Hi, everyone!

JJ, sorry I missed your post yesterday. Can't understand how I did that! Good to hear from you.

You asked where I get my ideas. I'm a news junkie. My books are all suspense/ thrillers, and I watch reports of crimes that could be committed with the use of computers. Or my imagination sometimes takes off, and I realize what could be done with a computer. (I'm a computer programmer by trade.)

During the 2000 Presidential Election, I was sitting in a restaurant with some clients watching the election officials in Florida holding up cards and debating whether a chad was pregnant, dimpled, hanging, etc. And we got into a discussion about technology and how antiquated our election system is, and how it needed to be automated. But as I sat there, I realized that I was writing a complicated program for these clients to detect Medicare fraud and abuse, and they really had no idea how I did what I did. They only knew if it alerted them of someone "suspicious"... And I realized how easy it would be for me to build in a few lines of code that would rig the election. That's where the idea for "The China Conspiracy" was born. Later, as the book was hitting the bookshelves, an independent study was done of the new election touch-screen technology, headed by Johns Hopkins University. And their findings were that the election software was so security flawed, even a foreign government could infiltrate it and rig our elections. Despite the security risks, a number of states still used this software in the 2004 election. By the way, there are no recounts with this software. The recommendation was to provide a printed "receipt" that would be submitted like we submit the punch cards now, but it was determined to be "too expensive" to implement...

Yes, I do occasionally write elsewhere; not too often, as I'm so busy with my books (and running a few companies) ... but on March 21, several of my poems will be published online at www.sistersinthelord.org/magazine. I hope you'll check them out!