Born 1968, I have a BA in Business Economy, freelanced as a comedy writer, studied theology for a couple of years but dropped out in 1997 in order to write comedy and entertainment for television full time.

It was around the same time that I travelled to New York and Los Angeles several times and, inspired by the cultural differences and similarities between Europe and the US, developed The Dublin Treaty, a political thriller taking place in Copenhagen 2027. It was supposed to be a feature film but as soon as I showed the synopsis around, DR, national public television in Denmark, wanted it as a cop show for television.

That made a lot of sense, to me at least, but once they got their hands on it the whole concept of the future did not make sense to them after all.

So, the project stayed on the hard-disc for a couple of years but eventually got a new life as the back-drop for Both-And:

Both-And is written as a dialogue between Cornelius Magnussen, retired TV-producer who did the cop show that I didn't do, and Tenna E. Rasmussen, a 35-year-old lifestyle journalist, who wants to interview him about the things he said about the future in the TV-series. She expects the interview to last an hour or so, it ends up lasting five days and as a result she has substantial parts of her world view either expanded or turned upside-down.

Writing and publishing
Both-And became a full time project in 2001, and the first volume, Both-And Monday, I published in 2005. The following four volumes were published in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, respectively.

All in all, the five volumes make up a total of 2,300 pages and writing and publishing such a big mother f..... book series of philosophy and science according to schedule was... a lot of fun. I truly enjoyed every moment

There were a couple of challenges, though: Since the dialogue lasts five days all within the same week, in the fiction there is only one evening and one night between each two consecutive volumes of Both-And. But in real life, there was one year between the publishing of the five volumes.

Though there are a lot of references to contemporary cultural and political events in Both-And, in volumes 1-4 that didn't cause much of a problem. But between Thursday and Friday / volumes 4 and 5, the Bush administration was replaced by Barack Obama, and world economy went from booming to global collapse. The expression "everything changed over night" suddenly became very litteral!

I can't complain, though, because one of the core predictions of Both-And was exactly that kind of change in politics and economy.