The Book

Read into my debut novel The Cyclone Release

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On the air:

  • Story Discovery Podcast - A reading of the new short story, “Man-Man” and discussion of The Cyclone Release with hosts JW McAteer and Melissa Collings.

  • Coffee Conversation with Heena - A discussion of the writing process, and The Cyclone Release with host Heena Pardeshi.

  • All Things Writing - A far-reaching conversation about Silicon Valley, the writing life, and the making of The Cyclone Release with host Bryan Nowack.



The Cyclone Release

A Novel of Silicon Valley


Chapter 1

Brendon Meagher sat alone in his spartan cubicle searching through the system. Finally, he found the list of hyperlinks that would show him what all the hype was about, and he clicked the last one. A window opened, displaying a splash page that hundreds of people had seen by then—the engineers who had built it, the capitalists who had funded it, the customers who had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy it, and now Brendon.

This first look at it stopped him. Few outside the tech business would understand the beauty of a splash page like this, with just a few action buttons there, arranged in the shape of a wave:

Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.

It was a dry business process transformed into something comfortable, each button glowing gently as you slid your mouse over.

What was he doing here? he thought. He was a technical writer, an interpreter of complex systems, but this thing looked to be as simple as an ATM. What could they possibly need a technical writer for?

The temperature in the cubicle was cold, then warm, then cold again. Brendon’s skin under his poly/cotton polo shirt had felt sticky all afternoon and had remained so in these early hours of the evening. Sweat would paint his forehead, then dissipate in the refrigerated air. While his fingers on the keyboard and right hand on the mouse were firm and calculated, he somehow felt the need to escape. It was the same feeling that had dominated that first six months after Sadie’s death: struggling first to escape the tragedy of it, escaping immediately from the stress of his job, then descending into a long malaise from which, again, he had needed to escape. These sensations of hot and cold, the sweat that dappled his forehead, they had persisted through all of it.

His backpack sat against the cubicle wall. It was his first day on the job at Janela Software, an all-star of the Internet boom, and that morning he had paused, rendered helpless, suddenly, over the backpack: What to put in it? A notebook and a pen to write with? Yeah. A couple of reference books? Sure. A picture of Sadie? No.

[Read more…]


About The Cyclone Release

The Cyclone Release was a finalist in the Blue Moon Novel Competition, and is now available from Madville Publishing.