I originally wrote A Famine Where Abundance Lies as a contemporary story. It didn’t sell (I think I know why — I’ll get to that) so when collecting stories for 19-Infinity it occurred to me to rewrite it and set it in 1996. I think this improved the story (I’ll get to that too). Fair warning: this post includes spoilers so read the book first.
The inspiration for this story was a friend observing on Facebook that the Seven Deadly Sins are invariably portrayed as six ugly old men — Gluttony’s a fat blob, Avarice is a withered Scrooge type — plus Lust, who’s female and super-sexy. In reality, she said, they should all be sexy: the reason they’re deadly sins is that they’re all super-tempting. Gluttony’s going to look like Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa or whoever it is floats your boat; they’re standing there in your living room in nothing but bikini briefs, a gallon tub of ice-cream under their arm: “Yes, I know, your cholesterol’s bad, your weight’s bad, you need to diet … but are you sure I can’t convince you to indulge, just a little?” Two hours later the ice cream is gone, you’re sick to your stomach but if they came back with another tub, you’d eat that one too …
In hindsight a scene like that would have made the story more sellable but I wanted something more overtly realistic. It involves an IT professional struggling under irrational deadlines and a boss whose solution to everything is “more meetings!” Both Hannah and her boss are Christian but her boss, Carla, is big on the prosperity gospel — forget what Jesus said about giving your spare coat to the beggar, God wants you to be rich! Carla gets the bonuses from the board, Hannah and her staff get a 3 percent raise if they’re lucky (the board of directors socializes with Carla — they’ve never met the IT department).
Hannah’s convinced her new project is a game-changer that will guarantee either big bonuses and raises for her team or they can easily move on to another employer. Except a rival company is about to beat them to the punch with a similar project — can Carla’s new, incredibly handsome consultant turn things around? And how exactly will he do it?
In addition to the Seven Deadly Sins angle this was partly inspired by stories from friends in IT. Another inspiration was a story I’d started years earlier, in which a supposed hacker is a literal wizard but hides his magic with technobabble (Big data! Proprietary algorithms!). And by my personal disdain for the rich, expressed some years back in Kernel of Truth.
Like I said, it didn’t sell. I suspect the problem is that the supernatural aspect was too well-cloaked: I gave hints something weird was going on but not enough to make it feel like fantasy before the ending reveal. Another problem may have been that I never got into details about Hannah’s cool new project; I could never think of anything that sounded right.
Setting it in 1996 fixed that. Search engines were in their infancy so having Hannah come up with an intuitive, easy-to-use engine was a plausible innovation that anyone reading would get. With a little advice from IT professionals I adjusted the tech details and voila!
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward. 19-Infinity is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook and also available as an ebook on other websites.
