Red Crisis: The Backstory

The flag of the USSR (United Soviet Socialist's Republic.) That's
what Russia used to be called during the days it was ruled by
the Communists. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Sooo... I know I promised to post a ton on Red Crisis this month... and guess who forgot about editing/posting/working on it?

I kid you not, I actually forgot to work on it. I just remembered today when I picked up Free and was doing some paper editing on it. I realized I hadn't done anything more on Red Crisis. I felt very bad! So, today I am going to give you the backstory of Red Crisis, because I'm on the phone with the medical health insurance people and they take forever to answer and I have a ton of free time on my hands out of the goodness of my heart. I think you may have a bit of fun with the previous little-known-facts about the story.




The original plot of Red Crisis involved Jacob Craig (Look for him in the Hijacked! section) an Australian cowboy that's been in a gazillion of my stories, and an orphaned girl. There was also a very dramatic reunion between those two characters and the orphaned girl got adopted at the end. It's almost embarrassingly dramatized, in a fun way. I have fond memories of the first draft!

The second draft had a totally different outcome- it was the idea of my longtime pen pal in Florida and I. We thought it would be fun to do a story about me coming to visit her in Florida, and how we discovered three evil Communist spies in her school. (This was before we knew a lot about the Cold War, so we had it in modern times.) I think it also included a FBI agent who was my friend and how we ended up becoming hostages or something. Be glad the second draft was pitched out the window as well- the third draft was the best version of the story, believe me.

Lisa's name was first Emilia, then Lilly, and finally Lisa. Cecelia's name stayed the same throughout all the revisions.

Red Crisis was my very first story with Russian bad guys. I had never attempted a story before that with villains with a Russian ethnicity. Before that, all my antagonists had been cowboys, Nazi spies, bank robbers, forgers and thieves. In fact, Red Crisis was the reason I began to research KGB agents and the Soviet government, which later lead me to a full-blown research on Russian history and ultimately made me fall in love with these people from a far away land that have been through so much hardship.

Nicolai Igorovich Dobzhansky. Copyright ©
2015 by Melissa McConnell.

Finally, for a really fun and random fact, there is a scene in Red Crisis that is a nod to one of my other book series. Nicolai Dobzhansky (you can read about him HERE) gets a quick mention in Red Crisis, though it was funny to add that in because technically Nicolai wasn't born until 1969. It was just a fun way for me to let Nicolai cameo in that story.


I hope you had fun reading some of the back story on Red Crisis! I hope to do at least one or two character spotlights on Lisa and Cecelia.








How many times have you changed your story? How drastic were the changes? Do you keep your original versions? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!