It began at a traffic light, a red light that stopped me on my way home from work one day. Minds often wander at such moments–at least mine does–and at that particular red light a thought came to me: it would be fun to write a mystery in which a mathematician plays a key role. Deservedly or not, mathematicians have a reputation for quirkiness. I could play that up to good effect.

Not a bad start! But it took two more years before I connected that character with a story. What took so long? Well . . .

Something like a decade earlier, I’d written a science fiction novel and started shopping it around. In those days I was an “aspiring writer,” a polite and encouraging term for a writer who hasn’t made a sale yet. I’d written oodles of short stories, mostly science fiction, but sold none of them. I had also written one longer work, a mystery just barely of novel length.  And then there was my magnum opus, the SF novel Jurek’s Legacy. My first full-length novel, it was arguably the best thing I’d written. I had high hopes of selling it, and set out to find an agent.

Although it may be hard to remember now, at that time there were just two kinds of book publishers. One, real publishers, carefully picked the works they would produce and paid advances and royalties to authors. The other, vanity presses, would produce anything somebody would pay them to produce. Real publishers pay the costs of book production. That’s why they’re so picky about what they produce and reject the vast majority of what they receive. Vanity presses produce just about anything, because they make their money off of writers, not books. As there are always a healthy number of desperate aspiring writers, vanity presses can always find customers.

But I was looking for an agent. I’d collected a few “thanks but no thanks” notes and one agonizingly near miss from an agent who said she loved my work but was closing her business to focus on other things. (Drat!) At just that moment, a fellow writer contacted me to say he’d signed on with an agent and encouraged me to submit my novel to her.  I did. End result? She turned out to be less an agent than a scam artist. She charged a modest up-front fee, then did nothing in return. When I began to press for my money back, she informed me she’d sold my novel, but when the contract arrived, it was from a vanity press.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that knife went in so deep the wound took nearly a decade to heal. I largely stopped writing fiction after that. Possibly I judged myself too harshly, but the words refused to come out right. I did write, but my efforts turned to nonfiction. I sold a couple of technical articles on software development, and later a pair of essays to Sky & Telescope. I contracted with About.com to write content on the Baha’i Faith, and after that venture folded I created a new site, Planet Baha’i, to continue that work. (PB had a good ten-year run before I retired it. It’s been resurrected as an occasional blog.) I was no longer an aspiring writer; I was a published author.

But a fiction writer? Not so much.

And so back to The Fibonacci Murders. Once I had both a character and a story–a series of murders based on the Fibonacci sequence–I got busy writing, and amazingly the result wasn’t half bad. Mathematician Tomio (Tom) Kaneko didn’t turn out as quirky as I’d originally envisioned, but you’ll find his genesis embedded in the first paragraph of the novel:

First I must state two things: I am a mathematician, and I am not crazy. I mention the first because it alone explains my involvement in the events that recently took place in Howard County, Maryland. Otherwise, I would have had no connection to them whatsoever and would have been spared injury. I mention the second for two reasons. First: strangeness is associated in the public mind with my profession, notwithstanding that relatively few mathematicians are odder than the average person. Second: it seems to me the tale I’m about to tell could only have been imagined by a lunatic. Indeed, there was a lunatic. But he was not I.

So there you have it. Where the story itself came from, how the detectives wandered in, and how they caught the culprit, well ,those are tales for another day.