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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Andy was ten, he wrote his first book. Attack of the Dinosaurs was seventeen pages long, variously single - and double spaced, with rough cut cardboard backing and a masking tape and white yarn binding.

It was the heart-pounding tale of Alaskan scientists using nuclear bombs to prospect for gasoline and--as happens all too often--inadvertently waking frozen dinosaurs. Without giving away too much, things didn’t end well for the dinosaurs. (Things never end well for the dinosaurs.)

He fell in love with writing and promised himself that, one day, he’d write an even longer book. Then, one evening many years later while reading bedtime stories to his daughter and son, he thought:

Andy has been a library page, dairy science programmer, teacher, technical writer, healthcare software developer, and official Corporate Philosopher. He grew up in a town in Ohio Amish country. He’s a husband, father, and nonprofit web consultant living in Madison, Wisconsin.

Thanks for asking! I’ve been doing well (despite a global pandemic and everyday life’s various twists and turns). Can’t complain. I hope you can’t, either.

For many years I’ve been worried about how society is getting more politically and socially polarized. I see that strongly in the States, where I live, but I suspect it’s a global phenomenon. We seem quicker to assume that people who disagree with us are lunatics or stupid or evil–in a word, that they’re “other.” Hate seems to be getting easier.

That’s made me think a lot about empathy, which is the opposite of polarization and hate. I’ve been thinking about hearing someone who disagrees with me and, instead of dismissing them as a pawn in a global conspiracy, trusting that they genuinely feel that way. Then, trying to understand why. That’s really hard to do, but it feels…right.

And that got me thinking about the neurological mechanism for empathy. What if empathy wasn’t an imagined connection, but a real and measurable property? And if we discovered that mechanism, how might we try to use it–and how might that go wrong?

It’s standalone. I’m not sure I have a series in me. I like to discover interesting people and see how challenging situations help them grow. Once I’ve done that, I want to discover new people and learn about them.

Harmony “Bibi” Cain is the protagonist. He’s an elderly recluse and a powerful empath who experiences others’ emotions so strongly it’s uncomfortable. Decades earlier, during a civil war that fractured the Old United States, he was inadvertently part of a project that weaponized empathy. Bibi’s still struggling with his empathy and dealing with the aftermath of that program.

His lifelong colleague and closest friend, Candice “Dys” Altamirano, is his empathic opposite: She doesn’t experience empathy at all. Before Bibi shuttered his detective agency, she was the investigative brains behind it, essentially a Sherlock Holmes to Bibi’s Doctor Watson.

There are many others…but those two will do as central characters.

Same as for The Nothing Within: not writing, but getting ready to write.

I take a long time to work everything out in the back of my head before writing: worldbuilding, plot outlining, character personalities, backstories, speaking styles, major themes. I draft a lot of passages or even whole chapters scattered throughout the book, like starting a puzzle by assembling randomly spaced groups of pieces. The actual writing goes quickly.

I don’t know whether this is exciting, but maybe it’s interesting: From the very beginning, we see that Bibi is narrating his story to an unknown audience. We don’t learn who the audience is for a very long time. And the audience matters.

A story about an elderly former detective who’s dealing with too many personal issues, who is asked to solve an extremely important problem that he’s badly suited for (and that he wants nothing to do with), and who learns something important about himself and the nature of the universe in the process. A story that’s near-future science fiction with touches of mystery, cyberpunk, dystopia, and a splash of metaphysics.

My cover designer, Daniel Schmelling, has done wonderful work on many book covers, and his portfolio ranges from realistic to symbolic. We wanted to strike a balance between the two, and I think we did.

The story is set in rural Wisconsin, and the prairie plays a role. I started by riding my bike around prairies and farmland in my area and snapping reference photos for Daniel. Then I gave him a detailed summary of the plot, themes, and main character and we worked from there.

Daniel’s in Germany and I’m in the U.S., but we worked well together through email. He was great at communicating and at keeping everything on schedule.

I saw it a little at a time as it came together, but even with the earliest rough draft I felt it captured the spirit behind the story. A small-seeming older man is walking through the prairie toward something large and menacing – a futuristic city with drones hovering up ahead – with something dark and mysterious going on below.

It captures the beauty of a summer day in the rural Midwest of the United States, along with menaces that are encroaching at the edges.

The Nothing Within was a SF-fantasy hybrid; Three Grams is more solidly SF; and to complete the pattern, the next book will be more solidly fantasy. So I guess I am writing a trilogy in some sense after all. :-)

It won’t be a high fantasy with swords and rings and heroic armies clashing, but there will be an elder god or three, and something like a wizard, and (of course) the fate of the world will be at stake.

The working title is Afflictions and Graces. That’s about all I can say since I’m still in that long “working it all out” phase.

I just hope that folks who decide to read this will find it a thought-provoking take on empathy in a world where empathy seems imperiled.