Army Training, Sir!

General Barnicke: Where have you been, soldier?
John Winger: Training, sir.
Soldiers: Training, sir.
General Barnicke: What kind of training?
John Winger: Army training, Sir.
Soldiers: Army training, Sir.

- from the motion picture Stripes

You know, when I entered the Active Duty military as a young second lieutenant, I figured that it was all business, all good soldiering, and there wasn't any of that joking around silly stuff of fiction to be had anywhere, anytime.

Boy, was I wrong.

My second day on actual Active Duty, in fact, is a day I'll remember for a long, long time.  See, I'd shown up the day before, dropped off of the back of a 5-ton truck in the middle of what most Seattle area residents were enjoying as a nice, relaxed snow day, to take charge of a platoon-leaderless platoon of motorized infantrymen doing light infantry maneuvers.  Yes, that all works out to mean that guys who were used to putting their rucksacks in the back seat of a Hummer and driving to the battlefield were ordered, on a day of inclement weather, to put those rucks on their backs, move on foot through thick woods, and close with and destroy enemy forces.

In retrospect, just that last sentence is comical as crap.  Shouldn't be, but it is.

For our first enemy contact, we were crossing a narrow but rapidly-flowing stream that had been covered in snow when an opfor (opposing forces--our own troops playing against us in war games) machine gun (firing blanks) opened up on us.  We closed with and destroyed the position in a suitable timeframe, granted, but not before one of my soldiers slipped and fell directly and completely into the 12-inch-deep stream, causing instant hypothermia followed by a quick Medevac.  *sigh*

Oh, he ended up being just fine, but I wasn't just worried about his welfare.  We'd been told over and over at West Point that a platoon leader whose troops had to be removed due to heat or cold injuries was liable to be removed of leadership on the spot. So there I was, first day on the job, liable for--yeah.  Dang. 

They didn't, though.  Relieve me, that is.  I stayed in charge, and we kept pushing forward to the next objective.  There, we assaulted a hill, again firing blanks, and we successfully took the hill and dug into defensive positions.  Only, then my platoon sergeant needed medical attention, and not due to cold injury. No, he'd consumed too many Cokes in a heated Hummer, and he was dehydrated. 

Double dang.  Crap, even.  Any chance I ever had of becoming a general officer, I saw slipping through the cracks down the mudslide that was the hill we'd taken through the warming snow, and all that on my first day.

The next day dawned cold and crappy, but that is the kind of weather that makes most infantrymen happy.  We rose and left behind the comfort of--um, holes in the dirt--and continued in a southwestward direction toward what was marked as the Final Objective.  I, the newbie platoon leader, was in the middle, the second most senior platoon leader to my left, and the senior PL, the guy ready for another post soon, to my right, all moving steadily through the damp and chilly forest.

It didn't take too long to get there--which I must admit I found a little suspicious at the time.  "Alpha Six," the company radio called out for the my commander, "enemy position spotted to our front.  Sending scout, over," the senior platoon leader to my right said, and wow, I thought--smart man, apparently--I'd had us as not quite there yet according to my own map readings.

Then again, you know what they say about second lieutenants with a map.  If you don't, then go to any web site where there's a lot of derogatory cursing going on, and you'll get the gist.  Despite the weekends I'd spent as a kid with my dad roaming the Tombigbee Forest with a map and a compass, I was supposed to have no idea where I was, as evidenced by the golden bar upon my lapel, and I was fine with that as I waited for instructions to attack from the company commander.


"Alpha Six," an embarrassed voice finally came across the line, "We scouted the enemy position, and found that it is our position from last night."

They'd left our side and land-navigated into a full circle.

*sigh*

I giggled a lot that day, thanks to the confirmation that others were as prone to errors as I was.  More so, even, when it came to land navigation.  In fact, I still giggle about that, today, many years after I left the active duty infantry behind me for good.

A year, ish, later, I had my own Senior Lieutenant moment.  This time we were at Yakima, our major training ground for motorized Fort Lewis troops.  We were playing against an opfor again, and to be honest I was really looking forward to being relieved as a platoon leader by some young butterbar so that I could move up to battalion staff. 

"I see troop movement to the front," one of my squad leaders called, and I relayed that information up to Alpha Six.  I didn't see anything, granted, but I was hunkered down in a Command & Control position near the middle, and the squad leaders, all experienced sergeants, were looking out over the killing field we hoped to command with their night vision sights.

"Keep me informed," my company commander radioed back. 

Some time later--I don't know; it was well into the nighttime hours, and I wasn't watching a clock--the same squad leader reported more troop movement to his front.  I relayed it up, and the company commander radioed back, "Keep me informed."

The third time the squad leader reported movement, it was well into the early morning hours, and so I was tired of the lack of progression.  I raised the platoon radio handset in preparation to order one of the forward troops to get out of their vehicle and check out the movement to the front when another, somewhat more senior, squad leader radioed in.

"You idiot, those are cows," the rebuke came clearly across the platoon's frequency.

Dutifully, I reported the cows up to the company commander.  After all, I wanted him to get whatever rest--and, um, giggles--he could, right?

In the morning I asked him whether he'd relayed the cows report to battalion.  "Nope, didn't have the courage," he said, and that made me laugh.

Hey, at least I had the courage to report the cows.

The strange, writer-centric part of this?  If I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't believe the incredible humor that was part of the service lifestyle.  Too often we writers get drawn into ideas about how things should be instead of how things are, and we forget that real life is way, way stranger than any fiction we can create.

Enjoy!

- TOSK

The Absence of Noise

"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers." - Doug Larson

How strange our language is, to define certain things as the absence of other things.

I'm specifically thinking of the word quiet, which is defined by Ye Olde Dictionary as the absence of noise.  Noise--yes, that can be defined, and pointed to; we all know noise when we hear it.  Right?  But quiet?  It's--well, um, it's the lack of, um, well, it's, I guess, it's the lack of noise.

See what I mean?

There are any number of sonic physical definitions we could come up with.  After all, sound is merely a vibration in the air around us, and that is easily measured in terms of decibels.  I suppose one could--and, now that I think on it, someone probably already did--specify "quiet" as a certain number of dBs.  Still, that seems a waste, since few of us carry dB-meters around with us.

That said, we all know what quiet sounds like, right?

Quiet's certainly not the only word that's defined like that.  Take my own pastime, writing.  It's got an entire category of genres--and here I refer to non-fiction--that is defined by what it is not.  Fiction is fairly well defined; it is prose that's imaginary, made up, false.  Romance, for example, is fiction (take that for what it's worth).  The same is true of science fiction, but I suppose that one was too obvious.

So the antonym, or opposite meaning word, of fiction is truth, right?  Problem is, that space in the bookstore contains far too many books by folks like Rush Limbaugh to be called "The Truth Section."  Thus, I imagine its title is the result of a bookseller of old nodding at it and saying, "Forsooth, verily, I supposeth that yon volumes be not entirely made up."  Not Entirely Made Up is too long a title for that area, though.

Hence, the non in non-fiction.

But I digress.

I've written about quiet before.  Then, it wasn't completely quiet; I was actually surrounded by the beautiful crescendo of a natural wooded environment awakening for a splendid fall morning.  This morning, on the other hand, the lack of noise was pretty much complete.

I awoke to a power outage.

I didn't realize it at first.  Upon my eyes fluttering to their open position, I noticed a couple of things in rapid succession.  The first was that it seemed quiet--but then again, it was morning in our new Mobile, Alabama, home, a solidly brick house with a decent quantity of sound-proofing.  Second, my bladder was full, full, full.  The second sensation rapidly overwhelmed the first, and so I staggered toward the bathroom along a path I'd already walked a few times that was luckily rather well back-lit by the morning sun streaming through the open window shade.

As usual, I closed the bathroom door first so as to not disturb my beautiful wife's slumber, and only when the door latch caught did I flip the light switch to its on position.

Nothing happened.

Now, I wasn't entirely awake yet.  That, and my mind was occupied in dealing with the screaming sensation coming from my bladder.

Slowly it dawned on me that what should've happened--a bathroom appearing before my very eyes--hadn't, and that could only mean one of two things: either the bathroom had been taken away in the middle of the night, or the light switch was broken.  So I did the only thing any sane person would do: I reached over, flipped the light switch back off, and then moved it back up again.

Again I was shocked by the amount of nothingness that happened.

By this point I was coming out of my morning stupor enough to wonder if it could be a power thing--I didn't take those electrical engineering classes at West Point for nothing, after all--but also by this point my bladder was starting to wrap itself around my entire abdominal cavity and do its best boa constrictor impersonation.  Luckily I knew pretty much where the toilet was, and I'd learned a secret trick long ago that drastically improves my aim first thing in the morning, especially in the dark. 

(don't tell anyone, but I'll share it with you--the secret trick is called sitting down.  I manage to avoid hitting the seat and the floor 100% of the time when I do that little amazing trick--just, never in public.  I am, after all, a manly man)

Bladder finally satisfied, I sallied forth to discover the extent of the not-noise.  Our bedroom ceiling fan was off, I noticed for the first time.  It's almost always on, and though it's not a noisy one, its soft shwoop-shwoop is noticeable in its absence, once you--um, notice it.  The main bathroom similarly didn't have any light no matter how many times the switch was flicked.  Every appliance in the kitchen was dark, and even the little guy in the refrigerator refused to turn that light on when I opened the door.

Definitely, the power was out, I realized as I closed the refrigerator door.  See how much good that excellent EE education I received was doing for me?

I tried using the spiffy cell phone app the power company has to check it.  Problem is, Mississippi Power and Alabama Power are so close together--literally--that they use the same system, apparently, and so when I signed in I got a "well, of course your power is out; your account was closed five years ago," message.  No, no, no--not that account in Biloxi, this one here in Mobile, I told my cell phone, which for once didn't prove itself smarter than me.

Finally I called the actual phone number, and right away they told me that there was, in fact,a power outage, and that crews were working on it, and that power was expected to be restored within a couple of hours.

Ahhhhh, I was finally able to say.  Coming up: a couple hours of--well, of quiet, and today I'm working the late shift and don't have to be in till afternoon, which meant that I could enjoy the entirety of it.

What was I to do?

Sleep, was the obvious answer, and so I did the only sane thing I could think of.  I went back to bed.

Have a great day, and--oh, by the way, have a great 2015!

- TOSK

Oh Facebook! My Facebook!

Well, hell's bells.

Crap.

I mean, it was just getting safe to come right out in public and opine that maybe a certain large retail web site isn't gonna to punch us authors in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport, what after all the uber-sales authors got in the middle of what was essentially a contract negotiation between them and a major publisher, which finally ended after the giant retailer embarrassed the snot out of the other side by happily coming to terms with someone else, which made the other publisher whimper up to the table and the mega-sales authors run a full-page ad asking the DoJ for--um, something--and everybody finally SHUT UP about it and then finally the whole angry, disastrous mess came to an end just like this overly long run-on sentence is doing.

Now it's Facebook's turn to poke the bear, apparently.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the big evil giant of a bad-man corporation is out to punch entrepreneurs in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport (sound familiar?).  Or, at least, take our advertising money for, um, revenue.

Yes, Facebook!  My Facebook has announced that commercial operations have to pay to play, now.  Or will, then, in the near future, anyway.  Which means, I assume (they haven't, near as I can tell, released a description of their actual algorithm yet, nor are they likely to), that people are far less likely to see what I put on my author FB page unless I pay to Boost the post, in which case they're actually more likely to see it.  Which is, um, how advertising is supposed to work, by the way.

Which, I think, ain't all that bad of a thing.

Look, here's how I see it.  If you want to see what's on my author page, go look.  Please; I'd love for more people to do that.  In fact, I'm about to start putting even more stuff up there, considering the tremendous success I had through NaNoWriMo with activity.  To tell the truth, I'm'a gonna start havin' some fun. But that said, if you don't want to see what's on my author page, then you must be insane you shouldn't have it stuck in your timeline.  Shouldn't, that is, unless you've identified yourself as someone who likes the kind of stuff that's on my author page, and I've paid Facebook to run a targeted ad in the hopes of getting your attention. Which is, again I say, how advertising is supposed to work.

Yes, I'm an author--an authorpreneur, as I've been referring to myself since--well, quite some time ago.  I'm also a Facebook user, though, and to be perfectly honest, the number of times I interact with authorly stuff  on FB is pretty minimal.  Oh, I've bought a couple of books thanks to interactions on FB, but usually I'm on there just trying to convince my friends of the opposite political persuasion that I'm right and they're wrong, or posting pretty little pictures of my Chihuahua, or stuff like that. 

And the thing is, I bet you are, too.

The part of FB's message that is being forgotten, or ignored, by so many folks right now is that "Facebook’s paid-advertising options have become more effective recently," a claim that I, personally, have seen.  My Thanksgiving promotion was wildly successful, in fact, in large part thanks to a simple and fairly cheap Facebook ad. 

A friend of mine wrote (in a massively-popular Facebook post about, of all things, Facebook's new policy) something to the effect of "I'm sure, if you complain loudly enough, Facebook will refund every penny you've ever paid for your free advertising."  Zing.  That's a tad snarky, perhaps, but the core is something I agree with wholeheartedly.  Facebook created for us a social media platform, somewhere we could go for free and post pictures of weddings and weedings and kittens and puppies and everything in between.  Yay, them!  That some were able to tap into it for a free advertising platform is good for them, but there's no reason to expect the practice to continue.

Anyway, there's an awful lot of opinion flowing around out there.  Assuming you made it this far, then you've now read mine.  Feel free to share yours in the comments; I love hearing from you! 


Peace,

- TOSK

NaNoWriMo: Done

NaNoWriMo is done for another year!  Woo hoo!  I mean darn!   I mean yay!  I mean aww shucky rootbeer float!

Mixed emotions are overflowing here.

So, remember that post two days ago? You know, the one on November 29th where I said "*yawn* I can do it, but I don't think I will, because I don't really care enough."  Well, not those exact words, but close, anyway.  Yeah, I did say that.  Right smack in the middle of the day before the final day of NaNo, I threw in the towel.

Unfortunately--well, or fortunately, I suppose--my blog posts are shared on my web site automatically, and a couple of my fans/readers/friends/coolashellpeeps said "Oh, no you don't."  They poked me, and to be honest it didn't take much to get my writerly engine going again. 

Hey, when it comes to writing prose, I'm a cheap date, so to speak.

So yeah, I put 3K words onto the 6K words I'd already written that day, and added another 10K words on November 30th, and poof, I became a Winner.  A rather sore-fingered Winner, but a Winner nonetheless.

I still don't really care.  I got a cool graphic.  Woo hoo!  The prize I really wanted for winning was the cool discount on Scrivener, but since I already got that and bought the software when I won in 2012, this one is--pointless.

Well, no, it's really not pointless, come to think on it.  I did get a draft done, sort of.  I mean, it's not done.  It's a solid story behind all the writing, and it's going to be well over 50K words when I label the draft as actually done.  In fact, it's going to be well over double that, and likely triple that.  So, yeah, I still have a lot of prose to fill in. 

But you know what?  It's started.  It's ended, too.  The skeleton of the plot is there, and all the people are there.  The hard part's done, so yay!  Go, NaNo!

A good friend (who, admittedly, I've never met, and it's just as likely we'd hate each other if we did, but hey, he's a guy whose blog posts I like) wrote a post lining out exactly how I feel about it, and what to do about that as well.  I'm not gonna repeat it, of course, in part because you're here to read my writing, not his, and also because I'm scared he could send his penmonkeys out after me for copyright infringement, or something. 

Anyway, go read it here:  Chuck Wendig's beautiful but NSFW piece on why NaNoWriMo doesn't matter  

(I do have to quote one line of his: "Because now it’s NaEdYoShi month — National Edit Your Shit Month."  Isn't that beautiful?  Brought a tear to my eye, it did.)

Now, once you're done with that, here was my response in one of the NaNo groups I'm in:  

I--I gotta stop for a while, man. No, not stop writing, I mean stop drafting. I have 2007's NaNoLoser, 2012's NaNoWiener, 2013's NaNoWiener, and now 2014's NaNoWiener, in addition to two other drafts, sitting on my stinking hard drive (yes, and backed up in Google Docs) waiting on my tender slash-and-crash revision love. Even Scrivener is looking at me like "you better slow down, man."

So, yeah.  The reason I've only put out one book this year is that I've written and revised and worked on other projects, but you can plan on this spring bringing two, if not three or four, new Stephen H. King novels to market.  

Yay!

Anyway, for those who just won NaNo--congrats!  For those who didn't make it to 50K words--congrats!  'Cause, right now, what matters is that you wrote something in November.  Awesome work, all!

- TOSK

NaNoWriMo - November 29th and Counting

Yay, NaNoWriMo is almost over!

Oh, crap--that means NaNoWriMo is almost over. 

Yes, I know that sounded redundant, but those of you who've done this extreme writing sport will get the difference.

And nope, I'm probably not going to win NaNo this year.

I mean, look, I know I could.  Win it, that is.  I'm currently at 37K words, ish, I can probably write 13K words in a single day; heck, I've written 15K words in a single day before.  So with a long, long day tomorrow of blasting through words, I could win.

That, or I could cheat.  See, I used to teach software tricks for a living.  Back when it was Excel 5, I could show you how to get into the flight simulator.  Or, was it a maze?  I can't recall any more, and any copies of that software have long since been relegated to the trash heap.  But yeah, I used to know all the tricks, and even today I know most of them.

Microsoft Word has something ready-made for the NaNo'er who wants to win no matter what.  It's the randomizer function.  Back in the old days, it used to give you x number of "The quick brown fox jumps over..." sentences in y number of paragraphs, which generates a crapton of words in mere moments.  Later they changed it to create a bunch of Latin wordsmut, but these days it's just boring Help tutorial words.  It's still x number of sentences in y number of paragraphs, though, and the command looks like this:

=rand(x,y)

G'head, try it.  Open a blank document and type it in there, only replacing x and y with numbers.  Turns out I need an x of 25 and a y of 30 to finish my NaNoNovel right now.  In fact, with an x of 100 and a y of 100, I can get over 200K words, composed in about 30 seconds.  Woo hoo!  A whole novel, written in 14 keystrokes (fifteen, technically, since we should count the pressing of the Enter key after).

How's that for automation, eh?

Only, it's not a story.  It's just words.  They're not fun to read.  There's really no reason to even waste the bits on my computer, much less pages on a printer, on drivel like that.  So yeah, just--.

No.

I'm simply not gonna do it.

That's not to say my story isn't worth finishing, mind you.  It's a pretty awesome story, with a pretty awesome protagonist who's going through some pretty horrible stuff right now as I write one of the pivotal chapters.  I'm really enjoying writing this, to tell the truth.

The thing is, there's plenty I can blame my not winning NaNoWriMo on.  Most of it is external, too.  But you know what?  The only person who really cares whether I win NaNo or not is me, anyway.  Those who read my books don't care; they just (generally) want me to get more out there to read as quickly as possible.  Which is, I have to add real quickly, part of why I stopped blogging so much--I've been focusing on getting drafts done.

But this manuscript takes some effort, and some research, and some harsh emotional trauma, to finish.  I was in tears a little earlier, in fact, writing about--well, no plot spoilers here.  Later, when you read the book, you'll know it when you see it.

So, sorry, but I probably won't be a 2014 NaNoWriMo winner. 

Ah, well.  You're really going to like this story, anyway.

- TOSK

The Cover Counts!

I'm so excited!

Most of you reading this know that I've been pretty proud of the learning curve I've beaten down in regards to making my own covers for the books.  What started as a pretty pitiful attempt has, I think, gotten better and better, to the point where the cover for Prophecy had some people oohing and ahhing at RavenCon.  And so, I was happy.

Prophecy has been well reviewed, too--three of the four reviews to date come from the pros, bloggers who just review books.  4.5 bits of happiness out of 5 ain't bad, then.

So why, then, wasn't it selling?

One of the things I remember learning from my marketing class in the MBA program was that if stuff isn't working--well, change it.  Do something.  So I started looking, and kept hanging back on where one of the reviewers had called my cover "confusing."

Huh?  Confusing?  Hey, I didn't count, but I'm pretty sure I spent well over 100 hours on it.  I'm not confused.  Still, I wondered what that could mean, so I went to my friends on Facebook for their wisdom, and learned that the reviewer was right.  The cover was confusing.  My daughter, beautiful artist that she is, focuses on anime style, and so the cover suggested an anime type of story rather than the coming-of-age story set in a mystical land of elves that it is.

Oh--yeah--blinding flash of the obvious--I sees it now.

So I redesigned it quickly, working with just the graphic of an object that is central to the story, and it still didn't take off.

*sigh*

Enter my friend, Renee Barratt, of TheCoverCounts.com.  Once I'd finally admitted that I couldn't make a

cover good enough to wrap around the awesome story inside the book, I asked her for help.  She stepped up in a big way, I think, and I'm excited to brag that today the new cover stands proudly on the "shelf" of Amazon.com, looking for you to purchase it!

Click on the link below the cover image to go see it.  Oh, and as a special thankfulness kinda thing, it being that week and all, I'm lowering the price to just $0.99--less than the cost of a soda.  But you have to be quick, as Amazon will only let me do that for a short period of time.

Get the book at Amazon.com

Enjoy!

- TOSK

NaNoWriMo: More On Plotting

More on plotting....

Or is that moron plotting?  C'mon, go with me here....

As I sit ready for an explosion of Trick-or-Treaters to come by, and also checking regularly to see my classmates' pictures on Facebook as they all (but me) enjoy the 25th reunion of The West Point Class of 1989, I can't help but think on past and future and present and plotting and--well, stuff.

See, the reason I'm not there is that I haven't yet found another job after my position was eliminated last spring.  I've come awfully close.  I've turned down a couple that weren't good fits.  I've taken one, briefly, that I should'a turned down.  I have things working--irons in the fire, so to speak--and I'm thinking my situation is about to change. It just didn't change in time to make the reunion. 

 Ah, well, there's always Facebook, right?

Through the (seemingly) countless job interviews, though, it's been interesting how many times I've been asked questions beginning with "Why did you...."  Why did I leave Alaska?  Why did I leave Biloxi after only a year?  Why did I go to Richmond?  Why did I approach a retention problem the way I did?  Why would a college think that laying off an Academic Dean was a good idea? 

I have to come up with an answer that is truthful while still being positive and upbeat and professional.  I can't, in other words, say what I'd like to say sometimes: "Well, I made what was, in retrospect, a dumb-ass move."

Actually, I can.  I did, in fact, once when I was feeling overly tired.  Not in those specific words, but it was about that level of humph.  And, as you can imagine, it went over like an audible expulsion of human gaseous waste during a religious ceremony.  *sigh*

But it happens, and it happens to everybody.  We all do stuff--in our personal lives as well as our professional lives--that, later on, would be rather tough to explain in a positive, professional manner in a job interview.   Right? 

I've said other dumb things, too.  I nearly had one position; I'd already interviewed with a couple of recruiters, several executives, and others, and was on my very last interview, talking to the guy who was going to be my future boss.  Only, I had an absolutely craptastical morning, and wasn't at my top game, and (insert any other excuse you'll grace me with here), and he asked me what I did to relieve stress.  Now, I could've truthfully answered all sorts of ways.  I take my family on walks in the park.  I listen to music.  I play computer games.  I write.  And I actually did say: "Well, I write."  That wasn't the most targeted response, since the guy I was talking to was more of an athletic sort, but it would've been fine if I hadn't added, "I like to write so that I can kill people."

The silence that ensued was absolutely chilling.

Now, wait a sec--this is something we writers joke about all the time.  Somebody ticks us off, they're going to get killed off in our next writing session.  You just have to expect that, if you do something to make a writer angry.  You won't feel any effects, of course; it's pure stress relief for the fiction writer.  After all, it is, in fact, only fiction.

That said, writers shouldn't ever talk about that outside of writing circles.  Especially not on a job interview, where the guy at the other end of the phone is immediately going to put you in the bin with Freddy Krueger.  Bad, bad, bad TOSK....

No, I didn't get that job; it was filled by "another candidate."  Probably one who didn't admit to writing for the purpose of killing people, I'd say.  Life is like that sometimes, right?

So what does this have to do with plotting?  Well, see, I've always had this problem.  I'm writing along, and my main character really needs to do something stupid to advance the plot line, and I don't want to do it.  It's stupid, after all.  Who does stupid stuff?  Who blurts stupid stuff out at the wrong time?

Oh, right--I do.

I do it all the time.

Why, then, wouldn't main characters behave just as stupidly as I have on my worst days?

I--um--well, I just don't know.

- TOSK