LISA BRACKMANN: At some point after I finished writing BLACK SWAN RISING, my lovely agent told me that I was not allowed to write about World War III.
I did not intend to write a book that was “ripped from the headlines” when I started work on BLACK SWAN RISING. And it was more than slightly disconcerting to see things that I’d written
as fiction repeated time and time again on the nightly news in full, awful reality. Friends started calling me “Cassandra.” And as we all know, it’s no fun being Cassandra.
So I guess my agent really has nothing to worry about. Cassandras can only predict, not change the outcome. But I think for my next book I will write something hopeful and healing, just in case.
I wrote the first chapter and a very rough outline of BSR in mid-2014. I was inspired by several things: an incredibly expensive and polarizing congressional campaign here in San Diego, in
what was at the time a swing district, the then unexamined link between misogyny and violence against women and mass shootings —“incel” was a self-characterizing term used on obscure message boards back then – and GamerGate, an organized campaign of harassment and at times violent threats against women and their allies in the gaming industry. Which, at the time, was not taken very seriously but provided a template for the Alt-Right and their online harassment and organizing. What’s even worse? That white supremacists found incel and gaming forums the perfect recruiting grounds for their racist movement.
(you can find out more about the genesis and setting of the book here)
None of that is any good in a novel if it isn’t anchored in characters and story. Writing about “issues” in fiction can all too easily become didactic and dull – the real-life stuff has to be embedded deep in the bones of the book and in individual human struggles. I hope I did that with BLACK SWAN RISING. I’m very fond of the characters – ambitious Casey Cheng, struggling to find meaning from her own tragedy, deeply damaged Sarah Price and Matt Cason, each in their own way searching for connection with others that they can’t quite make, existentially frustrated Lindsay Cason, who can’t figure out how her life went off-track and where to lay the blame. And I hope the plot is suspenseful and involving. But it’s not a story that ends with any easy answers. As I was writing the book, I kept asking myself, how do I wrap this up? How do I
solve the problems that the book posits? And I realized that I simply could not. The closure the characters sought was still a ways down the road.
A lot has happened since I wrote this book. We’ve had three and a half years of a disastrous presidency that has polarized our nation even beyond what BLACK SWAN RISING portrayed. Before, the book was a description and a prediction, my attempt to put some of the seemingly disparate pieces together to create a picture of where I thought we were heading. I think of it now as a prequel of sorts to the times we are living in today. I hope that our country has a
happier sequel in its future — I have to believe that we do.
Lisa Brackmann is the NYT best-selling author of the Ellie McEnroe trilogy (ROCK PAPER TIGER), and suspense novels GETAWAY, GO-BETWEEN and BLACK SWAN RISING. Her books have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Strand Critic’s best-first-novel and Amazon’s Top 100 Books of the Year and Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Travel+Leisure, Salon, LARB, and CNET. She lives in San Diego with a cat, far too many books and a bass ukulele, and plays a regular bass in a local band. You can find her at www.lisabrackmann.com
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Rising-Lisa-Brackmann-ebook/dp/B089ZN4DFL/ (new ebook)
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Rising-Lisa-Brackmann/dp/0738759473 (old HC)
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Rising-Lisa-Brackmann-audiobook/dp/B07GWYFKJ9/ (audio)
DEBS: Readers, stop in and welcome Lisa!
