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:

I know perfectly well why you people read my books. It’s for the footnotes.

Some of you buy the Mastery books for the cover art, but those few who open the things do so for the footnotes.

My conscience has been at me again, the filthy bastard. Charging everyone exorbitant rates for a handful of footnotes is robbery. I should produce books that people want to read. I have therefore gathered all of the footnotes from all of my books in a handsome collectible hardcover edition.

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.

Yes, it’s 1 April. April Fool’s day. This has got to be a joke, right? Am I the sort of person who would release an entire book as a gag? Might I even release a special edition of a book for those unable to accept feminine pronouns in their tech books?

Yep. A good 1 April post has meat on the bone.

It is absolutely real. ISBN 9781642350548. $24.99 USD, because hardcovers cost a bunch to manufacture.

Unfortunately, IngramSpark has delayed production. You can’t buy it yet. (Insert one of those sobbing emojis, except he’s also enraged and flinging a Molotov.) (EDIT: It is now available, see https://mwl.io/nonfiction/wtf )

Only Footnotes will exist only in hardcover, to be show off the lovely interior illustrations by OpenBSD’s Ayaka Koshibe. There’s no ebook, it’s a collectible. Specifically, it’s another step in my quest to make a career out of publishing the least useful nonfiction books known to humanity.

Publishers have researched the best book release strategy for decades. Even the indie folks have done lots of number-crunching to determine the best day to release a book, and how to optimize that release. Me? My indie book release strategy is “trebuchet this mess into the cold world as soon as it’s done.”

Running a pre-order through Kobo or Apple or one of the little, less relevant retailers requires knowing the release date. My release date is “day back from copyedit + days to lay out in print + day to index + day to produce final print and ebook versions” = “usually 10PM on a Saturday, but sometimes bite me o’clock Sunday morning.”

These constraints don’t apply to my bookstore, though. I can have a release date of “when it’s done.”

TLS Mastery is due back from copyedit 1 April. I should have ebook out about a week later. Print should be in stores a couple days after that, more or less, kind of sort of.

The book will come in two versions, the Beastie Edition and the Tux Edition. The only difference is the cover. Buy the ebook or paperback anywhere else, you’ll need to pick which version you want. Only in my bookstore will you get both ebooks in one purchase. The hardcover dust jacket will have both, of course.

This release will let me achieve a personal goal. Here’s a picture of me with one copy of everything I’ve published, including translations.

The paperback and hardcover will push the stack over the top of my nose, officially achieving “drowning height.” I could argue that I achieved this some time ago, as I don’t own a copy of the Korean translation of Absolute OpenBSD. My Platonic Ideal Pile is a couple inches taller.

But drowning’s digital. Either you’re drowning or you’re not. Either the stack would kill me or it wouldn’t. And until now, I could breathe.

I’m planning a stack taller than me before the end of 2022. And with that, I’m off to make some $ git sync murder.

I’ve completed a rough cut of TLS Mastery, and am now looking for tech reviewers who know TLS. If you know more about TLS than the above average sysadmin and would like to review the manuscript, please drop me a note at mwl at mwl dot io with the subject “TLS Reviewer” or use the contact form. I’ll be collecting feedback until 28 February. Then I integrate everything and make a real book.

I’ve given the manuscript to sponsors, plus the Digital Reader and above Patronizers. (Thus proving you don’t need blockchain for “proof of work.”) If you’re a sponsor it’s in your account. There’s three PDFs: the one for Windows and Mac, the one with everything embedded, and the one that’s printed to PDF. One of them should work for your combination of PDF viewer and OS.

Next up, I start hammering on $ git sync murder. Plus I fix some annoying web site issues, get the Montague Portal omnibus in production, and maybe even clean my office.

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.

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.