Meet Andy Stevens, who works in Union Square in Click City. Only her boss and her father call her Andrea. Here’s Click City Episode 4: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Click-City-Episode-4-The-image-becomes-clearer-4978707.php

  Click City Episode 3 is live: Beth Fixes a Leak and Stokes a Flame. http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Click-City-Episode-3-Fixing-a-leak-stoking-a-4975297.php A little background on the hacker contests: The residents of the hacker hostel AT 101 enter bug bounty competitions for extra money. Companies offer cash prizes to anyone who finds a bug that can crash their server.  There are also sponsored Iron Chef-style competitions, where a target computer is placed on the network and […]

With the rents skyrocketing in San Francisco, driven tech people are willing to live in linen closets. Communal living to share expenses and ideas is very popular. While often these places are broken-down Victorians like my hacker hostel AT 101 in the Mission, there are some fancy incubators in Pacific Heights mansions. I visited a hostel on Twin Peaks with 5-star views.  If you’re a bunch of single people with […]

  The San Francisco Chronicle launched the first episode of Click City today at http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Click-City-Episode-1-Trying-to-cracking-the-code-4971245.php#page-1 It’s been more than 30 years since Armistead Maupin’s classic novel, Tales of the City, was serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, depicting a free and easy San Francisco with the drug and sex counter-culture in full swing. Now 30 plus years later, the techies and digerati have arrived with an intent to fit in […]

This Sunday, November 10th, the San Francisco Chronicle will launch the first episode of my fiction serial, Click City, which is about the San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech scene, in the tradition of Tales of City.  Every day this week the Chronicle will introduce a new character. See Roger Martin here: http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Click-City-Meet-Roger-Martin-4948327.php

Today, as promised, we have a female FBI Special Agent as a guest blogger–what a treat.  Being a special agent sounds like an incredible career for women. She tells me that the FBI has been hiring female special agents since 1972!  –Heather * There are no guarantees for the Special Agent in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  I was reminded of this fact the first day I […]

  The Girls with Guns post has been much more popular than I expected! Check out this photo a reader sent in of her beautiful 6’4″ daughter with what John just pointed out to me is an AK-47. In his words: “You can tell that it’s an AK-47 because of the second tube on the top. The expanding gas that pushes the bullet down the  barrel enters the tube and […]

Summer is on the horizon and the teenagers are asking where we’re going on vacation. I haven’t told them that the question is not where but whether—as in whether we are taking you. As teens they are more demanding, setting moratoriums on seeing shrines and lingering at dinner. They complain that no one understands when the crazy husband is joking—they were mortified when he asked the waiter whether they’d hire […]

I like to write stories on the edge—almost absurd, but then you realize that life can really get this nutty, as a reviewer of my novel False Alarm put it. It’s a fine line. While researching my just-completed novel, The Incompatibles, a black comedy about family dysfunction and infertility, I saw a Newsweek article “You Got Your Sperm Where?” about men who call themselves donorsexual—a guy who gives his sperm […]

You know how I like to draw heavily from real life so the novel I’m just finishing is set right here in the Silicon Valley outback.  I’m calling it The Incompatibles— a whacky black comedy about infertility—possibly the world’s first. There’s an aggressive sperm recruiter on the loose, coming between a Los Gatos couple, who get themselves into a darkly comic pretzel, working at cross-purposes to get a baby. I […]