The more things change the more they stay the same springs to mind. Today has been trying to say the least. I am livid but trying not to be because I don’t have proof and haven’t read the offending book yet. I will be reading it when it arrives on Tuesday. It cost me $38 fucking dollars so it better be a good read.
I have little hope of that, to be honest.
What am I talking about?
This Elly/Ellie Conway saga and that Argylle book. People are contacting me asking if I am aware of the similarities between that fucking book and my work. I very much hope it’s not true and there are no real similarities because that would be totally shitty and underhanded.
And I just had a massive deja vu right then. I’ve typed this before. I’ve been here before. Wish I knew how it ended!

What’s been annoying me for ages about that book/movie is the name Argylle because it’s so similar sounding to Carlisse. (I know, you’d expect another l in Carlisse but there isn’t one. Live with it.)
Why would that matter? Well, my brave wee readers, Peter Carlisse was one of my first characters, he was FBI. Pretty sure some of the short stories featuring Carlisse were published in various journals and whatnot years and years ago. There’s a story called Rainbow Creek that definitely features him. Thing is it only started knocking around in my head when the first few people started asking me if I wrote Argylle a couple of years ago.
Ellie Conway was/is an FBI special agent and at one point she was seconded to the CIA. She caught more than a few spies in her time. She was very good at it.
Aidan Conway is her brother and loves his nasty cat. He is an insurance claims adjuster.
Grange is the rock band that features in several of my books along side Ellie Conway. In fact, Rowan Grange, the frontman of the band, is a love interest briefly. (Spoiler: until he does something incredibly stupid.)
Ellie and Rowan wrote a few songs together. (They are in “Whispers in the Water”)
Ellie inherits a cat that she worries about because she doesn’t think she’s the best person to take care of another living creature.
My Ellie Conway is a poet and at one point her sister-in-law tries to convince her to write a book based on her work as an FBI agent. (That was mentioned once but is picked up again in the Veronica Tracey Spy/PI series when Ronnie and Crockett are talking about how the person who wrote the Byte Books had to have insider knowledge. Without giving a massive spoiler away … it causes them to really stop and think about how the books could’ve been written.)
AND, in Eraserbyte there is an author writing a series of books that SSA Dr Kurt Henderson thinks are about SSA Ellie Conway. (Pretty important plot point.)

The Byte Series is an action based FBI thriller series with a good deal of humour woven through it. (If you’ve ever known a few cops then you know just how deep and dark their humour can get. :))
Ellie Conway has been around for twenty years as the main character in the Byte Series. My main character. My most favourite of all invisible friends. Do not fuck with her. She was and always will be my creation.

Funny story … the acquisitions editor at Penguin NZ turned the first 3 Byte books down in 2008 because there wasn’t enough Kiwi content and suggested I take it off-shore which I did, and ended up at (the now defunct) Rebel ePublishers for 10 years. (Ten books/Ten years not a bad run, there are of course 12 Byte series novels, a couple of novellas, a poetry book, a couple of short story collections and the all important Raidbyte – the short story collection that tells the truth about Mac and also, someone is writing Ellie’s biography and she is not pleased.)

Everything is linked. All my work has easter eggs for readers. It’s half the fun for me, because I generally do not do it on purpose, it’s just the way my brain works. Far different to anything AI created which is quite possibly what Argylle is.
Guess one day we will know.

I’ll let you know what I think when the book arrives and I read it. I suspect I’ll be using highlighters while I read.
If you find me drinking tequila and a ranting about fakery, you will know why. 🙂

Will the real Ellie Conway please stand up?