Category Archives: Novel

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

No ​Risk, No Reward

09 Saturday Feb 2019

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BBS Check

This never gets old.  Nor is it likely to lead to wealth.  Six pack of IPA though, or a couple of hand-rolled puffers from the local dispensary.  Enough to get me through the winter.

The last time I posted a photo of a royalty check, I received comments voicing concern from publishing the bank routing and account numbers.  Myth.  As you’ll learn from reading my pending sequel to Cyber War I, Full Spectrum Cyberwar, the ACH system is quite secure based on its high degree of authentication.

Crooks can compromise your checking account, but not anonymously.  I don’t make these cyberattacks up.  I interviewed my banker brother-in-law for those specifics while drinking rum at a wedding in Cancun.  Full Spectrum Cyberwar does take some liberties with what my brother-in-law shared with me.  It’s fiction after all.

I’ve improved on my writing from the first book, and have toned down some of the tech talk.  Not entirely though, because that’s the point of it for me.  To tuck away a primer on cybersecurity inside a fictional thriller.  You’ll learn how to confidently auction wares on the dark web.  And how to hack into a wifi server.  I expect this next book to be banned in certain countries.

This blog has been visited by fifty-five countries so far this year.  Including all eight countries currently banned for export by the U.S. State Department.  If I’m not careful, I could be swept up in Mueller’s Russia investigation.  These are risks writers face.  I’m up for it.

 

Ten Thousand Words

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

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tenk words

My manuscript is 10,000 words short.  Let’s say I agree with that, because by convention, tech thrillers are at least 70,000 words, and I only have 60,000.  And let’s say I come up with 10,000 more words.  Where would I put them?

It’s a fair question.  Coming up with 10,000 words is easy.  I’m a writer.  I’ll probably enjoy it.  But where will they go?  Where would you put them?  At the end?  Seems sensible.  I wouldn’t have to move any other words around to make them fit.  They could just line up at the end.  Easy peasy.  But my manuscript already has an end, and endings are sort of final.  The dénouement.  Can’t go there.

By similar logic, they would fit nicely at the beginning, and that’s where I intend to attach most of them.  I’ve already added a few hundred words for one new beginning scene, and I’m going to keep doing it until I have a beginning scene that I’m satisfied with.

This will address another issue, pointed out to me by one of my beta readers.  Very likely a typical mistake on sequels.  I assumed my characters were already introduced.  Character development on sequels is a bit tricky.  I know these people already and I’m not inclined to keep describing them.  I should be adding depth though, so I’ll focus on that too.

Curious to receive feedback from other writers.  I know this is a running blog, but when’s that last time I ran, let alone blogged about it.  I know that people who read blogs often write blogs.  And bloggers are writers.

The first question is how much you worry about following word length conventions.  The second question is how you would go about adding to your story when the shortfall is 10,000 words.

RTFM & the EULA

05 Saturday Jan 2019

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Stash

The holiday break was good for my writing.  I received feedback on my draft manuscript from two of my three beta readers, and I’ve incorporated most of their suggestions.  Some of it was super helpful and will make for a better story.

It’s still overly technical, although I’m certain it’s not nearly as geeky as the first book.  I’m considering dedicating it to those techies who RTFM and the EULA.  If you understood that last sentence, you might be my target market.

I still plan to use my computer mouse tanks photo for the book cover.  I’m also looking for a publisher though.  Assuming I find one, my book cover ideas might not be mine to act on.  If finding a publisher becomes too onerous, I’ll self-publish again.  I’d like to learn the formal publishing process though.  If you know an agent or publisher who is interested in my genre, let me know.

I also, finally, came up with a title for the book, again, assuming I get to name it if I go the publishing route.  I’ve been referencing my manuscript Cyber War II.  It makes sense but didn’t feel very satisfying to me.  I came up with “Full Spectrum.”  The storyline is around Hybrid warfare.  Full spectrum references the mission statement and tactics of US Cybercom.  Another thought I have is using “Defend Forward,” because that speaks to my plot and is yet more language used by the DoD.  They’re both good.

If that’s not enough, I’ve also started writing my third book.  You could argue it’s the 3rd in a cyberwar series, but it’s 20 years into the future and is in the cyberpunk genre rather than tech thriller.  It’s already more fun.  I’m able to take more liberties with reality in this genre.

I’m also reading every day.  I got two books for Christmas gifts.  My new year’s resolution is to focus on reading and writing in 2019.  It’s all about the books.  I’ll try to share some time with health and fitness, but my aperture on personal interests has narrowed over time.  I rarely even watch sports anymore.  Reading and writing.  That’s my focus now.

The End

24 Saturday Nov 2018

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Cyber War

Just finished the first draft of my second novel.  I haven’t named the title yet but I’ve been calling the draft Cyber War II since it’s a sequel to the first book.  I already licensed the graphic above for the cover.  Nothing says cyberwar more than computer mice dressed up as tanks.

Once again, Thanksgiving week plays a special role in the timing of my writing.  Two years ago, I took off the entire week to self publish my novel.  I’m on a slower schedule this time around, taking two full years to get to a first draft, whereas I completed writing the first book in six months, then edited and published two months later.  Still, this week plays a productive role in my personal storyline.

For those of you who served as beta readers the first time around, I promise you, this first draft is much more readable.  I’ve developed my skills.  I can tell it isn’t finished yet though.  It’s 40,000 words less than my first novel, 10,000 too short.  There really aren’t rules on this but the convention for a tech thriller is to be between 70,000 and 100,000 words.  This draft is at 60,000.

No doubt, it could use another 10,000 words worth of character development.  I’ll take feedback from friends on that.  I developed some new characters that I actually plan to use for my third novel.  It’s not exactly a trilogy, but the 3rd book will be 20 years in the future, using the more youthful characters from this story, and will be in the cyber punk genre.  Always thinking ahead.

I know that I improved my writing in one specific area for this book.  My biggest criticism from the first book was that it was way, way too technical.  That I should consider writing for people who enjoy reading user manuals.  Fair enough.  Not that I shied away from writing another primer on cyberwar, but I’ve employed a number of tricks to make the learning more digestible.

Despite my confidence on improving in that area, I find it impossible to know if I’ve written a good story or not.  I’m too close to it.  I’m certain Stephen King never scared himself with his own novels.  I’ll find some help on that.  I’m targeting completion of a second draft by end of winter, seek out my ‘ole editor, and maybe publish in the spring.

The Cyphers

02 Saturday Jun 2018

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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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bitcoin image

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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Telephone_Building_in_Denver

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

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winterrun

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.

The Kirkus Review

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

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I was slow to warm up to the idea of paying for a professional review.  Not that I was concerned over the criticism, but I simply wasn’t comfortable with how marketing works in this industry.  I’m learning and I’ll leverage this review for some promotional plans.

It’s good feedback too.  Sort of reminds me of working with my editor.  I can’t thank my friends enough who have posted online reviews for me.  Those are like gold.  But, not surprisingly, they contain very little criticism.  That makes receiving professional criticism so much more interesting.  I’ve posted my Kirkus review below, but first here is what I think about it.

There are two negative critiques.  The point of some of my less-than-great writing examples doesn’t bother me.  I rushed this novel with a first draft in 6 months and fully published in 9 months, with minimal editing while working my day job.  I met my objective of getting a book on the shelf.  Plus, that’s really just an example of my writing style that I am okay with.  So no biggie.  The criticism on my character development though stun a bit.  Not just because I know it to be true.  One of my lessons learned was that I’m weak in this area.  Still, it hurts for the review to use my lead character to make this point.  I was somewhat confident on my efforts describing my protagonist.  It’s good criticism though.

I’m totally thrilled by the compliments.  Clearly this reviewer appreciates the tech thriller genre but it made me feel pretty good to be told I did well describing technical detail through dialog.  I initially used a large amount of narrative to describe highly complex topics and received negative feedback on this from my beta readers.  I responded by rewriting it into dialog.  To be fair, I deleted a great deal as well, but good to know my efforts were deemed successful by this reviewer.  Especially since my target audience is technical.  Below is the review.

*****

Computer-security analysts stumble upon plans for a cyberstrike that could immobilize the United States in Mahoney’s debut thriller.

After a security breach involving user IDs, Cyber Business International’s investigators trace the source of the hack to one of its clients, the Arabian Nights Casino in Macau. Rob Warner, who leads CBI’s incident-response team, heads to the Asian territory to investigate. It turns out that Justin Peters, a CBI network administrator there, had been doing work for the casino when someone accessed his privileged user account and wreaked havoc. Rob, however, is suspicious of the casino’s director of cybersecurity operations, Edmund Ho; he may have a grudge against the casino that stems from his demotion after a cyberattack that crippled the local network by flooding it with traffic. Further investigation reveals other players, which leads CBI to predict a similar attack in the United States. But a larger conspiracy may be at play—which would explain why an assassin is targeting Rob. Mahoney’s acronym-laden technological jargon gives his novel an air of sophistication. For example, he intelligently defines terms such as “botnet” and “exploit kit” by context, generally via dialogue between Rob and others, such as Rob’s friend and colleague Bill Johnson. Myriad plot elements along the way keep the tale exciting, including the actions of an American spy and more than one hired killer and a Las Vegas–set final act in which many characters converge. Some oddly structured sentences slow the story down, though, as when Rob questions “flirting with guidelines, well ethics, shoot, the law, like he did in Macau.” The novel also includes little information about its protagonist’s personal life, although it’s abundantly clear that his job is putting a strain on his marriage.

A smart, highly detailed entry in the techno-thriller genre.

*****

Kirkus reviews are known to be almost entirely a rehash of the storyline.  I feel fortunate to receive as much commentary as I did.  The final sentence is what I’ll be able to attach to book covers and other media to promote the book.

The Sequel

10 Friday Mar 2017

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Cyber War

I’ve started writing the sequel to Cyber War I and am interested in feedback and ideals.  I have the outline about 50% complete, and have even written a couple of random scenes.  If you’re interested in how writers write, I outline the story first to a degree that includes not only the storyline, but concepts I want to cover.  That’s where I’m interested in your thoughts.

I’m limited by my genre, tech-thriller, in terms of how much I can stray from the action.  A literary novel could contain unlimited extraneous topics.  Going off topic too much in a thriller loses the audience.  I only added in a single commentary to Cyber War I, that of automation.  My intent was to generate awareness of the current impact of automation in the technology industry.  I did this by expressing various viewpoints through character dialog.  I even shared my partial viewpoint near the end, which might not be good form but still, I think readers could take away their own point of view without me having added too much bias.  I’ve had feedback on the corporate culture in the book, but that was really just coincidental as part of the story setting.  I wasn’t trying to make any point with that.

The next book will of course focus on the same topic, cyberwar, which is a cyber attack between nation states.  I intend to add in commentary on big data and data privacy, which I think are highly correlated, much in the same way I commented on automation in the first book.  Do you think I’m missing anything else that is very close in topic to cybercrime?  Something that would be relevant and topical?  And a natural fit with hacking?  I need to do research on these topics ahead of time; that greatly speeds up the writing effort.

By the way, this graphic will very likely be my cover for the second book.  Any thoughts on that?  Any characters, for those of you who read the first, you care to see return?  Any that need to die?  Crowdsourcing here.  This is your opportunity.

Color Mode

25 Saturday Feb 2017

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This is a bit geeky but I want to share some of my lessons learned as a survivor of the indie publishing process.  This mistake cost me some money because I bought a handful of books to sell on consignment at a local bookstore before discovering this problem.  The issue was some of the text in my book was a lighter shade of black than the rest of the text.  I had two shades of black.  Turns out, there are maybe 1004 shades of black.

RGB represents the three primary colors of red, green and blue.  Computers and TVs, essentially all monitors, output color in RGB because they are working with light.  Think the colors of the rainbow.  All the colors of the rainbow combined are white.  You see the white in the middle of the RGB Venn diagram above.  Conversely, when there is zero light, a monitor screen is black.  RGB is represented by 0 to 255 values for red, green and blue respectively.  Based on what I just said, 0,0,0 is black and 255,255,255 is white.  Microsoft Word outputs fonts in RGB because it assumes it is outputting to your computer screen.  Your printer converts RGB fonts to CMYK as you print.

Which brings us to CMYK or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key.  Key means black because the last letter in black is “k” and “b” might lead you to think blue. Your printer isn’t dealing in light like a monitor, it’s working with ink.  Think a box of crayons.  You were told in elementary school that all the colors of the rainbow make white, but you could never get all your colors to come out as white no matter how big your box of crayons.  CMYK is represented by values from 0 to 100.  Hence, the Venn diagram above yields black for the 0,0,0,100 combination of C, M, Y and K.  Black and White are on opposite ends of the spectrum for RGB vs CMYK.  And they use a different amount of pixels, 256 vs 101 per color setting.  Make sense?

When I had to use Adobe InDesign for my book layout and create print and ebook formats for my publisher, I didn’t know that this graphics package was preparing my fonts for a printer and converting MS Word fonts from RGB to CMYK.  This alone would not have been an issue had it converted everything to the same color mode.  For some reason my MS Word fonts had two different values for black.  Or at least they converted to two discrete values.  One was a default setting for black that InDesign calls Black, for which the CMYK values are 0,0,0,100.  Or maybe 100,100,100,100.  I forget but think both sets of values are equal.  The second default setting was called Registration.  Its CMYK values are various numbers for each of the four settings.  The result is a lighter shade of black.

My publisher, Ingram Spark, which is really a distributor as I have my own publishing firm, Lobo Media, returns an electronic proof to me to look for issues with my print uploads.  Had I actually printed it, I might have noticed the color disparity.  I only reviewed them online though, and guess what?  The CMYK values don’t contain nearly as many pixels as RGB, think 100 vs 255 as printing is at less resolution than display monitors, so I could not discern the disparity on my screen.  It shows up in ink on paper, but not on a monitor.

I think the lesson here is to print out at least part of your proof to look for printing errors.  I’m blogging this because it was a topic of discussion at my book signing Thursday night.  I signed and gave away my leftover copies that contained the misprint.  They are totally readable, but flawed.  While Karen was walking around assuring everyone that the kinky sexual preferences of the book’s protagonist were entirely fiction, I was having conversations on color mode.

Marketing Plan

24 Friday Feb 2017

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cake

Last night, I got my cake, and got to eat it too.  That was how it felt to talk about nothing other than my book with friends for a two hour happy hour, that stretched into five hours. Don’t ask me how bakers can make photo-realistic frosting.  It involves printing and leaves me with the impression we’ve gone as far as we’ll ever go with technology.

ellie-n-chase

Ellie and Chase focused on the eats while the adults imbibed beverages.  Chase’s mom Wendy hosted this book signing for me and I can’t thank her enough.  Such a sweetheart.

suzy

A couple of other events competed for my neighbors’ attention last night, but Suzy picked hanging out with authors over more socially responsible activities.

fam

Last night’s book signing kicks off my marketing plan.  My ebook will go on sale for 99¢ Sunday.  I’ll follow that up with some advertising – a $25 or $50 investment on Facebook and maybe something on Amazon.  I expect a Kirkus review in early April, about the same time as I hope to have my book on display at the Tattered Cover.

blaine-and-doug

You might be able to find these two characters in my book.  Doug represents all Security Analysts.  Blaine is the source for some of my dialog.  He’s promised to help me launch my website, which is key to my marketing plan.  Blaine has also published several books and is guiding me on next steps.  He thinks he knows more than me, and he does; but I think I have the better cover design.

Bath Time

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

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dr-teals

Want to know how I do it?  How I run so much for an old man?  I’ll tell you how I do it.  After running long runs, which I consider to be 12 miles plus, I soak in epsom salt.  Cost about $4 a bag.  Cheap thrills.

This will be my first week to run over 50 miles as I train for the Colorado Marathon in May. I’ll be running two or three 12 mile or longer runs per week for the next ten weeks.  That’s a lot of baths, but Dr. Teal can go the distance.  I probably won’t need to buy a second bag.  Much more affordable than a massage.

I ran 12 miles today.  Taking off tomorrow to drink like Hemingway at my book signing.  Stop by for happy hour 4 to 6 at 2020.  I’ll be running 15 miles on Saturday if you want to join me out on the trail.

Book Signing @ 2020

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

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bb-with-ellie-2

The Boulder Bookstore still has copies of my hardcover if you’re interested in attending my book signing Thursday, February 23rd.  They are shelved in the Local Authors section.  There are even some paperback editions in Longmont at Local Editions at 17th and Harvard.

book-signing

My friend Wendy has been so gracious to set this event up for me.  Some people still think writing is cool.  She emailed some people and sent out a Nextdoor invite.  I figure this blog post should capture anyone not on either communication.

2020

I’ll order some food trays and it will be a cash bar.  Happy Hour prices though.  The event time is 4 to 6, although you can stay for dinner.  They generally serve one entre but are otherwise small plates and pizza.  My neighborhood also has Mexican, Thai and BBQ.  I’ll tell you where this story came from, answer any questions, and let you know about my next book.