The very first review of Dot Dead, written by the prodigious Alan Paul Curtis, concluded by saying, "If Mr. Raffel ever decides to leave his present Silicon Valley position to write full time at this same level, he'll certainly have my complete support!" Do you think he is offering moral support or financial support? I fear it is the former, and since I need to provide the latter to a hungry brood at home, I have not left my day job. If dreams come true and volumes of Dot Dead start flying off bookshelves, we'll see. In the meantime, barring any such oneirological miracles, I'll keep writing in snatches early mornings and on weekends. Readers have expressed interest in what Ian does next. I am as curious as the next fellow; however, we're going to have to wait at least a little while to find out. I've toiled in Silicon Valley now for some two decades. In Dot Dead, I tried to capture the entrepreneurial mania that has driven the Valley to world technology leadership. But prior to returning home to the Valley, I spent four years as counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C. While many of the issues I worked on there lost relevance with the collapse of the Soviet empire, terrorism looms an even larger threat today. Before I get too old to forget what D.C. was like, I thought I'd better mine that vein of memories as well. My next book, tentatively titled Two Graves: A Novel of Politics, Intrigue, and Betrayal, centers on the adventures of Sam Rockman, an associate professor of history at Stanford, who goes back to Washington to help Congress deal with the terrorist crisis. Sam finds himself on the spot for classified briefings at CIA headquarters, high-level negotiations with the Russians, head-to-head confrontations in the White House, a clandestine visit to the world’s largest nuclear reprocessing plant, and a ground-level survey of a terrorist incident. The manuscript is now at the publisher’s. Stay tuned to my blog for the latest news.