How I got published
The debut author tells Dolores Gordon Smith that he did a lot of rewriting before his cyber thriller, Trading Down, was published
STEPHEN NORMAN
Dolores Gordon Smith
‘It goes back to a Christmas party. There were probably 800 of us IT folks partying hard on the South Street Seaport on lower Manhattan. We were the IT department of Merrill Lynch, America’s largest broker. On the way home, I got a phone call to say that our new, vast data centre in Staten Island was melting down and so were the thousands of computers inside it. The New York markets were due to open in seven hours and all our systems were down. What was I going to do about it? Oops.
‘I told the story of that night to my non-geeky friends and to my surprise, they were really interested. (It’s not easy being a geek at dinner parties.) I’ve had loads of other disasters in my time in trading banks: cyber attacks, lighting storms, 9/11. So I thought – why not a crime thriller that brings the reader into that world? That’s half the story behind Trading Down.