It’s a countdown to the election and my new Brooks/Lotello stand-alone novel, JK’s Code! 🤩🌟📚 In case you missed it in my exclusive VIP newsletter blast on Monday, I’m celebrating with a limited $0.99 pre-order sale, so get this book CHEAP while you can! Also, below is the cover reveal, and a peek into where this book came from, how it was written, my experience with the dark web 😱, and what you can expect to find when JK’s Code releases on December 15th, 2020 in eBook and in print. Enjoy!
From the Desk of Ronald S. Barak
“How I Write”
In writing my latest novel, JK’s Code, I had the support and camaraderie of sixteen volunteer beta team readers of several drafts of the novel who provided me with great input and feedback. Along the way, several of them asked me to explain how I write.
The answer is occasionally with a pen, but mostly with my laptop keyboard. Now that I’ve disposed of my wise guy answer, here are some more genuine answers.
First of all, I don’t write until I have an idea pop into my head about which I become passionate, really passionate. Usually, it’s born out of something I read in the news or see on the news somewhere that prompts me to say “Wow, what if . . .
So when something hits my mind and sets me to thinking, I just start “pantsing,” writing by the seat of my pants. I don’t outline first and I don’t have any idea where the story is going until I get there, and by there I pretty much mean both the journey and the end of the story.
In JK’s Code, I actually had an itch to write a story about cybercrime involving the dark web and alternative strange forms of currency such as bitcoins. I had never dealt in any such currency and I had never been on the dark web. I had heard that bad people lurk on the dark web and that it was a dangerous place to go. To check it out, I actually bought a dedicated laptop computer and installed a Tor dark web browser on that laptop. I created a complete alias to function on that laptop, a different name, a different email address, etc. I guess I’m more risk averse than I am brave!
I figured out how to find my way around the dark web. I actually bought and traded in some of the alternative currencies. And a strange thing happened. I found it all pretty boring. I gave up on this story idea completely. My dark web laptop sits in a dark closet in my office. I haven’t used or looked at it again.
Months went by, and . . . nothing. Then, all of a sudden, it came to me, the story here—at least for me—was not this strange currency, but rather, election fraud. Like all of us, I was seeing headlines in the news virtually every day about how the Russians—with President Trump’s knowledge and support—manipulated the 2016 U.S. presidential election in his favor—and are going to do it again and even more aggressively this year.
I would still use the dark web and even darker characters. It just would be about election fraud and not alternative currency. I would write about a 20 year old computer genius, Jake Klein, JK for short, who decides to drop out of college to make his fortune in cybersecurity, kind of a cousin of cybercrime. Instead of committing cybercrime, my young protagonist would establish his cybersecurity brand overnight by figuring out whether (how) the Russians were (again?) planning to alter the U.S. presidential election in 2020—and then coming up with his own software application to stop the bad guys dead in their tracks.
JK is certainly more brave and daring than I would ever be! Did I maybe I create JK so I could live vicariously through him? Beats me; maybe so.
So, I sat down and started writing JK’s Code. I didn’t have a clue where this story was going or how it would turn out. I just knew this kernel of a story had really appealed to me, resonated with me. I was so excited and driven to find out where JK’s journey would take him, and to what end, that I wrote the novel, approaching 400 pages, in just six weeks. (By comparison, my prior novels, also “pantsed,” typically took me six to eight months to write.)
I had no idea what the twists and turns in JK’s journey would be until they happened, and there are lots of them in this story. I also had no idea how the story was going to end until I was only about 20 pages from that ending, when it finally all came to me—or my characters.
And the protagonist I had in mind when I started writing JK’s Code turned out not to be my protagonist at all. The protagonist just kinda crept up on me out of the blue, like the story itself did.
So that’s my story—how I write and JK’s Code—and I’m sticking to both of them.
JK’s Code releases in print and in eBook on December 15. It is extremely timely. I keep weaving relevant current events into the story every single day and will continue doing so until my publishing house finally says, “Hey, Ron, sorry, but we gotta go to press and you gotta save anything more for the sequel.”
