I did not want to create a brilliant woman simply so I could tell readers she was brilliant.
I wanted to know what would happen if a woman possessed an extraordinary mind and then had to live with everything that came with it.
That became Dr. Ladonna Stone.
From the beginning, I knew Ladonna could not simply be the smartest person in the room. Intelligence by itself is not a character. It is an ability. What interested me was what she would do with that ability, what other people would expect from her because of it, who would resent her for possessing it, and how much responsibility a person should carry simply because she is capable of carrying more than everyone around her.
Those questions eventually became part of the foundation of the Quantum Series.
Ladonna is a scientist, an engineer, a business leader, a wife, a mother, and a woman whose abilities place her in rooms where decisions can affect far more than a company.
That creates a contradiction I wanted to explore.
The more capable she becomes, the less freedom she sometimes has to think only about herself.
If Ladonna discovers something that can change millions of lives, can she treat it as private property?
If she develops technology more advanced than governments can properly regulate, who should decide how that technology is used?
If she knows she can solve a problem that others cannot, does that create an obligation to solve it?
And what happens when other people decide that her intelligence, her company, or her discoveries belong to them?
Those questions interested me more than simply creating futuristic inventions.
Technology is powerful in the Quantum books, but technology is rarely the real problem.
The real dangers are people, ambition, fear, entitlement, government pressure, corporate competition, and the belief that possessing enough authority gives someone the right to determine another person's future.
Ladonna stands in the middle of those forces.
I also wanted Ladonna to look different from the genius we are accustomed to seeing
There is a familiar image of genius in popular fiction.
Too often, the extraordinary scientist is emotionally detached, socially dysfunctional, arrogant, eccentric, or incapable of maintaining an ordinary human life.
I did not want Ladonna built from that template.
She is extraordinarily intelligent, but she also loves her husband and children.
She runs a corporation.
She understands politics.
She reads people.
She can make difficult decisions.
She can also make mistakes.
Her intelligence does not remove the complications of being human.
In some ways, it gives her more complications.
If everyone believes you should already know the answer, what happens when there isn't one?
If people regard you as almost impossible to outthink, what happens when the threat is not intellectual?
What happens when the person you need to protect is your child?
Your husband?
A friend?
An employee?
A stranger?
You cannot solve every human problem like an equation.
That matters to Ladonna's character.
Representation mattered to me too
Ladonna is a Black and Thai woman.
That was deliberate.
I wanted a woman of color standing at the center of a story about scientific achievement, corporate power, national security, wealth, leadership, and technological innovation without the story treating her presence there as unusual.
She belongs there.
The people around her may question her decisions. They may challenge her authority. Some may resent her success. Others may want what she created.
But the narrative itself never asks whether someone like Ladonna deserves to occupy that position.
She does.
I think that distinction matters.
Representation does not always have to announce itself.
Sometimes representation is allowing a character to walk into a room where people who look like her have historically been underrepresented and letting the story concern itself with what she is there to accomplish.
Ladonna's heritage is part of her.
It is not the limit of her.
I wanted her power to create problems
One of the easiest mistakes to make with a highly capable protagonist is allowing capability to eliminate tension.
If Ladonna can solve everything, there is no story.
So the real challenge became finding problems intelligence alone could not solve.
She can understand technology.
But can she predict greed?
She can anticipate strategy.
But can she know which person will betray her?
She can build extraordinary systems.
But can she control what happens once governments, corporations, intelligence agencies, competitors, and ordinary citizens understand what those systems can do?
That is where Ladonna became interesting to me.
Her greatest ability continually creates greater responsibility.
Every solution opens another door.
Every breakthrough attracts someone who sees opportunity.
Every increase in power changes the number of people interested in controlling that power.
Eventually, the question becomes larger than Ladonna herself.
How much influence should any one person be allowed to possess, even when that person intends to use it responsibly?
I don't think that question has an easy answer.
I don't want the Quantum books to pretend that it does.
Ladonna also gave me a way to write about power differently
Most stories about power begin with someone trying to acquire it.
Ladonna often has the opposite problem.
Power keeps accumulating around her because of what she is capable of creating.
That changes the conflict.
She does not always need another title.
She does not necessarily need another billion dollars.
She does not need someone to tell her she is important.
What she increasingly needs is to determine what she is responsible for doing with the influence she already possesses.
That interests me.
What happens when success stops being a reward and becomes an obligation?
What happens when the world begins expecting one person or one company to solve problems governments have failed to solve?
And what happens when solving those problems makes that person even more powerful?
Those are dangerous questions.
They are also very human ones.
Why do I like Ladonna Stone?
On Goodreads, I once wrote:
"I really like Dr. Ladonna Stone. She is a force."
I still mean that.
But I understand now that reviewing my own character is not the best place to say it.
What I really meant deserves a better explanation.
I like Ladonna because she keeps making me ask harder questions.
Every time I increase her abilities, I have to increase the consequences.
Every time she gains influence, I have to ask what that influence costs.
Every time she solves one problem, I have to consider what new problem her solution creates.
And every time the world around her becomes larger, I still have to remember that somewhere beneath Quantum Innovations, governments, wealth, espionage, technology, and enormous decisions is a woman who wants something remarkably ordinary.
She wants the people she loves to be safe.
She wants her work to matter.
She wants to build something worthwhile.
She wants to believe that doing extraordinary things does not require sacrificing everything ordinary that makes life worth living.
That is why I created Dr. Ladonna Stone.
And I suspect that is why I am still discovering who she is.