Gleefully Malicious Books
As part of the FreeBSD Foundation’s FreeBSD Fridays series, I’ll be giving a talk on Introductory Jails on 25 September 2020, at 1700 UTC or noon EDT (CORRECTION: 1pm EDT). Yes, that’s tomorrow.
I’ll be taking questions after.
Join the talk at https://live.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/freebsdfriday/.
The “Face The Strange” anthology has escaped, including my Prohibition Orcs tale “Woolen Torment.”
I sold this story to this traditionally-published anthology back at the beginning of 2018. It was due to come out this fall, but the publisher cancelled the anthology this spring because of the plague. Thankfully, the editors chose to release it themselves on a royalty share basis. That’s less than ideal, sure, but after waiting so long I’m glad to see it happen.
The important thing about “Woolen Torment” is that every word is absolutely, 100% fact. It is an entirely true story. Other than what I made up, of course.
“Woolen Torment” will be available on its own in a couple months, once the exclusivity period expires. Patronizers will get their copy then.
You can get the ebook of FTS on Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
On a related note:
My short story Drums with Delusions of Godhood is now available on its own. Originally published in Boundary Shock Quarterly: Apocalypse Descending, it’s full of euchre and Front Line Assembly and genetic engineering for supremacy in Dungeons & Dragons. Plus, loss of innocence and the meaning of life and all that serious stuff.
No, that’s not a typo. TLS Mastery will have two covers. Eddie Sharam outdid himself this time, in more ways than one, parodying an artistic masterpiece that folks have requested for years.
Munch’s The Scream could not be used for just any book, mind you. It demands a topic of particular notoriety. A subject that drives even seasoned systems administrators to desperate shrieks for aid. Something that makes the world whirl around us all. With its classic combination X.509, ASN.1, ITU and IETF standards, and more, I’m pleased to say TLS fits this more than any other general topic.
The book will appear in two versions: the Beastie Edition, and the Tux Edition.
The hardcover dust jacket will have both.
As a unique touch, Eddie painted the Beastie version. By hand. With oil paint. You know, like real art. And if you should ever be unlucky enough to enter my office, you’ll see this.
Every day as I work, I’ll be looking at this.
That old beat-up bookcase? Once we can safely go to IKEA, that’ll be replaced by a new bookcase for my brag shelf. My current brag shelf is overflowing.
Real authors have the cover art for their books hanging on their wall. I guess I’m a real author now. It’s been a long time since one of my books had a painted cover. How long, you might ask? Well, the wall behind my desk has the previous paintings.
Those are Tom Dow’s cover paintings for the two Gatecrasher books, plus a Bradley K McDevitt original from the interior. They’re roughly 1992. Getting those paintings converted to a form suitable for printing involved going to an industrial photographer and having a photograph separated into four CMYK transparencies. Each cost several hundred dollars, and had to be shipped to the printer. If any of the transparencies got damaged, the whole set was ruined. Dealing with the interior art involved high-grade photoduplication, a light table, and a wax roller.
To prepare the Beastie Scream oil painting for printing, Eddie got out his camera. No, not the cellphone camera, a good camera.
This is truly the best time in history to be a creator. Other than, you know, plagues and long-overdue racial reckonings and political upheaval and such.
I’m gonna be self-indulgent here and show off the BKM interior illo as well. Like I need an excuse, it’s my blog.
This was one of the very first pieces Brad did for me, but once I saw the book titles I knew we were going to get along famously.
If you’re interested, you can get T-shirts and small posters with the Tux Scream and Beastie Scream at my shop. The book itself is still open for sponsorship.
Solar systems form out of vast clouds of particles and gas. Motes of dust aggregate, drawn together by their own minuscule gravity over innumerable aeons. Those aggregates creep near other aggregates, eventually colliding into heavier masses, and their combined gravity draws yet more matter. A cosmic observer with a really compressed sense of time would see nothing happen for millennia, then there would be a huge rush as all this matter sucks itself together and becomes so heavy that the innermost atoms are compressed into involuntary thermonuclear fusion. It looks quick, but most of the progress is invisible.
Writing this book is a lot like that.
I’ve used TLS and SSL for decades. I have debugged errors and battled bogus certificate chains. I have screamed the vilest obscenities at SSL Labs for daring to expose my weaknesses and, like every other sysadmin, have doused browser developers in kerosine as they slept and set them on fire. I had a good working knowledge of TLS, but writing about it demanded a deep plunge.
So: the book is about a quarter written.
Most of my time has been spent aggregating tiny details into facts, building those facts into knowledge, and fitting my experience into that knowledge. I’m not going to jinx myself by publicly declaring that I expect the mere writing to go quickly, of course, but I feel I have some decent aggregate chunks and am ready to start throwing them together.
The Princess Bride motif I was considering seems to be a natural fit. Which is good, because if a motif doesn’t fit naturally it’s the wrong motif. My subconscious brain recognized the suitability before my conscious mind did. (Weirdly, John Carpenter films would have also fit well. I did cosmic horror for the SNMP book, however, so my beloved Carpenter must wait for another suitable title.)
Some bits, of course, won’t fit. A stray comment from Ray Percival reminded me that this book doesn’t mention my personal favorite Great Evil: Oracle. You might not have noticed, but Oracle has exerted great efforts to earn my personal loathing. The conversation ed1conf and I had on the Great Beast is irrelevant to TLS.
“You’ve heard of Informix? DB/2? SQL Server 2019?”
“Yes.”
“Morons.”
“In that case I challenge you to a battle of integrity.”
“For the database?”
“Yes.”
“To the death?”
(nods)
“I accept!”
“Good. Then open your console. Read this, but do not click «agree».”
“I comprehend nothing.”
“What you do not comprehend is called a EULA. It is odorless, tasteless, devolves instantly into legalese, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.”
(deploys system)
“All right: where is the liability? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both click «agree», and find out who is right and who is sued.”
(much later)
“They all had a EULA. I spent the last several years building up a mastery of Postgres.”
You can still sponsor TLS Mastery either at the print level or ebook level. Don’t wait too long if you’re interested. The dust cloud is coming together faster and faster, and once fusion hits it’s all over.
Kris Rusch has a lovely blog post today on the need for courage in the writing business. I started to comment on it, but the comment grew to such a length that would be rude to leave it. “Comment” does not mean “lengthy diatribe.” So:
A key component of courage is the willingness to accept the risk of pain, and perhaps actual pain. Publishing is full of emotional pain. Every time I write something, I wonder if I should make it public. If I should put it out there. And then I remind myself of the very worst that could happen.
The Book Police will show up at my door with their lead-type-studded cudgels to drag me by my ankles to the front lawn of the Library of Congress, where they’ll put me in stocks for the day with a sign hanging around my neck declaring me a Bad Writer and place a bushel basket of rotten fruit a few feet away for amateur literary critics’ throwing pleasure, while simultaneously the Bad Art Correction Squad will break out their erasers and hard drive degaussers and eliminate all trace of my work from meatspace and Internet alike.
No–wait. That’s not it. Sorry.
The worst that can happen is nobody notices. Nobody cares. That the thing I spent hours or weeks or even months writing gets no attention and attracts zero readers.
That hurts. I’d rather take rotten nectarines to the face for a few hours.
As long as I don’t publish, my comforting dream of this book’s explosive success remains alive. I avoid the risk of pain.
Writers, especially new writers, believe that their books are special. I hear writers call their books their babies, their special friends, their precious. And it’s simply not true. Or worse, they don’t call their books that. They call their book (singular) that.
If you’ve just finished writing your first book, or your second, this is understandable. It’s even natural.
But it’s a terrible mindset for any artist.
Writing is a creative skill, like any other art. You can learn to write just as you can learn to paint or throw clay or staple yourself to the world’s largest ball of string and have your friends set you rolling down the freeway and call it performance art. A potter would not expect to find success from their first successful vase. A painter would not expect their first portrait to win awards. No, these creators finish a piece, take a moment to appreciate and contemplate it, and start on the next one.
Successful writers are the same way.
Don’t get me wrong, the dream of success is great. The dream of fame and glory and supple book groupies can keep you going.
But being a writer is about being able to take a punch and either laugh it off or full-on ignore it. I’m a full time writer, and not a week goes by that I don’t get a scathing review from someone who didn’t read the book description or even look at the cover. (Don’t read your reviews. Seriously.)
Is that email from an unfamiliar sender spam? Or is it a vitriolic screed against one of my books or my entire career? Is it from someone who read the Immortal Clay novels and wants to helpfully inform me that I require intensive therapy, immediately and preferably inpatient, as if every single person who’s ever met me hasn’t already informed me? It might be from someone offering me money, so I guess I better open it.
People who’ve previously said they loved my books take lengthy detours to tell me this latest one is not up to scratch, but they figure I needed the money.
Being ignored hurts. Being noticed hurts more. Writers must have the courage to face the risk of emotional pain. Just as with athletic pain, critical pain gets easier to cope with the more you overcome it. It doesn’t get better. You grow stronger.
Yes, we all want our books to be noticed. To achieve success. The only way to make that dream reality is to consciously, deliberately, and with premeditation murder it and accept the risk. Your work cannot succeed so long as you hide it.
If you can’t accept the risk, feel free to cuddle your dream. Just don’t complain to any pro author about it. We want to help folks who are willing to take the necessary hits.
You’re willing to face the pain, but you need that dream of supple book groupies to keep you going? You need hope? That’s not only dandy, that’s human. Hope is the greatest gift.
But make a new dream for each book. Even if it’s the same old dream with the serial numbers filed off.
By the time I publish one book, I’ve already started writing the next book. The published book will live or die as readers dictate. But the book I’m halfway through writing right now? That one’s gonna hit big. I guarantee it.
I’m a potter fondling the next lump of freshly-scooped raw clay, convinced that this next piece will be my greatest triumph.
A virtual con, that is. Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) asked me for an interview. I’ll be live tomorrow at noon, US Eastern DST (1600 GMT).
It’ll be on Jitsi, so there’ll be the tech to have a live Q&A. I expect we’ll have time.
Not on the schedule yet, but I’m sure they’ll get things updated.
Today, this happened.
This is a Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition print sponsor’s gift. I shipped this book out just after I got the hardcovers, back in late 2019. It went to Russia. Months later, it came back with a tag saying “No such person at this address.” In the months between purchasing the sponsorship and me finishing the book, the sponsor had moved to Estonia. I shipped the book out the second time with the Networknomicon sponsorship shipments, just before the United States Postal Service to suspend all shipments to Estonia.
Today, I checked my PO Box for the first time since sending those books. I don’t get much mail there, and I’ve avoided leaving the house because of the plague. The length of this delay is 100% my fault. Fortunately, mail service to Estonia has been restored. I can now reship this package. AGAIN. The good news is I’m entitled to a refund on postage, so I don’t have to pay postage a third time.
The sponsor (who I’m not going to name for privacy reasons, though he’s welcome to chime in here to call me an idiot) has been beyond patient. I’m going to add some extras to his package, to show my gratitude.
But if you’re considering book sponsorships, or Kickstarters, or anything that involves physical goods, this is the sort of headache you’ll be dealing with. If (when) the plague is still going on when I finish TLS Mastery and start the next tech book, I might decide to not offer print sponsorships. Don’t get me wrong, I’m utterly grateful for people’s support–but I must not make promises I cannot reliably keep.
Stupid plague.
Anyway, that’s enough annoyance for today. I need to go make the words. Stay home, wash your hands, and wear a mask. And be kind to those around you–they’re just as stressed out as you are.
A few weeks ago, as part of BSDCan 2020, I held an auction to benefit the Ottawa Mission. And once again, Bill Allaire crushed all opposition. (Not that there was a huge amount of opposition, because plague, but still.) Bill has made his winning donation and then some, and is entitled to my malformed student notes.
Bill is too generous for his own good, however. This is not the first of my auctions that he’s won. (I believe there’s more, but they’re not coming up on a blog search.) What’s more, the student notes he won? They are being donated to the BSDCan 2021 Charity Auction.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled apocalypse.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre hosts Stark Reflections, an essential podcast for writers. He was kind enough to interview me on my new book, Cash Flow for Creators. If you have any interest in managing money in a creative business, check it out. We also talked about the Networknomicon and other special editions, as well as many other options open to today’s creators.
Mark knows the publishing business cold, and his thoughts are well worth listening to. Plus, Mark is giving away a copy of the book. Listen to learn how to win.
Meanwhile, over at Writing Slices, Alex Kourvo reads books about writing. Now, I’m not saying that Kourvo calls her blog that because when she finds a bad book she slices it to ribbons. I wouldn’t dare. Alex turned her experienced and incisive eye to C4C. While I’ve given up soliciting long-form reviews, I’m always pleased when they happen. I expected her to leave my book a heap of ribbons, but was pleasantly surprised.
If you’re a writer and you have any interest in learning your craft, you should subscribe to Writing Slices. She really will save you a whole world of frustration with lousy books, freeing you to discover your own personal, entirely unique realms of frustration. I rarely buy writing books any more, but when I do it’s because she recommended them.
You can get C4C in all the usual places, including at my ebookstore and my print bookstore.
That’s enough resting on past successes. The electricity has returned after a 51-hour outage. The fridge has been sanitized and restocked. It’s time for me to descend into the Word Mines and drag out a bucket of high-carat verbs, not all of them obscene.
Late notice, but I have a brain like a stainless steel sponge.
Tomorrow night, 9 June 2020, I’ll be giving an SNMP talk at the mug.org meeting. The meeting starts at 6:30EDT or 22:30UTC, but they have to get through their usual meeting work before they unleash me.
The talk is, of course, based on SNMP Mastery. Or the Networknomicon. Whichever.
Put on your pajamas. Show up. Listen to the my frenetic babble. There will not be prizes, because I can’t throw them at people.