Guest Blog: TG Trouper - The Inspiration For 'The Collaborator'

I am not a one genre author, I have ideas for stories and have to write them. I’m not, not going to write then just because it’s a different genre to my others. I have written female led action stories, dark romance, crime, supernatural suspense, and horror. I had a hankering to write a dystopian novel set in the east of an alternative world.

It would be twenty-somethings rising up against a tyrant, but I didn’t want the usual ‘underdogs against the evil overlord’ trope. There had to be something more.

Photo credit: Tanner Johnson

Around this time I had read about an animal experiment done in the sixties which was not what you imagine an animal experiment from that time to be. In this experiment, mice were given perfect living conditions: plenty of food and water, plenty of space and just the right temperature. They were just left to get on with it, and that meant getting it on. The population rose and continued to rise. Then an odd thing happened. After a certain number of generations, some of the males grew much larger than the females and lost interest in breeding, as did some of the females. Those females that did breed, neglected their young, and within a short space of time the death rate exceeded the birth rate and the whole society collapsed.

The experiment was repeated multiple times and the results were the same every time; as soon as the larger males emerged the society was doomed.

This I found fascinating, but it wasn’t enough for a story, it was just a thread.

Photo Credit: David Duky

A little while later I met a person who I used to work with and hadn’t seen for twenty-odd years. He asked what I was up to, I said I was writing novels, we had a little discussion about it and he said that he’s only ever written one story. That was when he was at school in the early seventies. His English teacher was Irish and she’d set the class a task to write a story where a person had to get from one side of the country to the other without being seen.

He duly wrote the story and thought no more about it until years later, when he wondered if the stories had been used by paramilitaries during the troubles in Northern Ireland. Had they been using the mind of a child to come up with something so off-the-wall that an adult wouldn’t even think of it.

I said, “thank you very much, I’ll use that!”, but again it wasn’t enough for a story, it was just another thread.

My story is set in the east of an alternative world and I wanted an Anime feel to it, so the characters needed to have far eastern sounding names. By chance I came across the Korean word ‘Hyodo’. I thought it would make a cool name, but I like to know what words mean. After a bit of research I found out that in Korea, if you a practicing Hyodo, you are showing absolute devotion to your parents until they die.

A soon as I had that, I knew I had the story. And if you want to know how those three disparate things came together, and why Hyodo became the backbone of the story, then you need to read ‘The Collaborator’.