{"id":8288,"date":"2018-10-20T16:18:44","date_gmt":"2018-10-20T16:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/?p=8288"},"modified":"2020-02-23T16:34:06","modified_gmt":"2020-02-23T16:34:06","slug":"backstory-the-story-behind-a-truth-stranger-than-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/backstory-the-story-behind-a-truth-stranger-than-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Backstory: The Story Behind A Truth Stranger Than Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

WARNING: This entry contains spoilers about the novel A Truth Stranger Than Fiction. Continue reading at your own risk!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Most of my mystery novels, and my fiction in general, start from a kernel of an idea, a factoid, an image.<\/p>\n

I see or hear something that piques my interest, but whatever it is I sense it\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg; there\u2019s a story there. At this point I file it away (usually writing it down, of course), forget about it and move on with whatever I\u2019m currently writing.<\/p>\n

Sometime during the winter of 2006-07, I saw a documentary about the moon that discussed the existence of the isotope Helium-3 embedded in the moon\u2019s soil, or regolith, and how then-President Bush (\u201cDubya\u201d) had vowed years earlier to send us back to the moon, ostensibly to colonize it and begin mining the Helium-3 for nuclear fusion energy production back on Earth.<\/p>\n

\"\"(NOTE: Because this piece is about the story behind the novel, I won\u2019t be going into the science of Helium-3 fusion. If that\u2019s something that interests you, you can view a page of the Helium-3 resources I consulted<\/a>, or you can listen to several interviews<\/a> I gave about the book, or you can read a previous blog entry<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

As I said at the opening of this piece,\u00a0 most of my fiction begins with an idea, a factoid, an image. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov suggested that novelists were like birds building nests\u2014gathering twigs and string and bits of fluff\u2014and that it was unclear whether the bird visualized ahead of time the nest it was going to build.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think birds building nests is the right analogy for novelists; birds generally gather their materials and begin nest-building immediately; novelists tend to gather their materials over years, and speaking for myself, I think of myself as more akin to the junk collector-cum-inventor in the original Mad Max films\u2014I collect interesting things, things that I sense will be useful down the road, things that can be combined with other interesting things to create something new and special.<\/p>\n

\"\"Subconsciously I suppose (because a \u201cplot\u201d for A Truth Stranger Than Fiction<\/em> was not in my consciousness), after seeing the moon documentary in the winter of 2006-07, I began my collecting, but I didn\u2019t write a first draft of the novel until 2013. By then, however, I was brimming over with interesting ideas, factoids and images that I\u2019d collected. Here, in no particular order, are a few that I\u2019d filed away over those six years:<\/p>\n