January 15, 2021
Broken World Post Five
Welcome to Broken World Day Four!
Week 2, Day 4 – Broken World
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Release Date: July 2, 2014
Cover Design: Jimmy Gibbs
Formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Universal
Audible
Goodreads
As a deadly virus sweeps the country, Vivian Thomas teams with brothers, Angus and Axl, in hopes of making it across the country to find the daughter she gave up for adoption. By the time they make it to California, most of the population has been wiped out, but when the dead start coming back, they quickly realize that no electricity or running water are the least of their concerns.
What inspired you to create these characters?
Everyone basically knows the story of how Axl and Angus came to be about. I was watching The Walking Dead – and loving it – and I fell in love with Daryl’s character. As I said the other day, he and his brother, Merle, had only been in one episode together when I started writing this series, during season 2, but that short interaction between them really inspired me. At that point, the viewer didn’t know if the brothers would ever be reunited, but I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if they’d never been separated. Daryl’s character had already started changing. He was fitting into the group better, becoming a team player, and really finding out who he was independent of his brother for the first time. Would the same thing have happened if Merle was around? Was Daryl strong enough to break away from his brother’s bad influence, or would he have crumbled under the pressure? I liked to think he would have eventually stood up for himself, which was my thought process when I created Axl and Angus.
Vivian was another damaged character and loosely inspired by Carol, although the comparison is VERY loose. Remember, this was during season two, and at that point Carol was still a very weak person. I didn’t want that for Vivian. I wanted her to have broken away from her abusers years before and already be in the process of trying to find her inner strength. I chose to make her a stripper because I have a very close friend who was a stripper in college. I know a lot of people probably think I chose that profession as some kind of indication that I think all strippers are trash, but they’re wrong. It’s totally a nod to my very close friend – who I love and would never think is trash.
Other than those three characters, I had very little inspiration for the people I added. In fact, I didn’t know who they were going to become or how long they’d last. I’m not much of a plotter, so I like to let my characters develop on their own as the story progresses. I definitely never would have imagined the transition some of them would end up taking. My only goal when I started writing Broken World was to provide a diverse cast of characters who were different races, ages, and came from very different backgrounds. A book, like life, is more enjoyable when if it’s diverse. Many people think Al was a “Glenn” character, and that always annoyed me, because other than the fact that he’s Asian, the two had nothing in common at all.
I explain the origin of the brothers’ names in Broken World, but in case you forgot, here it is: their mother was a big fan of Guns N’ Roses and AC/DC. Vivian I got from Pretty Woman because it would have been popular around the time she was born and I thought her mom seemed like the type of person who wouldn’t think it was weird to name her daughter after prostitute from a movie. All the other names just came to me on the fly except for Sophia, which was, of course, another nod to The Walking Dead.
