This is the fun part of finishing a book—thanking the people who helped the novel move from idea to finished product. I’ll start with the most important one—my co-author Amanda Iles. Amanda was initially a great editor for the early stages of the novel, but once she started contributing ideas, it turned out that she had worked in the bioscience field in her past and still had contacts there who could help us in the tough scientific stretches. Since she is a writer by trade—and one who shares my values and sense of humor—it only made sense for her to be a co-author on this project. So here’s what we learned while writing the book:
Rule #1: If you don’t know something, ask someone who does. Deep, huh? But when you’re writing a book like The Forever Factor you’re cutting across a number of fields, each of which demands deep levels of knowledge. Specifically:
VCs and startups: This one was the easiest, given that we’ve both worked in this field for the past twenty years. So I went back to the VCs and startup CEOs I’d worked with as part of Crowded Ocean, as well as those my partner Carol and I interviewed for our non-fiction book The Ultimate Startup Guide.
Scientific resources: Amanda had resources in the biology research and biotech worlds, so we had a good start. Then one of the VCs, when she learned about our topic, suggested we contact her BFF, Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, an expert in biological engineering. I contacted her and she, like so many people we approached, said it sounded like fun, count her in. We initially tried a string of brief phone calls, but my ignorance was so deep that it made sense for me to visit her institute at MIT and meet with her colleagues. Their input is evident throughout the novel.
Biohacking: I’d never heard the term before my dinner with Goetz. Luckily, it turned out that some friends from my regular poker game both researched and practiced biohacking. They schooled us in this part of the book, sharing their own practices as well as those that were beyond the pale but practiced by the more extreme members of the biohacking community.
The usual suspects: I never used to read the acknowledgements of the books I read, especially those with a ton of names. But when you finish a project like this and start to count who helped you along the way, the list does get long. In my case I focused on the gang that has read every word—including multiple drafts—and contributed ideas that advanced the narrative without losing the initial concept. This is a group I can speak short-hand to, since they’ve been with me from my first novel. It’s like the friendship between Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in Broadcast News, where he says: “Meet me at that place where we did that thing” (or something like that) and she knows exactly what he means. When you have friends like that—and who can often write better than you—you’re a rich person, and that wealth will show up in the pages of your books.
