Quinn Cozens is THE carbon copy of Yours Truly
Quinn Cozens of Beyond the Lost is eerily familiar to me because, in many ways, he is me. Just with a few slight differences in his backstory.
What made me base Quinn Cozens almost entirely on myself? One reason is that my survival thriller trilogy, Beyond the Lost, kicked off with a situation that walked into my mind one night in November 2023.
I was falling asleep after what I’m sure was another poor showing from the Buffalo Sabres, the hockey team I covered at a rather popular fan blog at the time. Then it hit me. What if I were at a K-pop concert and disaster struck because covert sleeper cells launched a coordinated attack on America?
Think Red Dawn, but something even more hopeless, and you’ll get where I’m going. As for the idol herself, I was thinking about Yena, before she switched to resembling Mina from Twice, then Yuqi from I-DLE (I probably botched that spelling), and, even Moametal from Babymetal.
Moa’s not necessarily K-pop, but you get the gist – especially since she and my co-protagonist in Book I, Yui Kikuchi, share a family name. Plus, I named Yui after the girl’s former bandmate, Yuimetal.
Anyway, there I was, as the old cliche goes. Crawling like a soldier through an array of wasted bodies and sneaking into the thick woods just to get the hell outta Dodge. And there she was. Perplexed. Frozen, almost, in fear.
At that point, I knew exactly who I’d base the artist about to be known as Quinn Cozens on.
Quinn Cozens ain’t a total rendition of Yours Truly
No, Quinn Cozens and TC Marti aren’t totally alike. Quinn’s birthday’s April 27th, 2001, making me exactly 10 years older than him. Quinn’s a professional sports writer, but he covers the NFL as opposed to the NHL.
He was a hockey writer in early drafts. But, because I found myself mentioning NFL Sundays instead of hockey games when he’d have his nostalgic moments, it’d make more sense to the reader if I just rolled with the NFL. Especially in a novella like Beyond the Lost Horizon, which is about 37,000 words long.
I’m also a fan of K-pop, with artists like Gyubin, Yuqi, and Yena taking over my Spotify playlist. In Beyond the Lost Horizon, Quinn makes it clear he can’t stand K-pop, as he’s purely a power/symphonic metalhead.
Power/symphonic metal is another one of my genres of choice, and I listen to it more than anything else. But not without bands like Babymetal or even Dream Catcher.
Am I the survivalist that Quinn is?
In Beyond the Lost Horizon, you’ll learn within minutes that Quinn’s a hardened survivalist. But to be honest, Quinn acts purely on instinct. He’s got no survival training, and has little, if any, survival skills.
He just has a K-pop idol to look after. One who’d be dead in seconds if he didn’t stumble across her. That said, Quinn’s never faced the elements, and I doubt he’s even engaged in primitive camping.
But things change when you got another life that depends on you. And if I were in that situation, I’d think along those same lines. So, yes, I’m the survivalist Quinn is. Even if neither one of us knows much in the way of survival.
