Trudy Trinket

My latest novel published on Amazon Kindle is Trudy Trinket.

Trudy Trinket is a teenage girl and lives with her parents and younger sister in Cornwall in the South West of England. She is in the final year of high school and preparing for examinations, with an expectation of gaining good grades to enter University.

It’s April and her eighteenth birthday, and like all girls of her age she wants clothes, makeup, the latest tablet device, and so on, but in her case, she has an unhealthy interest in Dragons, which we all know, do not exist.

At her family party, Trudy’s Grandmother gives her a dragon book, and a dragon onesie, which causes continuation with her parents, as they think they are inappropriate for a girl of her age.

Trudy ignores her parent comments, and over the days following her birthday, she delves into the contents of the book, which included a memory stick which she activates on her computer, and eventually wears the onesie. The consequences of her actions transform her life, way beyond her wildest thoughts, as she experiences a fantastic mythological adventure.

This book has adult themes.

The Concept of "Pet" as a Sentient Smartphone

As a child I had a vivid imagination when playing with my toys, especially I remember thinking that my trains and cars talked, and I spent many happy hours chatting with them.  This desire did not diminish as I grew up and to my delight in the 70’s talking electronic devices started to appear. They spoke a few words only, but they fascinated me as I wondered how the technology would evolve. 

    
I decided on a career in the electronics industry, and my first fifteen years of work were in consumer electronics development. This was the golden time of Electronics in the 70/80’s as I worked on early personal computers and development tools. I remember an electronic speech synthesis motherboard, which I could programme to speak a limited word set. I brought it home and demonstrated it to my children explaining that one-day many toys and consumer products would talk and that you would be eventually able to hold a conversation with them.

After I had retired, I started writing, and my life-long thoughts of a conversation with an inanimate object fascinated me to the extent I had to include the concept. The big question was how. My frustrations of the inadequate performance of cell phones at that time (2004) came to mind, and that enlightened me to consider an interactive talking smartphone as an attractive proposition. Clearly, it would have to offer features way beyond talking, messaging and other functional applications that the smartphone providers could envisage. 

As you will have noticed from your own experiences with smartphones, the vendors offered many features with the latest delivery systems but failed to realise that the key application that users would hook onto was messaging. Therefore, a sentient smartphone would be the ‘Killer Application’ as it would make obsolete the current trend in products and applications. It would perform whatever task is required by the user, and not by the providers. For maximum effectiveness, when embedded within the body it would provide the sensor functions of sight, smell, speech and sound. In this way, the device would bi-directionally communicate with what you view, hear and speak and be your extended source of sound, vision and smell, and would become your closest friend and companion.

With these concepts in mind, I conceived Pet in my first novel ‘Island Homes’ as Kath’s companion device. The year is 2145 and Kath graduates at the University of Dunedin in New Zealand, her ambition, to be a teacher, find a partner and have children. Lonely, with all her friends having left town she purchases the latest Smartphone, which she names Pet and with whom she builds a relationship. This Smartphone is sentient and is the coolest product on the planet. Kath and Pet become inseparable and together they embark on finding her a job, friends, and romance. Her adventures start the day she starts teaching. The events that follow turn out to be far beyond her wildest dreams and her life is dramatically changed when by luck another girl Holly on the other side of the world contacts her using her companion device.

Maybe, this is a far-fetched idea, but you have to consider how fast electronics and software developments are progressing. In the past, we had hard-wired phones in our homes, then we had simple cell phones to provide the same functions, and today we have smartphones and tablets. These devices are complex and offer fantastic features and performance, but they are primitive as they are not sentient. Future products will be sentient with no buttons, no connectors, no need for charging and no apps, only a screen and a sentient microchip. Ultimately, I imagine the Microchip will connect to the brain directly. Thus, the device will be your friend for life and record everything you do. It will be your memory and communications centre, and your secret friend.

The social consequences will be immense, but they are already today with the irritation of people talking and messaging everywhere you go. In time, it will be normal for people to be talking and thought speaking to their companions and real friends. Maybe, that is a more acceptable social interaction.

The Writing Process

I began writing in March 2004 whilst on a vacation in New Zealand. My wife and I had been spending a number of days in the Abel Tasman Park on the South Island, and it came to me that this would be a great backdrop for a Science Fiction Romance novel. Up until then, I had never had any inclination to write a novel so had no idea where to start.

When we returned to the Bed and Breakfast, I started to write an outline of the five novels on my Psion handheld device. By the time, we returned home to the UK I had written 30k words of the first book 'Island Homes’.  I transferred this onto my laptop and completed writing the novel in November 2004.

The novel was too long, and grammar and formatting not at an acceptable level to consider publication. I invested in writing textbooks and attended a creative writing course at my local college. I worked on correcting the book and at the same time continued to write the remaining four books of the series.

'Island Homes' and ‘Virtual Companions’ were written entirely by typing into my Psion and laptop. During the writing course, they suggested that writing into a notebook had creative merit as it prevents you from trying to edit as you write. As a result, I wrote the rest of the series in notebooks, mainly whilst on holidays, which I completed in March 2008, whilst backpacking in Thailand.

Editing is difficult as it is impossible to find all the mistakes, no matter how careful you are. I used a proofreader for 'Virtual Companions' but I still found grammar errors. I started again and, have rewritten all five novels, and with the assistance of friends, eliminated errors.

The process of writing has been a welcome addition to my life.