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If you have read some of my other blog posts you will know that I managed to write a novel by accident, impressive I know. Death in the Anechoic Chamber my first short story that has just been published in Harvey Duckman Presents… Volume 7, was definitely planned and no accident but just as enjoyable. However, the reason it was planned was because of that first accident and my participation in a writing group.
Ah, a sci-fi book about a coder set in the near future. Normally that is a sentence that makes me a bit twitchy. As a coder myself I get a bit sick of the poor way that we are represented on TV and in books: hoodie wearing beings with questionable personal hygiene and social skills tapping away on their laptops in a darkened room. Ok, the hoodie bit might be correct, but most coders have at least one, if not three, external screens that are in use at the same time. I’m very glad to say that Bitcoin Hurricane by Kate Baucherel came as an excellent diversion from the norm and had me captivated from the beginning. Clearly written by someone that actually understands the basis for the world they have created and that the use of external screens for coding is paramount.
So last year on the 31st of October I decided to join in NaNoWriMo as a spur of the moment thing that I thought would be fun. We were travelling around New Zealand at the time and, having just completed Inktober, I felt like another month challenge was just the thing for me on this trip. If you don’t know about NaNoWriMo it stands for National Novel Writing Month and to ‘win’ you have to write 50,000 words of a book during November. It can be any kind of fictional book, or if you are a NaNo Rebel you can do non-fiction! Talk about last minute, NaNoWriMo starts on the 1st of November every year, so I started with nothing planned out except a title and just saw where things took me.
