With my weapon beside me within easy reach and the bedroom door tightly bolted, I felt I could sleep. I knew it was unlikely they would return, but the police thought it was a possibility. I was still unsettled from the activities of the night before, but sleep did come.
While the experience was terrifying, primarily in retrospect, the aftermath was like being in a police procedural. We went through the neighborhood looking for clues. We had to deal with police and detectives. We watched with fascination as the fingerprint specialist did her job. She wasn’t bothered by our watching. She said that these days with the popularity of CSI everyone wants to watch the process. We also learned that the fingerprint powder gets on everything. Our cat’s white paws were black.
We were blissfully unaware while it was happening. It was not until the next morning when Belle took her walk that we knew there was a problem. I was not yet out of bed when she came in and asked “Did you move the car for some reason?” It was no longer in the driveway. It had been stolen, and just the week before we had celebrated paying it off.
It was worse than just a stolen vehicle, though. Whoever stole the car had been in our home while we were upstairs. We know the timing because the person was caught on the many surveillance cameras in our gated complex. I was still awake upstairs watching YouTube videos with noise canceling headphones on as he rummaged around downstairs. I thought I heard some weird noise, slipped off the headphones and listened, but heard nothing. I thought for a moment to go downstairs to check out the sound, but with nothing but quiet, I decided not to and slipped the headphones back over my ears.
He took the keys to our cars, and more disturbingly, opened a box in our living room that had the spare remote for the main gate and took it. When he discovered that the one car had a dead battery, he threw the keys for that car into a neighbor’s yard, but not before stealing the gate remote from it. Instead he took the car we had just paid off. An eye witness saw him drive away in our car at around 12:40 am. He now had all three of our gate remotes, allowing him to reenter our community at will.
The above is a description of what happened to us the other night. It is reality. The various details such as just paying off the car and chatting with the fingerprint specialist and the almost going downstairs which could have led to a dangerous confrontation are all things that happened. I could have left them out and still told the story, but it is those details that give the story color. They make it more real and more interesting.
The same is true with fiction. The little details are important. Details are the color palette of writing. Of course, just like with a jumble of colors that don’t quite go together, the details you use must not be too much and they must fit the story. Details reveal character, they can set the place, they can foreshadow. Too much detail, though, and you slow down the pacing.
My fictional world is quite dystopian, but it is only hinted at through adding what are extraneous details to the story. When Grace goes to Barry’s home, she notices shelves filled with books, which is unusual for her to see as most countries have banned printed books under Accuracy in Publication laws. Printed books become inaccurate too quickly and can’t be updated, making them unreliable, so in most countries, only digital books in the registry can be distributed. You need a collector’s license to own printed books. Of course, this also gives governments complete control over what can be distributed. This part of the future is only hinted at through a brief mention of books on shelves.
My biggest problem is that my version of a fictional dystopia may be outflanked by America’s tragically unfolding reality as we march towards a fascist theocratic dystopian future of our own. The Republicans have promised, if they take back power, to round up and arrest their political enemies, to make abortion illegal throughout the country with no exceptions, to tear down the barriers between church and state, to undo much of the social progress of the last 70 years, to end the investigations into the crimes under the Trump administration, including the first ever and nearly successful attempt to overthrow our democracy
They have so rigged our courts, which they packed with unqualified but extremist jurists, and distorted and narrowed our election system, that we effectively have minority rule. Unfortunately, that minority is extremely extreme. Our Supreme Court has been packed with theocratic radicals. It looks like abortion rights are gone, as well as the right to privacy. Without that right to privacy, other Supreme Court decisions are on the cutting board, such as the right of mixed races or the same gender to marry, the right to contraceptives, the right to same sex relationships, and many other rights. We are facing a wholesale clawback of rights for the first time in our nation’s history. When I started working on this book a few years ago, I could never have imagined that America would be this far down the path of dystopia.
The title of this entry was inspired by the name of a store called Its All About the Details. They had a prominent sign as you drove by, but no markings on the store so you had no idea what it was. They eventually went out of business, whatever that business might have been. The sign stayed up for years after that. As a writer, you want to do much better than whoever owned that store.