Any fiction I write feels like ripping my clothes off and dancing across a stage. That’s how I know I have it right.

Yet within that general statement there are differences. When I wrote my first novel, Wrong Highway, I felt like I was taking screaming voices out of my head and pinning them down on paper (sorry if i’m using a confusing clump of metaphors). By the time I completed my final version of the manuscript the screaming voices that compelled me to write it were safely under control, relegated to the past.

With my upcoming novel, “It’s Always 9/11”, (to be published August 17, 2021) I feel uncomfortably like I’m writing the future into being, like a dystopian version of Harold and the Purple Crayon. I have no sensation of relief, and little sense of control.

My crayon is not unfailingly accurate. The scenarios portrayed in my novel do not totally parallel the current day, partly because the raw materials of its fictional past differ from reality. “It’s Always 9/11”’s President Kaspar is (deliberately) not Trump. He’s much smarter, and does some social good (single payer health care, banning fracking) before everything goes to hell. He’s not a racist. As my character Teddy puts it, “he oppresses everyone equally” so race does not play a role in my book. When I began writing the novel in 2017, Covid was nearly three years away from escaping a bat or a pangolin or a lab or wherever it came from and wreaking havoc. The health crises that rattle New York City in the book are different. While the book contains social unrest galore, I must admit I never anticipated the right wing assault on the Capitol. In fact, the divisions splitting the country are both far more subtle and far more profound than a right/left split.

Yet so much has come to pass. I chose illness as a fictional device because of its capacity to tap into basic human fears that transcend ideology, and the capacity of that fear to descend into panic, obviate rational thinking, and render people more susceptible to authoritarian creep. This is no longer a fictional device. This is our reality and I put it on paper two years ago, down to the masks and the lockdowns and the emptied supermarket shelves. The (essentially) cashless society. The total reliance on online information, from newsy Presidential chats to comedic relief to helpful advice on adjusting to the “new normal”. The improbable emergence of Portland, Oregon as a center of resistance. Police in riot gear, tear gas, and worse. An eerily empty Times Square where the ball drops in front of nobody.

I won’t tell you where “It’s Always 9/11” goes next but I will tell you I hope that we in the tangible world aren’t following along.