I have a technical blog that I’ve been maintaining since 2012. It started as a place that I wanted to post articles about software details that I might want to look up some time in the future. Like a journal or maybe a wiki. Over time, I improved my writing skills and arrived at a point where I wanted to try my hand at writing a novel. Having no book-writing experience, I started by reading books on how to write books. I tried my hand at writing and at first, I was awful. That didn’t stop me. I wasn’t sure of the mechanics of a story at the time so I just wrote until I ran out of ideas.
That’s when I discovered that I was a pantster at heart. I like to just sit down and write a story. Outlining seemed too mechanical and I wasn’t able to look down the story far enough to form an outline before writing. Unfortunately, what I discovered is that I had difficulty in ending a story. I assumed that the story would come to a natural conclusion, but that’s not how it works. I have one rough-draft that is 45k words in length and I don’t have an ending. I have a list of potential endings, but none of them really “move” me. I have another rough-draft that is 34k words in length. This one has an ending, but it’s not very compelling. Both of these stories have some interesting concepts to them and I will one day, go back and rewrite or rework them to be great novels. To make up for not having an ending, I have vowed to come up with something clever and impactful.
The next most difficult thing I discovered about writing a book is that an idea doesn’t always translate into a good story. Seasoned authors know exactly what I’m talking about. Everybody has an idea for a story. I have lists of ideas. It’s not difficult to come up with the basic core idea. What’s difficult is turning that idea into something that is at least 50k words long, is readable and enjoyable. When the NaNoWriMo contest came around I decided to try my hand at writing 50k in one month. That’s where Crimson Justice was born. I put together an outline in October. I decided that I probably couldn’t write 50k in one month, so I started right away and didn’t enter the contest. This became a personal goal. I had started October 13th and I reached 50k words by November 14th. Apparently, I could write 50k words in one month. The rough draft ended with 57k words. This year, I’m going to do the contest. If you’re an aspiring writer, or you’re just interested, the website can be found here: https://nanowrimo.org/.
Why am I writing novels? To be honest, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, there is an element of work involved in writing a novel and not all aspects of putting together a marketable novel are fun. I don’t enjoy the editing part of it, but I really like writing the story.
My wife, Michelle, also reads SciFi. She can read twice as fast as I can and she knows a good book when she reads it. We like to throw around story ideas or just technology ideas. Here’s an example: Imagine if Star Trek transporters are invented. Except transmitting data about every atom of your body is too much and the engineers decide to only encode your DNA and your brain pattern. Then you beam down and are reconstructed from only this information. What would happen?
Tattoos would be gone. Any dirt or scars would be gone. If you are sick, then the illnesses would be gone. Of course, your immune system would be back to square one. It would be an excellent way to cure cancer. You would arrive at your destination hungry. Very hungry. If you were overweight, you would arrive at your ideal fitness level.
All of that leads to possible story ideas. Some of these ideas have been thought of by other people. The idea of beaming down your DNA and brain pattern is something I read from a technical article. That’s what got me thinking about all the other aspects of a transporter that uses minimum data. A compelling story would include something like a soul that didn’t get beamed down. Let’s entertain the idea that the soul is real, but a new transporter device proves it because people who get beamed to a new location end up as human zombies. There’s something not right about the humans that reach the other side of the transporter. A good story will drop clues about what is wrong with the person that arrives. Maybe they are different in ways that are not measurable. Maybe their loved-ones can see it right away. Other people don’t take notice.
It’s fun to toss around ideas. New technology can spur stories. Nano bugs come to mind. What could a government agency do with such devices? What if an evil organization wants to collect information about people. Something the size of a fruit-fly could land on the ceiling in your office and watch what you type on your keyboard. Passwords? No problem. Account numbers, easy. It could collect information during the day and maybe hack your wifi to send it back slowly at night. There is also the possibility of a trojan horse on your phone. It could just snap pictures at random intervals and then transmit them back with the GPS coordinates and directional information. Then a computer algorithm could put that together into a three-dimensional image of your entire house and belongings. It’s a massive amount of data, but if all of this happened at millions of places at once, the data could be processed in the cloud and then items can be identified by AI. Items that are worth stealing. Maybe the location of in-house safes. Bad actors could then use this information to tell the remote trojan to videotape whenever the phone is in the same room as the safe. Eventually, it will probably get a video of the owner opening the safe.
Yup, there are some stories in there. In the real world, such things are unlikely. Currently, it would take too much data and the security systems of our devices would prevent most of this from happening to the average person. Also, it’s currently cheaper and easier to dupe people to pay a ransom for having their computer hard drive encrypted.
So that got me thinking about another story…
I’ll probably never write this story, but it’s a thought. What if a crack software security guy is minding his own business. Life is grand. One day he gets hacked and loses all of his family photos (he should know better and have an on-line backup of his computer, but work with me here). He’s angry. We all know that feeling of being violated by some crook who stole something or they are holding your hard-drive hostage. I would format my hard drive and install the backup, but this guy doesn’t have a backup. So he pays the ransom and moves on. Except for a week later, they re-encrypt his hard drive, because the trojan is still on his system and he can’t figure out a way to get rid of it (now it’s questionable about how good a security guy he is, but I can come up with an angle on that too). At this point, what would this guy do? What would you like to do if you had the power to do anything?
This is where the story can get tricky. It has to stay within ethical bounds. This is where the revenge or payback story comes in. The guy is a security expert and he finds out who the bad guys are. Maybe, he doesn’t know who the bad guys really are, but he decides that he’s had enough of these hackers and he is going to take them all out. ALL of them! Oh yeah.
One thing to note is that large mob-like organizations will invent trojan horses that they release into the Internet. These trojans will infect many servers and each one will call home. They keep an accounting of these servers and if you’re willing to pay, you can buy a block of these hacked servers and use them for your own processing. That’s where our protagonist gets in the door. He uses hacked servers to attack other hacked servers, but he comes up with a trojan horse that can uninstall the bad guy’s trojan horse and patch the server so that it can’t be hacked again. The owner of the server suddenly sees an improvement in their server performance, but other than that, they don’t know what happened.
Where does this story go? It has to go to a bad spot someplace. Let’s imagine that the Russian mob finds out what is happening (I’m assuming there’s a Russian mob). They come at him in the real world. First, they try to bribe him into working for them. He refuses and then they abduct someone that he is close to. Then it’s a game of cat and mouse. He needs to free his loved ones and he needs to bring down the organization so they can’t come at him again. Otherwise, he needs to go into hiding. His family would need to go into hiding as well. Not a good story ending. He would have to bring the mob to its knees.
There are many story ideas rattling around in my head. I need to get them into novels so I can share them. I’ve gone back and read the rough drafts that I wrote several years ago and there has been a lot of improvement in my writing skills. Improvement never ends. I keep reading what other authors have done and I read books with an eye for analysis. I hope to get to a level that Issac Asimov was when he wrote books like the Foundation and the I Robot series.
As of this blog post, I only have one book available: Crimson Justice. I have to start someplace. I have two more books that I’m working on. I have 11k words of one book written for the rough-draft. That book has an outline already and I have a firm ending. The other book has a first scene that is a good hook. I have an ending for that book too, but I’m not sure what I want to base the story on. There are a lot of possibilities for that book. Once I flesh out the story, I’ll hammer out the words within a month or two. When I get to the editing phase of either book, I’ll post on this blog what my progress is. Stay tuned.