The Unification Chronicles

As many of you have prob­a­bly noticed by now, I’m mak­ing heavy use of cur­rent events, trends and tech­nolo­gies in the nar­ra­tive of Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. Specif­i­cally, Susan is a blog­ger, Jeff used Twit­ter and every­one is on the net with GPS-​​enabled smart­phones. But wait, some of you might be ask­ing, isn’t that going to date the work? What hap­pens in a cou­ple cen­turies when peo­ple are pick­ing the time­less clas­sics of the twenty-​​first century?

The answer, of course, is I’ll be dead, so what do I care?

Okay, let’s dis­cuss this. I tried, when writ­ing the orig­i­nal Between Heaven and Hell novel­las, to avoid things that would freeze the story in a spe­cific place and time. But because my knowl­edge of the future was imper­fect — isn’t it always? — a num­ber of things slipped in any­way that ring out today as hope­lessly anachro­nis­tic. When con­fronted with a car wreck in the very first scene, Daniel doesn’t call 911 on his mobile phone, because in 1996 he didn’t have one. Susan copies the data­base of demons onto a CD-​​ROM. No one filmed these amaz­ing things and put them on YouTube. Even though I tried to avoid such things, they’re glar­ing in their absence when com­pared to our daily lives today.

So my advice is don’t try to make your book “time­less.” You’ll fail. A lot. You can’t pre­dict the future, and instead of mak­ing your work time­less, you’ll make it bland. Go ahead and use real brand names and trade­marks like Twit­ter, Nike, Pepsi, CNN. Done well, they’ll lend your work an authen­tic­ity, a solid­ity, it might not oth­er­wise have. It’s one thing to say your char­ac­ter had a ham­burger, it’s sub­tly dif­fer­ent to say he had a Big Mac.

But like any nar­ra­tive tool, don’t overuse it. All those proper nouns can be dis­tract­ing if you whack the reader over the head with them. And you really want to be care­ful that you don’t give the appear­ance that the brand names are paid prod­uct place­ment, unless, of course, you got paid a boat­load of money to do it.

What about using real peo­ple, not just things? Celebri­ties are fair game, right?

Sort of.

When writ­ing the first book in the UC series, I assumed I’d cement it in 2010 as solidly as I could, so when it came time to men­tion peo­ple in high gov­ern­ment office, I used real politi­cians. The Pres­i­dent was Barack Obama, etc. But as I’m get­ting into Cru­sade, I’m real­iz­ing I have to take a step back on that. Why? Because I have to kill people.

Specif­i­cally, one of the events on the world’s spi­ral into chaos is a Pres­i­den­tial assas­si­na­tion. Two of them, in fact. First the Pres­i­dent gets whacked because some nutjob is try­ing to prove he’s a demon, and then the Vice-​​turned-​​Acting Pres­i­dent is killed by a demon dur­ing a riot that pretty much burns Wash­ing­ton DC to the ground. I can’t really use Barak Obama and Joe Biden for these roles. At least not if I want to avoid the Secret Ser­vice dis­ap­pear­ing me off to Gitmo. Using celebri­ties in your work is one thing, some­thing that could be con­strued as a threat to a sit­ting Pres­i­dent is another.

So now the Pres­i­dent in Cru­sade is Ricardo Ale­jan­dro Cruz. He was a two-​​term Con­gress­man from Miami before run­ning for Pres­i­dent in 2008 and being elected the country’s first Latino Pres­i­dent. He was born in Miami to Cuban immi­grant par­ents, and spent a good chunk of his child­hood in Cuba. Right wing con­spir­acy nuts have insisted for years that his birth cer­tifi­cate is a fake, and that he was really born in Cuba, and that he’s been installed here, Manchurian Can­di­date–style, to com­mu­nize the United States. In Cru­sade, one of these nuts goes even fur­ther and decides he’s not human at all, he’s a demon, and to prove it, the nut’s going to put a 30 – 06 round right between his eyes and watch him get back up on live TV…

Which of course, Cruz won’t.

On the one hand, using fic­tional politi­cians gives me the abil­ity to do what­ever I want with them just like any of my other char­ac­ters. But I have to admit I do kind of miss the verisimil­i­tude using real elected offi­cials gave Rev­e­la­tion. It was one thing to say that the heat was com­ing down on the FBI from the Direc­tor of Home­land Secu­rity, another to day it was com­ing down from Direc­tor Napoli­tano. But to do what I really want to do in this story, some things have to stay fiction.

But not every­thing. No way Susan’s giv­ing up Twitter.