Writing My Memoir Forced Me to Answer a Question I Was Afraid to Ask In her early twenties, my biological daughter took a DNA test and found me. She had not been told she was donor-conceived, and once she learned the truth, she started looking for answers. I had been an anonymous egg donor under rules that were supposed to keep us strangers, so neither of us had expected this moment to exist. There are entire reunion stories contained in that sentence. The match. The first message. Photographs sent back and forth while both people stare a little too long at noses, eyes, expressions, hands. Then comes the strange experience of recognizing something familiar in a person you have never met, followed eventually by the first time you stand in the same room. Those are the parts people understand instinctively because they come with beginnings and reveals and emotional payoffs. They make excellent television. What nobody hands you is the chapter that comes next. When my daughter found me, I thought the reunion was the story. How could it not be? We had lived separate lives under an arrangement built on the assumption that those lives would remain separate. Then consumer DNA testing came along and apparently informed the universe that our paperwork was no longer binding. Suddenly, there she was. The first meeting felt every bit as extraordinary as you might imagine. There was recognition before there was history, which is a very strange way to meet someone. Pieces of her felt familiar when I had no memories to attach them to. I could see things in her that belonged to me and things that clearly did not, because of course she had already become an entire person without me. I understood that intellectually from the beginning. I’m less certain I understood what it would mean emotionally. Reunion stories tend to end at the hug. The camera pulls back, everyone cries, strangers on the internet restore their faith in humanity for approximately forty-eight hours, and we move on to the next thing. Real life is inconsiderate enough to keep going. Afterward, two people still have to figure out what they are to each other. In our case, biology came with words already attached: mother and daughter. The relationship did not. That had to be built in real time, between two adults carrying entirely separate histories. Somewhere along the way, those words stopped describing how we were related and started describing who we actually were to each other. You do not recover twenty-something years by declaring them irrelevant. You cannot bolt a new relationship onto two established lives and expect nothing else to move. There are families, loyalties, memories, losses, assumptions, and people who loved each of you during all the years the other person was absent. Everyone arrives with history. DNA may answer who? It is considerably less helpful with now what? That was the story I began collecting almost without realizing it. Notes. Memories. Things I wanted to ask. Things I wasn't ready to answer. Moments that seemed funny until I thought about them too long, and moments that seemed devastating until enough time passed for me to see something else inside them. At first, I still approached the whole thing like a writer who believed the material would eventually cooperate. Adorable. I wanted shape, cause and effect, maybe even a clean emotional arc. Childhood here, decision there, reunion here, healing somewhere around chapter twenty-two. Perhaps an epilogue in which everyone has acquired wisdom and excellent boundaries. Life has, so far, declined to participate in this structure. The more seriously I thought about telling our story, the more obvious it became that I couldn't write honestly about being found without writing about who had been found. That part was less comfortable. I had spent years developing explanations for myself that worked reasonably well. Most of us do. We tell stories about why we made certain choices, why particular relationships turned out the way they did, why some parts of us became louder while others learned to stay out of sight. Eventually those explanations stop feeling like interpretations. They become facts. Then someone new enters your life carrying your DNA but none of your carefully annotated backstory. My daughter did not know all the versions of me that other people knew. She hadn't watched me accumulate them. She met the person standing in front of her, and that difference unsettled me in ways I hadn't expected. I had always considered myself extremely self-aware, which should have been my first warning. I knew I was competent. Independent. Funny when sufficiently caffeinated. An introvert capable of performing extroversion when circumstances required it. I knew what I was good at and could produce a reasonably detailed spreadsheet on the areas I was not. What I understood less well was how much energy I had spent making myself legible to other people. Competent enough, easy enough, useful enough, normal enough. I had learned early that reading a room was valuable. Figure out what was expected, understand the rules, adjust accordingly. Do it long enough and adaptation can begin to feel remarkably similar to personality. My daughter arriving in my life did not trigger a cinematic awakening in which the clouds parted and Authentic Monica stepped forward wearing flattering natural fibers in a full Nancy Meyers aesthetic. What happened was quieter and much more inconvenient. I started noticing things I had been able to leave alone before. I noticed how quickly I wanted to get things right with her, as though motherhood were an exam I'd been allowed to enter twenty years late. I noticed the temptation to make up for time that could not actually be made up. Guilt appeared in places where logic insisted it had no business being. I wanted her to understand decisions made long before either of us knew the person she would become, and sometimes I was so busy wondering what I should be to her that I almost missed the person she was becoming to me. That is still hard to admit. It is also much closer to the story than the fairy tale ever was. There was magic in finding each other, and I won’t diminish that simply because reality became more complicated afterward. Some experiences deserve wonder. This is one of mine. Wonder, however, is a terrible long-term relationship plan. Eventually you have to answer the phone. Misunderstand each other. Learn what hurts and what doesn’t. Discover where your similarities are comforting and where they are deeply annoying. Find out which jokes land, which assumptions don't, and which subjects require considerably more grace than either person would prefer to provide on a particular Tuesday. You have to become real to each other, and that process changed the way I think about family. Biology matters. History matters. Choice matters. None tells the whole story by itself. I am her biological mother, but over time that qualifier became less important than the life we were actually building. Today I am simply her mother, and she is my daughter. That does not erase the years before we knew each other or the people and experiences that shaped her. DNA gave us the connection. We had to do the rest ourselves. That sounds beautifully reasonable written on a screen. Living it can be messier. It is also one reason I haven't rushed the larger story into a book simply because I know I want to tell it someday. The material exists. I have notes, fragments, memories, questions, and more than a few things I suspect I understand differently now than I did when I first wrote them down. But this is not solely my story, and wanting to make meaning from something does not give me ownership over everyone inside it. My daughter gets to grow into her own understanding of what happened to us. So do I. That may be the hardest adjustment for the part of me that likes answers. I can write fiction and make the pieces eventually behave. I can move a conversation, sharpen a motive, remove the character who insists on ruining Act Two. Life is much less responsive to editorial notes. There may be a memoir here someday. I believe there is. But I no longer think its most important question is how a daughter found her biological mother through DNA. That is the remarkable thing that happened. The story is everything the remarkable thing disturbed: what it means to become someone's mother after she is already grown, what we owe the families that existed before reunion rearranged the picture, how much of identity is something we discover and how much is something we built because it helped us survive the rooms we were in, and what happens when another person recognizes pieces of you that you've spent years explaining away. I don’t have tidy answers to all of that, and for once I think that’s probably a good sign. Some stories need enough distance to become stories at all. Others have to remain unfinished while the people inside them are still living them. This one deserves that patience. Nearly four years after she found me, the reunion is no longer the thing that defines us. Life happened after the hug, which was the whole point. We accumulated the ordinary things families accumulate: celebrations and hard days, long conversations, stupid jokes, worries, disagreements, milestones, and thousands of completely unremarkable moments that would make terrible viral videos and turned out to matter much more. DNA brought us to the same room. Everything after that made us mother and daughter. There is still plenty about this story I am figuring out. Who we are to each other isn’t one of those things.

A few weeks ago, a fellow author I admire wrote about needing to step away and recharge. I remember reading it and thinking, Good for them. Smart. Also, quietly: I’ve got this. You can probably see where this is going. A little while later, the same exhaustion found me. It didn’t arrive dramatically. No cinematic collapse over the keyboard. I just reached a point where everything felt heavier than it had any right to. Writing the second book. Marketing the first. Thinking about the third. Keeping up with the website, social media, email, publishing decisions, and the approximately six thousand other things involved in turning “I write books” into an actual career. Eventually my brain tapped me on the shoulder and said, Sit down. So I did. I’m not naturally good at that part. Give me a problem and I want to solve it. Give me a deadline and I’ll make a plan. Give me twelve competing priorities and apparently I’ll spend some amount of time trying to convince myself that the solution is better organization rather than fewer competing priorities. This particular stretch taught me otherwise. Creative work is strange because so much of it happens where nobody can see it. I can spend hours wrestling with a character problem and have nothing measurable to show for it. At the same time, the business surrounding the work is extremely measurable. Emails answered. Posts published. Tasks checked off. Marketing scheduled. Pages updated. Guess which side becomes very tempting when the creative side gets difficult. That’s how I can end a day exhausted and still wonder whether I accomplished anything important. I used to think the answer was mostly discipline. Protect the writing time. Show up. Push through. Those things still matter, but there’s a point where pushing through stops being admirable and starts producing increasingly expensive garbage. Sometimes I need to walk away. Not forever. Not because the work has defeated me. I may simply need enough distance for my brain to stop treating every unfinished task as an emergency. That can mean taking the afternoon off. Watching something ridiculous. Going somewhere without bringing the laptop “just in case.” Spending time with people who have absolutely no interest in my word count. Occasionally it means accepting that the brilliant solution I was trying to force at eleven o’clock at night will probably arrive faster after sleep. This should not have been revolutionary information. And yet. The timing was especially funny because I was deep into my second book when I hit this wall, while still promoting the first and already carrying pieces of book three around in my head. I had wanted exactly this. Books in motion. Readers. A series growing around me. A career that felt real. I still wanted it. I was also tired. Those two things are perfectly capable of being true at the same time. That may be the part I understand better now. We tend to romanticize creative exhaustion because it makes the work sound important. The tortured artist, the sleepless writer, the person sacrificing everything for the thing they were born to make. I have no objection to caring deeply about the work. I care enormously. I’m just less convinced that depletion is evidence of devotion. Sometimes it’s evidence that I’ve been doing too much for too long and should listen before my brain upgrades the request from sit down to something considerably less polite. I’m still learning what recharge looks like for me because I suspect it changes depending on what emptied the tank. Sometimes I need distance from the book. Sometimes working on the website or some other author-business task actually helps because it uses a different part of my brain. Sometimes I need to stop being Monica Chase, Professional Person With Goals, and spend an evening doing something completely useless. That last category is underrated. The work was still waiting when I came back. So were the deadlines, the ideas, and the messy middle of the book. The difference was that I wanted to pick them up again. That seems like a much better measure of whether the break worked.

Procrastination gets blamed on laziness a lot, but mine is usually much more industrious. I can reorganize notes, research something tangentially related to the chapter, answer email, tweak a website, decide my desk has suddenly become intolerable, and spend twenty minutes solving a problem that did not exist when I sat down. All while technically working. This is one of the stranger things about writing for a living. There is always something productive I could be doing, which means procrastination can wear a very convincing disguise. The trick is figuring out whether I’m doing useful work or simply avoiding the thing that currently feels hard. I’ve picked up a few ways to catch myself at it. When procrastination is actually a clue When I’m resisting a writing session, I ask myself a question that sounds almost too simple: What happens if I don’t do this today? Sometimes the answer is nothing dramatic. Life is busy. I’m tired. My brain has reached capacity, and forcing another thousand words out of it is unlikely to improve either the book or my personality. Other times, the question exposes the real problem. Maybe I don’t know what happens next in the story. Maybe I know a scene isn’t working and don’t want to admit I need to tear it apart. Maybe I’m avoiding a decision because whichever way I go will close off another possibility. That’s useful information because a time-management problem and a story problem are not the same thing. No productivity hack is going to fix the second one, and pretending it will usually just gives me a more organized way to avoid the manuscript. I’m also not above bribery. At one point, I lined gummy bears across my keyboard and rewarded myself as I hit small writing goals. I wish I could tell you I have evolved beyond this, but I have not. There’s a reason rewards work. Sometimes the brain needs a little help associating effort with something pleasant, especially when the larger payoff is months away and currently exists as a document nobody else has seen. The reward doesn’t have to be candy. An episode of something I’m watching, time with a book, a walk, whatever works. I’m not particularly interested in whether the system sounds sophisticated if it gets me through a stubborn chapter. For the record, “gummy bear performance incentives” looks much more respectable on a quarterly report. Make the work easier to start Writing became easier to protect when I stopped treating it as the thing I would do after everything else was finished, because everything else is never finished. I block writing time on my calendar. My family knows that a closed door and earbuds generally mean I’m unavailable unless someone is bleeding, something is on fire, or the dog has developed a new and legally complicated hobby. The calendar block doesn’t guarantee good writing. It simply gives the writing a place in the day before email, errands, marketing, and assorted digital nonsense consume it. That matters even more now that writing is also a business. I’m either working in the business, actually writing the books, or on the business, handling publishing, marketing, the website, newsletter, and everything else required to make sure readers know the books exist. Both matter, and both are perfectly capable of cannibalizing each other. If I spend an entire week designing something beautiful for the website while the manuscript remains untouched, I may have been productive. I was just productive at the wrong thing. Timers help for the same reason calendar blocks do. They make the work smaller. Twenty-five minutes of writing feels manageable even when “work on novel” feels enormous. I’ve used the Pomodoro technique, longer blocks, shorter sprints, and occasionally the highly sophisticated method of telling myself I only have to fix one paragraph. Often, once I start, momentum takes over. If it doesn’t, I still did twenty-five minutes, which is better than spending those same twenty-five minutes researching a new note-taking app I absolutely do not need. The workspace matters too, although I’m not convinced anyone needs a perfect writing cave. I care more about reducing friction: decent lighting, a comfortable chair, headphones when I need them, notes within reach, and pens I actually like using. I have certain pens reserved for writing-related notes, which serves no rational purpose whatsoever beyond making my brain happy, so obviously I’m keeping them. The more I write, the less interested I become in finding the perfect productivity system. I’m much more interested in understanding my own weird machinery. I know that difficult story decisions can suddenly make administrative work look fascinating. Deadlines help me. Starting small helps me. Timers work. Rewards work. Sometimes taking the afternoon off is smarter than forcing myself through a problem I haven’t solved yet. And sometimes I just need to stop negotiating with myself and write the damn scene. That may be the least sophisticated productivity advice I have. It is also annoyingly effective. Some days the words come easily. Other days I have to lure them out with a timer, a closed door, and confectionery incentives. Either way, the work gets done.

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to edit human embryos that resulted in the birth of genetically altered children. The changes were intended to reduce their susceptibility to HIV, but they also crossed a line the scientific community had spent years debating without expecting anyone to cross quite so soon: changes to the human germline, meaning alterations that could potentially be passed to future generations. The backlash was immediate. He was later convicted in China of illegal medical practice and sentenced to three years in prison. [SOURCE] I wrote about him because his story landed squarely in territory that fascinates me as both a writer and someone who genuinely loves emerging technology. CRISPR has enormous therapeutic potential. The uncomfortable part begins when technical capability starts being mistaken for permission. And He Jiankui has not disappeared from that conversation. Since his release from prison in 2022, he has been trying to rebuild a scientific career around gene editing. His exact progress has sometimes been difficult for outside reporters to verify, but by early 2026 he was publicly describing plans to use embryo editing to introduce genetic variants intended to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview with Wired, he said his current work remained at the cell-line stage but made no secret of his ambition to move eventually toward edited embryos and human trials if he can find a jurisdiction willing to approve them. That makes his story more interesting to me now than it was when I first wrote this post, because the central question was never whether He Jiankui had learned his lesson. It was whether we have learned anything from He Jiankui. The Line He Crossed There is an important distinction in gene editing that tends to get flattened whenever CRISPR enters the popular conversation. Editing cells in an existing patient to treat disease is one thing. Editing an embryo in a way that may alter the genetic inheritance of a future person is another. The second decision reaches beyond the patient in front of you. It potentially reaches into generations of people who had no opportunity to consent to the experiment. That was part of what made He’s 2018 work so explosive. The concern was not simply that somebody had used CRISPR. Researchers were already investigating gene editing for medical purposes. He had moved experimental germline editing into human reproduction before the scientific and ethical questions surrounding its safety and use had been remotely settled. The technology makes the story possible, but the more unsettling part is human. Someone had to decide the existing safeguards were too cautious. Someone had to believe the potential benefit justified moving ahead. Someone had to decide that being first mattered enough to accept risks that would be carried, at least initially, by children who could not choose them. That pattern extends well beyond genetics. Treatment, Prevention, Enhancement CRISPR becomes particularly difficult to talk about because many of its possibilities are genuinely wonderful. If we can safely correct a mutation that causes a devastating disease, the moral case for doing so can seem fairly straightforward. Preventing suffering is one of the things medicine is supposed to do. But the edges get blurry quickly. He now describes his proposed Alzheimer’s work as disease prevention rather than human enhancement. That distinction matters, but it does not settle the ethical problem. An embryo cannot consent. The effects of a heritable edit can extend beyond the person initially treated. Safety decisions become inseparable from questions about who gets to define acceptable risk and which interventions justify making permanent changes to a future person’s genome. And eventually we run into a problem humans are very good at creating: definitions move. What begins as treatment can become prevention. Prevention can expand into risk reduction. Then someone has to decide which risks matter enough to edit, which traits count as disease, and where reducing vulnerability ends and improving the person begins. There probably won't be a giant flashing sign announcing that we have crossed from one category into another. There will be meetings. Why This Keeps Showing Up in My Fiction This is exactly the kind of territory that pulled CRISPR into The Helix Chronicles. In Broken Code, the danger is not that gene editing exists. The danger comes from people who become convinced that their ability to alter human biology gives them the right to decide what improvement should look like. That distinction matters to me because I am not particularly interested in stories where technology itself is evil. Technology does what people design, permit, fund, normalize, and eventually find ways to justify. Harper Brasfield spends much of the series fighting people who believe they are acting for a larger good. Some of them have compelling arguments. That's what makes them dangerous. Nobody needs much courage to resist a person twirling a mustache and announcing plans to destroy humanity. The harder problem is the person offering something genuinely beneficial and asking you to ignore what had to happen behind the curtain to make it possible. He Jiankui’s story is obviously not my fictional conspiracy, and real children are involved in what he did. I don't use that casually as a plot comparison. What his case gives us is something more useful: a real example of how quickly the debate changes once someone stops asking hypothetically. Before 2018, the world could discuss the ethics of genetically editing future generations as something we might eventually have to confront. Then someone did it. The Question That Remains I am still enormously optimistic about gene editing. CRISPR and the technologies developing around it may ultimately spare people from diseases that have devastated families for generations. I want that future. I also want the scientists building it to be challenged by other scientists. I want regulators asking irritating questions. I want ethicists in the room. I want people willing to slow down a breakthrough long enough to ask who carries the consequences if the person pushing hardest happens to be wrong. He Jiankui’s return to this field doesn't prove that gene editing is too dangerous to pursue. If anything, I think it demonstrates why the argument cannot be reduced to being either “for” or “against” CRISPR. The technology is going to keep getting better. Our ability to use it will expand. People with enough money, ambition, conviction, or desperation will keep testing the boundaries of what is allowed. So the question that interested me when I first wrote this still does. Who gets to decide when we are ready? And perhaps more importantly, what happens when someone decides they don't need to ask? Updated August 2026 to reflect subsequent developments.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get things right before allowing them to exist. Writing has been particularly effective at exposing this habit because there is always something else you could fix. Another sentence to tighten. Another chapter to reconsider. Another round of research that will surely resolve whatever uncertainty is currently bothering you. Eventually, perfectionism stops looking like high standards and starts looking suspiciously like procrastination with better branding. There’s an uncomfortable argument for quantity over quality, at least while we’re learning something. The phrase sounds wrong because nobody wants to produce mediocre work on purpose. But the point isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to accept that doing something repeatedly is often how you develop the ability to meet them. You write the awkward pages before you write the good ones. You play scales badly before your fingers know where to go. You take photographs that are technically fine and utterly boring before you begin to understand what makes an image work. Improvement needs material to work with, and perfectionism has a nasty habit of starving it. I’m hardly the first person to notice this. Crispin Thurlow has made an argument for embracing mediocrity as part of learning, and Mark Manson has written from a different angle about loosening our grip on outcomes. Both get at something I’ve had to learn the annoying way: improvement requires enough attempts to actually improve from. My husband learned a particularly brutal version of this in college when he was studying architecture. One assignment required sixteen drawings. He produced fifteen beautiful ones. Fifteen. He had spent so much time making each drawing excellent that he didn’t finish the assignment. The quality of what he completed didn’t erase the missing sixteenth drawing, and his grade reflected it. The experience stuck with him enough that he eventually changed majors, which sent his career in an entirely different direction. I’ve thought about that story often because my instinctive sympathy has always been with the fifteen drawings. But look how good they are. The assignment, however, was sixteen. There’s something useful in that distinction. Quality matters, but completion is also a skill. So is working within constraints. So is deciding when something has received enough of your time and letting it go. Creative people can become especially good at pretending those decisions are beneath the nobler pursuit of making great work. I can always justify another pass because I care about quality. At some point, though, “I’m still improving it” can mean “I’m afraid to find out what happens when other people see it.” Social media hasn’t exactly helped. We spend a lot of time looking at finished products with no access to the pile of mediocre attempts underneath them. We see the published novel, the successful business, the beautiful painting, the effortless performance. We usually don’t see version three, the abandoned idea, the embarrassing first draft, the project that consumed six months and quietly died in a folder. Then we compare someone else’s finished work to our own construction site and wonder why we feel behind. I’m increasingly convinced that mastery looks much less glamorous from the inside. It’s repetition. Experimentation. Getting things wrong often enough that you start recognizing why they’re wrong. It’s accumulating judgment, which is hard to do if you refuse to produce anything until you already possess it. That doesn’t mean I’ve become a champion of sloppy work. I still care enormously about getting things right. If anything, becoming a better writer has made me more aware of how much craft matters. What has changed is my willingness to let imperfect work be part of getting there. A bad page can be revised. A bad idea can teach you why it failed. A finished project gives you information that the perfect project living indefinitely in your head never will. Sometimes you need another pass. Sometimes you need to send the sixteenth drawing. Knowing which moment you’re in may be the real skill.

The Titan submersible disaster bothered me for reasons that went beyond the horror of what happened. I had been following the story when I came across a long Wired piece about OceanGate, its CEO Stockton Rush, and the warnings that preceded the implosion. I finished it with that uncomfortable feeling you get when real life starts resembling something you would normally dismiss as a little too obvious in fiction. Not because the circumstances were identical to anything in my books. They weren’t. What caught me was the pattern underneath them. A smart, ambitious person believes deeply in what he is building. Conventional thinking becomes something to challenge. People raising concerns begin to look overly cautious, resistant to innovation, or unable to see the larger vision. Success reinforces confidence. Confidence becomes certainty. And eventually the question stops being What if they’re right? That progression fascinates me because some of our biggest technological failures don’t begin with people trying to cause harm. They begin with people who are convinced they understand the risk better than everyone else. That is much harder to write about, and much more interesting. I’m an early adopter by nature. New technology generally makes me want to get closer, not run in the opposite direction. I want to know what it does, what problem it solves, how far it can go, and what somebody will inevitably try to make it do next. But enthusiasm for innovation and skepticism about the people controlling it can coexist quite comfortably. In fact, I think they should. That tension sits at the heart of The Helix Chronicles. The series deals with genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, institutional power, and people making decisions that affect millions of lives. But the technology itself is rarely the villain. People are. Or, more accurately, people can become dangerous when intelligence, resources, authority, and an unshakable belief in their own judgment all end up in the same room. The antagonists in my books don’t wake up thinking, Today seems like an excellent day for evil. They have reasons. Some believe humanity needs saving from itself. Some believe progress moves too slowly when left to governments, regulators, or public consensus. Some look at suffering and see problems that technology could solve if only somebody had the courage to ignore the usual constraints. From inside their own heads, quite a lot of it makes sense. That’s important to me. A villain who knows he’s the villain is easy. Someone who genuinely believes the ends justify what he’s doing is considerably more unsettling, particularly when parts of his argument are persuasive. Thomas Baxter, one of the central figures in Broken Code, operates in that territory. He has enormous resources, extraordinary scientific ambition, and very little patience for anyone who might slow him down. His belief that he can improve humanity makes him more dangerous, not less, because he can interpret resistance as evidence that other people simply lack his vision. Harper Brasfield comes at the problem from the opposite direction. She’s an attorney, skeptical of concentrated power and deeply suspicious of systems that demand trust without transparency. She also has her own blind spots, which means I don't let her occupy some morally pristine mountaintop while everybody else makes terrible decisions below. That would be considerably less fun. The Titan story stayed with me because technological history is full of tension between the person saying we can do this and the person asking should we do it this way? We need both. Innovation often requires somebody willing to challenge assumptions. Plenty of advances we now take for granted happened because someone refused to accept that the existing way was the only way. But skepticism is not automatically cowardice, and safety is not the enemy of progress. Sometimes the annoying person in the room asking the same question for the third time is performing a very useful service. That becomes even more important as the technologies we're developing grow more powerful. Gene editing can prevent disease and potentially alter traits passed to future generations. Artificial intelligence can accelerate discovery while placing more consequential decisions inside systems most people do not fully understand. Neural interfaces, synthetic biology, autonomous technologies and tools we haven't invented yet will keep expanding what humans are capable of doing. Our technical ability is advancing quickly. Human nature seems to be keeping its traditional release schedule. We still have ego, ambition, fear, greed, loyalty, competition, tribalism, and the remarkable ability to convince ourselves that the thing we desperately want is also objectively the correct thing to do. That's why I keep returning to these subjects in fiction. I'm less interested in predicting which technology will change the world than in what happens when somebody gains the power to change it and becomes absolutely certain they should. The disaster involving Titan was real, with real people and devastating consequences. I don't view it as a convenient metaphor for a novel, and I don't want to flatten it into one. But it did reinforce a question that runs through The Helix Chronicles: What happens when the person pushing the boundary is also the person deciding where the boundary should be? That question isn't going away. If these are the kinds of ideas that keep you up at night too, you'll find plenty of them around here. I write about the real science and technology behind the fiction, the people shaping it, and the uncomfortable territory between what becomes possible and what becomes wise. And if you'd like to get closer to the books themselves, you can join my launch team to help support upcoming releases, or subscribe to The Chase Signal for book news, behind-the-scenes updates, and whatever technological rabbit hole I've managed to fall into lately. I have a feeling we're going to have plenty to talk about.

I spend a lot of time thinking about technology. This is not exactly a hardship. I’m the person who wants to know what the new thing does, how it works, who thought it was a good idea, and approximately how long it will take before somebody uses it in a way nobody intended. I’m fascinated by what humans build. I’m even more fascinated by what happens to humans after we build it. That tension sits underneath most of my fiction. Genetic engineering can cure disease and force us into uncomfortable questions about who gets to define “better.” Artificial intelligence can solve problems at a scale we couldn’t touch before and make us wonder which decisions we’re comfortable handing over. Technology can connect people across the world while allowing two people sitting three feet apart to ignore each other completely. Very little of it is simply good or bad, which is probably why I keep coming back to it. The interesting part is what happens when extraordinary capability collides with very ordinary human nature. We still love badly. Misunderstand each other. Protect our egos. Chase status. Make decisions out of fear. Convince ourselves that our intentions should matter more than the consequences. Give a human being a revolutionary technology and they do not suddenly stop being a human being. For a thriller writer, this is excellent news. The technology gives me the situation. The people give me the story. That distinction matters to me because I never want the science in my books to exist simply so I can show off the research. I love the research. I can happily disappear into a biotech rabbit hole and emerge several hours later with fourteen browser tabs, three new questions, and no recollection of what I originally sat down to look up. But eventually I have to ask the only question that matters to the novel: What does this do to the people involved? What happens when someone has access to a technology that could save a person they love but carries consequences they cannot predict? What happens when a system designed to protect people starts making decisions about them instead? What does power do to someone who sincerely believes they’re using it for the greater good? Those questions interest me far more than gadgets for their own sake. They also explain why connection matters so much in my work. My characters may be dealing with genetic manipulation, artificial intelligence, corporate conspiracies, or institutions with far too much authority, but their problems are usually painfully familiar underneath all of that. Trust. Family. Loyalty. Ambition. Fear. The need to be understood. The uncomfortable realization that sometimes the person standing in your way is you. That’s the part I hope readers recognize. Not necessarily themselves in one particular character, but something they know. A bad decision made for a good reason. A relationship complicated by old history. A moment when two people who care about each other manage to communicate with all the efficiency of rival governments. Technology changes quickly. People are remarkably consistent. That combination gives me a lot to write about. The actual writing process is considerably less philosophical. It involves notes everywhere, abandoned ideas, research detours, occasional conversations with myself, and a great deal of staring at sentences that seemed much better yesterday. Over time, I’ve learned not to romanticize that part either. I keep ideas where I can grab them because inspiration has no respect for my schedule. I use technology when it makes the work easier. I write in places that are less than ideal because waiting for the perfect conditions is a terrific way to accomplish nothing. And when I’m deep enough into a project that the rest of the world is becoming intrusive, I’ll carve out longer stretches of uninterrupted time. None of these habits is particularly revolutionary. That’s probably why they work. The bigger lesson has been letting go of the idea that there’s a correct way to be a writer. I can learn from other people without copying their routines, use tools without allowing the tools to become the work, and take the craft seriously without requiring every writing session to feel profound. Sometimes it’s wonderful. Sometimes it’s work. Usually it’s both. And somewhere in all of that mess, eventually, there’s a story. If the kinds of questions I write about sound like your sort of thing, I hope you’ll stick around. This blog is where I follow some of those ideas beyond the books, especially the real science and technology that makes me wonder what we’re building and whether we’ve thought through what happens next. You can also join my launch team if you’d like to be part of supporting upcoming releases. Launch-team readers help give new books an early push and are some of the first people I turn to when it’s time to send a new story out into the world. Or subscribe to The Chase Signal for book news, behind-the-scenes updates, and whatever rabbit hole has managed to get my attention lately. I’ll keep asking uncomfortable questions about technology. You bring the humans.

There’s an old house near where I live, built sometime in the 1800s. It’s charming and a little wonky, the kind of place that looks increasingly improbable as everything around it gets newer, busier, and louder. Once, it sat among open farmland. Then came a small town. Now it occupies the corner of a busy suburban intersection, surrounded by traffic, power lines, and all the other evidence that progress rarely asks whether the scenery is ready. I pass it often, and I’ve always wondered about the people who lived there. What would they make of everything that eventually grew up around their home? Cars streaming past. Utility lines overhead. Neighborhoods where fields used to be. For years, mature trees partially sheltered the house from all of it. Unfortunately, the power lines running through those trees meant they had been subjected to some truly unfortunate trimming. They looked like the botanical equivalent of a haircut administered by an irritated mother ten minutes before school picture day. Recently, the property sold, and crews began clearing the land. The fence came down. Then the trees started disappearing. Huge limbs became awkward trunks, then stumps, then small remnants barely visible above the ground. Eventually, even those were gone. Around the same time, I happened to be listening to an episode of Michelle Chalfant’s The Adult Chair podcast about emotional triggers and the beliefs we carry with us. I’m fairly new to her work, but something about that conversation, combined with watching those trees disappear a little at a time, stayed with me. We all have things that get under our skin faster than they probably should. A comment. A situation. A particular kind of criticism or rejection. Sometimes we know exactly why. Other times the reaction arrives first and the explanation has apparently missed its flight. I’ve become more interested in that gap as I’ve gotten older. Not in diagnosing every uncomfortable emotion or turning ordinary human behavior into a pathology, but in asking why some things have so much power over us. The tree stumps kept coming to mind. Even after most of the tree was gone, the evidence remained. You could avoid the stump, walk around it, mow around it, complain about it, or simply get used to the fact that it occupied that particular piece of ground. Removing what was visible didn’t necessarily mean the whole thing had disappeared. Human beings are considerably more complicated than landscaping, obviously, but I liked the image. Sometimes the things we react to are connected to something older than the moment in front of us. Maybe we understand the connection. Maybe we don’t. Either way, noticing it can change what we do next. What struck me most about the old house was what happened after the last remnants were cleared. I could see the house differently. Not necessarily better. I actually miss some of those trees. But without them, details I’d passed hundreds of times suddenly became obvious. The proportions of the house. The porch. The way it sat on the property. Things that had always been there but had been partially obscured. That thought followed me back to my writing. I was finishing my debut novel at the time, which meant I was also approaching the deeply uncomfortable part where the characters I had lived with privately would soon belong, at least partly, to readers. Harper Brasfield, my protagonist, is bold, stubborn, capable, and very good at fighting whatever is directly in front of her. She is considerably less skilled at recognizing the old things she carries into those fights. That matters. Some of her worst decisions aren’t made because she lacks intelligence or courage. They happen because she doesn’t always understand why certain situations hit her as hard as they do. Like most of us, she can see everyone else’s blind spots with impressive clarity while remaining somewhat less enthusiastic about examining her own. I suspect that’s one reason I like writing flawed characters. Perfect people aren’t very interesting, and I’m not sure I’d trust one anyway. What interests me is what happens when someone who believes they understand themselves is forced to reconsider. When the thing they’ve stepped around for years suddenly blocks the path. When they realize that survival sometimes requires more than defeating whatever is outside them. The old house is still there. It looks more exposed now, sitting beside that busy intersection with nothing shielding it from the modern world that grew up around it. Maybe that’s what made the image stick. Clearing something away doesn’t erase what came before. The history remains. But sometimes removing what no longer belongs there lets you see what was underneath all along. And sometimes that’s where the interesting part of the story begins. Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

A while back, a freelance opportunity landed in my lap. I was excited about it right up until the first few minutes of the call, when I became increasingly convinced that either I had misunderstood the project or the person on the other end had misunderstood me. This did not sound like a fit at all. As they kept talking, I could feel myself getting irritated. Had they looked at my website? Did they know what I actually did? I had spent an absurd amount of time making all of that clear. Surely the evidence was sitting right there on the internet, beautifully organized and probably revised seventeen times. Then came the less flattering realization: I was annoyed because this person had failed to correctly interpret me, while they were calling because they had a problem of their own. Well, that's inconvenient. They weren't studying my website in hopes of achieving a deeper understanding of Monica Chase. They were trying to figure out whether I could help them with something. Their attention was exactly where you would expect it to be: on the problem that had caused them to pick up the phone. I had somehow decided they should first climb into my world, understand my skills, appreciate how everything connected, and then translate all of that back into their needs. In other words, I wanted them to do my part of the conversation too. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. I've always been fascinated by the machinery of personality. I've taken the assessments, read the books, learned the acronyms and dutifully discovered, over and over, that I remain essentially the same person. Apparently the next quiz is not going to reveal that I've secretly been an easygoing improvisational extrovert all along. There is value in understanding how we operate. I like knowing what I'm good at, where my blind spots tend to be, what motivates me, and why certain situations drain me faster than others. But all of that self-knowledge can become surprisingly self-centered if I'm not careful. Knowing myself better does not automatically make me better at understanding someone else. That phone call was a good reminder. Instead of mentally building a case for why the other person had assessed me incorrectly, I started listening for what they were actually trying to solve. What were they worried about? Where were they stuck? What did they need from whoever took this on? The conversation changed almost immediately. Not because I suddenly became more qualified. Not because they finally studied my résumé properly. We simply stopped talking past each other. It reminded me of something I'd taken from Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, particularly the idea of tactical empathy. The phrase sounds slightly sinister until you understand what it means: make the effort to understand the other person's position well enough that they feel understood. You're not agreeing with everything they say or manipulating them into submission. You're demonstrating that you've actually heard them. Simple concept. Much harder in practice, especially when your internal narrator is busy yelling, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT. Writers run into a version of this constantly. We know what we meant. We know why a character made a particular choice, what a paragraph is supposed to convey, why a story begins where it does. We've lived with the thing for months, sometimes years. Then a reader, editor, or beta reader comes along and interprets it differently. The first instinct can be to explain. No, see, what I was trying to do was... Which may be useful during a conversation, but it doesn't change what was actually on the page. If several people miss something I thought was obvious, eventually I have to consider the possibility that it was obvious only to the person who already knew it. Annoying, but useful. I've started carrying that lesson into more than writing. When a conversation isn't going the way I expected, I try to notice when I'm spending more energy defending how I should be understood than figuring out what the other person is actually saying. Sometimes I've been unclear. Sometimes they're coming at the problem from a completely different angle. Sometimes we simply aren't a fit, and no amount of empathy or communication wizardry is going to change that. That's okay too. The goal isn't to become so skilled at understanding other people that nobody ever misunderstands you again. That seems both exhausting and wildly unrealistic. For me, the useful question is much smaller: Am I asking this person to understand me before I've made any real effort to understand them? That one has saved me more than once. Including, as it turns out, from an extremely awkward freelance call. Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

Being a work in progress is terrifying I occasionally get anxious. Shocking revelation, I know. I’m also an overthinker and an over-preparer, which is a terrific combination if you’re planning an international trip or trying to survive a corporate reorganization. It gets considerably less useful when you’re doing something creative and there is no correct answer. And lately, I’ve been tripping over my own ambitions. Writing is something I wanted for years. I’m finally at a point in my life where I can give it real time and attention, which should theoretically have me wandering around in a state of permanent gratitude. Instead, my brain occasionally responds with: Excellent. Now don’t screw it up. Very helpful. There’s a strange thing that happens when you finally get something you’ve wanted for a long time. Wanting it is easy. You imagine the freedom, the possibility, the version of yourself who gets to wake up and pursue the thing that matters. Then you actually get it. And suddenly there’s no boss setting the deadline. No annual review. No corporate machinery telling you whether you’re on track. Nobody is going to appear at my desk and say, “Monica, I noticed you spent three hours researching something that ultimately produced four usable sentences.” I am the person in charge. This was, to be clear, the entire point. It is also mildly terrifying. Who makes sure I’m spending my time on the right things? How do I know when a story needs more work versus when I’m simply afraid to let it go? What if I take the wrong creative path? What if I invest months in something that doesn’t work? Welcome to entrepreneurship, apparently. I spent a lot of years in environments where mistakes could be expensive in ways that had very little to do with the mistake itself. Corporate life can teach you some useful things. It can also teach you to anticipate politics, protect yourself from embarrassment, and think three moves ahead because somebody else probably is. Those habits don’t disappear just because your commute now ends at your own desk. For a while, I treated that anxiety as evidence that something was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t prepared enough. Maybe I needed a better plan. Another system. More research. More certainty. You can probably see where an over-preparer goes with this. Eventually I realized I was trying to obtain something creativity does not offer: a guarantee. There is no quarterly forecast for whether a chapter works. No spreadsheet that can tell me whether readers will care about a character. No amount of preparation eliminates the possibility that I’ll make the wrong call. Some days, I still hate that. But I’m beginning to understand that uncertainty isn’t necessarily a warning sign. Sometimes it’s simply what freedom feels like when you’re accustomed to structure. That distinction has helped. There are things from our past that deserve real attention and, sometimes, professional help. There are also ordinary fears that show up because we’re doing something new, taking a risk, or caring very much about the outcome. I don’t need to turn every nervous thought into a referendum on whether I’m cut out for this. Sometimes I need sleep. Sometimes I need perspective. Sometimes I need to get away from the computer and remember that a bad writing day has never actually resulted in civilization collapsing. And sometimes I need to admit that I’m scared and keep going anyway. That may be the biggest adjustment of all. For years, success often meant knowing the expectations and meeting them. Writing doesn’t work that way. I wanted uncharted territory. I wanted the freedom to decide where I was going. Apparently, nobody mentioned that uncharted territory comes without road signs. I’m learning to live with that. Deep breaths. Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Shaping Tomorrow, One Innovation at a Time Every so often, I’ll come across some piece of technology we now take for granted and discover DARPA somewhere in its family tree. The early internet is the famous example. DARPA also helped drive the development of smaller GPS receivers, autonomous vehicles, and early brain-computer interface research. Much of that work began with national defense in mind and eventually reached far beyond it. Which makes me intensely curious about what they’re working on before the rest of us realize we need it. A few years ago, I came across a fascinating Gizmodo interview with then-DARPA director Stefanie Tompkins about the agency’s approach to innovation. What stuck with me wasn’t one particular technology. It was how comfortable DARPA seems to be with attempting things that might fail spectacularly. That’s essentially the job. DARPA goes after problems where success is uncertain but potentially transformative. Its history includes projects that helped lay the groundwork for the internet and accelerated autonomous vehicle development, along with plenty of ideas most of us will never hear about because they didn’t work. I love that. I would also be lying if I said it didn’t make the speculative-fiction part of my brain start pacing around the room. Because DARPA’s job isn’t to invent cool things for consumers. It exists to develop breakthrough technologies for national security. Sometimes those breakthroughs eventually make civilian life better. Sometimes the same capability can be useful, unsettling, or both depending on who controls it and how it is used. That’s where the interview got especially interesting to me. Tompkins acknowledged that there is no way to anticipate every consequence of a new technology. She described DARPA bringing in ethicists, legal experts, anthropologists, philosophers, and even science fiction writers to think through some of those unknowns. Then she said something I may like even more than the technology itself: “We want to lose a little sleep thinking about the consequences.” Yes. Please lose a little sleep. The history of innovation is full of things created for one purpose that eventually changed society in ways their original developers could not have fully predicted. ARPANET grew into the internet. DARPA’s autonomous vehicle competitions helped accelerate technology that is now being developed for civilian roads. Work once confined to laboratories and defense programs can eventually become something millions of people use without giving much thought to where it began. That unpredictability is part of what makes emerging technology so exciting. It’s also why “can we build it?” is rarely the last interesting question. What happens when it leaves the lab? Who gets access? Who controls it? What other uses become possible once the technology exists? And how much responsibility belongs to the people who create something when they cannot possibly know every way someone else will eventually use it? Those questions turn up constantly in my fiction because I’m fascinated by technological ambition without being particularly inclined to trust ambition on its own. I don’t want scientists and engineers to stop attempting impossible things. Quite the opposite. I want the impossible things. I just appreciate knowing somebody in the room is losing a little sleep. You can read the full Gizmodo interview here. Until next time, I’ll see you in the bookstores. Monica

Scientists are using CRISPR to cut methane emissions in cows—innovation or risky DNA experiment? Cows have a climate problem, although in fairness to the cows, they are not entirely responsible for it. A lot of the methane associated with cattle comes from microbes living inside their digestive systems. Those microbes help cows turn grass and other plant material into energy, which is quite useful if you are a cow. The unfortunate byproduct is methane, released mostly through belching. Multiply that by roughly a billion and a half cattle around the world and suddenly the burps become everybody’s problem. Scientists have been trying to reduce those emissions for years using feed additives, breeding, and other approaches. Then I came across a Washington Post article about a team exploring a considerably stranger possibility: change the microbes themselves. Using CRISPR. Inside cows. Obviously I kept reading. The researchers aren’t trying to genetically redesign the animal. The target is its microbiome, the huge community of organisms already living inside it. The long-term idea is that if scientists can establish a lower-methane microbial community early in a calf’s life, perhaps through some kind of oral treatment, the effect might last much longer than a feed additive that has to be continually supplied. That could be particularly useful for cattle grazing across large areas, where slipping something special into breakfast every morning is not exactly practical. When I first read about the project, much of the work involved figuring out which microbes were doing what and which ones might be useful targets. Since then, researchers have made more progress understanding the relationships inside that ecosystem and what might allow methane production to drop without simply creating another biological problem somewhere else. And therein lies the fun. A microbiome is not a row of tiny switches. It is an ecosystem full of organisms that have been interacting with each other and their host for a very long time. Changing one part may affect another in ways that aren't immediately obvious. This doesn't make me think, Stop immediately. It makes me think, Okay, what happens next? That distinction probably explains why I find technologies like CRISPR so interesting in the first place. One of the scientists involved in the broader effort is Brad Ringeisen, executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute and a former DARPA biotechnology program manager. In the original reporting, he talked about bringing a “DARPA mentality” to the challenge: don't solve the problem for a handful of animals under perfect conditions. Think about whether you can build something that might eventually work at enormous scale. I love that mentality. It also makes the author in me slightly nervous, which is generally a good sign. There’s an appealing logic here. If you can alter the microbial process responsible for a significant amount of methane and make the change durable, you may have a climate tool that doesn't depend on every farmer everywhere adopting the same feeding regimen forever. At the same time, biology has spent several billion years developing an impressive resistance to our desire for simple solutions. That’s the piece of this story I keep coming back to. Not whether CRISPR is good or bad, or whether scientists should leave nature alone. We have been changing biological systems for as long as we've practiced agriculture. The scale and precision are changing. And so are the things we can plausibly attempt. Most conversations about CRISPR eventually end up with humans: inherited diseases, gene therapies, embryo editing, designer babies. Understandably. The ethical stakes are enormous and personal. But cow-gut microbes are a useful reminder that gene editing could shape the future in much less obvious ways. We may end up altering microbial communities in animals, crops, soil, or other environments because those microscopic systems influence much larger problems. Which means the question isn't always going to be, Should we rewrite DNA? Sometimes it will be: How much of this system do we actually understand before we start rearranging it? I’m excited by the possibility that something as strange as engineering a cow’s microbiome could become a useful climate tool. I’m also perfectly comfortable admitting that “this might work” and “we understand everything that happens after it works” are very different statements. Somewhere between those two statements is usually where I start paying attention. In this particular case, somewhere between them is also a cow, quietly chewing grass while an international team of scientists debates the future of the microbes in its stomach. The cow remains unavailable for comment. Sources: This post was originally inspired by The Washington Post’s reporting on efforts to use CRISPR and microbiome science to reduce methane emissions from cattle and has been updated to reflect subsequent progress in the research.