Dark and, at times, amusing fiction from award-winning author Dave Zeltserman

Friday, August 26, 2011

Where my ideas come from: Dying Memories


After seeing how difficult it had been to sell The Caretaker of Lorne Field and A Killer's Essence, books that I thought should've been easy sales to the Big 6 publishers but kept getting blocked because they were deemed too different, I decided to write a more conventional thriller, but one with enough of a noirish edge so I'd be happy with it. So now I needed both an idea and a plot, and after some brainstorming hit upon a very cool idea. I needed to do some research on nanotechnology to better understand and formulate this idea, and while I don't want to ruin the story by giving this away now, the idea I came up with is something I'm convinced that will be developed in the future. Maybe not today, or next year, but give it 10 years or so. And it will be a scarier world when that happens.

So now that I had myidea, I needed to work that into a plot, and I did so by steeping it deeply with paranoia, and Dying Memories was born. I wrote it to follow the standard thriller conventions: shorter chapters than I usually write with a kind of cliffhanger at the end of each of these, and like my other books, lots of twists and ever escalating danger. But I also gave it enough of a noirish edge so it would stand out as a book that my current readers would also be happy with. My friend, Vincent Zandri, was having a lot of success with the ebooks that StoneGate Ink were publishing, so I decided with Dying Memories to play more in the ebook world and have StoneGate publish this one also.

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