Tag: sausage

This post goes to Patronizers in August and becomes public in September. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File. Also: am I choosing See The Sausage Being Made post titles by picking words out of my 1933 Oxford English Dictionary that do not appear online? Moi? Would I do that?

Long-time Patronizers know that I’m stuck using a commercial operating system for publishing books. Choosing between commercial operating systems is like choosing between Catholic Hell and Evangelical Hell. My last real job was a Windows shop, so I stuck with it. Microsoft wants all of its users to 1) use their Copilot generative LLM and 2) store all their documents in their OneDrive cloud so they can feed their LLM. I cannot use any generative LLM for writing. The purpose of an LLM is to produce minimally acceptable text, even if that text is not factual. My purpose is to produce easily readable and factual text infused with character and experience. These goals are incompatible. Legally, I run two businesses. I produce and license intellectual property, and I provide bundles of ink-stained paper to customers all over the world. The output of an LLM is not copyrightable, and thus not intellectual property. I could produce ink-stained paper of LLM output, but why bother? Plus, I don’t want to deal with accusations of using an LLM. I worked for decades to get this job, why would I stop doing it?

Microsoft has grown increasingly heavy-handed in pushing people towards Copilot and OneDrive. Every time they update Windows or Office they turn them back on, and I must resort to increasingly arcane hacks to disable them. Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows reinforce one another in re-enabling Copilot. Last week, the hacks to disable it and various TPM shenanigans cost me a week. Given that I’m still dealing with family matters, that’s a week I didn’t have. This problem will only grow worse.

Microsoft’s insistence on forcing me to use an LLM has compelled me to switch from Microsoft Hell to Apple Hell. Did I want to spend the money? No. Between the two options, which do I prefer? BSD, but that’ll get my books pulled from IngramSpark and keep me from distributing lumps of ink-stained paper outside the Amazon ecosystem. I still have my OpenBSD desktop for daily work.

Why? The OS and the word processor do not reinforce each other. MacOS has a single switch for enabling and disabling Apple Intelligence and doesn’t automatically stuff your home directory into their cloud. I use Dropbox for cloud work, because they make money off of me and aren’t so desperate to pillage my work to feed an LLM.

MacOS. It’s like Windows, but like an iPhone, except it has a functional command line. You WILL store your files the way MacOS says, although I have symlinks so it’s not too bad. I’ve spent less time adjusting to the differences than I would have wasted on stopping Microsoft from pillaging my files and poisoning my intellectual property. It’s just as annoying as Windows, but as their motto says: “Rage Different.” Or something like that.

If you’re in a similar position, Apple offers a “one year same as cash” deal.

On the plus side, the bottom of my standing desk is now much less crowded.

The Mac Studio is mounted under the shelf. I could fit my printer under there now, except then I’d have to get down on my knees to access it. Never go to your knees before computers, it gives them ideas.

In other news, the print sales system in my bookstore is working. People are ordering books. The big surprise for folks is that US Media Mail is not insured. I’m trying to figure out how to put that as a warning on the ordering page in a place folks will see it.

Since the store works, and folks are getting books, and the fees I have to pay are in line with my expectations, I’ve implemented a permanent coupon. The code MWL gets you 10% off. Folks need to pay shipping, but if you order a couple books that should mostly cover the shipping expenses. It’s not valid on sponsorships, gift cards, or discounted bundles. I make more on direct sales, and want to give a cut back to folks. I might raise the cut, I might lower it. Depends on the ever-varying fees I have to pay, world politics, and other elements I can’t control. Running a business during a national collapse presents challenges, so I’m hedging a bit.

I am engrossed in tech edits on Networking for System Administrators. I really, really want to finish this book, get it copyedited, and get a test print before I launch the Kickstarter. I don’t know that this will explode the way Run Your Own Mail Server did, but I think it’ll do better than Laserblasted. (Note to self: don’t launch a crowdfunding campaign two days before your country’s leader unexpectedly destabilizes international commerce.) My tech reviewers are making me double-check everything, which is both good and a real pain. (“What do you mean, there’s no standard for Ethernet jumbo frames? Sure there is!” “Oh? Where? But I better triple-check to prove this negative…“)

My web site redesign is underway. On the finished pages, clicking on a book description takes you to a separate page with buy links, all generated by spreadsheet as described last month. I still have a couple pages left to do. The new problem is that folks see the book description twice, once on the catalog page on my site and then again on the individual page. Once I have all the pages converted to have individual pages, I’m thinking that I’ll reduce the catalog pages to a gallery of book covers and titles. Clicking on a book will take you to the full description. That might help. I am actively soliciting suggestions for what folks would find useful, however.

Building a spreadsheet containing all the store links, tag lines, and descriptions for each book shows just how inconsistent I’ve been on all of that. Once I have everything converted, I get to go through the spreadsheet and fill in missing data. Oh joy. Oh rapture.

But at least I won’t be doing it in Microsoft Hell. Apple Hell is still Hell, but it shows a minimal concern for my future.

Thank you for your support.

This post goes to Patronizers in July and becomes public in August. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File.

I was very proud of having made a schedule over the last couple months. The schedule gave me hope.

Any orc will tell you that “Hope exists to be crushed” but nooo, I listened to the Hope Demon and here I am.

Family matters have largely overwhelmed me in the last few weeks. Book sales are always low in the summer, but ever since Fearless Leader declared that one way or another there would be tariffs, they’ve hit an all-time low. My Patronizer income exceeds everything else combined. So once again: thank you for supporting me!

Real life complications hit everyone. If I worked for a company, my boss would classify me as “temporarily zombied” and increase the amount of time he spent beating me until I produced something. It’s nothing personal, of course. Being self-employed, I have to beat myself to produce things. In particular, I’ve promised the world an orc story for the Twisted Presents collection. That story does not exist. I’m going to delay the start of the Kickstarter until the tale does exist. I have half of something, and I know the shape of the tale, but every word I grunt out lies dead on the page.

Advertising “there’s a brand new orc tale in this collection so back it” only works if the story is good. Oops.

The mysterious, omnipresent, all-knowning They say that “a change is as good as a rest,” so I’ve turned what attention I have to a simple matter of programming.

Print sponsors might buy a book as much as a year before the book is released. I’d like to be more timely, but that’s the sad truth. The new Networking for System Administrators has about 170 print sponsors. Even a small rate of address changes means several returned packages. Each book attracts more sponsors. Don’t get me wrong, that’s great, but this problem will only get worse. I really must verify everyone’s shipping address.

The standard method of business data exchange is the (ugh) spreadsheet. WooCommerce exports data via spreadsheets.

So I wrote a simple Perl script to extract sponsor names and addresses from an export spreadsheet and send a confirmation mail to the sponsor. No, I’m not going to put this on github because 1) github takes money from ICE, and 2) some poor bastard might try to use it. When I order the sponsor gifts I’ll use the script to correct everybody’s shipping address.

Yes, some folks won’t catch the mail. If it halves the number of bounced packages, I’ll count it as a success.

That led to my other project. My web site is a mess. Listing books by category and genre helps hold the site down to a vaguely sane number of pages, but stuffing all the buy links next to each book makes the page ugly and unwieldy. Plus, it’s unauditable. All of my books are on Kobo, Amazon, TWP, Apple, and so on, but not every store is listed for each book.

I’ve decided to treat my web site as a catalog, without buy links. Clicking on an individual title in the catalog will take you to an individual page for the book. Maintaining pages by hand is unsustainable. I want to be able to hand maintenance to someone else, so that means (ugh) a spreadsheet. Or I could write a web app but no, the first thing I’d have to do with that web app is build a report system to generate a spreadsheet so let’s just stay with the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet records the buy links for each non-Amazon retailer, the Amazon catalog number (ASIN) for the book, and Amazon affiliate codes. It also has the book’s jacket copy and tag line.

I also have a long-running annoyance where people on the socials link to one of my books but an unrelated image shows up. Giving each book its own page lets me work around that by setting a featured image in the HTML.

The script basically works. I need to change the text for free ebooks, but that’s fairly minor. Now I’m going through every page on mwl.io creating spreadsheet entries and ad images for each title. Comparing, say, the finished SF page to an old tech book page, it does look better.

Click on a title and you’ll get the individual page, like this one for the brand-new Laserblasted.

Oh, right. Laserblasted left my bookstore this month and went into the broad world of retailers. A couple folks bought it at Amazon. Reception among those who read it has been positive, which is nice. If you’ve read it, I would appreciate a review at Goodreads or Amazon or… anywhere, really. (The usual reminder: Amazon and Goodreads considers a three star review negative and their algorithms will treat the book as such.)

The good thing with spreadsheet work is I can snatch a few minutes here and there to do it, amidst the larger mayhem that is my life right now. Right now I’m hanging on, hoping matters will settle down enough in the next week for me to actually clear my brain and write for a few hours. I’m hoping US politics settle enough that I can sell some books and stay in business. I’m hoping I can return to my home after September’s trip to EuroBSDCon in Croatia.

In happier news, I have received the N4SA2e challenge coins and they’re quite spiffy. Sponsors and print-level Patronizers will be pleased. But that’s about it for happy news.

Months like this, your support means the difference between keeping this career and returning to normal employment. I am grateful to every single one of you.

Until next month!

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of April, and to the public at the beginning of May. Yes, I know, everyone already patronizes me, but if you want me to pay attention sign up here.

As expected, the economy is in an unforced crash. Yippee! Buckle in folks, it’s gonna be a wild ride. I wish to thank all of y’all for backing me. Those folks who signed up to See the Sausage Being Made for $12 a year add up. The whole Patronizer thing often makes me feel like the founder of the world’s most useless cult, but you do keep the bank from taking the house and I am grateful.

I spent some time this month going through my bills. We’ve had the same cable company for almost twenty years and two different houses. (No TV, just a bit pipe.) Every few years, I’d get a letter that they were upgrading my plan. Fine. I gave them a call and told them to cut my bill or lose me. They cut the bill and upgraded my service again. I really need to put “negotiate with cable company” on my calendar for every two years.

Next up: the cell phone. We had Sprint because it worked here, which means we became T-Mobile, which means our bill had gone up. Probably switching to Consumer Cellular. It’s time to stretch those dollars!

Happier news: all active Tilted Windmill Press titles are in Bookvault, which means I will be able to sell them from my bookstore. Yay! I have a box of 21 proofs coming. If they are okay I’ll get them in the store.

I’m already offering the FreeBSD Storage Bundle in print at $24 off. I’m afraid to look at what I’ll have to charge for The Full Michael in print, but it’ll happen.

Okay, fine. Let me build a spreadsheet and add it up.

34 print books, $785. If I give a 20% discount that makes it $628. Call it $629.99. Nobody’s that insane, but if I don’t offer it one of you is gonna ask me why not. Plus, being able to offer it all feels correct. Like the bookstore is truly complete. You want it, I can send it!

Why do a 20% discount? When you buy direct from me, I don’t have to pay a bookstore or a distributor. 20% splits the difference with the reader, which seems fair. I do have paperwork and financial overhead on direct sales, though, so I’m compromising by offering the split on larger orders. Larger orders also save on shipping. Eventually I want to say “buy 4 or more get 20% off” but I implement only one headache at a time.

Sadly no, I can’t include No Starch titles. They are not print-on-demand. I would have to touch them and compute shipping. Not happening.

The question I’m still struggling with is the default format. I have to choose either “print/epub bundle” or “just epub.” Yes, people can change it with the “Format” drop-down. But defaults do impact people. Is it more ethical to set it to the less expensive option? How many people won’t see the “Format” option?

Clearly I need to pivot to “just give me all your money and I’ll decide what you get,” sigh.

I discovered a complication on direct print sales to Europe, though. The printer does not include commercial invoices. Bookvault does not know how much I charged you, or if I charged VAT. You can download an invoice with your order. I had one European customer who had trouble with this, but other Europeans say that’s fairly standard. I need to go through the print store and add that warning to every print version.

The good news is, I have the hard part of the networking book done. Sort of. I sent the TLS chapter to Bob Beck for review, and it went horribly wrong. The good news is, I get to do some new sysadmin stuff and set up QUIC on my web site. Then I get to do some netflow analysis and see how much of the traffic is QUIC versus everything else. Good fun times, for a strange value of good and stranger value of fun.

The good news is, the second half of the rest of N4SA2e requires very little in the way of updates. Some of the warnings need to be louder, but traceroute hasn’t changed, nor netcat.

Laserblasted is due back from copyedit on 15 May, and I’m wondering: if I can crank hard for two weeks, can I finish this draft and get it to tech review by then? I don’t know, but it’s a worthy goal. If nothing else, I’ll have two weeks of cramming on it.

Speaking of Laserblasted: as an experiment, it’ll be exclusive to my store for a few weeks before I release it on other bookstores. It’s a weird book so it’s not a real test of windowing, but I’ve heard from a few folks who missed the Kickstarter and maybe I’ll scoop them up that way.

Laserblasted also taught me a lesson. I had so much fun ranting about the film that I forgot to describe what the book is. Or: I spent so much time saying what it isn’t that I forgot to say what it is.

Meaning that I broke my own rule, and didn’t write the jacket copy before writing the book.

I still am struggling with the jacket copy. I might just steal my pal ZZ Claybourne’s description:

“What would happen if Gomer Pyle got turned into a scathing indictment of the military patriarchal industrial complex but with way more aliens and laser-inflicted explosions than the sitcom managed to achieve? Starring Brad Pitt as Gomer, directed by Sam Raimi.”

I’m scathing? When did this happen?

Er, uh–yeah. I meant to write that. What that says. I planned that. Yep.

Now to get back cover text that means that.

Maybe I’ll just put that on the back.

I really do need to get a Prohibition Orcs Christmas story written for my Christmas collection. Ideally I’ll launch the Twisted Presents Kickstarter on 25 July and be ready to fulfill immediately upon payment, so I can do the N4SA2e Kickstarter right after. Wait–does that work? Let’s sketch this out.

Let’s be pessimistic and say I finish end of May. I want a month for tech review, which means end of June.

I’ll have Laserblasted proofs ready and hard copies ordered before BSDCan, and order the books for delivery when I get home. Fulfill that by the end of June, no problem.

The copyeditor will have N4SA2e in July. She’s usually about six weeks on a tech book. I haven’t checked with her, of course, and she might blow up my entire schedule.

So if I launch Twisted Presents on 21 July and let it run for two weeks, it ends 4 August. I order books 5 August. Yes, I don’t have the money yet, but I’m assuming Kickstarter coughs up the dough on 18 August, like they do. I can ship them that week. It’s only a handful of copies, it’ll only take a day.

So I get the N4SA2e copyedits about 15 August and spend about a week doing corrections and laying out the print and indexing, all that crap. Launch that Kickstarter early September, let it run for three weeks. (Tech book campaigns should run longer than fiction ones.)

Now to work backwards.

Launching Twisted Presents on 21 July means I must have a print proof in hand by that date. I’ll need everything finalized by 7 July. I need the final manuscript end of June. Most of this book was previously published, but the orc tale needs copyediting and everything needs a final proofreading. I might have to use an alternate editor for that, someone less expensive at speed. That’ll take a couple weeks at best, which brings us up to the end of BSDCan. I’m not working on books during BSDCan. The book must go to copyedit by 9 June.

I need a few first readers to read the orc story. That takes two weeks.

I must have a completed orc story by 26 May. Achievable.

Except I’m cramming to finish N4SA2e by then.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m terrible at scheduling?

All of this is built on the very slender reed of finishing N4SA2e by the end of May. Which means I get QUIC on my web server.

I think I better go get to work.

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of April, and to the public at the beginning of May. Not a Patronizer? You could be. It’s a terrible deal, but you could be.

I’ve considered myself well-prepared for personal financial disaster, but we’re not headed into personal financial disaster. We’re headed into a global one. I would say that I’m conservative–I save money, look after my family, mind my own business–but the reactionaries have stolen that term from me. Plus, I’m not conservative enough to cope with this economy. Nobody could be.

Last year was an all-time writing income peak, thanks to the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter.

This year? Well, the Laserblasted Kickstarter is concerning. Yes, this is something of a gag book–but it’s a real novel. Folks who would normally take a $200 leather-cased book are backing for $6 ebooks. Several folks wrote me to say that they wanted to support the book, but simply couldn’t right now. I’ve also lost Patronizers.

I don’t blame them. But the upshot is, I’m expecting this year to be ugly.

Plus, this month I’m writing checks for taxes and retirement fund. Because of RYOMS, those checks are large. While I understand the logic of “feed the IRA while the stock market is low,” it definitely feels like I should just set the money on fire instead. The IRS would let me record that as a business loss.

From the latest happenings, I think it’s clear that I need to start increasing my overseas business. I need my books to become more accessible to European and Asian markets. That means dealing with VAT. Even with the RYOMS Kickstarter, I didn’t quite make enough in Europe to qualify for IOSS. I suspect that if I can include VAT in my book prices more Europeans will buy them. If I get an IOSS number I can have my books printed inside the EU, which would make them still more accessible. To get there, I need to sell more.

Chicken, meet egg.

I need to ask folks who run businesses in the EU for their thoughts. Fortunately, there’ll be a bunch at BSDCan.

Anyway. Money sucks.

The good news is, my readers seem to like ordering print books through my store! Each week there’s a handful of print sales from my bookstore. While I still have no idea what my best-selling titles are, I used a couple months of Amazon print sales as a proxy and have started working my way down that list. I’ve set up PAM Mastery, the two versions of TLS Mastery, and FreeBSD Mastery: Jails with the new printer and ordered the proofs. If they come out okay, I’ll have them on the store as print/ebook bundles straight away.

When converting books to the new printer, my titles are either simple or disastrous. I plan to focus on the simple ones first, but ideally I want to offer “The Full Michael” in print. I don’t know that anyone will actually buy that stack, but being able to offer that makes me as independent as possible.

The other good news about direct print sales? Bookvault recently added printers in Australia and Canada. Cracking Canada has long been a goal. Yes, I can ship from the States, but for two countries right next to each other, shipping to Canada sure is expensive and annoying. Printing and shipping from Canada also lets me skip the annoyance of customs.

The funny thing about this exercise is: chapbooks. When Amazon shifted their prices, I stopped putting short stories in print. I might bring short stories into print again, but make them exclusive to my store. If I was smart, I’d put them in a series like William Meikle did. Number them. Make them seem collectible. Brand them like a unit. See if I can trigger that completist urge in collectors.

Oh, wait. My hardcore collectors are mostly Patronizers. I’d just have to ship them copies. Huh. Well, I might do it anyway just for the laughs.

On the writing front: Project IDGAF, aka Laserblasted, survived first readers. People like the stupid thing. Many Patronizers will get a copy as part of their benefits, but if you’re not one of them you might take a look at the first chapter as see if it interests you. First reader reaction was universally positive, which was quite a shock. I wanted to write something that I had no stakes in, that people were not expecting or demanding, so I’d be free to stretch myself and be a little daft. (More daft. Whatever.) It seems to have worked, which is nice.

Which leaves me grinding on the new Networking for Systems Administrators. Writing a cross-platform book is weird. We pretend that TCP/IP is a universal standard, but everybody made different decisions regarding that standard. Sigh. Still, it’s starting to coalesce into something resembling a book.

Hopefully I’ll get N4SA2e to Kickstarter this summer, along with the Twisted Presents Christmas story collection. Most of the stories exist for that one. I still need to write an exclusive Prohibition Orcs tale for it, but I’m hoping that doesn’t go horribly wrong. Last thing I need to do is accidentally write a Christmas novel about a cranky little old lady orc (no matter how much JG would like that).

Anyway, I better get back to these edits. Thank you for your support. I appreciate every one of you, especially in these troubled times.