Dan's Desk

I’m Dan Blanks, a retired software engineer living in Silicon Valley. I like to post blogs, stories, essays, photos, and commentary on topical issues.
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I’m a huge fan of Andy Weir’s latest book, Project Hail Mary. But even a great book like PHM has plot holes. One particularly puzzling plot hole was how Eva Stratt, an adminstrator in the European Space Agency, mysteriously became the most powerful person on the planet. Every political leader and power broker bowed down to her, despite that fact she had two massive strikes against her–she was a scientist and she was a woman. To fill this plot hole, I wrote Whatever Happened to Eva Stratt?. As it is a fanfic, it’s not publishable, but I had fun writing it.

DKB — 09/02/2026
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Collateral, was inspired by a writing assignment. My fiction class professor gave five writing prompts with the instruction to pick one for our story. Being a bit crazy that day, I decided I wanted more of a challenge. Despite the fact that there was no apparent connecting theme between these prompts, I wrote a single story incorporationg all five prompts.

Unlike my previous posts, this one uses a plugin that displays the story in an EPUB format popularly used in applications like Kindle. I think it works pretty well, but if you see any problems with it, let me know.

DKB — 08/18/2026