MWL’s 2016 wrap-up

The year-end post is an Internet tradition. Being naturally conservative, who am I to buck tradition?

It’s a couple days early, but I’m going to go out on a limb here: the list of people 2016 killed does not include me. Yet. (Dear 2016, this is not a challenge. I would not dream of questioning your ability to slaughter folks. You are the champ, truly.) This was in doubt for a while, but I responded well to treatment. My bone marrow has started firing. I have hemoglobin again. At the end of 2016, I stop taking all the meds.

Now that my bone marrow is firing again, the theory is that it will keep going. It might not. I need to monitor my blood for the forseeable future. Hey, if I reach 50 and that’s as bad as it gets, I’ll be doing good.

The lesson here is: if I stop making words, don’t assume it’s only because I’m an undisciplined slacker and that I need to “try harder.” That’s a great assumption if it lasts for a week, but if it keeps going on I need to see the doctor.

Dammit, what happened to my youthful invulnerability?

Writing-wise, I published three tech books:

FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems
FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS
PAM Mastery

I’d like to note that the specialty filesystems is now my worst-selling tech book of all time, lagging far behind the PGP and Tarsnap books. It’s a necessary prerequisite to the jails book, though. (No, you won’t have to read it to understand the forthcoming jails book, but I had to write it before writing the jails book.)

The ZFS book was co-written with Allan Jude. The specialty filesystems book was mostly written in 2015. PAM was written entirely in 2016.

I published three novels:

Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay 2)
Butterfly Stomp Waltz (a crime thriller)
Hydrogen Sleets (aka “Aidan Redding 3” or “Montague Portal 4”)

The first two were written entirely in 2015. The last was half-finished in 2015.

So, yeah… anemia pretty much whupped my butt in 2016. While word count is not the be-all and end-all of writing, it’s a useful metric for a working writer. I wrote 15,600 words in July, 4400 words in August, and 5000 in September, for both fiction and non-fiction. That’s not enough to make a living on.

I started treatment in September. They said it would take effect very slowly.

At the beginning of October, I thought I was feeling well. I set myself a three-day challenge to complete a short story. It bombed. My “feeling better” was a condition the experts call “wishful thinking.”

October: 6900 words.

In November, I wrote 30,700 words. December so far has only 25,800 words, but I see a drop every December because of the holidays. That’s fine. I’m shooting to break 30,000 before the end of 2016.

As of today, total word count in 2016 is 195,700.

I’m not back where I need to be. But I’m clearly on the way back. Apparently, if your brain doesn’t have oxygen, it stops working. Who knew?

Many of the November words were fiction. I wanted to write something quick and short, because I really needed to complete something. 28,000 words later, I had a new Prohibition Orcs novella. Which my writer friends will tell me was a daft thing to do–short stories sell. Novels sell. Novellas don’t.

But orcish rumrunners in 1927 Detroit amuse the crap out of me, and that’s all that’s really important, so buzz off. I’ll post the official announcement on it once it’s available on iBooks.

Other things in 2016? Well, today I hit 60 inches on the stretching machine. That’s great for my martial arts practice. I put on weight: not good, but highly predictable when you have roughly enough brain power to handle Star Trek: Voyager. (I was still saying the plot twists before they appeared on screen, though: I was slow, not dead.)

Where am I today?

The novel I started on 1 February 2016, git commit murder, is flowing nicely. (Think “Agatha Christie does a Unix con.”) I haven’t spent more than a year on a novel since 2001, and I have no intention of starting now. I might stretch my fiction hours in January to keep that from happening.

The new tech book, “Relayd and Httpd Mastery: OpenBSD Web Services” is also flowing nicely. I’ve almost finished the httpd part–all that remains is OSCP stapling.

Best of all: once I get going, the words pretty much arrive the way they used to. Getting started is still painful, but I expect that to improve with more blood.

My 2017 goals?

  • Write 4 complete tech books.
  • Write 4 novels.
  • Keep practicing martial arts.
  • Stand up against racism, sexism, and fascism in my daily life.
  • Be sufficiently flexible to kick Ray Percival in the head at BSDCan.
  • Drop 20 pounds.
  • Stay writing.
  • Stay married.
  • Stay alive.

If I pull those off: I win.

Reddit advertising of “PAM Mastery”

I spent $25 on a Reddit ad that ran for the last week, for PAM Mastery. The ad (Pluggable Authentication Modules: Threat or Menace?) appeared in /r/CentOS, /r/Ubuntu, /r/sysadmin, /r/unix, /r/freebsd, /r/linux, /r/BSD, and /r/debian.

So what did I get for that?

62,521 impressions. 215 clicks through to the ad. 89 click-throughs to the book page.

How many of those translated to purchases? That’s pretty hard to guess, but: the links from my web site are affiliate links. When you buy the book from Amazon through my link, I get a few extra cents for referring you there. So, let’s assume that all of the affiliate purchases of PAM Mastery during that time came as a result of the Reddit ad. That’s going to overestimate the ad’s impact, but it’s the only real promo I did during that time.

So, the total sales I can attribute to the Reddit are:

One.

This isn’t Reddit’s fault. Maybe the ad sucks–I’ve never claimed to be an ad man. Maybe the cover image drew them in, but then they looked at my site or the book description and said “Oh, hell no.”

Or perhaps PAM just repulsed them.

Why advertise?

My book sales have been way down for the last few months–both fiction and nonfiction. PAM Mastery did not sell as well at release as some other books.

Other writers have reported similar slumps. (When pro writers get together, what do we talk about? Money, books written by people not in the room, and business.)

If sales continued that poorly, I would have had to make some changes.

Weirdly, though, my sales picked up… on November 9th. The day after election day. Other writers I know have reported similar surges.

A week does not mean that the writing is better. But the folks saying uncertainty is bad for business have a point.

Or perhaps advertising on Reddit brought people to my site, where they bought books that were not about PAM.

Reviews and Murder

First, an independent review of PAM Mastery, from nixCraft. The book took bloody forever to write, but from the reviewer’s comments like “Once again Michael W Lucas nailed it,” apparently the end result was decent.

Not sucking is good. I like not sucking.

Next up: something I can see myself linking back to in the future.

I normally don’t link to Amazon reviews here, but a review on a short story compels me to make a general comment.

This story is billed as “a DevOps murder mystery.” I’m writing another, a novel called $ git commit murder. (Yes, the dollar sign is part of the title–otherwise, git might be running as root, and when you’re trapped into using git you don’t do it as root. Sheesh!)

I mention a lot of different software in these pieces. Some of it’s real. Some of it’s imaginary, or clear plays off of stuff that exists. It’s pretty easy for readers in the software world to figure out where SkyBSD and CoreBSD fall in the open source ecosystem.

But here’s the important thing about murder mysteries:

People kill other people in them. Most often, deliberately.

Real people killing each other… is not funny.

I’m not going to write something where a developer on a real project goes on a killing spree. That’s happened in the real world. Projects don’t come back from that. And yes, it has to be a spree. Novels require more than one murder.

Plus, I know a lot of people in these communities. Many of them are my friends, and I respect most of the remainder. (Sorry, HB.) The characters in these pieces are like people I know, but they are not those people.

Wearing my fiction author hat, I sometimes need organizations to behave in ways that the real organizations don’t. Murder requires strong motivation. One of the earmarks of successful real-world open source projects is that they’ve learned how to get along without literally killing each other.

I mean, imagine if I wrote a piece of fiction claiming that OpenBSD was contemplating a switch to GPLv3? You’d either throw the book across the room or laugh until you soiled yourself. Neither is the appropriate reaction for a murder mystery.

I have to invent new projects, so they can behave as the story needs.

So I invent projects much like real projects. These projects have different areas of focus than the real projects, so that they’re not just a renamed Debian. They need different focuses and different purposes while retaining enough that the reader will believe they’re a real open source project in a parallel universe.

And then my imaginary friends wander in and pick the project that suits them.

And then they kill each other.

Because, despite the rumors, I’ve never killed a real person. There’s no evidence to say otherwise, at least.

The Apocalypse, on Sale

Lots of apocalyptic news and feelings in the last couple days, and probably for a while to come. Why not trade one apocalypse for another?

My post-apocalypse SF 1novel Immortal Clay is on sale for the next few days. You can get the ebook for only $0.99.

Immortal Clay plays off of John Campbell’s classic story Who Goes There, (filmed as The Thing), but after we lose.

Why do this? Book sales routinely drop before an election, and jump right after. Selling a few copies per day for a few days on Amazon.com would be enough to get the book into the Top 100 list, where it’s more likely to be discovered organically. I can then turn the price back up. And of course, hopefully people who read it and like it will buy the sequel and my other novels.

Grab the ebook at: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Amazon IT, Kobo, iBooks, Gumroad

On the Election

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who advocates and empowers active hatred for women, blacks, latinos, and the poor.

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who declared that if he became President he’d have to do “unthinkable things” to “make America great again.”

I wanted to believe we wouldn’t vote for a candidate that proposed rounding up folks based on their ethnicity and putting them in internment camps.

Well, crap. I guess this is what America is.

I won’t defriend people over differences in economic policy. I think Ayn Rand was a sociopath, but I’m friends with folks who believe in her work. (The fact that she died broke, dependent on government handouts, kind of makes my case.) I’m OK if your stance on issues is different than mine–I’ll argue, but it doesn’t make you an enemy.

But blatant racism? Bragging of sexual assault? Not ok. I have too many black friends, too many female friends, to accept that.

So many of those friends are heartbroken today.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do.

I have no idea how to talk about this with my friends and family. The only thing that comes to mind is “move to Canada.” I’d post a link, but the Canadian Immigration web site has crashed due to all the folks hitting it.

I can’t use my “White Male Magical Inherent Worth” to protect the vulnerable people I care about everywhere they go. Are we supposed to all move together into one armed commune and only travel en masse? “It’s noon, everybody to the bus for grocery shopping! We’ve reserved sixteen carts for today. Remember, stay with the group. The Expedition Leader will blow her whistle twice to signal an advance to the next aisle. We’re starting in produce and working our way through canned goods, then the convoy will hit dairy and end up in frozen foods. If you’re somehow separated, hit your panic button and we’ll send a white man for you.”

We survived the incompetence of the Bush administration. (And yes, he was incompetent. I’ll fight the whole bar on that, but only in person, not online.) If that’s all we faced, I’d say “crap, we best save money for the coming economic crash” and move on. Heck, I’d plan to make a profit off the inevitable crash.

But a President who brags about sexual assault? Who says that folks from our most populous neighbor are rapists? Who declares that “certain people” need to be kept from voting?

The President is a role model. Trump’s election empowers every entitled dude who abuses random women in the hardware store or the park. It empowers the freaking KKK. It empowers people who think they’re better than others because of the luck of the genetic draw, who want to make life worse for other human beings.

I want to make things better for those folks.

And I have no idea how to do it.

All I can say is: I’m sorry. You deserve better.

(PS: The First Amendment only applies to governments. This blog is private property. Comments are open, but if you’re a jerk I’ll moderate you right off. There’s lots of soapboxes out there for people who good with racism or who think Bush’s handling of Katrina was great.)

Ohio LinuxFest 2016 wrap-up

I spent last weekend at Ohio LinuxFest, present on ZFS and meeting readers. First, the obvious question: how did things go between a BSD Unix guy and a whole bunch of Linux fans?

It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe–the GNUniverse, if you will. And unlike Star Trek, that universe’s inhabitants are perfectly friendly.

The program heavily featured system administration and community presentations, where a BSD conference would have had more code. (That’s not a complaint, just an observation.) Friday had a single track of talks, while Saturday had six. This meant I skipped a couple of talks on Friday–I’ve been a sysadmin since 1995, and if I must sit through another talk on GNU screen someone’s getting a serious wedgie. Saturday’s program had an embarrassment of riches, however.

The keynotes were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Catherine Devlin’s talk on open source in the US government. 18F is a great example of how a government agencies can be perfectly competent.

On a BSD-specific note, Ken Moore from iX Systems talked about the new system management tools in PC-BSD TrueOS.

For a small conference OLF treats their speakers quite well, with lunch every day and a pre-con party on Thursday night. They also did an excellent job of communicating with speakers. I knew exactly what was going on, my timetable, and the presentation requirements. Knowing simple things like “our presentation gear is VGA, please bring an adapter” helped everyone a lot.

OLF did have a couple of extra surreal notes to it.

If you watch an SF show with parallel universes, somehow all of the major characters appear in slightly different form. This is absurd–changing the universe around you would change your interests, your personality, and possibly even your very name.

I’m pleased to report, though, that in the GNUniverse of a Linux conference, Andrew Fresh and Peter Hessler are still hackers. Their names have changed, to “Justin Smith” and “Andrew Pullins.” They even wear hacker T-shirts. Their allegiances have changed, however…

20161008_214844

Challenge bomb

I felt great on Monday. Did 2400 words in 3 1-hour sessions. Tuesday? My anniversary. I had more important things to do than write. Today, after packing for Ohio LinuxFest, I’m exhausted.

So: I made words, but I didn’t finish anything.

I’ll finish this piece next week, after the con. Completing a small something will do more for me than a similar number of words in an ongoing book.

Stupid anemia.

“PAM Mastery” print sponsor books

I have the first official batch of PAM Mastery print copies. Here’s the stack ready for the sponsors.

pam-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.

My 3-day challenge for Oct 2016

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.