Looking for Inspiration in All the Wrong Places

When I was getting close to releasing The 13, one of my readers asked what inspired that story. I’ve gotten a lot of comments about the names of the ships – the Nimoy is a favorite – and where the idea came from. The answer is a lot of places.

When I went to college, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I took all the classes: the five credit hour chemistry that met every day of the week including a three-hour lab slot, the biology course in the giant lecture hall where I personally believe they were doing something meta and trying to make you feel like an insignificant individual cell in a giant living organism, the calculus courses – because we all know that there’s a lot of calculus involved in determining an illness ;). I did all of it for a year before I had to stop and take stock of what I really wanted.

I’ve never been good at memorizing things. Something in my brain revolts at the very idea of it. I love math and I excelled at the physics and calculus classes. But, as soon as I attended my first Organic Chemistry lecture sophomore year and they put a gigantic carbon chain up on the screen for the students to look at, my brain nearly rioted. I knew then and there I wasn’t cut out for that stuff. I dropped my science courses and enrolled in a bunch of 100 level intro courses to find my passion. I tried psych 101 – the first lecture was about how one of the four professors who taught the course could sit with us for 15 minutes and know more about us than we knew about ourselves. I know it was supposed to impress, but I just found myself annoyed. I stuck with the course, and there were some really interesting things taught, but it didn’t enthuse me. I took econ 101, because I did like math and figuring out problems, but it was a little dry for my tastes. And I took PoliSci 101.

Breathe deep. Look at this cat. I will not be talking about politics here.

Oh no. Politics. Not here. Not now. Nonononono! Don’t worry. That’s not what I’m going to talk about. In those days, what really and truly drew me into Political Science was the comparative politics branch. Where I went to college, you chose two political science disciplines to focus on from four: American Politics, Political Philosophy, Comparative Politics, and Statistical Models. You took a little of all of those, but you took more on your chosen two fields. I chose American Politics – because I was 19 and an American so it seemed like it was one of those “in my wheelhouse” things.