Writing full time. Second novel, Gardener, is conceived.

I’m back and I have great news. Spending time at home with my family provided an enormous boost to my writing. That is, in addition to a huge bubble of happiness that’s still floating somewhere in my chest. I have to constantly check that my feet are still touching the ground!

Being away from the day job meant I could write full time and, for the first time since I started, I actually felt like a writer. I had a massive influx of ideas from the day one. Not being able to fit them all in into the Snowflake, I started recording them into my software program. It didn’t take long for it to inform me that I had enough plot milestones to start another book.
I’ve chosen ‘Gardener’ as the title for my second novel. Just as the Snowflake, the Gardener will have a single human flaw entwined into the back-story. And just as the Snowflake, there will be a legend to give a deeper meaning to this modern tale of computer crime. The flaw I’ve chosen for the second book is fear. Fear that either makes you stronger, or slowly erodes your soul until there’s nothing left.

Snowflake, The Legend

I have already mentioned the reason I decided to use Snowflake as the title for my novel.

In the novel Sally Clarke tells her daughter, Amanda, a legend about a Snowflake. She explains to the child that kindness fights cruelty, friendship is better than enmity, truth is worth much more than lies and only indifference has no antidote. Snowflakes have been sent as a reminder to people to care for each other, to clear their mind and soul of negativity, to notice the beauty of the world around them. Tiny snowflakes, each an epitome of care taken in crafting it differently from millions of others. They are like a human souls carved in ice: so similar, yet each unique.

I’m going away on a three week long holiday in a few days time. I’ll be visiting my parents, my grandparents and my German shepherd. I’m also planning to do some serious writing in a hope that the walls and the gardens of my childhood home will nourish my imagination. In the meanwhile, I’d like to leave the Legend of the Snowflake for you to read.

Indifference

It’s easy to understand why people do good things; it’s the bad that puzzle. In children’s fairytales villains are simple, two-dimensional characters with little depth and the only fitting description of evil. As grownups we understand that good and bad have shades of grey in between. How is it that a real-life villain is made? Can simple feelings, even positive traits, turn into flaws nasty enough to make us into a villain? Can admiration turn to envy, fear into cruelty, contentment into indifference?

Indifference is the feeling I want to talk about today. Is indifference a vice? Is indifference to human suffering as bad as causing that suffering? Is indifference good or bad, or neutral? I see indifference as a null-feeling, a no-feeling. To me it’s not an opposite of care, but a no care, a complete absence of compassion. We get so engrossed into our own lives, our own problems that we forget to think about other people. When I talk about indifference I hear people responding: “What’s the point, there’s nothing I can do about it.” You don’t need to be able to do anything to care. And if enough of us care, maybe then we’ll finally be able to do something.

Global Economic Crisis

I don’t think that the topic of Economic Crisis needs an introduction. The one that happened, or rather got accepted and announced, just over six months ago affected nearly every one of us. People like me who were trying to get a foothold on the property ladder, found getting mortgages impossible; people already owning a home suffered from bad rates (unless you had a tracker), negative equity, even repossession. Coincidentally, organisations started major re-structuring and improvement of the overall org charts A.K.A. sacking. And job losses became another big hit of this crisis that turned global.

It didn’t take long for the why-it-all-happened programs to appear on TV, so at least now we have an official version of what went wrong. I don’t know exactly why the financial bubble burst, but I believe that there were plenty cyber criminals who used the situation to their advantage, worsening the effects of crisis further. I’m trying to describe one such possible scenario in the Snowflake. However, before I do, I want to ask for your opinion. Would you agree that serious computer crime doesn’t get enough coverage and that the real extent of cyber machinations is much greater than we are lead to believe?

Boss

I remember learning the word boss at a fairly young age (it actually sounds the same in Russian). It was someone my dad argued with, my mum got upset by, while my granny kept insisting that hers shouldn’t have got the job in the first place. Having worked professionally for a while now, I can declare that I’ve been lucky with bosses. Our managers are people who used to do the same job we do. They understand the difficulties and encourage openness and collaboration. Still, they do, at times, force their point of view. With explanations, of course. They oversee the projects and sometimes they have to call the shots. But if I believe my manager is wrong, I go and talk to him. No problem there. The situation I’m trying to describe in the Snowflake is the opposite.

There are certain jobs that require more responsibility on the manager’s part, the jobs that carry higher penalties for failure. In a job like that, a boss might be stricter, have a more totalitarian point of view. Now, if your boss was like that and he/she happened to firmly believe something that you felt was wrong, what would you do? And what if you already tried to point out the mistake and he/she refused to listen, refused to even consider it? How would you go about it?

Have you ever faced a situation like this?