When I was three years old, I fired my parents from telling me bedtime stories. I was tired of the same old stories about princesses and ships. So, I decided to start telling myself my own stories. I began a habit of daydreaming about a whole host of favorite characters I created over the years. This continued into high school, where I was in boarding school in the early nineties. I shared a dorm with one television, two phones and sixty girls. With few distractions , my imagination was my principal form of entertainment. I became an obsessive self-storyteller then, sometimes spending hours staring at the ceiling in my room absorbed in my own stories.

It was then when I first created the main characters in Crown Colony of Spies. Inspired by an eighth grade history class project, I had already taken on a habit of setting my stories in the context of the past–in particular, building from a character I created for that project on the American West in the 1880s. So, each year of high school I told myself stories about the next generation of that family. The characters and their stories were inspired by what I was reading in English class, learning in history, what was exciting in the movies, but also the people in my real life who inspired me. Above all–at first anyway–it was James Bond–the Pierce Brosnan James Bond. It was so sexy, so international, so exciting–but also so not real. Though I had grown up in the comfort of Connecticut in the 1980s, the community that raised me included Holocaust survivors who spent their childhood in hiding; Hungarians who came to the US as refugees in the 1950s, having fled their communist country during the revolution, walking–sometimes barefoot, stepping over dead bodies and dodging bullets–to cross the border into Austria; my own grandfather, who served as a US Naval Officer in the South Pacific during World War Two, and who suffered nightmares for the rest of his life after being adrift at sea when his ship was attacked by the Japanese. As inspiring as their stories were, there were also adventurous diplomats, my own international experiences, and, importantly, the international students at my boarding school, many of whom had left home at 14 to go to school half-way around the world, many of them from Asia. I wanted stories that were as sexy and exciting as James Bond, but as real as I knew the real stories deserved to be told–stories that likely were hidden. I also wanted more women. 

By the time I got to university, these stories had evolved into four generations that had adventures in international business, journalism, and ultimately, espionage, where it became further refined when I was in university studying international affairs. I never wrote any of these stories down—but I remembered them.

When I considered writing a book, I found the amount of research required to write this family’s story with any degree of self-respecting accuracy daunting. I envisioned a page-turning espionage story set in the context of real-world international events, settings and intelligence operations that secretly shaped the course of history. So, I tried developing other more modern day characters in other genres instead. But none of my characters were as compelling—ah hem, persistent—as the ones I created in high school. Finally, twenty years after I first created them—and despite having a full-time corporate career and other commitments—I told them I would do it, and with as accurate a historical depiction as possible. And with the help of many volunteer readers, and advising history professors, retired journalists, diplomats and intelligence officers–I did. Crown Colony of Spies, set in the late 1950s Hong Kong, is my first complete novel. 

I have a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, with a focus on International Affairs, from Barnard College, Columbia University. Similar to the family in my book, three generations of my family have lived overseas as American expats, myself having lived in São Paulo, Paris, Dakar, Stockholm, and Heidelberg. My day-time career for the past twenty-plus years has been in tech, where I have had various roles at SAP, Accenture, and Google. I live in San Francisco.

I am looking for an agent to represent my book.