Season 2 Ep 3: Tossing it with Rosy Fenwicke

I learnt a LOT during my chat with Rosy, who was Zooming in from her home in the Wairarapa Wine region of Martinborough. Having traveled extensively, she prefers life in the town where everyone knows your dog, and the pace accommodates for someone seeking to change a hectic medical profession into a writing career.

She credits her medical background with her easy transition into the world of literature, with that knowledge proving valuable for the protagonist in her most recent novel, ‘Cold Wallet.’ Having researched cryptocurrency since its introduction to our soils, Fenwicke has us following a young, naive doctor Jess as she navigates the process of accessing assets left to her by her newly deceased husband. 

God help me if I was in that position… I can do words, but numbers/technological jargon evades me. So bear with me upwardly mobile listeners, here’s what I learned. A hot wallet is where people can stash their currency once they’ve bought it, but that information is visible online. The wallet becomes cold when you want to secure those assets offline where it’s inaccessible by anyone other than the owner who has it bound by numerous passwords. So, unless Dr Jess is able to find or figure out each password her genius husband allocated to the wallet, no one will ever have access to the goods - of which there are millions. There is a bunch of other intel about block chains and miners etc, but I’m clinging to the basics. 

Consulting with accountants and those who work in all areas of the crypto industry, she wasn’t afraid to ask the ‘dumbest questions in the world’ in order to understand the way it all works. Following the press around the investigation into Christchurch’s Cryptopia hacking and liquidation also proved invaluable. Rosy isn’t afraid of delving into the knowledge that the world is becoming increasingly automated, crypto’d and digitised. She even has ideas around how we can capitalise on the progress we’re making in those areas to further advance information storing for the medical sector, with block chain technology being the blueprint to enable people to hold and file their entire medical histories. 

Between medicine and traveling, both of which inform her storytelling, she is interested in narratives that see strong women rise above their adversities, as well as women who have the ability to inject a bit of magic into the mundane, (highlighted brilliantly in the slogan to her Euphemia Sage Chronicles; ‘Superpowers are Wasted on the Young.’) 

No stranger to having to juggle multiple roles to ensure her writing came to fruition, Rosy is also an advocate for doing the hard graft, and we had a good chat about the business of following your dreams versus educating for practicality. We both agreed it requires a combination of great ideas and focussed action to be successful in any realm of the arts, and that participation on either end - creator or audience member - is a luxury, not a necessity. Humbling stuff indeed. 

The Euphemia Sage Chronicles are still being added to, with the 4th book ‘No Retreat’ set to release in July. Rosy is also beginning another thriller this year.

To contact Rosy or to access any of her work, you can find her on social media @rosyfenwickeauthor

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Rosy Fenwicke - Author Profile