The Creation of Road Kill and the Universe of Hyperion and Meagan
In November of 2022, Gayle Surrette of A Curious Statistical Anomaly invited me to do an essay on my writing and where it had come from. The following is a recap of that essay, posted here to help keep a centralized record.
I recently published my first novel, Road Kill, a project which has been percolating in my head for over a decade although, technically speaking, it’s not my first novel, it’s just the first one I managed to complete. The larger universe in which Road Kill is set has been under development for over forty years and 99% has been created through sheer chaos. A prequel and sequel could be available as early as next year, depending on how cooperative certain characters are.
Two primary characters, Meagan Robichaud and Hyperion, were the first components of my universe. Meagan is a woman that has the superpower of invisibility, but it only occurs when she’s scared. And, just to be contrary, knowing she’s invisible helps alleviate the fear.
Meagan’s situation established one of the plot components of the universe, useless superpowers that can, somehow, be forced into being useful. Numerous characters with these powers have come to life over the years, such as Jamie Sullivan, who has the power to cloud people’s minds and make them think she’s a coat tree. She got bored at a Christmas party once and ended up having to hold three coats, two hats, and an umbrella for a half-hour before she could escape. She now works as a corporate spy, which pays enough to make the boredom worthwhile. Jamie and most of the others have yet to make their way into any story, but they continue to bide their time.
Hyperion is a smart-ass, talking, European lynx. Nobody knows what secret government laboratory he comes from, or whether he escaped or was kicked out. He’s annoyingly resistant to speaking about his past or how he came to be wandering on North Turner Mountain for Meagan to rescue. I like to think of Hyperion as the Batman of the stories. He has no powers, and only holds his own due to his intelligence and cleverness … and the fact that the humans put up with him beyond all reason. But then they’re fantasy stories. And he is kind of cute.
Into this setting, Road Kill was born when I had a dream. A lot of plot points come from dreams, but never whole-cloth because my dreams tend to be stupid. In this case, I dreamt I had the power to travel back in time to a point when an animal has been hit and killed by a car. I would then stop the assassination and return to the present. I’m guessing the dream came about because of the number of dead animals I see abandoned on the side of the road, and the several times I’ve seen drivers deliberately swerve, trying to hit one. At the conclusion of the dream, I was hauled up before the Time Cops because I saved a cat, which somehow resulted in the total annihilation of humanity. My defense of “The bastards had it coming” was not considered legally well-grounded. Once I woke up, Emily Charron got that power, minus the legal hassles.
Emily is a graduate student, closing in on her PhD, and so totally focused that she’s been ignoring everything and everyone else around her. And once I had Emily, Chris Rodriguez popped into my head, cruising down a rainy road, volunteering to be the Watson to Emily’s Sherlock in a mystery revolving around a grand academic mystery that would, I hoped, somehow manage to include time travel, if only I could figure out how. Chris is an IT security specialist, working to help law enforcement deal with cybercriminals while also trying to keep Emily’s life from imploding under the strain.
This brings up the final component of my plotting and writing style. Neither the plot nor the characters listen to me in the slightest. Chris transformed into Emily’s childhood friend and a romance began to bloom before the conclusion of the first chapter. Chris gained his own superpower, which inconveniently appeared while they were eating pizza. It took me entirely by surprise and I had to go back and sprinkle hints into previous chapters. And to solve the issue with the time-travel sub-thread, Emily popped back to save an animal just because, even though it was the worst possible time.
Once that happened, the rules of time travel quickly grew from a half-page of notes to several pages with timeline graphs and detailed breakdowns of all the permutations I could think of, one of which became the central premise for the sequel, The International Criminal Conspiracy. But, more importantly, suddenly, the novel was no longer a mystery but instead an urban fantasy, geeky, romance, with a mystery sub-thread.
Worse of all, two-thirds of the way through Road Kill, Hyperion found a way to force himself into a novel he had no business being in. He just showed up in Chris’ living room, dragging poor Meagan along with him. This, in turn, dragged in Kristina Trantor, an individual with a questionable superpower who had been languishing, unused, on my dramatis personae since I had a dream back in the 80s.
The next thing I knew, a previously non-existent teenage daughter, Kaylee, apparated out of the ether and revealed herself to be Hyperion’s partner in sarcasm, forcing herself backward through time to a starring role in the long-suffering prequel, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold, replacing a lackluster neighbor that I never really liked anyway, plus shoehorning herself into the sequel as well. I, merely the author, stood no chance.
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