One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.
This week, we bring you Erica L. Satifka, whose second novel, Busted Synapses, comes out November 3rd from Broken Eye Books!
Creating Rural Cyberpunk
We all complain about content farm websites on the internet, but the inspiration for my second book Busted Synapses started when I decided to give into temptation and read a clickbait article. A few days after the 2016 election, a site I can no longer remember the name of published a list of fifteen (or maybe it was seventeen, or twelve) things that could happen under Trump. The item that struck me about two-thirds of the way down the list prophesied that video games and the opioid crisis would combine in interesting and perhaps apocalyptic ways. And thus, a concept was born. Thanks, anonymous content creator!
Busted Synapses takes place in the near future — very near. The action of the story centers on small-town West Virginia, where only some of the marvels of this possible future (including the artificial “New Woman” whose appearance kicks off the story) have trickled down. As a pessimist I’ve always been a fan of cyberpunk. The Bridge trilogy by William Gibson is one of my favorites, especially as it focuses on “normal” characters who aren’t especially smart or talented but are doing their best anyway to survive in a massively unequal world. While I’ve written cyberpunk-ish short stories set in an urban milieu, I thought it would be interesting to set this kind of story in a more out-of-the-
way area. You don’t see that too often in cyberpunk compared to books set in New York or Tokyo. If I’ve done nothing else original in my life, at least I managed to write and publish the world’s first and so far only cyberpunk novel set in Wheeling, West Virginia.
As I said before, video games are an important part of the story, and the competitive playing of such has evolved into a vicarious gig economy. Perhaps ironically, I’m not a hardcore gamer. But I do read a lot of fiction involving drugs — I am a fan of Philip K. Dick, after all — and used my extensive reading on this subject to flesh out my next inspiration.
The drug in my book is called Trancium, and in addition to its on-label use as an anti-insomnia medication, it’s also an illegal way for the people in this hell-world to escape reality, albeit at a high potential cost. One of my favorite drug-related novels is Vurt by Jeff Noon. In both that book and mine, reality itself becomes spliced by the use of the drug, with potentially catastrophic results for users. The idea of drugs and reality heavily 
drives a plot point I hope to develop more in the sequels, which I really hope to have the opportunity to write.
Music is another integral part of Busted Synapses. Enigmatic outsider musician Johnny Electric self-releases records with scientifically inexplicable effects upon his listeners. Here, I found myself drawing inspiration from Jandek, a reclusive Texas-based auteur whose real identity wasn’t even known until around a decade ago. I first read about Jandek in the non-fiction book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music by Irwin Chusid, and immediately knew I had to write him into a story. And about twelve years later, I did! I’m more a fan of Jandek’s persona than his music, which can be hard to listen to. In Busted Synapses, the music of Johnny Electric can do more than any drug to change a person’s perspective on life. But is that necessarily a good thing?
The last major influence on Busted Synapses is an essay called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber, which has been expanded into a book. My book’s co-protagonist Jess Nowicki, who tried to make it in one of the exclusive city enclaves, falls back into a make-work job at a call center in Wheeling shortly before the start of the story. In “Bullshit Jobs” (the essay), Graeber asks: “How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment?” Jess does feel this rage and resentment, and furthermore, knows she’s powerless to express it. Even worse, she has to hold this job to keep her family going. But there’s no dignity in this, only a crushing acceptance.
Re-reading Busted Synapses in the COVID-era has been an interesting experience to say the least, as it’s been working its way to publication for a while now. When one of your primary sources of inspiration is “the news,” that’s bound to happen. But there’s hope to be found in both our reality and the one my characters experience. They just have to know how to look for it, just like I looked for that clickbait that created my near-future reality.
You can pre-order Busted Synapses now on the Broken Eye Books website.
Erica L. Satifka’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Interzone, Shimmer, and the upcoming Baen anthology Weird World War III. Her novel Stay Crazy won the 2017 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and her rural cyberpunk novella Busted Synapses will be released soon by Broken Eye Books. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband/editor Rob and several adorable talking cats.
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