing, and admitted to herself that she might have had a drink too many.

Partway down the block, her heel caught and she stumbled, falling against the side of a building.  Pain flashed in her hand as she scraped the skin on the rough brick surface.  She leaned against the building and pressed her injured palm to halt the bleeding.

A shadow emerged from the alley only a few feet ahead of her.  Still rubbing her hand, she noticed it, but made no effort to flee.

“Need some help?”  The harsh voice was not that of a Good Samaritan.  The shadow moved onto the sidewalk and stepped toward her.  As he drew nearer, she could see he looked solid and strong beneath his T-shirt and jeans.  She could also see the menacing sneer on his face.

Shaking her hand to erase the last traces of pain, she stepped away from the building, pulled her purse strap back up onto her shoulder, and continued walking home, right toward the man in the shadows.  As she was about to pass by him, he grabbed her arm and spun her toward him.

Stella laughed.

As the man began to drag her into the alley, they came.  They came on soft wings, like leathery butterflies of the night.  Nearly soundless, they leapt from the ledges where they’d hung and fluttered down.

He released Stella and screamed as a cloud of bats engulfed him.  They swarmed; they closed in, avoiding his flailing arms with ease.  Soon they all dug their claws and teeth into his clothes, his flesh.

Stella smiled as they lifted him up, up into the night.

When he was gone from sight, she straightened her dress, hitched her purse strap back over her shoulder, and continued on home.

She loved her neighborhood and wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else.

 

*Originally published by DarkFuse, July 2013.

The Making of: THE JANUS LEGACY

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JANUS LIGHT AND DARK*

In THE JANUS LEGACY, I return to my obsession with looking at how a potentially beneficial technology can be twisted to serve dark purposes.  I find endless fodder in the daily news to fuel my work.  Absolutely endless.  For me, it’s a matter of coming up with a solid plot and populating it with characters my readers will want to follow into the hell I create for them.

For JANUS, the technology is the manufacture of replacement organs cloned from the patient’s/client’s own cells.  At least, that’s how it starts.  Naturally, things spiral out of control in due course, unfortunately for the characters.  But think about it—wouldn’t that be a great technology to have?  Today, donor organs are hard to come by.  People sit on the waiting list for years, often dying before the needed organ becomes available.  Sometimes a communicable disease or cancer comes with the gift organ, to disastrous results.  The technology in JANUS would eliminate all that.  Well, at least for wealthy clients.  JANUS explores the beneficial side of this technology—and then delves into the tragic consequences when things go too far.

The idea of cloning as the subject for a novel is one that has been bouncing around in the back of my head for so long that it’s on my original handwritten “list of story ideas” that I’ve toted around since I first became serious about writing fiction.  I’ve wondered for quite some time, if we ever did clone a complete human being, what would be the nature of that being’s consciousness?  If he or she only ever experienced a lab environment, what would go on in the clone’s mind?  What sort of point of view would he or she have?  I won’t say any more here at the risk of spoiling some of the plot, but I will say that this was a key challenge I took on when writing JANUS.

THE JANUS LEGACY is only my second novel.  As I’ve mentioned in other articles and forums, I actually wrote the manuscript for my first novel, THE GENESIS CODE, some time back and then disappeared off the face of the earth for several years to attend law school and emerge into a new career and a new place to live.  I began writing THE JANUS LEGACY shortly after DarkFuse accepted THE GENESIS CODE for publication—but before I could get started on it, I had to remember how to write a novel-length work and adjust my methods based on what I’d learned.

With GENESIS, I was in a very different place and time, and so would draft a chapter or two on the weekend, print them out and take them and a medium-sized spiral notebook to work with me, then write/edit during lunchtime each day.  I edited each chapter to completion before starting another one.  While I am pleased with the end result, I don’t think this was the most efficient way to go about it.  Then again, this was before iPads and ultrabooks and such—so it worked for what equipment I had and the nature of my work day and location at that time.

In preparing to draft JANUS, I had to think through what logistical approach would work for me in my current situation.  I don’t typically get out for lunch these days—and even if I did, I’m not located near quick, cheap little places to eat as I was in my Minneapolis/GENESIS days.  It was so convenient to scoot out of the office, hustle to some fast-food place, grab something to eat, and hunker alone in a corner and work on the manuscript until it was time to head back.  Reliving those days as I developed my new approach made me a wee bit nostalgic, and that is one reason I chose to set JANUS in the Minneapolis area.  That and the fact that Minnesota’s dramatic seasons formed an absolutely crucial backdrop to the story.  I spent a considerable amount of time arranging key plot elements to coincide with the seasons before I began drafting.

For JANUS, once I completed the plot outline, instead of editing each chapter to death before moving on, I wrote the entire manuscript, and then undertook several revision cycles top to bottom.  And I did it all on the computer, no printouts.  This approach worked well for me.  It certainly saved an entire forest of trees.  But beyond that, I think it let the entire plot breathe and adjust as needed before committing “final edits” to each chapter.  That was a much more efficient use of time right there.  It took me more than two years to write GENESIS; it took me four months to write JANUS.  Then once I was done, I had the urge to write something noir, and that became ASH AND BONE.  And that’s a story for another day.

I hope you enjoy THE JANUS LEGACY!

*Originally published in DarkFuse Magazine, when THE JANUS LEGACY was first released.

The Janus Legacy on Amazon

The Janus Legacy on Smashwords

The Making of: BLOCKBUSTER

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BLOCKBUSTER:  THE FUTURE OF PATHOGENS?*

Lots of things scare me, some more than others.  While this can be mighty inconvenient in daily life, it does give me plenty of writing ideas.  See?  There’s a silver lining in just about anything if you look hard enough.

Several of my biggest fears play starring roles in my BigPharma thriller, BLOCKBUSTER.  For one thing, it scares the bejeepers out of me that some very nasty pathogenic bacteria have become resistant to our arsenal of antibiotics, and that more will likely follow.  So, what if a bacteria got loose that was readily transmitted and extremely deadly—and was resistant to all available antibiotics?  Well, that’s part of what happens in BLOCKBUSTER.  The idea scares me so much that as I was writing the book, if I happened to feel a simple itch on my toe, for example, a part of me would begin to panic because of what happens in the novel.  Can you imagine how frightening it would be if something like that started spreading, and no existing antibiotic could fight it?  Talk about being fresh out of bullets.

Just so you know, I actually completed the manuscript long before the recent Ebola crisis that made the news a couple of years ago.  Though a virus, Ebola shares some characteristics with the bacterial disease(s) in BLOCKBUSTER, in that there is no particular cure, and that it is incredibly vicious and deadly.  However, Ebola is far less communicable than the diseases in BLOCKBUSTER, and because it’s a virus, antibiotics aren’t helpful anyway (except perhaps as prevention for secondary bacterial infections).  When I “created” the diseases in BLOCKBUSTER, I deliberately combined the pathology of MRSA (the flesh-eating bacteria) with the terrible internal ravages of Ebola (and some more grisly features for good measure).  I find it hard to imagine a more terrifying communicable disease.

On another level, I’m scared of disease in general, of being ill and in a hospital, under treatment, and fearing for my life.  I’m sure most people are.  In BLOCKBUSTER, that fear is magnified by the strict quarantine procedures necessitated by the nature of the disease.  What would it be like to be gravely ill and in a quarantine chamber—with no human contact whatsoever—just when you’re at your most vulnerable and frightened?  Unfortunately, that very thing plays out in an Ebola outbreak.  The disease itself is horrific enough, but to be denied even the slightest bit of human comfort is unimaginably heartbreaking—though necessary.

As some of my readers may know, I edited a weekly email newsletter for biotech attorneys, the BioBlurb, through much of my time in law school.  I’d gather stories from the week centered on the legal and ethical issues of various biotech developments—and I’d insert my own snarky little comments that my readers really enjoyed.  On one level, it was fun to do and I learned a lot about what was going on in the biotech world.  On another level, it provided all manner of novel fodder to my twisted little brain.  But alas, in law school, there was little time for anything but…law school.  So all those ideas fermented in the back of my head.  And now I get to reap the benefits of all that fermentation.  BLOCKBUSTER didn’t stem from any one particular story, but from a sort of gestalt of the stories, together with a “what if” question about a particular form of corruption.

Another thing that shaped BLOCKBUSTER is an annoying bit of reality:  it takes a long, long time to develop a new drug and bring it to market.  There are early trials, false starts, human trials (if you even get that far), FDA approvals, and all the activities needed to actually produce and distribute the eventual drug.  If I’d adhered to that reality in the book, readers would have passed out from boredom by page 4.  I had to do something about this!  So, I decided to set it 10 years in the future, and “create” a very lovely and enviable piece of lab equipment that fast-tracks the drug development process, and even eliminates the need for human trials—the fabulous Pathosym.  Such equipment isn’t totally without a basis in reality, however.  There are prototype testing devices “on a chip” for certain things.  I just took the concept a whole lot further.  And this is why writing fiction is so, well, empowering.

And because I’d set the story 10 years out, I couldn’t just slap a fancy piece of equipment in the lab and stop there.  I needed to envision future versions of normal, everyday electronics that we take for granted.  Most such items in the book are either on their way or are based in some part on reality.  For example, wristwatch computers are becoming a reality, or at least early versions of them.  I just imagined something more mature and put it in the book—the PortiComm.  These things had to feel like fairly natural extensions of current devices that might be real 10 years out.  They were meant more as part of the environment, the “set” as it were, rather than stars of the show, like the lab equipment.

BLOCKBUSTER was a fun book to write:  lots of biotech, high-tech, skullduggery, greed, and things going horribly awry.  I hope you enjoy it…and that you have lots of antibacterial scrub handy.  You’re going to need it.

Thanks for reading!

Lisa von Biela

*Originally published in DarkFuse Magazine when BLOCKBUSTER was first released.

Blockbuster on Amazon

Blockbuster on Smashwords