Making the Existential Real

Yesterday I talked about launching an event series with all three of my author names.  Gender Swap Outbreak is about just that:  the outbreak of a gender swap virus.

The thing is, though, a gender swap plague on its own isn't really all that scary.  I mean OK it would shake people up if all the men and boys turned female, but it wouldn't exactly wipe out all life on Earth--for a little while.  And considering there's male sperm banked, there's a chance even if everyone did turn female they could still have babies, some of whom would probably be male.  Thus humanity would survive, though the popular would probably sharply decline over a few generations.

So the problem there is it's more of an existential threat.  It's a nebulous crisis like global warming.  Legendary (horrible) filmmaker James Nguyen knew this when he made Birdemic:  Shock and Terror.  Sure global warming is a threat, but you need something more personal and immediate.  Like, say, flocks of weird-looking CGI birds exploding like their bellies are full of nitro and clawing people's throats while they're taking a shit outside.  Other slightly less awful movies like Day of the Animals and The Day After Tomorrow similarly try to make a nebulous threat more immediate.  In one case the ozone layer depletes and so animals start going nuts--for a day and then they die.  In the latter it was a bunch of disasters or whatever; I never actually watched that movie.

Anyway, I wanted something that would actually make this plague dangerous for people.  One thing I got to wondering was:  what happens when kids get it?  They turn into girls and...what?  Nothing really.  The women turn into super-sluts fucking anything that moves but the kids wouldn't really do anything.

Then I had my James Nguyen moment and thought:  what if the diseases melts the kid's brain and turns him (now her) into a flesh-eating ghoul?  And if one of those kids bites an adult (male or female) they too turn into a flesh-eating little girl ghoul?

Which when I thought about it played into Ivana Johnson's wheelhouse because most of "her" books were age regression stories like Time & Space 1-3, Trick or Treat 1-3, and Naughty or Nice 2-3.  So then Eric Filler would do a fairly traditional gender swap story and Ivana Johnson would do a sort of traditional age regression story.  It made as much sense as any of this makes.

I set this up at the end of the first book when the sheriff who is first infected infects his young son.  The son wakes up as a little girl with a taste for flesh and bites a social worker.  Soon enough this new version of the plague--this Mutation--is spreading through town.

Also in book 1 I mentioned one of the town deputies, Joe Wallace, was out of town on his honeymoon.  So I decided to use him as my focal character.  Joe and his new wife Kate are on their honeymoon when their town literally disappears from maps and the phone lines are all dead.  So they head to town, circumventing a National Guard barricade, to find the town empty.

Except it's not!  They go to Kate's mother's house where one of the ghouls is feasting on her and then attacks Joe and Kate, turning them into little girls.  Joe soon finds he has a hankering for living flesh that he has to fight against.  And he starts to get younger, from eight-ish to sixish, and ultimately a toddler.  Meanwhile the government is trying to quarantine the plague and learn more about it, not for purely altruistic reasons.  But of course shit happens and Joe (now Jo) escapes to spread the plague with some minions she infects while an adult survivor spreads the other form.

Hence we set the stage for UPPING THE ANTE tomorrow!  It follows the idea of making it bigger with each book.  I think I said once that the problem with Alien 3 was they tried to go smaller instead of bigger.  Alien had one alien terrorizing the crew of a ship.  Then Aliens had a bunch of aliens terrorizing people on an outpost.  So logically Alien 3 should have gone even bigger with lots more aliens terrorizing lots more people.  Like, say, on Earth.  But I guess for budgetary reasons they tried going back to one alien and a small group of people and it's just so disappointing.  I mean the prior movie you had Ripley blowing up aliens with machine guns and grenade launchers and flame throwers and then fighting the queen with the robot forklift suit and then the third movie they go back to fighting the alien with sticks or some shit like that?  How lame.

So yes we go big and then even bigger!  That's how you do it, Fox!

Like yesterday here are Sims of Joe/Jo and Kate/Kate:

And also here are the covers from the traditional version to the final version:

With this last one the girl growling is definitely pretty freaky and kind of how someone with this virus would look, though with sharper teeth and more blood and gore on her face.

Come back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion!