Lake County >> Some four decades ago, Lake County resident Nicki Brandon was on her way to the gas station to fill up her tank. But this was the 1970s, and gas rationing was in place. So she had a thought. “What if I didn’t have oil anymore?” she wondered. “What would happen?”
People rely so heavily on their vehicles that this was a fascinating question for her. At the same time, magazines and newspapers were regularly running stories about solar power. That’s when another idea popped into her head, about people living in solar powered motor homes.
Brandon’s book, “The Solarbus Legacy,” was born. It began as a short story, but she quickly realized that she had a far bigger project on her hands.
The book is set in a world in which oil reserves have been depleted, farms are barren and dry, and both the economy and society have collapsed. In this post-apocalyptic society, the privileged live in Solarbuses while everyone else scavenges and wanders. The plot surrounds two Solarbus Society members whose 18-year-old daughter is kidnapped in a quest for revenge.
“It’s been described as a futuristic adventure romance,” Brandon provided.
The novel is as much an adventure tale as it is a political commentary. “This is a story about the environment, and about the use of solar power,” Brandon said. “It’s also about the fact that the Earth can heal itself if it’s left alone long enough without fossil fuels.”
“The Solarbusy Legacy” was a decades long project waylaid by holidays and children and life in general. For fifteen years Brandon didn’t write at all as she took care of her mother. But while it may have taken some time, when she first started, she never even thought the would finish. She’d written poetry and short stories before — one story was a Mormon tale, inspired by her great great grandfather’s dairy, printed in a Berkeley publication — but she didn’t think she had the self-discipline to pen a novel.
“I never really had faith in my own ability to write a book that anybody would be interested in, but I just kept plugging away at it,” she said. “I never gave up on it because I became so enthralled in the story. I kind of liked it better than my own life.”
While she’d finished writing the book in the 90s, Brandon finally published “The Solarbus Legacy” in the fall of 2014. Over the years, she’d typed up the 372 page story on ten different computers and typewriters, then shipped chapters to someone in Idaho who typed up the whole thing for her. When she had the completed book in her hands, she turned to Amazon and their self-publishing platform, CreateSpace. There she worked with an editor and a designer before publishing “The Solarbus Legacy.”
Brandon is working on the sequel now, but it won’t take nearly as many years to complete as her first book, thanks to more free time and the Internet, which wasn’t around when she wrote “The Solarbus Legacy.” In fact, she just finished her first draft, and it going onto the second.
Although Brandon didn’t start writing until her 30s, she’s been in love with words since she was a child, reading every book her mother brought home, regardless of if they were intended for children or not. “I loved reading. It was my escape from reality,” she said.
She recommends her book for anyone aged 15 or 16 and up, as there’s quite a bit of romance. “The Solarbus Legacy” is available on Amazon and at the Lake County Library.
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
