Dakota Banks wrote short stories in high school and college, submitted them, and got rejection letters. She still have some of them. Writing was shelved while life ran amuck, and she came back to it in the 1990s. She published six books, all hard-edged suspense thrillers dealing with virtual reality, one of them set in a future world. None were written under the Dakota Banks name. She enjoyed these books because they were her first taste of the writing life, not to mention that they brought in some money and put 600,000 published words under her belt.