You might be familiar with David Wellington's Monster Island Trilogy, but you might not know that Mr. Wellington is a card carrying member of the MLS club. Today he has stopped by to share his tale of "The World’s Most Dangerous Library."
Don't miss out on David's latest thriller Chimera, out in July. If you like a little sci-fi mixed with your action, you'll love this suspenseful story of a small band of fugitives who escape from a secret upstate NY military facility, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Dun, dun dun!
Interested in some sneak peeks? You can find an excerpt of Chimera here, and (this is cool!) check out Minotaur, an e-short original here!
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When I finished grad school in Creative Writing, my professors took me aside. I was never going to make it as a writer, they told me, and I had received a B in a class on Medieval Poetry (unacceptable!) so I was never going to be a teacher. They wished me luck and asked what I would do next.
I had no idea.
So I moved to New York City in 2002 with no skills and no future. All I really had was my love for books. I decided I would go to library school and get yet another degree, which would raise my job prospects from non-existent to, well, poor. I enrolled at the Pratt Institute for the MLS degree, full of hope (it’s free, unlike the degree). I did not know at the time that I was beginning an adventure that would expose me to snipers, terrorists and foreign spies.
No, really.
To put myself through library school I took a series of temp jobs, working for the same agency as a friend of mine. He got a freelance position at the United Nations and invited me to come join him for what turned out to be a two-person job. We were going to digitize a vast collection of UN records and create a database—perfect training for my new career in archive management. I thought I would be building finding aids and doing some hardcore cataloging. In fact, the job meant running a scanner all day long, then cleaning up gnarly OCR text word by word. Dull, mindless labor.
A few weeks after I started, though, the General Assembly went into session. This was in 2003, and the specter of 9/11 was still very much alive in New York. Every car that came near my office had to be inspected by men with mirrors on poles and sniffed by dogs. Anti-sniper tents were set up outside the Secretariat Building and, yes, the UN main library. Just getting to work meant showing official passes and being scrutinized by heavily armed men. Suddenly my dull job was the most exciting thing I’d ever done.
That was when I fell afoul of the KGB. Well, former KGB. The chief librarian at the UN, it turned out, was Russian. I had to interview him for one of my library school assignments. I asked what I thought was a harmless question—where had he trained in library science? He grew immediately hostile and demanded to know why I wanted this information. It wasn’t until later that I learned that my boss, another Russian, was a former KGB agent and the chief librarian was still terrified that he was being watched, even a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. He thought I was spying on him!
Eventually the General Assembly finished its business and things went back to normal again, normal and dull. I was surprised how much I missed the action thriller atmosphere that surrounded my job. However, I wasn’t to stay bored for long. It was about this time I started working on my first serialized novel, Monster Island, which I wrote during my lunch breaks. The book took place in a New York overrun by zombies but full of Somali child soldiers and weapons of mass destruction and yes, there was a scene where the heroes have to break into the UN Secretariat building. I was surrounded by research possibilities and great inspiration and I could not have written the book without being there on the spot. By the time I left that job, I had my first book deal and my future had finally begun—but I’ll never forget my dull data entry job that threw me into the middle of international suspense and intrigue!
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Thanks, David! Would you like a galley of Chimera? The first 10 people to write to librarylovefest@harpercollins.com get one!
– Annie