With National Novel Writing Month ’07 coming up, I thought I’d take the time to let you in on what I’m planning for my third novel:

I read an article about a man who, during his own autopsy, woke up claiming to be in extreme pain. At the same time, I had been playing Metroid Prime 3, constantly annoyed that enemies re-spawned whenever I left a room and re-entered it. “Didn’t that thing just die?” was a consistent thought of mine.

So I was inspired to create a story. What if this kind of thing were happening all too often? What if there was, in essence, an “epidemic of un-death”? I don’t mean zombies, not at all – in fact, an entirely different direction. What if this epidemic were a biological threat?

Something is making things seem dead, and then reviving them. Or, something is reviving what recently died. A recent scare involving MRSA across the northeastern US has also inspired me – the future of bacterial survival is entirely dependent on their evolving to avoid our antibiotics. We know that in the future most every strain of bacteria will be resistant to our treatments, and MRSA is just a taste of that deadliness. But what would happen if one of these bacteria weren’t deadly, but un-deadly? Who would try and use this bacteria to figure out how it worked?

And who might try and reverse-engineer it?

I announce Spawn, my third novel – a work-in-progress right now in overall plot, but looks to be shaping up to become my best novel, and possibly most action-filled novel, ever.