So, I wasn’t going to put the fights on an island.
I have always been kind of fascinated with offshore oil rigs. They don’t look very big when you see a picture of them, but they are huge and often hold hundreds of people. And the life of an off-shore oil-rig worker is very non-traditional. I’m not going to get into it too much because it’s all beside the point. I didn’t put the fights on the rigs, I put them on the installation ships because these ships are floating cities and they live under different rules than the rest of us. This is the part of these conspiracy stories that I like to explore.
The ship in the beginning of the book is modeled after a real oil-rig-installation ship called Pioneering Spirit and it is largest ship ever built (as I write this).
This ship is part of the reason this book took so long because in order to write that first fight scene I had to look at videos of the inside, kinda learn how the cranes operate, and how the ballasts work. I needed to know what the inside of the command center looked like and I had to get a general idea of what it was like to be on this ship, so I scoured websites that hire people to get a feel for cabins and watched recruiting videos. I needed to know all kinds of shit about this stupid ship before I could get past that opening fight sequence.
But get this… the things you find when you go looking are fucking weird. I had never heard of Pioneering Spirit when I started this book. I did a basic Google search for “Largest ship in the world” and this thing just popped up. And I didn’t give any fucks at all about who owned the ship or how it got its name, I just wanted to see some freaking pics and vid of this thing so I could model my fictional ship after it.
But I wanted to give you guys a little information about the ship for the EOBS so I did a little post-book research just twenty minutes ago and it turns out that this Pioneering Spirit ship is owned by a company, which is owned by a man whose father was a Waffen-SS Nazi and was linked to another company that used slave laborers for the Nazi war effort. And the owner of the company that built the Pioneering Spirit originally named the ship after his father, the Nazi, but naming a ship that had the attention of the entire world after a Nazi caused a “controversy”, so it got changed to Pioneering Spirit.
There’s that saying, right? You can’t make this up. I most definitely *could* make this up, but I don’t need to. This is real.
I run into these coincidences when I write these stories all the time (See the End of Book Shit for Mr. Match for proof). I didn’t know any of this when I started the book. And I swear to God, the longer I write these crazy books set in the dark underground world of absolute shit-bag people, the more I realize that truth is stranger than fiction.
My big revelation in 2013 was the idea that people are bought and sold like animals.
Right now, somewhere on this planet, there are slave traders buying and selling human beings.
This is a fact.
And my new revelation when it came time to write Sick Heart was so much worse than just “humans” being trafficked.
It was children.
That’s the dark side of Sick Heart.
But again, this book isn’t about trafficking. It’s not about the abuse Anya or Cort dealt with as children. It’s not about any of that.
Of course, all that stuff matters.
But then again, none of it matters when you’re living it. Because if you’re living with it, the only thing that matters is that you survive.
My stories are about surviving.
Sick Heart is about all the ways in which you fight.
It’s about all the things you do to cope.
It’s about coming to terms with who you are, and what you’ve done, and then taking a stand for yourself, and hopefully, others like you.
And I know there are readers out there who will leave me a review and say this book is dark. And they’re just wrong.
This book is about HOPE.
And if their lives are so damn perfect that they can’t relate to the world my characters live in, then good for them.
Not everyone is that lucky.
So that’s my story.
And I’m sticking to it.
I hope you enjoyed Sick Heart. I fell in love with these people and I left the ending open for a book two, but we’ll see how that goes. Also—fun fact—this is the longest book I’ve ever written and comes in at just under 130,000 words. An average romance novel is about 70,000 words so… you got your money’s worth with this one, unicorns!
Anyway, thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
P. S. If you’d like to know how all my stories connect, you can find that info on the next few pages.
JA Huss
February 18, 2021
Sick Heart is a standalone book. None of the characters who appear in this story can be found in any other story I’ve written. (yet). :)
But if you want to know the complete story of this world from start to finish, here are all the related books and characters (with ages).
Rook and Ronin Series
The entire Company beginnings start in this series. But each series is its own entry point. You can jump in and read them out of order as long as you follow the specific series reading order.
Tragic
Manic – Vaughn Family and Sick Boyz appear
