In line with updating this story to the present day or even near future, I’ve come to wonder if casting Susan as an up and coming newspaper reporter is still a good idea. Newspapers have fallen out of favor in the age of the blog, and while they still carry an important seal of authority, Jason Blair, Judith Miller and others have shown them to be no more reliable than an informed and skeptical reading of the blogosphere.
With this in mind, I still think Susan longs to be a reporter, and might even have a degree in journalism. But I think she makes her living as a blogger. And more to the point, I think she blogs about religion and conservative politics.
I approach this with trepidation, since it’s a worldview 180 degrees from my own, but a fiction writer has to be able to write about characters different from himself as they are. Given that I’ve already decided Susan has to be a devout Christian and that we know she falls under Michael’s authoritarian spell in Jihad, I think she naturally gravitates toward Christian-friendly, authoritarian ideals. And in today’s world, that makes her a George W Bush Republican.
As conservative bloggers go, I think she’s probably mild, mild enough at least to be a likeable character. While she may read Coulter and Malkin and listen to Limbaugh and Hannity, I don’t think she writes that way herself. I like to think of myself as an accomplished writer, but I can’t make Ann Coulter into a sympathetic character. Then again, on the theory that Coulter is more performance artist than pundit, maybe Susan does write that way, but doesn’t actually go that extreme in her personal thinking. Maybe she just amps it up a bit for the blog.
And now we’re starting to see some life in these characters, some of the David E. Kelly quirkiness that I just couldn’t find for Dragons, my attempted solo Script Frenzy screenplay.
We’ve got Daniel, our hero and point of view character, a trained ER doctor who works as a paramedic so he won’t be asked to play God and finds himself nonetheless caught up in the granddaddy of all ancient conspiracies. Daniel wanted nothing more to be left alone with minimal responsibility, and yet finds himself eventually the founding president of the world’s first global government, a war hero and liberator bigger than George Washington.
We’ve got Susan, a conservative Christian blogger who stumbles upon a conspiracy she never could have imagined, something that goes against everything she believes in, and eventually has to make a stand against those in authority to do what’s right.
We’ve got Jeff Frankel, at least for book one, a crazy old kook who just happens to be right about the one thing he wishes he was wrong about.
Suddenly I’ve got a nice interpersonal dynamic with Susan and Jeff as polar opposites and Daniel caught in the middle. Not a bad core for the book. And I still have one more major character to add on the side of light for this first novel. FBI agent Jack Harris.
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