Category: Chatter

[this post went to Patronizers at the beginning of September, and to the public at the beginning of October.]

Pretty sure August was eating locoweed.

The “Run Your Own Mail Server” Kickstarter owned most of my hide this last month. Not all of it. A patch on the back of my neck remains freehold. I managed to make a few words on what I’m calling #projectIDGAF, but mostly it’s been investing in production stuff. Which means spreadsheets.

My main printer, IngramSpark has facilities in the US, UK, Australia, and Italy. When I launched the RYOMS Kickstarter, I intended to dropship copies through them. Turns out, it’s not quite that easy. Part of the problem was scale. Based on previous Kickstarters, I thought I might need to dropship to thirty, perhaps fifty people. I got over seven hundred. The IngramSpark ordering interface is tortuous. I am not capable of correctly entering seven hundred orders in that interface. I began looking for a virtual assistant. Found one.

Then I discovered a way out.

Turns out that IngramSpark has a secret industrial-scale ordering system that accepts orders via spreadsheet. Gaining access to it requires you have a friend who already has access, who is willing to vouch for you. Fortunately, I have such a friend. You also need to be submitting several hundred orders. I barely qualified. (Random people on the Internet, please don’t contact me asking me to vouch for you. I don’t endorse random Internet people.) It’s an Excel spreadsheet, complete with macros, that must be filled out in a very specific manner. You know, like every application written in-house by non-programmers. Once you grow accustomed to its quirks, though, it’s infinitely better than entering orders by hand.

I’m keeping the virtual assistant info, though. With luck, I’ll need them later.

When it came to ordering books for backers in the EU, the plan fell apart. The EU has VAT. I have never worried about VAT. I don’t have to worry about VAT until I hit ten thousand euros of EU business per year. Even with RYOMS, I didn’t hit that. When I ship from the US, recipients pay VAT as part of the delivery. It varies by country, but the general pattern seems to be “recipient is contacted, recipient goes to a web site to pay, carrier delivers package.” My sponsors and Patronizers are pretty familiar with how that works.

When I cross ten thousand euros a year, I have to register for the Internet One Stop Shop VAT. This is expensive, but if I’m doing over ten thousand euros a year it would start to be worth it. That’s very much a First World Author problem, though.

If I print books inside the EU, the books would be mailed to recipients without those fees. The problem is getting people to print books in the EU. IngramSpark’s interface to their Italian plant is in the UK, and is legally treated as a UK entity. (I don’t pretend to understand the details, but presumably they have the contracts and lawyers to make it legit.) Brexit fubar’d everything for me there. There are other printers in the EU, however. Some of them would print a few hundred books for me! Except every one of them wants my IOSS paperwork beforehand. It doesn’t matter that I don’t need IOSS. Printers run quite conservative businesses, and take zero risks. It doesn’t matter that even with the lightning strike of RYOMS I don’t meet IOSS limits.

So I’m shipping most backers globally from IngramSpark. Based on the advice of assorted experienced folks, I’m using BookVault to fulfill EU orders. The books will be shipped from the UK, which is greener than shipping from the US.

I started fulfilling dropship orders in Australia, mostly because I needed a smaller group to test Ingram’s spreadsheet ordering but also because Australia is traditionally last in everything. The Australian copies have started to arrive. The rest of the world should follow shortly.

Then there’s books for me to sign. I have four crates of paperbacks in my living room to sign, pack, and ship. Hoping the hardcovers arrive soon, as well as the backer-exclusive special editions. I have something special for print level sponsors and Patronizers this time. Silly, but special. I’m hoping I can tell you about that next month, but the recipients need to receive them first.

Once those go out, I can launch the Dear Abyss Kickstarter. Quite a few people are telling me that the RYOMS Kickstarter is my new normal. As much as I’d love to trade up to that problem, I have no reason to believe that’s so. And seriously, Dear Abyss is not going to push me over the IOSS limit. If the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators was to also experience explosive crowdfunding I’d look more seriously at IOSS, but not before. I don’t act based on lightning strikes until I start consistently attracting lightning.

Am I ignoring the success of RYOMS in my planning? Nope. There’s clearly a market for crowdfunding tech books. I’m hoping it will raise $20k, but will leave headroom for more. Hope for the best and plan for WTF, that’s the business.

After all these big projects, I need to write a palate cleanser. Something daft, and quick, and fun. I’m starting something I won’t talk about in public, yet, but if you’re curious you could follow #projectIDGAF on the fediverse. Why that hashtag? I have no idea if this thing will work, or even if it can work, but I’m going to have fun with it and that’s all that matters. I’d like to knock a full draft off by the end of September, but we all know that’s not going to happen. After a few years of these heavy projects like RYOMS, SNMP, TLS, and so on, my spirit needs a quick hit of weirdness.

In unrelated news, I sold five short stories to various anthologies at the beginning of the month. They include a new Aidan Redding tale, a Rats’ Man’s Lackey tale, and some one-offs. Look for those to escape in 2025. I’ll also have a new Rats’ Man’s Lackey tale in the next issue of Pulphouse.

Anyway. Off to sign a bunch of paperbacks, and maybe even get them mailed!

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of August, and the world at the beginning of September.

Wow, is it raining. The word “acquerne” has nothing to do with water, but I believe the acquerne are crazy damp and none too pleased.

Anyway. In the name of Dog I’m tired, but here’s where things stand.

Most importantly, I learned how to pronounce “floccinaucinihilipilification” and “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.” That should guarantee I live my next life as ringworm.

Run Your Own Mail Server is now through copyedit and print layout. The paperback proof arrived in my hands about an hour ago. This paper back is the same thickness as a hardcover most other Mastery books. This is my last chance to find and fix any errors in my best selling indie tech book EVER but hey, no pressure. I can’t say I’m happy with the book because I am never “happy” with any of my books, but I am not displeased. The dang thing is done. Nobody else wanted to write it, but I believe independence is vital, so I had to. Yes people have written excellent tutorials, but a tutorial isn’t the same as an in-depth book. RYOMS is context-rich, something most tutorials lack.

Getting RYOMS to this stage feels disorienting. I’ve spent so long with this book filling my head, having it in print feels like a scoop of my brain is in my hands. I need to let it settle before reviewing it.

Amidst the copyedit corrections and page layouts and so on, I did get to write some short fiction for anthology calls. I’m not sure if the tales work, but they knocked the RYOMS rust out of my head, so that’s good. She Who Must Be Obeyed’s broken leg is healing, so that’s good. The garden refused to provide squash but the next morning offered up a twelve-inch Ambush Zucchini, so we have food and that’s also good.

Been pondering publishing schedules and Kickstarter timings. I normally launch Kickstarters when I send the book to copyedit, because at that point I’m confident the book will actually come out. I can’t launch a new Kickstarter until the old one fulfills, for obvious reasons. I find that I might want to run three before the end of the year, however: Dear Abyss, Networking for Systems Administrators 2/e, and one I can’t yet discuss. I doubt I have time to fit them all in using that model. Clearly, I need to leverage standard Mean Time Between Failure/Mean Time to Repair logic here, and reduce my Mean Time To Fulfillment. If I delay the Kickstarter launch when the book is back from copyedit, I can fulfill more quickly and launch the next. It feels wrong, but that’s mostly because I’ve trained myself to release books as soon as humanly possible. I want sponsors, Patronizers, and Kickstarter backers to get theirs before the general public can–with exceptions for people who live in places with slow mail service, sorry South Africa. (People in South Africa order my books? How did this happen? What’s going on?)

The switch from video hangouts over to Discord is complete. Not much traffic there, but I’m posting things. If you’re a Discord user at the right tier or above, say hello.

Next week I’m going to a writers’ meeting in Las Vegas. If you’re in the area, there will be a gelato meetup Monday night. Ostensibly, this is to work out the contents for a series of anthologies. In practice, I’m there to pick people’s brains about neat things they’re doing. Foil-edged tech books with embossed dust jackets, anyone? I don’t know that I’ll do any of those things, but I want the knowledge so I can choose the right project. We’re in a covid surge so I’ll be masking everywhere indoors except my hotel room.

The one major piece of work left is the RYOMS special edition. I have to write a page for it and add certain carefully-honed commentary throughout, much as I did for the Networknomicon. I’ve also commissioned special interior art for it. I plan to have that ready by 20 August, so I can get a proof and do the final order of all the sponsor, Patronizer, and backer copies. I don’t know that the books will arrive here by the end of August, but it’ll be dang close.

While I wait for those books to arrive I can work on integrating print book sales into tiltedwindmillpress.com, so I can sell print/ebook bundles on an ongoing but hands-free basis. Looks like I’ll be using Bookvault for the back end on that. They print North American sales in the US, and the rest of the world in the UK. My “worst case scenario” is shipping to Australia, and shipping costs from the UK to Australia are much better than from the US. It won’t beat Amazon Prime’s free in-country shipping, but folks who want to buy print direct from me probably don’t have Amazon Prime. I’m hoping to be able to offer a cheaper price on direct print/ebook bundle sales, perhaps through a coupon, to offset some of the shipping costs.

RYOMS will be the first book I offer direct print sales for. I’ll add other books as time permits.

After all that, what will I write next? I’ve decided to work on a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators, which needs a couple new chapters and a meticulous audit. I’d also like to finish the $ git commit murder trilogy, so I’m going to take a run at $ git merge murder.

I also have to a tax attorney investigating my finances and my intellectual property inventory. Because I asked him to. RYOMS was an income shock, and might have made it sensible to start depreciating my IP like the big companies do. Disney is still depreciating Cinderella, and there’s no reason I can’t do the same. The question is, will accounting expenses outweigh the financial gains? If the answer is no, I’ll spin up “Burke and Hare Press” in the next few months as a C-corp and proceed. TWP will become an imprint thereof, and I’ll contract to provide books to the corporation. I’ll have to negotiate carefully, though; that Lucas dude who’s going to run B&H press is known to be a jerk, and I must protect my intellectual property from him.

No wonder business people are mad.

Anyway, that’s this month. Hope all of you are enjoying your fading summer. Or, for those of you down south, your fading winter. Whatever’s fading, enjoy it.

I discovered today that my mailing list signup forms have been broken since last December. (Yes, I need to figure out how to monitor this.)

If you’ve tried to sign up to one of my announcement lists and couldn’t, I do apologize. If you still want to sign up, it actually works now! Nonfiction subscribers get a free tech book, fiction subscribers get a story or two a week for six weeks, and sponsors get left the heck alone until I want money for no good reason.

I only send mail for event announcements. New releases, bundles, sales, Kickstarters, that sort of thing. Basically, new excuses for you to give me money.

Or there’s the Everything list, where you get… uh, well, everything. It’s three smaller mailing lists in a trench coat.

https://mwl.io/about/mailing-lists

Now back to work on the RYOMS Backers-Only Edition.

Because this all certainly feels like a jape.

Last month, I hoped the RYOMS Kickstarter might round out at $50k. It hit $76,883, with 1966 backers. $25K of that was in the last three days. Plus, there were a few hundred sponsors. This is what we in the writing business call “freaking insane.” My reaction once again proved that I am temperamentally unsuited to success.

This isn’t life-changing money. I’m estimating half for fulfillment. Half of what remains will be reserved for taxes. It does take the emergency fund from “busted water heater” to “totaled car,” and that’s most welcome. Before you ask: yes, I assign a specific definition to “life-changing money.” Life-changing money changes my monthly cash flow for the better without reducing my lifestyle. Paying off ongoing bills is life-changing, but we no longer buy anything on installment payments. The only big bill that can be permanently paid off is the mortgage. Once you have all your bills paid off, “life-changing money” is enough to improve your life without adding new ongoing payments. (Huh. Maybe I need another edition of the cash flow book some time?)

But BSDCan was successful. The Kickstarter is over. RYOMS is at the copyeditor. SWMBO’s leg is healing. This has been a rough few weeks–but in their defense, they’re all rough weeks.

I’ve been fighting with WordPress on tiltedwindmillpress.com. It uses the Jetpack module to send new Patronizer post announcements by email. For a handful of users, Jetpack was conflicting with the Woocommerce credit card module. I had to temporarily disable that function. I believe it’s fixed, but will be watching Patronizer renewals closely. Fingers crossed!

The crush of finishing RYOMS and running the Kickstarter has left my brain kind of wrung out. I have a stack of anthology invites that I’m writing short stories for. Short stories are quick hits of success. It doesn’t matter if the story sells or not. My brain needs to finish something.

It did prompt me to look at my spreadsheet of incomplete collections. A collection should be about 60,000 words or so. Twisted Presents, the Christmas collection, is over 40,000 words. That’s enough for a Christmas book. Books of Christmas stories should be small–nobody wants a doorstop of mayhem for the holidays. I still need to write an orcish Christmas story to round it out. Somehow I have over 40,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales. A couple more stories and that’s a proper collection. Found Meat, the next Prohibition Orcs collection, has 22,000 words. Lots to go there. So I’ll probably launch Twisted Presents next June, for an October delivery. There’s some overlap there–does the Rats’ Man’s Lackey Christmas tale go in Twisted Presents, or the RML collection? My gut says both.

The last anthology call is due 14 July.

RYOMS is due back from copyedit 15 July. That’s the rest of July tied up, I’m sure.

Amidst the chaos of the Kickstarter, I’ve been looking at options for sponsors and Patronizers. Of all my readers, y’all are the ones I must treat best.

The general reaction to the whole “what if Patronizers had private chat instead of video” was met with “use Discord,” so I’m going to be setting that up this next week. Will people like it? Who knows? That’ll mean quarterly video hangouts for all Patronizers, as well as invitations to any release parties I have. The RYOMS Kickstarter did well enough that I’m having two release parties, one in the morning and one in the evening. With 2000 people, I’m thinking I’m going to need a moderator to help me out. Perhaps someone to interview me.

Then there’s sponsors. Sponsors get their names in the book as a thank you. The print sponsors have me slightly worried, though. The Kickstarter backers could get the same special edition that print sponsors are getting, but the sponsors pay me months ahead and have faith that I will finish the damned book. I’ve figured out something odd, unique, and limited for the print sponsors, but I have no idea how it’ll go over. If it’s well-received, I’ll do it for all future books that have 90 or more sponsors. If it’s rejected, I’ll do something else next time. Being creative is like cooking spaghetti: you throw stuff on your most enthusiastic readers and see if it sticks.

I’d been pondering doing a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators next. I suspect that might Kickstart well. Right after the RYOMS Kickstarter closed my inspirational muse soiled my skull with the title It’s Always DNS, and what you should do about it. It is always DNS, but that’s because people don’t know DNS. That seems like it might do well.

And there’s the ugly part of a runaway success Kickstarter. It makes me ponder how I can make that kind of money again, instead of what I want to write.

So come mid-August, when I have RYOMS put to bed, I’ll start writing one of those. I’ll also need to make sure I spend a couple hours a day writing something for pure fun. I don’t want to do another RYOMS forced death march. It kills my joy in life. And if I’m not having fun, I might as well send my resume to an AI company.

At the same time, I’ll open the next tech book for sponsors. And launch Dear Abyss. Because the Lucas Book Machine never stops. NEVER. NO MATTER WHAT. THE BOOK MACHINE MUST WRITE WRITE WRITE GRIND ON AND MAKE MORE WORDS AND MORE WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS <bzzzt> <zap> <thud>

I will be at in Las Vegas next week for a private writing event. Coincidentally, it’s during Black Hat. Probably not a coincidence. Vegas hotel rooms go cheap during August. My schedule is absolutely jammed, but I’m slicing out an hour or so Monday night to get gelato.

7PM at Up In Scoops, 4624 W Sahara Ave #2, Las Vegas, NV 89102. It’s well-reviewed and looks nicely indie. Off the Strip, so parking should not be as big an issue as last time I tried this.

I’ll be eating outside because covid, but after a day of flying and a day sitting in a hotel meeting room it’ll be a good break.

Again, it’ll be about an hour and won’t run late. I’ll be jet lagged, and must return to the hotel for more meetings.

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of April, and the public at the beginning of May.)

Well, this last month officially blows.

I just got news that Craig Maloney finally lost his fight with cancer. Craig was a regular in our Patronizer Zoom hangouts. The guy had the usual IT cynicism, but it floated on this bed of optimism and hope. I’ve known him for decades, but he supported my work for years before that. The first entry in my title index was a tabletop RPG published in 1992. He bought it when it came out, and it wasn’t until he’d known me for ten years that he realized that I was that Michael Lucas. I gave a talk at MUG shortly after that discovery and he brought his twenty-year-old marked-up copy. Despite that, he had no trouble calling me on my bullshit. He was all about connecting people together and unabashedly loving creativity and art.

Craig made the world a better place. I don’t know if there’s a next world, but if so he’ll do the same there. Plus, there’s a bunch of metal bands out there who can use a drummer. What happens if your drummer explodes in the afterlife? Craig would have loved that discussion.

The cough I mentioned last month? Yeah, it put me off work for three weeks. I avoided classic chronic-fatigue long covid, but my one bout damaged my body in ways you don’t hear much about. Mask policy or I don’t show up. “Cough and you’ll black out–oh, and you have to cough every thirty seconds, even when you sleep” is not fun. Having doubts about my 100 books by 2033 goal, but all I can do is keep plugging away. And not write stupidly complicated books about multiple intertwined stupid protocol stacks, like email.

The good news is, I was able to cram the two thousand words I needed to finish Run Your Own Mail Server into those three weeks. They’re not great words, but they they exist. The book is out for tech review. I’ve requested reviews by 15 April, because that’s also Tax Day and I prefer to pile all my suck into as few days as possible.

The recent vultr rights grab that they insist was not a rights grab has me moving hosting providers. I discovered that bloom.host has great deals on dedicated systems, for about what I pay for hosting all my VMs now. They specialize in gaming servers but 6 cores, twin 500GB SSDs, and 64GB RAM for $99 a month is enough for web and mail servers. Thanks to the glories of zfs send I’ll be replicating my VMs as jails. Some of those jails will have nested jails. It’ll probably lead to a new edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails eventually, although it’s clear I’ll need to update the storage quartet before I can write that. Sigh.

Oh, and a proper poudriere jail. That’ll go in there. FreeBSD Mastery: Packaging, anyone?

I’ll still need one tiny VM on a different network as a DNS server. Yes, I know people would offer to host secondary DNS for me, and I appreciate it. But I want the option to switch between the primary server between hosts, so that I can better cope with outages and unplanned migrations. Yes, the hosting company could pillage the authoritative DNS data. I’ll have to take that risk, and laugh in their face if they try it.

But first, I have to finish getting BSDCan infrastructure ready. I agreed to manage the new mail system and promptly fell over. That shouldn’t be too hard to set up, as I now have the core mail knowledge. Migrating from the old BSDCan mailman will be an educational sysadmin adventure, but hopefully with very little screaming into the abyss. (Remember: if you’re not screaming into the abyss, you’re not learning.)

I’ve been focused on tech this year. Sold a couple short stories by invitation, but I can feel my literary brain starting to freeze up. Part of that is my three-week outage. I’m still planning to get the giant fiction epic done this year, and I’ll be starting promptly on a big non-Absolute book for No Starch Press. Amidst that, I have bits and pieces for a second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. I’ll be doing Kickstarters for Run Your Own Mail Server, a new collection of the FreeBSD Journal Letters column (Dear Abyss), and late this year a weird off-brand book I’ll discuss later.

I’ve also discovered the stupidest WordPress incompatibility yet. I use Woocommerce for my bookstore, where some of you are reading this post. I use Jetpack there, so that Patronizers can subscribe by email. Jetpack is owned by Automattic, a big WordPress firm. There’s scuttlebutt that Automattic is pondering licensing the content of all sites that use Jetpack for AI pillaging. I’ve been keeping an eye on that, and looking for replacements.

A few people have had trouble with their credit cards in my store, however. Thanks to a Patronizer who generously donated their time in reproducing the problem, I discovered that the problem is Jetpack. I must accept credit cards. Jetpack is turned off. Which means that those of you who subscribe to Patronizer updates by email rather than RSS won’t get those emails.

It seems there should be a simple replacement plugin for “allow email subscriptions,” but they all run through third party services. I have a mail system. If you subscribe, I can send you mail. But nooo, as far as I can tell nobody’s written that plugin. I would welcome pointers and suggestions for automating this, but for now I’ll be sending an email to all direct Patronizers whenever I publish the monthly posts.

Sigh. Computers were a mistake. But if you’re reading this, you already knew that.

That’s pretty much it. Thanks for backing me. And please stop dying, folks.

Onward!

I’ll be at Penguicon this weekend. Come by, say hello, buy a book or heckle a talk. All talks are fifty minutes.

Friday, 26 April

• 5 PM: hang out in bookstore
• 7 PM: Reading (Orcs? Tech advice column? Nonfiction? Who knows?)

Saturday, 27 April

• 10 AM: The Good, the Bad, and the Yikes: 20th-Century SF (panel)
• 11 AM: How I Make a Living Writing
• 1 PM: How to TLS when You Don’t Know TLS (my talk, given by Bagel Garrison)
• 2 PM: BSDCan Concom Call (Not a Penguicon event, but it’s where I’ll be)
• 3 PM: Run Your Own Email Server
• 4 PM: Prying Money Out of an Indifferent Public: Self-Promotion for Creators (panel)
• 6 PM: It’s Always DNS, and What to Do About It

Sunday, 28 April

• hang out in bookstore

The “hang out in bookstore” blocks are actual work, sort of. I watch over other folks’ books, they watch over mine. If you want to buy a book send money via Paypal, show the watcher your receipt, and walk out with the book.

I’ll have a select, uh, selection of books, the sort of stuff that usually sells at Penguicon. If there’s a particular title you want, let me know in the next few days. I’ll bring a copy with your name on it. Otherwise, I might not be bringing that book at all.

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of March, and the public at the beginning of April)

Last month, I mentioned blood pressure problems.

The good news is, I have the blood pressure under control. The bad news, it’s given me a cough so fierce that I occasionally fall over. People have told me I work to hard, so now I’m taking a thirty-minute break every four hours around the clock for a breathing treatment that leaves me wheezing and quivery but functional. It’s an opportunity to prove the maxim “sleep is for the weak,” and I needed to develop my abs and rib muscles anyway. The doc changed my meds yesterday, so I’m hopeful I can exchange these side effects for less inconvenient ones.

This is all covid damage. I’m not risking developing more problems. You want me at your events, enforce a mask policy. I got too many books to write to put up with any more symptoms.

I also failed to finish Run Your Own Mail Server last month. See the above cough. I’m down to one technical issue, MTA-STS, and a few social issues that only require spewing words. I was tempted to wait on this post until I write those, but that’s pretty much a guarantee that I won’t complete either. You folks are my strongest supporters, and I need to give you the attention I agreed to. (Not the attention you deserve, of course. I don’t have that much attention.)

One of the headaches in this book has been its constant violation of one of my usual writing rules: do the hard part first. When I approach a new project, I rank the contents in order of difficulty. Usually, there’s at least one thing I haven’t previously done. Those are the things I need to write first. Writing the stuff I know how to do is pretty straightforward, but the unknowns wreck my plans. RYOMS could only be written in one way, though. The services must be set up and documented in a particular order, without shortcuts. If the book said “This is wrong but we’ll come back and fix it later,” I know perfectly well that none of you would go back and fix it. We have to set it up right the first time. Which led to some extra work. I use pyspf-milter so I wrote about it, but rspamd turns out to be a wiser choice. Retreat, refactor, rearrange, try again.

On the fiction side, I sold a new Rats’ Man’s Lackey tale to a magazine. The RML tales have a strange publishing history; every magazine or anthology I’ve sold one too has collapsed before they could publish my tale. Once a story destroys a publication, I put it up on my bookstore. I’ve written enough of those to release a collection, but a few buyers are still in business so I have to wait for them to implode–uh, publish. Publish.

I’m most of the way of a massive Terry Pratchett Discworld reread, not just studying his craft but how he improved his craft. There’s something fascinating about reading a large body of work in the order it was written. The quality of Pratchett’s early work was borderline, but some editor saw something unique in his craft and decided to give the kid a chance. You can see him improving with every book. At a technical level, there’s a certain fascination in saying “Oh! This is where Sir Terry discovered cliffhangers!” “Hey, he learned the difference between description and setting!” “Ooooh, he figured out how to stop violating drifting point-of-view, thank you Om.” This binge gives me hope for my own craft, because nothing Terry with his craft did was magic. The art expressed through his craft was magic, but art is not craft. I started reading Pratchett when The Light Fantastic came out, and in retrospect I can honestly say he taught me how to improve my craft.

Note that you can’t binge-study James Patterson. This kind of study requires examining the work of someone who writes their own books. You also can’t binge-study Ayn Rand, because she never got better.

Anyway, this binge study leaves me feeling validated about my method of deliberately practicing one skill per project. That’s a dangerous feeling; I don’t study to see what I’m doing write, I’m looking for ways to improve. I’ve found a few, but I still suspect I’m missing something big. Oh well. I guess, in a year or two, I’ll have to… study Pratchett again.

I’m going to cut this a little short, because the coughing has backed off and I desperately want to finish RYOMS this week. Thanks for supporting me, everyone!

(This post went to my Patronizers at the beginning of February, and the public at the beginning of March.)

Last month, I made plans. Immediately thereafter, life gave me a surprise.

Since my last doc visit in June, seems my blood pressure has doubled. It’s been 80/110 my whole life. Suddenly it went to 130/190.

What changed?

I had my first bout of covid, that’s what.

Fortunately high blood pressure is a well understood problem. I am resistant to the medication, but it’s been dragged out of “holy crap your brain is gonna explode” territory down into “well, that ain’t right” and we have hope it’ll reach normal before too much longer. The long term impact is real. The effort to arrange my life so I can be properly productive remains in place, though. I’ve had to slow down a bit. The drop in blood pressure has left me with orthostatic hypotension, which is great fun for a martial artist who specializes in throws and falls. Been focusing on tai chi and physical relaxation.

In some ways, that physical relaxation will be most difficult. The hip-height split keyboard works well for pure word production. I’m using them right now. I carefully placed them at a height where they only work if I relax my shoulders. Using them involves a tiny bit of knee flexion, but that’s actually preferred. It ensures I don’t lock my knees for eight hours straight. The problem is, “relaxed arm dangle” height corresponds with “tense your shoulders the way you shouldn’t, and hunch the way you also shouldn’t.” Martial arts practice has given me a decent posture, which in turn has helped me avoid myriad health problems caused by desk jobs, and I need to maintain that.

So: NO HUNCHING.

I’m still planning to publish a crapload of books this year, though. I might publish more than were on last month’s plan, if certain things work out. I totally forgot about one book that’s damn near ready to go to production. I need to finish the mail book first.

And how goes the mail book?

It’s my only writing project at this time. I’m cranking on rspamd. Rspamd is a seriously complicated program, mainly because people are complicated. It requires tuning. Some useful features are disabled for privacy reasons, and enabling them means explaining more than I had hoped. Rspamd has no single consistent management interface: some tasks can only be accomplished in the web interface, while others are limited to the command line. Technically, fetch http://localhost:11334/symbols is on the command line, but it gives you a file of compact JSON. Trying to grep that for a symbol name is not productive. I’ve been pointed at jq as a solution, but that’s another daft thing I need to figure out. It’s all a process of figuring out what I need to explain so I can explain what I need to explain, sigh. I’m spending the time to dig up solutions for command-line-based management wherever possible.

I’m still hoping to finish the first draft before family matters drag me to Las Vegas mid-February. I don’t know if I can do it. The blood pressure meds leave me a little woozy. Not sure if it’s because of the meds themselves, or if I’m acclimated to high pressure and returning to normal is destabilizing. Either way, it’s costing me time. Dealing with spam takes time and experience. While I use rspamd elsewhere, never before have I used it methodically. But once I finish that, the rest should be a matter of spewing the words onto the paper.

At least I have my email entirely switched over to the shiny new host, which is a good line to cross.

If you happen to live in Las Vegas, by the way, you’re welcome to have gelato with me on the 17th. 7PM. Details will be posted on my blog.

And if you don’t follow my so-called blog, I finally have an index of all my titles. It’s sortable by title, year of publication, fiction or non-fiction, and even length. I don’t know why you’d want to sort by length, but it was easier to leave that option than turn it off. Building this served as a double-check of all the titles on my site. No, I didn’t do the work myself: this is the first public-visible project completed by my Competent Assistant, and it’s something folks have begged for for years. I wasn’t ignoring y’all, I just didn’t have the information.

Dang. I’m hunching again. Stop it, dude.

I’ll blame WordPress. Because blaming wordpress is not always correct, but it is never wrong. Not as fiercely “never wrong” as always blaming Oracle, but never wrong.

I submitted a few talks to my usual conferences, Penguicon and BSDCan. Some of them involve email. It gives me a deadline for getting the book in people’s hands. If I can’t manage print by then, I at least want the Kickstarter going for Penguicon. Or a Kickstarter. I’m running enough of the damn things.

That’s all the news. Seriously. No big business decisions, no projects ready to announce. I’m just keeping on.