I Are A Author

It's a scary thing to take leave and treat your hobby like a job. That's what I attempted over the past few days, spending hard earned IT industry money on flights and accommodation in Sydney to research and write the chapters of my sequel to Law & Odour, despite no publishers yet showing interest in the original.

Unperturbed by the voice of reason I packed my notebook, pen and phone and set about visiting locations, ordering coffees there and writing chapters. I'm not sure exactly how many words I scribbled, but my thumb, elbow, shoulder and neck are all exceedingly tender now so I believe it was a decent total.

I admit, upon landing I was a little nervous that I would struggle to run with the threads of my prepared plot, which actually could have been a blessing. I would have had concrete proof that I was a terrible artist and I should focus on preventing cloud hosted artificial intelligence from stealing my current job. Instead I have thousands of words needing editing so that they can be compiled into a manuscript, discovered after my death and turned into a mildly successful Netflix series created, edited and starring cloud hosted artificial intelligence.

While visiting, I also attended the NSW Writers Centre's annual Speculative Fiction Festival. There I learnt about the business side of writing, and how to network by standing and staring at successful authors until they felt awkward enough to invite you into their conversations.

And, perhaps the best thing I learnt over the course of my trip was that I shouldn't set my novel in Sydney. San Francisco here I come, either for my next writing blitz, or for my final showdown in Silicon Valley to try and take my job back from cloud hosted artificial intelligence servers.