Here’s the MP3 of me reading installment five of After the Siege — back in London, with a slight sniffle. Argh. Got lots of the story written on the plane last night, though.
Update: This recording cuts off mid-sentence! Whups! I’ll pick it up where I left off the next time I record. I believe that the reason the hiss cuts out midway on this recording is that’s where my laptop’s fan switched itself off. If I can figure out how to keep it from switching itself on in future, I’ll do so.
Part Four of my serialized novel-in-progress, Themepunks, is up on Salon today. This installment deals with the arrival of the first MBA on the little hacker enclave in South Florida, and what he plans to do with their imaginations:
“You know,” he said, after they’d ordered coffee and desert, “it’s all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it’s providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can’t find room for — that’s superabundance.”
“I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.
“There you go. It’s a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, “My daughter, Anushka, is 12, and my son, Lee, is 8. I haven’t lived with them in four years and I’ve only seen them twice since. They’re good kids, though. It just couldn’t work with their mother. She’s Russian, and connected — that’s how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections — so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they’re good kids.”
“Only twice?”
“We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”
Here’s the fourth installment of me reading my story After the Siege — get the MP3.
