For reasons foreign and domestic, last year was my time off from publishing. However, I didn’t stop writing completely. My focus now is bringing Ovid Fairweather to the world stage. Who’s that, you ask? Ovid was an introverted, somewhat neurotic book editor in New York, in therapy but feeling stuck. In the rat race of life, she’d crashed against the wall. Then the virus came and kept on coming. As an evolving virus decimates New York, Ovid finds herself in Hell’s Kitchen on a collision course with a small group of privileged survivors determined to control everyone else. Hounded by regrets and quietly seething with anger, she’s certain she has no future. To deal with dictators, Ovid Fairweather is going to have to learn how to get tough, and quickly.
She’s among the unlikeliest of heroines, but if you know my work, you know I love unlikely protagonists. From This Plague of Days and The Dimension War to The Night Man and the Jesus Diaz series, no matter the genre, none of my main characters are what they seem at first glance. They aren’t born heroes. They stumble, fall, get up, and grow into their roles. If you loved Jaimie Spencer, the mute kid on the spectrum in This Plague of Days, you’ll love Ovid. As a book editor, she shares his obsession with words, but the angle on this new book is a little different. Ovid has a voice in her head that chains her to the regrets and pains of the past.
Like Ovid, the voice in my head is unkind. Many writers have an inner critic that thwarts their progress. The voice in my head swears a lot and constantly reminds me of every mistake, every insult, every time anyone underestimated me. That’s what I share with Ms. Fairweather: an eidetic memory for pain. For me, it’s an albatross. For Ovid, that voice might prove to be the source of her power. I’m working on the novel now. It’s called Endemic and it should be ready in a couple of months.
In the meantime, I have a book recommendation for you. An author friend of mine writes a blog I love called Skeptophilia. Today (Jan 26, 2020) Gordon Bonnet penned a piece that hit me between the eyes and scalded my brainpan. The Cost of Regret is a blog post about the science of the road not taken.
Gordon gives you a view of the mindscape: That voice in your head obsessed with regrets and alternative paths? That’s called counterfactual curiosity, and there’s a paper on that in the journal Psychological Science. If you could know what would have happened had you made different choices, are you sure you’d want to know? Even better, there’s a new book about that voice in our heads. Chatter, by Ethan Kross, analyzes the inner voice, but also delves into how to manage it, quiet it, or even harness it to better ends. I can’t wait to read it! (Thanks for the recommendation, Gordon!)
If you purchase Chatter through the link on Skeptophilia.com, you’ll also support a very worthy voice of reason in a chaotic world. Don’t forget to subscribe to Skeptophilia while you’re there.
Gordon Bonnet has written 17 books. Check out his fiction on his Amazon page here.