by Anne Louise Bannon

Google used to think that I was a 35-year-old male. I was in my mid-50s at the time, and I’m a cisgendered female, so I found this revelation highly amusing. Google’s algorithms have gotten a lot better, so sadly, the jig is up on that one. But the reason Google got confused back then was that I was into reading a site called Lifehacker.com.

Lifehacker.com is still with us, but when I was reading it, the emphasis was on the technology. I learned a lot about flashing ROMs on Android phones, overclocking my hard drive, and other such geeky things. Some of it was because I had to. There was no one else in the household who could get the frickin’ printer to work with the new laptop. Or figure out storage apps. Or get Word to do what we wanted it to do, not what it thought we wanted.

I did not grow up thinking of myself as a geek. My sister and I were the artistic ones in the family. Science was, obviously, a guy thing, with my father programming computers and my brother eventually becoming a surgeon. Except that both my sister and I eventually got into webpages and blogging and that sort of thing.

Compared to most of my writing friends, I am a geek. Over the years, as I have built my website (using a content management system), and played with my computers, bought a smart watch, tricked out my phone with fun ringtones and notifications, my writing friends sat back in awe.

The truth is, I’m a piker. I have become friends with some folks who are genuine geeks – people who write code for places like Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the physics department at California Institute of Technology. They are people who not only know what a Raspberry Pi is, but also know how to make them work, which is the long way of explaining how I came to write my latest novel, Running Away to Boston.

I had a mother-daughter story, in which the two had been separated due to a terrible, terrible mistake. The daughter, Jannie Miller, is asked to find someone and is reunited with her mother, Rae, when Rae has to warn Jannie of finding the person. What I needed was a good reason for that person to be hidden and an evil plot.

I’d been reading a lot about computer and internet security, mostly to protect my tech but then, the idea began to form, and I chose to set my story in the shadowy world of computer hackers. My only problem was that I am not a real geek. I may know a lot about how computer code is written, but I can’t write code myself. However, that was also my salvation because the story may take place in that environment, but it’s not about the technology. It’s about the people who are using it.

It can’t be about the tech. For one thing, technology changes so fast. The story would have been outdated before it could be published. Secondly, watching people write code is not very interesting. You’re watching a screen and pounding keys.

So, the story is about characters. While there is an evil corporation out to take over the world, the story is really about Jannie coming to terms with the mother she thought was lost. It’s also about Jannie dealing with the other broken relationships in her life. The tech may be the solution to one of the problems, but the story is about people going up against huge odds and finding a way to come out on top. Computer code may be the tool my characters are using, but the story is about them.

Now, I had to do quite a bit of additional research – mostly reading lots of technology and web safety sites. I also asked my certified geeks to read the text and offer suggestions and corrections, which they did. They even caught a few plot holes that had nothing to do with computers. The fun part of my research was that it was stuff I was reading, anyway.

While I am not a full-on geek, I do like technology, and writing about it was an interesting exercise.

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Author Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. Her latest novel is thriller Running Away to Boston. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. Visit her website at AnneLouiseBannon.com or follow her on Facebook.

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