“I hate her because it’s her damned revolution that took everything from us, reduced us to comparative poverty. You know how carefully everything has to be watched now, both here and on Mars…And she took my son…She ruined everything.”
-Lorne Michaels, Uncomfortable Truths
“Strength means blessed with an enemy…”
-Sara Bareilles
In An Expensive Retreat, I had to build a world that could encompass all my characters, whether they were intentional or made themselves known. But once I got to Uncomfortable Truths, that world was built for the most part so I could just run with the story. This book is a fast-paced plot compared to An Expensive Retreat and the writing of it was just as fast. I completed the first draft of this book in 13 months. There were stumbling moments of course. I remember one discussion with a former office colleague in which she assured me that some people could never get enough money. So yes, greed was always an option for why a person could become a “bad guy.” Okay, so let’s go deeper into this book.
SPOILER ALERT
There is A LOT going on in the background of this novel. I had to figure out a lot of things before I could make sure that everything was happening in the right order and at the right time. Sometimes I still slipped. When looking through my notes for this blog entry, I found an email I’d received from one of my best friends that pointed out a slip in the timeline. No, I could not kill Louise, have a wake and funeral and bury her all in an afternoon. Yeah, that got fixed pretty fast. It’s part of why I really like having an alpha reader when I’m writing the first draft. They tend to be just enough outside of the story to catch stupid things while my brain is too caught up in trying to remember all the moving pieces. You can see some of the background planning that went into this book in this image:
I always thought it would be fun to rerelease these books with bonus content from all the behind the scenes work I did. At one point I even designed a flag for the city of Statlear. This is what comes of writing in this universe for the better part of ten years before I ever considered putting it out into the real world.
To do something for the greater good seems to be a theme over and over in politics. I understand it, even while I don’t agree with it. That brought me to one of the first issues Nadine experiences in this book. How to get someone with experience to come to a remote job. I’m sure anyone who has ever lived and worked in a small community knows this struggle. So they do what they had to in order to move forward. But that’s what they did about the dead in the hospital in An Expensive Retreat (AER). They moved forward for the greater good. But it really pisses me off when people get away with doing bad things. One of the perks to being a writer is that you can do something about that. So I sent Nadine off to Earth to investigate. By the end of the trilogy, they all had to pay for their decisions. (The way it should be, no matter how powerful/rich you are.)
Now the side bonus to this is Sven. I wasn’t very nice to him at the end of AER and I left a lot of people wondering what had happened. (My deepest apologies to those who had to wait a year for the release of this book in 2018 but I hope it was worth it) When things are going really badly in your life, it makes a huge difference when you have a purpose. Doing things for the greater good came up here again. I don’t support what the Michaels did to Sven but I wanted to at least give it the veneer of logic (being afraid for your child). I feel like giving Sven a purpose was a way to help him through what his family did. At least he had the interviews, the dream that he could escape the monitors and eventually get back to Mars. It was also a big step forward for Nadine when they were reunited. Then they’re off and looking for the person who made the decisions. But here’s where Nadine’s focus, honed over two years as the governor, comes to the front. She’s absolutely determined to find the “big bad guy” no matter what it takes. But when the quest continues to risk their lives and safety, it’s Sven that talks her into coming back in a formal way. I think they made a good pair.
This was a really interesting book to write and I’m glad I had the opportunity. It did leave a lot of strings hanging though that all had to be tied up in A Family Affair. But I had the time. I was going to take a little break before I started the next book. Three weeks later…
In June, we’ll take a look at A Family Affair. Hope to see you then. Have questions about Uncomfortable Truths or An Expensive Retreat? Please send them to m.negrijn at gmail.com and I’ll put them in the next blog post in June. See you then!
Looking to buy Uncomfortable Truths? You can find it at Amazon here. It’ll be back on the Kobo site by the end of the month so check Facebook for that update.
It's all about the words 