Seeker starts in Scotland, with the four main characters on a remote estate that has remained mostly the same for hundreds of years.

Seeker takes place in the near future, and the world has progressed from where it is today. There are aircars and tall buildings in big cities are much taller and more slender than they are today, because technologies have gotten better. But I always felt that Scotland wouldn’t see much of these changes. I imagined that Scotland would remain pretty much as it is today. Scotland has many bustling, modern cities, but once you get outside these populated areas, the countryside feels a lot like it must have felt hundreds of years ago. And I think it will still feel that way hundreds of years in the future.

So I wrote the Scottish estate exactly as it would be today, or 40 years ago, or 40 years in the future. It remains its own world.

Walking down a tree-covered lane like this one, it was easy to imagine the strange contrasts in Quin’s and Shinobu’s lives. They were raised to use outlandish, seemingly high-tech weapons, while growing up in completely peaceful surroundings. From early on, they must have felt a strange separateness to their families

Did you know that there are more sheep than people in Scotland? So the truth is, Quin didn’t know much about other people or the world outside the estate until she took her oath. She believed what her parents told her and her imagination filled in the rest, which can happen very easily in such a calm and pretty place

(All photos courtesy of and (c) Jennifer Anderson)

Seeker starts out in Scotland, but a lot of the book takes place in Hong Kong. I love Scotland for its isolation and sense of timelessness, and I love Hong Kong for being the complete opposite of Scotland in almost every conceivable way.

There’s something about the contrast between Scotland and Hong Kong, a sort of friction I guess, that made the story come alive in my mind. From the first moment I stepped off the plane on my first trip to Hong Kong, I started to see parts of the story that would become Seeker.

The center of everything is the Victoria Harbor, which divides the city between Kowloon on the mainland and Hong Kong Island. And all the action in Seeker is also in and around the harbor.

At one point I got into a tiny speedboat and we explored the harbor up close and personal. There are a few parts in Seeker where characters end up in the water. I wasn’t willing to go quite that far…

And then there are all the creepy crawly things that come out of the water and are actually delicious. The more legs, the better

In Seeker, on the Scottish estate, lie the ruins of a very old castle. Finding ruined castles in Scotland is pretty easy — they’re practically lying around everywhere you look.

I visited two castles in particular that looked a lot like the ruins on the estate.

This one is Kilchurn Castle, which sits at the Northeastern tip of Loch Awe.

I wanted to bring home video of what it’s like to move around in these ruins, because that’s something Quin probably did all the time when she was a kid, and it’s something the Young Dread still does. I bought a head-mount for my GoPro and got a lot of funny looks when I strapped the camera to my head and ran around inside the castle ruins. It was pretty embarrassing at first, but luckily there weren’t too many people around, and the sheep didn’t really notice.

The second castle was Finlarig Castle, which is small and pretty thoroughly ruined, and looks almost exactly how I imagine the ruins in the book. And also the castle seems to be dripping the green life of Scotland out of every stone

Here’s a clip of the video I took at Finlarig Castle. I sort of imagine the hands in the image belong to the Young Dread.

(still photos on this page courtesy of Jennifer Anderson.)

(A version of this article was originally published in the Kindle Daily Post, January 24, 2012 Author Spotlight Arwen Elys Dayton on Resurrection)

Here’s the problem. The best explanations of how the Great Pyramid was built just don’t hold up — unlike the Great Pyramid which HAS held up, for over four thousand years, despite being stripped for parts, so to speak, by successive civilizations of Egyptians.

View of Great Pyramid from our hotel across the street.

The most accepted of the official explanations boil down to some version of: a giant ramp was used, blocks of stone (some weighing as much as 200 tons) were floated down the Nile, then rolled on logs, up the ramp and set neatly in place.

The problem with the ramp theory is that it turns out the volume of the ramp would have been as great as the volume of the pyramid itself. And as for the logs, well, trees can be very strong, but if you look at how far away the quarries were, how many trees would have been needed (and how few existed in Egypt), how heavy each individual block was, it’s hard to arrive at the pyramid being built in a single lifetime.

I’m not saying the pyramids were built by alien intervention or advanced technologies, but the facts leave a novelist a lot of wiggle room.

In researching Resurrection, I toured the Great Pyramid with maverick archeologist John Anthony West, known around the world for poking large holes in archaeological doctrine. (His best-known book, Serpent in the Sky, is a great introduction to his work. http://www.jawest.net/)

When we arrived in Egypt, the pyramid was actually closed to visitors due to some renovations of the interior walkways. Luckily, John understood baksheesh and was also able to pull some strings with the higher-ups to get us private entrance into the pyramid. We explored it by flashlight — a flashlight with batteries that were already low when we started and which had nearly run out by the time we emerged back into the sunlight and heat of the Giza Plateau.

Walking up the Grand Gallery. It was almost completely dark, except for the camera flash going off in my eyes.

John walking away from one of the air passages in an interior wall of the pyramid.

John was a big proponent of the importance of the pyramid’s sound enhancement qualities (which ended up playing a part in the Resurrection plot), and I was instructed to lie in the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber and chant an Om. Why an Om? I don’t know, but it sounded amazing. The chamber didn’t echo exactly, it just took the sound and magnified it, letting it reverberate through the solid walls for a LONG time. In that dark space, with the flashlight’s beam starting to flicker as the batteries gave out, it was eerie and also breathtaking. From my standpoint, my visit to the Great Pyramid may have been more exciting than the one paid by Pruit and Eddie in the story — but I’ll let you be the judge.

Me inside the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber saying Om…

Of course, Resurrection is not actually about how the pyramids were built. That’s just a piece of the story. It’s about a clash of cultures and personalities that gave shape to ancient Egypt and threatens to change the course of our modern world. And above all it’s about Pruit, who hopefully, like other female heroes (Ripley from Alien always comes to mind) makes you think, “I want to be her, but please — I don’t want her problems!” For better or for worse, I think there’s a little bit of Pruit in all of us.

I hope you enjoy Resurrection. I certainly enjoyed writing it.

One of the most important locations in the second half of Resurrection is the big bazaar in Cairo. Exploring it with John Anthony West helped set the stage for the climactic chapter in the book where many elements and characters come together at once.

John Anthony West in his trademark red suspenders in Cairo bazaar.

This picture ended up being the basis for certain descriptions in the book of Pruit scrambling up onto rooftops.

In case anyone is interested in what I read in 2012, I thought I’d post a list. I reconstructed it from my Kindle, and so is probably missing the occasional book I read in paper, but I certainly have included my favorites from last year.

The Fault in our Stars

John Green

Kids with cancer is a tough topic, but he might be the one writer to tackle it with with the right mix of humor, irony and honesty.

Wool

Hugh Howey

Wool came out around the same time as Resurrection and it’s been my great pleasure to watch its amazing success. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carre

Divergent

Veronica Roth

My middle child became obsessed with this series and we had lots of fun deciding which factions we (and the rest of the family and all of our friends) belonged in.

Insurgent

Veronica Roth

The Apothecary

Maile Meloy

Such clear, graceful writing framing a story that blends history with historical fiction.

Matched

Ally Condie

My middle child greatly enjoyed the author’s writing style and the world she created, and said child charged immediately into the rest of the series.

Spur of the moment trips to Las Vegas are good.There was just enough space in the back seat to work. Finished third draft of manuscript on the trip! It had rained the night before and LA was amazingly clear, even — dare I say it? — beautiful.

Here’s Sky flying us there with his instructor. I was impressed. It was his first IFR flight. (Meaning he’s training to use instruments, not just visual control.)

This is a nice little shot of the Vegas Strip. Can you find your favorite hotel and casino? Looks sort of silly and small in the daytime, doesn’t it?

Editing manuscript while at my girls’ gymnastics class. 

There’s nothing like organizing a huge pile of pages covered in notes while sitting in a gym that, essentially, smells of feet. But they have table space and free WiFi, so no complaints. I wasn’t the only mom in there catching up on paperwork — I just had the most ridiculously large pile.