FAQ

For my first novel, I wanted to explore what happens to close friends when circumstances pull them apart. How much of friendship is familiarity, how much of it is trust? I also wanted characters with flaws, characters who think they’re doing the right thing, but do things that may make us cringe.

As to why I didn’t do all that in a world filled with robots and AI, it’s because I didn’t trust myself to not get lost in the technical detail. This said, there are little nuggets on AI (sniffers) in there, but they’re incidental to the plot.

This is an interesting question in that it implies the two are fundamentally different. They’re not.

When I write a scientific proposal, I need a good hook to grab the reviewer, compelling scientific objectives, believable scientific challenges that stand in the way of those objectives, and a plan to navigate all that to a satisfying solution that will have scientific impact.

When I write science fiction, I need a good hook to grab the reader, compelling characters, believable antagonists that stand in the way of the main characters, and a plot to navigate all that to a satisfying resolution that will have emotional impact.

Obviously, there are differences in style, but scientific writing isn’t about generating reports. You need to tell a story if you want to be successful.

Yes, but decided against it.

Why? Because this is me. I talk about writing, AI, robotics, ethics, movies, and sometimes soccer and hockey. When I comment on the use of technology in sports, would that be this me or that me? When I talk about AI ethics on TV shows? Is that the writer or the AI professor talking?

Since I couldn’t answer these questions, I kept it simple.

Absolutely, and for many reasons.

The obvious one is that it gives you new windows into your story. I’ve attended two workshops, and both had a mix of established writers and new writers. Their perspectives were critical in determining what worked and what didn’t, particularly in my early chapters.

Another reason is that often times we know the problems with our plots or characters, but we make excuses for not fixing them. Hearing someone else say exactly what we know is wrong forces you to face the facts and get to work.

The more subtle one is that it shows you how different people react to the story. I had two fellow writers argue over one element of my fist book. One hadn’t liked it and wanted me to change it while the other said it was her favorite part. Just listening to that reminds you that ALL reviews are subjective.

And a final one—when you find yourself on the other side of the process—is that you learn new tricks. When you read a novel with the intention of critiquing it, you see it differently. Plots, world building, character arcs, all “pop” as though they come with comment bubbles to draw your attention to what the writer is doing.  Once you see a book that way, you become a better editor, which makes you a better writer.

Sort of.

I write “anchor” scenes that are critical to the plot and characters. They’re scattered throughout the book, so I know where the story is going and what the key revelations are. Then I plot a path from one anchor to the next.

Do I stick to the plot? Not exactly. I often find better links between my anchors than the plot I’d come up with, so I go with the flow. But the anchors are what the story is about, and they don’t change.

The Uregs stand for the Unregulated Territories. They’re the lawless parts of the world in which Purged Souls and Carved Genes take place.

There are two analogies in Purged Souls that capture how the characters view the Uregs:

Amy thinks of the four New California cities as: “four islands of sanity drifting in the sea of violence that was the Unregulated Territories.”

Eric compares New Cal to Swiss cheese, and when Amy doesn’t know what that is, he adds: “Cheese with holes and New California consists of the holes, as all my critics like to point out.”

So, the Uregs are either a sea or cheese. See, wasn’t that simple?

The Uregs are everywhere. Marin and Kern have what we’d call traditional boundaries, but even those get hazy as you move east. New Cal though doesn’t have the resources to claim or patrol the lands connecting its cities, so the four New Cal cities are surrounded by the Uregs.

Basically, the moment anyone leaves Cal City or Mountain View or Santa Cruz, they’re in the Uregs.

In today’s maps, the Uregs comprise most of San Francisco (other than the Presidio), all of East Bay, most of the Peninsula (other than Mountain View/Moffett Field),  the Morgan Hill/Gilroy/Hollister region, and pretty much the whole I-5 corridor.

Sigh.

I started writing Purged Souls in 2013.

I finished the first draft in 2015 and started querying.

I received my first full request in 2015.

I did a complete rewrite in 2016 based on an agent’s notes.

I did another complete rewrite in 2017 after a writers workshop.

I signed a contract with a publisher in 2018. Due to an unfortunate set of events we cancelled the contract and I got my rights back 3 months later; on the positive side, the book got professionally edited.

I rewrote a few key sections and got a second edit in 2019.

Purged Souls  comes out in June 2020.

So, no, I didn’t conceive, write, edit, and publish this in the last month. I took me over seven years to get to this point. This is a difficult time for the entire subgenre, and many authors are struggling with how to proceed. So, I don’t have a simple answer to whether it’s a good idea to release Purged Souls in June 2020, but I wanted to provide a bit of context on how long it took to get this story to this point.

Purged Souls is as much about a pandemic as The Martian is about dust storms.

What I mean is that the Purged Souls world suffered a pandemic, but the story is set decades later where most characters have more pressing problems than worrying about something that happened in their past.

If you mean conceptually,  you’ll have to read Purged Souls.

If you mean structurally is it even possible for the bridge to look like that, the answer is mostly yes. The towers, the main cables (coming down from the two towers), and most of the stringers (supporting the deck from the cables) are intact. So there is enough structure to support the weight of the deck (road). With some of the stiffening truss (the crisscrossing section under the roadway) missing, I wouldn’t drive heavy trucks too close to the missing roadway. But yeah, it would stand as pictured.

By the way, the artist is Colas Gauthier.

Think of a tida as an advanced smart phone. It stands for Tiered Intelligent Digital Assistant. It’s finger sized, cylindrical, and computational glass. A tida:

• fits anywhere a short pen fits
• has a huge amount of computing power
• does everything a smart phone does and then some
• displays short message on the glass, though it mostly projects images (like 2D holograms)
• accepts user input through speech or gestures

Follow up question: I’ve heard of Intelligent Digital Assistants. What’s the tiered bit about?

A tida operates on three layers (or tiers). Lowest layer is what we’d consider the operating system. the second layer is what we’d consider all the apps. the third layer is where the sniffers (low level AIs) live, and that takes us to the next question.

A sniffer is a low level AI.

In this setting, low level means they specialize on fairly narrow topics (they are not going to debate Shakespeare with you). They do searches or pick locks (which is another search), or follow simple directives on the user’s behalf.

Simply put, instead of typing something to a search engine, you give objectives to a sniffer that then sends many queries to search engines to find what you are really looking for.  A good sniffer knows all the subtle questions you didn’t ask but should have. As I state in Purged Souls, a sniffer is like a concierge: its ability is not based on what it knows but on how to get the information it doesn’t have.

The good hounds (hackers, really) know how to design and seed the sniffers so they can be successful.

Well, it’s hard enough to explain why I put what I put in there, so this is a tough one.

But there was one character I really liked, a character that worked as a foil to Mika. He’d also known Lori for a long time and understood their complex bond. I took him out and put him back in three times. In the end, I edited him out because his presence turned the middle of the book into a “buddy movie,” and also because neither Mika nor the Lori-Mika dynamic needed training wheels.

But damn, he had a cool name!

It is. This said, Purged Souls resolved the plot and mystery that it set up. But of course there was more to explore, so Carved Genes picks up some of those threads.

I structured Carved Genes to require little to no knowledge of Purged Souls.  What I mean is that it reintroduces the world and characters to some extent and focuses on new challenges. But of course having read Purged Souls will give additional insight into the mystery, the characters, and their struggles.