Conniveo

Conniveo: Afterword

And just like that, it's over. 'Conniveo' was a wonderful ride for me, and I hope you loved it as much as I did. Now that the story is over, I guess I can talk about the creation process.

The entire book was formed in my head on a sunny Monday morning when I stepped out of the house without my glasses. I felt weird, and so I went back inside to get them. When I came out again and put them on, I blinked a few times to readjust to the change in sensation and the world looked and felt different. And then I wondered...what if the world changed every time a person blinked?

Well, that's pretty much it for the inspiration of the story. The rest of the details came from my own personal madness, and this is impossible to define, so I'll skip it.

For those of you who care about specifics, the numbering of the chapters was based on the background histories of both characters. Our number system came from Arabic, while the Homini's system came from ancient Roman (the origin of their civilization). That's why it keeps swapping from 1 to II to 3 to IV. Some people actually thought it was accidental and I couldn't make up my mind on which one to use, but I actually intended to use it as a way of making you the reader know when the protagonist changes. The final chapter is numbered as 3I - because it looks like 31, but is actually a combination of 30 and I (1 in roman numerals) to represent the joining of the two systems (in the form of the two characters. The final chapter is also told by both characters, to depict this joining).

For the title of the story, it was initially named 'Blink' but then changed to 'Conniveo', which is the Latin word for 'blink'. The Latin title gives reference to ancient Rome, like the number system. The word is also related to 'connivere' (meaning 'to close eyes'), the latin word from which the English word 'connive' was taken. As the entire story was based around a grand scheme of conniving by the Homini government and medical officials, the word seemed even more suitable as a title, hence the change.

As for the naming of the chapters, I decided to use a single word: a noun that represents something within the chapter - a feature, a statement, even something in the environment - but does not give away the story direction (a very similar concept was used for Whore). But in this story, every pair of chapters begins with the same letter (fifteen letters for the thirty chapters), and no two start with the same letter.

I bother with too many specifics.

Anyway, thank you for reading. I have enjoyed writing, and now I shall truly take my sabbatical. There would be no rapid returns with new stories (even though I'll always be working on something), because I have to leave the grounds for Ed to get some work in. I appreciate everyone who has toiled through the excessive geeky terminology to uncover the story within the story. I could have decided to write a sequel or side-story to 'Whore' (which would probably have gotten a lot more reads and votes as it's essentially literary porn and doesn't require as much brain power), but for goodness's sake, I'm royalty.

Much love.

- Dex