Without going too far with this, when I think about whether Robbie is symbolic of any real-life corruption, I have to think of him as three people — he’s Perry, Robbie and Trevor all in one. They are three views of the executive in the midst of the fraud. Trevor is at one extreme — the person who knows about the fraud, who was actually part of setting it in motion, and doesn’t care. Perry is at the other extreme — living in a kind of hopeful denial, wishing what he feels to be true wasn’t real, yet nonetheless working quietly to bring the fraud to an end. And then there’s Robbie, in the middle, knowing what he is doing is wrong, struggling with the ethics and morality of it every day, wanting not to benefit from the fraud, but unable to confess to the fraud, or to reject the fraud completely.

So how does that relate to real-life frauds? I think the truth is that real-life frauds are more varied in their motivations than we want to admit, more so, at least, than the press often shows. Some of these people are purely and consciously diabolical. These are the Trevor’s of the world. But some are clearly more conflicted, they are swept up in a corruption that, while it’s of their own making, they want to undo it, like Robbie. And some are blind to the truth because they believe in what they’re doing but are, eventually, too smart and too caring to deny the truth forever, like Perry.

Perry, for instance, in my mind, would have become a whistle-blower had Robbie not agreed to give everything up. Whistle-blowers — of corporate or government corruption – are modern heroes, I think. The pressure and threats that they face when they fight their bosses, when they speak truth to power, it’s unimaginable. We all can talk a good talk about doing what’s right, about avoiding anything unethical, but if it’s you’re job — the paycheck that feeds your children, that heats your house, that puts food on the table — if all that is on the line, would you speak up? Would you put yourself at risk?

So many people wouldn’t.

Perry, in that sense, is the true goodness in the novel. Not just because he listens to his own ethical voice, but especially because he helps — pushes, goads, enables — Robbie to find his own best self, the self that can give everything up, that can do what is right.

Put another way, some of these frauds we see are, I am sure, awful people. People I wouldn’t want to share a cab with, wouldn’t enjoy a drink with. But other people who we see getting led away from the courtroom, I think that most of us would, if we spent time with them and learned what led them to them to their fraudulent and corrupt acts, we’d find that they were actually quite nice. Quite decent. Well intentioned. Human.

None of which is to say I wasn’t ready for some negative reactions to the sex. There had been a couple of editors, in fact, who, in rejecting the manuscript, registered a quite serious level offense at Robbie’s obsession with prostitutes.

And so as I’ve done interviews and, especially, book clubs, I’ve been ready for someone to register a similar complaint. The sex scenes in the book turn increasingly dark and disturbing. I’ve thought someone would be offended.

I always knew I wanted to write a series of scenes that, through the first third of the book, would offer a certain voyeuristic appeal to the reader. Yet I knew that any sense of appeal or attraction would need to disappear for the reader as the book — and the darkness of the sex scenes — progressed. I even wanted readers to, maybe, feel a latent guilt that they’d maybe enjoyed the earlier scenes.

What I didn’t at all expect was the way in which many women who’ve read the book simply brush the sex off as silly dalliances. They aren’t offended. They aren’t bothered. They just take it for what it is: One more sign of Robbie’s inner weakness.

Men are more apt to express that discomfort I was trying to engender. They stammer uncomfortably, glance around the room, wonder exactly who to reconcile what they clearly felt with what is appropriate to say.

An issue men do register with me, although it’s always been privately, is the apparent sexual prowess Robbie seems to display, night after night. A friend of a friend said to me, leaning close, “Now I’m not sure he could be having sex that often, now could he? Must have been a bit of exaggeration there, right? Right?”

One of the many problems with the book having been called a thriller is that for some readers the thriller label inevitably created an expectation that the book should be taken literally, as if each word and sentence were one more clue in the evolving plot.

It’s a maddening reaction for me, the way the thriller label diminished (or shut down), for some readers, the possibility of experiencing the book in that murky, vaguely magical space between reality and fantasy.

Put another way: What matters, in a thriller, is how many times Robbie has sex. What matters, in a work of literary fiction, is that Robbie is struggling to understand his need for sex with prostitutes.

It’s too bad anyone ever saw Shimmer as anything but a work of literary fiction. I can’t quite imagine reading the book, sex scenes included, in any other light.

That’s the kind of thing I find hysterical, even if my friends and family don’t.

I was horrified when I met the group, though, because one of the first people I talked to was a former mainframe programmer from IBM. He’d worked there for many decades.

I wanted to turn and run, sure he’d tear the book apart, exposing me as a hack writer fraud who’d made everything up.

He didn’t. He enjoyed the book. He had many interesting questions and comments. Late in the conversation, though, he said he had one more question. “There’s just one part of the plot that I couldn’t quite follow.”

And from there he proceeded to point out the one truly impossible aspect of the lie at the heart of Shimmer. I was fully aware of the point. But no one else had ever raised a question about it.

Shimmer is fiction, and is fiction filled with exaggerations and untruths. There was no Frederick Fadowsky. There is no Core Communications.

But fictional or not, the book had to be true to the world it created. A part of that, is that the company and the people who ran it all needed to seem possible. The schemes, the lying, the notion of a company built on a secret lie, these things are all clearly possible. We have real world examples, big and small, to which most anyone can compare the world in Shimmer.

Yet there’s an aspect to the fraud that is simply impossible.

I’m torn on whether to point it out here. I won’t today. Maybe soon.

Of course, they’re only conditions I’ve set with myself.  (Punch line: Even then, the negotiations are ugly.)

I do, however, make outlines after I’m well into a project. It might be 50 pages in, it might be 200, but at some point I have to start planning how everything I’ve written will come together. Sometimes, it’s as much as anything a need to catalog the many disparate parts that I’ve put on the page. That catalog then becomes an outline.

With Shimmer, one part of the catalog was setting the timeline for the impending collapse of Robbie’s fraud, especially as the lie manifests in the shadow network (the series of servers and satellites and networking that is secretly supporting the actual company).

I didn’t remember doing this until I found it on my computer, but, as part of sorting out that timeline, I apparently put together a detailed spreadsheet of scenes and dates.

(There’s a PDF of the file here.)

This doesn’t reflect the final timeline — there was no need to update it as the text changed — but the timeline is pretty close to how the book was published.

Interesting note on the side:  “Need to accelerate decline [before this point] OR heighten need for extension beyond collapse.” I think I did the latter. Maybe I did both.

I’m continually surprised by how people read Shimmer and say it was such a fast read. A page-turner. To me, there were so many details — as reflected in this timeline (and the financial spreadsheet I had to put together) — that my experience of the book was slow, a slog through the minutiae.

I guess things like this timeline are part of what made the book quick?

But that’s just how I write.

As a result, I’ll spend a lot of time on various scenes that I ultimately don’t finish. Sometimes, I’ll finish them, then, in the process of editing and finding some structure for the book, I realize there’s no place for the scene.

The Putt-Putt Golf Scene that Unbridled rightly cut from Shimmer was probably one of those scenes that shouldn’t have made it into my final draft. And below is a scene that I cut from Shimmer on my own, prior to sending the manuscript to anyone.

I think I wanted the scene to be at once funny, and puzzling, and reflective of some sort of deeply ingrained dysfunction in the way businesses operate. The disconnection between what is said and what is heard (and what is meant and what is real).

Maybe the scene does that. But I just couldn’t find a place for it in Shimmer.

<><><>

“And so really, in the end, my message to you is very simple,” the salesman was saying.  Morning, and I was sitting in on a sales presentation to a few members of the tech group.  “What I’m offering is a multi-dimensionalized, fully integrated solution that will leverage your core, traditional strengths in what we like to call the second sub-transition of the new economy.”

The salesman shrugged with a confident finality.  He put down the controller to his LCD projector.  He sat down in the chair near the end of the table.

Three young men from system administration were nodding seriously toward the salesman.  Two young women from software development scribbled detailed notes into handheld computers, both also nodding in appreciation.

A few times a month, I still sat through sales presentations from outside vendors – insurance agents, office product resellers, software vendors, each promising greater efficiency, increased productivity and quick cost savings for us.  Like my Monday drop-ins on internal staff meetings, it was another way for me to stay in touch with the routine operations at Core, as well as a chance to see how other companies pitched their products.

After listening to the salesman’s fifteen-minute presentation, I had a question.  Yet I could not find a way to phrase it correctly.  However, Leonard, sitting next to me, was speaking already, already asking the question on my mind.

“I have to ask,” Leonard started, then paused a moment.  “And bear with me, because it will seem obvious that I missed a key point early on in your presentation.”  Leonard was nodding toward the projector screen, but let his hand drift across the marketing materials placed carefully on the table.  “What, well, what exactly is the goal of this?”

“That’s a great question,” said the salesman.  “One that too often does go unanswered. What this is – and at this point I like to use the analogy of your home – what this is the living room furniture, i.e. the sofa, the chairs, the coffee table even,” he said and, for some reason, he laughed lightly as he said it.  “A coffee table made of the finest hand laid wood, I should say.  And in using that analogy I’m as much saying what this isn’t, as I am saying what it is. It is not the dining room.  It is not the kitchen.  It is not the attic and certainly it is not a bedroom or basement.  Again, it’s the living room, Leonard.  A post-analog, post-borders, new economy living room.  And more importantly, it’s an integrated solution.”

The young staffers nodded, scribbling faster, glancing knowingly at one another.

Still the question lingered for me and, I could see, for Leonard.

“Let me put it this way,” Leonard was saying.  “Is it software?  Or is it hardware?”

The salesman nodded quickly, standing now.  “Sure.  Great question.  You see, it’s neither and, in fact, it’s both.  Think of electricity – stored up, generated, passed from power plant to power line, corner pole to building or home.  That, really, is the best comparison I can think of.”

“If and when we were to buy this,” Leonard said, “would the item or items arrive in a box?  Would it come via email?”

“Truthfully,” the salesman said easily, “because we’re so scalable – the industry press, for instance, has consistently called us the most scalable solution in this space – because of our scalability and the highly tailored approach we take to building your solution, because of that we truly arrive how you want us to arrive.  That’s the beauty of our system.  I don’t have to walk in here and sell you on what we have to offer.  Instead I simply walk in, let you tell me what you have to say, and then I shape the resulting package around your needs, not mine.”

“Let’s try this,” Leonard was saying now, and I thought that I could see even the innate patience and understanding so central to Leonard’s being, I thought I could see it withering just slightly.  “Talk to me in terms of its size,” Leonard said.  “Is it small?  Medium?  Large?”

“Again you’ve hit on what I think is one of the great pressure points of companies like yours.  Size doesn’t matter, does it?  You’re up and running twenty-four/seven, right?  You’re open when your doors are closed, yes?  Complete integration with your clients and suppliers, correct?”

“Is it bigger than a bread box?” Leonard asked.

The salesman started to answer, but Leonard cut him off.

“Does it make noise?”

The salesman started to answer, but Leonard cut him off.

“If I touched it, what would it feel like?”

The salesman started to answer, but Leonard cut him off.

“Does it have or emit an odor?”

And it was only now that I saw the slightest, almost imperceptible hint of anxiety in the salesman.  Because finally he’d realized.  Realized that not only did Leonard have no idea what this product or service was, but he’d realized – worst of all – that he had no idea either.  He’d searched his catalog of analogies, anecdotes and quotes, trying again to find some deft and productive response from his two-week sales training course.  But as he searched his memory – scanning all those training handouts, visualizing all those charts drawn so carefully on a massive whiteboard in his employer’s high-tech training facility, replaying all those training tapes he’d listened to in his car and at his home – suddenly these things only highlighted for him that he did not have an answer.

Because he didn’t know.  He had no idea what he was selling.

No one else in the room saw this realization pass over him.  I saw it only in the slightest paleness that crossed his face, in a slight shift in his shoulders, in the way he made a note to himself on a legal pad in front of him.

Leonard was squinting his eyes, his neck stretched out, and I thought that if he leaned forward any farther his chin would touch the table.  “What exactly,” Leonard said, speaking so very slowly now, “in the simplest terms, what exactly does this do?”

And now the salesman nodded just once, smiling again, eyes blinking faster, life returning to a nearly drowned man.  “Now I see what you’re asking.  In simple terms, what does it do?  Leonard, let me tell you,” he said, leaning forward too now, the young Core staffers sitting back in their chairs, staring at him, waiting breathless for his answer, “Leonard, it’s even guaranteed.”

<>           <>           <>

My flippant response is always that I hate research. Which is true. The thought of doing any amount of research for something I write makes me panic, as if I’m back in a college English class, frantically trying to finish a research paper on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the day before it is due.

The better answer is that it was never my intent to write a book that was an accurate portrayal of some technology or business. I could care less about accuracy. What I wanted was to create a world that was true to itself. The technology (the mainframes and blue boxes) and the business (including the financial fraud underlying it) had to work within the context of the book, the characters, the world that they inhabited.

I found this spreadsheet from back when I was mid-way into the first draft of the book. I vaguely remember putting it together. I’d written myself into a lie — a company based on a growing fraud that was nearing an end. But I needed to sort out some details on how the fraud would work.

Here’s the spreadsheet:

(Here’s a PDF of the file.)

I like this line, which is in the notes:

"Exponential increase: Because Global Relay [later changed to
Core Communications] is allowing the client to pass so much
more information, it has an exponentially larger commitment.
Basically, if the Blue Box increases the rate by 40,
then GR has to buy 40 mainframes."

I can only sort of follow what I did on the spreadsheet, by the way. The details of the fraud continued to change as I wrote. What matters is that I used it to get a feel for the exponential growth of the lie, and thus the problem, that Robbie had created.

The other surprise is that I listen to music while I write.

I know I’m not alone in doing this. But, for people who don’t write, it often surprises them that I can write with music playing, a seeming distraction from what I’m doing.

For me, though, the music helps.

While writing the very dark Tacoma stories that ultimately made up my as-yet-unpublished novel Circus Vargas, for instance, I listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. I listened to them over and over, often at the highest volume my ears would allow.

And yet it’s worth noting that, for reasons I’ll never understand, I don’t much listen to the lyrics of songs. This is not limited to listening to music while writing; this is a reality whenever I listen to music.

I find no interest in the insights, imagery or possible meaning of the words to any songs I listen to.

I read Gravity’s Rainbow recently, and even struggled to pay attention to the song lyrics that permeate the book. The same words, set as prose, would have interested me more.

It’s not surprising, I guess, that some of my favorite music, especially while writing, is singer-less (lyric-less? I’m resisting the word “instrumental,” which evokes Muzak and Lawrence Welk) music like Bitches Brew and ambient Brian Eno and Aphex Twin.

Over the past decade, I’ve started listening to the dark, orchestral (and vaguely pretentious) music of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra. There are songs of theirs that I’ve listened repeatedly, more times than seems possible, while writing.

I’m listening to Silver Mt Zion now. “Sow Some Lonesome Corner So Many Flowers Bloom.”

It’s part of the loose playlist I put together to go with Shimmer. Music I listened to while writing and editing the book. Music that, it seems to me now, goes well with the book.

The list is here on my site. And portions are here on iTunes and Last.FM. (Rights issues, apparently, prevented me from putting the complete list on those sites.)

I’ve even managed to copy and paste the list here. It’s in order, by the way, the music following the changes in the novel.

“It sort of loses focus around page 220,” is what I remember Gary saying.  “And somehow, Robbie’s just a little bit too passive.”

I spent a few months trimming and focusing the last third of the book, which was muddied by a series of strange subplots, and making Robbie less passive.

The latter point was relatively easy when I realized that all I needed to do was shift a fair amount of the decision-making in the book from Whitley to Robbie. In the earlier draft, it was Whitley who took the lead in dealing with the near collapse of the company after the hacker attack. It was Whitley who dealt with Wall Street in rebuilding the company’s reputation. It was Whitley who, too often, drove the changes in the company.

In the edited version, Whitley remains strong enough without making those decisions. And the book is better for Robbie being that much less passive.

The only major edit that Greg Michalson at Unbridled asked for was to cut an extended scene of putt-putt golf between Whitley and Robbie. I’d always liked the scene as a relatively silly digression from the growing tension in the book, the increasing distress the characters are experiencing. It may have even been that, for me, writing that scene was a relief from the increasing darkness of Shimmer. The book gets more dark, less funny. Ever more severe.

Maybe I was the one who needed a break, not the reader.

The scene survived in a much more purposeful, focused moment that better portrays the changing relationship between Whitley and Robbie, and better shows Robbie’s realization of how to extend the life of the company, if only temporarily.

Here, though, is the original scene, in its entirety. I have to admit, it is pretty silly.

(The italics are, for the most part, what was cut. The bold text is text I knew I wanted to keep, one way or another.)

<><><>

Maybe it was the relief of knowing that Regence’s attack had failed.  Maybe it was the success of having restored the network in time.  But one week after the attack, I had what I can only call a vision.

It happened near the end of eighteen holes of putt-putt golf, on the advanced course known as Pebble Beach.  It only lasted a second.  But, in that second, I had a revelation.  A revelation that came from Frederick Fadowsky.

In the week since the attack, I’d taken to re-reading Fadowsky’s published journals late at night, poring over the pages as I waited for the sun to light my living room.  Three years earlier, when Trevor had first brought me the idea for the Blue Boxes, I’d read the entire published set of annotated journals.  Now, as I came back to them, Fadowsky struck me as more visionary than ever, an arrogant but brilliant man haunted by wildly prescient, deeply inspired insights into the future.  Fadowsky had foreseen a networked world, and had seen it in a light so separate from any of the purely technical issues.

What he’d seen was an entirely new relationship between people and time.

“The future network,” Fadowsky had written back in 1977, “a truly robust and high-speed network made up of a near infinite number of interdependent machines, a network such as this alters completely and forever people’s relationships to one another.  Fundamentally, a network such as this alters time.  It renders distance meaningless.  It renders physical space unimportant.  It renders such artificial constructs as time zones and borders irrelevant as it recasts the very notion of human interaction.”

Wordy, self-important, filled with an inflated sense of his place in the world, Fadowsky was nothing if not arrogant.  But he was also right.

And so it was that as I entered a game of putt-putt on Friday afternoon, my head was filled with Fadowsky’s thoughts.

Although, thinking back, I know it was more than Fadowsky’s writings that inspired my vision.  It was also the game of putt-putt itself.

I was playing in a group of four, partnered with Whitley, the two of us matched up against a pair of remarkably skinny Java programmers carrying binoculars, a mobile surveying kit, and two handheld GPS units.  There’d been some resistance to the programmers using the GPS units during the game.  Whitley and I hadn’t raised any concerns, but the marketing coordinator on seventeen who doubled as manager of the Pebble Beach course had been wary of allowing the use of any type of electronic navigational devices.  As manager of the course, the marketing coordinator was charged with tracking the scores of all registered players, checking out clubs and balls to those who didn’t have their own, and upholding the course rules as defined by the Official Core Tournament of Putt-Putt Specialists (OCToPuS, or more commonly, Octopus).  Octopus acted as a standards body for each of the six separately operated courses within the building and the five more located in field offices worldwide.  After asking the Java programmers to give a thorough demonstration of the features of the GPS units, the Pebble Beach manager was concerned enough that he called one of the members of the Octopus executive committee.

“This is Rick up at Pebble Beach,” the call started, “looking to see if Octopus has a precedent on the use of handheld GPS.”  He paused, listening.  “Yes, I can hold.”

So common was the internal dialect of games and competitions within the company that none of the players, course attendants or spectators standing near the marketing coordinator’s desk even smiled.

And so ingrained was the culture, that no one thought twice about doing this in front of their CEO.

After a moment, word came that there was not a previous ruling barring the use of GPS, so the units were allowed on the course.

I had never played Pebble Beach.  Only now, as I looked over an eight-page color booklet mapping out the course, did I realize what I’d gotten into.  With eighteen holes stretching across four floors, eight departments, sixteen divisions and a remarkable thirty-two sections of the company, players had to wend their way from the mailroom on four to the cafeteria on eighteen to the edge of the lobby on one, ending again in Marketing on seventeen.  The terrain varied from the relatively slow, low-cut carpeting covering most of the building, to the horrendously fast linoleum in the break rooms and lunch areas, to the uneven, highly unpredictable tile surfaces in bathrooms and various meeting rooms.  The course took players through hallways, workspaces, conference rooms, break rooms, closets, three different elevators, a copy center, two sets of hard steel stairs, three vice presidents’ offices, and a small atrium I’d had no idea existed.  There were chip shots over conference tables, long balls sent careening across the carpet of a fifty-foot hallway, combination shots to be bounced off of printer stands, file cabinets and doors.

I noticed, in a footnote, that the course had been designed by Perry.

Like all the putt-putt courses, Pebble Beach was as much an obstacle course as it was a golf course.  The obstacles included furniture, printers, potted plants and the nearly endless movement of people through the building.  Balls had to be played between the running feet of the office messengers, the clogs of the assistants in HR, and the slow-moving sneakers of wandering programmers.

The course not only tested players’ ability to determine the shortest routes to the holes, it also tested their ability simply to locate the holes at all.  It was a situation made more difficult by the fact that usually the holes were not really holes, given that cutting into the floor on a regular basis had been deemed “impractical and inappropriate” by the facilities department in a still-famous memo written by Julie.  “Although the requested holes would result in no impairment to the structural integrity of the building,” she’d written after Octopus’s joking request had somehow made it to her desk, “the addition of such holes presents an engineering challenge unprecedented in the history of this company.  Sadly, it is also a challenge insurmountable at this time.”

And so, although cups were sometimes placed on their sides, although shipping tubes were laid lengthwise on the floor, most of the holes were actually objects that had to be hit with one’s ball.  A steel trash can, a clay planter, a fire extinguisher, a broken and soon-to-be-discarded computer.  This meant that in the company’s tech and marketing departments, where the various courses most frequently crossed over one another, there was often a noise like a violent Midwestern hail storm as players slammed balls into objects spread out across the floor.

As with most of the Octopus courses, it took about an hour to finish Pebble Beach.  Most playing took place at lunch or between three and midnight.  Even if the playing had taken place throughout the day, however, there was no manager in the building worried about the apparent loss in productivity.  The people who played most tended to be the top performers in the company – extremely bright, deeply committed, and highly stressed people who, if they hadn’t found putt-putt, would have had to participate in some other form of emotional and physical release.  And during the games themselves, a remarkable amount of work was usually accomplished.  Players talked through a range of solutions to seemingly impossible system problems, they discussed strong but incomplete ideas for new products or services, they formed plans for pursuing new strategic partners.  All of this meant that most players – the best and worst, those who played a few times a week and those who played only every few months – could name the course and hole they were on when some bright moment of clarity had come to them.

I played only every few weeks, usually limiting myself to nine holes and staying on the novice or intermediate courses.  But today I’d found my way onto Pebble Beach with Whitley, who’d encouraged me to extend a weekly security meeting with her.  “You look especially tired,” she had said as she led me toward the first tee – a printer stand in a hallway on the north side of the building.

Through the first few holes, I was too occupied with the security plan we were still discussing to notice how well Whitley was playing.  By the fifth hole, though, I realized what was happening.  Playing with a care, speed and purpose that was at once deeply creative and hauntingly dispassionate, Whitley had built an eight-stroke lead over the rest of us.  By the seventh hole, she was ten strokes ahead of us.

“I’m a one handicap,” she said to me as we rode up an elevator, the Java boys desperately attempting to recalibrate their GPS units despite apparent interference from the elevator’s doors.

“Which means?” I asked her.

She tapped her white teeth.  She pulled at her black sleeve.  She smoothed her black suit coat where it lay against her sides.  In a moment, one of the Java programmers said quietly, “It’s the highest possible rating in the Octopus system.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

The two programmers nodded slowly, seriously.  Wide-eyed in the presence of genuine greatness.

Whitley shrugged, smiling lightly.  “It’s true,” she said, turning away from me, pushing that sharp black hair from her eyes as she then gripped her club with a casual balance and care.  “I’m a bad ass.” She leaned back, lifted her club nearly two feet from the floor, then all but drove the ball out of the elevator as the doors opened onto thirteen.

For most of the first nine holes, I had been barely hanging in the game.  I fell as far as twelve strokes back, totally unfamiliar with the course, the obstacles, even the color maps we were following through the building.  But that began to change.  Maybe I was inspired by Whitley’s methodical commitment to the game, by the Java boys’ obvious passion for each shot they took.  Maybe I was gaining confidence as we entered a series of floors that were much more familiar to me. Whatever the reason, by the twelfth hole I’d pulled ahead of the Java boys.  By the fifteenth hole, I’d cut Whitley’s lead to four.

“So much promise,” Whitley said, watching as I sank a twenty-foot shot.  “Some would even call it hope.”

The sixteenth hole was another elevator shot.  This time, though, we had to hit the ball into an elevator as it opened, rather than swinging out of the elevator.  I stood near the center of the floor, the four of us hidden behind a series of abnormally high workstation walls.  We were sixty feet from the elevator.  Essentially, the hole was a maze, the kind of hole that, more than anything, challenged players’ knowledge of the building’s layout and their ability to read the course map.  The programmers were now studying the GPS units’ bright displays, heads bent low, staring intensely, seeming to believe the machines could foretell their fortune and future.  Whitley had clearly decided to follow whatever path the Java boys took, she too putting her faith in the predictions of the machines.  But as I waited for the programmers to absorb the GPS results, I happened to tap the end of my club against a file cabinet behind me.  I turned, hearing the flat, metallic sound echoing out from the cabinet, and after a moment I noticed that there were actually two cabinets, very wide and tall, pushed together behind me.  They’d been placed back-to-back, their tops forming a five-foot by five-foot platform some six feet in the air.  And I had a thought.  With surprising ease, I lightly flipped my ball up onto the tops of the cabinets.  It bounced twice, rebounding easily off a forgotten pile of paper, then rested almost dead center on the two cabinets.  Whitley turned around a moment later, just as I was lifting myself up.

“No,” I heard her saying slowly.  “Don’t.”

I stood on the file cabinets now, my head in the space near the open duct work and fans that hung from the ceilings of every floor.  I was still sixty feet from the elevator.  But now I had a clear line of sight.  I would have to hit the ball the full sixty feet in the air, above the workstations, the walkways and an open meeting space that lay between me and the elevator.  I’d also have to wait to hit the ball till the elevator doors opened, given that I wasn’t quite willing to drive the ball toward the doors before they opened, in so doing exposing a group of innocent employees to my oncoming ball.

It was a bad idea from a number of points of view – the club was ill-suited to an airborne shot of any distance, let alone sixty feet; there was a quite high risk of injury to passersby and the growing group of spectators who were watching their CEO stand on two file cabinets with a golf club; and, not least of all, there was the significant likelihood of a lawsuit or workplace safety filing whether I hurt anyone or not.

I decided to try the shot nonetheless.

“Clear out, please!” I yelled, cupping my hands to my mouth.  “This will just take a second!”

Heads popped up from the workstations around me.  A group of five now sitting in the meeting space near the elevator all stood to turn toward the voice.  People in the walkways stopped in place, looking around, finally settling their eyes on me.  After a minute, all had cleared out of my way, pulling others along with them.

I watched the elevator doors open once, then again, then a third time.  Even people who didn’t play putt-putt knew the Octopus rules prevented them from helping me at all – holding open the doors, pressing the button to draw the elevator back to the floor, even calling someone on another floor and warning them to stay clear of that particular elevator.  Everyone knew the shot had to take place within the normal flow of the natural workplace, even if it was a workplace made artificially self-conscious by the presence of four putt-putt golfers and the now fifty employees standing to the sides, watching them.

I stared as the elevator doors opened again.  I silently counted out the seconds before they closed.  I made note of how long it took the passengers to step forward from the door.  In all I tried to get a sense of the elevator’s motions, its timing, its rhythms.

I took a practice swing.  I slowed my breathing.  Whitley, standing near my feet, quietly asked if I’d ever even been on a real golf course.  I shook my head.  No.

And in what to me would seem like one long second, one motion, one thought, one vision of all the space around me, I then saw the elevator doors open, saw two people slowly clear out of the elevator itself as I moved my head to the ball, already drawing back my club, bringing it forward not hard but firmly, making contact with the ball, lofting it out into the air above the emptied workstations, over three small statues of the empire state building decorating someone’s desk, over the now abandoned chairs of the empty meeting space, toward the doors now beginning to close, closing not slowly, not quickly, but, it seemed, at the perfect speed.

The ball slid in as the doors made contact.

And the crowd went wild.

And I saw myself there, standing on two file cabinets, putt-putt golf club in my hand.  Not sure what I was doing, not caring at all, thinking for that moment about this section of this floor of this building in New York, fifty people sharing the silliest of experiences here for this short second as work went on around them, Core Communications passing data to its clients worldwide, its employees talking to co-workers, suppliers, partners around the globe, its shadow network bouncing data between satellites and hidden outposts, all of it in motion in that frozen second as we cheered.

And I saw it.

Fadowsky was right.

The kind of high-speed network made possible by the Fadowsky Boxes changed completely how we had to view time.  The shadow network working simultaneously in every hemisphere, above the north and south poles, in just seconds passing information from a western day to an eastern night.  Time meant something else completely.

I stood [on the file cabinets] and saw the network.  Saw myself.  And I saw an answer.  A way to take so much pressure off the shadow network.

…

…

I found a whole series of notes I made before – sometimes years before — writing Shimmer. I don’t remember writing any of these notes. Which isn’t necessarily surprising – I’ve re-read any of things I’ve written and there are sometimes pages and pages I don’t remember writing.

These were notes I was taking while working on another manuscript, Powdered Milk. I usually do that — take an increasing amount of notes on the next project while finishing the current project. It keeps me from panicking about finishing the current project.  And it my mind in two places.

8/30/97

A very tall building. Maybe an insurance company. With lots and lots of file cabinets. (And one day we have to open them up.)

10/19/97

Somebody using computer boxes to make a fort entrance to their cubicle

1/14/98

First line:

As a kid I had dreams (or, I’d started having dreams where I could fly. I didn’t launch myself off of buildings, though. Didn’t take firm Superman steps that catapulted me up into the air. Instead I only brought my right leg up to my chest, in a moment lifted the left, my tightly curled body hovering a few feet off the ground.

12/8/98

The Vice President of Sales is reluctantly telling me that Kenny G. is, really, not very good.

12/9/98

Buttery.

12/12/98

So much of my life is conducted from the sitting position.

2/14/99

buttery

“We’d entered a period of half-finished projects.”

“I’m looking forward to this movie. I think it’s going to be sordid.”

4/6/99

Lying. It is definitely about lying.

And, probably, money.

And definitely a big, growing company with lots of turnover. whole divisions. whole floors.

And there is a sales office and other offices, out in the field, removed from the home office.

“I’m sitting in a Holiday Inn outside Cincinnati watching Spectravision at 2 in the morning, just five hours from a meeting, and I still haven’t gone to sleep.”

4/7/99

The constant effort to keep one’s office clean — the floor, the shelves, the desktop, the unique and separate parts of the desktop, the computer, the emails, the desktop of the computer. The ants crawling in through windows after a rain. Even here on the 23rd floor.

Collabra, Marimba, Outlook, Copeland. Naming, we are constantly attempting to name, to make sense of, define. We call our computers anmials, our programs people, our areas countries, our floors continents. We have code names, we have cover names, we have version numbers and subverion roll outs.

4/8/99

No sleep. Employees coming and going. Hiring and company meetings and memos and emails and small and large and all kinds of meetings.

But what is the product?

4/19/99

Somewhere out of NYC, some office that does “data processing’ and that is really retyping all the information from one legacy system to the new system. And maybe the growth, the investment, something was built on the notion that they had found a solution to bridge the gap — implicitly, they’d done it through a computer. But, they hadn’t. They’d lied.

They (he?) bury the cost by having the same typing group do other things — check processing, payroll, mail processing. Something.

Maybe there are multiple groups. That bridge — originally so simply a task — broken into a series of smaller steps, all coded and blind-boxed, and kept in order by barcodes and maybe an all-important customer code.

And the customer code is a single point of failure.

The multiple groups, maybe some parts of the bridge are handled by independent contractors who type and retype one part of the piece and then pass the information along.

No one can know what they do. Or who they work for.

Maybe these groups are separate companies, owned largely by the main character (or characters). Maybe he had to turn to some outsiders, who now are holding this against them.

On some level, this was good, because it drew attention to the book. But there were downsides. The Madoff connection cast Shimmer in even more thriller-esque light. The book isn’t a thriller, but was sometimes perceived as one – because it involves a Ponzi Scheme and lies and so on — and the Madoff parallels only supported that, as it empowered reviewers and interviewers to throw out words like “timely” and “prescient.”

During many interviews, I end up spending a great deal of time politely explaining how the book is not a true thriller and was written long before – 10 or more years before – the Madoff story broke.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that another downside of the Madoff comparisons was a certain skepticism among book sellers that Shimmer had been bought, let alone written, before the Madoff story broke. It’s as if the book sellers were concerned Shimmer was a quickie book, written simply to capitalize on the Madoff story, almost like one of those “unauthorized” biographies that come out when a star dies and/or is imprisoned.

I always said that I’d written the first version of the book 10 years before it was published, which is true. But the other day I found a file of notes and ideas for stories and novels. The dates are 1995 and 1997, when I’d finished a manuscript for a novel, High of Sixty, Occasional Rain (about a bankrupt bill collector hiding out in Alaska) that was being shopped in New York. I was trying to figure out what I’d work on next. I didn’t start Shimmer till 1999 — instead I worked on Powdered Milk (about a reporter covering a series of arsons in New England) — but was making notes about ideas for Shimmer before then.

Here are some of the notes. In one form or another, all of this made it into the novel:

New York

4/22/95

Riding in a cab that’s squeaking … the sound echoing through the car, cruising up Broadway.

7/4/97

The walls lined with file cabinets, the grand views of Colgate in New Jersey.

Living on the 39th floor of a building with a subway stop in the basememt.

Maybe this is the novel where there’s something that happens, some freak accident, one click too many on an insurance form, and the character is wronged.

And, or, also, there’s the proposal at work, some … campaign, a new product feature, something that begins to spiral, build and escalate.

All of it’s in New York. All of it is in buildings. In the winter. In the dark.

…

I’ll post some more from the note file soon.