"Where do you get your story ideas?" This is a question I am regularly asked.
Every two weeks, I have been posting a new blog to partially answer this question regarding each of my twenty books. You can go back and read the last three blogs, but I am now up to the fourth.
When I wrote A Shred of Truth, book two in the Aramis Black series, urban myths were a big part of pop culture. YouTube and social media were taking hold, allowing any Joe Blow to come up with a "truth" and blast it across the internet. Sometimes these myths sounded plausible. Sometimes they were downright crazy--yet people still believed them. I wanted to explore this concept of truth and lies. What makes us believe one thing and not another? Why do we reject some common-sense ideas and then embrace a farfetched notion? What part do fear and anger play in lowering our BS filters, making us prone to accept things we might otherwise challenge?
Aramis Black is faced with a number of lies and deceptions in A Shred of Truth. Each leads further into his past until he is confronted with the truth about his own mother's demise. This journey is one of the most thrilling and satisfying I have ever written. A Shred of Truth is still a personal favorite of mine.
In both Aramis Black stories, The Best of Evil and A Shred of Truth, I hid a secret message in plain sight. Most readers never catch the clues stated plainly on the last page of each book. Go back and see for yourself. I tell you how to piece the messages together. In The Best of Evil, the message is a clue for Aramis Black. In A Shred of Truth, the message is a clue for all of us--a steadfast truth in a world built on shifting sand.
Eric Wilson
