241 Pizza

187 Men to Avoid

12. As an Easterner, I felt like a fish out of water in Los Angeles. I lived in a low- rent "artists", apartment complex, whose hallways overflowed with unusual individuals-aspiring rock stars, male models, drama queens, and stand-up comics. Amazed by this new world, I thought it might be fun to compile a list of some of the more bizarre sightings. Over the course of a few days, I wrote a list and called it: 187 Men to Avoid. Blythe thought the list was hilarious. She quickly wrote several literary agents and included a portion of the list. To my astonishment, I immediately got calls from a number of agents, including George Wieser, who told me he had already spoken to Putnam Books and could get me $12,500 for manuscript. Having faced disappointment in the music industry, this quick success in publishing surprised and encouraged me. I agreed to sell the manuscript and chose to use a female pseudonym (albeit a pretty obvious one, Danielle Brown).

13. 187 Men to Avoid was published in August 1995 by Berkley Publishing Group. Around the time of publication of 187 Men to Avoid, my new literary agent, George Wieser, came across an article I had written for the Phillips Exeter Magazine entitled: "Goodness and Knowledge on the Sunset Strip". The article was a humorous look about the travails of a "preppy geek from New Hampshire" who had been transplanted to Los Angeles. George told me over lunch that he had seen the article, loved my writing style and "power of observations". He strongly encouraged me to write a novel. He told me that he had been in the business a long time and "knew a novelist when he saw one". Although I still had aspirations of writing a mainstream novel that was as fun to read as the one I'd read in Tahiti, I was still focused on song writing and felt I should give my music career a fair chance to catch on. In addition, I had no idea what I would write about.

Digital Fortress (published 1998)

14. The "big idea" for my first book came to me by chance. In around 1995 I was on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. At that time, the U.S. Secret Service came to campus and detained one of the students claiming he was a threat to national security. As it turned out, the student had sent a private email to a friend saying how much he hated President Clinton and how he thought the president should be shot. The Secret Service came to campus to make sure the boy wasn't serious. After some interrogation the agents decided the student was harmless, and not much came of it. Nonetheless, the incident really stuck with me. Email was brand new on the scene, and like most people, I assumed email was private. I couldn't figure out how the secret service knew what these students were saying in their email.

15. I began doing some research into where organizations like the Secret Service get their intelligence data, and what I found out astonished me. All roads led to a powerful intelligence agency larger than the CIA, but which few Americans knew existed - The National Security Agency (NSA) - home to the United States' eavesdroppers and code breakers.

16. I continued researching NSA more in depth. A particularly influential book, at the time, was James Bamford's The-Puzzle Palace (D.26), which although dated, is still one of the seminal books on the covert world of America's premier intelligence agency, describing how the NSA pulls in intelligence data from around the globe, processing it for subversive material.

17. The more I learned about this ultra secret agency and the fascinating moral issues surrounding national security and civilian privacy, the more I realized it could be a great backdrop for a novel. I remember Blythe commenting that life seemed to be trying to tell me something. The music industry was clearly rejecting me, and the publishing industry seemed to be beckoning. The thrill of being a published author (187 Men To Avoid), combined with George Wieser's words of encouragement, my newfound fascination with NSA, and the vacation reading of Sidney Sheldon's The Doomsday Conspiracy, all had begun to give me confidence that I could indeed write a novel. I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA. That's when I started writing Digital Fortress.

18. NSA is home to the world's most potent computers as well as some of the most brilliant cryptographers, mathematicians, technicians, and analysts. Digital Fortress is about a brilliant female cryptographer (Susan Fletcher) who works for NSA and the adventures she and her partner (David Becker, a linguist and lecturer) have in parallel throughout the book.

19. So, I had my "big idea" for the book. The novel explored what I consider to be a fine line between civilian privacy and national security. My first reaction had been that the security methods used in. the U.S. were a gross invasion of civilian privacy. When I found out, however, that the NSA helped thwart terrorist attacks, my view changed. Initially, I had been indignant that the NSA was reading emails. But subsequently I realized their work constituted a fascinating moral grey area.

Researching and Writing Digital Fortress

20. I have followed a very similar approach to researching and then writing each of my four novels. The first step is to select a theme that I find particularly intriguing, this is generally the "big idea". Because my novels are so research intensive, they take up to two years to write, if I am going to stay focused on a two year project, it is imperative that I remain excited about the subject matter. Therefore, I choose a subject which is not black and white, but rather contains a grey area. The ideal topic has no clear right and wrong, no definite good and evil, and makes for great debate. The one aspect of writing that is by far the most difficult is staying motivated over the entire time that it takes to research and write a novel. I keep myself interested by writing about things that interest me. I have some favourite subjects, which I wove into the Digital Fortress story once I had my "big idea" in place. For me, the "must have" themes include codes, puzzles and treasure hunts, secretive organizations, and academic lectures on obscure topics.

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