with David Bajo
We are delighted to welcome novelist David Bajo to Omnimystery News today.
David's new medical thriller is Mercy 6 (Unbridled Books; September 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had a chance to catch up with him to talk about it.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to Dr. Anna Mendenhall, the lead character in Mercy 6.
Photo provided courtesy of
David Bajo
David Bajo: Dr. Anna Mendenhall is a trauma specialist in a Los Angeles ER. In the novel's opening, she receives four patients who seemingly die at the exact same time and she prudently calls for containment, sealing the entire hospital. Infectious Diseases takes control. Immediately she second-guesses her call. She spends the rest of the story trying to diagnose the real cause of the deaths while fighting the very powers she set in motion.
OMN: Is the character based on anyone you know?
DB: Interviewers, reviewers, readers, and people who have attended my readings always ask about how my sister, who has been an ER doctor for over twenty years, influenced my depiction of Mendenhall. The honest answer is: very little. The truth is, Mendenhall is what it's like trying to honor your vocation in a contemporary society that so quickly embraces and empowers the easily apparent.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
DB: The best writing advice I ever received came from my Milton professor, C.A. Patrides, at the University of Michigan. He read a bad scholarly essay I wrote about the poet Andrew Marvell. He handed it back to me and told me I should apply to an MFA program, a really good one that will give you some money and support. I left the Michigan Ph.D. program, finished with an M.A., and got into the MFA fiction program at UC-Irvine. Patrides didn't even know I wrote fiction (no one did). He just knew I wasn't a very good scholar. It was his kind way of getting rid of me.
Too much has been made of the good and bad of MFA programs. What I've learned from being in one, from teaching for a long time in a few of them, from directing one, is that writers have to find a way to support their habit. For three precious years, a good, legitimate MFA program can give you that. Whatever circumstantial guff you have to endure while there won't be any worse than the office politics you have to endure in your eventual real life.
True, if Kafka had attended the UCI or Iowa program (assuming he could get in), after those three years, he would have still had to take his lifetime job as an insurance officer. The program wouldn't have changed a thing about any of his work. Metamorphosis would still be Metamorphosis. The Trial and The Castle would be no more or less brilliant. But I think he would have been a lot happier about it all. I think he would have spent a lot less of his precious writing time composing long letters complaining about how little time he had to write because of his Brotberuf (his bread job).
Maybe in Olden Times it was a little different. The best writing advice James Joyce ever received came from Nora, his wife, who he kind of hated. She asked/advised: Jimmy, why don't you write books that people want to read? He answered this by writing Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, books no one read or wanted to read until long after James and Nora had died. He dragged Nora around France and Italy taking teaching jobs that weren't really there while begging off his family back in Dublin. If Joyce had attended the Iowa workshop (assuming he could get in), I think he and Nora would have been a little happier together and that Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake would have been just a little better and a lot more successful on the market. Because Nora's words would have rung differently in his MFA-tuned ear. He would have had three years of support coupled with three years of seeing that others were undergoing the same fears he had about himself as a fiction writer, how vital it was to learn how to balance Brotberuf and epiphanies.
Some fiction writers get lucky and their first three books make a lot of money and their bread job is their fiction writing. But that is nothing to hope for. That's the second best writing advice I ever received. It came from my mentor at UC-Irvine, the novelist Oakley Hall.
OMN: Who should play Mendenhall in the movie?
DB: Michelle Rodriguez.
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David Bajo was raised on the California-Mexico border and has worked as a journalist and translator. He teaches writing at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Elise Blackwell, and their daughter.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at DavidBajo.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Mercy 6
David Bajo
A Medical Thriller
Four people collapse dead in the same instant within a newly renovated Los Angeles hospital. Dr. Mendenhall, the woman who is head of the emergency room, isn't convinced the cause of death is a contagion. But it's in the interests of the hospital administrators — and of the world at large — for people to think that it is. If the world knew the truth there could only be widespread panic.
The hospital is immediately locked down. Information is suddenly being strictly controlled. Government troops encircle the hospital to enforce the quarantine, and other bodies arrive in ER.
Working with an ally in pathology and a colleague outside the hospital, Mendenhall develops her understanding that what has taken these lives has global implications … and whatever it is, it's not a virus.
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