A Goodreads user asked Rosemary Cole:

Your new book, The X-Variant, is terrific! How did you come up with such a unique idea for the story?

Rosemary Cole Thank you! I think that other authors' works have a lot to do with my answer. Not that my book is derivative! But in any body of fictive work, there are just so many ideas/themes/tropes out there. They (don't ask me who "they" is) say there are only six main plots and so every book must be a form of one of these, but with the author's own original stamp on it. I think what happens is, as a writer becomes exposed to more and more intriguing ideas as they grow older, these ideas go into a sort of soup cauldron bubbling away in the back of their mind. The ingredients combine, separate and combine again, often with new additions (either someone else's ideas or those from one's own imagination), until suddenly voila! a whole new lifeform emerges (sorry about the mixed metaphor). That's pretty much what happened with The X-Variant. I'm a nut for post-apocalyptic fiction (The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, The Road, Station Eleven, Margaret Atwood, World War Z, Mad Max, etc, etc ad nauseam), and I was looking for a way to take that main premise (society goes down in flames, usually due to mankind's own brilliance and stupidity) and make it my own. I think Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy was especially influential - I loved the way he made his zombies so different from everyone else's. I was determined to do the same, and then it just hit me - an evolving synthetic virus. First it's deadly, then after centuries it becomes an enhancement, and then it becomes - well, you'll need to read the book to find out. :)

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