5 IRL Things That Inspired My Books

Since I have quite the backlist now, I thought it would be fun to discuss five topics in my books and the real life events that inspired them. :)

1. Chess in the Horrorscape series. I actually play chess. I used to be fairly good at it-- and have played against national masters-- but I was way better at the antichess variant, in which the goal is to lose all of your pieces first in a series of forced captures. (In fact, I once beat one of said NMs at antichess!) I thought it would be creepy if someone took that one level further and built a series of killings around an imaginary game of chess! And boom-- that inspired the serial killer in the book. :)

2. Pulp horror in Little Deaths. To research for the book, I read a lot of books about trash cinema and Roger Corman (seriously, his movies are pretty wild!). I wanted to write about an actress who was in movies that people loved but didn't take seriously as "real" art. There's a mini documentary on Vox about The Room where the host talks about "Z-films," which become cult classics but don't necessarily do well commercially. People who appreciate Z-films and trash cinema are often correlated with having higher intelligence because, as with the appeal of foreign or art house films, these are movies that are often avant-garde and challenge the status quo. The direct-to-VHS boom was so freeing when it came to output and creativity, but for someone like Donni, I felt like it could lead to type-casting and an inability to see her beyond "just another scream queen."

3. Medieval literature/history in Batter My Heart. For reasons I won't be getting into, I ended up taking a medieval lit class during my first year of college. It wasn't relevant to my studies-- I just needed the credits-- and I used to joke at how useless it was, and how I'd never use that knowledge for anything. Then over a decade later, I crammed all of that knowledge into BMH by making the hero a medieval lit scholar who is also working on a dense and literary romance novel as his thesis. Before the heroine convinces him to give it a happy ending, the story he writes is loosely based on the story of Pedro and Ines of Portugal. Look it up. It's Game of Thrones dark and does NOT have an HEA.

4. Food allergies in Raise the Blood. I haven't seen a lot of books that have characters with food sensitivities/allergies, outside of mystery novels. I gave the heroine mine because I am an advocate for food allergy/sensitivity awareness. Food is a central and unavoidable part of our lives and if you have dietary restrictions that you need to follow for the sake of your health, it can be very invasive and stressful to deal with. I can't dine out spontaneously, and I have to read the ingredients labels of everything I consume that isn't a single ingredient (like an apple). Characters with food allergies often get killed off in mysteries, so I thought it would be fun to write one where the poor allergy/sensitivity-laden person doesn't die; they just get put out of commission for a while.

5. Video rentals in Rent Girl. While watching a documentary about the last functional Blockbuster video store, I couldn't stop thinking about those cassettes and what a perfect vehicle they would make for smuggling hidden items. Especially when the people being interviewed talked about some of the things the people left in the cassettes by mistake. (Or shall we say, "mistake"?) It made me think, Why not drugs? And the bare bones of this story were formed. Also, I just think video stores are incredibly nostalgic. If you've ever been in one, you can INSTANTLY recall the smell, just like that (old popcorn and carpet cleaner). I wanted Rent Girl to feel like a sleazy, low-budget crimesploitation story that you could actually FIND at a video rental store back in the day, so it ended up becoming a very meta work.

I hope this was interesting to some of you. LMK if you'd like to see more posts like this sometime. :)