As near as I can pin it down, it was late January in 2009 when, frustrated by whatever recalcitrant writing project I was struggling with at the time, I opened up a new document and typed these sentences:

Everything changed when Hasta flipped Bobby Kimball the bird. The universe turned inside out—or at least that's how it seemed.

From then on, for Hasta and her friends, nothing was ever the same.

This was the opening for a novel with the working title Technomancers, a sort of young-adult urban ...