I live in Trump’s America, and lies are the air we breathe here. I mean, the literal air in Seattle is literally not good for breathing because of wildfire smoke, but this is not what my post is about. This is about the last six months—no, it’s not about COVID-19 either—but about the novel I…
Category: Modern History
The End Is Always Near, Version COVID-19
I found Dan Carlin’s The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in December 2019 at the book fair at my kids’ school, and I picked it up because of the great title and also because in my speculative historical novel characters live under constant fear of…
Extreme Vetting and Dreams Deferred—A Chapter from My Thriller
Before the times of COVID-19, all the way back to the beginning of January 2020, I finished my new novel, an immigration thriller called Extreme Vetting. The title comes from a catchword coined by our own salesman president, and it refers to the treatment of immigrants in the United States—undocumented and documented—under the current administration….
“Show, Don’t Tell” Doesn’t Always Work, Especially with the Coronavirus
The other day, I wrote a post here on my website about getting ready for the coronavirus tsunami to hit. It’s much closer now but the world still resembles the one I always knew, except that today the toy store in our neighborhood is closed, as are the interior decoration boutique, the hair salon, and…
Here We Go. Are We Prepared?
Here in Seattle, we’re embarking on a journey that not all of us might survive. A journey with no fixed timeframe and a destination that could only be called “back to normal,” before the times of COVID-19. Ten days ago, our local officials told us to prepare for the disruption of everyday life. I thought…
And Then There Was Racism
A few weeks ago, I got into an email back-and-forth about racism with a male acquaintance who lives in Romania—I’ll call him Alex. We were in the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation when he quoted the following saying, “You give a Gypsy a finger, and he takes the whole hand.” It was one of…
My Story of Sexual Assault
This is my story of sexual assault. It happened in my fourth year of college, in Bucharest, Romania. I remember some important details about that evening but not others. Such as the exact date. It could’ve been anywhere between October 1998 and March 1999. After it happened, I didn’t think to memorize that certain date…
Author Interview: James Emerson Loyd’s The Great War Won Trilogy
It’s early 1918 and the Great War has exhausted all the parties involved: from the Western Front, where resources are scarce, to the Eastern Front, where Russia has been engulfed in a bloody revolution. Having prevailed in the east, Germany could now try to crush France and Britain before the United States might intervene, or…
A Killer Detail: You Don’t Belong Here
You don’t need to be an immigrant or a minority to know what it feels like to be rejected by a desirable group, or any group for that matter, even a group that didn’t seem to exist until you walked up to it and the circle closed to exclude you. You just need to remember…
Prisoners of Geography
These days, I read in the US news about a possible nuclear war with North Korea, a trade war with China, Mexico, and other countries, an invasion of Venezuela, of all places, and of course the reasserted racism of the right. Never before have I felt the urge to understand what the hell is going…