Fictional TV Shows

I had so much fun with pop-culture in On Black Wings. There are three television shows Jessica tries to relate her current situation with, and they keep coming up in the book. The first is Time Wizard, a show about a time-traveling magician she keeps trying to use to understand her ability to travel back and forth through time. It's a funny pop-culture reference where she tries to explain what's happening through her by using a TV show, and it is kind of what real people would do, so I loved the idea and went with it.

Some of the other characters in the book are fans, so it is hilarious when they bring it up to her. There's even one point where she is so sick and tired of being reminded of it she's like, "Yeah, just like that show."

Another faux TV show is The Undead Hordes, another cable show she talks about when trying to explain the zombie hunters with guns. It is another fun pop-culture reference that comes up a couple times, but she quickly realizes these zombies can shoot guns and the ones in the show can't, so it's not as useful a comparison. But zombies shooting guns is kind of cool, it runs against genre, but it was fun enough to run with it and make these a part of the forces of evil.

More on them later.

The last is Thrones of Thorns, a faux cable drama she uses when talking about the Medieval knights and peoples she meets with people in the modern day. Her and Brad are fans of this, and Brad even goes to say the people she sees in her "nightmares" resemble the actors in the show, and this all is a figment of her imagination.

That there is a powerful clue, and it supports a theme that runs through the book that this all is a figment of her imagination she is experiencing when her older self is under surgery for a head injury.

Brad could be right. She could be lapsed back in a coma at the end of the book and all of this could be a dream. Or at least that is what the bad guys want her to think, and this fact is used against her with vengeance. They have power and knowledge, and they are ruthless and wicked, so they pull no punches. The forms evil takes could be based on figments of her imagination and the things she saw in shows, and they could have different forms altogether when the masks are taken off.

But something says to me this isn't a dream. At the end, what she does is real. There are hints in that direction as well with some of what the characters do and say. That uncertainty, that off-balance feeling, it was important for me to keep that going and never let up, so the trippy dream-like nightmares played a part right up until the end. Again, this is what I wanted, and I had to go back during my final passes and reinforce this thought.

Bet yes, the veiled pop-culture references and my silly names are silly, but in reality, people going through this would have to use TV and fantasy to describe what they were going through. It felt real and good to me, and it gave me a couple lighthearted moments along the way as people are trying to figure out if she was crazy or not.

I take it all back, I'm the crazy one.

Oh, and there's one final faux pop-culture reference her by Colonel Becks, World of Orcwars, an online game he plays and makes a comment about when he sees her armor. She tells him "she hates him" in a disgusted tone of voice as I was laughing writing that line, and the rag-tag group of heroes pull themselves together and gets back on the road to save the world.