Why Emilia Cross Keeps Her Notes in Pencil

Of all the choices I made writing The Eleven Minute Void, my favorite is a small one. Emilia Cross, a woman who works at the beating heart of the world's digital financial system, does her real thinking on paper.

She keeps a notebook in mechanical pencil. She arranges her notes on a corkboard with black thread. She grounds herself with a brass fidget cube instead of another screen. Her colleagues, surrounded by four-monitor workstations, treat this as a quirk, the harmless eccentricity of a talented obsessive.

Then the lights go out, and it stops being a quirk.

When the blackout wipes every digital record in the building clean, the only instrument still telling the truth is the cheap analog watch on Emilia's wrist, and the only account of what happened is the one she writes by hand, in pencil, minute by minute, while it unfolds. That is the whole argument of the book, made quietly, long before anyone says it out loud: in a world where any record can be edited, the last reliable witness is a person who was paying attention.

The Eleven Minute Void is out now, free on Kindle Unlimited or yours to buy. Search Christie Winter on Amazon.