This is a 7th in a series of posts that will look at histories of recurring (or not) characters in my writing. It takes a look at another of my oldest characters.

Moss Valley is the main character from my first novel, Plague, which is my most successful release and series to date, but one that I soured on.

Plague was my first attempt at writing more than poems and essays in roughly a decade at the point that I started it in late 2004. The story was inspired by two things. 1) A dream I had in which me and another person were watching a city burn from several stories above the ground. 2) The series of 2004 hurricanes that hit Florida (where I was until I moved back to Ky in 2008) that caused mass chaos, evacuations, damage, and social unrest. I can't remember why I picked Ebola as the virus, but the story was meant to be hard SF and I needed a nasty virus. I finished the first draft by the end of 2005 in almost exactly a year, mostly between customers at an office job, and edited it in 2006 at the same job. Technically, I was paid for writing it before it was ever released. I took what I now see as some super bad advice in the final editing and cut one character, John, who was replaced in a later revision years later. From the end of 2006 to 2008 or so it was a free download from my website and print editions were on Lulu. Then I took the free download down and put it on Kindle. It got a big bump in sales during the 2013 West African Ebola epidemic and I got some credit for predicting the lackadaisical international response to Ebola during that outbreak. Two followup short stories, John's Story and Escape, finished up that storyline in two different collections (Aftermath and Ruination), but they were done years after Plague and were 3rd person instead of 1st and had stories by other people in them. The series wasn't planned out very well and was allowed to die with Escape. Every mistake that could have been made was made, although I still had some more to make and still do. Now, all three stories are in one volume called Plague: Moss and John and I'm only three years from Plague's 20th anniversary. Maybe, I'll do something special for the 20th anniversary and maybe I'll just let it lay. Not sure yet.

But this is a character profile, not a book profile, so on to Moss.

Full blog post: https://www.jeremiahdonaldson.com/blo...