Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

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What you can’t unsee…one year earlier.

September 16, 2018 /

One post earlier, I discussed how the ubiquity of an opening hook can seen as an artifact of the literary agent’s workflow. Then and now, I’ll agree that a hook can also be a great storytelling device. It can serve as evidence of the writer’s bona fides that the story will take you somewhere remarkable if you continue reading.

The hook isn’t limited to traditional publishing. The Martian is a triumph of web/indie/self-publishing. It opens with, “I’m pretty much screwed. That’s my considered opinion. Screwed. Six days into what should be the great month of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.” The Wikipedia entry notes that Weir first shopped the story to literary agents, so the hook could be an artifact. He was unable to land an agent. To get his story to its first readers, he serialized it on the web, where the hook took on new importance. Sure, the story was “free”. So was the reader. Free (and likely) to click away if the story didn’t immediately engage.

Hooks are cool. Except when they’re not. I’m about to do something bad. I’m about to say harsh things about the work of another. Worse yet, I’ll say these harsh things without having given that work a fair chance. It’s just wrong, so fell free to read this as an indictment of me as much as it is critical of the Amazon Original series Tin Star. And there will be spoiler-ish content. So many bad things. Here we go…

Not in our stars…

Tin Star was promising in the way that data-driven programming has a special power to be. I’ve enjoyed Tim Roth’s work since I mistook him for American in Reservoir Dogs. The Canadian Rockies setting was made for 4K UHD HDR viewing. I started watching it shortly after writing my artifacts post. The phrase “gratuitous in medias res” was fresh off my fingertips. You can guess what’s coming.

The story opens on an old sign outside an abandon-looking gas station on a mountain highway. At the bottom of the sign is an addition that offers 24-hour pay-at-the pump. Jim Worth (Roth) and his family drive past. Inside the car, everyone is tense. The low-fuel light comes on. Worth curses and turns back for the gas station, circling a road-killed coyote. At the station, he tells his family to stay in the car. He checks his rearview mirror. He exits the car and we see a pistol on his hip. He opens is wallet to pay at the pump and we see a police badge. As the gas pours in, he spots a fresh tire track leading out of a puddle nearby. He finishes refueling and gets back in the driver’s seat. His son needs to use the restroom. Angela Worth (Genevieve O’Reilly) gets out to help the boy. During this distraction, a masked gunman steps out in front of the car. A shot rings out, the windshield shatters, and blood sprays onto the face of the Worth’s teenage daughter in the back seat. Cut to titles. Whoa. Way to set the meat hook. After the titles, Worth wakes up in bed and offers prayer for one more day of sobriety. Was it a dream? Superimposed in the lower right corner are the words, “one year earlier”. Maybe not.

Again, I might have been primed to be annoyed, but my reaction was: “BITE ME!”

It was cheap. It was the showrunner deciding things needed to start with a literal bang. It screamed that the writer(s) didn’t have faith in the material that followed. It oozed an adolescent need to shock.

But in ourselves…

This anger of mine may not come from a consistent or principled place. I enjoyed the heck out of Fight Club. The book and the movie open with the narrator at gunpoint, high in a skyscraper that’s set to explode. They do a “maybe I better explain this” and we’re back in time to when things are a lot less violent. It’s a wild, crazy, abrupt shift that worked for me in a way that Tin Star’s didn’t.

This anger of mine may be related to my frustrations with HTML TABLEs and transparent GIFs. Back in the ‘90s, I was a soldier in the Browser Wars. (We won.) While I worked on the browser, it became difficult to just read a web page. I stopped seeing the content and fixated on how it was built and whether it was rendering properly. Before CSS matured, designers used and abused HTML TABLEs to gain control of web page layout. Blank space of a desired size was created by placing a transparent GIF image in a table cell and stretching its width and height as desired. This was one of many hacks that corrupted HTML. Knowing such things were there allowed you to see them. Once seen, they could not be unseen.

It follows that even here in the shallow end of learning storytelling, what I have been made aware of changes how I experience a story. These changes can add layers of appreciation. They can also raise distracting awareness of structure, technique, trope, and artifact. If I’d started this journey earlier, I’d now be that much further along. If I knew then what I’m beginning to know now, I’d have seen the seams and heard the engine noise of many of my favorite tales. And I’m left with a noodle-baking question: If it opened next week, would I still enjoy Fight Club?

Artifacts of Agency

September 5, 2018 /

Artifacts tend to be ancient, at least in the common use of the word. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. The Antikythera mechanism. Paleolithic Venus figurines. In a more general sense, artifacts are made things, products of human craft. Merriam-Webster adds: “something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual.” Science and engineering love to appropriate common terms for their specialized use. On the science-y end, artifacts are a type of error that arises from the instruments used to gather and analyze data. In the computer science arena, artifacts are errors that creep into data as a result of how we sample and transform said data.

In this picture the apparent arc of the skyway lines is an artifact of the algorithm that combined a series of pictures into one panoramic shot. If you zoom in to the picture, you can see more artifacts.

The blockiness is an artifact of breaking the image into little pixel boxes. The blurry haze around the tower and the skycar are compression artifacts resulting from the camera using JPEG compression to squeeze a bunch of pixels into less space on its storage card. High resolution screens and better compression algorithms insulate us from these sorts of errors, but they’re in there none the less.

What on earth does all this have to with agency or storytelling? You know: the things the post and the blog purport to be about, respectively?

Fair question. Bear with me a moment longer. Pixelation artifacts are intrinsic to the raster displays we use to work with our computers. Come and see the errors inherent in the system! The blurry edge artifacts in JPEG pictures represent a trade-off between quality and image size. What’s more important? The fidelity of the picture, or how many pictures you can store on your phone/camera?

My earlier post discussed how traditional publishers relied of a wall of literary agencies to filter out unsuitable manuscripts and direct viable works to the right editors. In an ideal world, the agency would read would read every manuscript and form a holistic appraisal. In the real world, agents receive queries from multiple authors every day. It’s just not practical to read all those manuscripts. The agent must rely on her own rules (algorithms and heuristics) to manage the river of dreams flooding her inbox. This is unavoidable and not unjust. It also introduces artifacts into the traditional publishing system that distort the population of new stories and voices that reach the bookstore shelves.

The Query

The query is typically the first thing the agent sees. It is a sales pitch by the author. In the course one page, the author must sell the agent on quality of the story’s core and the desirability of establishing a long-term working relationship with the author. A clumsy query can doom a wonderful story. This is sad, but there are a great many authors with stories to tell and an agent needs some evidence that a given author/story are worth pursuing. An artifact of the agent’s query filter is that authors who can’t sell their story and themselves within the constraints of the query letter won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.

The Synopsis

Some agents will ask to see a synopsis before they commit to looking at the complete manuscript. By its nature, a synopsis is a form of lossy compression. Chapters get pixelated into paragraphs. Memorable characters are squeeze out. Tense is flattened into a brisk present. An author has to be deft or very lucky to preserve the qualities of the story such that a synopsis does it justice. An artifact of the agent’s synopsis filter is that authors who lack this specific skill won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.

The Hook

Agents themselves emphasize the importance of “hooking the reader” in the opening sentence or page of the book. This requirement is echoed throughout the para-publishing industry. An intriguing question must be raised, or a dramatic event unfold, right out of the gate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Any reader could enjoy it, but the general reader doesn’t demand to be hooked. A review, a friend’s recommendation, the jacket copy, or even the cover art, has already got them past the initial commitment to explore the story. The hook is as much for the agent as it is the end reader, perhaps more so. It frontloads the story. The agent doesn’t have to dig far at all. An artifact of the agent’s need to quickly divine the intrigue and/or excitement of the story is that authors seeking agents’ approval must begin with a particular class of beats.

This can be made to work in service of the story. It can be made to work well. The first of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books opens with, “I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” Boom! Our narrator is in trouble! Who is he and why is he being arrested? A dramatic event and an intriguing question rolled into one sentence. Cormac McCarthy spreads it out over the first paragraph in All the Pretty Horses. Who died? What did the dead man mean to the man standing over his body? The convention meets the needs of the agents and can serve the interests of the reader. But it is, in part, an artifact of how agents judge manuscripts. It encourages gratuitous in medias res, which isn’t necessary for good storytelling. Huckleberry Finn opens with a brief recap and some exposition where you catch up with Huck after Tom Sawyer. You get some time to adjust to Huck’s voice and learn about his character. Moby Dick does not open with a harpooning. The artifacts of modern literary agency shape the stories we read.

That warm analog sound

As I hinted at above, while artifacts are technically errors, the distortions they introduce result from trade-offs that are part of how the traditional publishing system works. It is even possible to stop worrying and love the artifacts. Ask an audiophile. There can be a deep affinity for the “warm” quality imparted by the artifacts of an analog amplifier. To some ears, vinyl recordings are more alive than the best digital music. Many of your favorite books are infused with artifacts of agency.

Perfect Pitch

September 1, 2018 /

Short version

There’s no such thing.

Long version

Let’s stipulate the following:

  • You have written a novel-length manuscript.
  • You love the story, its characters, and its theme(s).
  • Your beta readers enjoyed reading the early drafts.
  • Your manuscript has benefitted from their feedback.
  • Editing and proofreading have refined it to the point where you’re ready to share it with the world.
  • You are willing to share the fruits of your labor with a publisher in exchange for access to their considerable talents and resources.

That last point means you’re not done writing. For myriad reasons, publishers won’t invest their talents and resources in just any story. It is up to you to convince them that investing time, sweat, and tears in your story will help keep their lights on and put their kids through college. This expectation is absolutely fair. In a world of infinite bandwidth, every publisher would read every manuscript and judge the stories holistically. Ours is not a world of infinite bandwidth. Far from it. Publishers have a very finite amount of time to choose which stories to they want to add to the catalog that they will offer to the millions of potential readers. The 21st Century publishing ecology is inhabited by an astounding number of writers. So many that the publishers have retreated behind a layer of literary agents. The agents filter out the noise of unready, unreadable, and unmarketable manuscripts. They use their industry knowledge to route promising stories to receptive publishing house editors. Before your manuscript is seen by an editor, you must convince an agent to represent it. In our world of finite bandwidth, an agent will not judge your story by reading your manuscript from start to finish. That’s where the additional writing comes in.

In Hollywood, they call it a pitch, as in sales pitch. The pitch may take one of many forms. It may summarize the story. It may highlight the emotional journey. For a character-driven story, the pitch may focus on the fascinating people rather than the plot. It might try to sell the story by comparing to hit movies. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” A key feature of a movie pitch is that it’s much shorter than the actual movie.

The literary world sees itself as more dignified than Hollywood. You don’t pitch a book. That would be vulgar. You ever-so-politely submit a query.

“Would you be interested in representing this story?”

The thing is, the query is essentially a pitch. You have one page to sell the agent on your story and yourself. This may seem brutally arbitrary and capricious, but it is also a rather elegant solution to several problems. The fixed length enables the agent to budget her query reading time reliably. The brevity provides a quick test of the author’s writing skill, not unlike a whiteboard coding problem in a software job interview. Abiding by constraints of the query hints at the writer’s ability and willingness to function within the commercial literary system. The query letter is a lossy compression scheme that folds information beyond “what’s the story about?” into the agent’s input in a digestible format.

There are innumerable books, magazine articles, blog posts, online communities, and services that offer recipes and coaching to help your write a great query letter. By studying the common features of several prominent such sources, I produced what I thought was a worthy query letter. A couple of rounds of revision with an industry professional produced a better take on my original and an alternate query that the pro recommended. I had two viable query letters. At the very least, I could deploy both in a form of A/B testing. Over time, I might learn which, if either, got better results. That was something. Right?

Yes, that was something. Something, but not enough. I researched literary agencies and discovered that that even within a given agency, individual agents might be looking for different things in a query. The query gurus counsel that to be appealing, your query should be seasoned to the taste of the given agent. The actual requirements amount to distinct recipes. In some cases, the recipes are prescriptive enough to cross the threshold from cooking into baking. My two polished queries were a good start, but they are ultimately just raw ingredients.

In Seanworld, queries would be XML documents whose schema encompasses the full range of the publishing industry’s requirements. Authors would populate the document with word count, a short biography, contact information, back cover text, synopses of various lengths, agent-specific text, the manuscript, and whatever other metadata the industry might be interested in. Software on the agent’s end would display only what the agent needed to see to make her decision.

In the real world no such schema exists. Agents operate from personal experience and taste. They set their requirements accordingly. The first step pleasing an audience of readers with your story is pleasing an agent with a bespoke query. Such is the path of traditional publishing that I have set out to explore.

Traditional Publishing from 10,000 Feet

August 29, 2018 /

This post is for friends and family who are curious about what I’ve learned while working on my book. For readers who walk the writer’s path, there won’t be much news here. Folks who are farther along the path may even roll their eyes or gently shake their heads.

I am pursuing a publishing deal for Raether’s Enzyme. I would like a book publisher to pay me money for the right to print my story as a book and sell copies on the open market. The terms are negotiable, but I’d expect a certain portion of the proceeds for each copy sold. This general arrangement is quite old and used to be pretty much the only way to bring a novel to market. Here in the 21st Century, e-books and print-on-demand technologies have changed things enough that the classic author-and-publisher business model is now referred to as traditional publishing. In the course my pursuits, I have learned enough to refine my very hazy notion of how the publishing business works to where I can now form a 10,000-foot view*.

From my 10,000-foot perch, the traditional publishing world (in the United States) looks something like this**:

Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Attribution for crowd scene: By Sérgio Valle Duarte
Wikidata has entry Q16269994 with data related to this item. CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Working our way from top-to-bottom and left-to right…

Readers

  • There are still a lot of them.
  • Their appetites range from voracious to picky, so each year an author may have many or few opportunities to connect with them.
  • Their tastes range from refined literary fiction to fun commercial genre fare to a wide variety of nonfiction subjects.
  • They consume novels as eBooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and audiobooks. The latter three formats remain a strong suit for traditional publishers.
  • Usually prefer novels from authors they’ve read before and non-fiction from authors with established platforms.

Sellers

  • Buy books from publishers. There is usually a clause in their agreement that allows the seller to return unsold books after a specified time.
  • Present books for sale to readers in their bookstores and on their websites.
  • Promote a limited number of new books by placing them near the front of the store, on the aisle endcaps, and higher in their web pages. This can make or break a book’s commercial success.
  • Amazon and Barnes & Noble are also publishers. Self-publishing authors can place eBooks in their marketplaces directly and offer paperbacks via print-on-demand services like CreateSpace.

Publishers

  • Acquire publishing rights for manuscripts from authors via contracts brokered by literary agents.
  • Edit manuscripts to raise the quality and character of the writing to meet their standards and commercial goals.
  • Format and design the interior of the book in consultation with the author and agent.
  • Produce cover art and jacket text for the exterior of the book.
  • Print, or arrange to print, paperbacks and hardbacks.
  • Design and prepare eBooks for electronic distribution.
  • May produce or edit the audio book.
  • Provide variable amounts of sales and marketing support. New authors can expect less of this in the modern publishing world.
  • Take a risk by publishing new authors.
  • Have a finite catalog of books, new and old, that they publish.
  • Have a limited number of slots in their publishing calendars, most of which are spoken for by established authors.

Para-marketing

This is my term for a portion of the industry which is outside of the sellers and publishers. It serves readers by informing them about new books and serves publishers and sellers by bringing new books to the attention of the readers.

  • Provides readers with reviews of new books.
  • Prominent reviewers are courted by authors and publicists.
  • Favorable (or cleverly excerpted) reviews are blurbed on and within books, promotional materials, and on web sites.

Agents

  • Buffer the publishers from the vast number author manuscript submissions enabled by the word processing revolution.
  • Solicit submission of author query letters matching the agent’s interests/specialization by announcing their interest via websites, wish lists, and by participation in real-life events such as writers’ conferences and workshops.
  • Represent a small number of authors at a given time.
  • Pour through large numbers of query letters and manuscript samples to find the rare query or proposal that justifies the risk of investing their time.
  • Work on spec. The agent gets paid a percentage of the books sales (typically 15%). If the book doesn’t sell, the agent doesn’t get paid.
  • May offer to edit the manuscript make it more marketable.
  • Use their experience, tastes, market insights, and intuition to identify which publisher’s editors are in the market for a story that matches the author’s manuscript.
  • Pitch their clients’ stories to appropriate editors.
  • Broker publishing deals between authors and publishers.
  • May offer career management services for authors they represent.

Pre/para-publishing

Another one of my terms. Here I’m talking about a segment of the industry that is largely invisible to the reading public. It’s general function is to provide advice to authors on the craft and business of writing. No one organization is likely to do all of the following, but they link to and advertise each other.

  • Provides how-to advice on a wide range to topics: story structure, genre conventions, characters, pacing, market trends, writing query letters, etc.
  • Publishes directories of literary agents and publishers.
  • Offers freelance editing services that scale from developmental (structure, plot, characters, pacing, tone, etc.) to proofreading (this word is misspelled, needs a comma here, the word you want here is abstruse – not obtuse).
  • Organizes conferences and workshops where writer’s gather to learn craft and business, usually from speakers with industry experience.

Writers’ Conferences

  • May be organized by para-publishing organizations or writers’ groups.
  • Speakers may include literary agents or publisher’s representatives.
  • May offer opportunities to pitch stories to literary agents in-person.
  • Provide opportunities for real-time Q&A with industry and para-industry professionals.
  • Provide opportunities to network/commiserate with other writers and contact new writers’ groups.

Writers’ Groups

  • Provide authors with socialization in an endeavor that can be very, very lonely. Oh, so very lonely.
  • Provide a first line of readers to critique and encourage a writing project.
  • The success of one member can benefit other members with referrals to agents, blurb-able endorsements, etc.
  • You have people to hang out with at Writers’ Conferences.

Authors

  • Make up stories about people and events that aren’t even real.
  • Struggle to make these lies compelling enough that readers will want to believe them.
  • Want someone, somewhere, to affirm these made-up stories with praise and/or renumeration.

Oooops! I did it again!

Okay, for all its 10,000-footness, that’s probably more than any of my friends and family really wanted to know. Friends who were also coworkers might offer a rueful smile in memory of my overstuffed Brownbag talks*. Sorry. Then, as now, I have trouble with the short story format.

* Back in the day, there was a program within the engineering division called Brownbag Talks. These were scheduled at lunchtime. Bring your own lunch. An engineer prepared a thirty-to-forty-minute presentation about something her or she was working on. There were PowerPoint slides. Early in such talks, the engineer oriented the audience with a high-level overview of the subject. “How high?” you ask. The number typically cited was 10,000 feet. That’s a ways up there. You don’t see any intricate details, but the whole of the landscape is visible.

** In the unlikely event that someone working in the industry reads this, the choices here were the result of googling in August 2018. No offense of exclusion was intended.

Lockdown

July 31, 2018 /

In its final stages of development, a classic Microsoft project enters lockdown. No further changes to the software are accepted for that version unless they are recall class bugs. Teams wishing to fix that one last issue must plead their case up the line, providing evidence that the fix is both necessary and won’t jeopardize the stability of the project. No matter how mortifying a late-breaking bug might be, if it doesn’t meet the bar, the stern archons of the Ship Room will punt it until after launch. Knowing a bug is going out to a vast community of users can curdle the joy of releasing exciting new software, but for a project the size of, say, Windows, there’s always someone who wants to make one last fix. If the project is ever going to get out there and work for people, there has to be a cut-off, and it has to be enforced with rigor.

The manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme is in lockdown. Bugs identified by early readers and editing passes have been addressed. Addressed isn’t the same as fixed. In some cases, the responses of early readers conflicted. Fixing one reader’s bug would break another’s feature. Further revision risks removing the polish the proofreader provided. As much as I would like to tinker with text until the Sun balloons into a red giant, the time has come to focus my efforts on connecting the story with a literary agent and a publisher. They will have their own ideas as to what constitutes a recall class bug.

The Pfast and the Pluperfect

July 2, 2018 /

Raether’s Enzyme passed a major milestone recently when its corrected manuscript returned from the proofreader. The first post on this blog marked its departure. I am happy to report that the editor did indeed spot remaining errors and called shenanigans on a stylistic experiment that did not pay off. The manuscript is stronger for it. Yay!

Reviewing the marked-up version of the manuscript revealed patterns of error that I will work to stamp out in future projects.

  • Truly embarrassing misplaced apostrophes.
  • Missing question marks.
  • Absent and misused commas.
  • Dropped articles that escaped my eye.

Finding a run of clean pages was a source of joy.

The proofreader identified and began correcting another class of errors. He saw a pattern emerging and began to wonder if I was playing a stylistic game, or if I really didn’t know what the past pluperfect was.

BUSTED. On both counts, really.

I would have lost on Jeopardy! if the clue had been:

“DENOTING AN ACTION COMPLETED PRIOR TO SOME
PAST POINT OF TIME SPECIFIED OR IMPLIED,
FORMED IN ENGLISH BY HAD AND THE PAST PARTICIPLE”

Raether’s Enzyme is written from the subjective third person limited point of view, where the character who is in focus can change between scenes. The narrator takes opportunities to reflect on events in the focal character’s past when those events are relevant to the action of the scene.

Raether imagines itself to be a thriller. Thrillers move relentlessly forward. The narrator’s interest in the characters’ pasts put forward momentum at risk. I had made a pass to purge the pluperfect in an attempt to hide the retrograde motion. I had rationalized this by telling myself that the remembering the narrator was doing on behalf of the characters was portraying the characters’ thought processes in the scene. My illusion of continuous forward motion caught fire in the eyes of an important reader: an editor.

My recent work in the manuscript included unwinding my de-pluperfect-ifying shenanigans. There are other games afoot that will add to your enjoyment without making you wonder what time it is. I am an important step closer to sharing them with you, thanks to my proofreader.

Tomorrow is Fragile

June 30, 2018 /

A Cautionary Tale?

Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy built titanic writing careers by telling ripping yarns that spiked our familiar world with seed crystals of tomorrow’s technology and deftly avoided being categorized as science fiction. No, these weren’t stories about spaceships and aliens*, they were techno-thrillers. Keep that straight or the marketing department will have harsh words for you.

The techno-thriller trades robustness for accessibility. It only asks its readers to believe one impossible thing before breakfast. Accept that one dollop of Andromeda or the purr of Red October’s stealth drive, and you’ve bought your ticket to a wild ride. Millions of readers did so at the bookstore. Millions more bought tickets for the film adaptations. The price paid is that the stories aren’t durable. The technologies brought to bear on containing the Andromeda Strain were bleeding edge in the late 1960s. A modern-day WILDFIRE lab would have vastly more sophisticated tools on hand. Red October’s (movie) magnetohydrodynamic drive remains futuristic. The novel’s take on the stealth drive has been more-or-less implemented. (Clancy did major research on near-future submarine warfare.) The Cold War that the drive threatened to destabilize is long over. These two tales of tomorrow became alt-history novels in their author’s lifetime. I admit that I’d be happy to fail in a similar fashion. #BestsellingAuthorProblems

Moore’s Law Looms

Moore’s Law has proven to be prophetic, both in terms of literal chip density and in anticipating the expansion of software applications made possible by the more powerful hardware. Progress across all fields of technology is accelerated by advances in computing. Writing a techno-thriller in a world where Moore’s Law is in play is like surfing a huge, churning, fast-moving wave. Aiming your story just ahead of the wave is a tricky balancing act. If you don’t position yourself at the right point on the face of the wave, it will overrun you and wipe your story out.

The threat extends beyond story’s seed crystal. Characters in a techno-thriller employ today’s tech to meet the challenge of tomorrow’s invention or discovery. If there’s an app for a problem, they should use it. If that app is Uber, and between the time the story is written and is published Uber falls into obscurity as Johnny Cab takes over, then your day-after-tomorrow story seems rather yesterday.

Place Your Bets

As its own take on the techno-thriller, Raether’s Enzyme has already been buffeted by the waves of change that have been crashing around us in the early 21st Century. Per a previous post, the story required a technological upgrade and some changes to the plot in the course of novelizing the old screenplay. Working through those changes brought the subject of this post into sharp focus. Technology is intertwined with our lives like never before. If I neglected a contemporary technology, today’s reader would rebel at the oversight. If I invested too much of the story in the wrong tech, my techno-thriller would become a retro-thriller for tomorrow’s reader. It was a tricky balancing act, and it is not over.

Without getting into too far into spoiler territory, here are some of the techno-bets I made:

  • Facebook, hashtags, and viral media are with us for the immediate future.
  • Identity remains fragmented and susceptible to theft.
  • Computer security continues to be a problem for governments, companies, and individuals.
  • Online anonymity is still possible if you’re willing to put in some effort.
  • Government surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
  • Corporate surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
  • Private surveillance is more formidable than most people know, but not omniscient.
  • Blockchains and cryptocurrencies have not disrupted banking or common contracts.
  • Analyzing and synthesizing complex biomaterials is a hard problem.
  • Smartphones continue to claim an important share of our attention.

At the point when any of these bets are lost, the story becomes a retro-thriller.

The biggest bet in Raether’s Enzyme is one that I would be overjoyed to lose. As of this writing, we do not have a general cure for, or vaccine against, cancer. If an unexpected discovery, a glorious Black Swan, upended our understanding of this complex class of diseases by revealing a single agent of deliverance, I would set my manuscript aside and dance in the street. Until then, the mysterious and wholly imaginary substance known as Raether’s enzyme remains the seed crystal that catalyzes the plot and nucleates the themes of my techno-thriller.

Beyond Technodome

Technology isn’t the only threat to techno-thriller shelf-life. Fashion, pop culture, and slang can also drag the story back into last year. This problem is exacerbated for techno-thriller movies. Michael Crichton wrote and directed a number of films when he wasn’t writing best-sellers, including Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and The 13th Warrior. One that you probably haven’t seen is Looker. The techno-thriller seed crystals for Looker are fresh enough to work today. A high-tech advertising company is paying models to get very specific plastic surgeries, after which the models are scanned and their digital replicas go on to have a career with the company and the model collects royalties. Except the models are dying under suspicious circumstances and their killer may be invisible. The story works today, but the film captures the early 1980s in an amber of hairstyles, clothing, and, well, everything.

A novel can limit how much of the present sticks to it, but there is a cost. Sparse descriptions of characters allow/require the reader to dress and coif them in a contemporary style. Choosing common and long-lived makes and models of vehicles lets/demands the reader supply the right model year. Unless Tesla’s marketing department is paying you for Model S product placement, it’s safer to put your executive in an Audi sedan. As the /’s above suggest, the cost is born by the reader, who has to supply the details the author omitted. The deal can work for both parties. A reader doesn’t usually select a techno-thriller in hopes that the author will pause the action and use a detailed description to capture a trenchant snapshot of the zeitgeist. If the reader knows the character, the details will follow as needed.

The greater challenge is with dialog. By their words and deeds are characters known. Dialog must reveal a mix of who the character is and how she wants to be perceived. Voices must be distinct and provide color, even if that color is a somber earth tone. If the color is the lime green slang that was hip when the story was written, odds are that it will have oxidized to a 1970s avocado green before the second printing. One way to avoid this is to draw slang from an argot palette. This works well in the techno-thriller genre, which leans towards military and technical characters. Military and technical readers will eventually see stale slang, but the general audience is less likely to be bothered by it. Characters from outside the mil-tech milieu may benefit from customized argot. This involves creating a style which is consistent enough to be recognizable as itself and is distinct from contemporary trends. A prime example of this approach is Buffy Speak. Raether’s Enzyme uses a blend of these approaches for its core group of young technologists.

Pop-culture references aren’t typical in the techno-thriller genre, but I thought my younger characters would make use of them. You see the problem. The solution I arrived at involved blending extremely old references (arising from the characters’ joint ironic exploration of old movies) with call-outs to obscure anime of my own invention. It’s something of a kludge, but it adds some light humor and illustrates a generational divide that plays out in the story’s conflict.

A dragon lives forever…

but not so techno-thrillers. I accept that. My story belongs in the very near future. That’s where it will make its stand.

* To be fair, The Andromeda Strain did feature a spacecraft returning to Earth bearing an extraterrestrial organism.

Things to Do in Denver While You’re Read

June 19, 2018 /

No, not the movie.  I’m referring to the song that the movie borrowed its title from.

I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone
I said, Buddy, I’m afraid to be alone
I got some weird ideas in my head
About things to do in Denver when you’re dead…

It was exactly like that, except completely different. As readers following these posts in chronological order know, the simply difficult process of adapting the screenplay for Raether’s Enzyme into a novel manuscript reached narrative complete in October 2017. I wasn’t dead, but it was a period of relative quiet. My brain was cooling with subtle ticking noises and spurts of steam. Sizzling drops of cerebrospinal fluid hit the floor.

Friends help you move read your Facebook posts.
Real friends help you move bodies read your first drafts.

Unresolved bugs and story ideas lurking in OneNote invited me to dive into editing and rewrites, but the writings of the Ancients said that I should step back for at least two weeks then approach those tasks with refreshed eyes. My own experience in the software industry also argued that I should wait for feedback from my beta readers before making any big changes to my story’s code. That feedback would reveal a heat map of where the writing and story were strong and weak. The heat map would shape edits and rewrites, steering me towards what needed fixing and away from breaking things the readers already liked.

My courageous beta readers needed time. They had jobs, families, and lives of their own that somehow had priority over reading hundreds of pages my freshly-picked words. After months of working with imaginary people who existed to advance my narrative, the loss of control inherent in handing work off to real people was…grounding. While the beta readers worked, I was alone with some weird ideas in my head.

Doomsday Prepping

In the 20th Century, failure to secure a publishing deal all but doomed a novel. Vanity press was an option, but an expensive one with a low chance of successfully connecting the story to its audience or making money for the author. The new millennium saw the advent of eBooks and Print-On-Demand (POD) services. These disruptive technologies lowered the cost of “vanity publishing” to the point where any author could put their book up for sale in digital form or actually hold a bound copy in their hands for a modest price. These options have advanced to a point where they have challenged the traditional publishers and sparked lively debate as to whether authors of any level of success should submit their manuscripts or self-publish.

So, the arrival of that last rejection letter is no longer doomsday. Preparing for self-publishing is prudent. That’s what I told myself when I prioritized an exploration of self-publishing over working on a query letter, writing synopses, proofreading, and sundry other tasks. A friend had a good experiencing publishing a how-to book via CreateSpace, a POD appendage of Amazon. He assured me that I could hold a proof copy of my story in my hands without committing to publishing on the platform. It was irresistible.

CreateSpace-ing RE Draft 1.0

I was still a bit leery of committing my work to CreateSpace, so I set up the project to “publish” a novel titled RE Draft 1.0.

CreateSpace will walk you through the pre-press process, which has a small number of steps and some of the pitfalls along the way. I reached the point where I had selected the 6”x9” trade paperback format and was ready to upload my manuscript. I hope that magic on their end would reformat the text as necessary. It didn’t. The file was rejected. The site listed a number of general errors regarding content being out of bounds. It said the book would be over 700 pages long. I was stunned.

CreateSpace is not without mercy. It wants to help. It produced its best effort to wrangle the manuscript in the form of a downloadable Word file. From that, I could see where certain graphics embedded in the text broke through the margins. The high page count came in part from the manuscript’s double spacing. There were problems page numbering and chapters starting on the backs of pages that CreateSpace didn’t flag. It was a mess. After another iteration, I broke down an enable Adobe Flash to run on the site, which enabled CreateSpace’s previewer to give me a good look at the book’s contents. A bit more fiddling and an argument over who was responsible for what part of the front matter later, and I had what I thought was a good interior.

Dev Art

With the interior settled, CreateSpace said I was ready to work on the cover. The site has a library of design templates and stock photographs you can combine for a professional-looking but generic effect. I had something more specific in mind, so I picked the Simplicity theme, which allowed me to supply an image file that defines the whole cover.

Those who have read my bio and have worked in the software industry are rolling their eyes. In the early stages of app development, the graphic design team is busy working on the art that will be folded into the product to make it beautiful and useful. To keep the project moving along, the software engineers supply placeholder art. The quality of these placeholders varies from crude scribblings to carefully crafted work that the engineer secretly hopes everyone will fall in love with and ship to the customer. These placeholders are known as ‘developer art’, or ‘dev art’. They are almost always far below the quality required to ship and are rarely seen outside the company. I knew what I was setting out to do was dev art. I knew that in the end, I would hire a professional artist to do a proper cover. But I just had to try.

I’ve seen thousands of book covers in my life. There was I time when I would buy a book if it had cool cover art. I could see the cover for Raether’s Enzyme in my mind. Our protagonist is in the foreground. Her hands are pressed against her solar plexus, trying to contain the luminous vapors of Raether’s enzyme. Her trusty dog stands watch behind her, where the villains of the story loom. It’s all dark and all the characters are backlit, appearing as silhouettes. The title is corrupted by digital noise. This is a techno-thriller.

My search for public domain and stock photos to build this tableau went nowhere slowly. I couldn’t even find a dog of the right breed in the pose I needed. A professional artist can draw people and animals. I was stumped and went back to the stage before the drawing board. What I came up was to combine a picture of a mountain lake here in the Pacific Northwest (setting) with a stylized DNA double-helix (Raether’s enzyme arises from a rare mutation).

I enjoy hiking in the Washington Cascades, so my photo library has a number of picturesque lakes to choose from. The best fit based on lake size and picture angle is Snow Lake. Of the many pictures I’ve taken there over the years, I picked this one as my backdrop.

For the DNA, I went to Google image search. I told Google I wanted a DNA helix that was large and free for commercial use with modifications. It needed to be big so that it could fill the 6”x9” cover without the loss of quality that occurs when you enlarge a photo or bitmap. From the results, I picked the following.

Which no longer appears in the free-to-use results. 🙁

The glowing orange contrasts nicely with the blues and greens of Snow Lake.

I loaded these images into layers in Paint.NET. To help the helix and the title text pop, I inserted a dark translucent layer in front of the lake scene. The result was also less cheerful, which is fine for a thriller.

Given the format (6”x9”) and the page count, CreateSpace will produce a template image with guides to where the art must fit.


Not actual size

I resized the background image to match the template and added the template as a translucent layer in front of the background. It was time to add the title, author, and back cover blurb.

Experiments with various recommended fonts were not satisfying. I wanted the title’s style to reflect the dangerous world between the covers. My search for a menacing (and free) typeface lead me to FontSquirrel. Oh. My. As someone who reveled in inappropriate typography when the Macintosh first unleashed bitmapped fonts on the world, I was in heaven. (FYI: Chicago+bold+shadow+outline is never the right answer to your typographic problem.) I downloaded several candidates. Conspiracy was the best fit.

A few layers more and I had my cover. I’d share it with you now, but… At the time I was satisfied with the cover as a prototype. It was dev art and thus doomed, but it would do for the time. After a few rounds of argument with CreateSpace later, the system green-lit my book for production. I was free to order proof copies. Giddy with optimism and delighted with the under-ten-dollar price, I ordered five copies.

Draft 1.0

What arrived in the mail was disappointing.

I’ve been around desktop publishing since before color was really an option, so I knew that there is always a difference between the colors the computer displays on the screen and the colors the printer can produce. I had naively assumed that CreateSpace would make a quality effort to translate my cover art from RGB to the printer’s CMYK colors with maximum fidelity. I was wrong. I found a handy site that will convert an RGB image to CMYK. All you need to do is pick the right CMYK color profile from their menu. CreateSpace technical support was unable to tell me which profile to use. Grrrrrrr! It took a couple rounds of ordering new proof copies to find one that worked. FWIW, that’s GRACol2006 Coated1 V2.

The interior was a mess as well. This was entirely my fault. I failed to change the text justification from left-justified to full-justified. The book had ragged right margins. That looks so wrong.

The manuscript->book recipe I arrived at is:

  1. Upload manuscript.
  2. Get errors.
  3. Download resized version.
  4. Change Body Text style to single-spaced, full justified, Garamond 12pt.
  5. Change Handwriting style to single-spaced Garamond 12pt.
  6. Resize MAPP/MOPP tables.
  7. Substitute ⁂ for # scene breaks. Add 6pt before and after.
  8. Change Chapter Style to Garamond 16pt.
  9. Check spacing around embedded text messages.
  10. Page headers – remove author/title. Garamond 12pt. Outside corner odd/even.
  11. Chapters begin on odd pages. Delete page break and insert section break as needed.
  12. Map cover art from RGB->CMYK:GRACol2006_Coated1_V2 via https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/.

(Scrivener is a promising option for the next book project. It abstracts the writing from the format, turning my hand-tuning recipe into something resembling a simple ‘Save As…’ operation. There are trade-offs. If you render your Scrivener project as a Word document and hand that off to an editor, all the edits have to be merged back into the project by hand. Or so I suspect. More research is required.)

I am done with my doomsday prepping for now. I can produce bound copies of my story with a modicum of effort. The proof copies preview how various formatting games might play out in the real world. I can offer them to beta readers as a friendlier alternative to a stack of loose pages or an electronic document. And I get the warm, fuzzy joy of holding a copy in my hands and gently stroking the dev art on the cover. Insert purring noise here.

Adapting the Screenplay

June 4, 2018 /

The previous post tells the story leading up to writing my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

The Plan

I stood at my workstation with the screenplay PDF on the right side of my monitor and a novel manuscript template document open in Word on the left. The plan was to make the first draft as direct an adaptation as possible.

  • Lift dialog directly.
  • Grab the best descriptions with minimal modifications.
  • Translate the screenplay’s present tense action to the novel’s past tense.
  • Fortify scene and character descriptions minimally.
  • Defer addressing the impacts of advancing technology.
  • Complete first draft and work from there.

I tracked my daily productivity over the course of the first two weeks. Comparing the number of pages in the manuscript to the number of pages covered in the screenplay allowed me to estimate how long it would take to complete the first draft and how many pages I could expect it to be. Early on, it was looking like I would see two to three pages of manuscript per page of the screenplay and that the process would run for ninety days. I knew that was at best a lower bound, but still hoped it was in the ballpark. With one hundred or so pages of screenplay, the math said the manuscript would be 300 pages. I was worried that the book would come in too slim. I was very wrong.

Divergent Points of View

Before I got into serious trouble, I went off-plan in a happy way. Screenplays are generally written in the third person and the present tense. The tone of the narration, which is being delivered to the filmmakers as scene descriptions and stage directions, is consistent from beginning to end. It matches the overall tone of the script.

The script for Raether’s Enzyme does not stick with the protagonist all of the time. An early scene features a deputy sheriff confronting one of the problems that threaten the protagonist, who is off doing something less interesting. In the course of adapting this scene, it occurred to me that the tone I had been using didn’t fit. The third person narration was sympathetic to the protagonist. It reflected a young person of nerdly disposition who was struggling with depression. The deputy was more mature. She was also harder, more cynical, and more determined. If the tone and word choices gave the deputy’s perspective voice, the reader would see the story through new eyes. If I did this with the villains, I could show the reader how the bad guys were the heroes of their own dark stories. This was exciting.

This resulted in some dramatic tonal shifts between scenes. Early readers flagged cases where I needed to make it clear who the scene was tracking early on.

First Contact

Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

With hindsight, the clues were there. What I called the unpacking ratio, the number of manuscript pages for each screenplay page was drifting upwards. I was deviating from the plan.

The screenplay is a brisk thriller. Like many such stories, it moves through the complexities of the characters and the scenario very quickly in the interest of pacing. As I progressed, this seemed unfair to the characters and the world the story presented to the reader. It still needed to move along, but our hyperconnected modern world is wired to change in more extensive and dangerous ways than the world of 2003. As a smart, analytical person, our protagonist needed to react to the enlarged scope of her problem.

I accepted that this required a shift in strategy. I pushed ahead with the unpacking until I reached a critical juncture near the end of the first act. The scene in the screenplay is surprising, psychologically violent, and very short. It unpacked to something more revelatory, truer, and which was ultimately incompatible with the diabolical twist at the end of the second act. Damn. I loved that rug-pull.

Zeno’s Plot Point (with a whiff of spoiler)

Work on the second act proceeded, but I still didn’t have a replacement for my broken twist. It needed to flow naturally from the story before it and I wanted it to lead to the screenplay’s third act. Work became harder the closer I got to this hole in my story. I didn’t want to write anything I’d have to scrap on either side gap. That fear birthed a variation on Zeno’s Paradox of Motion and a perfect rationalization for stepping away from the work to enjoy the Northwest’s glorious summer.

I spent time with my villain wargaming evil schemes. He studied the protagonist, identifying her wants and needs. He found a weakness he could exploit. A new trap was set. I could move forward.

Narrative Complete Milestone

I come from the world of software development. Various old-school development models have points on the project schedule known as milestones. Reaching a milestone is cause for celebration. One such milestone is feature complete. This is where the team has delivered code to implement all the planned features but knows there is work to do on bugs, performance, fit-and-finish, etc. It is acknowledged that early user feedback from the subsequent beta testing may suggest important revisions.

In October 2017, I completed my first draft and declared Raether’s Enzyme narrative complete. The story I wanted to tell was all there, as were various typos, incorrect word choices, incomplete sentences, plot holes and narrative burps. While I made my first editing pass, I had beta test readers who offered to drive over the bumps and give me notes on the story as a whole.

There was much work to do but reaching narrative complete was cause for celebration.

Raether’s Genesis

May 30, 2018 /

In which I recount the origins of Raether’s Enzyme.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Way back in the 20th Century, I lived in Silicon Valley and did the sort of work you’d expect. I enjoyed hanging out with my friend M, who rented a real Eichler house in Mountain View. M is a talented hardware engineer with a strong entrepreneurial streak. We amused ourselves by dreaming up new devices of dubious utility aimed at people with more money than good sense. M’s residual ethics kept us from making millions by actually bringing the gadgets to market. One day, he took a break from suggesting a new Scam-u-tron to declare that we should make a movie.

Understanding the limited resources we had to work with, I spun-up the premise of our low-budget masterpiece. The Bay Area of that era was a hotbed for various self-improvement “technologies”. The Forum and NLP were in their heyday. The whole scene had a cultish vibe to it. In our story, a new mind technology hits town. Using Eureka, you can organize your thoughts and acquire knowledge in a way that reliably builds towards those elusive flashes of insight. Come to our seminar, we’ll show you how. The New Cognition™ may actually work. It may work too well for some people, who slip into a “hypercognitive coma” and emerge…changed.

It wasn’t what M was looking for, so I let it drop. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it really was an alien invasion via SETI or how the story should end.

The Dawn a New Century

Ten years later, I was taking a break from the open bit mines. Before I found a new corporate master, I wanted to try my hand at writing. In all those years, I hadn’t found a way around issues troubling Eureka and renewed efforts were unproductive. It bothered me that I was going back to such old story ideas. Couldn’t I come up with something fresh?

Yes, yes, I could. What I salvaged from Eureka was the format. A novel’s worth of writing was too daunting and I wasn’t clever enough to tackle my themes in a short story. Screenplays are lean, short, and at least comparable to a novel’s narrative payload once the artists and technicians of the film industry work their magic.

My first screenplay was an effects-heavy epic that combined hard science fiction with superheroes. The budget for The Atlantean would have been astronomical. At the time, superhero movies were not mandatory. Even today, no one would greenlight a spec script for a non-existent franchise. I figured that much out after completing the script. There was another problem. The audience for sci-fi superhero stories skews heavily adolescent male. Was there a way to explore the themes of The Atlantean in a genre that didn’t narrowcast? Could it be done on a small budget? Could I tell a superhero story that didn’t require super-sized willing suspension of disbelief?

Raether’s Enzyme was the answer to those questions. It was a techno-thriller with an appealing female protagonist. Its Pacific Northwest setting meant the production could leverage the economies of Canada’s film industry. Raether’s enzyme, the mysterious biomaterial, was a startling world-changer that didn’t dump a bucket of luminous iridescent goo over Science’s head. It felt almost-real, like something that could make headlines in tomorrow’s news.

Two of my early readers testified that they sat down planning to read a few pages and were drawn through the whole script. Where this happened to each of them was…amusing. It gave me hope that I was onto something worth pursuing.

An invaluable resource during this writing process was Dave Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible. Mr. Trottier also offers a script evaluation service. His critique was insightful and constructive. I balked when he suggested that I end the story earlier. He identified a specific point to close it off. During our phone consultation, he convinced me to cut the dénouement. The script and the novel are better as a result.

I submitted the improved script for the second season of Project Greenlight. Greenlight was a fascinating exercise in game theory. Contestants scored each other’s scripts and optionally provided feedback. Higher-scoring scripts advanced to subsequent selection rounds. Players had a choice of strategies. They could be fair and honest or they could work to knock strong players out of the competition to improve their own chances. Raether’s scores were split between people who really liked it, and said so in the comments, and those who silently gave it a minimum score. It sank without a trace.

Further exploration of the “breaking into the industry” process culminated at a big screenwriting conference in Los Angeles. There were so many aspiring writers in one place. We were all so sure that our story was the one The Industry was hungry to tell. The need for high hurdles and brutal gatekeepers became clear. As much as I loved my story, I couldn’t bring myself to move down there and run the gauntlet. I shelved my script and returned to the world of software engineering.

A Novel Idea

Long years of work for my benevolent overlords afforded me another opportunity to step away from gainful employment. It was time to give storytelling another try and see how much value I could create outside of the corporate matrix. Technological disruption created paths around the gatekeepers. Andy Weir and Hugh Howey provided proof that it was possible to connect compelling stories with their audiences. It was time to write my first novel.

I still loved the story and characters of the Raether’s Enzyme script. Its themes were still important. Advances in technology over the intervening years impacted the plot but (sadly) did not render the core narrative anachronistic. I had a strong foundation that had been workshopped and reviewed. The script was like a super-outline. All I needed to do was adapt it.

How hard could that be? Well, that’s a story for another post.

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