Vacant Space
A Brief History of...
In October 2024, I announced on LinkedIn that I had written a book. Most of my 500+ followers on that platform had no idea of my aspirations, but 38 of my closest colleagues and a few friends congratulated me with some kind words and an array of colourful emojis.
My post that day began, ‘I wrote a book...’ and included details from the exposé I had written to accompany it on its journey to a few select publishers. Faithful to the text on their respective websites, I had not heard back from them within their designated time slots and should consider my submission of no interest to them. Truthfully, I did not wait out the full six-month time slot of the first and barely made it past the three-month time slot of the second.
With that post, I joined the ranks of the self-published author, with the task of self-promotion before me. LinkedIn is great for many things and is the only remaining social media I use after dropping Facebook and Instagram, but it is not where people go to discover new books to read.
The following paragraphs outline what you can expect from future posts.
I will share details of my onward journey, a framing my father hates, nay detests. However, since a story is best told at the beginning, I will go back to 2016, when I started attending a weekly Meetup group called Shut Up & Write! in Berlin, Germany. The reason why a British guy moved to Berlin in 1997 would be another beginning but only tangentially relevant to my writing.
Only recently have I come across opinion pieces on Plotters vs. Pansters, which have given me a name for the sort of writer I became. If I tell you I am a software developer, you will most likely guess correctly that I am a Plotter. I write every day, but most of it is software, an activity that I consider more creative than many give it credit for. It did not take long for me to discover The Snowflake Method and to realise that this iterative approach would give me the structure to work for a few hours a week on a book without getting completely lost.
I am not sure if I chose my vocation or if it chose me, but it makes me detail-oriented, and because of that, I made copious notes on many topics relating to this story and writing in general. Getting into narrative structure and learning writing mechanics was almost as much fun as writing. A great springboard is Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. Gather a small group of like-minded individuals to work through the exercises to get the most out of it.
In November 2019, a bunch of us from the writing group took a trip to Dublin to visit another member who came to Berlin a few months a year to write. Writing from a different location, particularly a city like Dublin, was a boon. Grab your people and go somewhere else for a weekend or longer and see for yourselves. These people constituted one of my bubbles during the COVID-19 pandemic when the German government restricted the number of people gathering in enclosed spaces.
I finished the first draft in June 2021 and left it for a month before picking it up again. A small group of beta readers deigned to read it, and an even smaller group gave me feedback. It was beta readers from the Meetup group who diligently read and responded, so I can not overstate how important this group was to the process.
The second draft was completed in April 2023, after which I left it again before looking into writing an exposé demanded by most publishers and preparing submissions according to their proclivities. This step was more exhausting than I expected. I thought completing the second draft was the finish line I had been aiming for since 2016, but it was not. The finish line moved as I wanted it to find its audience.
In the meantime, I continued writing, but rather than writing the sequel that I still have in my head, I started something fresh. That is yet another beginning.
I read recently that it is good to have some comp titles so one can write, ‘It’s like x and y’. My take on AI is not one of the ‘singularities’ where technology is out of control and irreversible. Give a true AI a fleshy body, and it will want to reproduce and protect life. In my book, humanity takes a wrong turn and it is the emergent behaviour of a few AI-controlled ‘bods’ that may be what turns things to humanities favour.
It’s like Breq from Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice found their people in a world that would not be out of place amongst Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized.
Sizeable excerpts are available to read on most digital platforms. Just click the cover below.
I will post again soon.
Rx
Primarily as a solution to overpopulation, human minds and bodies are distinct entities where 'bods' are governed by artificial intelligence, playing host to multiple human minds. A bod narrowly misses destruction by the authoritarian state after its emergent behaviour is discovered by the software developer responsible for its development. Agents of the state mistake the plan of a group of activist minds, who desire a single body each, for the growing number of bods with emergent behaviour connecting within the state-run social network. Now, on the run from the agents, the software developer becomes involved with the historian who mistakenly betrayed the activists to the agents.
