Life Imitating Art?

  Writing.

   It has become a passion. I started putting fingers to keyboard a few years back after having a dream about terrorists holding parishioners hostage in a mega-church, so I started developing a plot line, characters and settings. Then I started typing.

   88,000 words and four years later I’m still working on my crime thriller. It’s almost finished, just a couple more chapters to go, but it has been quite a journey. Hours and hours of research, phone calls, map and image searches…and miles. I traveled to Charleston two years ago, where part of the novel is set, specifically to research locations I’m using for certain events in the story.

   The issue I’m having is that current events in the world have come very close to the heart of my book, and I’m now having second thoughts about trying to get it published. Is it morally right in light of the shootings at the Emanuel A. M. E. church in downtown Charleston last year or, more recently, the Orlando nightclub massacre?

   Tom Clancy, one of my favorite writers, told a tale in his 1994 book Debt of Honor that, seven years later, was mimicked in the terrorist attacks in 2001; in Clancy’s book an embittered Japanese airline pilot, after losing his son and brother in a conflict with the United States, flew his fully-fueled Boeing 747 into the U. S. Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress, almost decapitating our government.

   We know what then happened on September 11^th.

   In 1997 two bank robbers, both armed with AK-47s and wearing body armor, were met outside a bank they’d just robbed in North Hollywood by responding LAPD officers; nearly 1750 rounds were fired, with eighteen civilians and police officers being wounded during the running gun battle in the streets. The only lives lost were those of Larry Phillips Jr and Emil Matasareanu…the two perpetrators. Two years prior to this incident the film Heat, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, was released; in the movie, De Niro and his heavily-armed crew encounter police as they exit a bank they’d just robbed…and a running gun battle through the streets of Los Angeles occurs.

   Life imitating art, or just two instances of pure coincidence?

   I’ll still work to finish my novel, but I’m certainly not assuming it will be accepted for print. Getting a work into book form is extremely difficult and highly competitive.

   IF I decide to submit it.