How It Started: Pt. 1
A question I get pretty frequently. Everyone loves a good origin story, right? Well, if memory serves me correctly, The Hacker’s Monarchy made its first debut in 2011, but not as people would think. The novel you all will come to know and love (fingers crossed!) began as a short story in a Craft of Fiction course at Old Dominion University taught by Professor Oleander. I’ll never forget her name as she forced us to memorize it along with every student’s name in the class using an associative mnemonic device. Her’s was associating a name with alliteration, “Roots of a Tree, Renee.”
Anyway, one of her assignments was to write a one-page short story, or something akin to that. I wrote a story that actually has no connection and nothing to do with The Hacker’s Monarchy at all. To be honest, I didn’t even like what I wrote. I submitted the assignment and received perfect marks (I promise!), but the only comment on the entire submittal was “Nice Title!” I thought to myself, you know what? That is a nice title.
Flash forward a year and I was now in a Fiction Workshop, with a different professor, by the name of Professor McManus. With this course, we had the unique opportunity of submitting ANY creative works to be critiqued and evaluated by himself and our peers. For the first assignment, I had been marinating on that “Nice Title!” comment for a while, thinking, what is The Hacker’s Monarchy?
It wasn’t until I heard this song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjzc-5Y9JpE in case the link get’s taken down or stops working, the song is a remix of a Johnny Cash Song, called the Apparat Remix of “I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow” (Give it a listen if you want!) But that song transported me to the opening setting of The Hacker’s Monarchy, where I saw two of my main characters walking along dilapidated train tracks in some dystopic modern-day city. I just thought, “Who are these people? Where are they? What’s their relation to The Hacker’s Monarchy” (To be clear, this is not the opening scene in the book! But, actually inspired a later chapter.)
After that, the pen just started writing, while my eyes followed along. Rather, my fingers kept on typing. Before I knew it, I had finished the first chapter of The Hacker’s Monarchy, at about 12,000 words or about 25 standard Microsoft Word double-spaced pages. Now keep in mind, most students in the class turned in assignments with an average page length of about 5 pages for critique. So, coming in with 25 pages was absolutely nerve-racking. I thought these people were going to hate me, complain to the professor, or simply just not read it. (Hey, he never set a maximum!) But I was serious about writing and maximizing this rare opportunity. Then came the day of handing out my printed copies to all of my peers and seeing their faces just drop, making the wait until critique day even more painful… (gulp).