The Alchemist Triangle
People assume a book like this starts with a plot. For Sandeep, it started with a discomfort — a question that came out of his working life inside systems built on trust: cloud architectures, security frameworks, partnership agreements. What happens the moment that trust turns out to be misplaced, in a field where most people assume the science itself is neutral? That question, long before there was a triangle, a game, or a single named character on the page, is the real seed of the book.
Where the Idea Came From
The research wasn't scoped like a technology deliverable — it happened sideways, as an extension of reading he was already doing around cloud security, data integrity, and the quieter ethical questions that come up wherever science, technology, and money intersect. Much of what ends up dramatized in the novel began as margin notes on things he was reading for entirely different reasons.
The title isn't decoration, either. Every serious technical environment runs, underneath its official process, on an informal game of incentives — who gets credit, who takes the blame, what gets escalated and what gets quietly absorbed. Sandeep wanted to write the version where that game's stakes stop being a missed quarter and become something irreversible.
What Sales Taught Him About Plotting
"Every enterprise deal I've ever worked has the bones of a thriller in it... I'd just been calling it 'the deal cycle' instead of 'the plot.'" Two decades of enterprise technology sales — sharpening a half-articulated problem in a first conversation, handling objections in the middle of a deal, earning a close instead of springing it — turned out to be the same structural discipline good plotting demands: reveal too much, too early, and the reader (or the buyer) stops turning pages.
Writing at the Edges of the Day
The honest answer to "when did you write it" is: in the margins. Early mornings before calls started, on flights, in the gaps between deliverables — built the way most enterprise transformation programs actually get built, in disciplined, imperfect increments, with the throughline held in his head across long gaps rather than on the page.
Read the full story: Writing The Alchemist Triangle →
Read more: What Two Decades in Sales Taught Me About Plotting →
