For the past four years of having a decent human being serve as our US president in real life and subsequently in my Other Worldly novels, I’ve worried that as time goes by, the first book, Alienable Rights, would become somewhat difficult to relate to because it features a maniacal moron in the White House who tweets illiterate, bigoted blather.
This coming February will mark five years since it’s been published, but I began drafting Alienable Rights in November, 2017, one year after this nation made the monumentally horrific mistake of a electing a maniacal moron to the White House who tweets illiterate, bigoted blather.
In Alienable Rights, the story opens with the revelation that aliens are not only among us, but we human Earthlings all have alien DNA in our genetic makeup.
Predictably, many in northern Nevada react by lining up to buy more guns to kill this latest threat to their perceived superiority, and thereafter remain dementedly determined to deny the truth about who they really are, and how they got here.
Meanwhile, their narcissistic sociopath of a cult leader president resents his loss of limelight with the constantly breaking news about aliens and their spectacular spacecraft. He insists via tweets that he is 110 percent human and wouldn’t have sex with aliens because they aren’t hot like his daughter-in-law.
Here’s the rub. I killed that fictional motherfucker off after he was voted out of office but threatened to refuse to leave the White House on inauguration day in book two, Feeling Alienated, and after he used military members to try to kidnap and imprison my protagonist Rowan Layne on Christmas Eve for her alien rights activism in book three, Aliens Abound. Wherein, Rowan escapes to Earth’s moon until he is safely out of office and out of diabolical control of our nation.
In addition to the previously mentioned maniacal moron, I have also killed off or convicted and sent to prison a cast of characters in his corrupt, corrosive orbit, including lawyers, members of Congress, a military general, and rightwing media personalities in the next three novels: Being Alien, Alien Sensation, and Altogether Alien, published in 2022 and 2023. So what am I to do now?
But, hey, at least I don’t have to worry about new readers of the series not being able to relate to a great deal of the content in Alienable Rights. Yet it’s disgusting that justice, the rule of law, and good winning out over evil only occur in my novels because we sure could use some of that in real life.
By the way, at the end of Feeling Alienated published just before the actual 2020 election, an enlightened female named Harrison is elected president on a split ticket with a predominantly alien black gay male vice president who is a member of a newly created otherworldly Omnipresent Party.
As I conduct a final review of the now formatted for publication book seven, Aliens Watch, to be released in January, I question how best to deal with this new development in our increasingly dystopian world as I continue drafting the series finale, Alien Origins. Because the US election has already occurred and we once again made the monumentally horrific mistake of a electing a maniacal moron to the White House who tweets—or posts, ironically along with the billionaire owner of the former Twitter social media site— illiterate, ignorant, bigoted blather.
In Aliens Watch, the next US election has not yet occurred, but it is referenced as coming next year, with conniving characters trying to unseat a Democratic governor of Nevada with a not-so-democratic county sheriff (unfortunately it already happened in 2022), and an alien US senator from Nevada set to be challenged by an anti-alien candidate (luckily we retained our Democratic senator in the Silver State in 2024).
While my novels have somewhat covered the corrupted Supreme Court as well as a diabolical attorney general under the maniacal moron administration, and having definitely covered the dangerous ridiculousness of Fox News and its fake journalists, I haven’t tackled the foreign-born billionaire owner of the former Twitter out to buy the presidency and destroy our democracy from within. Hard to be original when the dude wreaks of a stereotypically stupid James Bond villain.
Hence, I’m still not sure how I’ll go about weaving current and unexpected catastrophic events into Alien Origins, but as Rowan Layne’s extraterrestrial pals have told her more than once, their work is never done. They chose to reveal themselves on Earth when they did for a very particular reason, and now that reason is just as prevalent and as dangerous as it ever was.
If only it weren’t so.