From time to time, I get emails inquiring about the validity of certain premises in the book. The nicer ones ask things like “are you making this up?” There are a few others who simply ask, “What’s wrong with you?” To address the former and other commonly asked questions:
- Does it really take X hours to travel from A to B? Yes! Probably. There is an actual timeline involved when I write books. I painstakingly chart each chapter on a spreadsheet and enter times and dates, including travel times. Why? Because I once read a book by a famous author who had a helicopter fly 2,000 miles across Central Asia in two hours. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with that, it’s 10x faster and 10x farther than a chopper can fly. I didn’t want to make that mistake myself (not that anyone bothered to call the famous author on it), so I’ve kept track ever since.
- Can a suicide plant really kill you? Yes! And no. If someone were to bludgeon you to death with it, yes. But its poison is not as deadly as I let on in the book. I hate giving good ideas to bad people, so I intentionally mislead certain aspects. However, the poison frog is indeed deadly. In that case, a good deal of knowledge on how to harvest the poison (without dying) was lost to eternity by the Spanish Conquistadors, so there’s little chance of that going wrong. (But if I should die mysteriously, you can rest assured that my wife figured it out.)
- Are these places real? Yes! Some are, some have fictional additions, and others should be. Before I start writing, I look up candidate sites and pick a few. As I write, the place I picked may be lacking a patio or a third floor (or a second roof-access door). I take the liberty of adding those as needed. Real places are used fictitiously, but, because they exist and you might go there one day, I try to keep them accurately portrayed. The Lanesborough Hotel really is ridiculously, French-Revolution-Inspiringly opulent … although, if they wanted to spot me a week in the Royal Suite, I wouldn’t turn them down.
- Have you been to these places? Yes! In my dreams, mostly. I’ve always wanted to visit the Peak District, but never got there on my UK itineraries, so the second-best option is to write about it. Same for many places in my books. Others, such as the Mayan ruins of the Yucatan, I’ve visited and researched extensively. Of my friends who own private jets I constantly ask things like, “Wouldn’t you love to help me research hiding places in the sewer systems of Brest, Belarus?” So far, no love.
- Can you prove any of this? Like Psychotherapeutic Suggestibility? Yes! Maybe. Terrorists have used psychedelics to help radicalize suicide bombers for years. Psychologists have been working on these dark matters for decades (the CIA claims they stopped). I also contact experts in many topics. In this book, Tania executed a tension pneumothorax operation thanks to the brilliant tutelage of Dr. Louis Kirby. In a previous book, the functions and limitations of LIDAR were kicked around by several professors at the University of San Diego (where they have a massive system for visualizing such things).
For more information, including links to some of the research (I often forget to collect some stuff in my OneNote files) visit my ONENOTE NOTEBOOK. There you will find everything but the timeline (which would be a spoiler).
Thanks for listening, you’re now my favorite reader!
