Crime writer. Many of those crimes involve computers.
My copyeditor returned the corrected manuscript for “SSH Mastery, 2nd Edition” to me last night. You should be able to buy the book within a few weeks.
In unrelated news, the first draft of #mwlSecretBook is coming along nicely. It’ll be the shortest Mastery book I’ve ever written, but at some horrific moment in your professional career you’ll be desperately glad to have it.
Season 2 Episode 7 of Chris Sanders‘ Source Code podcast features me. It’s a tech podcast, yes, but as Chris and I are both writers, we talk writing. Plus growing up in a farm town, reading, and the assorted unspeakable horrors of the literary life.
Chris not only donates his book royalties to the Rural Technology Fund, when he interviews someone on his podcast he donates $100 to a charity of the guest’s choice. I chose the Soroptomists International of Grosse Pointe, who are doing good boots-on-the-ground work on Detroit’s human trafficking problems. They’re less the “Ladies Who Lunch” and more the “Ladies Who Launch.”
The bad news is we, of course, discussed Savaged by Systemd. Somehow, we kept the podcast’s PG rating.
I’m girding my loins, gritting my teeth, and leaving the house this weekend. Specifically, I’ll be attending ConFusion, one of Detroit’s major F&SF cons. If you’re attending and want to avoid me, here’s a few panels and events I’ll be participating in.
11am Saturday – Petoskey – Last Exit Before The Worst Timeline
12pm Saturday – Isle Royale – The Ancient 1980s
5pm Saturday – St Clair – Mass Book Signing
You can roam the con freely those three hours. Otherwise, keep your eyes open and be ready to dodge away.
It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my myriad personal failures in 2017.
The obvious place to start is my 2016 wrap-up post, where I listed goals for 2017. As usual, these goals were wildly delusional.
The short answer is, my iron was back up to normal. My writing speed wasn’t, though. I’d lost too much general health, and needed hard exercise to recover it. Yes, writing requires physical endurance. Maintaining that level of concentration for several hours a day demands a certain level of blood flow to the brain. I could have faked it in a day job, but when self-employed as an artist? Not so much.
Then there’s travel. I did my usual BSDCan trip, plus two educational trips to Lincoln City, Oregon. The current political mayhem convinced me that if I wanted to hit EuroBSDCon any time in the next few years, I should do it in the very near future. So I went to Paris, where I promptly got pickpocketed. (Thankfully, they didn’t get my passport.) I was actively writing the third edition of Absolute FreeBSD, so I visited BSDCam in Cambridge to get the latest information and a sense of where FreeBSD was going. I also did weekends at Kansas LinuxFest (because they asked and paid for my trip) and Penguicon.
(Because people will ask: why EuroBSDCon and not AsiaBSDCon? A six-hour transatlantic flight requires that I take a substantial dose of heavy-grade tranquilizers. I’m incapable of making intelligent decisions while on those drugs, or for several hours afterward. They don’t last long enough for twelve-hour flight to Japan, so I need to be accompanied by someone qualified to tell me when I need to take the next dose partway through the flight. This isn’t a predetermined time that I can set an alarm for; it depends on how the clonazepam affects me at those altitudes. A drug overdose while flying over the North Pole would be bad. When I can arrange that qualified companion, I’ll make the trip.)
I need most of the preceding week to prepare for long trips. I need the following week to recover from time shifts and general exhaustion. Additionally, I have to hoard people juice for a few weeks beforehand so I can deal with folks during these expeditions. Travel disrupts my dojo time as well, which impacts my health.
Taken as a whole: I didn’t get nearly as much done as I hoped.
Here’s my complete output of big books.
Or, everything I put out: one novel, one tech book, one story, and one novella.
I wrote more stories, but Kris Rusch bludgeoned me into submitting them to trad markets. (The woman is a brute, I tell you. Cross her at your peril.)
Among my 2017 titles, my fiction outsold the tech books. No, not Prohibition Orcs–all four of the people who buy those love them, but the sales tell me I’ve done something wrong with those tales.
My cozy mystery git commit murder outsold Relayd and Httpd Mastery.
But what outdid them both, as well as most of my older books? What title utterly dominated my sales for the last quarter of the year? It was of course, my open source software political satire disguised as porn Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter.
I can’t believe I just wrote that paragraph.
The good news is, once I recovered from EuroBSDCon, my writing got better.
I finished Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition and submitted it to the publisher.
I wrote the second edition of SSH Mastery (no link, because you can’t order it yet.)
I’m plowing through git sync murder, the sequel to git commit murder. I don’t get to see the new Star Wars movie until I finish GSM, so hopefully that’ll be this month.
All in all, I wrote 480,200 words in 2017. Most of that was after September. It’s annoyingly close to breaking half a million, but after 2016’s scandalous 195,700, I’ll take it.
One of the nice things about being an author is that most of your income is passive. You do the work, and the money trickles in for years afterwards. I had money coming in while I was out of commission. The bad news is, that income slowly drops. If I’m to stay an author instead of becoming a wage peasant, I have to schlep some books out PDQ. I can do it, provided I remain focused on production.
That slump is the big reason why I broke down and started a Patreon. It’s why I started taking sponsorships for tech books. You folks carried me through my health problems. I can’t thank you enough.
The fact that AF3e is trad published complicates the financial picture. I won’t see any money from that book until 2019. No, I’m not complaining–that’s just a fact of life, and I knew that going in. But it provides extra motivation for getting my butt in gear right off in 2018.
So 2018 will be my Year Of Making Words. The finest words, of course. Artisinal. Straight from Detroit, a third world city in America’s heartland.
So what’s on tap for 2018? What’s the plan?
Other than the last two, these are all deliberately fail-forward goals. If I only get three tech books done instead of four–hey, I’m ahead by three tech books! If I only drop ten pounds, that’s better than gaining ten. “Stay married” and “stay alive” aren’t fail-forward goals, but I have a good idea how to achieve them both.
This time next year, come back to see exactly how I failed!
Last night, I finished a first draft of the second edition of SSH Mastery. The book covers OpenSSH as a server and a client, and PuTTY as a client. There’s small updates throughout the book, plus some new topics–most notably, SSH certificates.
I’m looking for SSH mavens who’d be willing to review the manuscript before publication.
I’d need any comments back by 2 January 2018.
I’d like comments in plain text, with enough context that I can find the spot you’re talking about.
Interested? Drop me an email at mwl at mwl dot io.
If you’re a sponsor and want to be a tech reviewer–you already have a copy of the manuscript. Read it. Send me comments. You’ve already helped me a bunch, but I won’t turn down your thoughts.
This morning, Google alerted me to a reputable site mentioning “Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition.”
To my shock, it’s a pre-order on Kobo.
[UPDATE: AF3e now has a web page, where I’ll be collecting pre-order links.]
I guess we have a release date now? And a price? Cool.
I expect other preorders to appear on other sites. No Starch will have a page for their combined print/ebook soon, as well as their early access program.
But as a writer, I adore Kobo. You could do worse than to get it there.
Today, I learned about Microsoft Word auto-recovery files.
If Microsoft Word crashes and can’t auto-recover the document, find the autosave file. The location is given in File->Options->Save. Sort the directory by date, and your autosave should be at or near the top. The file name ends in .asd. Copy that file elsewhere and open it in Wordpad.
Your text will be therein, stripped of all formatting but present.
In related news: I’m trying dictation. I know several authors who produce several thousand words per hour with dictation. I would like to produce several thousand words per hour.
Seemingly unrelated fact: I habitually hit the “save” button after typing every sentence. Note the key word: typing.
In more related news: installing Dragon 15 has made Microsoft Word lock up three times today. The third time, it couldn’t auto-recover the lost text.
And I hadn’t even thought about saving. Because I automatically hit “save” every sentence.
Beware your habits. They will cause you pain when you change.
Also: computers are terrible. I need a stenographer. Who understands MS Word styles.
SSH Mastery has been my best-selling title since I published it in 2012.
SSH Mastery has been on a five year mission to find and eradicate passwords. SSH has changed in the last five years. SSHv1 is no more, except where it is. A whole bunch of crypto algorithms are no longer in use, except when they are. We get jump hosts and centralized key management, except when we don’t.
It’s time for it to return to dock and get a refit. The new one will be cleaner! Brighter! Cover certificates! Capable of reaching Warp 5–no, wait, wrong story, never mind. But the cover will be pretty sweet. Here’s a rough draft.
I present to you: the Bloata Lisa!
SSH Mastery, 2nd Edition should be out before BSDCan 2018. If I do everything right, I’ll have two new tech books for folks in Ottawa.
This time, I’m soliciting print sponsors and ebook sponsors. As this is my best-selling Mastery book, I’ve raised the sponsorship prices a touch. Sponsors can expect readers to gloss over their names for years to come!
I must also concede that I’m hoping the sponsorships will help offset buying a block of ISBNs. I need ISBNs to produce the hardcover dust-covered sewn-spine print edition.
Oh, wait–did I not mention that? Sorry. Yes, hardcover. Stitched pages, not glued. A cloth cover and gold-stamped title beneath a glossy dust jacket.
Hardcovers are a little tricky, so I’m not promising I can accomplish that. Other authors manage it, though, so I’m not carving a new tunnel out of a mountain here.
A book needs 3-5 ISBNs, depending on the printing facilities I choose. As a US citizen I can buy 1 ISBN for $125, 10 for $295, 100 for $575, or 1000 for $1500. 100 ISBNs will last me for 20 books, but I know dang well that if I buy 100 I will regret it. The price of these arbitrary reference numbers will only increase, though, and I can easily see running out in a few years. So: I’m getting 1,000. For $1500. Ouch.
But hardcovers.
ISBNs will also let me take advantage of print-on-demand facilities in Europe, Australia, and post-Brexit UK. I’ll be able to fulfill wholesales orders for my books. It’s a reasonable business investment.
For those who can’t be bothered with long posts, here’s the short version:
My novel Immortal Clay is now featured as part of Kris Rusch’s Fear Bundle on Storybundle, one of the major book bundling sites. You can grab my novel, as well as thrilling and scary books from authors like Dean Wesley Smith, Leah Cutter, Rebecca Senese, Gary Jonas, Mark Leslie, Sean Costello, J. F. Penn, and Kristine Katherine Rusch.
If this was all that was going on, it’d rate a blog post. Storybundle is a big step up for me. I’m proud to be there. But this tale’s a little more complicated.
Immortal Clay is what writers call “a book of the heart.” Even as a child, pod people fascinated me. The Body Snatchers are Invading? I’m there. Carpenter’s The Thing is a favorite film. Philip K Dick’s tales of things that look human, that think they are human, but aren’t, have been my literary comfort food for decades.
In 1995, I realized that these tales all had one thing in common: they didn’t go far enough. The lightning strikes of implications and possibilities drove me to fill entire notebooks in an effort to get that inspiration to stop ricocheting around inside my skull.
And I lacked the writing skill to do anything with them. I tried, but… no. I just wasn’t good enough. So I wrote other novels, trying to develop the ability to express that manic inspiration.
Time passed.
I kept writing. Kept practicing. I love stories, I love storytelling, and I was going to master this skill.
I wrote in a bunch of different genres, sent out submissions to different short fiction markets, and collected the obligatory ticker tape parade of rejection slips. My favorite genres to read are SF and mystery/thriller, but what initial success I had came in horror.
Apparently I was a horror writer.
I focused my fiction writing time on horror, without much more success. Every day I polished my technique, obsessed with perfecting my storytelling.
Meanwhile, my nonfiction career writing about Internet technology exploded. Internet tech meshes perfectly with horror, by the way.
But then my fiction career stalled. After that initial small success, nothing happened for years.
I kept learning. And seeking teachers.
I’m selective on teachers. I want a mentor who has, say, won multiple awards over a course of multiple books. Or a working writer who’s consistently published many books, over decades, through a variety of channels. And in either case, they need to be a good teacher. Despite the old saying, not everyone who can do can teach.
Kris Rusch is one of the few authors who’s published literally hundreds of books and who teaches the craft of writing.
My first course with her was challenging–not because of the lunatic pace, or the jetlag, or being away from home for ten whole freaking days when I’ve successfully arranged my life so that I only need pants for the grocery store and the dojo. No, the hard part was how she methodically, kindly, and mercilessly blasted down my mental barriers. She has a rare talent of adjusting the lessons to the students. The lesson I needed involved dynamite. The second day, she called for someone to bring a bucket and a mop, because my brain had exploded out the back of my head.
I’m sheepishly proud that I was the last straw that finally drove her to write a book about how writers mess themselves up. (I’m in that book, anonymously. The truth is far uglier than what she wrote.)
During an afternoon break in the middle of the week, she asked me to stay behind. I knew what was coming. Obviously, she didn’t want to flunk me out in front of the class. It would be best for everyone if I just quietly slunk away before anyone came back from the bathroom and the snack table. After all, who wants a big messy scene?
Instead, she told me I could write fiction. That I could do it well. And she said something I never expected to hear: “Do you know you’re a science fiction writer? Has anyone ever told you that?”
No. Nobody ever told me that. I had a stack of rejection letters that said I wasn’t.
But Kris is not a person who sugarcoats the truth. That week, I watched her politely and helpfully feed people all sorts of bitter medicine–always with encouragement, yes, but a bunch of folks got sent back to the basics of the craft.
After that class, I went home and slept for three days. When I woke up, I waded through the wreckage of my mental barriers and started writing Immortal Clay.
Immortal Clay is science fiction, straight from the Pod People Playbook. It’s got a lot of horrific elements in it–it starts with the extinction of the human race, and goes downhill from there. People tell me it’s about hope and what it means to be human, but I’m pretty sure it’s about horrible monsters, small town secrets, and the importance of flamethrowers.
It’s horror by an SF writer–or SF by a horror writer. Something like that.
Starting this series felt I’d finally let out a breath I’d been holding for twenty years.
And of all the books I’ve written, it’s the one that generated the most demands for a sequel. The first pleas for book 3 arrived the morning after Kipuka Blues appeared. (Bones like Water will escape in 2018.)
And now, my teacher curated a Storybundle.
She asked for the book of my heart.
And the Fear Bundle is stuffed full of books written by folks who bled just as much to learn their art, and put just as much of their own hearts on the page. Seriously, I’m just stunned at the names I’ve been packaged with. The authors I haven’t read? I’ll be reading every one of them, just based on the company they’re keeping.
You really want this one.
I’ve done it. I’ve sold out. I’ve joined the trendy hip crowd.
By popular demand, I now have a Patreon.
Why announce this now? Well, I’ve finished the intensive work on the third edition of Absolute FreeBSD. I won’t have the rights to distribute electronic versions of AF3e to patrons. (Why? Remember, authors don’t sell books; they license copyright. I’ve licensed those rights to No Starch Press.) I will have the rights to distribute all of the Tilted Windmill Press ebooks, though. I feel it’s wrong to ask people to patronize me for working on stuff I couldn’t share with them.
Stupid ethics.
Financially, your best choice is to look at the books I write as they come out and purchase the ones you want. And I am perfectly good with that choice. I’m perfectly good with people who never read my stuff at all. My Patreon is for people who want to offer ongoing support, and get a couple tidbits in the bargain.
If you want to throw me a couple bucks but don’t Patreon? I have a tip jar. Or buy another book.
Short on cash? Reviews at the ebookstore where you bought a book are always nice.
Utterly indifferent to my existence? Then why did you read this blog post all the way to the end?