by Max Barry
I used many reader ideas. I wasn’t sure I should admit that in print, but my legal advice is that you can’t copyright ideas, so thanks a lot, suckers. Wait. You didn’t type that, did you? Good. Because people would kill for your job, you know.
Thank you to everyone who tossed me an idea. Even the ones I didn’t use helped clarify the boundaries of my story’s world. My favorite was from Meredith Course, who educated me about brain plasticity and free-roaming neurons. Carl’s “Fiber Shield” is from an idea by Kragen Sitaker. Even the first edition cover was chosen with online help, particularly from Reddit: thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts.
Thank you to Mike Taylor for allowing me to pilfer the heart and soul of his wonderful blog post, “A brief, yet helpful, lesson on elementary resource-locking strategy,” which so perfectly depicts why programmers should not be allowed to mix with regular humans that I couldn’t do better than to ape it.
Michael Ian Minter is responsible for the original comment quoted above. I don’t want to encourage people to go around goading authors. Particularly when the author is me. But Minter essentially convinced me to do this, and I would have blamed him had it gone badly, so I guess I should give him credit now.
Thank you to Jen for her patience on the days I struggled with my daily deadline (“I’m not happy with my page. I have to rewrite my paaaaage”), and for telling me it sounded like a good idea to begin with. Ditto to my agent, Luke Janklow, who also made sure this fun experiment in real-time fiction didn’t break me financially, by finding enthusiastic fans in Zachary Wagman and Tim O’Connell of Vintage Books, Aviva Tuffield and Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe Publications, and, with Brian Siberell, Cathy Schulman of Mandalay Pictures.