Who Wants to Live Forever? Guest Post by Rebecca Cantrell

Rebecca Cantrell: Who Wants to Live Forever?

In my newest thriller, The Girl Who Would Live Forever, a character is obsessed with “stopping the bony hand of death from choking out the life of everyone on Earth [and] bottling immortality.”As Queen sang, Who Wants to Live Forever? The answer is: a lot of us. Since humans started dying, they started looking around to figure out ways to keep it from happening. At first it was the province of the gods and special food they ate or drank. If humans consumed it, they became immortal too. Many cultures have such mythological food--from the Tree of Eternal Life to the Peaches of Immortality through a lot of magical milk. But getting those immortal god-food has proven elusive.

When the old myths didn't work, we turned to supernatural sources. If you want to live forever and look sexy doing it, vampirism is the clear winner. Immortality without trying hard but also not looking good? Zombies. Immortality on a slightly different plane? Ghosts. Immortality after death? Heaven and hell.

But most people want to live forever in the bodies they had when they arrived. So we started looking for other methods. Alchemists searched for the philosopher’s stone which, in addition to turning lead to gold, conferred immortality. Shelby Linton, the character in my book, searches for pharmacological means to extend life. She strives to harness the power of Turritopsis dohrnii, a biologically immortal jellyfish that reverts to an earlier life stage when needed and grows up all over again. She’s not alone in her search, as real life scientists are examining those jellyfish searching for the same thing.

Other scientists are using gene editing to reverse aging in mice, with promising results. In the short term, I guess that’s great news for wealthy mice, but not so much for humans.

More promising right now are metformin (diabetes drug) and rapamycin (immune-suppressing drug) which are already on the market. They’ve been shown to increase life expectancy in mice, even when administered to older mice. The science isn’t settled for either of them, but maybe these technologies will help us to live a happy and healthy 120 years and beyond.

Imagine what you’d do with all that extra time. Read more books? Write more? Finally clean out all your closets?

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New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Cantrell's works have won the ITW Thriller, the Bruce Alexander, and the Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry, Mary Higgins Clark, GoodReads Choice, APPY, RT Reviewers Choice, and Shriekfest Film Festival awards. She and her husband and son live in Hawaii where they avoid jellyfish instead of using them to become immortal. 

Partners in Crime: Rebecca Cantrell and James Rollins

Just in time for Halloween, I welcome "Partners in Crime" thriller writers Rebecca Cantrell and James Rollins, co-authors of The  Blood Gospel. 

JAMES ROLLINS is the New York Times bestselling author of international thrillers. His Sigma series has been lauded as one of the “top crowd pleasers” (New York Times) and one of the “hottest summer reads” (People Magazine). In each novel, acclaimed for its originality, Rollins unveils unseen worlds, scientific breakthroughs, and historical secrets--and he does it all at breakneck speed and with stunning insight. Find James Rollins on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and at www.jamesrollins.com.

REBECCA CANTRELL’S Hannah Vogel mystery/thriller novels have won the Bruce Alexander and Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry and RT Reviewers Choice awards; her critically-acclaimed cell phone novel, iDrakula, was nominated for the APPY award and listed on Booklist’s Top 10 Horror Fiction for Youth. She and her husband and son just left Hawaii’s sunny shores for adventures in Berlin. Find Rebecca Cantrell on Facebook, Twitter, and at www.rebeccacantrell.com.)

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REBECCA CANTRELL:

The last time I, Rebecca, blogged here for Halloween I wrote about the scariest experience I ever had while traveling. It involved a Cairo hotel, exhaustion, a bloody handprint appearing on the inside of my hotel room while I was sleeping, and a bloody trail that led down dark deserted stairs.

That was less scary than writing a book with someone else.

Writing a book is a very intimate process. It’s not all “which word goes here?” or “what’s the coolest way to kill a massive enraged black bear?” or “what if we blew up this giant landmark?”  or even “what’s the best way to end Act II?” There is plenty of that, but that’s the treat part of trick-or-treat.

For me, Rebecca, the trick was talking about sex and death and love and what would a character do if you dragged her through the worst experiences in her life, what would it mean, how would she be changed? And you can’t talk about that or write about that without revealing a lot about yourself, no matter how hard you try to pretend it’s just the character, it’s all of your experience and opinions going into making her. And, since Jim’s a writer too, he knows that.

When I write alone, I’m just about those things inside my own head, and I know the people in there really well. I trust them. At the start of the collaboration I didn’t know Jim that well. In fact, I know very, very few people that well. So, for me, writing The Blood Gospel was a giant scary trust exercise where I had to be honest and vulnerable and hope he didn’t laugh or sit in stunned silence thinking “what did I get myself into? She ought to be committed. Why did I give her my phone number?” If he did think that, he was smart enough to keep it to himself, and so by this point, Jim is practically a voice in my head too.

And speaking of that “voice,” here he is.

JIM ROLLINS: 

This whole collaboration process was an eye-opener for me, too.  I first met Rebecca when she was work-shopping a new thriller at a writing retreat where I was teaching. I respected her as a writer then, and over the intervening years, meeting at conferences around the country, as a friend. So surely this collaboration would be a simple process. We knew each other well enough. Well, it quickly became a learning curve about how “open” to be about the depth necessary to tell this story. Prior to this project, writing had always been a solitary experience, where the best and worst of yourself could be kept under wraps and dabbled with in private.

It took a while to reach that stage with each other, where we could drop our guards with one another: to be brutally honest, emotionally sincere, and willing to trust. But I think for any true collaboration to work, it’s an emotional Rubicon that must be crossed.

But we did, and I’m glad we did, because the book that came out of it wasn’t something either of us would have written on our own--and surprisingly, we had a lot of fun getting there.  And I learned a bunch of new ways to kill people.

(Rebecca again: I wonder if he thought up all those ways while we argued about the book? Not that I’m nervous. Too nervous.)

Frightful Fridays: Rebecca Cantrell/Bekka Black

FRIGHTFUL FRIDAYS: Guest blogging today for Frighful Fridays is Rebecca Cantrell, author of the award-winning Hannah Vogel mystery series set in 1930s Berlin. She is also known as Bekka Black, iDrakula.

REBECCA CANTRELL/BEKKA BLACK:

In honor of Halloween, I’d like to share the true story of the scariest moment of my traveling life.

In the summer of 1989 the man who would become my husband and I took a student trip to Egypt. We were on a shoestring budget, flying from East Berlin to Budapest (both still Communist, although barely) to Cairo.

After sightseeing in and around Cairo, we haggled our way onto a felucca to drift down the Nile to Luxor. It was beautiful and romantic, but not hygienic. On the last night of the boat trip, we each drank a cup of tea that we had watched boiling away on the boat. Surely, we thought, if the water had been boiled, it would be safe. I have a picture of my husband drinking the tea entitled “In the background, the temple of Kom Ombo, in his hand a lethal cup of digestive tract death, and on his face the blissful smile of complete ignorance.”

The next day, we hopped a second class train back to Cairo. And, well, you can imagine what happened. Within the next 48 hours I would lose ten pounds. I imagine if I was any older than twenty, I wouldn’t have pulled through.

As it was, every moment took on a sense of unreality as I wandered light-headed through the Egyptian summer heat near the train station. My husband realized that I would never last on a bus, so we splurged and took a cab.

We asked the cab driver to take us to a reasonably priced hotel with air conditioning (the only air conditioning of the entire trip). When we arrived, we didn’t even look at the hotel name, just stumbled to our rooms under eerie fluorescent lighting that flickered like a George Romero horror film.

It was far from luxurious, but the air conditioning did work as promised and we had our own toilet. My husband left me alone in the air conditioned splendor of the room and went to pick up film we’d left to be developed (this was pre-digital-film era). I collapsed on the bed and slept, my first good sleep since we’d left Berlin two weeks before.

And I must have slept very deeply. Too deeply.

I woke up when he came back, unlocked the door and brought our pictures and yoghurt and limes.

Sick and light-headed, we gathered our luggage and headed to the white-painted door. It shone brightly against the pale yellow wallpaper. Next to the door, on the inside, on the pale wallpaper, was a perfect human handprint. The handprint was reddish brown, each finger clearly defined. It smelled like blood. It looked like blood.

If it was blood, someone had opened the door while I slept, put a bloody palm against the wall, and vanished.

The hair rose on the back of my neck and my arms, and a chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

We followed the blood smears on the wall and the drops on the floor to a darkened staircase, which I refused to go down, and I wouldn’t let my husband go down either. I didn’t know who or what waited down there, but we were too sick and weak to face it. Instead, we told the hotel staff where to find injured person and left.

As the cab pulled away to the airport, I read the name of our lodging in the rear view mirror. It was called…The Everest Hotel.

What’s the spookiest thing that ever happened to you while traveling?

Rebecca Cantrell in Berkeley: July 7, 2 p.m.

Join Mystery Readers International, NorCal, July 7 for an Afternoon Tea with Rebecca Cantrell, author of A Trace of Smoke, A Night of Long Knives and out next week, A Game of Lies. Trace of Smoke won the Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award from MRI and the Bruce Alexander Award from Left Coast Crime.  I've read A Game of Lies, and it's truly terrific.

2 p.m. July 7, Berkeley, CA. To RSVP, leave a comment with your email address (can be encrypted)

About the Author from Rebecca Cantrell's website: A few years ago Rebecca Cantrell quit her job, sold her house, and moved to Hawaii to write a novel because, at seven, she decided that she would be a writer. Now she writes the Hannah Vogel mystery series set in Berlin in the 1930s.

A faded pink triangle pasted on the wall of Dachau Concentration Camp and time in Berlin, Germany in the 1980s inspired “A Trace of Smoke.” Fluent in German, she received her high school diploma from the John F. Kennedy Schule in Berlin and studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin and the Georg August Universität in Göttingen before graduating from Carnegie Mellon University.

When she visited Berlin in the summer of 2006, she was astounded to discover that many locations in her novel have been rebuilt and reopened in the last few years, including the gay bar El Dorado and the Mosse House publishing house.

Her short story “Coffee” appear in the “Missing” anthology, and her short story “On the Train” will be in the “First Thrills” anthology in June 2010.

Her screenplay “The Humanitarian” was a finalist at Shriekfest 2008: The Los Angeles Horror/Sci-fi Film Festival. Her screenplay “A Taste For Blood” was a finalist at the Shriekfest 2007: The Los Angeles Horror/Sci-fi Film Festival.

Don't miss this return visit with a truly entertaining and informed author!