Ryan Hakes asked Scott Hawkins:

Just read the library at mount char. Very fun to read and spooky to boot! Did your years as a computer programmer help you in your writing in any way?

Scott Hawkins Probably the main way the computer day job influenced the writing was by coloring what I didn't want to write. Before I actually had written any books I had kind of vague notions of doing some sort of techno-thriller, in the William Gibson / Neal Stephenson space. Or even just a straight-up thriller, like Tom Clancy or whoever.

This was all years ago, mid-90s. I even typed up a few pages in that direction, but writing that sort of story just wasn't fun for me. After 40 hours of slinging Javascript the last thing in the world I want to do in my spare time is to have to be technically plausible about cyber espionage and computer crime. It's just not fun. Give me some elves or a werewolf or something like that.

That said, I do think some of the underlying ideas about language in Mount Char came from my computer science academic background. I talked about that here, so I'll just link.

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