Jamie Dibs is author of thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy books.
He has built an award-winning career under a different name as a finance and technology journalist, editor, and media founder. This work and the global travel opportunities it brought inspire his fiction. Jamie was born in the United States (go Phillies!) in 1970, the Year of the Dog. He studied international relations in Washington, D.C., and got his first reporting gig in New York. He also leaped at opportunities to study in Bologna and Brussels.
In 1997, he moved to Hong Kong to cover Asia’s financial markets, and he’s lived there since, with a stint in Paris and regular visits to Lisbon. Living in a multicultural, Asian-based city introduced Jamie to Thai kickboxing (he survived), yoga, and some kick-ass food. More importantly, he’s gained exposure to different values and ways of thinking. His wife Mabel is a Hong Kong-born Chinese with her own pursuits, including a passion for cooking (Jamie opens the wine and washes the dishes).
Jamie’s inspiration as a writer
Jamie has dedicated weekends and vacations to writing fiction. He enjoyed some wins, with small presses publishing his early thrillers, and his journalism alter ego also published books on Asian history and on finance, investing, and tech. But thrillers and sci-fi? Fiction remained a hobby, especially after those indie presses went out of business.
Sometime in the late 2010s – before Covid, anyway – he returned to his childhood home (a leafy Pennsylvania suburb north of Philly) to help his parents downsize houses. Mom had kept a lot of his childhood stuff boxed up in the basement or the attic, and his job was to rescue anything worth keeping.
Among this flotsam, he found the earliest stories he had written. These were ephemera, even to Jamie, except for one thing.
Everyone in his fifth-grade class had written or drawn a mini-book, 16 pages of folded paper bound in a stiff cover. Jamie was amused to remember these protean stories, but what really struck him was on the back cover. “Other books from Jamie Dibs”, he had declared in big yellow letters, like a blurb for a writer’s other bestsellers.
He’d forgotten about this dream. As a child and then a teenager, he’d devoured fiction: James Bond adventures, Steven King spine-tinglers, fantasy from Tolkien to more contemporary stuff like Stephen R. Donaldson, sci-fi: Dune, “Star Wars” books, but also more political works that we’d call literary, like 1984 and the novella Flowers for Algernon, which made him cry.
Dreams and reality
These books were more than entertainment. They were guides on how to live, how to be a person, how to think about the world. Even the pulpy ones. Sometimes especially those: 007 sure had a suave sophistication that teenage Jamie could barely imagine. Later in life he deep-dived into jaundiced British spy tales, American hardboiled crime fiction, and gonzo Japanese novels. Fodder for the mill!
The shock of recovering his childhood school project inspired Jamie to develop as a professional author. It has also opened a door. He is now tapping those childhood days of Dungeons & Dragons and other primordial sources of storytelling. He wants to recreate that sense of wonder and adventure for grownups, to use story to help readers think about our world in new ways, to explore who we are – and have fun along the way.