Last night, I was writing a pivotal scene in The Resilient: Among the Forewarned when a new song came on my radio app. Wicked Man by Brad Arnold of the band 3 Doors Down. At first, I wasn’t paying much attention to it. It was just background noise. But as it played, I began to notice it seemed to match what I was writing, almost like a soundtrack to the scene.
Without giving away any details to that particular scene, it’s a particular moment when the “curtain is pulled back” on the conspiracy behind the United State Federation. I was in the middle of unmasking the Federation’s own “wicked man” when the song began to play. That’s when I began to really listen to the words. After a quick Google search to find the lyrics, I came across this quote from Arnold.
"The inspiration for the song has been the world around us. The recent events that have happened and are happening in our country are events that will shape the future. In so many of these events, it seems there must be 'someone behind the curtain.' I believe a lot of people agree with this. I think that people are tired of being lied to and manipulated and are beginning to see the pattern. This song just points out a few of the things that are dividing and shaping things. I hope it makes people realize that we truly are all in this together. It's everyone's future."
That felt a bit strange when I’m creating this fictional world, when the very idea of what I’m writing is being expressed in the real world. A second time that’s happened with the coronavirus following the same course as my fictional Anderton virus. In my writing, I try to base a lot of ideas off actual historical moments to help ground it in reality. Sometimes those lines cross in strange and unpredictable ways.
Nothing has felt as strange as seeing the fallout of COVID-19 spread in the same manner as what I had envisioned for my novel. Back when I began writing the first draft for Out of the Forbidden in 2014, a world wide pandemic was still the stuff of science fiction. Plagues like that didn’t happen in the modern age. And then as I was writing the fallout of the virus that had been planned 6 years ago, I was able to live through what my characters were experiencing.
Now, that’s not to say there’s a “man behind the curtain” of the coronavirus. I’ll leave that to the conspiracy theorists. But it is ironic that it too finds parallels in the current age.
Check out “Wicked Man” by Brad Arnold here: