Author Q & A Part Two

Fiction becomes reality

Readers have asked how I was able to foresee the future six years in advance. So many of the events in the novel seem to predict what has happened this year in the United States.

It’s not clairvoyance; it’s connecting the dots.

I wrote the first draft of Make No Mistake: The Novel in 2019. I did a lot of reading and research. I began to see the potential fallout of existing changes to women’s rights, and I understood how easily that could shift to human rights in general.

There is a quote in Make No Mistake about how women’s empowerment is intertwined with respect for human rights (Mahnaz Afkhami). It wasn’t hard to imagine a future where everything we take for granted in a democracy could be dismantled and destroyed. At the time of writing, I was speculating, never imagining how easily fiction could become reality.

Although I tried to interest agents and publishers in the story (I sent out close to 100 query letters over two years), no one picked it up. Perhaps they didn’t believe that the disintegrating political climate I described in the novel could possibly occur in the United States, a country that had always presented itself to the world as a role model for democracy and human rights.

I gave up on the novel and set it aside. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it.

But that all changed in January 2025.

Many events that I had written about six years earlier suddenly became headline news. Congress meeting in the dead of night, baby bonus to increase the birth rate (as daycare funding was cut to ensure the woman stayed home), extreme fines and prison sentences for doctors performing abortions, investigations into miscarriages, a snitch line and deportations of immigrants and even American-born citizens, separation of children from parents, and on it went. Each day, I saw more parallels between what I had written as fiction and what was quickly becoming the new “normal”. That’s when I decided it was time to share Make No Mistake with readers.

Releasing the novel as serial fiction on Substack gave me that option. In the space of two months, Make No Mistake went from the discard pile to over 1500 readers on Substack, a podcast (Substack, Apple, Spotify) with over 4100 downloads, a paperback and e-book.

And the book that I thought had missed its moment continues to inspire readers with hope and creative strategies for resistance.

Photo: J Wise

Unfortunately, the parallels between fiction and reality persist. Just like in the novel, the President is deliberately sending “police” (ICE, the National Guard) into communities to stir up trouble in an attempt to justify his aggressive actions against “insurrections” retroactively.

And, as I wrote this post, I read that South Carolina lawmakers have introduced a severe anti-abortion bill that includes the death penalty for women who have abortions and a 30-year prison term for doctors who perform them.

I can’t say that my novel holds answers to the chaotic times in which we live. But readers have told me that it gives them hope, and ideas for action. Perhaps that’s the best that I can offer as a writer these days.

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