Don’t fight the system. Beat it for the good of us all.
The finale of this trilogy Catching Cold Vol3 – Judgment, focuses on three intrepid souls who, following their own tortured paths, work to do just that.
Dr. Jon DeLeon CEO of CiliCold, Meredith Doucette ex-CEO of Triple S Pharmaceuticals and Olivia Steadman, ex- chief regulator for Tanner Pharmaceuticals, pursue ambitious plans to rein in a pharmaceutical industry that is out of control. The war is waged on the scientific, litigious, and legislative battlefronts. Damaged in their pursuit of remedies for the industry, a public health debacle of unprecedented proportions turns their operations into a spectacle that the world both breathless, watches.
Unlike in the previous two volumes, Dr. DeLeon plays a pivotal but much less central role in this book. Emotionally crippled, but an inquisitive scientist through and through, he is plagued by the question. “How do our cells communicate with each other?” How could cells work together for the survival of a newborn child or urban professional without such in-depth connections? He looks at the issue not as cell signaling, which sounds episodic and perhaps irregular, but as a smooth flow of information between cells that is continuous in time. In his words, it is a chemistry language three billion years in the making that all of the cells speak.
The implications are breathtaking. Each of us has forty thousand, billion cells. If one cell communicated with other cells once a second (and it’s probably much more intense than that) then it communicates 86,400 message a day. But this is just one cell.. Forty trillion cells communicate four quadrillion messages per 24 hours (this is almost a million messages per each star in our Milky Way galaxy). How can one begin to decipher this uber-cacophony?
It’s like someone looking at the earth, with its eight billion inhabitants and listening to all of the communication, all of the speaking, the emails, telephone calls, text messaging, blogs, books, social media, radio, streaming, cable, and broadcast TV, working to. understand it. Yet, Jon’s gift is not just one of ideas, but his ability to surround himself with unselfish geniuses who are interested in answering the question. The book follows the development of this translation to a shattering conclusion.
Jon’s emotional turmoil is soothed and cooled by a member of the Gila River people. Raven Sorrell. He meets her at a convenience store in the mountains of Arizona. It is a ten second interaction that stays in his head for weeks. Months later, he sees her again, and the two begin a. relationship. Raven has undergone terrible deprivations as a young woman, and has come into her late thirties wounded. Jon sees a need to bring emotional stability to her as she does to him. Attuned to Jon’s emotional needs, she is able to help him answer questions before he even asks them. Finally, Jon finds the stable emotional connection that he needs, and they succor each other with support.
Judgment also focuses on Olivia Steadman. Olivia, who has an intense love interest with Kevin, (this older pair may be the most ribald and entertaining characters in this book set) is haunted by a near death experience she had with Kevin driving to Arizona. The near-rape event opened her up to an energy to which she had been oblivious, like electricity looking for something to power. And she finds the work of her life– the remaking of the pharmaceutical industry’s oversight. While she sighted on a number of aspects, she focused on the FDA which has come under criticism over the past several years for their rapid review of some products and their inattention to others. She works with a small team to develop staggering new legislation, recognizing she will get little progress until the she has the full support of the American people.
The third battle involves Meredith Doucette, who was the CEO of Triple S Pharmaceuticals. At the end of Redemption, she herself was involved in a bitter fight with the Triple-S Executive Committee who wanted her to resign engaging in vituperous arguments until a terrible blast occurred, dismembering the leadership of the company. Meredith undergoes a series of setbacks from the resulting bacterial sepsis (generalized infection) and the reattachment of her hand. In the meantime, she is replaced as CEO, and the new leader moves forward with the approval of a product that she does not believe has been fully rated.
The new drug named, Ascension is a disaster. While it does reduce the incidence of autism, the first drug ever to do that, one of the terrible side effects is a neurological collapse leading to the death of the treated child. As the nation reacts in approbation, then surprise followed by outrage, Triple S pharmaceuticals continue to argue that the drug should stay on the market, because it does reduce the incidence of autism, and argument supported by the FDA.
Meredith is bereaved. Recognizing that her attempt to take the company in a new direction has failed, she looked for moral compensation. She finds it not with the regulatory authorities, but in the courts. This leads to her savage introduction to corporate trials. She undergoes a humiliated deposition and trial appearance, a process she endues while still suffering the effects of sepsis.
Multiple stories
The challenge in writing this book was the recognition has been that these three stories could each be a separate novel. As I began to design them, I recognized that I had two choices. One was to write these stories as standalone, then just interleave them to create one book. However, I felt that that was too sterile, leaving the characters disconnected. I therefore decided to interleave as I went along. That was much tougher to do, requiring mental alacrity as I moved from story to story, but it allowed me to see and build on the relationships between the individual connections of these characters as they struggled.
However when I completed draft 2 of Judgment, I felt that there still might be disconnection in the story of, say Olivia that was broken up between the others. So, in Word, I created a list of hyperlinks, separate for each of the three stories, but in sequence for each of them. So, for example, all of the chapters involving Meredith were hyperlinked together. This way, leaving her chapters where they were in the book, I could read each of these chapters in sequence, making it easy for me to read her story in isolation, adding language to allow the story to flow well for the reader.
Dialogue and beats
I enjoy writing dialogue. It’s a great way to communicate information to the reader, pulling the reader in, not just as an observer, but also as a participant in the story. However, using only dialogue is confusing to the reader, who can easily lose track of whose speaking, even with only two participants in the conversation. So the well accepted corrective action is to add beats. Beats allow a break in the conversation. Here is a dialogue snippet without beats
“What do you mean?”
“You heard me, the math model is missing a few terms.”
“How so?”
“Right here,”
Now, try it with beats
“What do you mean?” Jubal rubbed his eye.
“You heard me, the math model is missing a few terms.”
“How so?”
“Right here,” Jon walked to the whiteboard and pointing to the formula.
It becomes clear whether Jubal or Jon are speaking with the add ons. My problem is that this solution, if it is only approach becomes formulaic.
Enter Ava.
In Judgment, Ava is a delightful scientist who arrived from Poland to the US in 2017. She is light hearted about life, but dead serious about her robotics work. However, she has a wonderful affection. Being relatively new to speaking English all the time, she begins every sentence with a short string of “yeahs”. Since this is a trait of only her character, we can use this to identify her in dialogue without actually using her name.
Here is a snippet without Ava’s trademark.
He laughed as the wind buffeted the car. “So do I.”
“How long a drive do we have to Phoenix?”
“How about five hours.”
They were silent for a minute as they crossed into New Mexico.
“Actually, we won’t be in New Mexico long before we get to Tucson.”
“ Billy the Kid country.”
“So you’ve done some homework.”
“I just love Westerns.”
Now let’s add her affectation.
He laughed as the wind buffeted the car. “So do I.”
“Yeah, how long a drive do we have to Phoenix?”
“How about five hours.”
They were silent for a minute as they crossed into New Mexico.
“Actually, we won’t be in New Mexico long before we get to Tucson.”
“Yeah, yeah. Billy the Kid country.”
He laughed. “So you’ve done some homework.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, turning back to the window. “I just love Westerns.”
The “yeah yeah” show us who is speaking. In fact, we can demonstrate her mood by the number of consecutive times she uses the word. The last line with its multiple “yeahs” tells us how enthusiastic she is about Westerns.
I find this an interesting way to reduce the need for beats in a conversation as well as displaying the character’s level of emotion. No doubt others have discovered this as well.
Final comments
I have been asked whether Jon was the mastermind behind the science, legislative, and litigious actions. No, he was not. While Olivia and Meredith support each other as one after the other is bereaved by the assault that they sustain. Jon and Kevin support them emotionally, morally and spiritually. Without getting involved in all of the details of their struggles, he recognizes that their conflicts are their own, and that while he can morally uplift them when needed, it is up to them to push through. He does not offer them strategic advice. These characters make up their own minds.
Did I really need three volumes to write this story? My honest answer is “No”, but my characters did.