Diseased, Disturbed and Dysfunctional.

Disease is the word of the week and it's one I can get behind.

Why? Because to a very real extent the novel I'm working on right now is about disease. Oh, to be sure there are some twists in the notion, but hey, it's a science fiction tale of the apocalypse and while there are many ways to end a world disease is always good for a fun time.

I'm researching several disorders, diseases and catalysts for the same as a direct result of the novel. Some of the more interesting side effects of disease are, frankly, the stuff of nightmares.

Let's look at the dark side for a moment. We have diseases that can slough the skin right off your body. Others can cause violent dementia, creeping ulcerations of the flesh, high fever, bleeding from every possible orifice, flesh rot (Hey, now, there's a good time), pustules...really, it's a long list.

The fun of handling this sort of thing is figuring out which side effects, real and imagined, you want to use. And then designing the disease that causes them.

And in this sort of case, having the world you create react to a voracious disease that refuses to be easily treated and seems to have an intelligence guiding its actions. I get to consider the ramifications for a disease that affects humans, yes, but also other lifeforms as well. I get to consider the impacts it has on sea life (radical impacts, actually), on plant life, animals and humans, all of which will be affected differently, by the way, and then I get to consider the impact it has on a social-economic level.

And then things get interesting. I'm going with a very large cast this time around, but probably not as large as the one in SERENITY FALLS, which has over one hundred and eighty named characters. I suspect a lot of the characters will die horribly. Hardly a surprise given my track record, but still, it's going to be rather interesting working on a global scale.

I'm calling this a science fiction story because it is, but you know what? It's definitely going to have a few twists of the horrific in it, too. Why? Because diseases are horrible things, especially when they reach pandemic proportions.

And because I do so love visual aids, here's a teaser as to one of the symptoms of my fictitious disorder: the cause will not be neurofibromatosis type 1, but the end results will be similar...at during one stage of the disease.