Mindshadow (novel)

Production

Before writing any Star Trek novels, Dillard was a secret fan who smuggled the books into her home to hide them from her husband. At the time she worked as an English lecturer at the American University in Washington D.C., and began writing after being fired for attempting to organize a trade union. Mindshadow was her first attempt at writing any novel; she used Writer's Market to follow the correct format and submitted the manuscript to Pocket Books without showing it to anyone else. After a year without a response, she chased the editor and learned the draft had been lost. She began rewriting it, but before finishing the new version, the publishers contacted her because they had found the original and wanted to publish it. One character, Lt. Ingrid Tomson, was based on a person at the university who had fired Dillard; Dillard described that person as super-competent, anal-retentive, and really uptight. The character later appeared in other Star Trek books by Dillard and by other authors such as Ann Crispin's Time for Yesterday.