Yo! I totally stole that title. Because I liked it.

Smee:
I’ve just had an apostrophe.

Captain Hook:
I think you mean an epiphany.

Smee:
No… lightning has just struck my brain.

Captain Hook:
Well, that must hurt.

Yup. No doubt.

Also I kind of grabbed the title from another source, maybe. More about that later. What I’m getting at is that I’ve had two(2) potentially significant, life-changing, universe-expanding random thoughts lately. To which I attached significance. And in both cases they were mostly inspired by other people! I knew there was a reason for all these damn monkeys.

First, in chronological order: Chuck Pezeshki. Fascinating guy. I’ve had a lot of thoughts of my own regarding system(s) design, most of which boil down to distributed > centralized. For all kinds of things. And, yeah, I mostly almost actually mean ALL kinds.

So what Chuck did was tres kewl. He (for me) reframed that notion as “empathy,” which for my $$ is a better term on multiple levels. He has tons more to say, and it’s pretty much exploding my head right now. I started here, via a semi-random recommendation via a Twitter account I had set up (maybe more about that later too…but, nope, it turned out I didn’t include that stuff). Then Chuck suggested this post to me, which of course spoke to me more directly. Though it might have been even more apropos if I’d played, or at least seen, a game called Mario Kart. And here’s a reading list. What I’m going to say now, before I callously abandon the topic: this is a paradigm shift of the first magnitude.

AND I really hope I can help him publish his book. Seriously, I’d say more, but there’s this notion-detritus in my head right now & I think I can probably do a better job of describing it all later.

Okay then. Moving on.

Then there’s Becca Syme. I’ve enjoyed her books. She has this “Question the Premise” thing going that appeals to me. Sadly, or so I thought, she’s had her cognition kidnapped by this ridiculous Gallup “CliftonStrengths” groupthinkly morass. I read her stuff, watched some videos, and sighed a little. More than once. Yes, okay, these guys claim they have “science” behind their sales pitch. Kind of yawn-worthy on that front, honestly. But the interesting part for me boiled down to three ideas:

1. We have, via experience/practice, trained our minds to process information of various sorts in specific ways.
2. These ways are not all the same between individuals. Thus, different people have different preferred/specialized/optimized modes of operation on multiple levels.
3. It’s more productive to focus on what we already do well than to attempt to address weaknesses.

That last is especially interesting. Lean into strengths? Hmm. We learn faster by doing that than by focusing on ideas/processes that are essentially alien to us? Okay. Might or might not be true. But it’s an interesting idea. Obvious value to it, if it works. If not, not.

Now, does that mean that the various “themes” Gallup identifies/espouses have any particular objective value? Nope. Is there any reason to believe their classification of people will apply across problem domains? Not that I can see.

So  I sat on all that. Until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and (via a discount, I admit) took their test. And my mind started blowing up in all-new ways. Except that they weren’t new.

Bit of background: there are 34 “themes” in this scheme. They’re kind of listed in order for each person, based on blah blah a process blah whatever. In principle, to the extent you buy it, they’re giving info about what sort of processing/perception/action/reaction might in theory exist, and in any/some of which each test-taker might excel.

Yeah. Sounds kind of like voodoo to me too, except that vudu at least involves sacrificing animals and kewl ritual-dingi. Maybe zombies!

But anyway, as I said, I took their test. Here are my TOP FIVE STRENGTHS (bc nothing is a weakness in this world):

1. Learner
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Chances are good that you yearn to know a lot. It makes little sense to you to skim through a book and read only the highlights. You delve more deeply into intriguing subjects than most people do. You love to gather all kinds of information. This explains why you take time to grasp ideas that appear in print. Driven by your talents, you usually equate education — formal and informal — with understanding more about something today than you understood about it yesterday. By nature, you desire to acquire additional knowledge and gain new skills. Why? You are naturally curious. You often work alone to commit information to memory. You probably have a solitary place where you can practice your art, craft, sport, or science. Because of your strengths, you channel your efforts into the task at hand. You persevere until you have gained the knowledge and skills needed to attain a goal. You can toil for many hours to secure your objective. You probably work hardest and most productively at a particular time of day. Instinctively, you are an individual performer. You typically welcome opportunities to acquire knowledge and ponder ideas on your own. You often seek and find solitary places where you can think without being distracted by people or noise.
2. Ideation
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Driven by your talents, you bring new thoughts to most discussions and meetings. Your reputation for innovative thinking explains why you are recruited by groups. You derive satisfaction from mental activity. You recognize when you are especially creative. By nature, you frequently opt to systematically study various subjects, rules, processes, mechanisms, or programs when you work alone. In your opinion, having the freedom to decide how to approach a project is one of the advantages of being an individual contributor. Because of your strengths, you usually find novel and fresh ways to do things. People turn to you when they find themselves struggling to generate ideas. It’s very likely that you favor conversations where information, facts, or data are considered objectively — that is, emotions do not distort the truth. You pose questions, evaluate answers, and figure out how things work. Reducing an idea, theory, or process to its most basic parts provides you with many insights. You are likely to archive — that is, preserve — your discoveries so you can use them later. Instinctively, you welcome opportunities to understand people one by one. You carefully examine each person’s strengths, shortcomings, character, choice of friends, interests, goals, and history. This enables you to draw conclusions and make judgments about individuals.
3. Strategic
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Instinctively, you might enjoy a group problem-solving technique that involves the spontaneous contribution of ideas from all participants. When you have acquired specialized skills or possess specific knowledge, perhaps you can suggest alternative solutions for certain issues. Now and then, your expertise excites your own or others’ imaginations. Maybe this occurs when you are encouraged to think what will be possible weeks, months, or even years from today. By nature, you pay close attention to what is going on around you. You listen. You quiz people. You read. You probably take notes on key points. As you accumulate lots of information, you disregard what is unrelated, and pay heed to what is really important. The more you reflect on what you know, the more problems begin to reveal themselves, and eventually solutions start taking shape in your mind. Finally, given the situation, you select the best plan from your list of options. Driven by your talents, you may be viewed by some people as an innovative and original thinker. Perhaps your ability to generate options causes others to see there is more than one way to attain an objective. Now and then, you help certain individuals select the best alternative after having weighed the pros and cons in light of prevailing circumstances or available resources. Chances are good that you may generate numerous ways to enhance, upgrade, revise, correct, or revamp certain processes, action plans, or itineraries. Sometimes your suggestions influence how a project will unfold in the coming months, years, or decades. You might find fault with your own or another person’s talents, skills, or knowledge. To some extent, fixing people or things ranks in the top half of your list of favorite activities. Because of your strengths, you long to know more so you remain on the cutting edge of your field or areas of interest. Your inventive mind usually generates more possibilities than you can handle or fund. Nonetheless, you are committed to acquiring knowledge and/or skills. You study everything involved in a situation and conceive entirely new ways of seeing or doing things. What you already know prompts you to ask questions and delve even deeper into a subject or problem.
4. Responsibility
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Instinctively, you are an individual performer who wants to be held accountable for your results. Why? You generally accomplish more when high expectations are established. You probably set these high expectations for yourself when no one else does. Because of your strengths, you conduct yourself in an exceptionally mature and orderly fashion even when your teammates, classmates, friends, coworkers, and colleagues are acting childish. It’s very likely that you are quite comfortable being honest about yourself with others. You harbor very few illusions about who you really are. Furthermore, you can openly acknowledge your mistakes and shortcomings. This is apt to distinguish you from most people. By nature, you are naturally open and honest about who you are, what you have done, what you can do, and what you cannot do. Your straightforward explanations and stories help listeners see you as you see yourself. You reveal your strengths and limitations. You are forthright and plainspoken. People generally seek your company and want to work with you. Many are impelled to move into action by your words and examples. Driven by your talents, you probably want to work on your own because you thrive in settings where you can function independently. You have a strong need to know each task has been done correctly and ethically before you declare it is done.
5. Intellection
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Driven by your talents, you prepare for important conversations or discussions by collecting lots of background information. It is not unusual for you to set aside at least five hours of quiet time each week to consider what you have discovered. You are likely to use this time to expand your thinking. A new piece of material can send you hunting for additional evidence to support your theories, concepts, or proposals. Chances are good that you value education and scholarship at any level and at any age. Your thirst for knowledge causes you to explore many topics of study or specialize in one particular subject. You thoroughly enjoy opportunities to acquire additional information, skills, and experiences. It’s very likely that you are more comfortable talking about ideas than issuing orders or dealing with conflict. You gravitate to conversations with intelligent people. You intentionally cast aside emotions and concentrate on the facts. You continually search for evidence to make your points and wish others would do the same. Because of your strengths, you prefer having quiet time to mull over ideas as well as read and examine interesting topics. Periods of uninterrupted thinking give you great pleasure. You probably excuse yourself from noisy, active, or distracting situations to thoroughly process your ideas. By nature, you may place great value on moments alone with your thoughts. You might consider whatever arouses your intellectual curiosity. Setting aside time each week to explore particular ideas might be a pleasurable or necessary activity for you.

(Next five in order, if anyone cares or even if they don’t: Individualization, Achiever, Analytical, Competition, Developer. Sort of interesting to see what they’re said to mean. Ish.)

Okay. Right. Fine. All descriptions are flattering. It’s how they roll. Nothing wrong with that.

But…weirdly…since I’d decided to play the game, take it seriously for argument’s sake…it made a certain amount of sense to me. And led to some of them epiphanitis whatsits.

1. There’s nothing in my “top 5” about focus. About successfully limiting my options.
2. Also, nothing much about other people other than feeling responsible to them. They don’t motivate me at all? Hmm.
3. So, uh, it might be a mistake (within this paradigm) to self-define success and failure according to whether I accomplished a predetermined task? I mean, if I’m mostly a guy looking for new ideas…maybe trying to do a non-new thing isn’t going to be a great fit?
4. So this might be “why” outlining/planning won’t ever seem to work for me? I don’t know how to stop having epiphanies/ideas as I write? So the outline just can’t work. I mean, I rebel against it & come up with new stuff. The ideas in the outline might have worked, if only I hadn’t written them down and attempted to self-constrain….
5. Maybe the barriers to task-switching I’ve been attempting to set up (phone off, operating system only for writing, full-screen emphasis on one project, etc.) are actually counterproductive? Maybe I should instead minimize costs of switching from one activity to another?

Look, there’s lots more, and as I said about Chuck’s stuff above…it’s pretty much blowing my mind. Maybe distractions aren’t as bad as I’ve told myself (and others)? Maybe I get irritated when I’m “trying to focus” and people dare to breathe nearby, not so much because they did that gas-exchange thing with their lungs, but because “focus” itself really isn’t my forte? Maybe I need to find a way to make things new/interesting, not only sometimes, but ALL THE TIME??

Okay. Well, whatever. We’ll see how things develop. But I can see why, maybe, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” ended after a month. Or riding my bike from New Orleans to Alaska ended just south of Minneapolis. But how I maybe also built a lot of things, from scratch, on my own. Because they were new/interesting.

Maybe focusing on a project is the wrong idea. Maybe a project can only work for me in that context if it’s sufficiently complex that I can actually switch to different sorts of effort without (apparently) abandoning my goals? So, actually, project boundaries are sort of fluid/nonessential/arbitrary, and it might make more sense to give myself opportunities instead of trying to restrict them?

Well. Hmm.

I don’t actually expect this will make sense to many of you, of those few of you who are you who read these things. But I do love me a paradigm shift.

You know, it wasn’t too long ago that I identified “epiphanies” as my primary goal in both reading and writing fiction. So, uh.

I still say it’s fuckin’ voodoo. But I’m heading off on a path that’s, you know, other than others. To see how it goes from here.

Oh yeah! The title of this post! I think I remember a book by James P. Hogan of the same title. I haven’t found a reference to it online, though. Instead I found a Wikipedia article about him…the article called him a “Holocaust denier.”

Well, ouch. I liked his stuff. The Holocaust seemed like a bad thing. But here’s how my mind works: I got curious. Not enough to actually do any research, at least not yet. But in that CliftonStrengths world there’s a “Strength” called “Harmony.” It’s apparently about valuing the experience of having people all get along. Well, there are 34 strengths, so-called, and for me that’s #34. I really can’t think that way.

What I thought: “Huh. Hogan was pretty smart. No idea whether he was right/wrong, or whether he in fact said/believed what’s being said here, but it might be fun to research the topic and see what’s out there.”

Because, really, I don’t care about which hypothesis/theory turns out to be correct, in any area at all. I’m not interested on any level in “consensus” on any topic. I just want to play with ideas. See where they lead. And violently disagree with those that make no damn sense at all. AFTER I look into them.

So there’s that. It may offend some/most/all/none. Frankly, guys, I don’t care. And it’s fun to see a test that agrees I’m not supposed to do. Enabling! You should see what I do to cows when nobody’s looking! If anything! (Couldn’t get away with that on my home planet. Them cows is mean.)

Have fun out there!

An impossible goal? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I mean, what’s involved here?

• It should be distraction-free.
• It should provide potentially inspiring distractions.
• Writing equipment (phone, laptop, voice recorder, whatever) should be well-suited to the space.

Right. No problem. What I’m getting at: for me at least, everything needs to be portable. And swappable! There are times when working on my laptop in my office makes sense. There are times, such as next week when I’ll be on a road trip, when I’d really like to get some writing done in the car. I also like coffee shops. And I don’t like carrying my laptop everywhere I go.

No problem. If I write in text files, they can be edited on any device. And if I use Markdown as a text format, the files can include such things as italics. (Otherwise, once I import the file into a word processor capable of italics, I can no longer edit them as plaintext, which restricts the devices/apps I can use thereafter.)

What I’ve been doing until very recently is using Scrivener to synchronize projects with text files. That’s worked pretty well, but then I’ve moved everything into Jutoh to create ebooks. (Yes, Scrivener can create ebooks directly, but I strongly prefer Jutoh’s vastly increased scope for fiddling with the resulting document.) I’ve never liked Scrivener for writing fiction–too heavy for me, with lots of features that just get in the way–but it’s been working.

The problem? Once I’ve moved the text into Jutoh, editing it has only happened in Jutoh. After all, it’s clearly better to have a single always-preferred location for editing. And I’ve had no desire to re-create all of my Jutoh-specific formatting once I’ve done it the first time.

But I’ve been emailing with Julian Smart, technical director of Anthemion Software Ltd., and he’s solved that issue for me! Well, probably not just for me. Probably he thinks there are multiple users who will benefit. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but here’s hoping.

Jutoh is now capable of exporting and importing to and from Markdown. There are still a couple of glitches in the process (including losing quotation marks upon import), but I’ve figured out some workarounds and I expect the problems to go away very soon.

[UPDATE: Yes, very soon. I got an email about an hour after I typed the above. The latest beta release of Jutoh has solved the issues with quotation marks. Awesome!]

I could always have worked this out for myself, exporting from Markdown to HTML prior to importing into Jutoh, and exporting from Jutoh to HTML followed by conversion to Markdown, but frankly I didn’t think of it. Also that sounds like a pain in the ass.

What does this mean? It means I can edit anywhere, on any device. And my work is saved in Dropbox. So even borrowing a computer or phone would work, with very little setup delay.

Rather than carry a full laptop, I can carry my phone, a folding stand, a folding keyboard, and a Bluetooth finger-mouse if I happen to feel like it. In addition, I can carry a voice recorder. All of that fits into a very manly pouch-dingus, by the way.

As far as that voice recorder goes…I could record directly into my phone, and sometimes I do. Mostly I don’t, because I like the microphones of the recorder better. Either way, I can upload files to Dropbox and have my laptop (which is still sitting at the house in this scenario, and connected to Dropbox) auto-transcribe them via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The transcriptions are then uploaded to Dropbox, and available on any device I happen to want to use within a few minutes (depending on the length of the recording).

Another option is to use an app called Dragon Anywhere for dictation on my phone. But the profile I have on my laptop is much more configurable than the online version. It also doesn’t cost a goofy amount of money every month. It also doesn’t turn itself off every time I pause for 20 seconds.

We’re pretty deep into the weeds here. But just in case any of you think this sounds like fun, or even useful, I’ll give you a bit more information.

• I use WriteMonkey 2.7 on Windows when I want to dictate in real time. WriteMonkey “natively” uses Markdown, so something like CTRL-I will italicize via Markdown (*example* yields example) and prevent me from having to explicitly voice asterisks and such. Or type them either. I have to use this older version of the program, because Dragon’s “Full Text Control” doesn’t work in the latest version.
• I use JotterPad on Android for pretty much the same reason. It works very well with an external keyboard, and the usual shortcut keys work as expected.
• There is also a program called Jarte which works with Dragon. Jarte is built upon WordPad, so Full Text Control works very well. Or anyway it works after you apply the fix found on the following page: http://www.jarte.com/dragon_naturally_speaking.html. Jarte does not understand Markdown, so it’s not ideal for me, but WriteMonkey creates additional files in your working folder that are sort of annoying, so if you’re not interested in the Markdown piece of this it’s a great choice.
• FWIW, I strongly recommend not dictating into DragonPad, the text editor that comes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It crashes, taking Dragon with it, and losing your work. It’s much better to avoid this scenario.
• I really, really like using Typora to edit text (and Markdown) files when I’m not going to be dictating and when I’m using my laptop. It works identically under Windows and Linux, as far as I can tell. There’s a beta version for Mac, but I haven’t tried that.

Things can get even more ridiculous, of course.

• I can put my laptop into a backpack, connect a microphone, and walk around dictating.
• I can use my phone as a monitor for the laptop using an app called aRDP to see what I’m doing as I wander, and vastly improve on the dictation experience I would have using Dragon Anywhere. This works via sharing my phone’s internet connection via a Hotspot, or if I want to avoid any interruptions I can conversely create a Wi-Fi network on the laptop, put the phone into Airplane mode, turn on Wi-Fi on the phone, and connect it to the laptop.
• I can use an app called WO Mic to redirect the microphone from my phone to the laptop over Wi-Fi, and wander around the house or backyard, phone in hand, sans backpack, also using aRDP as above.
• I can simultaneously use a headset microphone connected to my phone and carry the voice recorder in my hand, reassuring myself that one or the other will actually work. This is probably just me, but dictation works better for me if I don’t look at the words being generated…but if I don’t see them I’m constantly concerned that speaking into the air won’t really work. Have I lost a lot of work that way? Nope. But redundancy makes me feel better.
• Since my voice recorder includes a jack for audio output, through which I can listen to my voice as I record (nice in a headset scenario when the recorder is in a pocket and I want to be sure it’s actually still working), I can get creative and run an aux cable from the recorder to a USB sound card dongle plugged into my laptop: this way I get both a recording (for backup purposes & training Dragon’s accuracy) AND real-time transcription. This is actually my favorite scenario, because I’m trying to train myself to use (and trust) the recorder by itself. Of course there are lots of other ways to get simultaneous recording and transcription. But I like this one.

So maybe this will help somebody. Or not. As for me, I have recently begun writing again. There’s a lot to say about that, and potentially also about my use of a pen name, but maybe I’ll get to it another day.

Have fun out there!

Hi!

Just putting this up because I like my wife’s new cookbook cover. I’ll be back with my normal post tomorrow morning. At least I think I will.

The cover may change a bit, especially that colon…if put up on Amazon that way, it’ll look like a subtitle. But there’s a separate subtitle, with potentially useful keywords.

Sort of potentially useful, anyway. If things go very well, at some point. Those particular keywords are not cheap or easily claimed by a new release from an unknown author, when Amazon’s users go a-searching. But they’re kind of free to add, and may be useful at some point.

Interested in the cookbook? Good. Maybe you’ll buy it.

But seriously though: she’s put a lot of work into this. The business, as well as the cookbook. Check it out at grainfreehaven.com…if you’ve a mind.

Ha. We’re expecting most sales will be of autographed copies, in person, at her booth at one farmers’ market or another. Or even via our free local delivery service. But some folks might buy the thing online, once it’s available. It could happen, and they’d certainly be welcome to do so.

Have fun out there!

Well, let me say this up front: it doesn’t have to be complicated. For instance, I recently pulled Take Back Your Privacy from Amazon’s KDP Select program, and as of yesterday you can get it free via Smashwords. It’ll hit more retailers (update: like Kobo) soon. But, hey, it’s free already. Done! Right?

Why’d I do that? Because KDP Select wasn’t doing me much good with that title, and I only had it in there to begin with because I wanted to see how many copies I could give away during the 5 free days Amazon allows for books in that program (in each 90-day period, during which the ebooks must be exclusive to Amazon). Answer: not so many. I could do much better distributing it for free on other sites. Hell, the thing’s been pirated (torrent site link; be careful if that’s how you roll) in more than one place, and it appears to have been downloaded more often that way than via Amazon. With no efforts by anyone, so far as I know, to “promote” those downloads.

Oh. Why do I want it to be free? Because I want people to read it. It bothers me that so many people out there don’t seem to have a basic understanding of how the internet works. But that’s a rant for another time and place. I’d love it if people were taught this material prior to graduation from high school, too, and it seems deeply weird to me that this ain’t the case. Um…yeah. Another day. Today is about the mechanics of distributing a book for free.

Hey, I can do it via my own website, right? Sure I can! And I probably will, once I get around to it. But, you know, when I post something to the blog it gets seen by maybe a couple of hundred people. Good people! But that’s about it, for the first week or so anyway. Some of my posts get more attention over time, but most don’t. Don’t misunderstand: I’m flattered to have a couple of hundred people reading my babble. But…since I really want this book, or at least this material, to be widely distributed…my site ain’t gonna cut it.

In theory, since I’m distributing the book (as a freebie) to various non-Amazon retailers via both Smashwords and Draft2Digital, it could reach a larger audience. Maybe it will. Maybe Amazon will price-match the freebies from elsewhere, too. That could happen. I won’t hold my breath waiting, though–some people have had good results emailing Amazon’s support staff and asking for price-matching when they’re trying to use “perma-free” to promote things like the first book of a series, but this one (so far) is a standalone work of nonfiction. Sometimes Amazon will price-match when they get some (unknown and possibly arbitrary) number of reports from potential readers of lower prices elsewhere, but that process is (1) a dark art, and (2) unreliable.

Note that I don’t think retailers have any obligation to host my freebies, or my other material, at all! They each have their own policies, and that’s as (I think) it should be.

But still. Giving away free stuff is harder than you might think. For instance, Apple won’t distribute my book, as written, at all. Why not? Because it contains links to Amazon. It’s a reasonable concern, I guess. But this book has hundreds of links. Most of them are to websites, but some are to books. Generally, it can be hard to link to a book without linking to a book retailer. Not all books have vendor-neutral sites, and many of those that do might be better off without them (maybe including mine!). I guess I can see Apple’s point here, but I have one too–if I’m going to write a book that works for a wide swath of readers, I need to include the links most likely to be useful to them. At the moment, that means (in some cases) links to Amazon. Is it possible that I’ll go through and publish a separate Apple-only version of the book? Sure. Not today, because I need to wash my hair, but maybe sometime. When I don’t have any higher-priority stuff to do.

Incidentally, this isn’t the first time I’ve had trouble publishing to Apple. They also don’t like my story …come what may. Why not? Because I didn’t capitalize anything. They told me I should change my title. I shrugged, and didn’t. Did they care? I doubt it very much. Me either. This sort of thing, I think, is entirely reasonable–we don’t actually all have to agree, and when we can just walk away without any offense being given or taken? I think that’s swell.

There are freebie-only sites, too, like Wattpad. I could post the book there. I doubt it’d get many readers, for two reasons: (1) Last I heard, Wattpad was mostly kids–I’d love it if this book were read by kids, but I doubt it’ll appeal to many, and (2) I have no idea how to use Wattpad successfully anyway. I’ve tried it a couple of times. A reader (thanks again, Heather!) tried to help me navigate those muddy waters, but I ended up wandering off with little success. I didn’t actually try very hard…but I can tell you this: it’s not just a matter of posting and waiting. That way leads to zero reads.

So, what about other freebie sites? I got invited to post material on one of those just the other day, apparently by its CEO. I said I was open to the idea but asked what benefits generally accrued to those who did. I got a response essentially telling me that I wouldn’t be a good fit after all ’cause I had this crass desire to monetize my fiction, and the site was more for people who were taking a longer-term approach to building their readership. Hmm, I thought, and decided “longer-term” meant “slower,” ’cause my experience to date tells me it’s easier to give books away on retail-type sites than on freebie sites. Plus, yeah, there’s always the chance that folks will move from your freebies to other material, and pay money, and money is nice. So…in the case of TBYP, I guess I could post it on freebie sites. But I have no idea of how to appeal to readers in such places to get them to give the thing a shot, and trying to figure it out on each site seems like it would take a long time with very little payoff–regardless of how “payoff” is defined. I’d rather write, or trim my toenails, or tickle my kid, than mess with all that. Lame, I know.

So the obvious thing to do is to reach out to bloggers, point out that the book is free, and ask ’em if they’d like to recommend it to their readers. I could write email to do this, and customize it a bit, and I actually do follow several bloggers who have readers who might be interested. Still a lot of work, right? I mean, I think giving this book away counts as a public service! Doesn’t that mean people out in the world should be, I dunno, somehow required to pay attention?

Heh.

You know what? Yes, it can be hard to give a book away. Even if you think it’s really important, and people should read it for their own good. And thank whatever gods you like (or dislike, or whatever) that’s the case! Imagine how awful it’d be if people were forced to read books they don’t enjoy…

Oh wait. There was that Ethan Frome (no link!) incident back when I was in high school. But, see, I didn’t actually read it. Because I didn’t want to. And I aced the test, too. I got asked, for instance, why some character or other committed suicide. My response (“She couldn’t deal with the reality of the new situation”) was apparently sufficient.

I want people to read my book. But I’m weirdly pleased that this matters so little. It’s just as it should be. If I put more effort into it, I may get better results. Or I may not.

Life’s full of unknowns. Which is why exploring possibilities is so rewarding. If we knew the results we’d get in advance…hmm…suddenly I have a new story idea! Gotta go write it down, for later. Which bumps the Apple-only book even farther out into the future, and maybe contacting bloggers too, and…it is what it is. And as it should be.

Have fun out there!

(New-fiction word count: zero. Blogged first, today. Told myself I could do the fiction later. Stuff happened. I’d say I should know better, but the thing is? I do know better. Did it anyway. Dumb, huh?)

Hey y’all!

I played around with the website design yesterday. Most of you get these posts via either RSS or email, but if you want to see a pic of me smoking a cigar and looking ridiculous from last Thanksgiving? You can. It’d be more fun to have included more of the pic–there was this glass of whiskey next to me, my brother in law on the left, a gayish-half-transgendered teen couple on the right, and I think it’d be amusing. But I guess I shouldn’t use the rest of that image without asking permission. So I haven’t. Yet.

Actually I should probably mess with a little bit of code so that image only shows up on the home page anyway. It kind of gets in the way. And there are other changes to the site, including a larger font. What the hell, it was time for something different.

Okay…I’m trying to blog lots more often. I’d love to post more book reviews, and I could do that pretty much forever, just talking about my favorites from the last 40+ years of intensive reading. But it’d be more fun to semi-specialize in indie-published books.

I don’t plan to publish the reviews anywhere but my blog. I don’t mind if other people quote them or distribute them in any way. But I don’t want to deal with things like ever-shifting Amazon review policies. That said? You could still post excerpts, at least, under “editorial reviews” on Amazon if you want to.

As for what sort of books? I have to tell you, I read all sorts of things. Probably not cookbooks. But fiction, especially if it’s somewhere in the SF-fantasy-crime-mystery-thriller spectrum that I typically read, is a possibility. So is narrative nonfiction. Bonus points for puns.

I have no idea whether this will be helpful to anybody. I don’t know how often I’ll post the reviews. Probably at least one a week? So there might be a bit of a backlog, too.

You got that part, right? No promises? FWIW, I see no point in posting a review of a book I don’t love. If I hate a book, or worse (don’t ask!), I figure lots of people out there can legitimately disagree with me. I’m not interested in trying to police other people’s reading in any way. I am interested in trying to share wonderful books with wonderful people (if you read my posts, that makes you wonderful–congrats!).

So. New-fiction word-count for today: 1485, net. There were more new words, split between Projects I and II, but I decided Project I was going in a dumb direction. So I dropped back and started over.

It’s a nice day outside. I think I’ll go sit in the sunshine and drink coffee. Hope you’re having fun out there…

UPDATE: Just occurred to me that guest posts might be fun too. If they have something to do with indie publishing, and I like ’em, I might post ’em. No guarantees of anything there either.

Hi!

First off? Some of you like to talk to me by hitting “reply” to my emailed posts. Which is very cool. I like it a bunch.

However, if you’re using one of Microsoft’s email services, they don’t like my email server. Which means I can’t send a response via that method. This is an annoying thing caused by three other things: 1) Microsoft’s policies, 2) Rackspace’s policies, since I host my email server with them, and 3) my policy of using only my own server for email. So if you want a response…please include some other form of contact information? I hate leaving folks thinking I’m ignoring them. But I’m pretty hard-nosed about the “using only my own server” thing. Reasons are in the privacy book. I’m barely willing to use email at all, actually.

A funny thing happened with the privacy book’s print-version proof! I got it in the mail a day early. Which was neat, ’cause all previous orders from CreateSpace had come in late. But…it came with the wrong cover. The exterior is for a novel called Burnt Devotion by Rebecca Ethington. My first thought? “Cool! The book’s all incognito!”

But I do hope it was an isolated event. Sort of. Maybe. It’d definitely be funnier if it happened every time, for all buyers. Meanwhile…hey, Rebecca? If you see this post? I like your cover.

Moving on. I wrote a while back about a writing process that involved getting up and starting to write fiction pretty much immediately. I used a timer set for 25 minutes, and would write nonstop without editing. Sometimes I’d even use a device/font combination that rendered my typing completely unreadable. I’d take a 5-minute break, then do it again. With four sessions in roughly two hours, I’d get something close to 3000 words.

I’ve tried something very similar with dictation. I use shorter time periods, and produce more words. However, cleaning up the text afterward is a major chore. And I’m not very comfortable with dictation when other people can hear what I’m saying. I don’t mind screwing up, but I like that to happen in private!

Meanwhile? The privacy book was nonfiction. It turned out I could work on it out in the living room, while surrounded/interrupted by family. I had two monitors set up, with one for the text I was writing and the other for online research. In contrast with my fiction-writing process, I had very little trouble getting into a “flow state.” I could just, you know, deal with things as they came up and keep going. No trouble at all.

Now…I think that just means I’m better at creating nonfiction than I am at fiction. Not necessarily that the nonfiction turns out to be better than the fiction, but just that creating nonfiction is easier. Why would that be? Well, maybe years and years of software development? In rooms often filled with (at best) cubicles? I wrote a lot of code. I also wrote a lot of email and documentation. Whereas, with fiction…I’ve only ever managed it, reliably, in a room by myself. First thing in the morning. Before even email, though not before coffee.

So. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of things on Dean Wesley Smith’s website. He is very much against the idea of creating a first draft that is allowed to suck. Instead he uses a process he calls “cycling”–which means he writes some words, maybe 500 or so, and feels a bit stuck, so he goes back and edits them. Then he produces another batch of words. And so on. When he’s done, he’s done–with a fairly clean first draft.

To me, that sounds like a great idea. And I think I’m moving in that direction with my fiction. But you know what? I think Dean underestimates the power of his own brain. I think his process is wonderful, and I also think he’s completely wrong when he criticizes the crappy-first-draft approach.

My theory: Dean has learned to achieve a flow state almost automatically while writing fiction. For those of us who haven’t, the (literally?) unreadable first draft has some value. Does that mean we’ll always need the must-keep-writing-no-matter-what approach? Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe we’ll learn to do what he does, over time. I feel myself moving in that direction. I’m not there yet.

Maybe some people need outlines before they feel comfortable writing fiction, for the same reason? They’re a confidence-booster? That doesn’t work for me, at all. I get immediately bored if I try to either create an outline or write to one. But maybe. For some people.

Fundamentally, processes that result in books that actually get written and published are probably good things, and processes that lead to work that gets hung up are probably not good things. In the software world, we “ship” or we go broke. Or both. But shipping is important. I think the same is true for writers. Though, if you really prefer to write and rewrite and strive for perfection? With the same work, potentially forever? Well, okay. Some folks like gardening, too, and sometimes in their backyards where very few if any other people ever see the results. Nothing wrong with that. For me, it’s not like that. I probably wouldn’t write much, if at all, if I didn’t think people would read it.

Is this earth-shaking? Probably not. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot, and I wanted to put it out there. So I have.

Thoughts?

Okay. I have what appears to be the flu. It’s inconvenient, as it makes concentrating on a new novel much more difficult. I also can’t do some of the other things I had planned for today. So, instead, I started reading stuff on the internet. Probably a mistake!

Here’s Claire Wolfe, who was recently generous enough to link to my currently-free privacy book. Today she has a link to an article posted by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) about license-plate readers. I have many, many problems with the EFF and their recommendations, but in this case I agree they’re pointing to a major problem: cops in Texas are apparently driving around with credit card readers in their car. They combine that with auto-scanning license plates as they travel, and pull people over if they have outstanding fines of some sort.

Maybe you think that’s not so bad? Even though they charge a 25% fee on top of the existing fine and pass that along to the company providing the license-plate scanning technology, if the motorist prefers to avoid an immediate arrest? Okay. What if the car’s registered to someone who’s not actually in it? To my mind, that’s an illegal stop. But we’ll ignore this issue too. Turns out the company supplying the tech also gets a copy of all data this system gathers. Which applies to all motorists whose plates get scanned. I mean…to me, it sounds bad that the cops get to have that information. But to supply it to a company? And to agree in writing not to talk to the press without the company’s permission? And what about when that system gets hacked? Which has, of course, already happened. But don’t worry: that info is only to be stored by the company “as long as it has commercial value.”

So that’s okay, then. It would totally have been in my book, but it’s a couple of days too late. Maybe in a second edition? Or maybe there’ll be more fun stuff to include by then and it won’t make the cut. Who knows?

All right. I tried to shut off the internet’s yammering and remember that I used to have a brain of my own. Or at least I imagine I remember such a thing. So I decided to fix a minor issue: my wife had told me that the caller ID when I call her from my phone, which gets voice over IP (VoIP) service via a company called Callcentric, was showing the wrong number. (Yes, I have several numbers. Just for fun, really. That kind of thing’s in the book.)

Okay. I tried to change the Caller ID for my outgoing calls via Callcentric’s site. Should be simple, right? Only, to–according to them–prevent Caller ID spoofing, they had a system in place. If I could show them a screenshot (which I could totally fake, by the way) of a website showing that I had control of a given incoming number, they’d accept that. Only I couldn’t show them a valid screenshot, because the folks supplying that phone number have a system that doesn’t seem to allow me to view or change any such information. No problem! Here’s Callcentric’s alternative solution:

1. I entered the number I wanted to use for outgoing Caller ID on one web page.
2. The next page gave me a PIN and told me to call a toll-free number, from the phone I wanted to use, and enter the PIN.

First problem: the number didn’t work if I called via Callcentric’s service. So okay, I used a different phone. Second problem: when I entered the PIN, I got an error. Because my Caller ID didn’t match the Caller ID I wanted to use.

Well. Right. How could it? If it were already set correctly…why would I be trying to change it? Hmm.

No problem! I did a quick online search, found a friendly website, and spoofed my Caller ID to match the Caller ID I wanted to use. For free. Problem solved!

I’ll just note here that I think it was funny that I had to spoof my Caller ID to convince Callcentric’s system I wasn’t spoofing my Caller ID. I had no other way to proceed. And why? Because their system’s set up backward.

Their system should call make the call to my phone, at the number I give. Then I should enter a PIN, via the phone, that was given to me via their website. Doing the calling the other way ’round is just silly. Do they care? I doubt it. For all I know, they were deliberately encouraging me to spoof Caller ID. Well…whatever. It’s done.

My point? If I have one? This kind of goofy human behavior makes it really hard for me to focus on fiction. I mean, it would even if I didn’t have the flu. Which I do.

Today is pretty much going to be a waste of time. I hope the above entertained you somewhat. But tomorrow? I’m getting my writing in before I look at anything online. Before I try to fix anything.

It’s the only way to go.

Have fun out there!

The privacy book is published, and free for five days. You can get it at Amazon here. Below this is the blurb/description, and I decided to post the text of “Appendix B: Jail!” for you folks too, right after that. I figured it might be the most-fun bit.

Enjoy?

Curious about surveillance? Wondering about the security of your computer?

These are just a couple of starting points. The author, with decades of experience in the field, takes us on a journey through the digital landscape. Exhaustively researched, with hundreds of links, it’s nevertheless written in an informal and entertaining style.

Do you know the difference between “a web browser” and “the internet”? That’s about all you’ll need, to start. When you’re done with this book, you’ll know more than most IT (information technology) professionals do about digital security. You’ll be able to analyze the claims made by tech bloggers and those who flog their own products. You’ll know much, much more about the risks to your privacy and anonymity–and why they’re both so important–in today’s fast-moving world.

Then, at the end, the author tells how he once went to jail for trying to help protect thousands of college students (including himself). It’s a chilling reminder of just how easily “spin” can replace substance. And yet, it’s a funny story.

Come on in and give this book a try. You’ll be glad you did. (Full table of contents available both in the Amazon description and here on my site.)

Appendix B: Jail!

Well, this all sounds rather dramatic. I guess it was. Personal story time!

It was not too long before the world went dark, and billions starved, because of the great Y2K crisis.

Oh wait. That didn’t actually happen. Instead, a lot of people billed high hourly rates to fix silly stuff, or say they were fixing it, and a lot of other people generated as much hype and fear as they could—because that helped them sell advertising space or get elected. Kind of the same things those people do now, whenever they can. Still, none of that’s directly relevant to this story. It’s just a weird backdrop to computery activities that were going on at the time.

So there I was, working at USAA. It’s an odd co-op sort of insurance company based in San Antonio, if you haven’t heard of it. It apparently got started when some guys in the military found out they couldn’t get auto insurance from anyone…so they decided to insure each other. A neat idea, in my opinion, but it grew into a monster. When I worked there, there were several thousand other people also working in the building. Big building.

The lowest level I knew about seemed more like an airport than anything else, with people hop-skittering out of the way of electrically powered vehicles carrying material, sometimes consisting of other people and sometimes not, sometimes honking and sometimes not. Nothing worse than a vehicle full of honking material, right? Especially if it dribbles out.

(Sorry. Words are just naturally goofy, though, and I like to take a moment to notice every so often.)

The upper level—there were at least five, but I was never totally sure—had plush carpets, lots of mahogany, and very few people. In fact I walked around up there more than once and never saw a single human. There may have been something truly frightening going on. Hard to say.

In between there were lots of large rooms, filled mostly with cubicles. Or so it seemed to me. Also cafeterias, bathrooms, and the like. Oh, and at least one gym. What does it say about the company, or those who work there, that gym use included free recycled loaner jockstraps? I often wondered about this and other topics.

The military origins of the company meant there were lots of ex-military folks around, especially in upper management, and it was considered completely normal to compare various aspects of the building to the Pentagon several times a day…and to employ terms derived from military use in somewhat surprising (to the uninitiated) contexts. Fun!

I got to my particular position at USAA through what may seem an odd route. I’d just experienced the slow-motion failure of a startup company in Incline Village, which is next to Lake Tahoe. There’d been no good reason to pay that kind of high rent for the company’s offices, but that was the least of the goofy decisions that led to the company’s demise. And, hey, the view had been really nice. So the corporate death spiral didn’t surprise me, but I was a bit surprised to be able to cash my last paycheck (which I did immediately after I got it, at the issuing bank, even though I had to drive all the way to Sacramento to do it…just in case).

I was in the mood for something a bit more stable. I get that way sometimes. I’d just been offered a job working for Microsoft in Reno, where I lived at the time, and that sounded pretty good…but then a recruiter contacted me about the San Antonio thing. I had plenty of family in San Antonio. My grandmother had just died, and I’d missed most of her last few years, and I guess I wanted to be near family. I get that way sometimes too. So I went down there—but it was a contract position, not full-time employment.

As a contractor, I made about fifty percent more money than the employees in similar positions were pulling in. I also got to decide for myself when I ought to take a day off, or a few hours off. Not that I did that a lot (I tend to obsess over projects), but since I didn’t really have a boss at USAA, and the recruiter who’d brought me in wasn’t my boss either—I could just tell everybody what I was doing, and I guess everybody involved generally assumed I’d cleared it with someone. Relaxing, you know? I just did my thing.

But USAA started a drive to convert contractors to employees. This meant, to me, that I could switch to another company (another recruiting/staffing outfit, not USAA itself!) and remain in the same job if I wanted to, because the recruiters were getting desperate as their whores…um, I mean workers whose pay they got to skim…were getting thin on the ground. I had weekly lunches with the boss of the pimp (sorry, maybe) who had recruited me, and I collected various job offers to show him as we continually renegotiated my hourly rate. Upward. This was a blast…not just for me, though. The recruiter-guy had fun with it too, and became a friend. (Hi, Erik!)

Meanwhile USAA was doing stuff. They decided contractors could only use the northern parking garage…I don’t recall how many other parking garages there were, but that one must have been considered inconvenient for some reason. Because, you know, we ought to convert ourselves to employees and by God that would show us.

When this parking limitation didn’t work well enough to suit upper management (whatever species they may have been, and I wouldn’t care to venture a guess), they said we couldn’t use that parking garage either—we’d have to park our vehicles in one of the outer, ground-level lots. Which meant we had to hike in, or take a shuttle bus (did I mention there were lots of people working there?).

So I started parking pretty far out, and also started billing from the moment I shut off my car…until the moment I turned the key to re-start it at the end of the day. Which new policy I explained to my supervisor-types at USAA. Which caused shrugs and eye-rolls, because they saw my point but couldn’t directly influence USAA policy. I offered to help! I could just leave the car at home entirely, I said, and walk the five miles or so to work, billing all the way. Also on the way back. But they didn’t take me up on it. A shame, I think. I was also willing to be flexible about hours, and either go with a shorter working day because of all the walking, or just add the walking time in. But, sadly, the conversation never lasted long enough for me to explain this idea.

As part of all this, I moved to a different job within USAA. The first group I was working with was pushing pretty hard on the convert-contractors front…but the folks who did computer-type support for the corporate lawyers were still hiring (they needed some new software to be written). So I did that.

But that too started getting pinched after a while. I eventually decided to cave, and take that full-time employment option. I held out for a couple of things like being able to work from home (though I never actually did that) and flexible hours, so I could go take some courses at UTSA, a local university, just for fun. I could have just gone on to do contract work somewhere else…but I was thinking of opening a bookstore on the side, and wanted to stay local, and San Antonio has never been a software-development hotspot. I didn’t expect to make money with the bookstore—actually I figured I’d have to subsidize it—but I’d always wanted one. So I had a pretty good inventory of books, and a friend ready to run the place when I was at my other job, and was negotiating with a couple of folks about leasing some space. And I had a line on some more inventory, too.

Then it turned out that the university wanted me to use their web-based system. It was (and apparently still is) called ASAP. I think that stood/stands for Automated Student Access Program, but I’m not going to look it up. Screw them, you know? So okay, I used the system.

I was immediately irritated about what UTSA used as a login ID. More on that later. The password was called a PIN, and I think it was actually restricted to a fairly small number of digits, but I don’t remember how many. Four, maybe? It was dumb, whatever the number was.

Meanwhile, once I logged in? I could add or drop classes, see and update my home and mailing addresses, see my (entire) credit card number and update that if I wanted…pretty much everything people used to have to stand in line for, back when I first went to college in the Darker Ages. Pretty cool in some ways.

But I got curious because the site said it required a recent version of either Netscape Navigator (remember that?) or Internet Explorer (remember that?). And nothing about the site’s design looked to me as if the browser version should matter a whole lot.

I ignored that for a little while. But then I had a slow day at the office. I mean, what the hell, I designed “secure” web applications for a living (unless I actually just negotiated my pay for a living and did the coding as a sideline, which often seemed to be the case)…so I eventually got around to looking at the site’s HTML. Just to see what was up with the browser-version thing.

And I laughed. And then I stared. Five minutes or so later—couldn’t have been much longer—I picked up the phone.

That last part, on a strictly personal level, was a mistake.

See, the site’s design was basically what I used to think of as “university HTML.” This meant there would be a wall of text with no particular formatting. This site had all sorts of functions mixed in with that, so there was a sort of unformatted button-cloud you could use to navigate to the various parts of the site.

You’ve used forms on websites, right? You fill in some data, then click a button that says something like “submit” or “sign over your firstborn now” or “resistance is futile” or whatever, or maybe you just hit Enter on a keyboard, and then—if all goes well—some sort of result follows. Yay!

Well, I could see why the more recent browser was needed: each of those buttons on the site was coded as a separate form. And some of the older browsers wouldn’t work well with a lot of forms on the same page.

Why I laughed: there was no particular reason to code the pages that way, especially if the developer happened to be aware of the browser-error issue…unless the developer were such a newbie that figuring out an alternative approach would be difficult? Perhaps. But didn’t the school have a computer science department? What was it for, if not for things like this?

Why I stared: the hidden form fields. You may or may not be aware, but not all of the fields in a given HTML web-page form are necessarily visible in the web browser. Hidden fields are used to pass other information to the server, or maybe just a place to store information while code on the page is running—usually they’re manipulated via JavaScript or some other type of code that runs in the browser. In this case the site’s developer was passing information from the server to the browser, and then back to the server, in order to identify users between page requests.

Most developers get around the fact that servers don’t automatically know which user is asking for a given web page via authentication cookies—they’re stored in some sort of database on the server side, and when the browser submits the cookie information, the server just looks the user up in that database. If you ever wondered why clearing your cookies from your browser’s cache meant you had to re-login to sites even if you’d tried to tell the site to remember you? That’s why. But…it’s not entirely unreasonable to use a hidden form field for the same purpose. Cumbersome, but it works and there are actually some situations in which it might be a better approach.

Why I picked up the phone: four reasons. First, there was only one hidden form field…the user identifier. Second, instead of being a server-generated random-looking value, it was the login ID the users entered on the first page of the application. Third, the use of the login ID and absence of a second hidden field corresponding to the password (ideally not consisting of the password, but you never know…and it didn’t matter in this case, because there was no second hidden form field) strongly implied that the a user’s PIN/password was only necessary on the login page. I immediately verified this—yep, I could get in to see/modify my records using only the login ID, as long as I just skipped the login page.

In theory there might have been an authentication cookie in use in addition to the hidden form field, which might have made this issue far less critical, but I already had cookies disabled in my browser at that moment because of some testing I was doing for a different application. Still, I checked: no cookies. This was bad.

Oh wait. There were four reasons, weren’t there?

Let’s stop and consider that the system was set up so that passwords were optional, before we go any further. It meant that any person who could discover a student’s login ID could find their home address, mailing address, and phone numbers. Could get their transcript. Could get full access to billing information (and no part of any credit card number would be masked, either…an awesome app all around). Could add classes, or drop the victim from classes, without the victim’s knowledge. Could access or change emergency contact information. Could probably do other things I don’t remember anymore.

That fourth reason I picked up the phone: the login ID was a social security number. Not a hash of the number—which would still not have been a secure setup, because an attacker could use the same algorithm and create an identical hash, though in that case I might well not have noticed anything just via a quick glance at HTML—but just the number itself. And I’d heard, though I hadn’t been enrolled at the university for long enough to confirm, that grades and such were often posted by SSN, on paper, on the wall. To protect students’ privacy.

If you ever saw someone using this system who left the computer running for a bit while stepping away? A quick glance at the HTML would give you their SSN. And of course an automated sort of attack could get access to lots of records just by trying one number after another. I’m not absolutely certain there was nothing in place to prevent that…oh wait, that’s a lie. I am certain, basing this on the sophistication of the parts of the system I could see, but I could be wrong. In theory.

Earlier, at UT Austin, I’d seen student ID cards with the SSN printed on them. I don’t remember whether UTSA did the same thing. It’s been a while.

So, yeah, I picked up the phone. I called the UTSA computer science department, and told someone about the problem. I also offered to help fix it, for what I considered a reasonable hourly rate (it goes up for short-term projects). Then I hung up and went about my business.

Okay, that wasn’t strictly true. A couple of days later, I told a buddy of mine—we’ll call him Fred—who had a similar employment/school arrangement to mine, about the situation. He said “No way!” or words to that effect.

“Mind if I look up your social?” I asked. He shrugged, so I did that in one of the systems we’d developed for USAA (the company; not the same as UTSA the university). Then I asked him to paste a URL into his browser.

Soon after, while looking over his shoulder, I asked him why his grades were so freakin’ bad. He hit the roof. Wanted to call newspapers, TV reporters, whoever, right away. I talked him into giving the university a couple of weeks to fix it. He agreed. Eventually. Under protest.

It should have taken less than an hour to fix the freaking problem, by the way. Any of several different schemes would work. Maybe two or three hours, for someone not familiar with the code.

I called UTSA again, and was told that they’d verified the problem (gee, thanks) and were working on it. I called again a few days later, and the person I spoke to said they were thinking of solving the problem with JavaScript. I explained that JavaScript running in the browser wouldn’t work, because an attacker could see and modify the JavaScript, and reiterated that I was available to help fix the problem. The person I was speaking to said that I couldn’t be given that kind of access since I was only a student—this nearly ruptured my eyeballs—and that there had been noises about prosecution instead. I laughed, and hung up the phone.

After two weeks, Fred got himself on the six o’clock news. I’d asked him not to mention me…not being a fan of that sort of publicity.

UTSA offered little comment, but did take their system offline immediately. It went up and down for weeks more, including one version that actually stored both the login ID and the password in hidden form fields, and I watched it all with some amusement. I may have sent an email or two detailing other issues they might want to look into—I vaguely remember writing something like that, but I don’t recall sending it.

Then some HR dweebs at USAA (the company) decided they needed to interview me. They’d been contacted by UTSA (the university), and told they had hackers working for their company (USAA). (Okay, I’ll stop.)

That interview was sort of funny. My boss was there, and my boss’s boss was there, and they clearly thought the whole thing was as stupid as it seemed to me. But there we were…

The below is paraphrased and probably remembered incorrectly. But the gist:

Interviewer: But you don’t ever try to find security holes in our applications, right? I mean, like [SYSTEM 1] and [SYSTEM 2]?

Me: Uh. Well, first off, I helped write [SYSTEM 3] and because of that I have full access to [SYSTEM 2] anyway. Because the app has access, right? Second, I actually noticed an issue with [SYSTEM 1] and told those guys about it months ago. They fixed it, and thanked me. Look, writing secure applications is my job here. So yes, I test them too. You know [SYSTEM 4]? I wrote that entirely on my own. So, do you think my access to it violates company policy? Because I’m supposed to do some more work on it soon. And yes, I’ve tried to hack my way into it, so I can fix problems I might accidentally create. I have a whole script for that.

Interviewer: [silence]

Me: I mean, software doesn’t just show up under cabbage leaves. Somebody has to write it.

Interviewer: So, you’re taking some computer classes and—

Me: Nope. German and physical anthropology. Not all that interested in their computer science classes.

Interviewer: [eventually] Well…we just need to be sure that USAA isn’t implicated in anything, and that our corporate name doesn’t come into this somehow. So, you’re suspended without pay blah blah more words blah.

Me: Okay. That should work.

So I changed my mind about publicity. That night I went on the six o’clock news with Fred. He was suspended too. But happy I was joining him, because it had bugged him to be taking all the “credit.”

We talked to a reporter about what had been going on. They put up a really cool “No Good Deed Goes…” backdrop for the conversation. As for USAA not being involved? They hadn’t been, yet. Now they were all over the thing, with their logo and pictures of their building and grounds. The suspension without pay bit was a major theme.

I was pleased, and also spending a lot of time on the phone with recruiters. My friend and lunch-buddy Erik had laughed when I’d told him the story, and put me in touch with lots of other folks around the country. He’s really good at that.

The next day, Fred and I were told we were, all of a sudden, suspended with pay. Hmm. I wonder why.

The HR dweebs said they’d want to talk to us again. We said we were open to that, and they were welcome to submit a list of questions for review by our attorney…and we’d have some questions for them, too. This sent them into something of a dither, apparently, since several days went by before we heard anything more. Then we told them we wouldn’t speak to them at all without an attorney present. More dither.

Meanwhile I’d taken a contract job in Memphis, working for a hotel chain that’s since been bought by Hilton. There are funny stories about that, too, but I guess they’re off-topic. I don’t remember what Fred did just then, but I know he was later working for a Dallas-area startup.

Oh, what the hell. That Memphis thing? A consulting company based in California had put together a team of several people (twelve, maybe?) to solve a software and server setup issue. Well, to customize things, anyway. Only they didn’t have anybody on the team who could write code. So I came in to do all of that. The others flew back and forth between their homes and the job, so we had a four-day work week…or I did. I’m not sure what anybody else actually did all day. I never even met most of them.

I did see a spreadsheet with their billing rates, though—IT people tend to find and distribute that kind of thing behind the scenes; it’s a commonly-played game. Many were over $200/hour, and one guy (from South Africa, with many fascinating stories of his home) was being billed at about $350. Interestingly, I found out via a conversation that one of the $250/hour guys was living in San Francisco and only being paid $70K/year. Which would be a lot more money in other places. I guess the consulting company had a lot of layers of management? Who all needed lots of money? I heard, in fact, that there were five such layers above the people who were working—if we can call it that—in Memphis with me. Was it true? Maybe. They supposedly did a lot of Y2K stuff too.

Rather than flying back and forth like the rest of them, I just drove my RV to Memphis and hung out. It seemed simpler. Anyway, when I left (the job was finished) I was asked to write a summary/evaluation of the project. So I explained that it wouldn’t and couldn’t actually turn out to be useful, and gave reasons…so the hotel guys offered me a job. I was tempted, ’cause I really like people who ask for the truth and then do their best to reward it even when it’s inconvenient, except that I didn’t know anyone in Memphis and Dell sounded more interesting. Around this time Fred arranged a job offer for me in Dallas with that startup, too, but I went with the Dell thing. Mostly because it was closer to family and friends again (I was born in Austin).

It’s quite possible that I received pay from USAA while actually working in Memphis before USAA eventually decided that I was fired for violating unspecified company policies (and possibly also for being obnoxious about not entering their building without an attorney present). I offer no opinion on this. Regardless, between going back to contractor-rates and some weird laws about hourly rates and non-taxable “per diem,” even without the expense account (not mine) that bought me lunches, generally very rare steaks, every working day…I was making about twice the money I had at USAA. Life is weird.

At this point in the story…all’s well, right?

While we’re still entertaining that assumption, I want to point something out: security problems like the one with UTSA’s website happen all the time. I had previously found nearly identical issues in (a) the iMall, an eBay-precursor that would inadvertently allow customers to set their own prices, and (b) iQualify, the first site that would let people get legally binding pre-qualifications for loans online, except that if anyone wanted to change an automatically-incremented four-digit number they could get access to other customers’ data. All of the data they’d provided on loan applications. Well, oops.

Only in both of those cases, I was paid and thanked. (Since the events above and below, I’ve quit telling people my name quite so often.) (Not counting books or my blog.) (Because if you like this one…)

Conceptually, this UTSA issue is not too different from the WPS PIN screwup with Wi-Fi routers (Chapter Three). It’s just…sometimes people get hired, or asked, to do stuff. They do the best they can. Sometimes they don’t fully understand the systems they’re working with, and they take what seem to be reasonable steps to solve problems. The people hiring/asking them to do the work are unlikely to spot a problem themselves, because they most likely know even less than the person who appeared to them to be proficient. We all only know what we know, so…some of us build systems with gaping holes. Lots of us will be smug about spotting other people’s goofs, too, but that doesn’t mean we won’t create our own. This is where an open-source attitude helps.

So after I left Dell I went to work, as a contractor, for a startup in Las Vegas—this one, amusingly…at least to me…was not only in the midst of its own death spiral but apparently had various people conspiring illegally with Netscape executives (who became AOL executives when AOL bought Netscape), which eventually led to jail time for the startup founder. In fact I was hired to work on a project that didn’t exist, but was said to exist in the hope that it would inspire analysts to say nice things about buying stock in the startup.

It took me quite a while to get permission to work on anything real while I was there.

There was also a fancy NOC (“network operations center”) with well-dressed beautiful people sitting behind a glass wall using thin—for the time—laptops, with gigantic monitors in the background. It all looked very high-tech. One of the monitors was always playing The Matrix. But that so-called NOC was just for show. In case somebody came by to see how the company was doing, and maybe felt moved to write an article. I figured it was an overly expensive sort of advertising display, but nobody showed me any numbers. Maybe it wasn’t. I’ll probably never know.

Another thing about that startup? They were doing stuff very similar to the code I’d customized for the hotel people in Memphis. But meanwhile the chain in Memphis had been bought by Hilton, which had decided to use the Vegas company’s software instead. So I ended up customizing the Vegas startup’s software…for Hilton. Sheer coincidence; nobody at either the startup or Hilton knew about the connection. Did I mention that life is weird?

One fine day I was driving to San Antonio from Vegas to see family-types, and my car’s alternator belt broke. Well, it’s probably called something else, because it also controlled power steering and other stuff. But whatever; the car and I drifted to the side of the road. I was fond of that car; it had been my grandmother’s. Never gave me much trouble before that. But maybe a bit of maintenance would have been a good idea?

A couple of state troopers pulled up, eventually, asking if they could help. I told them a tow would be nice, and I had no cell signal. So they nodded, ran my ID, and I stared into the engine of my car, musing productively about how it would be a ten-minute fix if only I’d brought a spare belt. And a manual. And tools.

Soon after, the troopers boiled out of their car, yelling stuff like “Hands in the air!” and “Stand still!” and “Turn around!”…as an attempt to compromise between these commands I turned, slowly, my hands having been slowly raised—and saw one of these geniuses now had his gun pointed at my face. It was really close, too.

At the time, I was more irritated than scared. Yelling does that to me. And the gun’s being so close meant I could probably knock it away before he could pull the trigger…I wasn’t even slightly tempted to do that, but stupidity when directed at me does tend to set me off. This was, clearly, directed at me. Right at my face in fact.

“Don’t get out much, do you?” I asked. I’m not a particularly brave guy in general. This is not something I’d decide to say after even a moment’s consideration, but there it was. I’d, as we say in Texas, done said it.

The guy’s partner laughed. The one with the gun out actually seemed a bit taken aback, and stepped back, and pointed the gun away from me. Slightly. It was an improvement.

They then cuffed me (after telling me to turn back around…weirdos), and searched my car, and refused to tell me what I was being arrested for, or even if I was in fact under arrest.

When I objected to the search, they told me it wasn’t a search. It was “just an inventory”…for my protection, see, because they were calling to have the car towed and wanted a record of its contents. I objected to that too. “Why do you care, if there’s nothing illegal in it?” asked one of them. “It’s not yours,” I replied. Fat lot of good that did me.

So I talked to cops. Probably shouldn’t have. I got nothing out of it that helped me. I’ll try to remember for next time.

Anyway, they took me to a jail in Van Horn, Texas. A county establishment, I think. They told me to get out of my clothes and into what looked like a Whataburger uniform (orange and white stripes; Whataburger is a Texas-based chain of which I’m quite fond) but also said, with an eye toward the non-cop girl who was standing behind a desk, that it was okay if I kept my underwear.

Nice of them, I guess. It might have affected what happened later, too.

So the state cops left and some other cops led me to a cell. In it were about ten other guys. I went in, the door was locked, and all that. One of the guys, apparently some sort of leader, said something in Spanish. Someone else replied, and there was laughter. I stood there.

The leader got up, came closer, and pointed at my feet. “Shoes,” he explained. “Give them to me.”

This was surreal. Also, a bit scary. But…sheesh. I was wearing jail-issued orange sneakers. Just like his. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight (I almost never am), but…I figured caving was only going to make things worse. So I tried something else.

“Give me yours,” I said. “We can trade. But you go first.”

I mean, hell. Mine were too big anyway.

More Spanish. It sounded sort of threatening. I felt stupid for not knowing more of the language, and more than a bit isolated, and I didn’t feel at all like getting hurt just then. But I managed to stand there and keep my mouth shut. Did I control my face? Did I look fearful? Maybe, and maybe not. I did what I could, anyway. And waited.

Suddenly the leader broke out in a huge grin. “Man, I’m just fucking with ya,” he said. Laughter all around. Eventually I grinned too.

Man, jail was actually not so bad, except for the whole couldn’t-leave thing. The people in it were fascinating. After the initial drama, it was a generally friendly place. Was it always going to turn out friendly? Yeah, I think it was. I think they were just goofing around. Bored, you know? But I’ve never been sure.

Somebody’s mom made enough menudo for us all and brought it to the jail. There were hamburgers. Somebody brought orange juice, too. Everybody shared. It would probably have been against some sort of policy if one or two of the prisoners had gone outside to help cook burgers, so that didn’t happen, because we all know policies rule the world.

The prisoner-leader-guy (I don’t remember his name) was solicitous, trying to help people who had trouble. Generally that meant emotional trouble, from what I saw, but I had the sense it might go farther than that if it needed to. He didn’t really believe that I didn’t know what was going on with my arrest and incarceration—though I’d begun to suspect it was the stupid UTSA/USAA thing by then—but that didn’t bother him much.

One guy in particular was a marvel. He would just start rapping. Words flowed out of his mouth, and I have no idea how he did it. It was beautiful. His vocabulary was extensive, and I don’t just mean the cussing, of which there was plenty. I mean what he came up with was clearly off the top of his head, because it was often in response to whatever was going on at the moment, but it was almost frighteningly complex. He was no stranger to nuance.

I talked to him a little bit, and to some of the others about him, and he was apparently in jail for hitting a couple of people in the head with a baseball bat behind a convenience store. For money, maybe, but that wasn’t clear.

I had to think: in a different time, in a different place, that guy would be called a bard. Or a druid. A warrior-poet, whatever the local term might be. He’d probably be a popular hero. Even with my general squeamishness about such things, I have to say I’m glad I met him. And that he was feeling friendly.

So, the night came (or at least the lights went off), and I slept in the jail. Sort of. Intermittently.

In the morning I got taken to see a judge in his office. I don’t know whether that was standard procedure, on a Sunday. It may have had something to do with my father, because I’d called home and let him know the situation and he did know a lot of lawyers and judges. He never said. It turned out I was charged with “breach of computer security,” a Class B misdemeanor. “A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.”

Dumb, I thought. Of course I accessed the ASAP system. All students did. Effective consent? It was required that students use the system. So…?

My offense was apparently to notice how I’d accessed it, and—more importantly?—embarrass someone by saying so. I’m guessing a relatively high up person in the UTSA food chain had been involved in the site’s development, and it was easier to label me as a sort of delinquent hacker-kid who lived in his parents’ basement on a diet of Jolt Cola and nothing else (it’d probably be Red Bull or Monster now), who probably wandered around barefoot like all them other hippies, than it was to admit he or she had created a system that was just…obviously silly. Upon even a cursory examination. But this is, sadly, just a guess. Somebody out there knows for sure, though. Maybe a lot of people. I’m just not one of them. Hey, do you know? Want to tell me? I’m curious.

Apparently I’d been declared a fugitive, and thus a warrant had been duly issued for my arrest. I’d have thought a phone call, or maybe just a postcard, to let me know this was going on might have been standard. Everybody involved had my contact information. If it was standard, they skipped it in my case. For fun, maybe? Was it relevant to all this that the university had its own police department? One perhaps inclined to be respectful of whomever I’d embarrassed? Maybe.

Anyway, the judge set bail and I paid. Never got any of that back, by the way. I wonder how often people do. Dad had told me they’d have ten days to decide whether to transport me to San Antonio or let me go, but I didn’t feel like hanging around in the jail to see which way it would turn out.

“Leaving” didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, though. I wandered around on foot, and there was a nearby auto parts store…but this was Sunday, in Van Horn. Not much was open.

So I walked back to the jail, and asked if I could stay one more night so I wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel. I’m a smartass, yeah, but I was also serious. Ish. I mean, I’d have done it. However, they declined to provide this public service. The spoilsports.

They even claimed nobody had ever asked that question before. If that’s true? A lot of people, I guess, are just spendthrifts. What a world.

Then the situation got a little bit weird when the female non-cop who’d earlier watched me undress told me she was getting off (from work, I hastened to assume) and would give me a ride to the nearest hotel. She did ask whether I intended to murder her with an axe, since I was a criminal after all, but seemed satisfied when I told her I wouldn’t know where to get an axe until the next day.

She walked me all the way to my hotel room, which was getting to be less unexpected by that point, but then seemed to realize the situation she was in and hurried off. Alone. I wished her a good night. And was relieved. I appreciated the ride, and had been fascinated by the way things were playing out, but…providing my own exit would have been awkward. Possibly even mean. Wouldn’t play well in the head-movie I was making. All in all, that worked out about as well as it could have.

Back in San Antonio, a couple of days later, Dad and I set out in search of a lawyer. He didn’t know anyone on the defense side who knew anything about computers. His network of friends came up with a recommendation, though. We went to see that guy. It went kind of like this:

Lawyer: I can’t believe that it’s gone this far, if what you’re telling me is all that happened.

Me: Yeah, me either. Guess I shouldn’t have offered to help. Just said something anonymously, maybe.

Lawyer: [disbelieving look] So, you were taking a couple of basic computer classes, and—

Me: Damnit. German and physical anthropology. Not computer classes from these bozos.

Lawyer: [another disbelieving look] So how did this get on the news, exactly? I don’t see why it would be a big story.

Me: Well, I guess it depends on how important you think students’ contact information, billing information, transcripts, and current class schedules are. Maybe you should ask the reporter who interviewed me, though. I mean, identifying what is or isn’t a story isn’t exactly my job. Want her number?

Lawyer: I can’t represent you. Go try this guy.

Me: Um, okay.

Dad knew nothing about the suggested lawyer. Neither did I. Neither one of us knew what the issue had been with the first guy we tried, either. But what the heck—we went to talk to lawyer number two.

This one told me all about how prosecutors and judges hated him because he didn’t like to plea bargain. That he was very interested in computer security. Didn’t know much about it, but wanted to pick my brain. Okay…

Then he told me that my buddy Fred had apparently been to court several times over the last year or so. He recommended that I not talk to Fred, which I have to say I wasn’t even tempted to do upon hearing this information. And he wanted several thousand dollars to get things started. So I paid him.

About Fred? Look, he had a wife and kids. At that point, I didn’t. He and I saw many things differently, with goodwill on both sides. (At one point he explained that he was thinking of spending $1800 on a crib for his newest daughter. I asked why he’d do that. He said it was because he loved her. He thought I was kidding when I immediately said that crib wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to her, and he could achieve the same ends from her point of view with a brand-new $3 cardboard box from U-haul, so maybe he should examine his motives a bit more closely before making that decision. I think he bought the crib, though.)

What I need to point out: I can see how, with a lawyer advising him not to talk to a friend about the charges because that friend might testify against him, he might have decided not to let me know what was going on. After all, if I didn’t even find out about the situation, it’d be hard for me to endanger him. Wouldn’t it? And if it all went away, maybe I’d never have to know anything had happened. He’d have protected me, along with his family, in fact. Right?

But nonetheless I wasn’t going to try to contact him. For entirely different reasons.

I want to be clear: I wasn’t worried that he’d testify against me. He wasn’t that sort of person. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have risked anyone’s welfare but my own by talking to him. I am fully aware that he was the sole source of income for his family, and I’m not sure what I’d have done, if I’d been in his position. I just…knew we clearly weren’t buddies anymore. I had no reason to talk to him. I’d say now that I would have tried to help him if I’d known. But talk is cheap. Maybe I’m lying.

Meanwhile I went back to Vegas. Told the startup’s CTO (Chief Technical Officer) about the situation. He laughed, grimaced, shook his head, and offered to help if it ever went to trial. That kind of inspired me, so I collected a bunch of people with impressive-looking job titles who said they would be willing to testify as expert witnesses, or character witnesses, or both. I wrote up a summary of the situation for my new lawyer. I sent him the information.

I never heard back from him.

I called the lawyer’s office a few times. He never returned any of my calls. Eventually, months later if I recall correctly, he or his office notified me…via mail…that I had an arraignment scheduled. I drove back to San Antonio for it, semi-glad that I still owned a suit, and showed up in court with Dad. We figured we’d find me a new lawyer afterward, though it was too bad about all the money I’d squandered so far already.

So there we were, sitting in the courtroom, and some “associate” of my lawyer showed up. She was pretty, and pretty young. No sign of the guy I’d paid. But then the prosecutor went up to talk to the judge, and they asked junior-lawyer to come up, and then the pretty girl came to tell me the prosecutor had moved to dismiss the case. And the judge had agreed. I think I heard, but never found out officially, that it was dismissed with prejudice—meaning that they couldn’t just charge me again five minutes later. If so, given what happened next, I assume there was a story behind that decision.

As Dad and I walked out of the courtroom, some Federal-looking types came up and spoke with Girl Lawyer. Apparently they’d wanted to arrange some sort of deal with me, as long as I would be willing to testify against Fred.

Then “my” lawyer showed up. He too talked to the Federal-looking types, who were never introduced to me, and may have been otherwise affiliated. Possibly with barnyard animals, and repeatedly, with very little skill involved, but who’s judging? I mean, other than at the county fair, but that’s a special event after all. Could be they’re even champions, though. I really don’t know about that.

Okay. Back to the actual story: the lawyer seemed surprised that the case had been dismissed. Then he turned to me and told me I’d been very lucky to get out of the situation without having to testify.

Remember how I said I’m rarely in a fighting mood? I’ve generally tried to claim to be a peaceful sort of person, right? I freely offer this testimony in support of my claim: I did not punch that sack of shit in the face. I also didn’t shake the hand he offered. I just left. And tossed the suit I’d been wearing in the trash. Haven’t worn a tie since.

Maybe I’m a self-centered jerk. Maybe I’m an ass. Am I enough of an ass to lie in court to help people convict a once-buddy (with a family) of a crime that makes no sense and that he couldn’t possibly have committed, just to avoid a chance to fight the damn accusations on my own? Because the threat of up to six months in jail is so scary?

Don’t misunderstand: I really, really didn’t want to go to jail. At all. I had a couple of nightmares. And my mom cried a couple of times. But for chrissake.

Fred called me, soon afterward, as his case reached some conclusion or other. I never tried to find out what it was, exactly, but I don’t think he went to jail over it. I didn’t prolong the conversation. Never heard from him again, either. I think he works for Microsoft now. I could check, but I’m not going to.

My helpful lawyer then sent me a sample of a letter he had ready to send to various police stations and courthouses and such, in order to get “my” record expunged. He wanted more money, before he’d send it. The letter had several errors regarding times, places, and the offense I’d been charged with. I didn’t pay him, or otherwise respond to the letter in any way. No reason to bother with him either, at that point.

To this day I don’t know whether I have a criminal record. Since, at border crossings and such, I often get asked “Have you ever been arrested?” instead of the more traveler-friendly “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” I’ve told this story many times. It’s probably landed me a few jobs and contracts, too, but I’m still a bit tired of the repetition. At least under those circumstances, right? Because here I am, putting it into a book.

Meanwhile, way back when, Dad pointed out that I still had a couple of months before the statute of limitations ran out, and I could sue both UTSA and USAA. He was somewhat enthusiastic, especially about the university, in his calm “this is one of your options” way. But that sounded like a lot of work, and I’d have needed to be available to show up in court. Instead I turned down the Vegas startup’s so-surprising offer to convert me from a contractor to a full-time employee at a drastically reduced rate of pay, and set out to hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

Didn’t get there, though I think my hike did outlast the startup company I’d left behind. The trail was surprisingly crowded, especially in the national parks, when what I wanted just then was a more nearly solitary sort of hike. And anyway I got hired, sort of by accident, by a telemedicine outfit in Alaska, almost directly from the trail. But that’s another story entirely, and this book’s long enough.

——————————————————————

Interested? It’s free for the next few days, after all…

The privacy book is out to beta readers. It kept getting longer and longer…ended up at about 92K words. My second-longest book, with Shiver the longest, and the damn thing is nearly fifty percent longer than the novel that inspired it.

I’m pleased with it, though. Lots of things I felt needed to be said, in a sequence that made sense (to me), and with many jokes and sometimes-relevant anecdotes throughout.

I have to tell you: I learned a ton. Lots of research in this one. It has hundreds of links in it…throughout, I ask readers not to believe me without evidence–because after all I’m asking them to do the same with other purveyors of privacy and security. So I provide evidence.

I really don’t know whether it will be at all popular. I expect some people will love it, some will hate it, and I worked really damn hard to keep the folks in between to a minimum.

Whatever; tomorrow I need to get started publishing some stories beyond Amazon now that they’re out of their contractually defined exclusivity. Right after that, though? I’m starting my next novel.

Probably the fantasy/semi-superhero thing. It’s been taking over my brain. Should it also be erotica? Hmm. Though the Destiny novel would be fun, and so would a couple of others. We’ll see what happens.

Have fun out there!

To all those who helped with reporting lower prices to Amazon–thank you!

Shiver on the Sky is now free for Amazon US (more Amazon sites to follow?), and is currently #753 for free books on the site. Which is pretty good, especially considering that (as far as I know) nobody’s advertising or promoting it in any way. I imagine that will fall off over the next few days, but for the moment it’s nice.

Anyway, that’s several hundred downloaders and potential new readers on the book’s first freebie day, and I doubt it would have happened so quickly–or, maybe, at all–without your help.

Pagan Sex may also become free at some point, but I’m not going to worry about it too much. That book never did sell very well, so I doubt it’ll do well as a freebie either. Okay, yeah, it’s probably my fault. I picked that title. But, you know, it’s funny and makes me smile. So there’s that. Anyway, I’ll think about PS again in a while.

The privacy book has been a bit stalled, since I’ve been doing final edits on Bleed on the Sky (must finish them by the 12th, because it’s out as a 12/22 preorder), but it does at least have a cover now. I’d post a preview just to show you guys I’m not necessarily quite as unstable as the title (and subtitle!) might make me sound, but with all the research I’m doing…the book hasn’t exactly been stable. Not even the Introduction, really. I like parts of it at the moment, but it seems to wander a bit and bog down in a couple of places. A work in progress, I guess.

I need to improve the descriptive text for Bleed, too. And make a decision about the next book to write. Still hoping to have the privacy thing come out in early January. But my list of before-the-next-novel projects has been getting shorter.

So. I’ll get back to it. Thanks again, and…if you want to…have fun out there? {8′>