I started writing The Last American at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. At the time, we were living in a log cabin on Smith Mountain Lake. The story takes place in a fictional part of that same county, where the narrator’s family has been for generations.
We were all unsure back then. Scared about a lot of things, and I guess that notion of fear and what it could do to your mind resonated with me.
At the time, I was also digging into AI. I’m not a coder per-se, but I spun up an account on the IBM Watson platform, took a few courses, and started building stuff that worked. I quickly realized that what I could do as a non-coder was way beyond what real coders could do just a few years earlier.
It was this frame that set the context for The Last American. I worked on the story off and on for a few months–I was also into a major revision of the first book in The Seven Coins series. Both are really fun projects for me. Around the 65K-word mark, I stalled as other life events started distracting me. Fast forward to early November, 2022, and the world seems to be a different place.
The march of technology has continued at a frightening pace. People split into different camps around the COVID, with some embracing vaccinations and others disdaining them. In the US, we sometimes seem to have more division than unity. But do we really?
I learned with my first real newspaper job that you get published if your editor picks your story–and you get placed in front of readers’ eyes by that selection. Editors pick what Publishers want to see. Publishers want to see ad sales. Sharp stories sell, but that sharpness can come with many angles.
Set in 2028 to 2029,The Last American explores one man’s struggle with the changes of his world. My wife observes, quite rightly, that many of those struggles are my own. But that’s the point of most of my writing–to explore topics that interest me, from within a safe little cocoon of my own making. I write because I have to. The world I imagine isn’t always a safe place. But in the end, we have heroes.
And we really do. We used to call them “Americans.”
