The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Melt (After the Apocalypse Book 1) by Ann Werner

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

The Melt (After the Apocalypse Book 1) by Ann Werner Members of the last tribe of reindeer herders discover a body in the melting permafrost of the northern Mongolian steppe, and the virus dubbed the Red Scourge is unleashed on the world. Unaware of the coming pandemic, Rina and Ethan Hampton shop for their first house in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. After months of searching, they find the perfect place to start their family, with the added bonus of a bomb shelter that Ethan plans to use as his man cave. Their excitement quickly turns to fear when news of the fast-spreading virus and the havoc it is wreaking around the world becomes public. As the news continues to pour in, the couple realizes the virus is unstoppable. They quickly make provision to survive the plague by locking themselves in the shelter. When they emerge after two months of living in the cramped space, ninety-five percent of the world's population is gone. Their neighborhood lies in ruins, destroyed by a massive storm. Body bags filled with the dead are stacked in the parking lots of local hospitals. All around them, unknown dangers lurk, but the worst danger unexpectedly appears, adding to the trauma they've already experienced. Fleeing the devastation in the city, they head for the tiny town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where Ethan's father owned a vacation cabin. They settle into a new life in the place survivors have christened New Hope. All is well until a stranger arrives on the scene and foments discord in the fledgling community. The response of the citizens of New Hope to the newcomer lays the groundwork for the events that follow. Where do you go when your world comes to an end?A woman always in search of experience, Ann Werner has sampled a wide range of occupations: waitress, radio advertising sales, copywriter, voiceover work, cemetery plot sales (she thought it was a dead end job), event coordinator, packaging design and wine consultant, to name just a few. She also worked as a professional actor, best known for her portrayal of Eliana, maid to the evil Dimera family on the NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives. An avid reader, she has always had a passion for writing. In addition to her novels, she has also collaborated on two non-fiction books with daughter and business partner, Kimberley A. Johnson: THE VIRGIN DIARIES and AIN'T NO SUNSHINE: MEN REVEAL THE PAIN OF HEARTBREAK. She resides in Maryland, where she is at work on her next novel.

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excellent author, and she's quite brilliant. She's written a multitude of books, more than I can count. I went to public school, so there you go. But her name is Ann Werner, and we're going to be talking about her new book called The Melt. And it's very apocalyptic, so it's kind of fitting for what we're experiencing right now. It might be a good guide maybe in the future. I don't know. According to her bio, she's always had a voracious curiosity and loved doing creative things. The combination of two has resulted in her lifetime experiences. From the mundane to the ridiculous to the sublime, she's pretty much run the gambit. At one point in the

time, she even sold the cemetery plots. That should be interesting. And it didn't last long and she became a professional actor her most notable role was eliana on the soap opera days of our lives for nearly seven and a half years so you probably saw her on tv and uh books have been her passion she started writing in earnest in 1997 and she's been writing most of her adult life uh she loves to entertain people thinks it's very important to do i think it's very important to you to entertain people. And when you're having a bad day, when your heart gets broken, when things seem bleak, you can always find a few minutes of respite in the pages of a book or watching your favorite movie, TV show, or movie, she says. She tries to provide that respite for people. and I feel that she's written something worthwhile.

She's written a lot of books, so people are definitely liking them. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Ann? Well, thank you very much for having me, and I'm doing just great. Well, thank you for coming. Your new book, The Melt. This is fitting for our times a little bit. Let's start out with your plugs, so people can find you on the interwebs first. Okay, well, if you go to amazon.com and you input my name, you can, or you input any of my books,

and you can go to my author page. Then I also have a website, and it is annwerner.info. And when people go to look for it, make sure that they spell my last name right. It's W-E-R-N-E-R. And then I am on Twitter. I'm at Ms. Werner. And I'm on Facebook and Instagram as well. Awesome, Sauce.

And we had your daughter on, actually, on the show earlier. Yeah. About a month or two ago. And she was really wonderful. So the book, The Melt, why did you write it and what's it about well i hadn't written anything in a while and i was kind of looking through all my i keep a folder with all kinds of ideas in it and nothing really resonated with me but I used to write for a liberal thing called Liberals Unite. I used to write for Liberals Unite.

And one of the stories that I had written was about some French scientists who discovered an ancient virus when they were doing core samples up in the Siberian, whatever, you know, way up north in Siberia. So that kind of occurred to me. And that's what kind of, that's what actually gave me the idea for the melt. And I just thought that would be, that would be a really cool thing to write about. Now, mind you, this was in the autumn of 2016. I had no idea we were going to go through a pandemic. And usually it takes me about a year to write a book. But this one, it took me about, well, three and a half years from the time I started until I finished.

And that was because I was, at the time, I was living in Northern California. My place was for sale. And then I was going to the time, I was living in Northern California, my place was for sale. And then I was going to take it off the market. But then somebody walked by my house and saw the sign and they called me and then it was like, okay, drop everything, stop writing. I had to get on a plane because I sold my house, I had to get on a plane, I had to, because I was going to come back to the East Coast after 40 years and find a place to live, and then I had to fly back. I had to pack up and do all that kind of stuff. So it was this protracted thing, but that's where I got the idea.

It was from that article that I'd written for Liberals Unite. Awesome sauce. So this is kind of interesting. Members of the last tribe of reindeer herders discover a body in the melting permafrost of the northern mongolia steeper step step i went to post school uh and the virus dubbed the scourge is unleashed on the world so uh it's kind of like the coronavirus only it's got a better name that's kind of more i don't know know, look better. The Red Scourge. The Red Scourge.

So there you go. Unleashed on the world. How similar is the Red Scourge to coronavirus? Well, it's way, way, way different. I mean, the Red Scourge kills 95% of the world's population. Sounds scourgy. Yeah, it's pretty scourgy and it's it's pretty nasty all right so definitely definitely 2020 don't listen into this we don't need this to end up on the apocalyptic bingo for 2020 don't give it any ideas so um

give us some more details on the book where the story evolves around. Does it mainly stay in Russia or does it spread all over the world? Well, it spreads all over the world. It starts out in Mongolia and the northern Mongolian steppe when these reindeer herders discover this body. So I wrote the book in two parts because a lot of the dystopian books that are on the market today, they happen after the fact. So whatever has happened has already happened and then the whole world is in disarray. I thought that I would like to take the readers through what it would be like. So I have the discovery, and then I have what happens after it's discovered.

And then I take it from Mongolia. I go from Mongolia, and I go to the CDC. And then from there, with all of the muggy mugs, who are going to do whatever they're going to do about it i go to this young couple in silver spring and so this young couple in silver spring uh they're shopping for a house they have no idea what's headed their way um but then they buy this house now the house because the guy wants a man cave so this is their dream house because this particular house is an older house. It's a post-World War II house, when everybody was afraid of the atomic bomb.

So it's got a bomb shelter. And this is where they escape the virus. They go in there. So that's the first half of the book. And it it's what they go through it's leading up to going into the shelter and then being in the shelter and then after they've been in there when they come out what happens so then the the second half of the book is is talking about you know where do you go when the world that you know it has is just gone yeah that's that's kind of what i do no more starbucks the world's over no more starbucks no more no more nothing so how much did the coronavirus pandemic influence the story did you already have it submitted well i finished i finished the book uh in november of last And then I started, you know, going through and doing all my little tweaks and everything.

So when the coronavirus came up, there were a few things that it was like, oh, you know, I mean, I. Who had ever heard of social distancing? I mean, so that's a term that found its way into this into the story. Another thing that I had been seeing a news report one night, and I guess some of the people from the CDC were being interviewed, and they were talking about small particle spread. So, you know, making it aerosolized. All right. Which the coronavirus is just droplets. All right. But this one here is a small particle and you don't really have to cough. You don't have to breathe it on other people. You don't have to do anything because in my virus, spores from it are shed off

of your body. And you don't even know that you have the virus until you are quite frankly at death's door it feels like catching a cold and you've already given it to everyone else yeah and then yeah and that's it and i mean and you're just you're shedding these spores you don't know that you have it and then by the time that you you feel like you're getting a cold and within 24 hours you're dead horribly suffering suffering, dead, horribly suffering. So it's kind of evil Ebola sort of, sort of, kind of a mixture of Ebola and the Spanish flu. That's my kind of drink on a Friday night.

Mix a little of that in. Here you go, man. Take a shot of that baby. 2020 coming at you live uh let's see some of the characters in the story particularly the president are very familiar uh uh was it on purpose or uh yeah because he had just he had just been elected when i had started you know i actually started this story before he was, I don't even like to say he was elected. Okay. Before he was installed into the Oval Office, he, you know, he had just, and I knew that we were in for some bad stuff, but no, I don't think anyone could possibly have envisioned. However, what really surprised me when I was going through this,

because mind you, you know, he had not really shown his full colors. And what surprised me was some of the ways that he acted, especially about the virus. There was no way I could have known how he would react. And yet, that's what I put in the book. And it's President Tower, you know, a little Trump Tower. President Tower. So, yeah.

So, it really did kind of surprise me how accurately I predicted what he would do. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's amazing. You know, narcissists are pretty interesting people. I've known a couple. That's why I kind of knew he was bad. I've known, I mean, not known, known, but I've known if Donald Trump studied him.

I used to think he was hot when, you know, the Art of Deal came out. And then within a few years, it was like, hey, man, something's up with you. And then the more you watch him does uh does president tower have small hands small mind small mind yeah um so you split the book into two parts and then of course uh we'll ask you this later uh the pandemic in the aftermath uh most of the stories of this nature begin after

destruction um so why'd you put it in two parts i guess because i wanted to take people i didn't want to be like so many of the other books you know i did some research i mean one of my very favorite books and i read it twice and once i get finished with this series, I will read it again, is Stephen King's The Stand. I also read, but you know, that starts after the virus. I also read, somebody had recommended a book to me called The Earth Abides. I cannot remember the author, but this book was written, I think back in the 1940s. And that book started after the virus. Now, I think there's a book out now by Nora Roberts, I think. Yeah, I think it's by Nora Roberts called Day One. Now,

I think from just reading the description of the book, because I have not read it, but I think it takes place at least for part of the actual pandemic before everything is all said and done. I could be wrong because I haven't read the book but you know every everything i've i've always seen it's always when it's all done yeah you know the virus is here it's just a story of people because it really is i wanted a study of human emotions and human reactions to what was happening around them yeah like i like one of my favorite movies, not my favorite, but one of the movies I've always loved is The Thing. And, you know, it's cool when they find the ice or like Alien, you know, where they find the, you know, you see them find the thing

and then, you know, everything goes down from there. But to me, that's better than coming in at the end where you're just like, what happened? So that's cool. You marked the book as book one of the After the apocalypse series uh you plan to do more in the series yeah i want to do i i'm aiming for at least three um i'm always scared to death so are they going to be called the melt more melt and holy shit lots of melt no i have no idea you know i came up with the name i came up with the name the melt right away

okay i have no idea what i'm gonna call the second or the third i just but i never ever know what my i just get an idea for a book and then it becomes organic i'm not one of these people that knows the whole story you know i mean i have so many characters that in the story they just like okay i'm gonna put this in oh okay i'm gonna do that and they're just organic and yeah my title is going to be and and i really don't even i kind of kind of kind of know what I'm going to do with the second one. Only because I've got a cliffhanger sort of ending. But, you know, I don't know how I'm going to do it yet.

Oh. I have little, I have, I have, I've been writing it in my head. So I have notes everywhere. I've got these little post-it notes everywhere. And I've got, you know, I have like little papers all over my house and I have little notepads here and notepads there I've got a big folder with ideas I have a folder on my computer I mean it's insane when I actually sit down and try to compile all of this my eyes will be rolling back in my head yeah it's the editing that kills you right well you know there you go uh so the cover

of the book has the melt on it and it shows uh basically the planet melting and i and i guess that uh the intention of that is to talk about uh how this virus came from the uh melting uh global stuff yeah global warming you never know what's going to happen with global warming and what's funny is since you started writing the books and i don't know it's funny but 2016 i mean we've had some really crazy stuff going on with the ice caps i mean they've been melting even further yeah i believe russian trawlers can actually go across the north pole now from one end to the other where it used to be they couldn't so um uh you know that maybe that's 2021 you know i mean right now 2021's got a lot to live up to i know this is a truly truly truly scary time for so many reasons yeah like the this this is an

apocalyptic book but at this pace it might be an uplifter. You're like, well, shit, this isn't as bad as what's going on now. I feel good about this. Let's do this part. I do try to have some uplifting stuff in the second half of the book. Well, that's good. There's quite a bit of stuff that goes on that's like, oh. So is the story mostly in the the second half uh focusing around the couple oh it's it's focusing about um a community um basically what happens is when they

when they when they get out of the shelter and then this just this really i mean some really terrible terrible thing happens and so they just can't stay there anymore. And they wind up going to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where the guy in the book, his name is Ethan, his father had a vacation cabin. And so they decided to go there. So when they get there it, there are some people there and then I pick up the story after they've been there six months. So it's this small little community of 35 people. Everyone's trying to survive. Yeah, just trying to survive. So it's, it's the story of, of this community. And then of course, you know, you have to bring in stuff that's going to be going against what they're trying to do try to keep all the people in the book believable.

And even the, the, the, the villain, the villain is, um, he's, he doesn't know that he's a villain. Ah,

I think some people don't know they're evil, but they're behaving in an evil manner. They think they're doing good. Yeah. Is that, is that usually the thing of most characters know they're evil or they're behaving in an evil manner. They think they're doing good. Is that usually the thing of most characters? They think they're doing a good thing, but they're not? Well, it depends. It depends, I guess, on the character. Some of them know damn well what they're doing.

In the book that I wrote about the satanic serial killer in Crazy, I really knew what that villain was doing yeah usually hopefully i don't know hopefully where do you get these words uh you would think that a serial killer would uh would kind of know after a while that hey you know murder is illegal eh and uh i'm doing it so So this must be bad. I mean, it's good for me. It's working out for me right now, but this seems kind of bad. Like I shouldn't do it.

Like I probably should hide the body because this is bad. This is my day. But no, it's interesting. How many books have you written total? Well, let's see. I've written the people next door, dreams and nightmares, crazy Cooper's Grove. I've got a couple of short stories. One's called, uh, a view from the meadow. The other is the chemtrail conspiracy.

Then I've got the melt. And then, um, I've got two anthologies that I wrote with my daughter, Kimberly Johnson, who, as you mentioned, you interviewed her. We did the Virgin Diaries, which was a compilation of 72 stories from real people. We gathered them off of the internet. They're all anonymous. So people wouldn't, you know, so they wouldn't sugarcoat. And it was basically, it was about their first experience the people that responded um their first about their first

time i guess their ages ranged from 20 to 77 77 what they're telling me about the first time they had sex 77 yeah that was the age of our respondents. I mean, we really had, we did half men, half women. We included gay people. We wanted a real cross-section of people. It's really kind of a fascinating study. Yeah, 77, talking about the first time that it was a gentleman about his first sexual experience. Basically, it's talking about the emotional aspect rather than the physical aspects of it. And then the other one is Ain't

No Sunshine Men. I don't know why I have the thing, but it's, you know, it meant something, the pain of heartbreak. And we, I think it was like 36 men that we interviewed. And they talk about what it was like to lose love, whether it was through being dumped, death, divorce. And it was really kind of a revelation to both of us. We didn't expect, I think most women think that after a breakup, the second that the guy breaks up, or you break up with him, or he breaks up with you, he's skipping out the door and on, you know, like a bee onto the next flower. And we found out, no, that's really not the case. I guess maybe that might be the case when he skips out the door after breaking up with you. But if you break up with him, man, some of these guys, I mean, for years, they couldn't get over it. And

it was like, what? So it was very informative. And some of the stories were funny. Some of them were really tragic and sad, but it was, you know, it was a good look into the male psyche. Yeah. And, and then we also, we interviewed bartenders for that book because, you know, a bartender it's, we hear all the stories uh we also interviewed psychics and um it was just it was really kind of it was very illuminating that's very interesting yeah it's very interesting the um the uh the 77 virgin i'm not gonna be able to get over that for a while that's gonna be stuck in my head now.

No, no, no. He wasn't a virgin at 77. Oh, it was the first time he had – what? Yeah, he's talking about – no, these were people that gave us their stories. They ranged in age from 20 to 77. Oh, he was 77 and he gave the story. Yeah, okay. He wasn't a virgin.

At 77, I don't think if he'd never had to – Sorry. I was going to say, if I lost my virginity at 77, I'd break a hip or something. I don't know. I don't know if I have energy for that. I'd be like, we're going to lose my virginity? Let me have a sandwich and I'll think about that. Yeah.

So he was 77 years old telling about how he lost his virginity. Telling a story at the first time yeah all right that's good because i was just like going wow he's a virgin but uh how what was the oldest person then that lost their virginity or did you ask him when like yeah yeah no we we asked how old was the oldest person i'm just curious like 34 years old it was a guy 34 it was a guy i could be wrong but i mean i think he was in his 30s i mean because it was like whoa dude but he yeah it was a guy and the youngest i think was 12 you could you could do it that was a freaking that was a ooh was it consensual it was just i mean it was just um you could probably do

another book called the incel diaries about right how people uh haven't ever had sex and then they really want it bad enough but they're angry at people because they're entitled i know they're so angry that nobody will go to bed with them because they go oh my gosh what's wrong with this generation i don't know i know um so an interesting book the melt uh anything more we should know about the book and what it's uh what it's all about well you know i mean we can't give a whole book away you know sorry audience but i i would i i would i would say you know basically what it is it's it's not it's not one of these mad max kind of books it is an examination of human emotions um and how people would react to just losing everything that they hold dear. I mean, all of it, electricity,

all of it. And, you know, how they get along, you know, I mean, what they do and, and also the, the, the fact that, you know, we're living in the time that we're living in and we have so much at our disposal and it's lost, but there are still things that say that book, you know, that I had read that was written in the 1940s. They,

it was kind of crazy because in that book, the guy kind of just, he wrote that 20 years later, these people are still eating canned goods from the supermarket shelves. Well, I'm sorry, that's just not going to happen. All right. First of all, the canned goods, I think you get sick if you ate something that old. Yeah.

You know, and also the people in my book, even though they don't have the grid anymore, they still have access to certain technologies, access to solar panels. Oh yeah. So they can, you know, they can, they can generate their own electricity. They,

and then they also have access because as is is mentioned several times in the book everything is free they can go to a computer store and they can get all these computers so they can use those and they can get all of these how-to things and and you know so they so they have a leg up because they can they can learn things that they can learn skills that they don't know because it's all out there. And a lot of it is on video disc. And a lot of it that isn't, well, then they also have libraries just that they can go to and get all of this knowledge. So it's a little different. And so I'm, you know, I'm just, that's what I really tried to portray and which I will be portraying as well as other things that I, I do know one thing that I'm going to get started.

And it actually did, it does start a little tiny bit in volume one, although nobody will probably recognize it, but I'll expand on it in volume two. We have something to look forward to in volume two this this could be quite the story you're going on uh interesting tom um so uh you guys can check it out you can go on amazon.com look for the melt and it shows the planet with a giant melting thing that reminds you of ice cream on there so i might have some ice cream after this uh that's supposed to be it must be glaciers melting the glacier is melting it looks like ice cream to me i freaking

love that cover yeah it's an awesome cover and it's got a little awesome maybe that cover the world's going to hell and yeah pretty much 20 definitely a book for 2020 so there you go it's maybe that's maybe i mean maybe you're just prophetic or psychic and you were just like this really i'll start in 2016 but this really can't come out of the candle 2020 because there's something going down that this is just gonna be right along with so and everything else i think it's interesting you incorporate some of the characters though do people wear their masks in this book by the way i don't actually no they don't they don't see that's one thing that i never added to it um but they didn't really have i mean really from start to finish by the time that my characters, when they found out about it,

it was just in the beginning of November. By the end of December, they were in their shelter. That's how quickly this thing moved. Wow. So, I mean, nobody, nobody really had time. They could see what was happening on television in other parts of the world because it spread out

from Mongolia and from Mongolia because of what happened. There was a team that went in when this body was discovered and it went back to Great Britain. So then it spread from and and then the way that it gets in the states is addressed and all that stuff so it's just um but no i didn't have masks or any of that stuff because they're really nobody really it moves so fast and yeah it moves so fast that nobody really had the time to

even think i mean they got there there was the thing that you know that that they were you know go home you know wash your hands stay away from people was that kind of a thing that was the advice they got because that's common sense advice and that's what i thought of when i you know when i was writing the book and of course and that's what they told everybody you know when we actually had the pandemic here yeah um so that's pretty interesting the melts this would make a great movie huh i think it would make an excellent movie there you go hollywood option this baby right away wait for the other two book two or three books and then there you go you got yourself a full

screenplay um anyway guys check it out go to amazon.com check out ann werner uh and give us your plugs one more time people can find you on the interwebs all right you can find me at a-n-n-w-e-r-n-e-r.info that's my website annwerner.info and if you go to amazon.com and you put my name in there, all my books will pop up. So just type Ann Werner into your search for Amazon in the Amazon search engine and my name will come up and it'll show my books and you can go to my author page and it'll have all my books on there. And then I am at Ms. Werner on Twitter. And then I'm Ann Werner author on Facebook. There you go. She's everywhere on the interwebs.

So check out the book, the, the melt. I almost said the thing. Sorry about that. I liked that movie. It's the thing, you know,

so the melt, I mean, that could be like a, I can see this being, you know, multi-part you could have like, well, the first book could be like part one and the second that could be like a i i can see this being you know multi-part you could have like well the first book could be like part one the second book could part part two and you know just have the whole it'll just be like the terminator it'll just keep right on going for

you'll be a franchise i'll be melting thank you guys be sure to check out the book you get arnold to do it uh go to the cvpn.com, subscribe to all our podcasts, tell everyone to join up there. You can see all the great authors on our show at amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can also go to patreon.com forward slash Chris Voss to see our new book club and youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss to see the live version of this or video version of this interview. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Thanks, Rand, for being here.

We'll see you guys next time. And I think that should be it.