How I Got Here

Chaos Theories started off to be another book entirely - or at least, half of it did. I started writing a pretty straightforward tecno thriller back at the end of the year 2000. I was at the time the head of operations and development for a tech company based in Atlanta, working in an office in the middle of a cube farm. It was over a year since Mark Barton had killed 9 people in Atlanta brokerage offices and then committed suicide. He'd lost a lot of money day trading and decided to take a little revenge before cashing out.

I came upon the idea of a software engineer (in my experience they tend to be a bit odd anyway) who went on a rampage in his office. Except that he wouldn't have any obvious motive, and he would get away. The rest of the book would be the chase and capture of a genius mad-man. I wrote the actual rampage as a prologue, something to grab the reader by the reproductive organs and make one want this monster caught. His name, btw, was Jim Parish. He had a lot of fire power, automatic rifles and pistols and who knew what else. I set the story not near Seattle but in a sleepy suburb of Boston. I'd never been to the great Northwest at that time, but I'd spent time in New England and had friends in and out of the software business there.

And then, in December 2000, a crazed software engineer named Michael McDermott walked into the Boston area offices of Edgewater Technology and murdered seven people in a shooting rampage. Stories at the time from eyewitnesses were spookily similar to what I had written. He used multiple weapons - an automatic rifle, a pistol, a shotgun. The first person he shot was filling in for the receptionist for the day. One of the others had just returned from maternity leave. Three had been barricaded in an office, listening, when he burst in and killed them.

I stopped writing. It wasn't fun any more.

Two years later, my family suffered a terrible tragedy. We lost our daughter Olivia in a stupid, senseless, random auto accident. There was no reason for it to happen, no way it could have been foreseen and prevented, no lessons to be learned, no way to ever achieve closure. There wasn't anyone to blame, there wasn't anything to be done. It was (and is) devastating for all of us, I can only speak for myself.

Grief is a mental illness. I spent five years doing nothing. The nightmares were always accompanied by attempts to fix it, to work backwards and figure out how and why, to somehow explain and to change things so that it had never happened. A way to turn time on its head, to find some miracle that would have saved her at the last moment. If only, if only, if only. Somewhere along that dark journey, I wrote the chapter Baby Bird as a short story. Just for me.

But eventually I had to come back into the world in some way. We have three other children, and grandchildren now. It wasn't fair to our other kids, they still had growing to do and had to do much of that with not only the loss of their sister, but with the diminished capacity of their parents. Those lost years will never be made right, but at some point I had to become nominally functional. I tried a couple of times to reintroduce myself to humanity in the workplace, interviewing for and nearly taking a sales job and more recently by taking a real estate licensing course. But I couldn't bring myself to be forced to face people every day. Or life. I completed the course and passed the exam, but never applied for a license.

I started acting again in community theater, which was better therapy. It's a great way to interact with people without ever having to deal with them personally, and after eight or nine weeks the group just dissolves. Plus I could be someone else while I was doing it. I'm pretty good (it's true!) and if I could deal with auditions and schmoozing and being in the world full time I might even be able to go pro.

Anyway, I kept coming back to Baby Bird. I needed a creative outlet that didn't require direct interaction with others, but I did not want to write even allegorically about Olivia. It was too personal to me, too painful, and I think I was also protecting the rest of the family from my dark thoughts - or protecting myself from the exposure of those thoughts.

At the same time, I saw that the work had to be influenced by my perceptions of reality, of the cruel nature of chance. Olivia was a strange and magical child, certainly some aspects of her life would creep in (Animals really were mysteriously drawn to her; the dolphins in the SeaWorld nursery would cavort wherever she stood along the edge of the cement pool, causing other children to crowd around her to get a closer look. Her clocks really did run backwards.) The theme of the book would be how lives are changed forever by a single, random watershed event. Now I just needed a plot and, to be blunt, a marketable genre.

And then one day I realized that I had not started two books, but only one. Looking back, it is easier to see how seemingly unrelated events start sequences of actions that eventually collide in ways that were impossible to predict before they happened. That is what Chaos Theory is all about.