The best part about writing a darknet cyber crime technological thriller, is the problem-solving moment of discovery.
Imagine this, you’re at the end of a long eight-hour slog through another revision pass of your book. That morning, you discovered there’s a massive plot-hole you hadn’t considered.
It’s staring you in the face, laughing at you with its devilish semi-colons and closing parentheses ;)
You want to destroy your computer. You want to put an end to this story which has tortured you with its irritating complexity. Why didn’t I write that f#$*ing children’s book instead? You think to yourself, doubting every decision in life which brought you to this moment, because you know this story can only be saved with a full rewrite of several chapters you spent weeks crafting.
You walk around your neighborhood pacing, muttering to yourself strange imaginations of the characters you’ve created, searching for the logical explanation for their character motivation. Children pass you on the street throwing halloween candy at your face. The hard kind, the stale stuff they left on the counter for months. Women look away in horror as you stare into the depths of the serial killer you’re trying to understand.
Out of nowhere, you’re kidnapped and robbed at gun point and then berated mercilessly for having no money to steal.
The kidnappers drop you off in an alley downtown, and as the halloween candy melts from your face and you’re crying in a puddle of your own tears, a kindly homeless woman comes up to you and whispers something in your ear.
“Get a real job, you chump!” She says right before she whistles to her pack of rabid street dogs who chase you down the alleyway, biting at the heels of your shoes and your dwindling pride.
You jump the fence into a deserted warehouse, taking shelter amongst a group of immigrant refugees fighting for their lives. The police come by to sweep the area, mistaking you for an escaped convict wanted by the FBI.
They forego the refugees, hit you with a Taser, and drag you to jail. The kidnappers took your wallet, leaving you without any identification to prove your innocence, so the cops throw you in solitary confinement for a week.
As you sit there in your cell, counting the tiles on the wall to stave off the boredom, you take a piece of cheese from the sparse dinner shoved through the slat in your jail door, and you start writing incoherent prophesies of dystopian nonsense.
As your cheese-pen dwindles to a crumb, the guards arrive at your cell door to let you out. When they see the cheese graffiti on the wall, they cross the room to beat you into a pulp with their nightsticks, and as the sound of your cracking bones reverberates around the cell, you suddenly understand your main character’s suffering.
You have a glimpse of inspiration, and the solution finally presents itself. You barely feel your bones breaking as you smirk with satisfaction at the cleverness of your twist. The shock immaculate. The satisfaction sublime. The audience’s favorite character dead on the floor.
You sit in the lobby of the police department until the mayor personally arrives to apologize for the misunderstanding, offering you a settlement check which will fund your next novel. Still mired in the stupor of brain damage caused by the night stick beatings, you stand up and rip the check up dramatically, thinking it’s a citation for publicly sympathizing with the homeless.
You walk out, head held high, armed with the solution to your plot-hole, as looks of absurd confusion cover the faces of the mayor and her police squad.
Is writing a thriller novel exciting? You’re goddamn right it is.
-K.M. Ecke
Read the first 10 chapters of Moral Panic for free: https://thedreamflow.com/pages/moral-panic-by-k-m-ecke-ch-1-10
