Category Archives: Novel

Stories related to writing a novel and the process of learning to write and publish.

Feel Good

12 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by in Colorado Trail, cyber war, Novel

≈ 3 Comments

I don’t sell enough books to brag about, but every now and then, I get something like this. Would have been nice as an Amazon review, but I received it via LinkedIn of all places.

***

Good morning, 

I just finished your second book. Brilliant work, both of them. I am retiring from the Army this week, and have appreciated the motivation you’ve given me. I ran electronic warfare teams, among other things. And I really appreciated the references in your second book. 

I am transitioning from intelligence work to cyber. This fall I even start graduate work at Brown in cybersecurity. It’s been daunting changing fields when I didn’t plan for it. But my body can’t take kicking doors anymore. Your books gave me a feeling, especially from ‘Rob’, that my chances are good for landing on my feet. So thank you for the good books, and thank you for the confidence they instilled.

Keep writing, you are great at it.

Corbett

***

That made me feel pretty good. It’s been a week of feeling good. I’m counting down to an epic backpacking trip along the Continental Divide Trail through the Collegiates in another week. My buddies and I have been exchanging emails on possible routes and gear choices all month. Each email gets me more excited. Seriously, we’ve been salivating over our dehydrated camp meal selections. Maybe its the Covid cabin fever but I was near manic as I inventoried my trail gear.

Wish I was in better shape for this trek but, assuming I survive it, I’ll be in better shape afterward. I’ll be struggling to keep up with my trail mates. Rob is a fitness coach at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He even teaches a course on hiking. He hikes over one hundred days each year. Rob tends to get naked and swim in alpine lakes. This pic of him wading into the waters above tree line on Snow Mesa near Lake City gives you a sense of just how fit he is.

I might be able to hang closer to George, since he’s coming up from Austin and won’t be acclimated to the altitude. This photo of his dying carcass from the last time I hiked with him, on top of Greys Peak, is what gives me confidence. Still, I know he’s as fit today as he was forty years ago in the Marines. These sexagenarian beefcakes might find themselves having to wait for the young 59 year old.

Gojira

03 Saturday Apr 2021

Posted by in Novel, Storytelling

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If you know me, then you’ve undoubtedly heard me say, there’s no such thing as a bad Godzilla movie. With the one exception of that Matthew Broderick cluster, there are few axioms more true. After streaming Godzilla vs Kong last night, I can report that my movie adage continues to hold truth.

I have to say, I was anxious about the outcome, so anxious that I almost didn’t watch it. I’m opposed to the notion of the world’s top two titans having to fight. A review I’d read implied one of them loses. I won’t spoil it for you. They fight multiple times in this movie and there are winners and losers each time. But I was almost furious with the director before even watching the movie believing the story might contemptuously slight the heroic majesty of either of these two creatures.

Kong represents the unmanageable force of nature as man exploits her resources. Kong has never been a more important symbol to all of us who want to protect nature. Godzilla is not too far off, conjured up by the folly of man. For me, Godzilla has always emerged to restore balance and harmony to the planet. Both these titans are far too noble to have to clash for our entertainment, as if they were just two more fighters on the MMA roster.

In the end, I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations panned out. Mostly. One does have to completely suspend their belief systems before watching a monster spectacle. Kong spends half the movie traveling to Antartica to enter a portal into the center of planet, only to exit later through a hundred meter tunnel under the city of Hong Kong. Perhaps the director recognized some alliterative value in having King Kong fight in Hong Kong. Who knows. The city has been relevant in the news lately. But it’s a classic error that I do fault the director for, to not include scenes in Tokyo. Toho Studio invented Godzilla and they deserve homage in every adaptation.

I suspect by now I’m coming across as some immature movie critic. A childish fan of monster movies. My appreciation does stem from my childhood. I never read the Marvel or DC comics. I subscribed to Mad Magazine in grade school, a rag that developed my appreciation for satire. I watched monster movies on Friday nights with my best friend Scott Sumner in Marion, Iowa. They would come on after Wolfman Jack’s Midnight Special and end with the National Anthem and a screen full of static around 1 am, back when people used to sleep. Zombies and vampires are okay. I like werewolves more, especially banshees, but Godzilla has always been my favorite. He, or she, says Matthew Broderick, was a monster I could sympathize with. Godzilla was the ultimate antihero.

The writing was bad in this movie, almost to be expected. Very little of the storyline was original or credible. I was fine with that. I know how hard it is from having written two novels. It was important to me for my cyberwar stories to be plausible. I based most of my attacks on real world events. But there comes a time in a fictional telling to drop all pretense in order to provide entertainment. Godzilla vs Kong was decent entertainment. And, despite the absence of a Tokyo presence, the storyline remained intact enough to satisfy old fans like myself.

Cozy Bear vs Fancy Bear

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in cyber war, Geek Horror, Novel

≈ 3 Comments

I would be remiss to let this SolarWinds story go without commenting and self-promoting my cyberwar series.  These opportunities don’t come around every day.  Well, actually there is a story just about every day, but few on par with the colorful intrigue of SolarWinds, FireEye, and Cozy Bear.

My favorite aspect to this story is how it more resembles cyberwar than cybercrime.  Experts are downplaying the cyberwar facets, but espionage is on the war spectrum.  I focused my novels on cyberwar to respond to what I perceived as a dearth of stories because most books published on the topic are on cybercrime.  The difference is that cyberwar is acted out by nation states and, North Korea’s Lazarus notwithstanding, for non-financial reasons.

Remember when you used to read stories of thieves stealing money from banks?  Two decades deep into the 4th generation of the industrial revolution (4IR), data is the new currency.  Steam power dramatically increased productivity three hundred years ago in 1IR as the industrial revolution launched a still-accelerating advance in technology.  Steam locomotives shrunk distance in terms of time travel.

Electricity further accelerated productivity, making the work day longer, in 2IR.  The 3rd industrial revolution commenced in the fifties, around the time white collar workers exceeded blue collar workers in the US work force.  Compute tech put the world on an exponential growth rate in the Information Age.  

Data networking, namely the Internet, and everything since from AI to blockchain has established a digital economy that drives 4IR.  We have complete industries now that exist only online.  But our success is our weakness.  The leading, most advanced economies of the world have more to lose in a cyberwar than the digital have-nots.  And that’s why so many people believe the next world war will be digital.  It’s where we are vulnerable, our Achilles heel.

Here’s the promo part.  If you are curious enough to read up on all this tech, but find it all just a bit too dry for your taste – read my books.  Read fiction.  I wrote my cyberwar series partly as a cybersecurity primer, so you’ll learn something.  But I chose a fictional format to make the content entertaining.  You don’t need a text book when you’ve got Cyber War I and Full Spectrum Cyberwar on your shelf.

You’ll discover that my stories are fairly prescient.  The first made Iran the bad guys but had attacks like this supply chain malware that compromise a large segment of the economy.  The second story focuses on Russia and might spook you just how closely it mirrors current events.

The Russian threat actors in Full Spectrum work for the GRU – Russia’s Military Intelligence.  I considered writing about the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence agency behind the SolarWinds hack.  I find one of their code names more literary – Cozy Bear.  The GRU is nicknamed Fancy Bear, which is still cool; Bear of course stands for Russia.

I felt forced to use Fancy Bear because it’s more plausible they would launch the type of attacks in my story.  Cozy Bear is more about intel gathering.  This is why some experts are suggesting this isn’t a cyberwar attack.  Cozy Bear doesn’t destroy systems.  They just listen to our secrets.  That doesn’t make for as fun a story as the mayhem in Full Spectrum.  Sometimes I choose plausibility when deciding my storyline.  Other times I take extreme liberties for a good story.

On Reading – the Woman’s Edition

19 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by in Novel

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I don’t often read women authors. Except when I do and according to my Goodreads’ history, my last five books have been authored by women. Some of my preferred genres lend themselves to men and perhaps my current trend is coincidence. I suspect I read Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to satisfy my confirmation bias after having weaved Putin’s oil oligarchy into my last novel, Full Spectrum Cyberwar. Her story did in fact support my fictional account. I was surprised when she dedicated part of a chapter to the president of Shell, for whom I served as an usher in his wedding.

I read Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider as part of a writing assignment for my writers critique club. It’s a collection of classic stories from 1939. We take turns in my small group of five male writers to assign exercises to each other on a monthly basis. Sometimes, the exercise requires research, which for me is what makes it fun. Research has always been necessary for my novels and I enjoy that. It’s also essential in my day job as a product manager, and one of the roles I most enjoy.

Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game reminded me somewhat of Where The Crawdads Sing. I think because of the setting; even though it was in the U.K. rather than America, as it was on the coast. There are other similarities in the mystery format. The main characters were all women and it caused me to consider if, on average, women are better at creating female antagonists and men are better at creating male characters. Seems safe to agree to that, but of course some writers are so good they aren’t challenged by gender.

Lucy Foly’s The Guest List is the very first audio book I’ve listened to. Karen and I listened on our long drive to Ouray. It was a great whodunnit for a drive. Each character was voiced by a different actor. That might have been jarring as a read as I suspect Lucy changed the point of view per scene in the text as well as the audio.

Jen Louden is a friend and I’d been wanting to read one of her best-selling books, but I’ve never been interested in the motivational self-help genre. Her latest book Why Bother? was perfect because it’s as much memoir as self-help. I thought once she steamed up the narrative with real-life stories in section two, the book became fascinating. It reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing, which was as much memoir as instructional. I find the sharing of personal vignettes a successful approach to storytelling. It helps to have lived an interesting life but I don’t think one necessarily has to be Hemingway.

After writing this, it has occurred to me my interest in reading women authors stemmed from making the antagonist in my current novel a woman. Call it research. My first novel was strongly male dominated. My wife gave me grief, and that’s putting it mildly, over the sexist undertones in my story. I was trying to convey a sense of men who travel extensively for their careers. She wasn’t a fan. I corrected that somewhat with my second novel by having the wife of the antagonist tag along during his adventures. I’m comfortable writing from a woman’s point of view. Doesn’t mean I’m good at it. If I pull it off, I credit having grown up with five sisters.

Second Edition

03 Friday Jul 2020

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I’m using the three-day weekend to submit my taxes.  I expect to get a return and will need it to buy Ellie Rose a laptop before she heads off to college.  I think back in the day, parents used to buy their kids a car for graduating high school.  Now we buy them a three thousand dollar MacBook Pro.  I really hope I get a nice return this year.

I find joy in doing my taxes when I sum up all my book royalties from Amazon.com.   I’ve made royalties almost every month of the year.  The coolest part is seeing book sales from other countries.  Mostly the UK, but also Germany, Australia, Japan, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and 26.77 rupees from India.  That’s 39¢ I wouldn’t have if I weren’t an international author.

Other writers might find this interesting.  I published a second book in 2019, but almost all my sales were from my first book.  I suspect this is because I handed out a hundred copies of my book at a tech conference in Austin and those techies followed up by purchasing my first book.  That’s exactly what they tell you will happen, and it did.  This is why you will make more money the more books you publish; readers who like your latest book will buy from your entire collection.  There’s a multiplier effect.

Knowing that, I really should work towards completing my third novel.  I’m twenty-five thousand words into it, but paused it to rewrite a second edition of my first book instead.  I believe I had multiple reasons for changing directions.  One was that, with the surge in sales of the first book, I wanted it to be better.  I didn’t have a copy editor for it, not that there were many typos, but I’m a better writer now and wanted to make some improvements.

The major edit, the reason I believe the rewrite qualifies as a second edition, is I changed it from present tense to past tense.  Most novels are written in past tense.  Present tense is rare enough that it can be a bit jarring sometimes to read it.  The book I’m currently reading, The Lying Game by Ruth Ware, is in present tense.  She does an okay job of it but it’s been my experience that past tense allows for more latitude in sentence structure.  It’s easier to write past tense.

That exercise took me a couple of months.  I spent the previous two weekends publishing it on Amazon.  I find formatting text and designing a book cover extremely tedious and I don’t enjoy it, but I’m too cheap to outsource it.  There are always problems.  It took me a week to fix my cover and another to get the formatting to show paragraph indents correctly on the InsideLook feature.

It’s good to go now though, so go out and download a copy.  As part of this second edition, the hardcover is no longer available.  Amazon might try to sell you one anyway.  They like to play this trick where they say it’s out-of-stock.  Trust me, it’s out-of-print.  If you already own a first edition hardcover, consider it a collector’s item.

Digital Tracking

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

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JV2

Just when you thought you were safe, talking to people…

It’s possible to pair public information about yourself with private information about yourself – to de-anonymize the data with a strong level of confidence.  And if you can do this yourself, so can others, to your personal data.  If anyone can find some studies that prove me right, post links in the comments.  Otherwise, it makes for a better story if you simply assume I’m right, as you read the rest of this blog post.

As evidence, I offer you this graphic of my pages-read stat from Amazon.  It shows two pages read on Tuesday and three read on Thursday.  First thing about those numbers is that they are atypical.

Typically, my pages-read stats are zero for longer stretches of time.  Then, when they are not at zero, they hover around 25 or around 100.  Apparently, Kindle Unlimited readers average 25 pages read in a day, on the days they read.  Maybe some also average 100 pages read, or maybe there’s yet another reason for that lesser cluster.  I don’t know.

I do know who that reader is, because I talked to him on both those days.  He told me what he read.  Good ‘ole HUMINT.  The benefit of my super low stats, is that I can easily correlate what he told me with what I see in my stats.  I know that every move on this trend line is my collaborator reading my book.  Imagine the fun I could have.

I could post his progress online, in this blog, for the digital world to see.  I’m correlating two sources of his digital footprint, one gathered from a public conversation, the other obtained from somewhere else his tracks are being published, seemingly anonymously – Amazon Books.

I was able to de-anonymize my Amazon author stats out of the law of small numbers, in my case, typically zero, then only two and three, and because the reader told me he was reading pages.  Because I know these stats are his, I can assume pages read in subsequent days where I don’t talk to him, will be his.  Net, net, I will know his reading pace.  I’ll know if he finishes the book, with further correlation with what I know to be the book length.

I don’t think he’s overly concerned.  I showed him what I was doing.  His response?  “Privacy is a thing of the past.”

 

Writing Naked

23 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in Novel, Running

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Here’s a photo of me after my eight mile run today, because this is still a running blog dammit.  With that said, this post might be more about writing.  Naked.

For me, the two hobbies are tightly linked.  I write my stories in my head while I’m running.  I mean, what do you think about when you’re running?  I write stories.

A number of people asked me if I wrote down the speech I gave at my daughter’s wedding this summer, because I didn’t read from a piece a paper and they thought it sounded “from the heart”.  I feel like I wrote it down.  The weekend before, I wrote it down in my head during a long drive to Aspen.  So to a degree, it was rehearsed.

I hope my writing sounds from the heart.  I hope it sounds real.  Honest.

I published a book earlier this year, but I won’t be stuffing it in anyone’s stocking this Christmas.  Despite being a product manager, spending half my days practicing product marketing, I sort of suck at self-promotion.  Clearly, I know how to do it.  You can see I’m wearing my favorite self-promo shirt in this photo, but it doesn’t come naturally to me.

My goal is to develop writing skills, and self-publishing competence, over the course of years as I approach retirement.  I don’t need to be immediately successful.  I hope to be better once I have the time to truly focus on writing.  My skills advanced considerably from my first book to my second.  I’ll be happy to maintain that pace.

The writing in my second novel was much tighter.  My editor on my first book told me I was the King of fragmented sentences.  I did write some awkward sentences.  She added semi-colons to a number of them.  Initially, I accepted those edits, but I went back later and rejected half of them.  I discovered that I have a certain writing style that I’d like to keep.  I have a habit of writing one long sentence, followed by a shorter sentence, followed by a single-word sentence.

It’s not a constant cadence, but a regular rhythm.  I speak like this too.  Sometimes.

Once I discovered my pattern, I decided that I liked it.  It’s my personal style.  I’m not going to shy away from it, even if it’s wrong.  It’s my personal poetry.

I do need to gain more confidence in self promotion if I’m going to continue self publishing.  It’s strange because when I’m writing, I’m full of confidence.  I have preferences that might appear tame.  I write what is called “closed-door” sex scenes, but I do write about intimacy.  That’s not because I’m shy, it’s because that’s what I prefer to read.  At least, in my genre of tech thrillers.

Autobiographical fiction became popular during the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.  Many people still say that all fiction is autobiographical.  I don’t think about that while I’m writing.  It’s after publishing, when friends start to question me on some of my characters, that I realize, holy shit, this might be a memoir.  And I become insecure, wanting it to sell to the anonymous public, but I stop promoting it to friends.

I’m going to have to get over that if I want to become a writer.  It’s not writing if it’s not naked.  Genuine.

I can try to put on a robe afterward, but the marketing phase of publishing is not the time to become shy.  Still, if you’re on my Christmas list this year, don’t expect one of my own books.  I’d be remiss, and totally suck at self-promotion, if I didn’t implore you to gift one to yourself.  And at a time when we all reflect on our gratitude for all everyone has given us, thank you for reading my books and my blog, and for not critiquing my fragmented sentences.

Running Errands

19 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in Novel, Running

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Selfies are good for knowing when it’s  time to get a haircut.  I can barely remember what life was like before we had digital mirrors.  My girls wouldn’t know.  I suspect they’d watch a youtube video to figure things out, like I imagine they do when they need to address and mail a letter.  Ellie asked me to take a package to the post office for her today.  Like they card you at the post office.

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Had an awesome run today.  My thoughts focused on my current novel, which is how writers get shit done.  Ran eight miles and added a good thousand words to the story today.  You can find Ellie at the post office.

Box Sets & Writing Conventions

20 Saturday Jul 2019

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Novels

If three books are a trilogy, what are two books?  You could call them a duology, but I think people tend to call anything other than three books simply a series.  There’s still so much I don’t know about writing.  I’m ignorant of many of the standard conventions.

But there are conventions.  There are formulas for writing and you ignore them at your peril.  On the series topic, all advice is to write them.  I didn’t think I would but I had one more cyberwar topic I couldn’t squeeze into the first novel, so I did write a second in order to discuss hybrid warfare.

The advice was that writing books in a series will promote additional sales, because people will go back and buy the earlier books.  I’ve seen that.  Four of my last five book sales were of my first book.  The second book has clearly rekindled interest in my first novel, Cyber War I.  Some people are buying both at once.  I think others are from the hundred promotional copies of Full Spectrum Cyberwar that I signed a couple of months ago at a tech conference in Austin.  Some of those books are converting into sales of the first novel.

I am going to write a third in the series.  In fact, I’m 10,000 words into it already.  Not understanding conventions better, I’m not confident it will be a true trilogy.  I suspose it will be.  But it will be twenty years into the future and a different genre – cyberpunk and a mystery rather than a tech thriller.

Another convention I broke was on my cover art.  Even self-publishers tend to purchase unique cover art.  They’ll spend from $200 to $400 with a cover designer.  I simply licensed art from stock photos.  From some of the writing blogs I read, I sense that’s frowned upon.  Still, I really like my covers because they so clearly say cyberwar.  They break convention though, not only in that they come from stock photos, but because they are on a white background.  Not unlike the first Jurassic Park novel.  But cyberwar and cybercrime books are expected to have dark backgrounds.  Maybe a hooded figure, or for some reason, a grid overlaying everything says “tech” to buyers.  I don’t know if my cover is hurting my sales or not.  I do know that writers care a great deal about their covers, and that covers do indeed sell books.

I’m committed to following the cover convention for book three.  I already licensed the photo I want, but it’s a bit racey and my family of girls have censored it from FaceBook.  It’s so perfect though in how it captures my protagonist.  I have time still to decide.  It’ll be the obligatory dark cover, in addition to being a bit sexy.  I have posters of my book covers hanging in my office.  Probably won’t be able to hang that one up at work.

PING

02 Sunday Jun 2019

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PING is one of the best acronyms ever.  It’s a tech spec, RFC 1739, that means Packet InterNetwork Groper.  It references when you validate the online existence of an IP address.  You ping it.  Techies also use the term colloquially in place of the word contact, as in ping me instead of contact me.  And, Ping is the name of the firm I sat down in Friday afternoon to be interviewed for the Colorado=Security podcast, by Robb Reck.

I drew a pint of the Codename: Superfan IPA by Odd13 Brewing.  At 6.5% ABV, it contains the hops Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo and Equinox.  I then esconcend myself in Robb’s office to be interviewed for my cyberwar tech thriller, Full Spectrum Cyberwar.

The talk was a lot of fun.  I forget which parts were recorded, but inevitably, when two old tech guys sit down to talk, the conversation turns to who they’ve worked with and where.  It’s nostaligic and fun, and then of course, what writer doesn’t like to talk about his book?

Being the CISO of Ping, Robb gave me grief over my storyline that characterized a CISO as the first bad guy.  Technically, I say Claire was an unwitting bad guy.  And I feel I should score points for representing women in tech.  You read it and tell me what you think.

 

 

Saturday night was even better.  The Jaggers hosted performer Jill Sobule at the house.  Jill was highly entertaining, and had us all singing along with her.  I just downloaded her latest album, Nostalgia Kills, because I liked her music that much.  Before the performance, Jabe passed around a hat for a young girlfriend with stage 4 cancer.  Jabe gave an impassioned plea that would have won the war for the allies.  Hoping the best for Sara.

I’m currently sitting at DIA, waiting for my delayed flight that I woke up for at 5am.  If any of my tech buddies are attending the Palo Alto Ignite User Conference this week, look for me at the CenturyLink Cafe.  I’ll sign a copy of my book for you.

Lunch with Sara

04 Saturday May 2019

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Sara Thomas

Below is Sara’s second scene in Full Spectrum Cyberwar, after traveling to the U.K. to be closer to the action.

***

Sara was hungry.  She barely arrived home after work Friday when a military Humvee parked outside.  Two good-looking men, whom Sara thought could be models, in fatigues, exited, walked up to her door, and explained to her mom how they were taking her to the U.K. to work with Major Calvert.  Her mom called her dad, who just got off the phone with Calvert, then helped her pack.  Sara missed dinner.  

The two nice looking soldiers drove her to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where she boarded a small passenger jet for a flight to somewhere in Georgia, where she boarded yet another plane, described to her as a C-130 cargo jet, that flew her to RAF Fairford Airbase, somewhere northwest of London.  

It was now Saturday morning, and she was being driven by yet more very fine looking soldiers to what they called the Doughnut, a half hour more northwest in Cheltenham.  Sara had yet to eat.  She didn’t know the difference between jet lag and low blood sugar, but she was confident she could ride out the jet lag if she could get some food.  Sara also wondered if the military had some synthetic printer running off copies of these darling soldiers.

“Are we driving to breakfast?”  Her brain starved of glucose, Sara had already forgotten the two soldiers’ names.  She didn’t care which of the two boys sitting up front answered.

“We’ve already eaten breakfast ma’am, but I’ll inform the Major of your request.”

“Bless your heart.  Thank you.”

Ma’am.  These boys must have five years on me.  Lordy, they’re cute.  Sara had yet to express much interest in boys at school, but traveling with these military men kindled something inside her.  They must think I’m older?

The soldiers didn’t talk unless spoken to and Sara was too tired for words.  After driving through the English countryside for twenty minutes, on what she understood to be highway A417, much like a Travis County highway but without shoulders, they reached the city of Cheltenham.  They parked in front of a large building.  She gathered, more from the curve of the parking lot than from what she could see of the building itself, that it was round.  Assuming it had a courtyard, she got the doughnut moniker.

The soldiers bypassed the security turnstile and took her to a side office where they printed her out a badge with a photo worse than any she’d ever taken.  Any.  She tried to put it in her backpack, but they handed her a lanyard and instructed her to wear it around her neck.  They emphasized the importance of keeping the photo-side visible.

“Miss Thomas.  I heard you were in the building.  How was your flight?”

Sara raised her head after donning her lanyard to see Major Calvert standing in the doorway of the small office.

“Hello, sir.  Mr. Calvert.”

“You can call me Major, Miss Thomas.  It’s been a full year since we met at BlackHat.  It’s good to see you.”

“Thank you for the job, Major.  It’s been really awesome.”

One of the privates addressed Calvert.  “Sir, Miss Thomas expressed an interest in having breakfast on our drive from Fairford.”

“Well, of course, we can have breakfast.”  Calvert already ate but suspected more food might aid his own jet lag.  “When’s the last time you ate Miss Thomas?”

“Bless your heart, Major.  Not since lunch yesterday.  Military planes don’t have flight attendants.”

“No Miss Thomas, they don’t.  I’m so sorry about that.  Let’s address this right away.”  Calvert looked back at the private.  “Her badge ready to go?”

“Yessir, her authorizations you requested are active, sir”

“Fine, thank you Private.”  Calvert returned his attention toward Sara.  “Miss Thomas, we could eat in the doughnut cafeteria, but think about how that sounds while we walk outside.  I know a place where we can get you a proper English breakfast.”  Calvert had already worked four hours and would like a break from the building himself.

“Private, drive us to the Bayshill Inn on St Georges Place.  Take the A40 to Lansdown.”

“Yessir.  May I suggest the Princess Elizabeth Way to A4019?”

“No thank you, Private.  I’m going for sites over speed.  Let’s drive past the Ladies College.”

“Yessir.”

Ten minutes later, Sara found herself seated at an outdoor picnic table with the major somewhere in what she figured to be the town’s center.  She ordered a tuna and brie omelette with potatoes while the major ordered sausage and mash.  Not one to assume a young girl with such a diminutive size couldn’t have a healthy appetite, Calvert also ordered a fish and chip board as a starter, to be eaten if needed.  Sara didn’t begin to speak until the chip board arrived and she had a few bites.

“Wow, these are good.  Sitting outside here is nice.  It’d be too hot in the Hill Country, this late in the morning.”

“I know.  I mostly work in San Antonio.  Maximizing your time in the sun will help you with jet lag.  I’ve always had good results from eating too.”  Calvert grabbed his first bite after sensing Sara provided him an opening.

“I really want to thank you again Major for the summer job.  But I can’t imagine how I can help you.  I barely know anything.”

“Straight to business, Miss Thomas.  Okay.  First, you have experience in analyzing the system logs from wind turbines.  Second, in the ELK stack, which seemed to have worked nicely for your analysis yesterday.  And third, in querying a massive data lake of vulnerabilities and exploits that your firm maintains.  Any idea how they put that extraordinary database together in such a short time?”

“I can’t talk about that stuff, and honestly Major, I’m just learning how to use the ELK stack.  I mean it’s not terribly difficult.  It’s hardly something that takes ten thousand hours to become an expert.”

“There’s more, Miss Thomas.  My team is already engaged in other projects.  You’re additional headcount.  Your skills might seem niche to you, but they are perfectly suited to the task at hand, and you’ll require zero training time.  Time is at a premium just now.”

“Not that it isn’t really cool to be here sir, but why not have me query logs from Austin?”

“I don’t expect you to be overly familiar with international data privacy laws Miss Thomas, but trust me, Europe invented them.  I had Jen, I believe she’s your lead, transfer an instance of your AWS data lake to an offnet data center here in the U.K.  In addition to playing by the rules, it affords us a measure of security should we lose trans Atlantic Internet connectivity to North America.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s a definite possibility.  Should cyberwar break out, we’d be remiss not to have contingencies for that.  A classic defensive tactic we call compartmentalizing systems.”  

Calvert had underestimated potential strikes in the past.  He was running this exercise by consulting a physical playbook every four hours in a stand up meeting with his NATO counterparts.  Not unlike facilitating an incident management and response plan after a breach.

“Can you tell me what an offnet data center is, sir?”

“Back at the Doughnut, you’ll be assigned to a work bay with two workstations.  One is connected to the Internet.  You’ll need that to download log files from several dozen wind farms where we’ve already established user access for you.  You’ll transfer files to a USB drive which you’ll use to load the files into your second workstation.  That computer is not connected to the Internet.  Hence the term, offnet.  It’s connected to a military network where your new data lake has been instantiated.  Jen worked through the night with my team here to rebuild your data lake and toolsets.  She didn’t have it finished until you arrived.  You think you’re tired.”

The seriousness of this adventure began to dawn on Sara.  She wasn’t intimidated but rather so excited, she mentally directed any self-doubt to take a back seat to her enthusiasm.  She stole the last fish slider when Calvert wasn’t looking and scooped up the remaining tartar sauce.

“Oh, I think that’s our food coming.  Phew, I started thinking this place was slow.”

Introducing Sara

03 Friday May 2019

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Sara Thomas

Technically, I introduced Sara near the end of book one, similar to how I introduced the major character of book three near the end of book two.  I’m consistent like that.  This is Sara’s introduction in the second chapter of Full Spectrum Cyberwar.

***

SARA Thomas was a serious-minded sixteen-year-old.  With two years of high school behind her, her petite 5’1”, 95-pound frame led people to guess she was only headed into 8th grade.  She got her share of double takes during night classes for the college level calculus she attended Tuesday and Thursday nights at Austin Community College.  Most boys considered her pretty, but she didn’t know that.  She wasn’t so dorky as to wear over-sized glasses, her specs were hip wireframes, but she’d yet to start thinking about boys.  Sara’s focus was elsewhere.

This was her second month working at Response Software, in their modern office complex off Loop 360, overlooking Lake Austin.  She got the job after meeting a Captain Calvert of the U.S. Cyber Command, the previous summer while attending a Black Hat conference in Las Vegas with her father. Captain Calvert, now a major, stayed in touch with her father, and Calvert’s wife K.C., who worked for the cybersecurity forensics firm, offered Sara the job in May.

She expected today to be like all the others.  Jen, her team lead and official mentor as the only other female on-site, tended to sit down with her around 10 am on Wednesday mornings to teach her a new software tool.  Software that Jen referred to as being part of their forensics toolkit or stack, which implied a set of tools that all work together.  

Sara was in her cube before 8 am, reading her email.  She had one marked urgent from Justin Peters, whom she understood to be pretty high up in the firm, one of the partners.  Sara had never received an email before with the urgent flag set.  She read it first.

Sara,

Jen tells me you’re up to speed on the ELK stack.  That’s awesome.  I need you to query these 45 days worth of server logs six ways from Sunday and let me know if you find any interesting patterns.  If you have time, download this server image too and compare it against the standard image we already have.  I need your findings by EoD.

JP

Sara googled “six ways from Sunday.”  Oh, he wants an exhaustive search.  Fun.  Next, Sara googled “EoD.”  My end of day or his?

Sara detached the archived file from the email, saved it to her hard drive, then decompressed it to find a trove of over a thousand log files from thirty-three separate servers.  She added these logs to the data lake she had been building as part of her internship.  That data store was comprised of massive storage in the Amazon cloud offering termed AWS S3 for Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service.  

She began to study the files by scrolling through their file names.  It was apparent there were thirty-three different servers, as their hostnames contained unique numbers, each with forty-five logs, and that each log captured data over a twenty-four hour period.  Fourteen hundred and eighty-five server logs.  

She opened up all the logs at once using her ELK stack to color code each unique data point over the entire forty-five days.  Her program determined the normal range of readings based on statistical analysis, and illustrated meaningful deviations from the norm with the colors.  Color patterns emerged across most of the data points, for each server, on each day, until the final hour.  Maybe that’s normal and the final day’s readings are anomalous because Justin didn’t get a full day?

Sara drilled down into the data points by clicking on them.  The logs contained readings that she didn’t understand.  She did understand each row of data was timestamped every thirty seconds.  And she caught visually, by the color-coded representation, that the readings were entirely identical across each of the thirty-three servers, until the final hour of the last day.  Her guess was that the data points flagged by her pattern-matching software should probably be more random, like the final hour readings.  

She googled wind farms and stumbled upon some information from the Department of Energy that explained the readings to her.  “rev/s” referenced the rotation of the turbine in revolutions per second.  “m/s” was a meters per second reading of the wind speed.  There were other readings for power output and pitch.  Every color-coded reading was identical, until the final hour, as if all thirty-three servers were running the same control program.  Sara wasn’t deep enough in her knowledge of this tech to know to what extent these systems were machine controlled, but clearly, windspeed came from nature and would have to be random.  

She spent more of her time reading online details of how wind farms operated than reviewing the logs themselves.  The ELK stack did all the log analysis for her within a few minutes.  The real effort was in understanding the significance of her findings.  She also had time to download the server image from a link included in Justin’s email, and run the compare.  Sara emailed her findings back to Justin before her 10 am meeting with Jen.

Go-to-Market Plan

20 Saturday Apr 2019

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FBads

These are my facebook ad stats for a single campaign that contains six ad sets targeting six cities.  I have many more stats but the screen capture would be too small if I copy/pasted all the columns to the right.  I’ll share with you some of my Facebook ads experience here, along with other book marketing steps I’ve taken.

First, I chose to target these cities because they represent some of the highest reading cities in America.  Seattle is #1, Portland #2, DC #3.  Austin and Denver represent places where I have a strong influence, and are also in the top ten.  Atlanta joins Austin, Denver, and DC as places with a large number of cybersecurity professionals.  Targetting these cities is what we term in product marketing as a Go-to-Market plan (GTM).

Notice this dashboard allows me to enable or disable the target cities.  I could have created a single campaign that included all these cities in a single ad set.  Separating them allows me to review their performance and make adjustments.  Some stats aren’t shown here but while Seattle has the best Click-Through-Rate (CTR), for whatever reason DC is the cheapest per click.  I’ve had all them running at once but have currently disabled all cities except DC – which actually captures the entire DC to Baltimore corridor.

The Facebook ads dashboard would not show how many clicks eventually lead to a sale, but it could if I leveraged the method of adding pixels from my Amazon seller’s page to my ad settings.  I can’t do that because it requires me to control the code on my selling website.  The Amazon dashboard is robust enough though that I can easily correlate results from the two.

Further marketing efforts involve mailing books to influencers.  I have yet to receive the books to mail because Amazon is super slow at printing and shipping authors’ books – copies that are invoiced at cost, which for my novel is $3.03 each.  Once I receive them, I already have a list of mail-to addresses.

I finally received my first online review – 4 out of 5 stars – which made me happy.  I’m told I need a good ten reviews to sway readers to make the purchase.  It’s a process.  Some friends promoted my book on LinkedIn for me.  I also have links to my book on this blog.  You probably can’t see them if you’re reading this on a mobile device – not enough screen real estate.

And I just added links on another blog of mine that I wrote to share my experience with cancer a few years back.  I haven’t produced content there in five years, and normally it only gets three hits a day on average.  Readership tripled though back in July, and tripled again in January.  It almost receives as many views now as this blog, and I do nothing to promote it.  From my stats, I know three things.  Readers are randomly global, all are going to my blog post titled “Cystoscopy“, and most of them are coming from Pinterest.  I went to Pinterest and searched on the term cystoscopy and noticed a photo and link to my blog shows up near the top.

No idea what made cystoscopies suddenly so popular.  If it leads to me selling more books, I’ll take it.  There are two camps of writers, those for and against blogging.  Blogging is writing and I don’t understand why some authors don’t get that.  They say it’s important for a writer to maintain an email list of readers.  That’s so nineties.  I have my blogs as my digital presence.

FSC Bookcover

Heavy Thoughts

13 Saturday Apr 2019

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IMG_2953

It looked like winter today.  And it was fairly cool when I stepped out the door.  By the time I reached the trail though, the weather was ideal for running.  I’m not yet in a strong running routine and I did well to get out there, but I overdressed.  I suspect I was compensating for not wanting to get outside.  I wanted to remain warm and cozy.

I won’t sugarcoat it, running overweight sucks.  I have to walk up some of the bigger hills still on East Boulder Trail.  And I don’t like other runners passing me.  At the risk of me too backlash, I especially don’t like girls passing me like I’m standing still.  It’s not good for my self-image.

Honestly, the last couple of weeks, I’ve felt overweight in every aspect of my life.  Work has been hard.  Traveled last week and had to spend 14 hour days with 4000 of my closest friends.  I’m somewhere in the middle on the extrovert/introvert spectrum, but together time like that leaves me totally exhausted.

Then there are my book sales.  Or lack of.  I’ve been advertising and the click-through rates are awesome.  But that just means I’m spending money, because my conversion rate sucks.  I’ve discovered and fixed some mistakes but for the most part, my problem is a lack of reviews.  People don’t buy online without reviews and to date, I have zero reviews.  I should probably stop advertising until I get some.

Sorry to bring you down but I blog what’s on my mind.  Right now, my mind needs to lose some weight.

Book Marketing

06 Saturday Apr 2019

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I told myself that for my second novel, I would focus on marketing.  As a product manager, that’s a big part of my day job.  Still, I find everything after writing, from formatting a book for publishing to creating online ads, highly tedious.  If a publisher approached me today and told me they would publish my book for 90% of the royalties, I think I’d sign up as long as they did all this post writing stuff for me.

I’ll share some of my marketing progress, to hopefully benefit the other writers who read this blog.  To date, I’ve only marketed on AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) and Facebook.  They are both easy enough to learn and have pervasive reach.  First step for AMS is buy KDP Rocket and watch Dave Cheeson’s training videos.  I think the videos are free, and also posted on YouTube.  But buy the tool too.  It will save you hours building up your AMS keywords.  And that’s a big part of what the training is for.

Cheeson walks you through building keyword lists that you will add to your AMS campaign.  He recommends 200-300 minimum.  With KDP Rocket, this took me a few minutes.  The goal is that when shoppers search on Amazon for books, your book shows up as a sponsored ad.  It’s not terribly difficult, but I found I needed some repetition to learn concepts like impressions, click-through-rates and cost-per-click.  The training videos helped but also the process of establishing ads and reviewing my reports and dashboards have reinforced my knowledge on these principles.

I found Facebook campaigns a bit more complicated.  Much of it is intuitive but they have these three components to advertising that I didn’t get at first: a campaign, ad sets, and ads.  A Facebook rep actually gave me an hour-long training session, so I have it down now.  I learned to use Facebook’s ad manager.  It’s a dashboard for launching and tracking campaigns.  Prior to this, I thought I had to boost posts on my Facebook author page, but that’s the worst method.

For example, I created the video above.  I wanted to use it in multiple campaigns.  The link would always carry traffic to where my book can be bought on Amazon.  However, Amazon has different URLs (web sites) for different countries.  The U.S. is amazon.com while the U.K. is amazon.co.uk and India is amazon.in.  See the complete expanded distribution list below.

Amazon Sites

Those are my ebook prices, although I’ve lowered a few of them, like India and Mexico, since I screen captured that graphic.  The far right column is my profit.  Back to my story.  If I target a Facebook ad to Bangalore, India, and I did, I need the video to link to amazon.in.  And my add targeting the Netherlands needs the link to lead shoppers to amazon.nl.  Everyone in the Netherlands can read in English, and there are more readers in India than there are books in America.

Using my Facebook Author page, I would have to repost the video multiple times, once per Amazon region I was targeting.  Once I learned how to use the Campaign-ad sets-ads feature of the Ads Manager, I only had to upload that video once.  All part of my book marketing learning curve.

Oh, and I subscribed to a basic plan on promo.com to create my video with licensed video and music.  There are a million ways to create videos, but it’s good to use a product that contains a library of licensed content.  Promo is where I got my M-60 tank and music.  I discovered from reviewing my India results that absolutely everyone over there uses a mobile device rather than a desktop computer.  And other research has led me to understand that video is the way to go for mobile advertising.  Time will tell.