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Thirty Years Late More about Deep Code
I started this book a long time ago.
I don’t mean last year, or even five years ago. I mean 1996. I was a runner back then — a couple of marathons, more half‑marathons than I can count. I trained a lot, about 2,000 miles a year. Those miles had me writing stories in my head, which eventually made their way onto my first‑gen Apple computer and were saved on a floppy disk. The words went from floppy to hard drive, then to another hard drive. I stopped running, and I put the writing down too. What I assumed would be a couple of months turned into three decades.
That’s not a tragic story. Life got in the way, which is what life does. The good news is that abandoned words don’t go anywhere. They just sit there, patient, waiting the right time.
A friend of mine told me about KDP — Kindle Direct Publishing — and that lit a spark. Now retired, maybe I could finally fulfill a promise I’d made to myself long ago: to become a writer. My first attempt was a collection of short stories, Jacks: Seven Short Stories. Each individual story is available on Amazon, and the full collection is available in paperback as well.
My current effort is to revive a thriller novel that, back then, I gave the generic title Long Story. What surprised me was how much of it still worked. Not the prose. The prose was rough. I’ve rewritten almost all of it. But the ideas were solid. A murder. A granddaughter who won’t leave it alone. Something buried in a piece of software with implications far bigger than anyone realizes, including the way the country manages its elections.
What surprised me more was how much the world had moved toward the story instead of away from it. When I first wrote it, the premise was speculative to the point of being a stretch. Today it reads like something you might have skimmed past in the news. I had to update the technology a bit, especially the advent of AI, but it fit well into the original concept. I didn’t need to update how plausible it sounded.
The book is called Deep Code. It’s set on the North Fork of Long Island, which is water I know, on boats I’ve actually sailed. A retired software engineer turns up dead off Orient Point. His grandchild is an NYPD detective, who does not accept the official version. What Mickey finds runs a good deal further than one dead man sailing the Sound.
I’ll say more about the story itself in the coming weeks. For now I’ll say this: it’s a thriller, it moves, and it ends somewhere I suspect most readers won’t see coming.
Where things stand right now: I’m on version seven, deep in final edits. Not the fun kind. I’m hunting down inconsistent apostrophes, checking that a Tuesday in chapter twelve is still a Tuesday in chapter thirty. Yesterday I spent an unreasonable amount of time confirming that a character’s dog appears in the right places at the right times. Most of my stories have an animal in them — usually a dog.
More soon.
— Paul Otto
paulottowrites 