Books > Portia's Ultra Mysterious Double Life

I was working as a creative director in interactive media and coming up with a lot of ideas about how to tell stories using emerging technology and new narrative tools. As a fun exercise, I first worked on the Portia idea as an interactive series for the Web, but that never ended up going anywhere. That was a little over ten years ago. But I couldn't shake Portia from my brain. I started to grow very attached to her as a character and as a way for me to explore my voice. I wanted to take the story further, so I spun the story into a book. The first draft of the book consisted of several mystery cases about people in Portia's world, including one about her missing father. Almost immediately, I had interest from the television world and spent a little more than three years developing it as a series. But regimes changed and so did marketing teams, and Portia went into "turnaround" and never made it onto the air. I put the project aside and continued in my work as a concept designer and writer for theme park attractions, toys, animation and interactive media experiences. A few years later, I met literary agent Dan Lazar online and I told him about Portia. He asked to look at the first five pages, and I immediately emailed them to him. That same afternoon he asked for the first fifty pages! Then I took off for Telluride, Colorado where my husband was part of a film festival. I remember that I was up on a beautiful lush green mountaintop staying at ski condo with a magnificent view. We had just connected our computers and there was an email waiting for me from Dan telling me he loved the book! I was 10,000 feet above sea level, but it felt much higher!