November is nanowrimo month– National Novel Writing Month. Without a plot, without a plan, I sat down and started a new story, hoping it might bring me to a conclusion by month’s end and the 50,000 words of a new novel that the nanowrimo experience aims to produce.
My heroine Veronica, known as Ron, has polished her new app, which she hopes will take the world by storm. She aims it at the media, believing that this app will allow everyone to tell truth from lies. Applied to photos, videos or voice recordings, her app highlights even the most subtle of discrepancies or differential sources, so that no one need be misled ever again. Why does she care? Because her young husband has slipped deep into a conspiracy cult that has cobbled together an alternate reality in which he lives, and he will not, and cannot, allow her to try to lead him out.
Ron, idealistically, thinks the best thing to do with her app is to send it out to the world, spreading it to all media that she can think of, and to universities and other institutions. She hasn’t thought about how much it will be hated by all political parties. She hasn’t considered the international elements who will be threatened in their efforts to manipulate the world stage. She never imagined that advertisers would have blood in their eyes as soon as they realize what this app could do to their sales. Truth in advertising? Never! So she panics and goes on the run, assuming that if she just gives this app a day to spread, the simple fact that she gave this away for free will protect her as soon as these outraged and menacing elements realize what she’s done. She’s not putting it out for bid, she’ll not sell to the highest bidder or blackmailer, there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. She just has to disappear until the pace of the news catches up and makes her safe and uninteresting once more.
What happens when you send an announcement of a truth-revealing app to the media, with the free app attached? Well, who values something given away for free? What idiot would simply open a free app and try it? No one who’s read about identity theft…. Ron has become too accustomed to the free and easy ways between programmers, and she’s been so deep in perfecting her app that she hasn’t stopped to think.
But there are some elements out there, including her husband’s cult, that understand the power of her offering and they are frightened. They believe it will be possible to put this genie back in the bottle if they can get hold of the author and however many copies she’s carrying with her in a pocket full of memory sticks. Some are even willing to give her a price for it.
As she realizes she is actually being pursued, Ron panics, and does her best to slip through the busy streets of her city. When she is captured and interrogated, she begins to see a very different price for her work, and a very different value.
It takes a thug to remind her of the basic truth, that you cannot make a person change his mind. Force doesn’t work. Even an app, can be seen as force. What happens to Ron, what unexpected friends rise to the challenge of allying with her, what the final price may be for her peace, these questions drive.
I have never been so seat-of-the-pants in writing an unplanned novel before. I don’t usually have a great fondness for outlines, but this was surely one of the wilder writing efforts I’ve ever tried. Is it any good as a novel? Oh, it likely has holes big enough to drive a semi tractor-trailer truck through, but it’s been such a ride, I won’t worry too much about that until this draft is done! I’m at 47,849 words today.
robinwinter 