So, I had this science fiction story in my mind for over a decade, but never had time to write it due to everything else I had to work on. It was always on my long-term to-do list.

When AI started to take off a bit over the past few years, I was like, "Jeez, I don't know if it'll be any good, but If I don't write this thing, it might turn into historical fiction rather than science fiction." More realistically, I'd have to keep adjusting it every five years because the future is now.

But things have a tendency to align. Or maybe I just look on the bright side. Because another big component of the story is about social media causing increased social isolation if we're not careful with it, etc.

Since we're doing some large construction work in Egypt over this past year, my husband and I have had to spend more time apart than ever (he's managing the project there, while I have to manage our obligations here, and we travel to each other when we can).

I work from home. So, sometimes during this period I have days where I wake up, go for a walk, work, do an interview about finance online, exercise, go back to work, then go to sleep, and never speak to someone in person. Just me in the house and being the weirdo trying to get 10k steps in the sun around the neighborhood.

That both gave me insight into how that type of isolation can affect people (luckily temporarily in my case), and also ironically gave me time to finally write the thing, which helped me deal with the aforementioned isolation.