R.S. Hopson discusses the forthcoming novel ‘The Drop’
I was eleven years old when the world went to shit.
Literally. It just started falling away, chunk by horrifying chunk.
That is both the opening line for my debut novel, The Drop, and a truth I used to rarely speak aloud, describing my personal experience as a child growing up in a household with a parent who suffered from a hard drug addiction. The Drop is at once an evocative piece of adult speculative fiction and a (highly) fictionalized memoir - but I didn’t know that when I started writing. I just knew the post-apocalyptic world was unique and needed to be explored.
The seed that would become The Drop came to me in 2016. I’ve always had extremely vivid dreams - shock-you-awake kind of dreams. I have at least 30 dreams on my “To Write” list, captured in the dead of night via Notes app or voice memo. I believe that I don’t create anything but am given or shown them, and then must take on the desperate task of trying to translate it to share with others.
That night in 2016, I had the most disturbing dream of my life, tossing and turning awake but always re-entering in the same place: a balcony on a dark night with curtains of neon rain falling around me. As I looked out over the flat, moonlit terrain, hundreds of black voids stretched out to the horizon - more appearing as I watched, more of Earth swallowed. In the dream, I was at a party, and everyone else was coming and going, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t take the elevator down like the rest of them. I’d watch them walk out into the night below, and some of them would be unfortunate enough to be on a patch of ground that dropped into a new void.
I woke up deeply disturbed and attempted to sketch what I’d seen. The next day, I wrote what would become the first sentence of The Drop (above) in a Google Document, but it took me three years to realize there was a novel there. While I loved reading and had been a good writer in school, I didn’t think I had a book in me. Later on a mission trip, family and friends encouraged me to try to write a book. When I sat down, I remembered that one line and decided to write from there, and I haven’t stopped working on The Drop since. The world of The Drop has since expanded greatly to encompass multiple sequels, a prequel, and two unrelated stories in the same universe. At times, it feels like too big a task, and I want to put the proverbial pencil down forever.
But, I feel I owe it to the characters, Jonah, Cal, Miyuki… and myself. It’s the book I wish I could have read when I was in my late teens / early twenties. A few months into writing The Drop, I realized that it wasn’t just a story about a young woman fighting towards truth and redemption in a terrifying world. As I wove through Jonah’s story, I realized the Drop was a metaphor for my experience growing up in a household with a parent suffering from addiction: the instability, unpredictability, and confusion… the loss, the grief. In writing the novel, I’ve painted different scenarios of that trauma to process it, especially that of my relationship with my estranged father. I’ve found healing of wounds so old that I thought they were my identity.
My dream is that this novel can entertain readers on one level, but on another also offer healing and hope for anyone who’s gone or is going through a similar situation.
If what you read is compelling to you, please consider visiting my website, rshopson.com, and signing up for the newsletter, so you can stay up to date on my path to publishing. I’m hoping to launch The Drop in Fall 2023. In the meantime, please enjoy a preview of the first chapter. Thanks for reading!
The seed that would become The Drop came to me in 2016. I’ve always had extremely vivid dreams - shock-you-awake kind of dreams. I have at least 30 dreams on my “To Write” list, captured in the dead of night via Notes app or voice memo. I believe that I don’t create anything but am given or shown them, and then must take on the desperate task of trying to translate it to share with others.
That night in 2016, I had the most disturbing dream of my life, tossing and turning awake but always re-entering in the same place: a balcony on a dark night with curtains of neon rain falling around me. As I looked out over the flat, moonlit terrain, hundreds of black voids stretched out to the horizon - more appearing as I watched, more of Earth swallowed. In the dream, I was at a party, and everyone else was coming and going, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t take the elevator down like the rest of them. I’d watch them walk out into the night below, and some of them would be unfortunate enough to be on a patch of ground that dropped into a new void.
I woke up deeply disturbed and attempted to sketch what I’d seen. The next day, I wrote what would become the first sentence of The Drop (above) in a Google Document, but it took me three years to realize there was a novel there. While I loved reading and had been a good writer in school, I didn’t think I had a book in me. Later on a mission trip, family and friends encouraged me to try to write a book. When I sat down, I remembered that one line and decided to write from there, and I haven’t stopped working on The Drop since. The world of The Drop has since expanded greatly to encompass multiple sequels, a prequel, and two unrelated stories in the same universe. At times, it feels like too big a task, and I want to put the proverbial pencil down forever.
But, I feel I owe it to the characters, Jonah, Cal, Miyuki… and myself. It’s the book I wish I could have read when I was in my late teens / early twenties. A few months into writing The Drop, I realized that it wasn’t just a story about a young woman fighting towards truth and redemption in a terrifying world. As I wove through Jonah’s story, I realized the Drop was a metaphor for my experience growing up in a household with a parent suffering from addiction: the instability, unpredictability, and confusion… the loss, the grief. In writing the novel, I’ve painted different scenarios of that trauma to process it, especially that of my relationship with my estranged father. I’ve found healing of wounds so old that I thought they were my identity.
My dream is that this novel can entertain readers on one level, but on another also offer healing and hope for anyone who’s gone or is going through a similar situation.
If what you read is compelling to you, please consider visiting my website, rshopson.com, and signing up for the newsletter, so you can stay up to date on my path to publishing. I’m hoping to launch The Drop in Fall 2023. In the meantime, please enjoy a preview of the first chapter. Thanks for reading!
Click on the front cover and enjoy the first chapter of The Drop.
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