April 5, 2005
Was doing pretty good today until the headache kicked in. Probably a combination of good weather--yes, high pressure systems give me headaches, but the transition, not the good weather--and several hours of transcribing interviews.

Anyway, thought I'd brainstorm a little bit. As I mentioned before, my agent has a ms of a thriller I wrote called Serpent's Kiss. I'm trying to come up with decent ideas that might make for follow-ups. I wrote a good immediate follow-up synopsis last night waiting for a doctor to call me back for an interview about hepatitis C and I looked it over today and it looks good. It will require a ton of research, but it would be pretty exciting, too.

Thinking technothrillers today. Something to do with nano particles--not quite like Crichton's Prey, which wasn't a novel I liked much anyway. But there has been some work done on nanocameras that could be used as cameras in medical imaging. And it occurs to me that they could be used in espionage as well, especially if they have decent lives and there was some way to record the images. Imagine having your ambassador meet with President Putin of Russia and shaking off some dust that was actually a thousand nanocameras that would provide image and sound for a specific period of time. No more secrets. But what would people do to prevent them from being invented and what would be do to get hold of them? Tricky, but intriguing.

I wrote two brief chapters to get it started a couple weeks ago and I like what I wrote, but it needs to be in a different location, at Carnegie Mellon perhaps, which is where a lot of robotics work is being done. Tie it in with DARPA, maybe. I interviewed a guy at DARPA for an article about bioterrorism once and I felt like they were running background checks on me before they'd let me talk to him. A little disconcerting.

I interviewed Harlan Coben last week to write a review/profile of his latest book The Innocent, which I'm reading now. Good, dark, compelling. Harlan's a nice guy, not quite as polished as I expected him to be. Nice chat, not a great interview, but good, and between what he said and the book I'm sure it'll make a good piece. The Innocent is excellent so far--normal suburban guy who's life goes to hell, typical Harlan. Has a Myron Bolitar short story at the end I haven't read yet. I could go this route for my next novel. I think it would work and of course, I'm a normal suburban guy so the research isn't a killer. I guess we'll have to see how Irene feels about the Serpent rewrite. I've got an excellent idea for a normal suburban guy thriller and maybe that's the way to go. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, got a doctor calling for an interview in 10 minutes about clinical trials, so I'd better sign off for today.

Best,
Mark Terry