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And Now for Something Totally Different...
Wait, I thought you only wrote about Japan? Yes and no. My first book, TANABATA WISH, is set in Japan and I enjoy writing/blogging/tweeting about my life as part of a biracial/bicultural Japanese-American family. But that’s not all that I do. Some of you know that I started out my writing career as a journalist and did magazine articles for regional and national publications for about a decade. Before that though, I was at the University of North Carolina, completing my degree in Public Health Education. My favorite class of my entire college experience was Epidemiology. Yep, weird deadly diseases are my jam. That’s where I first learned about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. I went on to do other things (including having two children), but I kept coming back to the Spanish flu. In 2003, PAHO-WHO hired me to do a piece about the Spanish Flu and how it compared to SARS for their magazine PERSPECTIVES IN HEALTH. I happily dug through tons of historical documents and interviewed cutting-edge researchers, including Dr. Kirsty Duncan (who sent me an autographed copy of her book HUNTING THE 1918 FLU) for the piece. While I was doing research, I found the first person accounts of the deadly influenza absolutely fascinating. As a fiction writer, characters always come to me before the plot does. I was a big fan of DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN back in the day, so I started playing around with the idea of a Michaela Quinn-type person as a teen girl. As I continued to do more research, I found that this slice of history has a lot of echoes in 2018. I’ll share some of those nuggets of cool info with you in future posts. It’s taken fifteen (15!!!!!) years for this “interesting idea” in 2003 to solidify into the book that it is today, but I think it was worth the wait.
Want to learn more about this time period? Stick around. I have lots of behind-the-scenes blog posts coming up. Want to order your own copy of BREATHE? Click here for the paperback version and here for the Kindle eBook.