I wrote the villain. A podcast just confirmed the world I built wasn’t far off. A few years ago, while researching gene editing for a speculative fiction series that would become The Helix Chronicles, I came across the work of Dr. George Church. I was fascinated. Synthetic biology, DNA data storage, species revival. It all felt like the edge of something astonishing, the kind of science that makes me want to keep reading long after I have technically gathered enough information to write the chapter. But the farther I went, the more interested I became in a different question: What happens when brilliant ambition gets far enough ahead of the ethical guardrails? That question eventually helped shape the fictional world of The Helix Chronicles. A biotech cabal emerged. At its center was a billionaire visionary convinced he was saving humanity, even as he became increasingly comfortable deciding what humanity should look like. He wasn’t based on Church, or on any single real person. What interested me were the recurring ingredients around powerful technologies: enormous ambition, blurry ethical boundaries, concentrated authority, and the dangerous ease with which I know what’s best can become a governing philosophy. Then recently, I listened to Behind the Bastards’ two-part series on George Church and had one of those unsettling little moments: Oh no. I’ve seen this movie before. The podcast draws a much more critical portrait than the straightforward scientific profiles I had encountered years earlier, spending time on Church’s ambitions, public statements, associations, and the broader techno-optimist world around some of his work. I’m not treating a podcast as the final word on a complicated person or career, but hearing those pieces assembled through that particular lens was fascinating. Someone else had wandered into territory I’d been exploring through fiction and was asking some uncomfortably familiar questions about ambition, influence, and what happens when technological possibility starts making its own case for inevitability. That interested me more than any eerie feeling of having “predicted” something. Fiction writers don’t have magical forecasting powers, despite what we would very much like you to believe around book-launch time. We notice patterns. We take something happening now, turn one or two knobs farther than reality has, and ask what breaks. And when I think about the biotech antagonists who interest me most, the frightening part isn’t really the gene editing. It’s the conviction behind it. The best villains rarely believe they’re villains. Mine certainly don’t. They have evidence, intelligence, resources, and a coherent explanation for why everyone should get out of their way. They can explain the benefit. They can quantify the risk. They can probably produce an excellent slide deck. They don’t twirl mustaches. They deliver TED Talks. That’s the territory I keep coming back to in my fiction. Technology gives people new capabilities, but power determines who gets to use them, who absorbs the risk, and who gets a vote when somebody decides the future should follow a particular blueprint. Add enough money, enough institutional access, and enough certainty that this is for your own good, and science fiction does not have to travel particularly far. Which is probably why I’ll keep writing these people. The technology changes. The temptation doesn’t. I’ll see you in the bookstores, Monica Note: This post discusses themes raised by publicly available reporting and podcast commentary about real-world science. The characters and organizations in my fiction are fictional and are not portrayals of George Church or any other individual. If you’d like to hear the episodes that sent me back down this particular bioethical rabbit hole, I’ve linked the two-part Behind the Bastards series below.

The Irresistible Allure of Dangerous Innovation What I love about science fiction thrillers is that the technology is rarely the most interesting part. Give me artificial intelligence, gene editing, automation, surveillance, or some breakthrough we haven’t named yet, and I’m curious. But what keeps me reading is what happens after human beings get their hands on it. Who controls it? Who benefits? What happens when ambition moves faster than restraint, or when something designed to improve our lives quietly begins limiting our choices instead? That tension is a big part of why I write the stories I do, so when BookDNA invited me to curate a list of must-read sci-fi thrillers, I knew exactly what kind of books I wanted to choose. Not simply great thrillers. Stories that leave something behind. I grew up alongside an extraordinary acceleration in technology. As a Gen-Xer, that meant watching one breakthrough after another arrive with some version of the promise that life was about to become easier, faster, more connected, or more free. Often it did. We also learned, sometimes considerably later, that convenience has trade-offs and that the people building powerful systems do not automatically become wiser because the systems are impressive. That contradiction fascinates me. The best sci-fi thrillers let us explore it without requiring technology to be either hero or villain. They ask what people will do with new capabilities, how institutions respond when the rules lag behind reality, and what happens when someone decides the potential benefit is important enough to justify the risk. Those questions feel a little less hypothetical every year. Artificial intelligence can do things that recently belonged in science fiction. Gene editing is already treating diseases once considered untouchable. Automation and data systems increasingly influence decisions that affect our work, health, finances, and access to the world around us. None of that makes me anti-technology. Quite the opposite. I’m fascinated by it. I’m also a little suspicious of anyone who insists progress comes without a bill. That is the territory where my own fiction tends to live, and it’s what I looked for in the books I chose for BookDNA. The stories on my list explore ambition, power, science, secrecy, and the uncomfortable consequences that appear when people become very certain they know what the future should look like. The most unsettling ones are not necessarily about technology that fails. Sometimes the technology works beautifully. It’s the humans you have to worry about. If that sounds like your kind of reading, you can find my full list of sci-fi thrillers that unravel humanity’s darkest secrets on BookDNA.com. Until next time, I’ll see you in the bookstores. Monica

I Sent the One-Pager. They Sent Silence. Note to my non-author friends: This is one of those peeks behind the indie-publishing curtain. No rogue AI. No CRISPR. Just a woman trying to outsource something without accidentally creating three new jobs for herself. Like a lot of indie authors, I eventually reached the point where writing the books was only one item on an increasingly ridiculous list. There was editing, marketing, platform-building, websites, newsletters, reader communication, publishing logistics, and occasionally remembering whether I had already fed the dog. Everyone gives you the same advice when this happens: Work smarter. Outsource. Hire a VA. So when a platform I already trusted launched a virtual assistant service specifically for authors, complete with curated matches and flexible terms, I was interested. Very interested. My kingdom for a second brain. Naturally, I approached this like someone who spent a significant portion of her previous life in corporate strategy. I made a one-pager. Not a cute one with my favorite snacks and a whimsical little bio. This thing had priorities, pain points, tech stack, current workflows, desired support, and enough operational context that somebody could reasonably determine whether they wanted to work with me or flee the country. I sent it before the discovery call. The response was enthusiastic. They loved it. Their assistants would love it. Matching me should be easy. Excellent. Business-lady Monica was ready. The first candidate was lovely. Warm, professional, enthusiastic. She also wasn’t quite the match I had expected given what I’d outlined. That happens. People are not algorithms, and sometimes a résumé that looks right on paper doesn’t translate into the right working relationship. What bothered me more was the process around it. The interview was thirty minutes, with no obvious room for a second conversation, portfolio review, or much exploration beyond meet candidate, choose candidate, proceed. For something being sold as a curated match, it felt surprisingly transactional. Still, I stayed open. There was another interview scheduled. The second candidate did not show up. Her AI notetaker did. So there I sat in a Zoom room with a bot representing a person I had never met, which felt like the beginning of a very different kind of article. I waited about ten minutes and logged off. At that point I sent a professional note saying I wanted to pause the process. I wasn't angry, and I wasn't closing the door forever. The experience simply wasn't giving me confidence that this was the kind of support I needed. Then the onboarding session was canceled. And nobody replied to my email. My email, probably. That was the moment that bothered me. The candidate mismatch was understandable. A no-show is bad, but things happen. Silence after a prospective client says, essentially, "I don't think this is working," is different. There was no acknowledgment, no “Thanks for letting us know,” no attempt to understand what had gone wrong, and no simple closing of the loop. For a service built around high-touch support, the absence of that last touch was hard to miss. I also realized something slightly inconvenient: I may have gone into the process thinking I needed a VA when what I really needed was a different level of support. A VA is useful when you know what needs to be handed off and need someone capable of reliably executing it. What I was wrestling with was partly execution and partly architecture. I was still deciding which systems belonged together, what could reasonably be delegated, and where my time was actually being wasted. In other words, I had made an excellent one-pager for a job I was still defining. That didn't excuse the broken process. It did explain why even a better candidate match might not have solved the whole problem. Because I am me, I eventually emailed the CEO. Of course I did. I wasn't looking for compensation or trying to get anyone in trouble. I had used and trusted the broader platform, and this experience felt inconsistent with the brand they had built. If it were my company, I would want someone to tell me. To the CEO's credit, they responded graciously, apologized, and offered to waive the first month if I ever decided to try the service again. Then the team member I had originally been communicating with followed up too. Her note was thoughtful and professional. She acknowledged that the silence wasn't their standard, confirmed that they had reviewed my one-pager and followed up internally, and owned the part of the experience that had gone sideways. I appreciated that. Her interpretation of why I paused was slightly different from mine. She framed it largely as my realizing I needed a consultant rather than a VA. There was truth in that, but it wasn't the whole sequence. I came to that conclusion because the process exposed the gap. The mismatch, the no-show, and the missing follow-up gave me enough friction to stop and ask whether I was trying to outsource the wrong problem. That turned out to be useful. Running an author business alone can create a weird urgency around hiring help. Once the workload becomes ridiculous, outsourcing starts to sound like the obvious next stage of adulthood. Find tasks. Find person. Hand over tasks. Become mysteriously efficient. I am still waiting for this montage. What I learned instead is that delegation works much better after you understand the problem you're trying to solve. Sometimes the answer is a VA. Sometimes it's a consultant, an editor, a specialist, better automation, or simply eliminating a task that never deserved to exist in the first place. And sometimes a disappointing vendor experience is just data. This one showed me that my preparation hadn't been wasted. It helped me recognize the mismatch quickly enough to avoid spending a lot of time and money forcing something that wasn't right. It also reminded me that good customer experience isn't the absence of mistakes. Their second response mattered precisely because the first one had gone badly. Somebody listened, owned the miss, and tried to repair it. Would I try the service again someday? Maybe. I don't need the answer right now. The bigger win was realizing that “I need help” and “I know exactly what help I need” are two very different stages of building a business of one. Apparently I had reached the first one. The one-pager was just slightly ahead of me.

Sometimes the music only shows up after you’ve played all the wrong notes. Two weeks ago I published a very thoughtful post about how to end a trilogy without playing it safe. It was measured. Strategic. Wise, even. I talked about convergence, nerve, and the importance of landing the plane with the calm authority of someone guiding a jumbo jet toward a perfectly aligned runway. Two weeks later, it turns out I had solved the philosophical part of the problem. The actual writing still had opinions. One of the stranger traps of creative work is that trying harder can make the work worse. It sounds counterintuitive until you run directly into it yourself, which is apparently what I’ve been doing while writing the final book in this trilogy. Structurally, everything is where it should be. The ending is mapped. The character arcs are clear. The major turns are locked in. If you looked only at the outline, you’d think the runway was wide open. The actual writing has slowed to a crawl. This isn’t the chaos of a blank page. That would almost be easier. The page isn’t empty. It’s stubborn. I know where the scenes need to go, but somewhere along the way, finishing the trilogy stopped feeling like writing and started feeling like performance. Every sentence began auditioning for the final hardcover edition. Every scene suddenly seemed responsible for carrying the emotional weight of the ending. Instead of allowing the draft to be a draft, I started trying to make it good immediately. Which sounds admirable until you discover what a fantastic way it is to make writing almost impossible. A few nights ago, I ran across a scene from Yellowstone that has been rattling around in my head ever since. Jimmy is sent to Texas to learn how to become a real cowboy, and one of the ranchers describes the work as “art without an audience.” Now, before the internet does this for me, writing a novel is not remotely comparable to the physical risks of cowboying. My keyboard has never attempted to kill me, although Scrivener and I have had words. But art without an audience landed harder than I expected. Readers eventually see the polished narrative, the clean character arc, the ending that feels as though it could never have happened any other way. What they don’t see is the mountain of work underneath it: bad sentences, half-scenes, wrong turns, and entire detours that existed mainly to demonstrate why they were terrible ideas. There are hours spent writing something, staring at it, deleting half, and realizing the useful thing you produced wasn’t the paragraph at all. It was the knowledge that this isn’t it. That invisible work is still writing. And lately I’ve been fighting it. I’ve been trying to play only the beautiful notes, which is not how music works. You find the melody by making noise first. The awkward rhythm. The transition that almost works. The sentence that gets halfway across the page before announcing, with admirable confidence, that it has no idea where it is going. Eventually the wrong notes fall away. But if you refuse to play anything until you know it will be beautiful, you mostly end up sitting there staring at the instrument. That was uncomfortably familiar. Earlier today, while talking through the problem, something else clicked. I’ve always known that I process ideas by externalizing them, but I don’t think I understood how fundamental that is to the way I work. The next thought often doesn’t fully form until I’ve spoken or written down the one before it. That explains quite a bit in hindsight. It’s why I blog. It’s why talking through a story problem can untangle something I’ve stared at for hours. It’s why putting down an imperfect thought often reveals the better thought sitting behind it. And it explains why trying to silently engineer a perfect paragraph before writing it feels like trying to start a song in the middle. My brain doesn’t work particularly well that way. Once I saw that, the problem with Book 3 became considerably less mysterious. I’d been trying to skip the invisible part of my own process: the clumsy thought, the wrong sentence, the scene that almost works, the long wandering attempt that eventually reveals what I was trying to say. I wasn’t doing it intentionally. I was being very respectable about the whole thing. Efficient. Disciplined. Trying to make the draft look smarter than it had any business looking. Meanwhile, the actual work has always been messier. A draft is where I get to be wrong. I can wander into the wrong room, talk for too long, follow the wrong character, and discover three pages later that the thing I thought mattered doesn’t. None of that has to survive. It only has to get me closer to what does. Readers will never see most of it. They’ll see the finished book and, if I’ve done my job well, perhaps assume I knew where I was going all along. Speaking only for myself, this is a charming myth. What they’re really seeing is what survived. So if the writing of Book 3 gets a little messier from here, I’m taking that as a good sign. I’ve spent enough time trying to perform the ending while I’m still drafting it. Time to make some noise and find the melody.

I’m 42,000+ words into Book 3, which is either disciplined momentum or a very elegant way of avoiding a harder decision. The number keeps climbing. It looks good in my planner and gives me that quiet, virtuous hit of progress. See? We’re moving. We are not stalled. We are definitely not spiraling. Except I’ve started to notice that the movement feels slightly diagonal, like I’m covering ground without necessarily lining up the runway. If I’m being fair to my own brain, I know exactly why. A growing word count is wonderfully concrete. I have inconsistent access to dopamine and an increasingly low tolerance for stopping long enough to question whether all this forward motion is actually taking me where the book needs to go. More words feel like progress. Progress feels safe. A bigger word count can even look like courage. It isn’t necessarily the same thing. Books 1 and 2 rewarded expansion. I could widen the world, deepen motives, introduce threads I didn’t fully understand yet, and trust myself to braid them later. Expansion feels generous. It feels intelligent. There’s always another possibility available if the current one doesn’t quite work. Book 3 has a different job. At some point, everything I opened has to start closing. That means choosing one consequence and accepting that another possibility dies offstage. It means deciding which version of the story was actually inevitable and which ones were clever detours I enjoyed enough to keep alive longer than I should have. And yes, I’m afraid of ruining the trilogy. Not in a dramatic, torch-the-manuscript way. The fear is quieter than that and probably more dangerous because it can pass for good judgment. I can soften an ending because I don’t want to alienate readers. Protect a character who may not deserve protection. Leave three doors cracked open because committing to one feels unnecessarily harsh. That can look like generosity toward the reader when what I’m really protecting is myself. Somewhere around 35,000 words, I felt the story change its demands. It stopped asking me for more ideas and started asking me to make judgments about the ones already there. Judgment is slower. It doesn’t produce the pleasant little look how productive I am buzz that another thousand words does, so naturally I responded by writing more scenes. Very efficient. When I tried to solve the problem from above by defining the immutable truths, locking the ending, collapsing every arc, my brain wanted nothing to do with it. Those questions read like a surprise thesis due next week, not handles I could grab. That distinction turned out to matter. Abstraction freezes me. Inventory moves me. Instead of asking what absolutely had to be true at the end of the trilogy, I started asking a much less glamorous question: What have I already made true? I wrote that scene. I promised that payoff. I lit that fuse in Book 1 and never extinguished it. A character made a choice that changed what could plausibly happen next. The reader has been carrying those things forward whether I feel ready to deal with them or not. Once I started listing those commitments factually instead of trying to divine the perfect ending philosophically, the problem got smaller. I wasn’t short on possibilities. I had too many of them hanging around after the story had already begun ruling some out. That’s the part of ending a trilogy I don’t think I fully appreciated when I started one. First books reward imagination. Final books still need it, obviously, but imagination can become a hiding place if I keep using it to generate alternatives after the story is asking me to choose. At some point craft becomes less about what else I could do and more about having enough nerve to say, This is the direction. This is the cost. Optionality feels strategic. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s avoidance with better branding. Lately I’ve been thinking of Book 3 as landing a jumbo jet on a jungle runway. You can circle above the canopy for quite a while. From up there, everything remains possible. You can change direction, take another pass, admire all that lovely open space. The runway is less accommodating. Eventually, the wheels have to come down. I still outline against my planner because I like to pants within guardrails, and because cleaning up my own structural mess before my developmental editor sees it saves both time and ego. I still draft forward. I’m not suddenly going to sit motionless until I achieve perfect clarity, because that sounds suspiciously like another excellent way to avoid writing the book. I’m just watching more carefully for the point where speed starts pretending to be alignment. At 42,000-plus words, I don’t need to stop imagining. I do need to start choosing. Because the final book cannot preserve every possibility I created along the way. If I’ve done my job, it should make some of them impossible. And then I have to land the damn plane.

The Librarian, the Gremlin, and the Zoom Call “Would you be willing to share in an upcoming meeting?” Sure. Of course. Happy to. My nervous system: absolutely not. It’s amazing how quickly a group of friendly authors on a Zoom call can feel like I’ve been called to testify before Congress. No subpoenas. No hostile cross-examination. Just coffee mugs, decent lighting, and someone’s cat stepping across the keyboard like it owns equity in the platform. There’s still a part of my brain that hears share and quietly reaches for the emergency exit. This would be mildly entertaining if it weren’t rooted in something very real. Years ago, stress shut my voice down. Not in a poetic “I’ve lost my voice” way. In a literal, neurologist-involved, Botox-in-the-throat way. I was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder that made speaking increasingly difficult under stress. This is deeply inconvenient when your job involves talking to clients without sounding like you’re negotiating through a kazoo. The injections were an experience. There’s something about having a needle involved in the machinery of speech that really clarifies your life choices. Meetings became endurance events. I could feel my throat tighten in real time, like the librarian in my head had slammed the filing cabinet shut and left an overcaffeinated middle-management gremlin in shoulder pads running the switchboard. That would be my amygdala. It does not believe in calm. What made the whole thing harder was that the reaction wasn’t something I could simply reason my way out of. My body had apparently reached its own conclusions about certain situations and saw no compelling reason to consult me. I eventually left that career and spent a long time recalibrating. Therapy came later, including DBT and EMDR, and the work is ongoing because nervous systems do not operate on an iOS update schedule. You don’t wake up one morning to a cheerful notification announcing, Congratulations! Threat detection has been downgraded. Things improved. A lot. My voice stabilized. The panic softened. I moved into writing full time, a profession that generously allows me to speak in paragraphs without anyone interrupting me or asking for a Q3 breakdown. And yet a casual “Would you be willing to share?” can still light up the old circuitry like it’s been sitting in a dusty drawer next to a Lisa Frank folder and an unpaid Blockbuster late fee. I write about systems, AI, optimization, unintended consequences. I can hold entire fictional worlds in my head without blinking. Apparently the screen-share button is where my internal firmware draws the line. For a long time, I thought the goal was to eliminate that reaction entirely. I imagined becoming the breezy version of myself who says “Absolutely!” and means it all the way down to her mitochondria. I’m starting to think that was the wrong assignment. Some parts of us run older architecture. They were built for a different season, and they do not particularly care that everyone on the Zoom call is nice. They hear performance and respond with whatever kept us functioning the last time performance felt dangerous. So instead of trying to rip out the wiring, I’ve started asking a smaller question: What would doing this well look like? For me, it looks like sharing the thing and then stopping. No overexplaining. No sprinting through the answer. Definitely no opening every tab in my brain like we’re doing a live demo. Just finish the thought. If my voice wobbles, it wobbles. If my heart rate spikes, it spikes. That’s information, not prophecy. The body keeps logs. Mine remembers a time when speaking carried real stakes. It remembers tension, effort, and the experience of trying to force sound through resistance. I don’t need to pretend those records vanished just because my life changed. I also don’t have to hand them the agenda. Therapy, for me, isn’t a finish line. It’s maintenance. It’s learning how to function even when some ancient alarm system is humming in the background like a dial-up modem trying to connect. Sometimes that means doing the thing while the alarm is still making noise. So I’ll share at the next meeting. I’ll say what I came to say, and when I’m finished, I’ll let the silence sit there without trying to rescue it. If my brain wants to draft an internal memo afterward, that’s fine. I just don’t have to sign it. I’m guessing I’m not the only one running 1998-era threat-detection software in a 2026 world. If you’ve got a stern librarian and a gremlin arguing over the switchboard in your brain, welcome to the club. We meet on Zoom. Screen share optional.

Where paying the bill is harder than pulling teeth. (…and the irony is that they’ve mastered one, but not the other.) I wasn’t planning to write about this. But when the universe drops a paper bill in 2025 with no online payment option into my mailbox, it’s basically handing me a case study in how tech fails us in the funniest ways. I’d like to thank my dentist for keeping my teeth sparkly, my gums healthy, and my analog rage alive in 2025. This place is beautiful. Spa-like. Scented like eucalyptus and wealth. The staff is kind, the tech is top-tier, and the vibe is very if Apple designed your molar experience. I genuinely love going. Except for one thing. Their payment system is stuck in a time loop that smells faintly of Aqua Net and shame. “You’re all set!” (Famous last words.) Every appointment ends the same way: I’m walked out, or rather walked to the front and encouraged not to stop, with a smile and the reassurance that insurance has handled everything. “You’re all set! Have a great day!” It feels very luxe. Very VIP. Very don’t-you-dare-stand-in-line-like-a-peasant. My hygienist even books my next appointment while I’m still in the chair. It’s efficient, personal, and honestly kind of wonderful. It’s also a lie. Two weeks later, I get a bill in the mail. A physical bill. With a perforated stub and no online payment option. And get this: not even a remittance envelope. Their website? Gorgeous. Modern. No way to pay. Just vibes and a chatbot who, when asked how to remit payment, gave me an answer that felt like it had been faxed in from 1993. So I do what any rational Gen Xer does. I dig out my checkbook like it’s 1982 and I’m paying for Girl Scout cookies. I void the first one because apparently check-writing is not like riding a bike. The second looks like a hostage scribbled it under duress. Stamp. Envelope. Shame spiral. I tell myself I won’t fall for the “you’re all set” routine next time. I fall for it next time. The Return of the Paper Bill My most recent visit followed the same script, except this bill arrived without perforations. I had to cut the payment slip out with scissors. I looked like a rogue crafter, or someone assembling a ransom note in an episode of Charlie’s Angels. All that was missing was a trench coat and a Fleetwood Mac 8-track playing softly in the background. Naturally, I visited the vendor site printed on the invoice. They do have a payment portal. For medical practices. Not patients. At this point I began to wonder whether I’d stumbled into some kind of Gen X endurance test. A Boomer trap. If Alan Funt walked out with a camera crew, I was billing him. I called the office. Hold. Transfer. Hold again. Eventually I reached a recording telling me where to mail the check. So helpful, thank you, Brenda. If You Know, You Know Maybe it’s generational. Maybe it’s just the increasingly strange gap between the world we live in and the one we assume we live in. I can unlock things with my face. I can move money between accounts without touching currency. I can have a conversation with artificial intelligence before breakfast. But I cannot pay this dental bill without summoning the ghost of Office Depot Past. There’s something especially funny about encountering an analog dead end inside an otherwise beautifully modern system. The dentist has better technology inside my mouth than probably existed in entire hospitals when I was a kid, but settling the remaining balance requires paper, ink, a stamp, and knowledge of where I last put the envelopes. We’ve got smart homes, smart watches, AI in our inboxes. Apparently dental billing is where progress goes to die. So if you’ve ever stood in your kitchen holding a pair of scissors and wondering how a simple payment became a craft project, I see you. We are one awkward check away from forming a support group. Bring snacks. I’ll bring envelopes. And if you have your own analog horror story, dentist-related or otherwise, I’d genuinely love to hear it. Misery may not love company, but it definitely appreciates a few laughs.

What I learned when life handed me the key I didn’t know I was waiting for. We love a good door metaphor. Writers, therapists, self-help influencers. Open one, close one, walk through one into your destiny. At this point I’m pretty sure there’s a rule requiring at least one door whenever anyone writes about a major life change. Unfortunately, mine came with an actual one. In my twenties, I donated eggs anonymously. I was told I would never know whether children resulted from those donations, and they would never know me. That was the arrangement. I accepted it, put that part of my life where we put things we believe are finished, and moved on. Then, in 2023, my biological daughter found me. I won’t tell the whole story here, partly because it isn’t mine alone to tell and partly because I’m still figuring out what telling it responsibly even looks like. But meeting her changed far more than my understanding of biology. It made me reconsider things I had treated as settled: identity, motherhood, family, and some of the stories I had been telling myself about my own life for years. That was disorienting enough. Then something else happened. I began wondering whether I should write about it. There is a strange difference between living through something extraordinary and deciding it might become a story other people are allowed to enter. The first belongs to your life. The second requires choices. What do you tell? What stays private? Which parts belong to you, and which parts only intersect with you because someone else lived them too? As a fiction writer, I am used to owning the whole world. I can rearrange the furniture, change the timeline, give someone a better motive, or delete an inconvenient person entirely. Real people object to this kind of editing. And this story has real people everywhere. For a long time, I thought the most remarkable part was simply that my daughter and I found each other. An anonymous egg donation, a DNA test decades later, and two lives that were never expected to meet suddenly occupying the same room. That alone would have been enough. It wasn’t the whole story. Finding each other changed the way I understood the years before it. It also changed the years after. I had spent much of my life believing I knew which chapters were closed and which versions of myself were already explained. Then one message arrived and made some of those explanations feel considerably less permanent. Writers are annoying this way. Give us one destabilizing event, and eventually we start wondering what it means. Around the same time, I was writing The Helix Chronicles, books full of questions about identity, biology, technology, and what happens when human beings decide they can control outcomes that are considerably more complicated than they expected. I used to think the origin of those books was mostly intellectual curiosity. I’m not so sure anymore. The science still fascinates me. But beneath all the CRISPR, AI, biotech conspiracies, and people making catastrophically confident decisions about other people’s lives, I keep circling the same questions: How much of us is biology? How much is history? Who gets to decide what family means? What happens when something you believed was fixed turns out to be anything but? Apparently my fiction had been asking versions of those questions before I was ready to ask them about myself. I don’t know exactly what form this story will eventually take. I have notes, memories, pieces of it I understand and others I’m still reluctant to put into sentences. I also have a daughter whose life intersects with mine in ways that make patience more important than my urge to organize everything into chapters. So the door is open. There. I used it again. For now, that’s enough.

A conversation I almost said no to. Writing gives me luxuries that conversation doesn’t. I can stop. Rewrite. Delete the sentence that sounded much better in my head. I can spend ten minutes looking for the exact word and nobody has to sit across from me while I do it. Put a microphone in front of me and suddenly all of those escape hatches disappear. My brain tends to run several exits ahead of my mouth, especially when I care about getting something right. Add the fact that my voice is not always a perfectly cooperative piece of equipment, and interviews can require considerably more bandwidth than they appear to from the outside. Sometimes I sound confident while internally trying to manage seventeen things at once. A surprisingly large percentage of adulthood seems to involve hoping nobody notices the control room is on fire. So when Tim Trott invited me onto the Author to Author podcast, part of me was excited. Another part was already drafting an extremely reasonable excuse. I said yes. We talked about The Helix Chronicles, how I went from corporate strategy to writing full-time, and why I seem constitutionally incapable of leaving technologies such as gene editing and artificial intelligence alone once I start asking what humans might do with them. We got into how Broken Code became, among other things, a love letter to Memphis wrapped inside a biotech conspiracy, why I created ThoughtCraft Publishing, my cautiously enthusiastic relationship with AI, finding readers as a new author, and even the highly scientific process by which I ended up writing under the name Monica Chase. You can listen to the conversation here. What I remember most, though, is not any particular answer. It’s the experience of having to let the answers arrive without polishing them first. That is harder for me than it sounds. When I write, I can keep worrying at an idea until I understand what I mean. In conversation, clarity sometimes shows up halfway through the answer. I start in one place, follow the thought, double back when necessary, and eventually find the sentence I was looking for. For years I assumed this was something I should get better at hiding. I’m less interested in hiding it now. That doesn’t mean I suddenly enjoy feeling on the spot. I would still happily accept a transcript, three revision passes, and twenty-four hours to reconsider every adjective before participating in most conversations. But I’m learning that an imperfect answer can still be a thoughtful one. Sometimes the interesting part is hearing someone work their way toward what they actually think. One of those moments in the interview came when we talked about writing complicated science without making the reader feel as though they accidentally enrolled in a graduate seminar. I use something I think of as a layman’s echo. When a character with deep technical knowledge explains something complicated, another character may translate the implication into normal human language. Not by repeating the exposition with smaller words, but by reacting to what it actually means. If the scientist says the system can alter gene expression across a population, somebody else may essentially ask, So you can change people without asking them? Now we have a story again. That little technique has become useful to me because the science in my books matters, but understanding every mechanism usually isn’t the point. The reader needs enough information to grasp the stakes and then needs to stay emotionally inside the scene. The second character gives them somewhere to stand. Which, come to think of it, may be what I was doing in the interview too. Thinking out loud. Translating. Finding the part that mattered. I nearly said no because I knew I wouldn’t be able to control every sentence before it left my mouth. I’m glad I didn’t. Not because I conquered some great fear or emerged as Monica 2.0, now available for spontaneous public speaking engagements. Let’s remain reasonable. I’m glad because I had a good conversation. Sometimes that is enough. I’ll see you in the bookstores, Monica 🎧 Listen to the interview here: Author to Author Podcast

A pep talk for tired authors everywhere. Me, probably. There’s a version of me in 2050 who is still writing. I assume she has opinions about everything I’m doing wrong now. By then, my Roomba and Keurig will hopefully have negotiated some kind of peaceful alliance. My spine may be held together by stubbornness and a heating pad that charges via sighs. I have no idea what we’ll be writing on, although I’m choosing to believe somebody will still make a decent pen. But I like imagining that I’m still doing this. Not necessarily in some triumphant, bestselling-author montage. I mean the actual work. Sitting somewhere with a story half-built, wondering whether a character is lying to me, whether chapter fourteen needs to exist, and why something that sounded brilliant yesterday now appears to have been written by a raccoon with access to my laptop. Recently I started wondering what that version of me would think about the things that consume so much energy now: launches, reviews, rankings, unfinished drafts, whatever fresh publishing problem has appeared in my inbox before coffee. I suspect Future Monica would remember some of them. I also suspect she’d be irritated by how much time I spent treating temporary things like permanent verdicts. That’s the useful part of imagining her. She already knows whether the book I’m currently worrying over worked. She knows which scenes survived and which ones I eventually cut after defending them for three increasingly embarrassing weeks. She knows whether the idea I’m convinced might be terrible became something worth keeping. She has the advantage of knowing that most of the things currently masquerading as emergencies eventually became anecdotes. I would like this power now. Instead, present-day me gets uncertainty. That may be the hardest part of creative work. You rarely know, while you’re making something, whether the effort is leading anywhere. You can spend days solving a problem nobody will ever know existed because the finished version simply works. You can write thousands of words and delete them. You can release something you love and hear almost nothing for a while, which gives the brain ample opportunity to conduct its own deeply unscientific analysis of what the silence means. Usually something cheerful. I don’t think Future Me would tell me every word mattered. Some words absolutely did not matter. I have deleted entire civilizations from manuscripts without measurable damage to the literary ecosystem. But the work mattered. There’s a difference. The seventeen attempts at a scene may not survive, but they can be how I find the eighteenth. A book that doesn’t perform the way I hoped can still teach me something about writing the next one. Even the stretches where I feel as though I’m producing nothing useful are often doing work I can only see later. This is extremely inconvenient for someone who would prefer measurable quarterly results from her imagination. I also suspect Future Monica would have little patience for the idea that I’m supposed to know exactly where all of this is going. I barely know where the book is going some days. Expecting a complete strategic map for an entire creative life seems ambitious. The next honest sentence is usually enough. Then maybe another one. Then water, because at some point my organs will unionize. There will always be reasons to stop. Some of them will even be good ones. Life gets busy. Books get difficult. Publishing can be absurd. Inspiration, despite its excellent publicist, is unreliable. The part I increasingly trust is much less glamorous: sooner or later, I want to come back. That’s what I hope is still true in 2050. I don’t need Future Me to be famous, enlightened, or living in a suspiciously photogenic cottage surrounded by first editions. I hope she still gets excited when an idea arrives at an inconvenient time. I hope she still follows strange questions farther than she intended. I hope she occasionally looks up from something she’s writing and thinks, Well, this got weird. Most of all, I hope she’s grateful I kept making things instead of spending too much time trying to predict whether they would matter. She will probably still check the reviews. Let’s not make her completely fictional. I’ll see you in the bookstores. Still. — M

A Lightly Haunted Tale of Metadata, Magic, and Minor Panic PS: Echoes of Control is coming soon… and if you thought things got twisty in Broken Code, just wait. 😏 Recently, I updated the cover for Broken Code: The Genesis of Rebellion. Nothing dramatic. Same book, same story, just a few design tweaks, mostly to make the title stand out better at thumbnail size, which is where book covers go to die. I assumed this would be simple. Then I attempted to update my Goodreads author page and wandered into what I can only describe as Goodreads’ secret metadata catacombs, where even the smallest change appears capable of disturbing something ancient. It started innocently enough. I fixed an extra space in my author name and was very politely informed by a librarian that I should never touch that field again. Kindly. Firmly. The digital equivalent of having your hand moved away from a museum exhibit. Then I uploaded the new cover and somehow the book stopped being linked to me. This required assistance, a small quest through the edition system, and considerably more attention to “primary edition” status than I had anticipated giving anything that day. None of this is really a complaint about Goodreads. Well, maybe a tiny one. Goodreads remains one of the places readers reliably go to discover, track, review, and talk about books, and there’s something genuinely charming about that. The site can feel a little like a time capsule, complete with dusty corners and controls you approach with the caution normally reserved for unlabeled switches in old buildings, but it is also full of people who care deeply about books. That includes the volunteer Goodreads librarians, who deserve considerably more credit than they probably get. Mine fixed the problem quickly and graciously while also delivering what I interpreted as a very gentle ruler-tap across the knuckles. Message received. So consider this a thank-you note wrapped in a cautionary tale. If you’re an author updating a Goodreads listing, proceed carefully, know which edition you’re touching, and perhaps resist the urge to “clean up” anything that appears harmless unless you are emotionally prepared to learn why it was not harmless. And if you’re a reader, thank you for continuing to venture into these strange digital halls with us. Somewhere between the metadata, editions, reviews, and occasional ghost in the machinery, the books are still the point. Until next time, I’ll see you in the bookstores. Monica P.S. If you’ve read Broken Code, I’d love to hear what you thought. And if you’re curious about the rest of The Helix Chronicles, you can explore the series here.

The Muck, The Mess, and the Moment We Cut the Dead Weight A while back, I wrote about the messy middle, that creative swamp we all wade through. Not just in writing, but in life. Because success rarely comes down to chasing a spark of inspiration. It’s mostly about hanging on long after the desire to achieve the “thing” has died a slow, miserable death. There’s still some stubborn little voice saying, Keep going. I know you can’t see the light, but run your hand along the edges. You’ll find the way. Meanwhile, life has other plans: bills, work, family, laundry. And lately, life seems hell-bent on dragging me deeper. This isn’t ankle-deep muck. This is full-body, boot-sucking, straight-out-of-a-nightmare quicksand. Gen X was warned extensively about quicksand, by the way. Between cartoons, adventure movies, and public-service television, I fully expected it to become a recurring adult problem. What nobody mentioned was that the metaphorical version would be much harder to escape and considerably more interested in my calendar. I won’t sugarcoat it. I’m not always in a good place when everything piles up. Sometimes the bills, the work, the family, the laundry, the book, the business, and whatever fresh nonsense arrived before breakfast all seem to sink together. Suddenly I’m not managing a difficult stretch. I’m underneath it. One thing helps, although probably not in the inspirational-poster way: I know I’m not the only one. I don’t mean that as comfort in shared misery. I mean there is something grounding about recognizing how common this is. Everybody ends up in the muck eventually. Some people wade through it. Some are flailing. Some appear to be sitting perfectly still thinking, Welp, this is fine, while the quicksand quietly claims a sock. What we’re much less comfortable doing is admitting when we’re there. We bottle it up, slap some version of a grindset over the top, and keep moving because getting stuck feels suspiciously like failure. My instinct has always been to respond by doing more. Make a better plan. Work harder. Organize something. Fix it. Surely the answer to having too much on my shoulders is an extremely detailed system for carrying all of it more efficiently. I am beginning to suspect this is flawed. What if the better question isn’t what I need to add, but what I can remove? That changes the exercise considerably. I can look at the pointless obligation, the distraction I keep pretending is necessary, the guilt I manufactured myself, the problem I have somehow adopted even though nobody actually gave it to me. There are things that require my attention and things that simply discovered I was willing to give it. Those are not the same. I’d love to tell you I figured this out and now float effortlessly above the muck like some Zen master who unlocked the cheat codes to life. I have not. Somewhere in this metaphor I apparently acquired a boat, and I’m still bailing out water. I also occasionally discover that the thing I’ve been clutching for support is an anchor and think, Well, that explains a lot. What has changed is that I’m more willing to put things down. Lately I’ve been asking myself a few basic questions when something starts consuming more of me than it should: Is this actually my responsibility? Can I control any part of it? Is this a real problem requiring action, or has it simply become very loud? I wish I could report that this makes the muck disappear. It doesn’t. Life continues to produce deadlines, complications, difficult people, inconvenient timing, and laundry with frankly impressive consistency. But I’m getting better at recognizing when I’m spending energy fighting something I cannot fix, carrying something that was never mine, or adding another obligation because saying no makes me temporarily uncomfortable. That last one is particularly annoying. There’s also a difference between cutting away what drains you and pretending difficult things shouldn’t be difficult. I have no interest in the "just think positive and climb out of the muck "school of advice. If attitude alone fixed everything, I would not be writing this. I’d be sitting on a beach with my enlightened self, sipping something strong and possibly making terrible financial decisions. I’m still in the mess. I just don’t think every piece of it gets to come with me anymore. Some things need my attention. Some deserve my effort. Some people are worth showing up for even when it costs me something. The trick, at least for me, is becoming much more selective about the rest. So if you’re stuck, maybe the answer isn’t another system, another goal, or another demand you can pile onto yourself in the name of getting better. Maybe look around first. See what you can put down. And if you’ve already mastered this, throw the rest of us a rope. Apparently I abandoned the boat again.