As a nine year old writing a few lines of code on a ZX spectrum to make a rudimentary chat bot, I felt like I was doing magic. The Usborne books for coding games were like spell books to me. 

In the noughties I was in an award winning digital art collective, UNFIT Productions. I was into themes of magical realism translated to an English setting. We also explored a glitchy, lossy, cyberpunk aesthetic and a kind of urban romanticism influenced by writers like Tim Etchells and music by Burial. We believed in the bedroom revolution. Be the media!

I wrote a short film about a rudeboy wizard from a magical south London council estate. We animated it together on a trio of laptops in a flat in Darlington. It won an award. This ended up becoming a graphic novel, several years later. This led to working as a commissioned author writing many books about street art and other subcultures. 

Later when I learned javascript, especially creative coding with P5.JS, I felt the same sense of discovering something magical. I've since begun developing a Discord chat bot called, the Cyberwitch Spellbook.

Cyberpunk Academy started out with an idea that there was something there when you blend computer languages with nursery rhymes, spells and scraps of arcana. When you use code to introduce randomness, you discover meanings that might go direct to the subconscious, bypassing the normal controls. Ideas of hypnotic suggestion, chanting, incantation and prayer. What if all these things were poured into an AI training set, would an arcane AI result? 

I wanted to write a genre bending novel, mixing gothic romance and cyberpunk, with an entirely female cast of protagonists. This was directly inspired by the cyberfeminists, especially by Sadie Plant's 'Zeros and Ones'. 

I had an intense dream in my early 20s featuring the woman with the disfigured face and her assistant. These became the AI Gods in the story. The Weaver, the Siren and the Crone.