Category Archives: Modern History

How to Smell a Lie

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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 researched and outlined, and I was ready to start writing this week (because I still need to do something while the world crumbles around me and the kids are in remote schooling).

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The End Is Always Near, Version COVID-19

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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 “the end of time.” What an opportunity, I thought, to revisit this aspect of history and make sure my world building was realistic, so I bought the book but didn’t get to it right away.

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Extreme Vetting and Dreams Deferred—A Chapter from My Thriller

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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. “Extreme vetting” describes a rough and cruel time in the lives of millions, beginning with asylum seekers at the southern border and ending with Americans whose citizenship could be revoked on technicalities. As an example, if an immigrant now leaves a blank space on a visa application, such as a middle name they don’t have or an apartment number when they live in a house, their application will be rejected.

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“Show, Don’t Tell” Doesn’t Always Work, Especially with the Coronavirus

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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 the kitchen store. The restaurants are only permitted delivery and takeout, but the wonderful people at the grocery store and the pharmacy are still somehow getting to work each morning so that our neighborhood doesn’t collapse under generalized panic. We’ve already embraced smaller panics: the Tylenol panic, the hand-sanitizer and the toilet paper ones, among others. But this is the way it must be for now, because every time we get too close to another human being, we create a bridge that the virus can cross, in one direction or another.

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Here We Go. Are We Prepared?

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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 a lot about those words. The advice was to stock up on food, medicine, and other supplies. So my husband and I went to the grocery store, the pharmacy, the hardware store and bought stuff. Not too much, as not to look ridiculous to our neighbors (though who cares today how ridiculous we looked ten days ago?), then we went by our normal routines.

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And Then There Was Racism

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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 those moments when you see something and you think, should I say something?

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My Story of Sexual Assault

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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 so that each year on the day I could revisit this story. Continue reading →

Author Interview: James Emerson Loyd’s The Great War Won Trilogy

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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 it could declare victory and leave the war to its drained enemies. This is the premise of James Emerson Loyd’s fascinating trilogy of alternate history The Great War Won. A small group of German officers led by General von Treptow risks negotiating across enemy lines with the French and the British in an attempt to influence the leadership into seeking peace in Europe. As the titles of the first and second book suggest (Who Desires Peace… and …Should Prepare for War), the conspiracy fails, paving the way for the American intervention developed in Book Three (A Power of Recognized Superiority). Yet the groundwork has been laid for a different outcome than the one we’re familiar with. Continue reading →

A Killer Detail: You Don’t Belong Here

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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 high school, or that sickening feeling you had walking down the street after a breakup and looking at all those couples holding hands as if they were touched by divine grace and you by plague. I do have this feeling of not belonging now and then, but I didn’t think I was going to revisit it when I picked up The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Continue reading →

Prisoners of Geography

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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 on in the world around me. I’ve always been an avid reader of history, and the more I read, the harder it is to see simple explanations to anything, but I needed some clarity, and so I picked up a copy of Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall, an experienced war and foreign correspondent for Britain’s Sky News TV. Continue reading →