I grew up in Nutley, NJ, home of Martha Stewart, Robert Blake and Annie Oakley. I first attempted to write a novel when I was nine. Called ‘Greatest Times’, it was about sisters who had a freaky-Friday talent of exchanging consciousnesses at will, causing hilarity and confusion. This tale was inspired by grammar school, where I was so bored out of my mind, my consciousness would regularly leave my body and float to a random kid in class. I’d space out while trying to imagine what the world was like through his or her eyes.
In High School, my friends and I would do the same thing, making up funny stories about what random people in our favorite diner could be thinking. What were their home lives like? What were their dramas?
Classes were still a slog. I was never inspired until my friend Robin and I had a class assignment to write a play. “The Butler Did It” was a dark comedy about a very proper English servant who accidentally kills his half of his boss’s corporate board. His boss then proceeds to make hapless efforts to cover up the crime and kills the other half. (Yes, a clueless Constable shows up and says “‘‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this then?”). Robin and I totally threw ourselves into the characters and stories. No one in class got the jokes, but the teacher loved it. Robin and I were stars for a day.
I decided I wanted to become a writer.
While studying for a bachelor’s degree in English, I tried to copy the cool, classic voices of favorite writers like Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion. I sent a few of my short stories to Vogue and Mademoiselle. All were rejected. Disappointed, I decided to focus on art and computer classes. Family life put my career on hold for a while, but when my husband had opportunity to go to Silicon Valley during the go-go 90’s, I found work as a web designer with 3Com. It was the best job I’d ever had – everyone around me was so sharp, I had to work hard just to keep up. The tech was evolving so quickly, if you blinked, you’d miss it.
There, I wrote my second book, Karoshi Dot Com, about Jerry Doyle, a Silicon Valley billionaire whose fortune was made by the video games his adopted son Taj created. When developers working on the project began dying like flies, presumably from overwork, Jerry takes the blame. Frantic about the imminent destruction of the company and their options, his employees investigate and discover that Taj is a time-traveling alien from an advanced civilization. They begin to wonder if the problem is with the game itself. Of course, there’s a twist at the end. It was fun to write a story in my own voice, trying to imagine what a super-advanced alien would think & do.
I wrote for fun, but I also tried to poke fun at ‘90’s attitudes about space travel being a waste of time. When even mildly ambitious ideas like a Moon Colony (the only thing I agreed with Newt Gingrich about) were treated like a joke, fiction seemed to be the best way to inspire people to embrace weird tech and explore.
NASA research showed that It would be a very long time before we’d achieve even level one on the Kardashev scale, a measurement of a civilization’s ability to conquer space and harness energy. But we are making great advances in "Microdimensional mastery" – understanding and manipulating small scale things like nuclear fission, nanotech and genetics.
I saw how a combination of genetic & nano technology could give us the the ability to change our appearance at will, so I gave those abilities to Taj. He could also use a sort of Star-trek-like transporter to shrink himself down to a nano-sized particle, transport himself via instant wormhole and reconstruct himself.
The transporter was my favorite under-used Star-trek tech. It could transcend the boundaries of space & time! Why were they using it as a taxi service?
I was taking a novel writing class and searching for an editor for Karoshi Dot Com when Saudi-sponsored militia men hijacked passenger planes and flew them into the world trade towers. I spent days worrying about friends and relatives in who worked in the city. Nothing ever pissed me off more that those attacks. Who the hell did these AQ jackasses think they were?
Even a cursory reading of the news showed that these jackasses had high-level protectors. Prince Bandar was such a good friend of the Bush family they called him ‘Bandar Bush’. The FBI helped Saudis with terrorist connections haul ass out of the US after the attacks. Saudi royals were paying Al Qaeda’s salaries, wealthy Saudis supported Bin Laden’s goals. I understood the government’s sleazy motives, but why did our supposedly ‘independent’ media consistently ignore these facts?
I put Karoshi Dot Com into a drawer and tried to learn more about the infrastructure that supported al Qaeda. The internet and the emerging blogosphere gave me access to previously hard-to-find sources like Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, Pakistan’s Dawn, Singapore’s Straits Times and Britain’s Guardian. I also followed foreign bloggers, like Where is Raed?
While our legacy American media directly (and uncritically) quoted politicians and foreign policy experts, bloggers who were experiencing these upheavals told their own truth about the effects of decisions made in Washington, Moscow, Tehran and Riyadh.
The more I learned about our foreign policy, the more I wondered if there really were time traveling aliens like Taj racing around to stop nukes from being launched and bioweapons from being developed. Given the quality of our representatives, it didn’t seem possible that we’d survived to this point on our own.
My Walter Mitty moment came in 2006 when I was offered a chance to travel to Beirut during Hezbollah’s attempt to take over the city via protests and ad-hoc settlements. After years of writing about terrorism here was a chance to meet it face to face. On my first full day in the Middle East, I was at a Hezbollah rally, taking pictures & making notes. Most people were happy to talk to a person who looked like they were with the Western media.
Kids asked me to take their picture. I listened to their stories and tried to understand their point of view.
One day, when I had nothing scheduled during the day, I decided to walk around Beirut, touring the nice neighborhoods and walking around the edges of the bad ones. The reality of the city was nothing like what I expected.
Spending time abroad, I saw how both sides of our media only acknowledge the facts that will please their own political party. The infrastructure that led to 9/11 was corrupt to the core, based on decades of misguided policies – but it also supported a thriving, complex and chaotic world economy. Fixing this complicated mess was a wicked problem, unsolvable. The bloggers that I travelled with were truthful, but even that couldn’t fix things when the politically powerful and misguided loyalists consistently ignored the worst actions of their party.
You can’t reason people out of a position they were never reasoned into. The only way things could change would be – time travel.
So, I turned back to fiction and research. Great advances have been made, and it’s becoming clear - it could be possible.