BEGGING TO DIE... ON THE PAGE

DROPPING THE WORD

BY BUTTON PUSHER

As a brand-new author, writing Mongol Moon in a coffee shop like JK Rowling, I was too focused on the story and actual writing to think about trying to fit friends and family into my debut novel. The only aspects from real-world people were me. All the mistakes that Gale Washington made in Mongol Moon were ones that I’ve actually made. Like when Gale was aiming his rifle at the front door while laying on the floor. The Iranian appeared in the doorway and Gale pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Safety was on. I’ve done this many times at the range.

That said, when I started writing the sequel and Mongol Moon was starting to pick up fans on Twitter, two things happened. One on Twitter and one in real-life. One of my mutuals, and one of many of yours, @genericancitizn, who’s Twitter persona is Mike Myers, asked me to run him over with a tank in the sequel. I said yes immediately not knowing how I’d do that or what character I’d need to create to have it happen. So, on I wrote. Now, I’m not the first author to write in friends and family into their stories, or to kill them off in spectacular ways, but this was a first for me.

Second, one of my best friends from high school, John, showed up at my house one day out of the blue. Now the backstory here is that his Step-Father owned a lot of guns and when he passed, left them all to John. Two of these rifles were Chinese SKS’s. I’d been bugging him for years to give me one. After all, he can’t shoot both at once. So there he stood on my front porch that day with a gun case. He came in and we chatted a while. Then he asked if in return for one of the SKS’s (he patted the case) I would write him into the sequel. Whatever I wanted to do. I accepted. Duh. And that’s how John died in the truck at the Point of Rocks bridge.

Now, since I’m pretty active on Twitter (X) and that I write slowly and methodically (ok, slow), it provided ample opportunity for other Twitter mutuals to ask me to kill them in my stories. Or, at least to abuse them repeatedly, like I’m doing to Demp. This all had another aspect to it. Our Twitter community is an amazing place. I took quite a few moments from the Twitter timeline and wrote them into the sequel, which I will talk about in the next blog spot. I was also able to find a Mike character to run over with a tank in the cul-de-sac toward the end.

The fact that I was now pretty invested in finding homies to kill in my stories made me realize something as I’m writing the third book. I had to start writing mutuals into the story early on so they’d be there when I wanted to kill or abuse them. It’s challenging to just come up with a character on the fly, only to kill them off. It’s more satisfying, I think, if the readers get to know them a bit prior to shenanigans. It also provides me some interesting and humorous things to build onto them. That said, not all may die, but some. That all depends on the story as I write it.

I didn’t have only the third book to write in the homies. I wrote five short stories in 2024 for the anthology, Apocalypse In Pieces, which expands on the Mongol Moon world with many other very talented authors. My short stories will link into the third book directly. You can certainly read the third book without reading the shorts, but you won’t have all the backstory, but it will be fine as is (read the anthology!). These short stories also provided me with an outlet for killing more homies or setting them up to be killed in the third book. In Remember the Drift, I wrote in Rick Pearson as the military commander of Richard’s Bay, South Africa. He is another high-school friend that I’m very close with. Reaper in that same story was built on a Twitter mutual we all know, @k9_reaper, who lives in SA and helped a bit with the story research.

I used twitter mutuals in the other four stories as well. Rob Province is the antagonist in Battle of Diego Garcia. In the short story, Irene, there are several homies. @OfAthenry (Pedro), @ZenfinityDesign (Zen), and @SharkFloppKing (Tekk) and one Firey, but Mostly Peaceful @Julio_Rosas11 (who servers as the mission’s own Joe Galloway). It was fun writing them into the danger, but I wanted that story to be from the CASEVAC (Pedro’s) viewpoint, so I was very cognizant to make sure I got it right with a lot of help from Pedro. There are many more in the stories, Catastrophic Success and Black Alice. Too many known and unknown (except to me) to list.

In the third book, there are so many to kill off (and want to be!), I had to use weapons of mass destruction on groups of them. I learned my lesson though. The prologue includes many homies you all may know from Twitter, but me writing them in doesn’t in any way take from the story for those who don’t know who they are. Those that do will just get an extra chuckle while reading (Cav, Shadzey, and Braxton for starters). All this said, the vast majority of my characters are not based on real people, but created out of thin air in my brain space.

In closing out this first actual blog spot, there are many aspects of writing these stories that I love. Writing in my friends and homies gives me (and I hope the readers) many giggles and eye rolls. Also, it pushes me to write more quickly when I figure out when one of them will die or be maimed. I want to get to that part and do the thing. So many of my mutuals on twitter have asked to be killed off in the stories, I don’t have room to do it all. One thing I do know is that Grimzy will be in a trunk at some point. He brought that on himself.