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“$ git sync murder” is out, so: how many books have I written?

The hardcovers are in stores now, so I think it’s official. $ git sync murder is out everywhere except my print bookstore. You can get it at all of the usual stores. I have the ebook in my store.

Every time I release a new book, or dare to show my face in public, folks ask me how many books I’ve written. My answer is, “define written and book.” That’s not as snarky an answer as you might think.

First, they’re asking the wrong question. I’ve written many books that were not published and that you will never read. Immortal Clay didn’t pick up a bunch of 4-star and 5-star reviews by being the first novel I ever wrote. It got those by being my fifteenth finished novel in a series of deliberate practice that continues to this day, and my first published novel. So, let’s change the question to “how many books have you published?”

Here’s the current output of the SNMP object where I keep my publications catalog. (Accessing this object is an easter egg in the Networknomicon or, if you’re still attached to your sanity, SNMP Mastery.)

SNMP table: TWP-MIB::mwlBooksTable

 titleIndex                                             title year      genre      length
          1                                       Gatecrasher 1992    fiction full-length
          2                               Believe it or Else! 1993    fiction full-length
          3                           Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995    fiction full-length
          4                 Women who Run with the Werewolves 1995    fiction   anthology
          5                                      Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
          6                                  Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
          7                   Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
          8                                         PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
          9                     Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
         10      Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
         11                             Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
         12                           Horror Library volume 2 2010    fiction   anthology
         13                                   Opening the Eye 2011    fiction       story
         14                               Breaking the Circle 2011    fiction       story
         15                                       SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
         16           Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012    fiction full-length
         17                                    DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
         18                                      Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
         19                          Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
         20                       No More Lonesome Blue Rings 2013    fiction       story
         21                            Sticky Supersaturation 2013    fiction       story
         22                                          Lavender 2013    fiction       story
         23                                        Pax Canina 2013    fiction       story
         24                              Wednesday's Seagulls 2013    fiction       story
         25               FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
         26                                     Immortal Clay 2014    fiction full-length
         27                               Waking Up Yesterday 2014    fiction       story
         28                                   Calling Control 2014    fiction       story
         29                                Moonlight's Apples 2014    fiction       story
         30             Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
         31                                   Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
         32                              FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
         33                                     Forever Falls 2015    fiction     novella
         34              Spilled Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs 1) 2015    fiction       story
         35                                      Whisker Line 2015    fiction       story
         36                                    Wifi and Romex 2015    fiction       story
         37                                       PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
         38                     FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
         39                   FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
         40                   Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016    fiction full-length
         41                                   Hydrogen Sleets 2016    fiction full-length
         42             Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016    fiction     novella
         43                  Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016    fiction full-length
         44           Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016    fiction     novella
         45                        Butterfly Stomp (Beaks #0) 2016    fiction full-length
         46             Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth 2016    fiction       story
         47            FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
         48                                 git commit murder 2017    fiction full-length
         49                                savaged by systemd 2017    fiction       story
         50                          Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
         51                                        Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction     novella
         52               Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction     novella
         53                          SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
         54                     Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
         55                           Bedazzled by Blockchain 2018    fiction       story
         56                                         Face Less 2018    fiction       story
         57                Boundary Shock: Tuesday After Next 2018    fiction   anthology
         58 Boundary Shock: Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My! 2018    fiction   anthology
         59                         Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
         60                            FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
         61                     Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019    fiction full-length
         62                                 Winner Breaks All 2019    fiction       story
         63             Boundary Shock: Apocalypse Descending 2019    fiction   anthology
         64                      Fiction River: Superstitious 2019    fiction   anthology
         65                                 Snot-Nosed Aliens 2019    fiction   anthology
         66                        An Interpretation of Moles 2019    fiction   anthology
         67                                      SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
         68                      Boundary Shock: Alien Dreams 2020    fiction   anthology
         69                                The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
         70                            Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
         71              Boundary Shock: What Might Have Been 2020    fiction   anthology
         72                                  Face The Strange 2020    fiction   anthology
         73                                  Bloody Christmas 2020    fiction   anthology
         74                              Drinking Heavy Water 2020    fiction full-length
         75                                        Final Gift 2020    fiction       story
         76                                    Woolen Torment 2020    fiction       story
         77                   Drums with Delusions of Godhood 2020    fiction       story
         78                    Uncollected Anthology: Deities 2020    fiction   anthology
         79                                    Woolen Torment 2021    fiction       story
         80               Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021    fiction full-length
         81                            Fiction River: Chances 2021    fiction   anthology
         82           Fiction River: Dark and Deadly Passions 2021    fiction   anthology
         83                                       TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
         84                                    Only Footnotes 2021 nonfiction     novella
         85                                   git sync murder 2021    fiction full-length
         86                        The Holiday Spectacular #2 2021    fiction   anthology

That’s 86 things with my name on the cover, excluding articles in periodicals and web sites. (I don’t have the energy to go through all that stuff.) So, I’ve published 86 books.

Except some of these are stories in anthologies. Anthologies are written by multiple authors. They’re only partially “by me.” Excluding those, the catalog has 70 entries. I have published 70 books.

Except some of those are basically chapbooks: single stories, put out on their own in print. I have many more stories than these, by the way, but they’re electronic-only. I ran out of energy before I collected all that information.

47 things with my name on them that are classified as either “full-length” or “novella.” This categorization is incorrect, however. The word “novella” means “a short novel.” The definition on “novel” has bloated over the last one hundred fifty years, driven by manufacturing concerns. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is about 43,000 words. Publishers would laugh at Doyle today and tell him to try a chapbook publisher based on the length alone. In the 1920s, a 20,000-word tale was considered a novel and might be published as such. I have a great big stack of Rex Stout mystery novels, and many of them contain fewer than 40,000 words.

Let’s take a nonfiction “novella.” Ed Mastery. It is a short book, but it’s unquestionably “a book.”

Alternately, consider Drowned Mirovar the second Prohibition Orcs tale. It’s over 30,000 words. In the era it was set, it would be a full novel that would appear first in a magazine, then as a standalone book. Today, it’s a prologue. As it’s packaged, it’s “a book.” It would look just fine on the shelf next to any of my 1950s novels.

Then there are collections. Vicious Redepmtion is a collection of my short stories. Aidan Redding Against the Universes collects short stories and novels. They’re listed here as “full-length,” which they certainly are. Should I could those as books?

Surely there’s a culturally-accepted standard or industry standard on how to count the number of books you’ve written?

Er… no.

Isaac Asimov established a standard that “if I appear in it, it counts.” He counted anthologies. He counted chapbooks. By that standard, I’ve published 86 books. I am uncomfortable with this definition.

I know authors who won’t count anything shorter than 60,000 words. By that standard, I’ve published 22 books. It excludes all of the Mastery titles except SNMP Mastery. That’s clearly not right for me, either.

For me, the original question is about milestones. It’s about accomplishments. I want to be able to say “I made this thing” and stand by it.

My preferred definition is, if I whack you with it, will it leave a mark? Bystanders would object, however. And I have created some titles that, while they’d leave a mark, I don’t consider them independent books. An example would be the Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. It is literally the exact same text as the regular FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, but with a cover drawn in crayon by yours truly. It is a thing. It gets offered up for charity auctions. I have a small amount of pride in it. It’s not really a discrete book.

So I’m trying this definition.

a) 15,000 words or longer
b) requiring distinct and discrete effort to create
c) something I’m not embarrassed to call “a book.”

This definition lets me exclude titles like the ZedFS version of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS, the Beck and Provost editions of Terrapin Sky Tango, and the Manly McManface version of Ed Mastery. Only Footnotes might have brand new footnotes in it, but it wasn’t hard to make. It’s excluded. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of these, but only because they polish my reputation as the good sort of troll. I knocked them all off in a morning. (They’re still in the pic of me with one copy of every edition of everything I’ve written, because that picture is only for fun.)

It lets me include works like Ed Mastery and Cash Flow for Creators. I spent three weeks writing the cash flow book, and thirty years learning how to write the cash flow book. It include volumes like the Networknomicon, because producing that required a whole bunch of work. It was a different sort of labor for me, but that unspeakable tome fine educational work is clearly a discrete, unique book.

I’m also counting collections. Again, the “how many books have you published” question is about milestones. Writing enough of A Thing to create a collection is a milestone. Aidan Redding Against the Universes is the closest thing to a Brandon Sanderson doorstop I’ve produced on the fiction side. (Also, that hardcover has two different covers, one on the dust jacket and one on the laminate, and they’re both lovely.)

Applying this definition leaves me with these titles.

          1                                       Gatecrasher 1992    fiction full-length
          2                               Believe it or Else! 1993    fiction full-length
          3                           Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995    fiction full-length
          5                                      Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
          6                                  Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
          7                   Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
          8                                         PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
          9                     Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
         10      Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
         11                             Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
         15                                       SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
         16           Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012    fiction full-length
         17                                    DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
         18                                      Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
         19                          Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
         25               FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
         26                                     Immortal Clay 2014    fiction full-length
         30             Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
         31                                   Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
         32                              FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
         33                                     Forever Falls 2015    fiction     novella
         37                                       PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
         38                     FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
         40                   Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016    fiction full-length
         41                                   Hydrogen Sleets 2016    fiction full-length
         42             Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016    fiction     novella
         43                  Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016    fiction full-length
         44           Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016    fiction     novella
         47            FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
         48                                 git commit murder 2017    fiction full-length
         50                          Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
         51                                        Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction     novella
         52               Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction     novella
         53                          SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
         54                     Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
         59                         Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
         60                            FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
         61                     Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019    fiction full-length
         67                                      SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
         69                                The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
         70                            Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
         74                              Drinking Heavy Water 2020    fiction full-length
         80               Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021    fiction full-length
         83                                       TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
         85                                   git sync murder 2021    fiction full-length

This makes $ git sync murder my 45th book.

Could this definition be gamed? Sure it could. But I don’t care enough to game it. I stopped counting my releases somewhere around 17 or 18 books. I counted titles on my brag shelf at one point a few years ago, using my gut as a definition, and got a number like 31 or 33 or something like that. I haven’t cared enough to count until today, when I’m putting off doing real work. Now that I’ve counted, I suspect I’ll maintain a silent count until I break 50 and then lose count again. 50 is a milestone, after all.

If you want to argue about my definitions, please find someone else to argue with.

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“git sync murder” sponsor & Patronizer gifts now shipping

I woke up this morning planning to plunge into the text of the new edition DNSSEC Mastery. Before I made it to my writing desk, however, UPS dropped a heap of paper on my doorstep. The “$ git sync murder” sponsor and Patronizer gifts.

So I spent today transforming a bunch of this:

into a heap of this:

Sponsors and Patronizers are also receiving an extra gift this time around. (Remember, these are gifts. I make no promise what my backers will receive, only that they will receive something.) This gift involves four thousand degree flames, rods of raw glass stock, and several small explosions. It also involves cow, although fake cow, because both cows and BBQ fans object to four thousand degree flames.

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the official release of $ git sync murder and answer the question “how many books have you written?” Hint: it’s a meaningless question, you’ll have to be more specific…

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Total Mastery, 2021 July

Hypothesis are the key to understanding and the fundamental root of science. A hypothesis must be falsifiable. Here’s an example.

Nobody will buy a bundle containing all the IT Mastery ebooks. Long-time readers already have some, and only want select volumes. New readers will want to try one or two first.

Folks at my mug.org talk last night assure me this is not true, and that if such a bundle existed people would buy it.

I’m testing this hypothesis via the Total Mastery ebook bundle. All my IT Mastery ebooks, 10% off.

Note that it’s dated. When I release a new book, I’ll create a new bundle.

Or stop bothering with it, when I fail to falsify my hypothesis.

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Public Online TLS Talk

I’ll be talking about TLS at mug.org on 13 July 2021. I get more than an hour, so there’ll be time for an energetic discussion afterwards. Their web site is not yet updated, because I just now sent them the talk abstract.

This is an online meeting. All are welcome.

Online meetings are getting more common, and I’m getting more requests to present. While online talks don’t have travel time, they do take a kind of energy I call “people juice.” People juice is scarce and not easily renewed. Video calls are even more exhausting than regular ones. I haven’t made this an official policy yet, but I’ve pretty much set a limit of “not more than one presentation a month, and maybe zero depending on what else is going on.”

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“DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd Edition” Open for Sponsorships

I’ve started making words on a new edition of DNSSEC Mastery.

After weeks of folks repeatedly asking when they can sponsor it, I have an answer other than “later.” Sponsorships are open now. Eddie Sharam will be doing the cover, as usual.

If you’ve just come across my sponsorships, here’s the deal. You give me money before I’ve produced anything suitable for human consumption. In return, I put your name in the book. $25 or more gets your name in the epub and mobi ebook versions, while $100 or more gets your name in the print and electronic versions. (The PDF version is straight from the print, so while it’s technically an ebook you need to have print-level sponsorship to appear in there.)

For the record: yes, I consider sponsorships something of an open scam. There’s no way you get enough benefit from a sponsorship to merit the cause. They’re a throwback to the medieval patronage system, where folks with money supported artists they considered worthwhile. Or, if you prefer: you give me money your excess cash, and write it off as a business expense.

On the other hand, I got bills. So here it is.

If you want to trickle money to me, rather than big lumps, I offer monthly patronage opportunities at both Patreon and my e-bookstore.

Or, just go to your favorite bookstore and buy my books. That’s all the support I need.

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the Write Stuff bundle, featuring: me!

My book Cash Flow for Creators lays out exactly how I make a living in this deranged business. You can get your own copy for a paltry $6.99.

Right now, you can get it for $5 as part of the 2021 Write Stuff Bundle at Storybundle. Plus three other books and classes on building a career from your craft. That’s even cheaper than my usual cheap. Or you can spend $20, and get ten excellent business books from people who know what they’re doing, who make a living with their craft, and who are cheerfully sharing how to do the same.

I’m delighted to be in this bundle, and not just because bundle curator Kris Rusch called Cash Flow for Creators “one of the most important books you’ll read all year.” (Mind you, I’m gonna keep that quote in a safe place so that when the world catches on to what a complete doofus I am, I can take it out and cuddle it.) But there’s some top-notch writers and business people in this bundle.

Johanna Rothman is best known as a business and technology consultant. She also writes charming heart-warming stories that remind me of fairy tales for some reason, because they’re totally not fairy tales. Except when they are. I’ve met Johanna at several conferences, and for a quiet and unassuming itty-bitty lady she knows how to put herself out there. I’d absolutely listen to her on getting speaking slots at a conference. Or, in this case, read her Writing a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts.

Joanna Penn writes top-notch fiction and hosts the Creative Penn podcast. I was lucky enough to have lunch with her at a conference on the Oregon coast a few years ago and frankly, I have no idea how she gets the energy to do half of her stuff. She’s a smart people, and has built one heck of a creative business doing this weird… what’s that word? Oh, yes. “Planning.” Something I constantly and consistently fail to do. I really ought to perform the exercises in Your Author Business Plan. I should also take her advice that I need to weasel my way onto more podcasts, because the whole “wait patiently for invitations” thing doesn’t work well.

Stefon Mears once worked in computing, but he got better. I’ve known him for years, and the interesting thing about Stefon? It’s not his obsessive Blue Öyster Cult fandom, though that is one of his better traits. It’s not even that I once made him laugh so hard that bystanders asked if he was having a seizure and if they should call an ambulance. It’s that he’s just this guy, and he keeps writing book after book after book in the grand pulp tradition. One after another, he churns them out like Rex Stout or Zane Grey or Lester Dent or any number of others. We’ve talked about how to write a novel every month, and I overwhelmingly agree with the advice he gives in The 30-Day Novel and Beyond!

All this for five bucks. But the bonus books, for those who pay $20 or more?

Award-winning writers and editors Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch have survived several economic crashes in this trade. They were the first professional authors I ever met who understood that writers don’t write books; they create and license intellectual property. I don’t always totally agree with them, but they back up their arguments and make me think about why I’m doing the things I do. You can’t buy that. Except you can. In several ways. In this bundle.

Mark Leslie LeFebvre was a bookseller. He’s worked for Kobo and Draft2Digital. He’s a fantastic writer and editor. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s worked at a printer. He knows this business like I know that weird growth on the back of my left hand. (Don’t worry about me, they always drop off before they hatch.) I respect this man’s mad skillz enough that when I finish the Current Giant Epic Fiction Thing I’m working on, I’m going to buy an hour of his time to talk through how to optimally release it. If you want your work in bookstores and libraries, he’s the man to tell you how. Oh, hey–An Author’s Guide to Working With Libraries and Bookstores. What a coincidence!

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Tonya D Price at more than one conference. Her excellent writing survived MBA school, a feat not many people manage. A Writer’s Introduction to Social Media Marketing is exclusive to this bundle, so I haven’t read it. Yet.

Writer, editor, and game publisher Loren L Coleman might be best known for his work in Battletech, but I mostly know him for his phenomenal Kickstarter chops and his devoted Prohibition Orcs fandom. Anyone who can raise multiple millions in a Kickstarter has my attention. He recently Kickstarted Crowdfunding Your Ficton: a Best Practices Guide. Kickstarter is on my Things To Play With list, so I backed it. You can get his book after those of us wise enough to back him, but before the great unwashed masses.

A cut of the purchase price goes to each author. Another cut can go to Able Gamers, if you check the box. You should totally check the box.

Also, the price is completely “pay what you want.” None of us would mind if those of you with real jobs realized that this bundle is dang near theft and chose to pay a bit more for it. If you read these and act on their advice, you’ll turn a profit easily.

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Sponsorship Notes on “TLS Mastery”

Here’s the heap of TLS Mastery sponsorship gifts, awaiting my poor postman.

43 packages on my front porch

I get asked about how sponsorships work, so I’m going to record a few notes here.

37 print sponsors at $100 each, plus 55 ebook sponsors at $25 each? In traditional publishing, we would call that an “advance.”

Except that I have to pay to purchase and mail the rewards. When I first tried sponsorships back in 2016, I calculated I’d have to pay about $10 for shipping for each print sponsor. Surely most of my sponsors would be in the US, not overseas.

I was so. Very. Wrong.

Over half of my sponsors are outside the US. Average shipping is $19. The print sponsorship is profitable, but I spend just under 40% of the sponsorship on fulfillment. I’m pondering if I want to go to the trouble of adding shipping costs to print sponsorships. The most expensive places to ship are Australia (for obvious reasons) and Israel (for inexplicable reasons, it’s right next to Europe, what the heck). Plus, there are occasional predictable failures.

I could raise the price. Going over $100 feels like it would be excessive, though.

I could integrate a shipping API, get an estimated cost, and charge $90 plus shipping. I’m not sure how such APIs react to “get a quote now and fulfill six months later,” however. I suspect Woocommerce would throw a wobbler. One reason I do sponsorships is because they’re pretty easy. This makes sponsorships more fragile. Also, my readers were voted “Most Likely To Habitually Evade Geolocation And Not Even Think About It” four years running.

I could add a note to the checkout that says “If you’re from outside the US, I’d appreciate a few extra bucks for shipping.” But I’m already asking for money for no good reason.

So, for now, things stay the same. If Australia develops Mad Lucas Disease and starts sponsoring like fiends, that might well change.

About 10% of sponsorships require a second contact. I have to drop the sponsor a note saying “Hey, USPS says your address doesn’t exist and Google Earth shows it’s an empty field in Wyoming, can you confirm?” Most often the answer is “yes, I live in a giant empty field, use my PO Box instead.” Clearly, anyone who sponsors me is probably unusual in more than one way.

I occasionally get someone who sponsored a book twice and I didn’t catch it, so I have to find out how to satisfy them. It might be a refund, perhaps another book stuffed in the envelope, whatever.

Each book gets more sponsors than the one before. I attribute this to the sponsors mailing list.

If you’re thinking of doing this: set up a real shipping operation. Buy waterproof bubble mailers. Get a tape gun. Get an online postage account (I use Shippo). Set aside a bunch of time. When I hit 50 print sponsors, I’m hiring a neighbor kid to package stuff as I sign and investigating a mailing label printer.

Sponsorships on DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd Edition will probably open in June.

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TLS Mastery Release, Sponsor Gifts, and Acknowledgements

As if 2020 wasn’t sufficiently rough, I spent it writing about TLS.

Now, I’m done.

TLS Mastery has escaped.

TLS Mastery Beastie Edition
Beastie Edition
TLS Mastery cover
Tux Edition

Transport Layer Security, or TLS, makes ecommerce and online banking possible. It protects your passwords and your privacy. Let’s Encrypt transformed TLS from an expensive tool to a free one. TLS understanding and debugging is an essential sysadmin skill you must have.

TLS Mastery takes you through:

  • How TLS works
  • What TLS provides, and what it doesn’t
  • Wrapping unencrypted connections inside TLS
  • Assessing TLS configurations
  • The Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol
  • Using Let’s Encrypt to automatically maintain TLS certificates
  • Online Certificate Status Protocol
  • Certificate Revocation
  • CAA, HSTS, and Certificate Transparency
  • Why you shouldn’t run your own CA, and how to do it anyway
  • and more!

Stop wandering blindly around TLS. Master the protocol with TLS Mastery!

Available in the Beastie Edition and the Tux Edition. The only difference is the cover. Hardcover has both covers.

Get the two-cover hardcover at any of the print bookstores below, or direct from my bookstore.

Get the combined editions at:

Get the Beastie edition at:

Get the Tux edition at:

If you’re a sponsor: your gifts are on order. I have enough on hand for my Patronizers, so I’ll be shipping those first. As soon as yours arrive, I’ll get them to you.

This was a rough book to write, so I want to share the acknowledgements.

TLS is perhaps the most complicated topic I’ve ever written about. Writing this book would have been impossible without outside help.

This book would not exist if the Internet Security Research Group hadn’t deployed ACME and organized Let’s Encrypt. TLS certificates are not only free for most people, their maintenance and renewal is highly automatable. They’ve changed the whole Internet, and deserve our thanks for that.

It doesn’t matter how many RFCs I study and how many technical mailing list archives I read: I lack the expertise and context to best illuminate an arcane topic like TLS. The folks who read this manuscript’s early stages and pointed out my innumerable errors deserve special thanks. James Allen, Xavier Belanger, Trix Farrar, Loganaden Velvindron, Jan-Piet Mens, Mike O’Connor, Fred Schlechter, Grant Taylor, Gordon Tetlow, and Fraser Tweedale, here’s to you.

Lilith Saintcrow convinced me that The Princess Bride could be a useful motif for a serious technology book. This book was written during the 2020 pandemic, so I must also thank The Princess Bride for providing me a desperately needed sense of hope.

Dan Langille gracefully submitted to the pillaging of his blog for useful hints and guidance. I am grateful that JP Mens, Evan Hunt, and John-Mark Gurney provoked him into updating that blog and saving me a bunch of work.

I am unsure if I should profusely thank Bob Beck for his time and patience in revealing the innards of TLS, or profoundly curse him and his spawn unto the seventh generation. I must acknowledge the usefulness of “Happy Bob’s Test CA,” however, so I’ll raise a glass to that while waffling over whether or not the bottle of fair-to-middlin’ wine I owe him should be laced with iocane powder.

For Liz.

Again, to all the tech reviewers and Patronizers and sponsors: thank you. This book would not exist without you.

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My Penguicon 2021 Schedule

I’ll be speaking at the virtualized Penguicon 2021, and hanging around several events making a nuisance of myself. Fortunately, these online events are moderated and they’ll mute me any time I start to make trouble.

If you’re looking to see me, though, here’s my presentation schedule. (Events I will attend, but not as any sort of speaker, are not shown.)

22 April (Thursday)

7PM: Author Reception (hangout)

24 April (Saturday)

12PM: Becoming a Better Writer (presentation)
2PM: Reading (probably Woolen Torment, depending on the audience)
6PM: Why Aren’t I Writing? Dealing with Impostor Syndrome, Writer’s Block, and Other Muse Killers (panel)

25 April (Sunday)

12PM: SSL and TLS in 2021 (presentation)
1PM: Self Publishing at Scale (panel)

Registration for Penguicon is a paltry $10. The money goes towards keeping various background stuff in place so that Penguicon 2022 can be A Thing. I want Penguicon 2022 to be A Thing.

My blatantly exploited Patronizers have to pay $10 for an hour of my time once a month. Even if the rest of Penguicon doesn’t interest you, you can get 3-4 hours of Lucas for that amount. That’s enough to last anyone a year. If you can’t attend, they’d appreciate a donation.

You’ll note that, compared to previous Penguicons, I will not be attending any LN2 ice cream demos. This is a tragic weakness in the virtual format. I will be visiting my local shop to lay in copious supplies so that I may maintain a sufficient dairy level throughout the weekend.

With virtualization becoming increasingly acceptable for conference presenters, I’m looking at setting boundaries on how often I will speak. Grab me while you can.

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“Only Footnotes” Now Available

My newest nonfiction release, Only Footnotes, is now in stores.

More than one person over on the Fediverse has informed me that this makes this book and/or my ouvre Pratchett-complete. Which I gather is something like Turing-complete, but cooler.

In case you missed it, or doubted that it was a real thing, here’s the release announcement–now with store links.


Only Footnotes. Because that’s why you read his books.

Academics hate footnotes. Michael W Lucas loves them. What he does with them wouldn’t pass academic muster, but that doesn’t mean the reader should skip them. The footnotes are the best part! Why not read only the footnotes, and skip all that other junk?

After literal minutes of effort, Only Footnotes collects every single footnote from all of Lucas’ books to date.* Recycle those cumbersome treatises stuffed with irrelevant facts! No more flipping through pages and pages of actual technical knowledge looking for the offhand movie reference or half-formed joke. This slender, elegant volume contains everything the man ever passed off as his dubious, malformed “wisdom.”

Smart books have footnotes. Smarter books are only footnotes.

*plus additional annotations from the author. Because sometimes even a footnote needs a footnote.

Available from:

  • my print bookstore
  • Barnes & Noble
  • Amazon US, Amazon AU, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Amazon DE, Amazon FR, Amazon ES