Writing novels is essentially an indulgence.
My first book, Reality, gave me the opportunity to address one of my bugbears – that people these days seem to blame everyone but themselves for the things that happen to them.
Writing it also gave me the opportunity to explore one of my favourite topics about how technology is changing every facet of society. Not only that, but I also got to take the piss out of everything and everyone, which is always great fun.
In case you didn’t realise it – frenzship is a book about friendship. I find the elusive nature of friendship fascinating. Having left my country of birth over 30 years ago and having lived in different places since, I’ve made new waves of friends and lost touch with many others along the way.
Friendship is something you can’t pin down. There don’t seem to be any rules about who you make friends with. And there seems to be no use-by date. Old friends can reappear in your life out of the blue and it feels as if they were always there.
frenzship explores the concept of friendship, but the technology twist on life as we know it plays a pivotal part in the story. In this era of Facebook friends and Linked-In connections, we make relationships online almost every day. While Gen Xers upwards scoff at the idea that people you’ve met online can really be friends, it doesn’t stop them dating online. Gen Yers reject old-fashioned notions of what constitutes a friend and insist on the validity of their online relationships. I don’t take sides. I’m not interested in writing polemics. I like to expose issues and explore them from every angle to force people to think about them and make up their own minds.
Reality and frenzship are both provocative books designed to make you reconsider how you see the world. From a plotting perspective, new technology constitutes a wonderful disruptive tool to turn things that were once familiar on their heads.
Without giving too much of the plot away and spoiling the book, frenzship is an app created by a world expert on affiliative relationships or what you might call friendship. In his view, there are real friendships and all the other imperfect ones we satisfy ourselves with because the selection pool we can access through the chance meetings of our lives is so small.
What would our lives be like if we could make the most fulfilling relationships imaginable, with people with whom we should be friends? With people we could never possibly meet in our daily lives.
That would be fantastic. Surely we would sing to ourselves, what a wonderful world!
Or would that be a dystopian Big Brother nightmare?
What is a friendship anyway?
I guess you’ll have to read frenzship to find out.
You can buy your copy here