Into the Wind

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From a scientific pespective, sailing is one of the most peculiar modes of transportation ever invented. Powered entirely by the wind, a sailing ship is able to move in a direction contrary to the one in which that very wind is headed. It derives from a balance of forces, some of which you can’t even see.[1]Sloop Reliance on a close reach
Consider the case where a captain wishes to take his ship to a harbor in the west, but the wind is blowing towards the east.[2]  If he were facing directly into the wind, it would blow him backwards, away from his goal. By facing to the southwest, however, he places his sail at a diagonal to the wind. The wind pressing on this sail tries to push it east, but is opposed by the keel underneath, pressing on the water through which it flows. The only way that ship can move is in the direction it is facing, and so it does.

After a while, however, you find that the ship is headed south of the target, and your southwest progress isn’t getting you any closer to the goal. At this point (or sooner, if you run out of open water), the captain turns to the northwest.  Each stretch of diagonal sailing is called a “tack”.  No single tack can carry the ship to its intended goal, but taken in sum, she will eventually reach port.

The same principle is true in a well-drafted scene. As an author, we want to bring our protagonist from point A to point B. The antagonist opposes this goal, and introduces conflict. Through the twists and turns of your plot, you tack, carrying the reader ever closer to the end of the tale. And the ever-changing view is what makes your story interesting.

This may, in fact, be the one time when it’s a good idea for your story to be tacky.

[1]Photograph of Sloop Reliance from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID det.4a15401 via Wikimedia Commons.
[2]This is a bit of an oversimplification.  Depending on the wind, nearby coastal obstructions, and the need for speed, the captain may choose anywhere from a close hauled point of sail (as close as you can go to facing into the wind without stalling out) and a beam reach (which gains you no progress upwind, but may give you lateral room for another tack), but in general one will select a close reach, which is somewhere in between. As a metaphor, however, I find it sufficient.

A Curse Re-Moved

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Josh was a curse to every sports team he had ever liked. Not that he was much of a sports fan. At first, he was the exact opposite. They never would have known he was a curse if he hadn’t been such a geek for math and science.

The first hint of his curse came when Josh was eleven, and his father signed him up for little league. He was assigned to the Tigers. They gave him a shirt and hat with the team logo on it. Mr. Bryant, their coach, called the team together before their first game.

“Boys,” he said, “we’re here to learn baseball and to have a good time. We want everyone to learn and have a good time, so everybody plays on this team.”

Josh had a strong arm, so Mr. Bryant let him play third base. In the first inning, a ball bounced off his glove towards the mound. Nick Wilson, who was pitching, stepped on it and twisted his ankle. He couldn’t play again for three weeks. The Tigers lost, 4-3.Fenway Park At-Bat

“Winning would have been more fun,” said Mr. Bryant’s son, Tommy.

“You can learn a lot from losing, too,” said Mr. Bryant.

The day before their second game, Mr. Bryant worked on batting with them.

“You’re all good batters,” he said. “Let’s see if we can have everyone get a hit tomorrow night.”

In that game, the Tigers were shut out. Josh got on base when he was hit by a pitch, but the batter behind him hit into a double play. They lost, 7-0.

“Even the best hitters get out most of the time,” said Mr. Bryant.

Before the third game, Mr. Bryant said, “Every one of you get out there and do your best.”

Vinnie Cepeda and Tommy Bryant were both doing their best when they ran into each other while chasing down a fly ball. Tommy broke his glasses, and the batter got an inside-the-park home run. The Tigers lost, 4-1.

On the day of their fourth game, the sky was dark with clouds.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” said Mr. Bryant.

It didn’t rain. In the bottom of the first inning, the Tigers scored three runs, taking a two-run lead. All the boys were excited, and then it started to hail. The hailstones were big, and they dented the cars in the parking lot. Josh was batting at the time, and a hailstone cracked his batting helmet.  They called off the game.

“I hope they can get the dents out of my car,” said Mr. Bryant.

The rest of the season was just as bad. Every boy on the team had talent, and everyone played hard, but they just couldn’t seem to win. Sometimes the wind would change direction just when an outfielder was trying to track a fly ball, and he would miss it. Routine ground balls would take a funny hop and skip through a player’s legs. Star second baseman Ted Archer threw past the outstretched glove of the first baseman, twice, in a single inning. It was unreal.

The curse wasn’t limited to his own team, either. When Josh was there, opposing-team batters who didn’t have a hit all season would suddenly go 3-for-4 with two doubles, and their fielders would make spectacular diving catches all over the park. Once, with the bases loaded and no one out, the Padres’ shortstop turned a sure-thing base hit into an unassisted triple play. The Tigers lost that game, 5-4.

The next year, Josh proved that he didn’t need to be playing the game to curse a team he loved. Five lost games into the season, Josh sprained his ankle in a skateboarding accident, and had to stay home. The Tigers won their next three games. The streak ended when Josh came to watch from the stands. Ace pitcher Jimmy Cronin took a line drive in the shoulder in that game, and was done for the season. The Tigers lost, naturally. When the season ended, Josh quit playing baseball.  He decided to watch sports, instead.

The next fall, his big brother Jeremy moved up to the varsity football squad. Josh was excited to see his brother play for the Wildcats, who had won the state championship the year before. With Josh in the stands, though, they lost nine games that year. Their one victory was in November, when Josh had a bad case of strep throat and had to stay home. Jeremy caught two touchdowns in that game. He came home and told his little brother about it.

“Why can’t you play like that when I’m there to see it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Jeremy replied. “Maybe you’re cursed.”

Jeremy had only meant it as a joke, but it set Josh to thinking. He decided to test it with an experiment.
Always more of a reader than an athlete, Josh surprised everyone in the family by becoming a sports fan. Lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, even golf – Josh would watch them all. Wherever he went, the person or team he was cheering for would lose. Josh kept careful notes of every game in a notebook he carried with him.

Jeremy, who didn’t really believe that his brother was cursed, was helped by his brother’s busy schedule. Playing with just his parents in the stands, he became a star. Three years later, he earned a football scholarship and went to Springfield College to study sports medicine.

Josh, for his own part, had learned a lot from his experiments. For one thing, he learned that his curse didn’t work over television. If he watched the game from home, sometimes the team he cheered for would win, and sometimes not. If he was there in person, though, they lost every time.

He also learned that it really was the team he cheered for, not the team he came to see. One year, he started attending football games for their rival, Brockton High, just to cheer for the team they were playing against that week. Brockton went undefeated that season. Things didn’t change much at college, either. His favorite teams changed, but they kept on losing. And then, in 2008, it happened.

Jeremy, who was working that year as an assistant trainer for the New England Patriots, managed to buy two tickets to the Super Bowl, and gave them to his father. Josh didn’t think it was a good idea, but hey, it was the Super Bowl, and the Patriots were undefeated. They flew out to Phoenix, prepared to see history being made.

Well, you know what happened. Patriots’ cornerback Asante Samuel missed an interception that would have won the game. Giants’ wide receiver David Tyree made that spectacular catch off his helmet to keep going after fourth and long, and then Plaxico Burress caught the winning touchdown pass. They sure saw history, just not the history they had expected.

Later that year, Josh came over to his brother’s apartment to apologize. His sister, Jennifer, was there, too.

“I’m sorry I made the Patriot’s lose,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” asked Jeremy.

“I’m cursed, just like you said I was.”

“You told him he was cursed?” asked Jennifer.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jeremy. “There’s no such thing as a curse, and if there was, it wouldn’t be Josh.”

“I can prove it,” said Josh, and he pulled out his little notebook. He had been to more than 200 different games, every one a loss for the team he supported. Nobody could argue with evidence like that.

“That’s bad,” said Jeremy.

“Maybe you should stop watching sports,” said Jennifer.

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” asked Josh. “Once I convinced myself that there really was a curse, I wanted to stop, but life is just so boring if I can’t go to a game now and then.”

“Can’t you watch from home?” she asked.

“It’s just not the same.”

Jeremy had to agree with his brother about that, but he wanted to know how bad it really was.

“Josh, you remember what happened to the Red Sox last summer?”

“How can I forget it?” he replied. “We had more players on the disabled list than most teams had players.”

“Did you go to any of those games?”

“Only about twenty, why?”

Jeremy groaned. If he didn’t do something, they wouldn’t see another sports championship, ever.

“Little brother,” he said, “we need to move you to a different city.”

“Do you think I can find a job somewhere else?”

“With your math skills, no problem,” said Jennifer.

“The big question,” said Jeremy, “is which team is going to get cursed. Do you have a favorite sport these days?”

“I like them all, but baseball is really my favorite.”

“How about moving to New York?” said Jennifer. “Maybe you could become a Mets’ fan.”

“After what they did to us in the ’86 World Series, I guess they deserve it,” said Jeremy.

“It’s too risky,” said Josh.

“What do you mean?”

“I might be tempted to go to a Yankees’ game.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“The team I cheer for always loses.”

Jennifer opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. Curse or no curse, there was no way she would ever ask her brother to become a Yankees’ fan.

“Then it’s agreed,” said Jeremy. “Josh can’t move to New York. But I think you had a good idea, Jenny. We need to send Josh some place that has a National League team, so he won’t be as tempted to cheer for the Sox.”

“We also need to find a home team that he’d be willing to cheer for,” Jennifer added. “Do you really like baseball best, even after all those tragic games in little league?”

“Definitely,” said Josh. “It’s the math. You know, batting averages, ERA, all that stuff. Still, if I’m going to move, I want to cheer for a quality team, one with history.”

Jeremy’s eyes went wide. “I have just the place for you,” he said.

Two weeks later, Jeremy and Jennifer moved their brother to Chicago. He got a job doing math for one of the big insurance companies, and he really likes it. To top it off, Chicago is heaven for anyone who loves sports.

Sometimes, Josh goes to see the Bulls, or the Bears, or even the Blackhawks. He loves them all, and baseball more than any of them. Every year, Jeremy and Jennifer get together to buy him a block of baseball tickets for his birthday – eight different home games in July and August. They even fly out to join him when they can.

Wrigley field is still the most beautiful field in baseball, and the fans there are some of the best in sports. Josh has such a great time, he doesn’t even seem to mind that the Cubs lose every game he goes to see.

Maybe that’s why none of the other fans have noticed, either.

Hardwood Gaming

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A friend once told me that it is not so much the big events that our children will remember as they grow, but the longstanding traditions.  For me, the best-held tradition is without question Sunday dinner. I don’t mean the meal, though my food preferences still lean towards the New England style I grew up with.  I refer instead to the hour or two of family time I had each week before that meal was served.cribbage

Every Sunday after church, my grandfather came over for dinner.  I don’t recall what my siblings did during those hours, but he and I spent them playing games.  Occasionally it was checkers or something else, but mostly I recall cribbage.  Unless you’re a Red Sox fan, you probably haven’t even seen a cribbage board, but we played endless matches.  As I grew older, I was even able to win some.  And I my head still resounds with the count.

Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, and a pair is eight.  Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, fifteen-eight, and a double-double run of sixteen makes twenty-four.  The occasional fifteen-two and let your voice fall.  And once, in all those games, twenty-eight, a single-point short of the perfect hand.  I remember dumping a pair into my grandfather’s final crib in the hope that I could count out before he ever got to see them, knowing that as dealer he was guaranteed at least one point for last card.  It was strategy.  It was probability.

It was relationship.

My children grew up a hundred miles or more from their grandparents, and we never made Sunday dinner a tradition. Sandwiched between homework and the press of outside commitments, even our family supper hour is rushed.   And we stopped playing games back when Arthur and Candy Land grew old.  Is it because they feel unfairly challenged?  I don’t know, but I’m confident they could beat me today if they had taken up the challenge in their youth, as I did.

It’s too bad Minecraft graphics make me feel nauseous, because that might be the best way to interact with the next generation these days.

Exercise Beyond Futility

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Frank used to be an engineer, like me.  Mechanical.  He worked at the Arsenal years ago, where they built that “bunker buster” bomb that helped win the first Gulf War.  The one where we were the good guys, defending Kuwait from aggression.  He told me his story as we walked the treadmills at cardiac rehab.

It’s what we do at rehab, swap stories.  There are a lot of stories in that room, earned during the active lives of men decades older than I.  Those who aren’t talkers usually have their wives in the waiting room, and I hear stories from them.  I learn how this one had a double bypass; that one, congestive heart failure.  We talk about treatments, and medications, and side effects.  I talk about my stent, and they marvel at how quickly a man can return to full activity after a heart attack these days.  “You look so good,” they say, and I thank them.  What else can I do?

Because I don’t feel so good, some days, and it never feels like full activity.  The nurse said I could push it this week, and I made it up to 4.3 miles per hour for half of my twenty minutes on the treadmill.  4.3 used to be my resting pace, for times when I couldn’t run any farther.  These days, I don’t run at all, and I haven’t even mowed the lawn myself in a month and a half..  I used to get up early on my days off to write; today, I get up early to take my meds, and stay up because I refuse to let my body stop me, even if my efforts lead to no more than a dozen words.

The restrictions placed upon me by the world seem worse by far than those imposed by my body.  I needed a doctor’s note just to return to my desk job, and now I find I will need a second note before they will let me travel by air for a customer meeting.  I monitor my eating of salt, of fats, of cholesterol, not because my blood pressure or cholesterol levels were high before my heart attack, but because people I love will worry if I don’t.  And I take my meds twice a day, every day, without fail, knowing my body will warn me if I forget, because I feel pretty good if I forget.  My heart rate is suppressed, my blood pressure low, and I feel best when they let me drive them back up through exercise.Piper_Super_Cub_N158FJ_02

I am pounding away on the exercise bike when Frank walks up to tell me about his loss.  He used to be a private pilot, he said. The Arsenal had a fleet of planes at its disposal, and they let their Aviation club borrow them for the cost of fuel and maintenance.  Frank describes them for me:  Cessna’s and a Piper Super Cub, and other planes whose names I don’t recognize.  Frank loved to fly, but they won’t let him do it any more. After his heart attack, they wouldn’t let him renew his license.  That seems deeply sad to me, but Frank seems happy just to share his story with me.  And I’m glad he can be happy.

At the same time, I’m not Frank. He is retired, and if he wants to sit and talk, or read, or watch TV, he can do so at his leisure.  I have a job, and a mortgage to pay, and two kids to put through college.  I have twenty years before I get to where he stands today, and stories to write before I get there.  So I’ll write my dozen words, and a dozen more after that.  I’ll go to rehab and work until I can run again.  I’ll work until I can mow the lawn, and shovel snow in the winter, and hike the Adirondacks with my wife.  And I’ll get that second doctor’s note.

I’m going to fly.

Photo “Piper Super Cub N158FJ” by Ad Meskens (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Opening Lines

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Like God Himself[1], a strong opening line foretells the end of the story, though we may not see it at the time.  This is in addition to the standard requirements that the opening paragraph needs to introduce a character in conflict, and my personal requirement that an SF opening should give some indication of the speculative context of the story.  For novel-length fiction, I think Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the gold standard[2]:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

In twenty-three words, Austen establishes the primary concern of her novel:  marriage and the assumptions that people make concerning it.  I have often heard women talk about the limited choices a woman was given in the period in which Austen wrote, and as a male reader I am immediately drawn to the way she demonstrates an equivalent way her society was manipulating men.  Since this is a novel-length work, Austen is able to focus on theme rather than conflict in her opening sentence.  For short fiction, one must necessarily move more rapidly, as in Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber:

“It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.”

Here I find an off-screen event has left the main characters in conflict between what they know has happened (Macomber is a coward) and what they are willing to admit.  This mirrors the ending, where we are left with a different conflict regarding Macomber’s death and the accident the remaining characters are willing to admit.

For my personal story, I think I must instead reach back to a story I like less, but which has no less of a great opening line, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…”

The Worst of Times

Thanks to some unexpected health issues, I find myself limited in stamina, and have had to exert myself to meet my minimum weekly obligations here and on Critters.  I have in fact written very little in the past month, and have finished nothing.  And while I hold high hopes for my friends in NaNoWriMo this year, I am not even going to attempt it myself.

This persistent state of exhaustion has led me to delay the second part of The Hard Work of Sex Equality in Fiction, which I had planned to post as soon as I finished one of my stories-in-progress with a female protagonist.  I have tried multiple times, but find myself unable to sustain the energy level needed to hear their voices and write their words. Until I can actually do this, I cannot possibly tell you what I learned while doing it, so you’re going to have to wait.  Fear not, however, you are not forgotten.

The Best of Times

Enter the greatest opening line which I, in my humble-yet-accurate opinion, have ever penned:

Fifteen meters is a long way to fall, even in Martian gravity.

I  have lamented in the past the difficulties I have had selling The Clouds of Mount Olympus, from which this quote is taken.  A big piece of my sadness is this opening line, which introduces risk (conflict) and setting without beating you over the head with either.  Most of the time I find myself needing complex or compound sentences to establish conflict and context right away.

Clouds was first rejected in 2011, but I kept plugging away, leveraging Duotrope to find new venues who had not yet considered this story.  Ten days before my heart attack, I applied Andrea’s Rule to this piece and sent it out to Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi.  And it sold.

The Clouds of Mount Olympus is scheduled for inclusion in the November issue.  They let you read things from their site for free, but if you like what you see you should really send them some money to keep them in business. They take all major credit cards and Paypal.

… And it Gets Better

This past weekend, I received an email from an assistant editor of Asimov’s, telling me that she would like to purchase “IT Came From Outer Space.”  I shouted to my wife so loudly she thought I was having another heart attack.  Yes, it’s only a short poem, and Asimov’s is known more as a publisher of short fiction than poetry, but it’s also a major market for SF[3].  That’s pretty much guaranteed to get any novitiate writer’s heart rate elevated.

Do these first few lines foreshadow a great story?  I can’t say until we get to the end, and I’m hoping that’s still a long way off.

[1] Isaiah 46:9b-10a:  “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done,…”
[2] Unusual comma use aside, I still love this sentence.  And I am well aware that fiction of the day could open in a more leisurely manner than modern stories, which is why I’m not concerned that the opening scene focuses on Mr. Bennet and his wife rather than the protagonist (Elizabeth), and the absence of Mr. Darcy until much later in the story
[3]Sadly, even major markets aren’t included on the magazine aisle of my local grocery store or pharmacy any more, but I did find it at my local Barnes and Noble. There is also an electronic edition, and subscribers get their copies up front.

Who Mourns for Abby Sciuto?

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My heart broke last week when NCIS jumped the shark in its 2014 season premiere, “Twenty Klicks”.

SPOILER ALERT:  If you haven’t seen the season premiere yet, you may want to watch it online.  Then again, those who do may never watch another NCIS episode again.

gibbs-jumps-shark-bw

Sorry, Gibbs.

I felt bad when actress Cote de Pablo (Ziva David) left the show last season, but I had some hope for Ellie Bishop, who seemed to be a cross between genius-probie McGee and straight-arrow Kate with a dash of Abby sweetness.  Besides, we still had Abby, everyone’s favorite problem solver and perky goth.  Then the scriptwriter introduced a computer virus as a plot device and managed to break every rule of rational computer science ever invented.  And sweet, brilliant Abby Sciuto was left looking like a technology fool.

As a professional computer geek and aspiring writer, I’d like to use this episode as a roadmap for everything not to do when introducing a computer virus into your plot.  For comparison, I’d like to use the real-world Stuxnet / Flame malware which attacked the Iranian nuclear program in 2009/2010.

Malware Attacks Favor Secrecy

When the virus hit NCIS[1], the computer screens all over the office went wild. This is perhaps the classic symptom of a Hollywood computer virus, and it is totally absurd.  Unless this symptom is the intent of the malware in question, the best way for malware to spread is to remain hidden.  Since this would make for a boring episode, I can understand why scriptwriters ignore it, but it’s still annoying.

For comparison, the Flame malware stayed hidden for a significant period of time, spreading slowly from machine to machine until it reached its eventual target, computers loaded with software that was used to program the high-speed centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear program. Only then did its presence become obvious, and even then the attack was subtle:  it caused the centrifuges to shake themselves apart during use in a manner that could have been misinterpreted as a hardware failure.

Malware Attacks Need an Attack Vector

In the season premiere, Abby triggers the virus by loading data from a memory card onto a laptop.  The laptop is isolated from the network, and has even been placed in a Farraday cage to prevent it from connecting to WiFi, but somehow it escapes over the power cord (!) and spreads to the rest of the building.

Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that laptop computers generally have a battery and don’t have to be plugged in to operate, this is perhaps the most absurd misapplication of technology I have ever witnessed.  You cannot transmit malware unless the recipient computer has a defect that causes it to execute the code somehow.  This can be done by human engineering (i.e. a trojan horse), by being attached to a piece of shared data (i.e. a virus), or by transmission over the network (i.e., a worm).  Unless you are using specialized network hardware to piggyback LAN traffic on top of your power cabling, malware can’t travel through the power cord, and even then it can’t use the powerline network unless it is physically connected to your computer.  Sorry, the malware might have mangled Abby’s lab PC, but it would have stopped there.

For comparison, Flame was transmitted on the ubiquitous USB keys people use these days to transfer large quantities of data between computers.  Since Microsoft Windows has an annoying habit of executing everything it sees as if it were a legitimate application, these systems were vulnerable to attack over this vector.  I still want to scream every time I get a new USB key and Windows wants to load a “driver” from the device.  Linux doesn’t do this, and while it implies that people who use Linux have to be able to load their own drivers when they need them, it’s a whole lot safer.

Malware Can’t Attack Everything

When the virus attacked NCIS, not only did the computer screens go wild, but the office lighting suddenly went dark, and the phone system failed.  Even if they use VOIP for their phone system and have a centralized system to manage their lighting, this still wouldn’t really make sense.  The reason?  Any normal business has separate systems to handle these three distinct functions, and they are generally implemented with different technology stacks.  The only way this virus could have affected computers, lights, and phones would be if they were all vulnerable to the same exploits[2] — but if NCIS knew about these exploits (to write the virus), wouldn’t they have already patched their own computers to protect against a similar attack?  Moreover, why would the NSA allow NCIS to connect to its secure  network when they were under an apparently unstoppable malware attack?

In the real world, any particular piece of malware is designed to attack  a single kind of computer system.  nVIR attacked early Macintosh systems, and Stuxnet attacks computers that run Windows.  It’s possible to write code that can attack multiple computer platforms, but it’s hard, because each piece of code takes up space, and the larger your malware code, the more likely it is to be detected.  I consider JavaScript to be a particularly evil vector for malware, because its ubiquitous, runs on multiple platforms, and the demands of ignorant users have resulted in it being essential for day-to-day work on the internet.  Even then, competent IT personnel keep their systems “current” with system patches, and it’s mostly the inexperienced home users who get hacked.

The Moral of the Story

When possible, protect yourself from malware by using less-vulnerable operating systems like Linux or OS X.  Practice safe computing by keeping your computers currently patched, and use antiviral software like ZoneAlarm or Kaspersky on your PC.  And don’t believe everything you see on TV.

Beyond this, if you are a writer who wants to include malware in your stories, the following process may be useful to insure that you don’t invent a Hollywood virus like the one that sank NCIS:

  • Decide first what your villain wants the malware to attack.  There are plenty of targets, and the number will only increase as our homes and vehicles get increasingly connected to network monitoring and control systems.  At the same time, any given attack will typically affect only one kind of computer system and people who use a different one won’t be affected.
  • Decide how the malware is going to affect the computer systems it attacks.  Once you have broken into a target system, it’s relatively easy to make it crash or operate more slowly, so these kinds of effects might come from a young programmer just learning about malware.  Tools that collect and return security information to your villain (e.g. keyloggers) might come from organized crime, because it takes a more sophisticated group of programmers to develop them.  And the really advanced techniques are probably coming from national governments with the money and power to fund these software teams.
  • Decide what vector(s) the malware might use to break into the computer system in question.  Most successful attacks will require one or more human errors to be successful:  a defect in SQL Server, for example, might go unpatched because of a bad business decision, leaving data exposed to the attacker.  Or someone might introduce a trojan horse into your network by opening an attachment in an email, which subsequently transfers itself as a worm inside your corporate LAN.
  • Once you’ve designed a plausible bit of malware, set it loose on your protagonist, and tell the tale.

There are a lot of bad people out there coding bad software, so we shouldn’t have to stretch our reader’s suspension of belief to include a nasty bit of malware into our plots — but you have to do it right.

[1] There are technical differences between the a trojan, a worm, and a virus.  All are malware.  People who get picky about the difference between a worm like Stuxnet and a virus like nVIR are being pedantic, so I don’t care that they called the attack a “virus” in the season opener.
[2] Well, the lights, phones, and computers are all plugged into the power grid, so maybe the magic power cord exploit was used on all three.

A New York State of Mind

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It has been said that The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.[1] This may be true, but my experiences in West Sussex (England) imply that our cultural differences go far deeper.

It was my first trip to the far side of the Atlantic, and after an overnight flight, an abbreviated day at work, and a brief nap in my hotel room, I awoke at 6PM local time hungry.  Not merely for supper, which was a secondary concern, but for knowledge.  Here I was in a new town, a new country, a new continent.  I had to get a feel for the place I would be living for the next few months.cigarette

This led me out the front door of the George Hotel in Crawley and down the High Street.  I passed a pub and a movie theater, and ran into my first local.

“Sorry, got a fag?” he asked, and I was sure I was about to be attacked.

For those who only speak American English, a “fag” is a cigarrette.  I already knew this.  I also knew, and gave, the correct response:  “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”[2]  What I didn’t realize at the time was the friendly reality of British culture. Apparently, even at a time when the IRA was actively bombing buildings in London, it was perfectly normal to bum a cigarette from a total stranger in downtown Crawley.

If you are ever in New York, and a stranger says anything to you on the street, be prepared to hand over your wallet.  We don’t talk to unknown people over here unless we want to transact business with them, and on an empty street, that business transaction is most likely a mugging.  The friendly people ignore you; it’s a completely different state of mind.

This wasn’t a unique experience for me, either. I have been chatted up[3] in restaurants, shared Sunday dinner with people I had just met, and been invited by young couples to join them for coffee and to watch Red Dwarf.  I’m an extreme extrovert myself, so I was able to take the whole thing in stride.

Still, I hope they weren’t expecting something more than conversation, because if they were, I left them disappointed.

Photograph © 2005 by Tomasz Sienicki [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Possibly said first by George Bernard Shaw, unless he didn’t.
[2] The British, when being polite, will say “sorry.”  Americans don’t do this; I think we avoid anything that implies culpability.  Americans say “excuse me,” presumably because it’s what we want you to do.
[3] I have only ever heard the term “chatting up” on PBS or overseas, so I assume it’s UK English. Language aside, the practice of making small talk with a stranger you’re not trying to date is certainly foreign to my experience.

Andrea’s Rule

/ davidgturner / 1 Comment

Andrea is my feminist conscience. She is also a friend. For the past decade or so, I have been tossing my story ideas at her to see what sticks, much as an undergraduate might toss spaghetti at the wall to see if it has been properly cooked[1].  This has proven useful over the years, because a lot of my ideas come out half-baked.  I think it’s even more important now that I’m actively doing battle with the Men are Generic, Women are Special trope in my stories.Asimov's Oct/Nov 2014

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has composed a brilliant little piece in the October Asimov’s about a woman struggling to live in the stuffy world of country club golf. I would love to be able to write that piece[2]. Sadly, I am handicapped not only by my inferior writing ability, but also by the annoying interference of a Y chromosome in my genome. I can’t really know how she feels, because I’ve never lived it. Then again, I’ve never been a three-armed alien from the planet Zzax[3], either.

The key, of course, to writing about things you’ve never experienced is research. To research women for my fiction, I read biographies and relevant SF novels and talk with my wife.  And when that turns into a possible story idea, I consult with Andrea.

One tip Andrea gave me has recently become the mantra for my recent stories.  I hereby christen Andrea’s Rule:  When you create a character, ask why it has to be male. Lacking a strong reason, make her female.  This one small act has taken a scimitar to my character design, shifted my plots, and overall made my stories less drab and boring.Andrea's Rule

One side effect of this action has been to make me notice when other writers make the decision to let more characters be women. In Robert R Chase’s contribution to the same Asimov’s, his commanding officer Lieutenant Jansons is a woman.  It’s a valid decision, but I was surprised when (two pages in) she was first tied to a pronoun, and it was feminine.  And perhaps, that’s the point.

As long as people like me are surprised by a generic woman, we need Andrea’s Rule.

[1] My wife would perhaps be a better choice, but she doesn’t really enjoy SF.  She does like spaghetti, but to date I haven’t thrown any of that at her, either.
[2] Not literally. That would be plagiarism, and I don’t do that.
[3] I have no stories pending about this alien.  If you want to write about her, please do.

Widowmaker

/ davidgturner / 2 Comments

EKGITammie Painter recently posted about the health risks of writing, primarily due to inactive lifestyles. One week later, I got first-hand evidence to confirm this post. Yes, it was a STEMI heart attack triggered by a 90% blockage of the LAD artery.  Depending on whom you ask[1], that may or may not be the Widowmaker, so named because it has caused a lot of women to lose their husbands. The event has necessarily delayed my writing, and I think this issue is important enough to deserve a few thoughts from the inside, presented in no meaningful order that I can discern.left-coronary-artery

  1. A heart attack can surprise anybody.  I don’t  drink heavily or smoke at all, I eat a balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, and have always had excellent blood pressure and decent (though not stellar) cholesterol levels.  I even started regular aerobic exercise two years ago, and I’m relatively young (not yet fifty).  I’ve been watching for this kind of thing for over a decade due to family history, yet it caught me without warning, and my friends were surprised that it happened to me, too. It is dangerous to assume this can’t happen to you, because it can.
  2. A support system really helps.  I spent a significant portion of the first day after my STEMI in tears – and not because of pain.  The support I received from our friends during this past week has been overwhelming. Yes, I have missed work — and writing — for a duration I would have considered unconscionable in the days before my attack, but they really did hold things together for my family while I was out of operation.  Oh, yeah, and my wife is awesome.
  3. Dealing with the risks in advance is worthwhile. All things considered, I am doing well after my heart attack. My hospital neighbors with compounding issues like diabetes or nicotine addiction have had it far worse than I.  Despite my reasonably good pre-STEMI health, I find myself frustrated today by how weak and slow my post-heart-attack body seems to be, even when I “feel” good.  They tell me this can improve, but even so, I look forward to taking multiple medications every single day for the rest of my life in order to avoid another attack.  If you think it’s annoying to eat right and exercise today, consider what restrictions could be applied to your life if you don’t.
  4. Trauma may have a delayed emotional impact.  I was mentally aware of what had happened to me from the start, but its implications seemed more like an annoyance for days after the event. I was actually more worried about my wife’s state of mind until a nurse in the PCU[2] pointed out the obvious:  that I could have died, and it was legitimately a big deal. Only then was I ready to apply myself 100% to my own recovery.

Moral of the story:  unless you’re looking to transition into a permanent career as a ghost writer, you need to take a hard look at your own life and do those things today that will protect your life tomorrow.  And if you know someone who has gone through a traumatic event (patients and relatives both apply here), give them the time to emotionally understand what has happened. We don’t all process things at the same rate.

[1] My doctor says the term “widowmaker” should only be used to describe blockage of the left main coronary artery, whereas it was my left anterior descending artery that was blocked.  Honestly, I don’t care if I’m being imprecise, because I’m not a doctor, and they’re both bad news.
[2] The PCU is the “Progressive Care Unit”, where they send you after you’re stabilized in the cardiac care unit, and before you’re ready to go home.  I told my sister that progressive care is just like intensive care, but with a livable minimum wage.  I was being facetious.

Photo “EKGI”. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Photo “Ha1”. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Reputation

/ davidgturner / 3 Comments

My new Mars story isn’t done yet, so I’m not ready to write about how I did it. While you wait, here’s a brand-new anecdote from the Mostly True collection.wbhs2

Every class has one student known by his negative reputation instead of his name, and some have more than one. Unable to excel at education, he strives to be known for rebellion instead. He may become the class clown, taking foolish risks to gain attention. Other times, he lashes out in violence.

As a high-school freshman (9th grade), my crowded course schedule placed me in gym with a class of 8th-grade students. This wouldn’t happen in most school districts, because most districts don’t teach 8th-grade classes at their high school. Ours was different. Eighth-grade students were using the gym in my only available calendar slot, so I was assigned to their class.a bubbler, or water fountain if you don't come from Massachusetts.

This left me in the unexpected role of “big kid.” I have never been athletic, and to this day I cannot truly comprehend the idea of being a threat to anyone in gym. Still, I was the outsider, older than everyone else, a clear target for the Worf Effect. And I drew the attention of the class tough guy.

We were in the locker room after class, he and I, jostling for position at the bubbler (water fountain). I was not a selfless child, and probably did something to provoke his ire, but the response I got was entirely unexpected: without a word, he punched me in the head. And I–

Did nothing.

Okay, to be honest, that’s not entirely accurate. If you’ve ever taken a haymaker to the left temple, you know it hurts. And while he didn’t knock me down, he did surprise me. And I just stood there, looking at him, while tears of pain filled my eyes. After a few seconds, he took his drink at the bubbler, and life went on.

Looking back, I wonder why this day lingers in my mind when nothing ever came of it. I didn’t hit him back. I didn’t meet him after school to settle things at a time and place when school discipline wouldn’t be invoked. I didn’t even change my standing in gym class, because I’m not a jock, and never will be. But despite all this, the memory of that day still haunts me.

Maybe it haunts me because I’ll never know what would have happened. I tell myself I did the right thing, that he led a tough life, and had probably been beaten on by tougher people than I. I tell myself that I was the “big kid” at that bubbler, and social standing being what it is, I had nothing to gain by a fight, while he had nothing to lose.  But I also know it hurt, and I tell myself I could have punched him back, and won.

Science is beginning to prove that it’s not the larger-than-life personalities who make the best leaders. For men, however, social ranking is still achieved by a Rambo-sized physique or a Napoleon-sized ego.  Ninth-grade boys desperately need to feel like a man, and society tells our boys that violence is a quick way to get there. But I did nothing. The adult in me knows I did the right thing.

The 9th-grade boy in me still doesn’t know.