The writing of my first novel actually began twenty-five years before I even thought of doing it. I was carrying my lunch tray, walking out of the cafeteria in the Student Union at the University of Wisconsin, onto the plaza overlooking the lake. Somewhere among that throng of students and faculty was a table full of my friends, but I couldn’t see them. Neither could I hear them, though they saw me and were calling my name.
One of that coterie of physicists and artists who hung out together was Ugo Camerini, an experimental physicist who fled fascist Italy just before World War II. Ugo was a fine scientist with a sharp mind and a sharper wit. Ugo grew frustrated with my inability to hear their cries of “Mark, Mark”, so he tried a different approach, a European approach.
“Herr Doctor Professor, over here,” he called out.
To my forever regret, that was the moment I heard their cries and turned around. From then on, I was always known in Madison as Herr Doctor Professor.
Skip forward those twenty-five years to a single-digits cold winter night at a farmhouse outside of Fargo, North Dakota. I was visiting my friend Doug Burgum, then a software entrepreneur and now the Governor of North Dakota. Doug asked me to help him put his three young children to bed by telling his daughter Jesse a bedtime story.
I sat on the edge of her bed and invented a tale of creature from a parallel universe that suddenly appeared in the laboratory of a physicist called Herr Doctor Professor by his students and friends. Thus was born the story that became my first novel, When Comes Such Another.
With the kids asleep, Doug and I talked well past midnight, sitting outdoors in the tree house he was building for his children, and I almost forgot the bedtime story. But flying home to New Hampshire the next day, the story came back to me and I started the book that launched my new career as a writer.