all right yeah i'll i'm gonna get on this because this sounds amazing oh speaking of amazing we're so excited you got to tell us about your ya debut of sorcery and science this is going to be of a lot of interest to the glasses so folks listen up

yes it's crossover time um so in of sorcery and science the main character is a high school junior named andy lau and he's pretty typical like he sucks at trigonometry and his parents are always comparing him to his overachieving older sister.

And they're always talking with him about college applications.

And no one believes him when he explains that he's actually like this magic wielding hero who saved a fantasy realm.

And so three months before the book started, he got sucked into this world through a portal right by Stanford University, about 10 miles from where I live.

And there, in this fantasy world, he trained to be a mage, he defeated this big thing called the Chaos Demon, and he restored magic throughout the land.

And then when he came home, he found that no time had passed, and he still sucks at trig, he's still dealing with his parents, he's still working at the boba shop.

What was switching to YA like for you?

So what inspired the story specifically?

Um, so, you know, I talked about like the, what happens after this will date me, but there's a very, very specific, um, PC role-playing game from the, I believe it's released in like 87 or 88, but I didn't play it until like the early nineties.

The series is called Ultima.

There were like nine games in the main franchise dating from like 1980 to I think like 1999.

Ultima V is called Warriors of Destiny.

So this series was really unique because it's like in many ways, your standard like Dungeons and Dragons style, like fantasy role-playing game.

But the middle part is Ultima IV, V, and VI.

How important is that for you to have such a diverse cast of characters?

Mm-hmm.

So that was like the under- underlying thesis in itself.

Being a technologist myself, and Jeannette being definitely on the aesthetic and the design side for merchandising, we wanted to figure out how could we use technology in the most robust way to actually be able to drive our product development, merchandising, and sales.

And so we basically built out a sales platform and design platform where we were able to ID really quickly while maintaining a very low overhead.

And we basically went to market by taking a lot of the gross profit that most companies would take on, and we want to deliver that into the value of the shoes itself.

So we built up a, a gigantic supply chain system where we incorporated our factories, our component suppliers, our retailers ourself, and everybody's on a single platform, and then we're able to actually do merchandising, product development, purchasing, import, sales.

And it accelerated, and our business basically blew up.

Yeah.

Can you tell us about your new book?

So my new book is called The Photonic Effect, and it is the, um, I guess the, the most science fiction that I have gone to.

It's actually...

It's with a science fiction, uh, imprint this time instead of, like, the literary fiction that I used to be with.

So it is a space opera.

It is very much inspired, like the, the pitch, um, the, the pitch that I used when, when talking to my editor about it was it's Star Trek: Voyager mixed with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine mis- mixed with Mass Effect, and if you like any of those things, as early readers have told me, like, they're very excited [laughs] about that.

It's about a starship captain and her crew who were stranded in this weird, uh, gravitational well for, like, 10 years, and then as it starts to collapse, sh- they find a way out through the help of the, um, the photonic aliens.

[laughs]