Originally posted on The Writers Vineyard

I’m very excited. My science fiction novel, The Gender Divide, was just released by Champagne Books on May 1st.

In celebration, I thought that I would share with you a little about how I came to write The Gender Divide.

It all started when I had just finished re-reading Blind Waves, a novel co-authored by one of my favorite authors, Steven Gould (co-authored with Laura J. Mixon). There’s a scene where the two protagonists are skinny dipping. The authors have done a good job of establishing a realistic love-at-first-sight connection between them, and as a result the conversation naturally segues into a discussion on becoming intimate. They share the pertinent details about blood tests and previous partners and then, in an almost offhand way, the female protagonist, Patricia, mentions that she had her cycles turned off during a previous relationship. When that relationship ended, she didn’t turn them back on because she didn’t see any reason to go back to tampons.

Turning off menstrual cycles. A simple and believable enough concept for a science fiction novel, so simple that it’s relegated to one brief paragraph in a 350 page novel. It’s not a unique concept either, as this is not the only novel I’ve read that mentions this. Nor is it treated any differently in those novels. Yet somehow the implications of turning off menstrual cycles intrigued me.

Perhaps it was because I was working for a bio-tech company at the time. Although I’m not a scientist, I quickly learned how interconnected all the systems in the body are. It is difficult to affect one part of the body without affecting other parts. That is why so many drugs have side effects. The company I worked for developed drugs based on compounds naturally produced by the body and even those sometimes had side effects.

It’s natural for a science fiction author to make simplifying assumptions about the future as they develop their story, but this assumption kept nagging at me. I began wondering what would happen if there was an unusual side effect to stopping menstruation. Menstruation starts at a young age and runs for roughly forty years. During that time there is a lot of biological activity that is occurring. What happens if that all that energy is available elsewhere? Where would it go and what effect would it have? What if it affected longevity and women started living longer than men?

From there I began to wonder about the implications of greater longevity for women. How would this disparity in life span impact world politics, economics, the military, and society? As I thought about it, I realized that the balance of power would gradually shift from men to women, resulting in massive changes in all these areas. Most of these changes were interesting to me only in the context of the new world that I was writing and how it affected the people who lived in it.

Enter Ryan Peters. Ryan, the hero in the novel, is trying to recover a formula that allows men to live as long as women. He has already been treated with this formula and is forced to pretend to be his own son to cover his longer life span. This becomes harder than he anticipated when he starts working for Olivia Morgan, his true love from forty years ago.

When I first started writing, I expected Ryan and Olivia to live ‘happily ever after’. Imagine my surprise when this didn’t happen, or at least not as I expected it to. Instead Ryan finds himself drawn to Nicole West, another woman he works with, despite having what appears to be the perfect relationship with Olivia.

I won’t divulge any more details, other than to say that the rest of the story wrote itself, with the help of Ryan, Olivia and Nicole. The result is a story that I hope you will enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing it, a story that Chris Bartholomew at Static Movement Online calls “…extraordinary reading, a book that will live in your thoughts long after you’ve read it…”.

Please visit the novel’s website at http://www.thegenderdivide.com for a full excerpt of Chapter One, links to where you can purchase The Gender Divide, and some more fantastic reviews (4 cups from Coffee Time Romance & More!).

I’ve also added a little spring bonus, to complement the 20% discount that the publisher is currently offering. At the end of the excerpt for Chapter 1, there is a link to my email address. Send me an email and I will send you a link to read Chapter 2 online.Enjoy!