Tell us a little about yourself and unplugged.

Hi, my name is David Schulze. I’m from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. I got a bachelor’s degree in writing for film and television from Emerson College, but when an LA internship I was banking on fell through, I decided to stay out East, regroup, and switch my efforts to independent novel writing. My novella unplugged is a speculative satire set in the 2040s depicting the rise and fall of the Unplug Movement, a nationwide boycott of digital living founded by a group of college-age Gen Alphas sick of America’s overwhelming dependence on technology. Their parents, the millennial establishment, refuse to listen to their kids and give up power so willingly, and so a culture war is born. My chief inspirations were Fight Club, Animal Farm, and a documentary I saw once on the hippie movement detailing the counterculture mindset of their beatnik founders and how their intellectual cause became a wild emotional monster they’d later disown.

Was your storyline something you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build/change it as you wrote unplugged?

Whenever I start a new project, I like to form a three-act framework with enough empty spaces in the specifics so I can improvise throughout the first draft. Doing so creates an organic flow to the story, plus I end up inventing new subplots and twists I never thought of before that actually elevate my original concept. unplugged, in its f inal form, is practically identical to the original outline I wrote in 2020, but a lot has happened in the world since then. The rise of Reddit meme stocks. Accelerated AI development. The weaponization of Big Tech. Congress single-handedly initiating the fall of TikTok. By the time I was finally able to sit down and write out the first draft in early 2024, I had plenty of real-world precedents to work with. Probably the most significant last-minute change of mine was the invention of unplugged’s framing device, a nameless narrator imagining his infant son’s radical future as the result of his own antitech parenting style.

How did you develop your characters?

I originally conceived unplugged as having nameless archetypes as characters. The Writer. The Acolyte. The Detractor. The Loner. I wanted my vision of the future to be as cold and dispassionate as the characters’ ruthlessness. But the more I thought about it, I decided it was better to switch to personal characters with real names and relatable backgrounds. unplugged could instead be used to study how the Unplug Movement morphs the characters into the versions of themselves they never wanted to be, and giving them personalities would make their individual tragedies more emotionally cathartic for the reader.

What are you working on now?

Currently, I’m developing a low-fantasy novel called My God Father, dramatizing the century-spanning tumultuous relationship between an immortal human and the insecure demigod that forced it on him, and a new anthology of over-the-top situational farces I’m calling my Shenanigans Trilogy.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.