Category Archives: Novel

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

The Cyphers

02 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in cyber war, Novel

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steganogrphy

I belong to a covert writing club.  We publish on the deep web.  Like using steganography.  I probably shouldn’t say anything more.  It started from a private invite.  We publish privately to promote creativity.

If any of this sounds illicit to you, let me define terms.  The dark net is where people conduct nefarious transactions.  Dark net sites are generally also part of the deep web, but the deep web is not inherently bad.  It’s simply web sites that have not been indexed by search engines or otherwise have their access obscured.  The metaphor is of an iceberg.  We use the Internet that’s been indexed for queries.  That’s the tip of the iceberg.  The vast majority of the web is not visible to us, like the deeply submerged section of the iceberg.

This started out as a way for us to hone our craft.  It’s also a good method to draft snippets of dialogue for later regurgitation in other works – for me, my novel.  I’m considering submitting my current writing for review, sort of like the conventional writer’s discussion group.

I’m relating this under my novel category because I think it’s a novel approach (forgive the pun) for writers to practice their craft.  Your contributions can be easily copy/pasted years into the future into derivative works.  A post today by one of the other writers spoke to me so directly, it felt unnatural.  Like the narrator had a Gods-eye view into my life.  That’s impressive writing that does that.  Not only will I benefit from the writing exercise, but I expect to read some really good stories, exclusive to my private group.

 

Virtual Currency

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

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Pretty sure I blogged late last year on my plans to buy Bitcoin.  I finally got around to doing that a couple of weeks ago.  I don’t care to start conducting transactions with virtual currencies.  This story is the best of many I’ve read that details exactly why virtual currencies aren’t really a thing yet, and won’t be for some time.  Perhaps not until quantum computing becomes pervasive.  I’m doing this for the experience.  To be able to relate accurate details in my next novel.  I referenced a bitcoin transaction in my last book but I glossed over the details.  One can’t write a tech thriller on cyberwar without speaking to virtual currencies.

I won’t go into too much detail here on my experience.  I think I’ll mostly provide links to some of the best stories I’ve discovered, and you can click on them if you’re interested.  I actually repeated a number of stories from my ten years of blogs in my last novel, and I will again.  So writing this post is more about building my reference library of content for book two than anything else.  Some of this will be useful to you if you are considering purchasing a virtual currency.

Since my goal isn’t becoming rich, I only purchased $100 of Bitcoin.  I wanted to invest just $5, and that’s an option, but there are transaction charges, and it occurred to me it’s more easy to do the math on $100.  It’s quick for me to understand the $2.99 cost of buying my $100 of Bitcoin is basically 3%.  I’ll incur similar future transaction charges and they would all be much more from a percentage perspective for only $5.

My first step was to read the Internet to understand how to begin trading Bitcoin.  I discovered I needed to register at an Exchange.  I settled on Gemini because it seemed the most professional to me.  It’s run by those Winklevoss twins whom successfully sued Mark Zuckerberg for a substantial share of Facebook.  After registering nearly two months ago, the Winklevoss twins still have not completed verification of my identity.  They did contact me once to inform me that my drivers license photo was too blurry and that I should resend it.  I did.  Nothing but chirping crickets since.  Seeing this as a red flag for future customer service interactions, I signed up with Coinbase – which is probably the most popular exchange.  Took a couple of days for verification, mostly because I did it over the weekend.  Go with Coinbase.

My research indicated that one should not leave their virtual currency sitting with an online exchange, given the history of these places having their reserves constantly hacked.  North Korea’s Icarus has made attacking exchanges their specialty of late.  Icarus is the modern day Bonnie and Clyde.

So I purchased a digital wallet.  I think I blogged on this already too.  I received the Nano Ledger S as a Christmas gift.  It’s pretty cool.  Cost about $79.  Another reason why purchasing only $5 would have been stupid.  The idea is one can transfer their Bitcoin from an exchange onto the digital wallet to avoid being hacked.  It’s mostly offline and connects to your computer via USB when you use it.  Transferring Bitcoin is essentially a copy/paste process.  Very easy to understand YouTube video here on how to do that between the Nano and Coinbase.

If I’m honest, using digital currencies is fairly complex.  But for a techie, sort of fun.  I created an account for myself at Bitsane too because I want to trade my Bitcoin for Ripple – another virtual currency that banks are starting to use.  Even more complexity as one cannot directly buy it.  Rather, you have to exchange Bitcoin for Ripple.  Yet more complexity.

There is nothing simple about trading Bitcoin.  It’s not something one can easily do from their 401K account.  But I’m a writer and my genre of tech thriller encumbers me to actually know what I’m talking about.  Fiction allows me to take some liberties, but readers of tech are interested in detail like this.

My Bitcoin stash is currently worth $130, after a single week.  $10 of that came from purchasing it from a recommendation, which you can do too from this link.  It will give you a quick 10% return on $100 transaction.  You and I will both get $10.  Seems like a better business model than actually trading Bitcoin.

WIX is the Website for Authors

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

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My friends think I’m technical.  I suppose compared to many of them, I am.  I would argue that ten years in personnel management killed my skills at the command line, but it’s all relative.  I just built a website for my novel.  I probably sound like a techie having just done that, but hear me out.

This morning, I built a decent web site for a book I published over a year ago.  Okay, so maybe I am technical, but lazy?  No, I tried to build a website earlier, it just sucked so badly I never really launched it.  Ultimately I deleted it.  And this is the point of my post, where I share my writing experience for other aspiring self publishers.  I built that first website with GoDaddy.  GoDaddy leverages WordPress for their platform.  Software that competes with Microsoft for the highest number of known vulnerabilities.  It’s so kludgy to use, I’m at a loss for words.  I could never get it to look how I wanted.  I couldn’t even use my own fonts.  That’s a big deal to me because I like to use a stencil font to give a military air to my book.  Think MASH.  I’d show you but this blog is on WordPress so I can’t.

It was my 15 year old daughter who talked me into using WIX.  I’m a happy camper.  Took me less than an hour to have everything looking how I wanted.  Much less than that to launch it but then I  tweaked things for over half that time because I was having fun.  WIX even provides simple-to-use email subscription forms.  Everything was so easy, a writer could do it.  I’m not just being funny there.  My experience meeting other writers is the majority of them are barely technical enough to format fonts in a Word document.  They refer to the people who publish ebooks as ebook coders, like it’s actually software development to publish a book in electronic format.  I’ll admit, it did take me about twenty hours of YouTube videos to learn Adobe InDesign, but seriously, it’s not coding.

So, if you are an author.  One of those writers who is just savvy enough to download Scrivener but not clever enough to integrate file sharing with DropBox, then Wix is for you.  Trust me, stay away from GoDaddy, it’s a POS.  That’s “Piece of Shit” for you non techies who shy away from acronyms and can’t RTFM.

Pensive Thoughts on Blogging, on Writing, on the Year

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Novel, Storytelling

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This was the first photo I ever blogged, on December 31, 2009.  I suppose I started blogging at work a few years before that, but it was the same photo that I started with.  I don’t consider myself visually-oriented.  If you’ve seen me dress, you’d agree, but I generally give attention to my blog photos because I feel they oftentimes tell the story better than I can in words.

I’ve been thinking about putting my blog on hiatus for a few months.  I don’t know that I will but it’s fair to say I haven’t been putting much thought into my blog stories lately, and that makes me a bit sad.  It used to be I would curate my thoughts all week before finally capturing the story into words over the weekend.  Even some of my longer posts only take me five or ten minutes to write because I’ve already written the stories in my head.

I should perhaps reword my statement above and say I haven’t been putting stories into my thoughts lately, because that’s how I think.  I wouldn’t say I’m a vocal storyteller.  I lean towards laconic.  But my pattern of thinking is to structure free thoughts into stories.  I imagine I have the same thoughts roaming around my mind as anyone else, but I typically form a narrative for them.  It’s clear to me that I should have considered a career in journalism back in college, but then writing is and has been one of the strongest components of my job and career.  From the fifty or so emails I type every day to the PowerPoints I create for Sellers and Customers.  I’ll be putting a few hours into creating a story today for how my company markets security information and event management.  In a PowerPoint form factor of course.

Working on a Sunday segues into why I might pause my blogging.  Not that I don’t have the time, as I already said it takes very little effort for me to actually write.  It’s that my free thoughts are so focused on work right now.  And I haven’t been reading much fiction lately, which has always been my muse.  I suspect I’m going through a boring phase so why write about it?

It is my personal digital platform to leverage for marketing my book, but it’s not like I’m doing anything now in that arena either.  Ellie said she would build me a website for my writing over Christmas break, maybe that will replace my blog.  I stopped blogging back in 2014 for over a month and no one seemed to notice.

I think what I’m struggling with here is that I don’t want to blog if I don’t have anything halfway interesting to share.  It is a good exercise even if I have nothing clever to say.  It helps me to be introspective.  And it’s practice writing.  I have a good friend whose writing I love to read.  Every paragraph is like a Dali painting.  Each sentence a masterpiece in creativity.  Yet he rarely writes because he says it’s a struggle and he doesn’t enjoy the process.

I’m the exact opposite.  I can write about nothing and find it easy.  That might actually be a bad habit that blogging isn’t helping me with.  If you’re a writer, than you are familiar with the strong attitudes authors have toward blogging.  They either say it’s a good exercise and serves as a marketing platform, or they despise it as cheapening the medium.  I’m asking myself that question now.  I’m wondering if it’s in my interest to continue or to take a break.  We’ll see.

Country of Origin

11 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by in Novel

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runnersblogstats

What’s up with Greenland?  I could understand if they don’t run much up there but do they not have Internet access?  These are my running blog stats illustrating the country of origin for my site visits.  I have zero hits from countries in gray.  I’m fine with a large swath of the Middle East dissing me but I’m a bit put out by the handful of countries in Europe that apparently don’t run.  Belarus has just earned a bad place in my next novel.  I’m planning an attack from the Baltic States.  Nothing from Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Albania either.  I’ve already figured Macedonia into my storyline but I might rethink that now.

prostateblogstats

The stats from my prostate blog are thinner and I get that.  I haven’t added to it in three years.  Still, does no one in Greenland ever get cancer.  Someone needs to visit to make sure those boys are alright.  I’m not above being spiteful.  I plan to do some writing this weekend and I’m making my list of enemy states.

 

Source Material

21 Saturday Oct 2017

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IMG_1611Want to flatter a writer?  Send them a selfie reading their book.  Works for me.  This man has nerd written all over him.  My target audience.  My tribe.

Cyber War I is as much a primer on computer security as it is fiction.  And as far as fiction goes, I didn’t make much up.  DDoS attacks.  Ransomware.  I took everything from the headlines.  I figured there might be a market for cybercrime fiction because I couldn’t find any.  Some stories play it up by saying a massive DDoS attack leads to some sort of dystopia, but that’s about as much tech detail they provide.

I read a number of nonfiction books for source material.  I will say, they were very good reads.  Such good stories that they read like fiction.  Fatal system Error by Joseph Menn and Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen.  Reminds me of the first cybercrime book I ever read, a solid twenty years ago, The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll.

I’m still outlining and researching more than actual writing, for my next novel.  I would tell you that my new job has slowed down my progress, but that’s not to say it’s because I’m too busy with work that I haven’t the time to write.  It’s that all the discovery involved in a new job occupies my free thoughts.  I wrote my last novel during my ten and fifteen mile runs.  Nowadays, my free thoughts center around all my work projects.  It’s so hard to discipline random thoughts.

I’ve discovered a new trick though.  My buddy Dave has prompted me to listen to podcasts again.  Dan Carlin and Sam Harris.  Something I used to do more regularly ten years ago.  I downloaded four cyber security podcasts and began listening to them on my ten mile run today.  Excellent method to obtain source material for my next book.  Absolutely brilliant use of my time.

 

Dmitri and the Wallet

14 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in cyber war, Novel

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DmitriHow big is your wallet?  Look at the objects on this tabletop.  I bet your wallet is not as big as Dmitri’s is.  I don’t really know his name.  Like any other guy, I was minding my own business in the hotel lobby when I was engulfed by a gaggle of techies attending some international conference for the betterment of humanity.  This guy sits in front of me, blocking my view of equally attractive people, and proceeds to pull out his wallet. Seemingly to make room for, not just one, but two smart phones.

To his credit, he used both mobiles at the same time.  Possibly dueling the same issue that was so important to him that he worked it while his comrades drank voraciously nearby.  Sounded more to me though that he was working some tech issue with skilled subject matter experts on the one phone, to the point he could set it down occasionally, while he yelled at the Help Desk on the other.  The wallet, despite serving as a focal point to at least me, was lost in all this performance art.

If you think it’s bad how I’m making fun of this guy, you should consider how much worse it is for me to take a photo of a complete, non-celebrity stranger, and post it online.  I don’t care.  This guy has earned a role as a European hacker in my pending novel.

Day 3

10 Sunday Sep 2017

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Wrapped up my final sessions today for this weekend’s writers workshop.  I swear, the alliteration in that previous sentence was unintentional.  Or maybe the result of so much learning.  I didn’t focus this year on a single area.  Last year I did focus on sessions related to character development and story arc.  I mixed it up this year.

I took one marketing type of course that gave hints on how to write good cover copy.  That’s the advert an Author writes on their back cover for paperbacks, or inside jacket on hardcovers.  A publisher would typically write this if an author has one, but indy writers have to do most things like this themselves.  There is a convention to writing cover copy that I didn’t know about, although I actually followed the rules fairly well on my initial novel.  I write my share of product announcements at work.

I took a course on writing subtext, which is another thing I believe I did well at just naturally, but then subtext does tend to write itself.  The other classes were about character development and story structure.  My most unique class, taught by Diana Gabaldon, was on white space, which is the absence of words.  What to leave out.  And also a bit on the aesthetic quality of positioning words and paragraphs on the page.

Overall, the conference was both interesting and fun.  It’s cool to be with so many others doing the same thing as me.  I’m struck by the large number of writers in their 70s and 80s.  Writing is their hobby.  This interests me, and I take the opportunity to talk with them, because writing is my retirement plan.  It’s a really good hobby because books can require extensive research, which is good for an aging brain.

Another objective of this workshop was to motivate myself to get back into a regular writing routine.  Time will tell but I’m optimistic.  Diana Gabaldon told the story of how she makes time.  Her three kids are grown now but she started writing when they were all under six years of age.  She would wake up at midnight and write until 4am.  She continues this practice today.  I’m simply going to target the evenings between dinner and bedtime.

Day 2

09 Saturday Sep 2017

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8am

RMFW’s independent writer of the year for her young adult fantasy, The Rampart Guards,  Wendy Terrien poses with me at 8am for a photo.  “Much too early for a photo,” Wendy said.

bookstore.jpg

Because writers tend to read, I consigned some paperbacks to the conference bookstore.  Haven’t noticed any sale yet, but I’ve also been aggressively handing out my writer business cards.  Karen and I came back from dinner tonight on the hotel shuttle with a number of attendees of another conference just starting to arrive – the International Open Source Software Foundation.  We joined the crowd in the bar for a nightcap.  One one side, my writers’ tribe, on the other, my tech boys.  I’ve never felt so included.

Day 1

08 Friday Sep 2017

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Diana

I got here in time for dinner.  I could stop there.  Dinner is always good.  I wanted to get here by noon but that didn’t happen.  Turns out, dinner here was awesome.  Diana Gabaldon is a hoot.  I even learned how to pronounce her last name.

Diana gave a motivational speech.  Or it was standup comedy.  It was one of those two things.  She said, “…ballerinas aren’t born on their toes.”  And later on, “…because a man in a kilt, you can be up against the wall with him in a minute.”  I think she was drinking Diet Coke.

I’m also watching the news this weekend, tracking the storm.  Am I the only one to notice how these storms come in across the Atlantic?  They slam into Cuba, then flip off that island like a pin ball up into Florida.  Do you think that’s why Florida doesn’t like Cuba?

I can see how Floridians would get tired of that.  Still, the channels I watch don’t give any details on the fate of the Cuban people after flipping that storm across the Florida Straits.  Anyone know?

 

Royalty Check

01 Friday Sep 2017

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I really feel like retirement is just around the corner.  I can taste it, it’s so close.  Just ten thousand or so more royalty checks per year at this scale and I’ll be living on an island somewhere off passive income.  I’m being cheeky of course.  I should appreciate any sales and I do.  As inconsequential as this check is to my overall financial well-being, it felt good to receive this in the mail.  Fortunately, my electronic fund transfers from Amazon are slightly larger and more frequent.

I’m told 90% of all books never return more than $1000 in their printed lifetime.  My expectations are low.  But I am serious when I tell people that this is a ten year plan.  That I truly hope to be earning a low five figure income once I’m retired.  The trick will be to establish a catalog of a half dozen or so books by then.  Becoming a better writer will help too, and I expect repetition to provide those skills.

Toward that end, I’ll be attending my second writers’ workshop next weekend – the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference.  It’s unfortunate timing as my undergrad alma mater Texas State will be in town to play my grad school CU.  I hate to miss that game but this will be worth it.  I learned tons last year.  And that experience was perfect timing as I’d finished my first draft and the lessons learned aided me tremendously with my second draft.

I’m hoping for this year’s conference to kick-start me on my current draft.  I started writing my sequel to Cyber War I in January but stalled out in May when I changed jobs.  I think I can begin to make time for writing again if I just get motivated and focus.  I need to stop drinking in the evenings like Hemingway and start writing like him.  Looking forward to this workshop.

The Sands Casino

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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BlackHat is in Vegas this week.  That’s the big cyber security conference for my tribe.  I’m not going, I actually leave for vacation mid-week, but it draws my attention to my novel, Cyber War I.  Allow me to explain part of my story.  I often tell people I didn’t make much up, and it’s true.  I called the casino in my story, the Arabian Nights.  Think about it.

The Sands isn’t actually a casino anymore.  It used to be.  Now it’s the name of the corporation that owns some of the largest casinos in Las Vegas and Macau – the Venetian perhaps being the most famous.  The Sands Corporation is majority owned by billionaire Sheldon Adelson.  You might know him as a prominent GOP contributor.  His elimination of financial support lead to Bush having to withdraw from the 2016 primaries.  His pro-Isreali speech at Yeshiva University in 2013 lead to his casino empire experiencing a major cyber attack by Iran in 2014.

The details are a little fuzzy to me now, but what I recall was he gave a speech where he proposed that the US should detonate a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert.  So that they would know what a nuclear attack looks like.  Sheldon’s idea of a deterrent.  Iran didn’t find it amusing.  A few months later, Iran attacked Sheldon’s casino in Bethlehem PA, where they obtained privileged user credentials that allowed them to proceed with a major cyber attack against the Sand’s casinos in Vegas.  The week-long attack cost Sheldon well over $40M.  Inadvertently, Iran took down the Active Directory services which stopped them from gaining access to the Macau casino network.  That would have pushed the cost over $100M.

If you read my book, which only an exclusive 100 people in the world have, you’d know this is all fairly transparent.  Sheldon is Sam Sumner.  The Sands is the Arabian Nights.  The larger story of course is based on Iran responding to the US Stuxnet attack against their centrifuges.  And the climax ends at the BlackHat conference.  Even though it took me a couple of years to start my book, I knew I was going to base it off this Sheldon storyline after reading about how his speech at Yeshiva University led to his casino attack by Iran.  Why bother making stuff up?

 

Still at it

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

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I’m still at it.  Still writing my next novel.  Being a sequel, there will be more similarities than not, but everything will be different to me.  I have different objectives.  I had two goals with the first book, discovering if I could tell a story, and learning the process of writing and publishing.  I’m satisfied I succeeded at both.  Enough people have given me positive feedback that I told a good story, and having completed the publishing process is inherent evidence of achieving my second objective.  This second book will be an effort to improve in everything I sucked at with the first.

I won’t rush it like the last.  I’d finish it again in six months if I could but this year is different.  I’m learning a new job and I don’t care to ignore my running habit as much this time around.  Not that I couldn’t use a few pounds but I gained ten last year.  Taking more time though should lead to a better book.  Cyber War I had enough typos that I’ve only recently fixed them all.  I think.

Going slower should lead to higher quality but I’ll also use better tools and perform more editing.  Using Evernote for the first book worked well but the font was so small I couldn’t see the errors.  I’m now using Scrivener, which contains the notebook-like features of Evernote but has a thousand times more benefits.  It’s the ultimate writer’s toolkit.

I was happy with the editing I received on Cyber War I but it was limited due to the money I put into it.  I intend to spend perhaps double this time.  And of course I’ll take more time to review and respond to the suggested edits.  My step sister Shirley visited me this last week and told me in so many words I could benefit greatly from more editing.  Point taken.

I’m doing other things differently as well.  I have much more of an outline prepared for the sequel.  It’s not complete, like the first I don’t yet know my ending.  I didn’t have an ending for Cyber War I until I was nearly half way through.  My climax came to me during a run and I immediately wrote it before filling in the second half of the story.  That much is true for this book.  I don’t write my chapters serially.  Like Schrödinger’s cat, I write three or four chapters simultaneously, I even move them around before determining a final position of events at closing time.

I can say, and this is probably why I’m blogging on this topic, that I’ve picked up the pace the last couple of weeks on my writing.  It’s not easy with so many other priorities.  Between binge-watching Thirteen Reasons Why, reading three books at once, learning the new job, and hiding from Karen while she’s on a home improvement surge, it’s hard to do it all.

My New Copy Editor

10 Saturday Jun 2017

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A month ago, one week into my new job, I navigated my way up to the 11th floor to look at my old office from when I worked in the Denver Main Central Office 23 years earlier.  Not sure of the date on this photo, but the art deco building was completed in the early 1940s.  The 11th floor was completely empty, under construction.  The experience left me nostalgic still, thinking of old work friends.  Namely my boss Lesley, and one of my colleagues, Victoria. Maybe I thought of them together because they were close friends themselves.  So I called them.  We finally met up this morning for breakfast at Tangerine on 28th and Iris.

They are both doing well, traveling the globe together to exotic locales, most recently Northern Italy.  Sadly, both their husbands have passed.  They look healthy and remain active though.  I’m going to ask Lesley to hike around the Indian Peaks later this summer.  Victoria is not exactly the outdoor type.

I also intend to ask Lesley to help me with my next novel.  She’s retired now, but apparently performs copy editing.  The irony here is that, as my boss, she constantly edited my work.  My job as a data network design engineer involved a great deal of technical writing.  She would take a red pen to my papers.  She no doubt enjoyed this activity as she was a college English professor in an earlier career.  I’m also hoping she will help me with some of my dialog that takes place in the UK, because she’s also British.  Lesley will be the perfect copy editor.

The Waning Days of Winter

31 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Novel, Running

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My week of vacation is waning with the final days of winter.  I know it’s been spring for the last week, but the mountains celebrate seasons on their own time.  Yesterday I ran 15 miles in 50° weather.  Today I ran 17 miles in 40° and pouring rain.  Tomorrow I’ll run 20 miles in 30° and snow.

The free time has been great for my other hobbies as well.  I’ve read a couple of cyber crime books.  I’ve been prepping for a book promotion and fighting with my distributor, Ingram Spark.  Not sure who lost but I ended my Amazon ebook contract with them today and published directly to that venue using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).  Ten times easier and highly recommended.

I have very little good to say about Ingram Spark.  They’ve been a nightmare.  They have zero quality control.  They don’t don’t check to see if retailers have successfully uploaded content from their portal.  They don’t check anything.  Everything is totally self serve.  My experience leaves me finding very little reason to use them for my next novel.  The self publishing tools at Apple and Amazon are significantly better.  KDP even spell checks your manuscript.