Category: Nonfiction Books

The video of my NYCBSDCon 2010 talk, BSD Needs Books, is now available at http://blip.tv/file/4844882. At the moment, it’s the top link on BSD TV.

This is the first time I’ve seen my own presentation, at any conference. I’ve always suspected that I look daft in front of an audience. It turns out that the slim chance I was wrong was a nice thing to have.

These are probably the last reviews for Network Flow Analysis: one from Left Brain Bookstore and another from ;login.  Positive reviews in ;login give me warm fuzzies.  USENIX feels like people I know, doing the things I do.

On an unrelated note I offer advice on grammar, in cartoon form. You no longer have an excuse.

My big project for the holidays was completing an outline for the next tech book.  I’m glad to say that the outline is done. I can’t yet give the title, but I can say:

• It’s huge:  29 chapters in a 25-page outline.
• I have a tech editor, a respected figure in the relevant community.  He’s currently reviewing the outline.
• No Starch Press wants it.
• I expect to spend a year writing it, so I would expect a release in early 2012.

The book’s length is a concern. I want to write books small enough for me to hold comfortably in the bathtub. I’m a big guy, but a 29-chapter tech book pushes that limit.  I might trim some content, or cover some parts in less detail, to meet that goal.

I don’t announce book titles far in advance, due to problems that’s caused me in the past.  (Some day I’ll write up that story, but not today.)  I expect that I’ll be far enough along in a few months to announce the title, so:  I’ll announce it during my presentation at BSDCan 2011.  (And now that I’ve made a public commitment to that date, I’ll have to get cracking!)

I sold my short story Wednesday’s Seagulls to short-story.me a few months ago. They released that story as part of their second “best of” anthology collection in November. I’ve wanted to check it out, but the holidays and my efforts to outline another nonfiction book interfered.

The order of stories within a volume takes more thought than most people realize. Most of the big-name editors have their own occult ordering methods, but there’s a few general rules.  The first story in the anthology is the story that, in the editor’s opinion, is most likely to hook the reader and compel them to read further. The last story is the one that, in the editor’s opinion, is most likely to leave the reader with the a good impression of the anthology.  While I’m proud of my previous antho sales, my work therein is buried in the comfortable middle.

Wednesday’s Seagulls is the first story in this anthology.  I have been awarded pole position.  Merry Christmas to me!  You can get the anthology in print and on Kindle.

I really must learn to write faster.  Maybe if I give up eating and sleeping…

One of my friends, SF writer Colin Harvey, just had his second mass market paperback hit the shelves.  Damage Time is a post-peak-oil police novel set in New York City.  The chilling bit is how he successfully combines the ideas of memory extraction with social networking.  And murder, of course.  (Where you have police, you get murder. Without police, people just get killed.)

If you look in the acknowledgments, you’ll find the line “and Michael Lucas hunted cliches relentlessly…”  That’s me.  I’ve got my name on another book!  Well, okay, in another book.  Close enough.  Sort of.  And apparently I’m relentless, too.  Maybe that’ll encourage me to get out of bed in the morning.

If you read SF, I highly recommend Damage Time.  Exciting, gritty, stolen memories, appalling and believable.

NYCBSDCon is this next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 12-14 November 2010.  If you’re anywhere near NYC, you need to attend.  If you’re not anywhere near NYC, you need to get to somewhere near NYC, and then attend.

I’ll be speaking on Sunday.  This talk could be subtitled “How I Reduce Suckage in My Books.”  Writing decent tech books is a skill you can learn.  I can honestly say that the slides are done, but in truth is that I still need to reduce slide suckage.  I’ll be reducing suckage up until the moment I present.

Occasionally someone will ask me to read their work and either comment or tell them where they should submit it. Some of these folks I know, some I don’t. It’s flattering to be asked, but my answer is: no.  I could describe my reasoning in great detail, but the inimitable John Scalzi has a far better article than I do.

On rare occasion, I make the mistake of saying “yes, I’ll look at your work.”  One of the following will result.

1. I will give you my honest opinion of your first page.  You will respond by dedicating the rest of your life to making me miserable.
2. I will give you the metaphorical equivalent of a pat on the head.
3. I will say you lack the fire.
4. I will tell you that publishers require sentence to have both a noun and a verb, and that you cannot use emoticons in published work.
5. I will “accidentally” erase your manuscript, your email, and my hard drive, so that I can honestly claim that losing your work was part of a much larger accident.
6. I will put off looking at your work in favor of paying work or spending time with my family.  I will feel increasingly guilty about this.  I will begin avoiding you.  The importance and difficulty of evaluating your work will grow in my mind until it assumes unbearable proportions.  I will take a week out of my life to evaluate your work thoroughly.  By this time you will have married your third spouse, adopted four feral children and a platypus, and moved to Aruba to fulfill your lifelong dream of being a beachcomber.

Note that none of these result in you getting anything you want.

If you really want to get my opinion, I suggest you either pick a response you like, or roll a die.

(Disclosure:  I have a Kindle, and I think it’s fabulous.  My newer books are available on Kindle. I expect that everything I write from now on will also be on Kindle.)

As an author, I think ebooks should be cheaper than paper books.  Ebooks are an inferior product.  Yes, you can get them more quickly, but you don’t actually get a book: you get a license to have a copy of a book attached to your account.  You can’t resell ebooks.  You can’t loan them out. You can’t express your disgust by using them as toilet paper.   Anyone in the IT industry knows the difference between owning a piece of software and licensing it.

When ebooks are more expensive than a hardback, people who have “invested” in an ebook reader become angry.  Amazon has many 1-star reviews of ebooks because the price is above that of a hardcover.  This leads to angry emotional arguments from both sides.  You can see lots of reader arguments on Amazon, and then there’s publishers’ arguments like this one from the SFWA.  But buried in the recent SFWA post are a couple of interesting facts that aren’t getting enough attention:

• ebook prices are set by the publisher
• physical book prices are set by Amazon

Amazon specifically dislikes the agency model under which books are sold.  They tried to use a more traditional model, but were forced out of that.  All indications are that Amazon is very unhappy about the agency model.

Amazon discounts their books under a formula known only to Amazon.  One side effect of this is that ebook devotees are angered by the price differences — and they’re getting angry at the publisher, not at Amazon.  And Amazon has previously used paper books as loss leaders.

I cannot say that Amazon is deliberately feeding this anger by choosing to price hardbacks slightly below the publisher’s ebook price.  But they make a point of labeling ebook prices as “set by the publisher,” where they don’t say that hardback prices are “set by Amazon.”  I think it’s fair to say that Amazon is aiming the anger.

And for those folks who say that publishers need to die, preferably soon:  I wholeheartedly disagree.  My books would not be nearly so good without my publisher.

Finally, on a completely different topic, but still about writing:  There’s a popular article kicking around now about reasons to date a writer.  I wanted to do a corrected, realistic version, but thankfully it’s already been done.

I don’t want to do a separate blog post for every review of Network Flow Analysis that comes out.  But it seems that I haven’t posted any for two months now.  If I’m going to batch these, I need to figure out a happy medium, say, every month or so.  Of course, now that the book has been out for a few months, the number of reviews is going to decline rapidly.

But to catch up: there’s been reviews at javaranch, from Henrik Kramshøj, from the Linux Users of Australia,  a few comments in Japanese, from Utah, and the Security and Risk blog.  There’s also a review in the illustrious Dr. Dobbs.  Back in the day, Dr. Dobbs’ was The Source for geek stuff.  A positive review there makes me feel like I have Arrived, that I am Someone of Substance.  Woo for me!

I’d like to thank all the folks who took the time to review NFA.