Robots for every girl
When planning this book I really wanted it to have a wide impact. With this in mind, the location and characters aren’t described in physical detail. It was tricky but hopefully worth it. Especially given I’m a (relatively) old, (definitely) white male.
Girls in Western, developed cities often already have significant exposure and advantages when it comes to technology. There may also be more role models for them around. That is definitely true where I live in Silicon Valley.
Obviously, it’s impossible for me to understand what lives are like in all cities in the world, let alone what they are like for teenage girls. So my attempt to make it appeal as broadly as possible was going to be a big challenge.
Whilst it was much harder, and perhaps not as strong, I have written the location and characters to be generic.
Note: Many of you who know me may be saying “What, Mr Focus is not being focused???” OK, yes, you got me. I’m making the focus sacrifice. Going for breadth instead of depth.
When I was thinking through the book the challenge kept coming up. When you are thinking about characters one the first activities is to describe them. Any description would have immediately limited the audience that could directly to relate to them.
So I decided not to describe the main three characters at all. I’m really curious about what people imagine they look like. For the 20 or so people who have read the book so far, they have described them in a wide variety which is great.
Then there is the name. Whilst there is a big variety of names, most of them are culturally or nationally based. I spent hours and hours trying to find names that worked for anyone, but ended up making up names. Hence why we have;
- AZ — main character. The name came from A to Z.
- 10 — I thought it was kind of geeky but interesting. Binary.
- Li — this one was more tricky. It sounds like it could be Asian but isn’t. Lea and sometimes Lee is another way to spell this name.
Other characters in the book I’ve tried to give a very wide range of international flavours. Lucia Muchado, Mrs D’Silva, Mr Habai, Dusan.
Any feedback on how this comes across in the book would be greatly appreciated.
Here is some more outline;
