Month: January 2022

E________, first draft: 37,000 words.

As Braking Day gets closer and closer to publication, the marketing folks at both DAW in the US and Jo Fletcher in the UK are asking me to pitch in by making myself available for interviews and to write pieces for blogs and websites. This, I am more than happy to do. A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make Braking Day available to the public, so the very least I can do is help make sure the public knows about it.

To that end, Ella at Jo Fletcher suggested that I might want to write a few words for the UK SF websites about how my day job is reflected in my writing. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that one of the reasons I write is to forget about my day job.

I work in counterterrorist financing, or what I tend to call financial counterterrorism because I don’t actually finance counter-terrorists. What I do, along with many others, is help the giant bank that I work for do its very best to make sure that money does not travel to or from bad people or countries. It is, after all, a lot harder to build a bomb if you can’t afford the ingredients.

It is an interesting and demanding job. I do not want to bring it home with me. And I most definitely do not want to write about it. After replying to Ella’s request with some breezy assurances, I retreated from my keyboard positively awash in self-loathing. Instead of avoiding the issue by telling her that I’d write something without specifying what (I’m a lawyer, after all), I should have fessed up and told her she was barking up the wrong tree.

But then I started to think about it some more. A lot of my job involves the tracking of resources. Allowing money for a tech start up or new fish and chip shop to get through, while cutting off the wherewithal to move drugs or weapons of mass destruction. Resources are finite. Whether you cut them off or wave them on, consequences follow.

The Braking Day plot is, to steal a word from Dan Moren, twisty. But a lot of it is driven by the fact that, after 132 years in deep space, resources have become constrained. Part of that plot involves terrorists (more or less). And a good chunk of it centers on the fact that the terrorists (more or less) need money – liquid water in this case. Water – and the need for water – drives a good part of the novel. Next time you see a bad guy running through a story, blowing things up with abandon and losing henchmen left and right to good-guy gunfire, think about this: where did he get the resources? Are they really as unlimited as the storyteller would have you believe? Partly because of my job, I have always had trouble with that, and I can’t bring myself to write it. In Braking Day, resources dictate what actions my characters can take, including the bad ones. Resources allow the bad guy to do things, but they can only do so much, and it gives an opening for other characters to track them down. Resources allow the good guys to move around and defend themselves, but they also limit how fast, how far, and how effectively. While it’s true that ISV-01 Archimedes doesn’t carry an expert in financial counterterrorism, she does have one telling her story.

The other thing that occurred to me is that the only way to do my job is to cooperate with other people. The whole counterterrorism enterprise is too vast for a single person to accomplish it on their own. This is not something unique to counterterrorism, of course. Human beings are social animals. We tend to do things in groups. But sometimes (often?) in the fiction game we lose sight of that. Powerfully gifted individuals save the world (or worlds) time and time again because only they can do so. Conditioned as I am by the strictures of corporate behavior, I have trouble writing that. I believe in teamwork. Ravi, my protagonist, is not a superhero. He cannot slay dozens of highly trained adversaries in hand-to-hand combat, or manually pilot a starship through an asteroid field, or put back together things that have been blown up beyond repair. He’s an “ordinary” young man. But he has two things going for him that could help any one of us achieve great things: a moral core, and friends. Although Braking Day is told entirely from Ravi’s point of view, it is very much an ensemble piece. “No man is an island entire of itself.” Ravi gets things done because his moral compass points him in the right direction and because he has friends to help him do it.

So, there you have it. I wrote Braking Day as a soothing antidote to my day job, and yet my day job informs every part of the story. Thanks, Ella, for opening my eyes!

I think.

E________, first draft: 33,300 words

Many years ago, now, my day job took me out to the West Coast. Work done, I found myself in LAX, Terminal Four, waiting for a flight home. While there, like so many travelers before me, I thought it would be a good idea to drop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee.

Turned out, the terminal had a problem with its water supply that day and the Starbucks was unable to serve anything that wasn’t bottled or chewable. Fear not, they said, this is LAX. There is another Starbucks in the terminal and their water supply is just fine.

I located the second Starbucks, swore under my breath, and decided then and there that I was done with it. The reason? The line for service was at least two city blocks long. There were hundreds of people hoping to get served. Clearly, there was a reason Terminal Four had two Starbucks. The sole survivor was simply overwhelmed.

No one in that unbelievably long line looked happy, but no one left. Or rather, they only left after a frantic glance at the watch told them they had run out of time. It was either coffee or the plane. Though I do sometimes wonder if some of them chose the coffee.

To be honest, the sight of a coffee line measured in the hundreds of yards was disturbing. It was, after all, proof positive that coffee is addictive. No one in their right mind should be standing in a two-blocks-long queue jonesing for a cup of Joe they were never going to get. Except for those people who really did have hours to kill, there was no way on God’s Earth they were ever going to get served, and yet there they were.

Fast forward to six a.m. last Saturday. The outside temperature in Pittsburgh was 17F/-8C and there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground. I planned to drive to my local coffee shop and work on E________ for a couple of hours. Problem was, for reasons I won’t bore you with, my car wouldn’t start.

I don’t have coffee in the house (don’t ask!) but what I do have is a ton of tea and a home office. A normal person would have called AAA, put the kettle on, and started writing. Instead, I trudged a mile and half to the coffee shop with a deep-frozen laptop on my back. I walked home, too. A three-mile round trip through the bitter cold and crunchy snow. And all the while I was thinking, Am I like those folks at LAX? Am I so pathetically addicted to coffee that I’ll crawl over broken icicles to get some?

Okay. That’s not completely true. I was also wondering how long I had until I got frostbite. But still.

Now, seated at a warm, comfortable writing desk and having thought about it, I don’t think I’m addicted to coffee. But I am addicted to writing in coffee shops – or anywhere that isn’t home. Hotel lobbies, airplanes, a doctor’s office, wherever. If I have time and a laptop, I start clicking away. I need the change of scenery. It makes me more creative – or maybe just happier – than if I write at home all the time. If I did that, I’d go mad. Or I wouldn’t write, which is pretty much the same thing. While there is some evidence that travel improves creativity, I don’t think the authors of those particular studies were talking about a short hop to the local barista’s. Nonetheless, and speaking just for myself, I find the act of going to a different place, sitting at a small, anonymous table, and cracking open a laptop immensely stimulating. Even if I have to slog across the urban tundra to make it happen.

Or maybe I like coffee a little too much.