Perpendicular Women follows two women living in different universes who, through an unlikely turn of events, are connected. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

First, thank you for inviting me to interview with Literary Titan. It’s an honor and a pleasure.

What got the story going—the spark, if you will—were my personal fantasies and questions. Like all of us, I wondered: What would a “perfect” life look like? Would it bring happiness? How much can we shape our lives here and now? These questions drive Kara’s journey.

Then I pondered the future. We’re talking future-future, like seventy years from now. What might it look like? Would the greed, anger, and fear we see today escalate as our world faces overcrowding, scarcity, and the rise of artificial intelligence? Even now it’s easy to get lost in news stories bloated with messages of doom. We’ll need solutions, for sure. Could everyday people discover them? These questions drive Pandora’s journey.

From these deliberations, Perpendicular Women’s plot, characters, settings, and literary mechanisms evolved.

Now enter the multiverse. The multiverse is a serious cosmological theory that proposes that all possible worlds exist, right now—anything you can imagine. For a writer, it’s golden and enabled me to suggest, metaphorically, a range of possibilities for our future, from cataclysmic to hopeful.

The story owes a lot to three wonderful authors: M.R. Franks, who describes the multiverse in layman’s terms; Peter Frase, who outlines four futures for humankind; and Verne Blanchette, who describes nuclear-survival scenarios. Other resources include the relentless shower of articles, newsletters, and TED talks, all of which made me stop and think.

At the heart of this speculation is a single question: what if? What if we found the “perfect” life? What if humankind did XYZ in the future? These queries form the serious foundation of Perpendicular Women. But the book isn’t all so pensive. I’m a sucker for humor and adventure, and I tried to make the book fun as well as meaningful. So go ahead. Take it to the beach.

I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?

Lots of fun here. I wanted a story that would be relatable, so the worlds in the book are either Earth as we know it or Earthlike. I imagined three worlds that had identical evolutions—until a certain date. It is on that date that a handful of everyday women, including Kara and Pandora, make the difference for the futures of their worlds.

The book opens at a trade show in Arizona—trade shows being familiar territory since I once was a marketing manager. One of the locales, Shell Springs, is loosely patterned after Coral Springs, Florida, where I lived for eight years. Most of the settings, however, were products of my imagination.

For the “future” worlds, the process was straightforward. I projected the issues of today into the future and again asked what if. What if someone did X? What if they did Y? From there, it was a matter of figuring out how that would affect the setting. The fun stuff came next: hovercars, hive-shaped buildings, human-looking robots, and the like. The result was three very different futures—one of which, maybe, could be ours.

As I wrote, the settings didn’t really change; they grew. I’d ask myself, Okay, if we had ABC, would DEF follow? No? Backlash? Then maybe XYZ. With these questions, the worlds gained nuance as I wrote—a process that continues into the writing of the sequel.

The cover for this book is intriguing and really draws attention. How did you create the cover for Perpendicular Women?

I did the proverbial throw-everything-I-can-think-of-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks exercise. I wrote down every theme and symbol I could think of (the book has a lot of both), plus descriptions of every significant character and setting. Then I winnowed the document down to six pages and sent it to the publisher’s design team. The designers at Atmosphere Press created nine mockups, bless them, and oh my goodness, they were fabulous.

From there, I narrowed the field to four concepts and ran them by my writing critique group. They chose two. Then I posted both on Facebook and invited comments. People love to share opinions, and the response was a tsunami. And you know what? The vote was even. Exactly fifty-fifty. I could have flipped a coin but decided instead to choose the design that I felt better fit the story’s vibe and characters—thoughtful, frightened, and in the end, courageous. I adore the result. Thanks for the question!

Will this novel be the start of a series or are you working on a different story?

A sequel is percolating. In it are more adventures of some new perpendicular characters, plus two that carry over from the first book. The sequel has a different intent. While Perpendicular Women focuses on the transformation of the individual, the almost picaresque sequel focuses on the transformation of humanity. Think The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver’s Travels, Red Mars, or The End of Men. Check out the sequel’s first two chapters. They appear at the end of the first book.

Here I’d like to interject something. While the themes can be taken seriously in both books, the stories can be read solely for fun and adventure. Or for catharsis. Or, of course, if it fits your mood, for the joy of heavy mental lifting. Reader’s choice.

Thanks again for the questions. Literary Titan does a wonderful service for readers and writers alike. I’m reachable at chrisbusiness@comcast.net, and Perpendicular Women is available on Amazon.

May your universe treat you kindly!

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