Crime writer. Many of those crimes involve computers.
I have the first official batch of PAM Mastery print copies. Here’s the stack ready for the sponsors.
Why is one box bigger than the others? One sponsor, who shall remain nameless but let’s call him SJ, sponsored the book several times over. Sending him more than one book seems like the right thing to do. Even if he doesn’t enjoy the books or their topics, they make great table levelers and spider smashers.
The meds are starting to work. I’m feeling better. Not great. Not good. But better. Better enough that I should be making some words. And I’m having a terrible time making words. My writing discipline has collapsed this year, because I’ve been ill.
This happens to every writer–really, any self-employed person who works fully independently. Us indies need to get our discipline back every time something goes wrong.
For me, the trick to getting things back together is to set goals that succeed or fail quickly. These goals give me a quick shot of victory, or confirms that I suck.
For these goals to work, though: someone has to know about them. Someone must know if I succeed or fail. Otherwise, I don’t push myself.
Thursday, I leave for Ohio LinuxFest, to talk about ZFS.
That gives me three days. I could slog into the next tech book, or grind out some words on my current novel, but on Thursday I’d feel like I’d just poked along. No real failure, but no real success either.
I’m giving myself three days to write a short story. There’s a hard word cap of 10,000 words. At 1,000 words an hour, that’s a maximum of ten hours labor in three days.
Some people do challenges where they write a story a day, but they’re up to speed, not coming back. They also write much shorter than I do–I call 10K words “flash fiction” and 80K “a brief novel”
I’ll post my progress on Twitter. Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll follow up with a blog post reporting success or failure.
I’ve had books translated into nine different languages. The rotating banner at the top of my blog shows some of them.
A reader pointed me at a translation that I wasn’t aware of: FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS in Russian. Unfortunately, the translator didn’t get rights to do so before translating it.
This is not the first time this has happened. For future reference, I’m putting up a post about my response in this situation.
The fact that someone thinks that Allan and I did a good enough job on the book that they spent their own time and energy to translate it is a huge compliment. It really is. It’s incredibly flattering.
But it eliminates any hope the publisher (in this case, myself) has of selling translation rights for this book.
This translator has also put this under a Creative Commons license. As they’re not the copyright holder of the original work, they also don’t have the right to change the license. As the book says, the license is “all rights reserved.”
I’ve sent the site a nice note, asking them to take it down.
Translation rights for my books are available, either from No Starch Press or myself, depending on the book. Any publisher is happy to sell translation rights.
I sell books to support my family. Translation income is part of that. So, like any author, I have to politely insist that some of my biggest fans not translate my work.
Now that PAM Mastery is out, I’m starting work on my next project.
I’m taking a break from anything filesystem related. Yes, I want to do FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, but that involves a lot of filesystem stuff, so that goes on hold for a bit.
Instead, I’m starting a book on OpenBSD’s web stack. Between httpd, relayd, and CARP, plus assorted surrounding infrastructure like acme-client, OpenBSD’s got a pretty solid offering for its environment. It doesn’t do everything–but most of us don’t need everything.
And yes, while the reference platform will be OpenBSD, I’ll also mention the FreeBSD support.
This book should be easier to write than the PAM book. Which is good, because I’m still fighting anemia. I have no idea when this will be done.
I will offer sponsorships once I have enough of the book done that I’m confident I can actually finish it. And I have some novel ideas for this book, but that’ll also have to wait a bit.
cue Movie Voice Over Voice
They thought they knew PAM. They were wrong…
My long-dreaded PAM book is now available, in both print and ebook.
You can grab it at all the usual suspects–I mean, bookstores.
On November 8 I’ll be at mug.org, giving a talk on how “PAM is Un-American.”
Last night, I gave an early version of the talk to the smaller, and not recorded, semibug.org crowd.
Josh Grosse live-tweeted the event.
The actual talk will be recorded. And will have considerably less swearing. Because it’s being recorded.
And yes, I think there really will be a Complete and Unexpurgated Edition of PAM Mastery available at the BSDCan 2017 closing auction. All I’ll need to do is add all the swearing back into the book.
Get it before it gets you. I’m still waiting for Apple to get the book up in iTunes, but it should be there within a day or two.
Print proofs are on their way to me. If they look OK, you’ll be able to get the book in print next week.
If you want both Kindle and print versions, buy the print first. You’ll then be able to get the Kindle version for $2.99.
(This is a “blog it so I can refer folks to it later” post.)
Last year, I wrote 403,000 words. Not great, but not terrible.
So far this year, I’ve written 130,900 words. That is terrible.
I also seem to have passed an awareness threshold. In the last few months, I’ve been offered speaking and teaching opportunities at half a dozen events, including big events like LISA and MeetBSD.
I’ve had to turn them all down. Which sucks. I want to expand my readership, and conferences are a great way to do that. Especially conferences that pay my expenses.
Ditto for the fiction opportunities I’ve been offered. (Which really tonks me off.)
It turns out there’s a reason why I’m tired all the time. Why I can’t concentrate. Why my productivity is in the toilet. Why flying somewhere and returning leaves me wiped out for a week.
Why I’m not doing my usual September writing retreat in Oregon.
Why I’ve had to take bloody naps.
I’m anemic. My blood marrow has shut down, and isn’t making more red blood cells. The ones I have are old and tired, and not doing such a good job of hauling oxygen around my innards.
There’s no reason for alarm at this point. My physician said “hmmm… that should have worked” and sent me to a blood specialist. I’m on more meds. They haven’t used words like “aplastic” or “pernicious.”
If I worked for someone else, they’d just have to put up with me falling asleep at my desk. But I’m self-employed, so my boss isn’t nearly so understanding.
Why am I posting this?
I am maintaining my existing commitments. I made those commitments already understanding my health. You’ll note that there’s only two of them. The furthest requires a three hour drive, and that’ll require rest breaks. (I’ll be fine at Ohio LinuxFest; I arrive early the day before, and I’m scheduling nine hours of sleep a night.)
My morale wobbles unpredictably between “not good” and “f— anemia.”
The bad news is: it took too damn long to find out this was going on. The anemia’s slow, stealthy progress hid the depth of the problem. It’ll take a while to recover.
The good news is: I’m expected to make a full recovery. There’s no reason at this time to think I’ll need vocabulary words like “aplastic” or “pernicious.”
More bad news is: you can’t do much to help me. The only thing I can do is wait for the meds to work, which will take a whole bunch of time. All I ask is that my readers understand why I’m slow in producing new books this year.
The great news is: I’m under medical advice to eat more cow.
I’ve been rolling this rock uphill so long, I’ve been feeling like Sisyphus. But “PAM Mastery” is finally copyedited and I’ve done the first print layout.
Next up? Indexing, cover finalization, and ebook production.
Soon. SOOOOON.
So… er… I put a new novel out last month.
And totally forgot to blog it. Apparently, releasing a new book is now such a commonplace occurrence that even I don’t find it noteworthy.
Or maybe it’s just that my brain absorbs information as readily as a stainless steel sponge.
Whatever.
Anyway, Hydrogen Sleets is the first ever Montague Portal novel.
Meet the new universe, same as the old universe—
but thirteen billion years younger.
Aidan Redding’s new assignment? A space station in a universe so young it’s barely invented hydrogen. Researchers study the cosmos’ earliest days, discover whole new realms of science…
and go screaming insane.
The mathematicians claim this universe obeys the same natural laws as Redding’s own.
At the beginning of time, though, the universe writes its own rules…
Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo, iBooks, Gumroad
If you’ve wanted more Portal stories, this is your chance.
I imagined the Portal tales as short stories. It’s a perfect setup for a short story series, with its built-in reset button and the opportunities for mayhem. Somehow, this turned into a novel.
Those of you who collect these in print: despite it being a novel, Hydrogen Sleets has the same cover size as the other tales. It’s thicker because, well, it’s a novel, but it won’t mess up your pretty shelf display.
It’s available at all fine online bookstores, in both ebook and print.
Buying the book on its own is the expensive way to get it, though.
Hydrogen Sleets is temporarily part of the Out Of This World fiction bundle, a collection of high-tech SF novels that are all, in some way, out of this world. Here you’ll find starship repossessions, space pirates, doomsday machines, and more.
Get six books, including mine, for a paltry $3.99, or $9.99 for sixteen books. This is days of reading from a crew of excellent authors, plus me.
Rebecca Senese, the bundle curator, invited authors whose work she enjoyed. This bundle includes some of my favorite authors.
Personally, I enjoy buying bundles. They’re a great way to get explore new authors. The inexpensive price lets me sample work from authors I’ve never tried. Inevitably, I’ll enjoy most the books and a few will hit my tastes just right. It’s a great deal.
Rebecca’s doing a daily blog about each book and the author, including J.D. Brink, Leah Cutter, Marcelle Dube’, Mark Fassett, Jamie Ferguson, J A Marlow, Stefon Mears, Debbie Mumford, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Rita Schulz, Rebecca Senese, Dean Wesley Smith, Douglas Smith, and Blaze Ward. She’ll have a new post every day while the bundle runs.
Oh, did I mention it expires soon? You have four days. FOUR DAYS. As of when I write this, of course. Probably less by the time you read it. Get it now, or miss out forever.
Well, no. Not forever. You can buy each book individually. But that’s a lot more expensive, and all that clicking will tire out your mouse finger. Be smart. Get it now.
And I promise, next time I put a novel out, I’ll actually say something when it’s available.