Category Archives: writing

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There’s a scene in AIpocalypse in which one of the main characters is describing “the mesh”. Here’s an excerpt:

Leon hesitated, weighing the coolness impact of answering, then decided. He felt sorry for the teacher. “The Mesh was formed ten years ago by Avogadro Corp to help maintain net neutrality,” he began. 

“At the time, access to the Internet in the United States was mostly under the control of a handful of companies such as Comcast, who had their own media products they wanted to push. They saw the Internet as competing with traditional TV channels, and so they wanted to control certain types of network traffic to eliminate competition with their own services.” 

“Very good, Leon. Can you tell us what they built, and why?” 

Leon sighed when he realized the teacher wasn’t going to let him off easy. “According to Avogadro, it would have been too expensive and time consuming to build out yet another network infrastructure comparable to what the cable companies and phone companies had built last century. Instead they built MeshBoxes and gave them away. A MeshBox does two things. It’s a high speed wireless access point that allows you to connect your phone or laptop to the Internet. But that’s just what Avogadro added so that people would want them. The real purpose of a MeshBox is to form a mesh network with nearby MeshBoxes. Instead of routing data packets from a computer to a wireless router over the Comcast, the MeshBox routes the data packets over the network of MeshBoxes.” 

Leon hadn’t realized it, but sometime during his speech he had stood up, and starting walking towards the netboard at the front of the room. “The Mesh network is slower in some ways, and faster in other ways.” He started drawing on the board. “It takes about nine hundred hops to get from New York to Los Angelos purely by mesh, but only about ten hops by backbone. That’s a seven second delay by mesh, compared to a a quarter second by backbone. But the aggregate bandwidth of the mesh in the United States is approximately four thousand times the aggregate bandwidth of the backbone because there are more than twenty million MeshBoxes in the United States. More than a hundred million around the world. The mesh is bad for phone calls or interactive gaming unless you’re within about two hundred files, but great for moving files and large data sets around at any distance.” 

He paused for a moment to cross out a stylized computer on the netboard. “One of the benefits of the Mesh is that it’s completely resistant to intrusion or tampering, way more so than the Internet ever was before the Mesh. If any node goes down, it can be routed around. Even if a thousand nodes go down, it’s trivial to route around them. The MeshBoxes themselves are tamperproof – Avogadro manufactured them as a monolithic block of circuitry with algorithms implemented in hardware circuits, rather than software. So no one can maliciously alter the functionality. The traffic between boxes is encrypted. Neighboring MeshBoxes exchange statistics on each other, so if someone tries to insert something into the Mesh trying to mimic a MeshBox, the neighboring MeshBoxes can compare behavior statistics and detect the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Compared to the traditional Internet structure, the Mesh is more reliable and secure.” 

Leon looked up and realized he was standing in front of the class. On the netboard behind him he realized he had draw topology diagrams of the backbone and mesh. The entire class was staring at him. James made a “what the hell are you doing?” face at him from the back of the room. If he had a time travel machine, he’d go back and warn his earlier self to keep his damn mouth shut. 

The teacher on the other hand, was glowing, and had a broad smile on his face. “Excellent, Leon. So Avogadro was concerned about net neutrality, and created a completely neutral network infrastructure. Why do do we care about this today?”

I think the time is right for Google to do something like this. They can afford to give away 60,000 Chrome notebooks to test Chrome, and give gigabit fiber optic to 500,000 people to test high speed connectivity. If they can do that, they can easily give away a million mesh-enabled wireless access points to help ensure net neutrality.

Furthermore, Google already has a presence of some kind in many cities: whether a corporate site, a data center, or a content distribution network. In that case, mesh networking would be even more effective, since the mesh network can interconnect with Google’s backbone. Most people would be within a dozen hops of a Google backbone, keeping latency down.

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Gene Kim recently asked me about techniques to tighten up writing as he works on his novel. I thought I’d share my recommendation.

This technique works best if you start with a paper printout of your writing, although you can accomplish something similar by using highlighting in an editor.

This is a three pass technique.

  1. First Pass: Read through your writing, and identify half of your paragraphs to delete. You can do this by rating each paragraph on a scale of 1 to 3, or simply by crossing out unnecessary paragraphs. In some cases, you’ll want to keep an entire paragraph. In other cases, you’ll want to delete an entire paragraph. But more likely is that you’ll delete most of a paragraph, but keep a sentence or two.
  2. Second Pass: Refactor your hodge-podge of writing into new paragraphs. Don’t focus on final polish, because you still have more deleting to do. But end this phase with paragraphs of writing, with dead paragraphs removed.
  3. Third Pass: Identify sentences to remove. Your goal is to try to remove at least one in three or one in four sentences. Some words or phrases might migrate to other sentences, but you’re shooting to eliminate as much fluff as possible.
  4. Do a final editing pass over your writing, cleaning up any awkward transitions or awkward language.
The key concepts and best writing remain distilled down into their essence, while the weak, unnecessary, and redundant gets eliminated. At a minimum, you’ll get a 30% reduction in length, while more aggressive cutting will net you a 50 to 60% reduction. The result is tighter, more value-packed prose.

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In 2010 I took a writing class with Merridawn Duckler. The class itself, offered at The Attic, was more than worthwhile, teaching me how to think critically about my writing, how to critique and observe what other writers were doing, and offering a forum to have my own work critiqued. 

Recently I needed some help with my second novel, so I paid Merridawn for a one on one consultation. She read my manuscript, then gave me feedback on my novel.
Although the feedback is specific to my novel, the issues and methods to address them could apply to anyone, so I thought I’d share.
  • Things can’t always go well. In most of my novel, things work out for the characters. If they are hungry, they go to town, and get food. If they need a computer, they find a computer store. If they don’t have money, it’s OK, they can make a deal. They struggle with the big issues, the main plot of the book, but they don’t even struggle with the little stuff. But they need to, in order to grow as characters, and in order to create tension for the reader.
  • Be sure of facts and timelines. I’m writing science fiction, and in that genre, even more than others, people really tend to notice any errors, even small ones, and pick them apart. So I need to be even more sure about timelines and locations. That doesn’t always mean I need to be specific about them in the book, but I do need to be specific about them in my head.
  • What makes the difference between science essay and science-fiction novels is characters that the reader can really get behind. If the characters are flat, underdeveloped, then the reader might as well be reading a science essay, because they have nothing to deepen their emotional connection to the work.
  • Work on language. My favorite novels are William Gibson’s early cyberpunk work. They have prose so beautiful I nearly weep when I read it. It feels impossible that I could ever create prose half so amazing, and yet if I don’t try, it won’t happen. I need to strive as much as possible to make that happen. (An aside: As I have told my friend Gene, if I was ever referred to as a “poor imitation of William Gibson”, I would be thrilled.)
  • Readers and characters need human problems. In my novel, there’s a scene where a building is burning down, and it’s been indirectly caused by the main character. He is overcome with guilt watching this. And yet, a building (or even an entire block of buildings) is too abstract for the reader or even the characters to be really affected by. It would be a far more personal, human problem if they said “Oh my god, Susie’s disabled mother lives in that building.”
  • Characters need skin. All of the action and all of the dialogue is focused on the events of the book. This makes for characters that are skeletons: they are there, but there is no meat or skin to them. The characters need to have lives outside the events of the book. Hearing this feedback made me ask, “But where does the inspiration for that skin come from? I read other books critically, and I always find myself wondering where all the non-core-plot stuff comes from. Why did they choose to have that character have that best friend? Why does the character have a birthday? Why did the author choose those things?” And that leads to…
  • One source for skin is the character’s relationship to the core theme of the book. All three of my books explore theme of man’s relationship to artificial intelligence: Can man and machine cohabit? For each character, then question then is, “How does this character relate to that theme?” For example, one of my characters is a woman named Rebecca Smith, who is a CEO in the first novel, and POTUS in the second. For her, the machines are just a distraction. She wants to do her thing, which is to run the company/country. She wants to be in control of the now. That’s how she relates to the theme. Which means that her skin should reflect those things: We should see her running the country: doing all the things a President would normally do: working with other politicians, dealing with her rivals, campaigning, etc. My main character is a student trying to get a scholarship when he is waylaid by the events of the book, but we should see him filling out scholarship papers, we should see him fail to get the scholarship when he doesn’t show up, etc.
I hope these ideas are useful to you. As I said, although the feedback is specific to my writing, these are issues anyone could struggle with. If you are in Portland, and want to get a similar critique of your work, I urge you to contact the The Attic. My experiences with them have all been very positive.

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From Writerisms and other Sins: A Writer’s Shortcut to Stronger Writing:

Writerisms: overused and misused language. In more direct words: find ‘em, root ‘em out, and look at your prose without the underbrush.
  1. am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with “by” or with “by … someone” implied but not stated. Such structures are passives. In general, limit passive verb use to one or two per book. The word “by” followed by a person is an easy flag for passives.
  2. am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with an adjective. “He was sad as he walked about the apartment.” “He moped about the apartment.” A single colorful verb is stronger than any was + adjective; but don’t slide to the polar opposite and overuse colorful verbs. There are writers that vastly overuse the “be” verb; if you are one, fix it. If you aren’t one—don’t, because overfixing it will commit the next error.

    and also:

  3. -ness A substitute for thinking of the right word. “Darkness,” “unhappiness,” and such come of tacking -ness (or occasionally – ion) onto words. There’s often a better answer. Use it as needed.As a general rule, use a major or stand-out vocabulary word only once a paragraph, maybe twice a page, and if truly outre, only once per book.

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If you are a writer looking to get published, here are three key resources that will help.

  1. Duotrope: Duotrope is an online database of fiction and poetry publishers (or as they call them in the industry: markets), with tools that allow you to find publishers by genre, length of your work, and more. This is a good first place to go to find relevant publishers. Some publishers aren’t listed, and sometimes whether a given publisher is open or closed to submissions may be slightly out of date. Duotrope also has a weekly email that will alert you to new publishers, or publishers that have recently reopened to submissions.
  2. Pred-Ed: Preditors and Editors is a site that lists publishers and agents, among other things. Ignore the website design (which looks straight out of the mid-1990s), and focus on the recommendations for each agent and publisher. Whereas Duotrope’s Digest offers a comprehensive database of publishers without any information about the quality, Pred-Ed offers recommendations for each one: ranging from “not recommended” to “highly recommended”. The recommendations appear to be primarily based on the relationship to the author: do they treat the author well, honor the contract, have a good contract, etc. When I was looking for markets for my first novel, I read through the entire database of publishers, looking for anything with positive recommendations. I found at least a dozen markets I hadn’t found through Duotrope.
  3. Publisher’s Marketplace: If you’ve got $20 a month to invest in your writing career, subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace for at least a month or two, and sign up for Publisher’s Lunch Deluxe, their daily email. Publisher’s Marketplace is an online database of publishing deals, among other things. A deal consists of an author, an agent, a publisher, and a book title. This means that if you’ve identified books or authors similar to yourself, you can see who their agent is. This is difficult to find anywhere else. 

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A must read for anyone doing creative writing: broca’s ten mistakes of writing. Excerpt from my favorite, the ‘to be’ words:

6. THE ‘TO BE’ WORDS:
Once your eye is attuned to the frequent use of the “to be” words – “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “be,” “being,” “been” and others – you’ll be appalled at how quickly they flatten prose and slow your pace to a crawl.

The “to be” words represent the existence of things – “I am here. You are there.” Think of Hamlet’s query, “to be, or not to be.” To exist is not to act, so the “to be” words pretty much just there sit on the page. “I am the maid.” “It was cold.” “You were away.”

I blame mystery writers for turning the “to be” words into a trend: Look how much burden is placed on the word “was” in this sentence: “Around the corner, behind the stove, under the linoleum, was the gun.” All the suspense of finding the gun dissipates. The “to be” word is not fair to the gun, which gets lost in a sea of prepositions.

Sometimes, “to be” words do earn a place in writing: “In a frenzy by now, he pushed the stove away from the wall and ripped up he linoleum. Cold metal glinted from under the floorboards. He peered closer. Sure enough, it was the gun.” Okay, I’m lousy at this, but you get the point: Don’t squander the “to be” words – save them for special moments.

Not so long ago “it was” *defined* emphasis. Even now, if you want to say, “It was Margaret who found the gun,” meaning nobody else but Margaret, fine. But watch out – “it was” can be habitual: “It was Jack who joined the Million Man March. It was Bob who said he would go, too. But it was Bill who went with them.” Flat, flat, flat.

Try also to reserve the use of “there was” or “there is” for special occasions. If used to often, this crutch also bogs down sentence after sentence. “He couldn’t believe there was furniture in the room. There was an open dresser drawer. There was a sock on the bed. There was a stack of laundry in the corner. There was a handkerchief on the floor….” By this time, we’re dozing off, and you haven’t even gotten to the kitchen.

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Every writer has different techniques to help themselves make time for writing and to keep writing. One technique that many writers seem to use is to write first thing in the morning. They may get up early, or simply make a point that the first productive thing they do is to write.

In my experience, the real benefit I get from this is that it gets my writing back into my active consciousness. I may only write for thirty minutes in that first block before I have to go take care of kids or get to work, but by then I’m excited about my writing, and thinking about what I’m going to write next.

When that happens, I’m really motivated to find some more time to write: maybe during a lull in my day, or over the lunch hour, or even in the evening after my kids are asleep. I’d almost never write during those later parts of the day if I haven’t planted the seeds of what I want to write early in the morning.

So if you are looking for a new technique to help fit in writing, try writing for thirty minutes first thing in the morning. Even if you spend fifteen minutes reacquainting yourself with your plot and characters and only fifteen minutes writing at that first block of writing time, I think you’ll find yourself coming back to your writing again and again during the day.

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Thanks to John D. Brown’s blog post on the role of plot in creating reader suspense, I came across this wonderful excerpt from an interview with Alfred Hitchcock:

“There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. 

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. 

“The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb underneath you and it’s about to explode. 

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.” 

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Author and editor John D. Brown has written a series of articles on creating reader suspense at the Craft of Writing blog at the Science Fiction Writers Association website.

The blog posts are wonderful, however the SFWA site won’t display them in chronological order, forcing you to read them backwards are puzzle through pages of posts. I’ve arranged links to the articles in chronological order below:

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Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands
#indieauthors
St. Ours
Alan J Porter alanjporter.com @alanjporter
Amelia Gray @grayamelia
Timothy Willis Sanders @timothysanders timothypresents.com
  • Have you seen things changing in the publishing world? Does Amazon, Kindle, CreateSpace.
    • It’s become a lot easier to become a known quantity. Historically self-publishing has been looked down upon by traditional press. But in the comic industry, it’s the complete opposite. You have to be self-published, to prove you are committed, you have an audience. That will start to happen in the traditional publishing.
    • I could publish a story in the Missouri Review. maybe 20 people would read it, 10 people would like it, and 5 people would like it enough to seek me out. But if I put it online, I can reach many more people. The old print journals start to lose a little bit of their prestige.
    • The best print journals now have really vibrant web presences now. 
    • My editor contacted me through my web site. I didn’t have an agent. it was totally backwards from the traditional expectation.
  • What successes have you stumbled on?
    • Porter:
      • Different social media places have different audiences. I do promotional stuff on twitter, I do personal stuff, slice of life stuff. I like to keep it a mix. Through it I’ve got to know several editors and people in the publishing industry. When/if I meet these people at a conference, they know who I am, and can put a face to a name.
      • Building relationships both with your readers and the people who publish and distribute your work.
      • I used to blog, but now my blog is more of a static site, and I interact more with people on Twitter
      • Last novella I told was completely because of Twitter: was following a publisher, find out about anthology, and was able to get novella published.
    • Amelia Gray: 
      • Do accept friend requests from everyone, use it to promote stuff and do my business.
    • Willis Sanders:
      • It’s such a new problem: how do I manage my twitter, social media accounts?
      • It’s very different for writers and literature, because so much of what we do is in a very old-school industry. Where else do you study material hundreds of years old.
      • Fiction writers grapple with new technologies in their own fiction. Fiction doesn’t reflect our realities: we’re on Facebook every day, yet Facebook doesn’t make it into fiction. 
  • Do publishers take that following into account? Does it have weight?
    • Gray: The marketing people are obsessed with how many hits my blog gets, what are the search terms, how many followers and friends do I have. (my day job is online marketing/search engine optimization.)
    • Porter: 
      • It’s a great way to study relationships – who does this editor friend? 
      • Too many authors are burning bridges, not realizing that editors are following them. An editor may go from one publisher to another, and you can run into them again and again. 
  • Are writers finding a way to give things away to fans online, the way bands do, and how do publishers respond to that?
    • Publisher (???) has printable books, iPhone app, storigami. They have a huge commitment to design.
    • Publishers and journals don’t like to publish what’s already been published. But there are many online journals/presences that you can be linking to from your own blog.
    • Some of the more forward looking publishers realize the genie is out of the bottle: anything you can find online. 
      • all these books were being bit torrented. so harper collins gave away books for free. which ended up driving more sales of the printed book than before.
    • I took my self-published book, which was $15 for the printed book, and did a $2.99 book on Kindle. It was slow for a while, but sales have taken off, and they’ve even driven up the sales of the printed copy.
    • My main motivation is to have as many people read my stuff as possible. I don’t care how it happens, I just want it to happen.
    • Self-published authors can be book tours and signing. If you can offer a book store an event: a mini-concert plus a reading. Found a local Beatles tribute band to tour and do book signings.
    • Did a cross country book reading tour at bars.
    • Merchandising:
      • Not a lot of writers make T-shirts and buttons, which is something that bands do, which raises money and spreads the world.
    • Of course, it comes down to the work being good.
      • No different than music.
  • Now you can be a full-time author, not being published, just publishing on your own. Will publishing go away?
    • Porter: 
      • Publishing won’t go away entirely. In the end, you still need an editor, a designer, a promoter, and a publisher is still an effective way to get that.
      • What is changing is that publishing is no longer a matter of moving paper around. It’s more about the content than before.
      • Print is still the best user interface around. Books that have great photography and great graphics, I still want in print. The throw away novel I’m going to read once, I am happy to read on my iPad.
    • Gray:
      • The big houses can still afford to pay more, they can hire the best designers, best editors, and they do great stuff. 
      • And they are hiring great experimental people too, doing innovative stuff.
  • Marketing of the book is always going to be a important.
    • Porter:
      • You have to do the marketing yourself, even if it’s a traditional publisher. You have to market the book, and you always have. Now it’s just easier to do. Once upon a time you had to get in the car and drive to every bookstore in the country. Now you can get a national or international following through online tools.
    • Willis Sanders:
      • It’s cool because now the writer has more control. Traditionally, when an indie artist gets popular, their record label starts to focus on what will sell, and the band loses artistic control. Publishing houses are similar: they choose the cover, and the author gets no say.
      • The writer gets more control over the public image of their work.
  • What have you found that hasn’t worked so well?
    • Willis Sanders:
      • Measuring your self-worth by how many twitter followers you have or how many people friend you is a danger
      • Writers are nervous, anxiety ridden people – when they approach social media it can either make them really excited or depressed or both.
    • St. Ours
      • Writers can be slow to adopt social media technology.
      • But once you give them the nudge, they can be eager to adopt.
    • Porter
      • The downside as a writer is that we can look for anything to do besides write: so you can spend all your time on social media, and have no product to promote.
  • Questions
    • Q: There are lots of tools for indie musicians to publish their work and see it rise to the top. e.g. with one site,
      • Fiction audit (fiction off?, can’t find the reference): you put a story up, and people vote on it.
      • Revolutionsf.com
      • There are individual forums and websites that do that.
    • Q: Publishers care deeply about follower count and “platform”. If I have to come with the audience and the content and the legwork, exactly what is the publisher there for?
      • A: Exactly.
      • I’d rather do it on my own terms.
    • Q: What are the terms that make you feel successful?
      • “Success and writer?” do they go together?
      • There are writers with six books and 5,000 followers, and they live in very small apartments.
      • A success is being able to write another book
      • A success is when somebody comes up to me and says thank you.
    • Q: Have you tried giving away first chapters, and then sell the rest? Using the free to sell the non-free?
      • I tried it with one novel, and it bombed. Not sure if that was the writing or the method.
      • But $2.99 is an impulse buy. 
      • Plus with the kindle, you get a free first chapter.
    • Q: Comment from the publishing side: The really great writers are good at building their communities. But you need to find readers outside those communities. You might get 5,000 books from the community, and 15,000 through the curators: NY Times Review.
    • Q: ???
      • An editor is going to read hundreds of manuscripts, and find the one golden one. Writers who are adverse to the online communities can still be successful.