Hello friends, I continue to put the finishing touches on The Quantum Contingent . I looked back at how it has changed over the last few months. The easiest metric is word count. From a cover-to-cover perspective, the novel progressed as follows: Alpha: 70,918 Alpha 2: 72,398 Beta 1: 76,178 Beta 3: 80,064

So, from the rough draft manuscript to today, the book grew over 12%! A great many of these changes came from your feedback (which I am grateful for) and some from just plain old polishing of the manuscript. This doesn’t tell the entire story however, because in any good editing process, you also cut some things out, so that’s a net growth of 12%, even accounting for the subtraction of some of the text that needed to be cut along the way.

The novel takes place across 10 different countries . In the U.S. it covers 8 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico . I’ve tried hard to make the descriptions of each of these locations match the real locations. I used photos from my travels, as well as google maps to get layouts and movement through different areas factually correct. The descriptions of places like Ngorongoro Crater (featured in the photo at the top of my blog page) are accurate as well. One city that is described grew significantly between now and the timing of the novel, 2028, and that should be obvious to the reader. One interesting challenge was getting my characters from place to place during this globe-trotting spy thriller. I can only imagine the effort that goes into making a spy film!

Similarly, I took real technologies and simply extrapolated their capabilities into the future. I touch on many technologies in the novel as outlined on my technology page.

Surprisingly, some of the more difficult things to write are things like the blurb that goes on the back cover. Anyway, rest assured, the book is coming. I will make (or beat) my self-imposed deadline of one year post retirement (March 1st, 2022).

Let me know if you’d like to know anything else about the process, or would appreciate a deep dive on any of the technologies.

Until next time,

Greg