A Curious Statistical Anomaly

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.

So far, I’ve been posting snippets from Road Kill and I hope people are enjoying them and the novel as a whole.  But, this time I think I’ll provide a small sample of the prequel in which we are introduced to Meagan and Hyperion, and their characters are quickly established.

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The Cat Who Came in from the Cold

Chapter 1

Meagan Robichaud gratefully closed the large, circular, hobbit-styled outer mudroom door behind her, shutting out the rain and wind that still howled around her house and rattled the few outward-facing windows. An occasional crack of thunder made the walls rattle as well. She leaned her umbrella against the hall tree, making sure the tip was safely inside the rimmed rubber mat, and slowly unbuttoned her rain jacket with fingers still numbed by the icy rain.

It had been a long day down in Bangor, attending another boring business meeting that had come, once again, within a hair’s-breadth of convincing her to terminate her contract. Why they insisted on face-to-face meetings was a complete mystery to her. Why she insisted on dressing up for them was equally mysterious, but unfortunately could not be blamed on them, not that it stopped her from trying.

What had started as a worthy cause was fast devolving into a quagmire that only existed for the sake of existing, offering incompetent bureaucrats validation for their paychecks, and as a transparent ploy for staving off the inevitable audit for another month. Keeping the internet services running for the residents of the Sunshine Retirement Villages now seemed to have been totally dropped from the list of objectives, written or otherwise.

By trade, Meagan was an Information Technologies Security Consultant. It looked snazzy on a business card, but what it really entailed was hours in front of a computer screen, keeping people out of places they had no business being, and tracking them down for law enforcement’s attention when they occasionally managed to do it anyway. Fortunately, that could all be done from the peaceful sanctity of her lair, allowing her to totally avoid humanity except for groceries, doctor’s visits, and business meetings. The latter was what had forced her unwilling participation on a day that nobody should have been out on.

Today’s meeting, filled with face-saving and finger-pointing, had been called due to an automated report that somebody had inexplicably decided to read. Yes, there had been a minor breach. No, it has not been the fault of her security team. Yes, they had it under control. And no, it did not require several hours of pontification by people that couldn’t find the computer’s power button without an administrative assistant.

Kicking off her shoes, purchased for their professional look and certainly not their long-term comfort, she gave a sigh of relief and slipped into her clogs. The jacket and blouse would follow as soon as she could get upstairs, but at least her feet were now free from hours of torture.

From the kitchen came the thumps and bumps that signaled the approach of the cat. She smiled as she dropped her messenger bag on the hall tree’s bench and finally shrugged off her dripping coat. It was nice to be back home with those that actually liked her and didn’t just make a poor pretense out of social politeness. She hadn’t wanted to leave him for so long while he was recuperating, but at least her worry had been mitigated by being able to wrangle him a cat-sitter.

She hung the coat on an empty hook and turned to say hello when two heavy paws slammed into the wall on either side of her head. Instinctively she recoiled from the bewhiskered face that stared her eye to eye, causing the back of her head to bounce lightly off the wall.

“Welcome home dear,” the cat said. “Would you like a martini before dinner?” Without so much as a pause, the whiskers swept back in amusement. “What? No kiss?”

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