Brent Salish

 

About Brent

Brent Salish (that’s me) lives on an island north of Seattle.

I’ve led an interesting life that informs my books.

I worked for one of those big tech companies (for a long time).

I’ve taught and lectured around the world.

I’ve played in bands. I even directed plays in New York, once upon a time.

Nowadays, I write. (There’s a blog down the bottom of this page, too.)

Novels

Published: First Tuesday, a thriller about stealing the election by hacking just a few voting machines in the right precincts. Torn from the headlines and all that crap, except I wrote it in 2015. And it’s based on real stuff, both deep research and a bit of inside dope. By the way, nothing has changed. It’s still possible for a couple of hackers to pull off the basics of the plot. So go buy First Tuesday, read it, and worry. (And yes, there is a solution to vote-machine hacking. No, it’s not returning to paper ballots. Just… read the book.)

Preparing for Publication:

Short Stories Published

  • Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
    Out walking today, I had what I thought was a great moment for a book I’ve been working on for a while. And as is my wont, and as I preach to others, I opened OneNote on my phone and “wrote it down,” which these days often means turning on the speech-to-text facility and speaking… Read more: Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
  • Uber-Rape
    No, there’s no umlaut over the U. This isn’t über-rape – I don’t want to know what that might be – but Uber- and Lyft-rape. An article in the NY Times suggests this is a significant problem. I mean, even one incident is a serious problem but here I mean significant as in “significant figures,”… Read more: Uber-Rape
  • The World in a Pocket
    I used to walk around with one of these: This was 1989 or so, and I was freelancing, and needed to be available to clients. Or so I told myself, and indeed I got calls on it from actual, paying clients. (I have the same number thirty-five years later. What I no longer have is… Read more: The World in a Pocket
  • What’s Writing Worth?
    I came across a survey that says Gen-n would pay considerably more for Broadway theater more when they understand how much work goes into it. Gen-n = anybody younger than me, which at this point is a whole lot of people. And I’ll ignore the fact that the survey was created by folks who have… Read more: What’s Writing Worth?
  • Coming Into the Country
    The NY Times acrostic today [spoiler alert] is a passage from John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, a book that was serialized in The New Yorker in 1977. That’s where I came across it. My parents subscribed, and though I was at that time living on my own in Greenwich Village, I probably went “home”… Read more: Coming Into the Country