Novelist Cat Connor’s idea for her first Conway novel, Killerbyte, came about after Cat received a string of death threats while co-running a poetry chat room, back in the days of MSN chat. The thought that people could get so nasty online fascinated her.

You’re gonna die-you bitch!

I looked at the words sitting alone on the expanse of white. A ridiculous thought occurred to me. The words were innocent. They had no volition. Just photons squirted out by a display system.

“Uh huh,” I said to myself. It was a shame this moron couldn’t see my eyes rolling.

Woo hoo, someone else wants me dead. I held the cursor poised over his idiotic nickname, Addictedtolove, waiting. Sunday nights bring out the miscreants, the later it is, the worse the behavior. It was almost Monday.

I’m serious. You are gonna die.

I typed a reply, I’m sure you are, bye-bye. Then hit the twenty-four-hour ban and watched him disappear. The chat room went quiet; to enjoy the moment I clicked off Real Player and with it the latest Grange album I’d been listening to. The room plunged into deep silence. I stretched my legs out under my desk and tapped away at the keyboard. What’s that now, Stormy? Twelve death threats? I looked up to see her answer on the screen.

Yup, she replied.

I’d set a new record, the most death threats received in one night. Excellent. I typed, well, that’s me for the night then, best check my doors and windows.

Stormy replied, LOL. Talk tomorrow.

I shut down the computer, not tired, but not interested in sitting at my desk all night either. The house creaked and grumbled like an old man settling into a rocking chair. I prowled around the house, both upstairs and down, checking every window, door and deadbolt. It wasn’t fear that motivated me. It was boredom. Funny really, boredom wasn’t something I tended to suffer from. Perhaps I was wrong about the boredom. Maybe it was me being just a little sick of my own company. It sure as hell wasn’t empty threats from chat room weirdos. I mean, what were they really going to do? Turn up on my doorstep and shoot me? I think not.

I live outside a very small town, west of Lexington, in Rockbridge County, Virginia; more an old village than a town. It’s a long way from anywhere and not the type of place where one has unexpected visitors.

I stopped thinking about chat room weirdos and made a firm decision. In the morning, I would drive north and visit Mac. What I needed was fun, and he was the perfect person for the job. Mac was fun with a capital F. It didn’t hurt that he was drop-dead yummy either.

Half way up the stairs, I heard a car door slam followed by heavy footsteps moving in the direction of my back door. The chat room screen flashed in my mind. People I know would not be visiting at this hour of the night. I scurried up the remaining stairs to my office, snatched my gun from the desk, and crept back down. The kitchen light was out, but from the glow of the security lights outside, I could see the silhouette of a head through the back door’s frosted glass window. A stupid rhyme popped into my head, ‘One two, they’re coming for you, three four, don’t open that door’. I slipped through the darkened room and stood on the hinge side of the door. It took conscious effort to keep my breathing calm and mind centered. My body was willing to react without the go ahead from my brain and controlling the twitch in my trigger finger wasn’t going to be easy; it didn’t like being disturbed in the middle of the night.

The door handle moved, keys rattled. The door handle moved again, this time twisting back and forth. The frame groaned under applied force to the door. Keys rattled once more and the handle now moved freely, unrestrained by the lock, but the secondary deadbolt kept the door from opening and seemed to annoy the person outside the door. It was almost ghostly as the handle twisted back and forth, even if mortal cursing emanated from the dark silhouette. My cell phone rang in the other room.

I backed into the living room and answered the call as I kept my gun trained on the door. I had to wonder how and why someone had keys to my house, as I thanked God for the extra deadbolts that this person didn’t expect to find.

“Are you home?”

Cat worked in a voluntary capacity for the Police, for five years, going out on late-night patrols, learning and implementing surveillance techniques, and even wangling her way into search and seizure operations, etc. This provided a great source of information for her writing and still does. She carried out extensive research of locations and procedures, picking the brain of a Special Agent friend, including having friends visit and document the locations she chose – in Virginia.

Cat’s second novel, Terrorbyte, grew from a conversation about living with a mentally ill parent with the real life model for Mac Connelly, one of her main characters in the book.

Cat took part in Nanowrimo in 2007 and 2008. In 2008, she used Nanowrimo to write the fourth Conway novel, Ethernet. Cat’s currently working on the fifth Conway novel, Satellite.

Cat Connor lives in Upper Hutt, New Zealand, with her husband and the youngest three of their seven children. She is a long time member of Backspace.org, (an online writers group). Cat is very active on MySpace, as are her two main characters (Ellie Conway and Mac Connelly), which is proving to be a lot of fun.  In the last few years her short stories have appeared in ThrillerUK, Mystericale, Bewildering stories, T-zero, The Writers Post Journal and Conceit Magazine. Currently Bewildering Stories are considering another of her shorts.

You can find Cat on My Space <http://www.myspace.com/catconnor>, Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=515161688&ref=ts>, Twitter <http://twitter.com/catconnor>, and her blog <http://catconnor.blogspot.com/>.

Tags: author, book, novel, terror