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Donald Shinn

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What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Donald Shinn The case of the mysterious survivor! The biggest mystery in my life is: How am I still alive? A recent infectious disease doc came into my hospital ro…moreThe case of the mysterious survivor! The biggest mystery in my life is: How am I still alive? A recent infectious disease doc came into my hospital room reading off my medical history and then stopped at the foot of my bed and asked, "What are you? A cat with nine lives?" I laughed and assured her cats were way cooler than I'd ever be. I was more of a dude with nine lives. She laughed and updated her notes.

When I was born in 1958 the expected life expectancy for a hemophiliac was the late teens or early twenties, the thirties if you were lucky. Advances in treatment both extended and then drastically shortened that expected lifespan. The new treatment involving freeze-dried clotting factor that came about in the mid-seventies made treating hemophilia much easier. (Also, much more expensive!) It involved pooling together large batches of plasma (initially ten thousand units and then later a hundred thousand units) to extract the clotting factor needed to treat hemophilia.

When you pool that much plasma together you will always have infectious diseases in the plasma pool. Nearly every hemophiliac using the clotting factor in the seventies got Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. When HIV came to America in 1976, it quickly found its way into the clotting factor. This led to the death of the majority of hemophiliacs. I was spared due to a genetic variation called CCR 5 Delta 32. This protects one from HIV, and also smallpox, and the plague. (I'm happy to report I haven't tested my immunity to smallpox and the plague just yet. It seemed to work okay against HIV though.)

In the 1990's the prions responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease found their way into the clotting factor supply. I used over 250,000 units of clotting factor that was later recalled due to that contamination. So far anyway, my brain hasn't wasted away. (Or if it has, I don't know it.)

I've survived losing an eye to a bleed, bleeding ulcers, pulmonary embolisms, DVTs, a torn abdominal wall, gall bladder issues/surgery, sepsis, a broken femur, osteoporosis, a collapsed lung, two iliopsoas bleeds, Hep B, Hep C, exposure to the prions responsible for CJD, and more. How did I do it? God only knows. He has a role for me to fill and I guess I haven't filled it yet, so he keeps me hanging around. I could have, should have died multiple times, but I haven't.

There was a brief period of time when due to a plasma shortage during the HIV crisis the lovely folks at the CDC, NIH, and FDA discussed waiving the rules on buying plasma from African prisons and using that for hemophiliacs. (Some African prisons at the time were forcibly extracting plasma to sell to offset the cost of holding the prisoners. The HIV rate in those prisons was reportedly 98%.) The theory was that since both AIDS and Ebola had erupted in Africa that using plasma from Arica for hemophiliacs would let the government see more easily if there was a new threat out there. Since we'd all already been exposed to HIV it wouldn't matter. Yeah. Suffice to say I pretty much stopped following the advice of the CDC, NIH, and FDA after that. If they say go left, I go right. I think that's part of why I'm still alive today Maybe it's not such a mystery after all. Do the opposite of what the government says, and you'll live long and prosper! (Now if only I could get that prosper part down. I sure haven't nailed that yet.)

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gardenman, This is originally teganslaw from QVC. I finally joined so I could start posting. I need to know if there will be any more Sara X books or if she's retired for good? I hope she comes back at least one more time.

Donald Shinn I don't have anything planned for Sara after book four. I'm not opposed to bringing her back again if I come up with a good idea for how to do it. I j…moreI don't have anything planned for Sara after book four. I'm not opposed to bringing her back again if I come up with a good idea for how to do it. I just don't have that idea right now. The original Sara book was to be the only Sara book. Then the 2016 election came along and inspired books two, three, and four. There's a germ of an idea where a social media mogul (like a Mark Zuckerberg) decides to figure out exactly how many people she's killed and exposes some of her former clients. It's just too easy for her to kill one guy though. Maybe something like a Project Veritas or Wikileaks type group starts to expose her former clients, but does so from secrecy? She has to figure out who they are and then stop them before they destroy too many people? She used a hacker group to expose the pedophiles in book four, so maybe one of those hackers then turns on her and tries to expose her clients and her?

At this moment, I'm trying to finish up a book where an odd group of four people discovers how a drug kingpin is smuggling cash out of the US and intercept one of his shipments netting themselves $2 billion in cash along with almost three billion in the artwork he was shipping to his villa in Colombia. They end up donating the artwork to the Philly art museum which creates all kinds of extra problems. Suffice to say the drug kingpin is not especially happy about this turn of events. It's a longer novel than I've written in quite a while at over seventy thousand words now, and likely to end up around eighty thousand when I finally get it done. I'm hoping to wrap it up by Christmas. I'm doing a rewrite on one section today.

I've got some other stuff in the nearly done category including "The Plain People League" where a group of normal Janes and Joes who are more or less invisible to the rest of the world, uncover corruption, criminals and take the law into their own hands to get justice. It's largely inspired by the song "Mr. Cellophane" in the musical Chicago. The PPL is made up of janitors, waitresses, customer support workers, maids, cooks, dog walkers, Uber drivers, etc. Being invisible (at least to some) can be a handy tool for fighting injustice.

There are another ten or so books in one stage of completion or another. There's a YA story of a couple of teenagers who discover they have the power to alter others' actions through their thoughts. They were part of a former CIA program where psychic abilities were tried to be genetically engineered but funding had been cut and the program abandoned. No one realized the abilities only kicked in after puberty. When the two discover what they can do all heck breaks loose. Suffice to say the CIA gets very interested in them again.

There's a story tentatively titled "The Programmer" where a young woman computer programmer who grew up programming computers and can speak to almost any machine in machine language realizes that DNA and RNA are both computer programs and the cells are computers. She starts to look around the world/universe and discovers there are many more things that seem programmed. She then finds that the universe's operating system is hidden in the cosmic background radiation. She then intercepts it and learns how to manipulate it. This gives her God-like powers. Russia and China are on the verge of attacking the US and have their fleets massed along our coasts when she uses her programming skills to send their crews back to their home countries and their ships to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Then there's "New Eden" a sci-fi story that never went too far as I never knew how to end it. Amazon has their new Vella program where stories can go on forever, so that may get dusted off and used for that. In "New Eden" I keep the physics of space travel sane. (No instant popping up halfway across the universe.) It starts out with a young woman journalist (Jessie Kowalski) learning that she's to be the journalist covering the first voyage to a nearby (ten light-years away) planet that's been dubbed New Eden. The flight there will take 25 years and the flight back another 25 years, so it's kind of a big commitment. Suffice to say she never makes it back but her daughter does, who's never set foot on a planet before. An entrepreneur who's building a new spaceship discovers that his father had acquired the ownership of the old ship and thus he now owns the young woman who's back on Earth but completely unprepared for life on Earth. The guy then takes her along as he and a crew of hundreds try to leave the universe and venture into the void beyond. Once out there they watch as the universe we know reverts to a single point and then erupts in a new big bang. (In theory, every atom has a critical mass but for most atoms, the mass is so large it's impossible to achieve. In the story, the critical mass of iron is everything in the universe, but over the life of the universe everything decays into iron, so it works out. Once everything is sucked together into a supermassive black hole, the iron atoms reach criticality and you get a new Big Bang.) The crew then divides up and settles on new planets only to then reunite outside the universe as that version nears its end. I like the idea of exploring how humans change over time when isolated and then reunite and see the changes in one another. Humans on a planet with heavier gravity might be shorter, stockier, and stronger. Skin colors change, facial patterns change. It is a never-ending story. Perfect for the Vella format.

And there's more. I have a story of a guy who had a near-death experience after getting hit by a car who finds out he can't rejoin his body and there are now two of him. The physical one and the purely spiritual one. Suffice to say his less physical self didn't "go to the light" as he was distracted looking at a pretty nurse and is now stuck here in nonphysical form. It's a problem for him.

And there's more yet. Suffice to say I don't need anything else to write. I need to finish more of the stuff I've gotten started. God willing, every three or four months I should be able to toss out another story. A lot of stuff is nearly done.(less)

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Donald Shinn’s books

Average rating: 4.43 · 136 ratings · 25 reviews · 18 distinct works

	Sara X 4.41 avg rating — 41 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Living Library 4.15 avg rating — 27 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sara X Book Three: Double Trouble 4.71 avg rating — 14 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Campaign: A comedic tale of how creating a Super Bowl ad nearly destroyed a small ad firm 4.30 avg rating — 10 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Becoming Santa: An Unconventional Christmas Story 4.25 avg rating — 8 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sara X: The Mother Hen it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 5 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Annie's Gift it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 4 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sara X: A Broken Trust 4.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Dave's Weird Christmas 4.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	How to Save Money on Your New Home: Secrets Architects and Builders Know and You Probably Don't. it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 3 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Book six of the Sara X series, "A Deep State Betrayal" is now available. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCW982PV/... This is a book that took me forever to get out there. It involved a concept that I felt might be too absurd when I first started writing it. Current events have made it seem less absurd.

The basic concept is that the Deep State wants to assassinate the president and vice president. They Read more of this blog post »

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Donald Shinn wrote a new blog post It's alive! Book six of the Sara X series, "A Deep State Betrayal" is now available. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCW982PV/... This is a book that took me forever Read more of this blog post »
Aug 14, 2024 07:28AM · like

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