In the last week or so I’ve put up three new e-books, so I figured they should get their own post.
The first is a fantasy novelette. It has unicorns, chase scenes, friendship, betrayal, and did I mention the unicorns?
Description:
Exiled from her people, Alila lives alone in a canyon harvesting Frankincense resin with her twin unicorns for company. When a pregnant princess on the run from assassins disrupts her quiet world, Alila chooses to help her reach the coast. Hounded by assassins and torn apart by distrust, Alila’s choice threatens to reveal her dark past and her terrible secret. If she and the princess survive their journey to safety.
Buy for Kindle (Or get it free via Kindle Prime Lending).
The other two stories I’ve put up are both ones that appeared in anthologies this summer.
Description:
Eking out an existence as a scavenger in post-apocalyptic Russia, Ryska never thought she would be more than a blind, discarded military experiment. Then she ends up in the middle of a kidnapping gone wrong and must use her all her skills to save herself, and the young boy who brings back painful memories of her past.
This is a science fiction short story that originally appeared in Mirror Shards: Volume One. Get it for your Kindle, or Nook, or in Other E-book Formats.
Description:
Diarmuid long ago gave up hope of escaping his indentured servitude on the Family’s large drug-refining space station. He owed money he didn’t have, they made him an offer, and he loved breathing so he couldn’t refuse. But when he accidentally uncovers a spy from a rival crime syndicate, everything changes. Suddenly escape looks possible and with a crazy sexbot and a paranoid Siberian on his side, what could possibly go wrong?
Nevermind the Bollocks is a short story originally published in Digital Science Fiction #2.
It’s that time of year again, I guess. I’ll be doing a summary of this past year around the 30th or so, along with a look back at least year’s goals and how I did.
But as the year draws to a close, I am looking forward and planning what I want to do next year. This last year has seen a lot of changes in my life, in my writing, and in how I am approaching my career. My goals for next year reflect those changes, I think.
One of the shifts is going to be away from sending novels to publishers. I’ve decided to not send anything this next year and instead focus on publishing my work myself. My preliminary experiments with self-publishing this year have been pretty good (much better than the nothing I expected) and I want to see what happens when I make it a focus. I’ll be continuing experimentation, of course, including putting up a few things in the new KDP Select program. I also have some genre and length experiments planned.
Another shift is going to be toward longer work and away from short fiction. This doesn’t mean I won’t write short stories, but many of the ones I have planned this year will go up as ebooks instead of out to markets. I do have a challenge planned for May which is all short fiction. I’ll get into that later. While it is cool to be eligible for SFWA and nice to collect the checks that come with selling short stories, I don’t see them paying my rent. My goal for the new year is to keep 10 stories on the market at all times, a big drop from my submitting high of nearly 40. I figure 10 is enough to stay visible and keep up the habit of sending work out without requiring much time or upkeep on my part.
So here are the writing goals:
Novels: Five crime novels (Books 2 and 3 of one series, Books 1-3 of another), one fantasy novel (Remy Pigeon book 1), and books 2 and 3 of the Lorian Archive (Casimir series). I will also finish serializing the first Lorian novel (Casimir Hypogean). I’ve got a cool surprise planned with those and the full series should be published by June.
Novellas: Four YA romances and seven adult contemporary romances.
Short stories: 50 total short stories written. 31 of these will be during the month of May. In May I turn 31, May has 31 days, so it is fate, really. I’m going to write 31 in 31 for my 31st b-day. Sounds fun! These stories will be a mix of SF/F which I will submit to markets and romance/erotica which will go straight to ebook.
That’s it. Much of this will be under pen names, of course. Officially, Annie Bellet is only writing maybe 25-30 short stories and 3 novels this year. It’s fun running multiple careers, if a little crazy-making at times. Thank god for spreadsheets!
The crime novels will run between 65k and 75k words each. The Remy novel will be about 80k words. The Lorian books will be between 80k and 90k. With the novellas, I’m aiming for 25k to 30k words apiece. Short stories will count as long as they are over 2k words minimum and under 15k maximum (anything over 15k will get put up as an ebook novella).
Total predicted word count: 1,112,000 words.
Which looks terrifying. It isn’t. Let me break it down. I write about 1,000 to 1,200 words per 45 minute session (if you don’t know what I’m talking about with the sessions, see my post on productivity here). My word count goal for 2012 works out to about 700 hours of work. Not insignificant, but not terribly much, either. For perspective, if I worked 40 hours a week, it would take 18 weeks or so to finish those 700 hours of work (yep, people with a full-time job work more than 700 hours every 5 months).
But I’m lazy. I love to read, play videogames, hang out with friends, and I tend to need time to myself to let writing stuff sort its self out. I don’t want to work 40 hours a week. I don’t want to work everyday either. So I made a plan which allows for over two months off. I’m planning to write 290 days out of the next 366 (woo, leap year!). I’m allowing myself plenty of days to be stressed out, for life shit to happen, for me to get sick or get stuck (though that rarely happens when I’m working on multiple projects).
So how hard will I have to work on those 290 days I do choose to show up to my job? I’ll need to average about 3900 words a day. That’s 3 hours of work (4 “sessions” with my hourglass) most days, maybe a little more if I’m starting something new or going through a tough spot in the murky middle of a novel.
There is my plan. I debated taking a picture of my calendar (I print off calendar pages and do a color-coded goals thing for each month so I can visually see when stuff is due), but I don’t think I could get the whole thing into a frame. Probably for the best, too, since while I’m fairly sure I’ll finish the things I want to finish, I want the freedom to move projects around if I get stuck on something or if something cool happens.
I’m lazy like an old cat on a blanket in the sun. I’d far rather sit on the beanbag and read ALL the books than do anything that resembles work. Even work I enjoy doing like writing. I am also very insecure. I have a lot of negative talk going in my head all the time and writing doesn’t get a pass there, either.
In fact, if ideas didn’t boil over in my head and basically frog-march me to the computer, I’d probably never get anything done. Being poor doesn’t hurt, either, as my father loves to say “poor is a good motivator”. Between the stories in my head writing themselves and begging me to start typing and the fact that my husband and cat like to have the heat on in winter, I manage to get work done despite my nature.
But I’d like to get more work done and I’d like to get it done more quickly so that I can get back to that whole reading thing (or playing videogames, that will do in a pinch).
Stress and depression are my biggest hurdles. This last year has been a roller-coaster for me between my husband having a little cancer, my grandfather dying, my husband losing his job, Clarion, medical bills, etc. I try to console myself that I’ve written over 400,000 words and still got a lot done, but it doesn’t ever seem like enough because I can’t manage to do the one thing I really want to do which is write more consistently on a schedule of some sort. And I know that I’m capable of more than I’ve done, so that bugs me, too.
And I think I might have found a way to do more. I met another writer at Orycon who insisted that I come hang out at a coffee shop and write-in for NaNoWriMo. I almost didn’t go. I don’t like writing in busy spaces, I don’t really enjoy being around strangers and find socializing draining, and I wasn’t sure it would be a useful experience.
I went anyway because, on the other hand, it sounded fun.
Boy am I glad I did.
I wrote 4500 words, the first chapter of a brand new novel. In 3 hours of actual writing time. Around people. And thus I discovered an amazing new way to work.
The structure of the write-in was this: 45 minutes of quiet where we all wrote, followed by 15 minutes of break time where we chatted, got more coffee, etc. Rinse, repeat.
It worked so well for me that I came home and decided to try it here. I didn’t have an hourglass (I do now!) so I used an online egg timer for my 45 minutes. Apparently being timed helps me focus, because I write as much in 45 minutes as I used to in an hour to an hour and a half. That’s right, 1000 to 1500 words in 45 minutes. Something about knowing that I have to work now but I get a break soon lets me put off the little things I used to let creep into writing time. Want to check my email? It can wait 20 minutes until my time is up. Want more tea? It can wait until my timer is up. 45 minutes is such a short time, just about anything can wait while I get the work done. Plus I can use the timer to mentally trick myself into doing more in the same way I use the timer on the treadmill at the gym to get myself moving longer. Want to finish this chapter? Well, okay, I’ll just set another45 minutes. It’s less than an hour, I can manage one more session.
And I’m starting to work in little bits of extra writing time. Before, if I didn’t have a large chunk of time free, I didn’t even bother to start. Now? All I need is 45 minutes.
It seems so simple, but without the NaNo write-in, I’d never have thought to try this. I probably would have shoved it off as “I can’t get enough done in 45 minutes” or something.
So that’s my new method for getting things done. 45 minute chunks. It’s almost 7:15pm now, so I’d better go flip the hourglass over and get a little work done. After all, what’s 45 more minutes?
November was a bit of a mess for my writing. I tried two different starts on the novella I was working on before deciding to switch to working on The Raven King. The bad news is that I didn’t finish anything. The good news is that I finally found a stride in this book and it will be done shortly and likely out in January as I’d hoped.
The novellas are percolating in my head and I think I’ll be ready to make a third run at them as soon as I finish this novel. That’s the benefit of working on multiple projects at once. When I get stuck, I can just switch to something else and work still gets done.
All right. Here are the numbers for November.
Short stories sold to magazines: 1
Words written: 39,078
Ebooks sold: 226
My husband has been compiling my ebook sales data into spreadsheets for me and making nifty graphs. I will have a giant data-filled post for the end of the year, hopefully with visual aids and stuff.
In happy news, I just published a Remy Pigeon short story. Ever have one of those characters who just storms into your head and won’t leave? That’s Remy for me. I have two novels planned with him to be written in the next year or so and I’ve already written three short stories about him. After many near misses with the magazines, I have decided to publish one of them myself. So here is the cover for Flashover, a paranormal mystery short story. I hope others will love Remy as much as I do.
Description: Creole gentleman Remy Pigeon has a gift, or a curse. He can touch objects and read the past from them.
He prefers to stay away from trouble, but when an attractive red-head with a serious problem and a supernatural secret wanders into his house on a hot summer day, Remy knows that trouble has just found him.
It isn’t live yet for Nook, but it is on Kindle or all formats are available via Smashwords HERE.
I also have discovered a very cool new way to organize my writing time. I think it deserves its own post, however, so I’ll work on that this week.
My NaNo rebel project is not going well. I’m stuck trying to figure out if this story needs to be told in 1st or in 3rd person. So I’ve switched back to the novel (the sequel to A Heart in Sun and Shadow). I’ve never written a sequel before. It’s tough writing one for a book that is published, too. I can’t change details that were set in the first novel, so I’m constantly having to recheck the older book for things. I think I might take a couple hours today and make a quickie world bible or at least a list with the relevant details. I wrote the first book before I’d really nailed down how I prefer to write novels and I have zero cohesive character notes or world notes at all (which is something I started doing AFTER I wrote this one). It’s odd to go back and look at a work that I did a couple years ago.
In other news, I sold another story to Daily SF. This is my tenth fiction sale in less than two years (first sale was in December of 2009). Five of those have been to Daily SF. I guess it is true, you just have to find an editor who loves what you write and then sell them as much as you can. I’m glad so many stories of mine have found a home with Daily SF. They are a great publication (delivered to your email! Go subscribe! /end plug).
Oh, and I crossed the 1,000 books sold mark for my e-books. Hopefully the next 1k doesn’t take quite as long, but it is definitely a mile-stone.
So that is what’s up with me. Now, where did I put that outline? Back to writing!
I’m taking an internet hiatus for a while. I’ll be around a bit, but probably not updating here much. I’m going to resume the weekly Casimir Hypogean posts as well as the Neo-pro Interviews in January. I have a ton of work to get done between now and the new year, so I’m taking a brain break from everything else. Which is not to say I won’t post if I absolutely feel I have something to say, but I’m not going to try to keep myself on a schedule or add any more things to my to-do list.
For the next couple months, life has to be all about the writing. I’ll be back in January with new goals for the new year and a summary of how 2010 went.
Steve: I was a weird kid; the worst part was, I didn’t know I was weird. It took me a long time to realize that when a teacher holds up a picture of a one-humped camel in a kindergarten class, you’re not supposed to say “dromedary.” When the school asks students for their input designing the new playground, they want you to draw a tornado slide, tire swings, a seesaw; basically anything but an interconnected network of cloud-shaped tree houses with foam harpoon guns.
I was scared of the dark. It was like a chalkboard where I could sketch my primal fears as big as my suffocating imagination could make them. I was the kid asking for doors to be left open a crack, for closets to be checked. I was the kid running up the stairs with the basement darkness nipping at my heels, clutching the jar of canned peaches my mom had asked for to my chest. I was also the kid begging my dad to tell me just one more scary story. The more something scared me, the more I wanted to tell stories about it, draw it, dig down deep and figure it out.
Maybe I’m still doing this.
These days, I have a wife and two little girls who blow my mind every single day, and I spend five nights a week away from them chasing this writing thing. It’s a life that doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, but I’ve found incredible fulfillment in it. Searching for true things and lying about them creatively is a hell of a job. It’s the only one I want.
I write speculative fiction of all kinds, but it tends to be visual and character-driven. Love stories creep into almost everything I write, and I’m starting to wonder if I might be, at least in part, a closeted romance writer. (I never went through the I-don’t-like-girls stage.) Most of what I’ve sold has been sci-fi, but I would like to write and sell more horror. I have soft spot for mysteries as well, and I’d love to sell a novel to Hard Case Crime someday. We’ll see what happens.
What’s your Race score? (1 pt for every short story out to market, 3 points for every novel query (1 per novel only), 8 points for every full (once per novel only also) )
Steve: Shit. You’ve got me. I’m at that weird place where I’m just beginning to sell, so I have a pile of stories in my writing folder, and I would be embarrassed to attach my name to most of them. Henlein’s fifth rule—keep a story on the market until it has sold—is a tough one for me once I realize a story is not pro quality. (Heinlein can talk big, but he was already an effing genius by the time he coined these rules.) I’ve only been producing publishable work for maybe two years, and many of those stories have either sold or continue to look for homes because they’re just so damn long.
I’m proud to say, as I write this, I’m about 5k from the end of my first novel. I’m really pleased with it, and I can’t wait to dig into revisions and send it out. Writing a novel is weird, because you’re working, but you feel strangely disconnected from everything. I’m looking forward to getting back in “the mix.”
So what is my score? Excuse-free answer: A pitiful 3 or 4, but it’s been much better in the past.
When did you “get serious” about being a writer?
Steve: March 2009. I was working security at a university, and I would spend all night walking around in the dark, through the nursing department’s creepy lab full of blank-eyed dummies or down into the depths of the old mansion that served as the campus library. (The kid version of myself would have had an aneurysm.) I had lots of time to think about my life and the direction it was going. I had been writing since I was a kid, but working as a professional had always felt sort of distant and hypothetical. For the first time, it felt like something I could do, not some future me, but me.
I bought a little $300 netbook and starting writing every chance I got. Six months later, I was accepted into Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp where I got to work closely with one of my heroes, Orson Scott Card. I sat across from the man at dinner. We split a pizza. It was surreal. I think it was John Brown (the author and Codexian) who said that Boot Camp was “a barn burner, a great blaze of insight.” He’s right. There was no turning back after that.
What are your goals with your writing?
Steve: I want to create disposable entertainment with thematic substance. I want to be one of those hard-working, skillful, genre authors who tells great stories and gets paid for it. I want to sell books the old-fashioned way, to a good publisher who will put them in the hands of the most possible readers. I want my books to save people during a long wait at the airport or the bus stop or the doctor’s office. I want people to stay up all night worrying about my characters. I want people to argue about them, geek out about them, enjoy them, and miss them when the book or series is finally over.
Where do you see your career in 5 years?
Steve:I have my goals mapped out for the year, five years, and ten years. My goals will change, of course, but it’s still important to have targets to aim at. I’ll spare you my ten-year, world-domination plans, but here are some of my five-year goals:
1. Sell a novel or series to a major publisher
2. Appear in both Asimov’s and F&SF (as well as other magazines—Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock are bonus points!)
3. Finish at least one novel per year
4. Win a major award (Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, etc.)
5. Establish a strong online “platform” (Still thinking about how to accomplish this one.)
*There are others, but they mostly deal with comics.
These are some pretty lofty goals for a relative newcomer like me, but I’m not in this game to dick around. I’m here to make the most of my time and talent. To do that, you have to aim high and work hard. I’m doing both.
Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?
Steve: If I had to settle on the one idea I’m most stoked about right now, it would probably be the book I’m planning to write next, “Early Birds.” It’s a zombie novel about a teenage girl who “wakes up” months after the last humans have succumbed to [whatever I end up calling the damn infection]. She discovers a group of other girls her age who have also recovered from being zombies, and ends up at a school led by the only adult anywhere (as far as they know), a brilliant, dangerous woman with a plan to rebuild the world—but first, they have to find a living male.
It’s a whole thing. School drama, cannibalism, “bunker people,” love, pregnancy, post-apocalyptic politics, violence. It’s going to be effing insane. I can’t wait to start.
What are your hobbies outside writing?
Steve: I’m a geek. I like to read comics and play video games and watch anime and play D&D, although this last almost never happens anymore. If I’m going to work that hard on something, it should be something I can sell. Lately, I’m pretty boring. I watch a documentary every night after the wife and kids are in bed, and oddly I find nonfiction more relaxing that fiction. I listen to NPR in the car instead of music. When did I get so old?
I sing and write songs and play a little guitar. I’m not disciplined at it (probably because my older brother Jay was), but I have a lot of fun. Jay s and I are in a band called “Hills and Downs” [link: http://listn.to/HillsandDowns] with our two younger brothers. My wife is always bugging me to sing, but for some reason, it’s the one thing I’m shy about.
I like to fight. I think it’s a guy-with-lots-of-brothers thing. My college experience was like Jackass with boxing gloves. I have a friend who trained at Throwdown San Diego (alongside guys like Tyson Griffin, Jeremy Stephens, Diego Sanchez, and Brandon Vera); he moved back to town and began training me in Muay Thai kickboxing a couple years ago. I like bad food too much to ever fight professionally, but I love to stand across from a guy who wants to kick my ass and go to town. Best stress reliever ever.
What’s your writing process like?
Steve: I get an idea, put in it a blender with a few others, and look for the story in the tension between the ingredients. Then I list. Lists are my friend. When the lists start to look like outlines, I start writing. If I get stuck, I drive and listen to music. A road trip is as good as a month of indoor brainstorming. I also talk things out with friends. Sometimes they can see what you mean better than you can.
When I write, I try to make every section fun. Every night, I know my wife is at home waiting to read what I wrote, and I never want to hand her something boring. My theory is this: if every damn page is fun to read (and you haven’t neglected the basics), you’ll have something good. With good editing, it might even end up great.
What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer? How do you keep yourself going?
Steve: Any time you decide to do something risky or unusual, the people around you worry. (Thankfully, my wife is not one of these people.) Sometimes they try to fix you. Sometimes that fixing goes beyond a healthy, helpful level and becomes almost discriminatory. I have failed at a lot of things in my life by kidding myself about myself, mostly in an effort to meet expectations. Writers (or the kind of people who become writers) aren’t normal. When they’re trying to do things they weren’t “made for,” they look broken—like a pair of handlebars trying to function as a wheel. You can’t get anywhere like that. Once you figure out, “Hey, I’m not a wheel; I’m a pair of handlebars” things get a lot better.
Shit happens. When in doubt, get stupid. Get single-minded. Get mad, and just write.
Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?
Steve: First, be a person. Live. Fight. Fall in love. Make mistakes. There’s no substitute for this.
Second, read. Read fiction. Read nonfiction. Read in your genre and outside it. Read comics. Read scripts. (Hell, watch movies.) Get so familiar with words and stories that your dreams start to make sense.
Third, write. Do it as often as possible, every day if you can. (Five days a week is pretty good.) Make plans for a project, then finish it. Start another one right away. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Fourth, become a student of writing. Read every writing book you can get your hands on. Talk to other writers. Get involved in the writing community. It may be hard to get out in the world and realize you’re not a unique flower, but it will be good for you. Stay humble and teachable. Get excited about learning new things. If you find a gap in your game, plug it with knowledge and practice. You have to do the writing, no one else, so learn all you can.
Finally, never stop.
And finally, got anything you want to pimp?
Steve: My story “She Who Lies in Secret” is slotted as the June 2012 cover story for Red Penny Papers. It’s a story about a college boy who finds a psychic mermaid in the basement of an old mansion. Things go bad in a big way. It’s one of my favorites. Check it out when it goes up. (You should check out Red Penny Papers anyway. They’re cool people doing cool things in a cool way, and I’m convinced they’re not afraid of anything.)
So, first off. October was my best e-book sales month yet, with 184 sales (that I know about, SW hasn’t reported for October for the places like Sony and Apple). 124 of those sales were from post-free sales last weekend after the short story collection and the novel I had up free went back to paid. Seems a little crazy, but giving away thousands of copies of my work seems to help sell the work later. Who knew? I’m definitely going to continue with the experimenting there.
A year ago, my friend Amanda and I bet each other that we could write 100,000 words a month. We both owe each other a lot of dinners, because neither of us ever made it to 100,000 in a single month. Between the health problems, the job loss, Clarion, and other things, my own writing this year fell off a lot.
But it is November again. Which means time for another November Crazy Challenge. I’m not actually going to do NaNo this year because I’m currently working on novellas, but I’m going to be a NaNo rebel and go with that.
So what’s the challenge? Finish five novellas this month. The word total should be around 110,000 because one novella is already partially done, so even though I’m aiming for 25,000 words per book, I don’t quite have to write 125k to get there this month.
The word count breakdown is 4,075 a day for 27 days. It isn’t 30 days because I’m going to be at Orycon and I know I won’t get anything done on those days.
I’ll post what I got done at the end of the month and probably keep a running tab on Twitter.
I know, I know, I can hear the head-shaking now. Yep, I’m sure that everything I write will suck, blah blah blah, why don’t I slow down and make the books good, blah blah blah, why don’t I work less than four hours a day because writing for four hours a day is nuts, blah blah blah. The nice thing is, no one will ever know what I wrote during this time and only other writers seem to care how fast something gets written anyway. Good thing, too.
Anyway, if anyone is also doing NaNo, I’m around on the forums over there. Good luck to all of you. Writing daily is a great habit to develop. Go forth and do it.
A small tick in his clean-cut jaw was the only sign Amos Levich, chief of security for the Special Projects division of BioCore Pharmaceuticals, felt anything at all about the news two of his network systems security analysts had just brought him. He scrolled through the collected data on his PUDI, willing it to make sense but mostly just getting a headache.
“Let me see if I have this correct,” he said in careful, measured tones, “That power hub break-in caused a leak in our server security?”
“Yes, sir.” The older of the two analysts, Michael, swallowed audibly. Though average in height and build with a gruff, sparse appearance, Amos had a reputation for being a man no one wanted to piss off. His job was his life, and he took security for the company very seriously.
“Humor me, kid. I’m an old man and slow sometimes. How does the power going out, in a district our building isn’t in, leave an opening in our wires?” Amos leaned back against his stark grey plastiform desk.
The break-in had been underneath the Kajipe central station, while the main center for BioCore’s Special Projects was located in West Morrow near the Central district edge. BioCore’s main building was also located in West Morrow. Their systems should be closed, accessible only from within the system itself. That was how Amos understood things from his spec manuals. Technology of it wasn’t exactly his strong point and he was smart enough to leave the details up to the network administrators. The two administrators in front of him were the leads of that team and supposedly the best of the best in their field. Amos grew more skeptical by the moment as they shuffled nervously in front of him.
“Well, sir, our system is closed, but we still have servers that have to have a hard, I mean, physical, location. We rent a server room in the Totsi Electronics building, due to its proximity to a. . . well. . .” The grey-haired admin swallowed again and glanced at his companion.
“We were piggy-backing onto a government black box. A super server, if you will, for the use of its array and private Wires. You can only access these directly at the site of the server, so we’d hardwired our way in.” The freckled, paunchy middle aged admin, Seth, picked up the explanation.
“So I take it that if we can hack into this ‘black box’, someone else could also?” Amos waved a gloved hand impatiently.
“It shouldn’t have been possible, but with the right mix of a hard hack onsite and then a power failure causing a system reboot, yes,” Michael confirmed. “The servers are protected in electronically locked boxes that are nearly impossible to destroy, but you can get in at the actual physical location if for example, the power fails. The locks would then fail. The only way to kill that power though is from the central station or a main power hub.”
“Wouldn’t the server also shutdown? I recall something on the newswires about interruption in certain Wires and feeds last night,” Amos said.
“Yes, sir.” The freckled admin nodded. “But that doesn’t mean the information just goes away. If you shut down your PUDI or one of those monitors,” he motioned to the bank of security cam screens that lined the wall behind Amos, “the information in the hard drives doesn’t cease to exist.”
“Cut to the part where there was a breach.” Amos sighed.
“Someone managed to hack into our partition on the server. When we went in this morning to repair it once everything was back online, we noticed the lockpad broken and the security system had been tripped but nothing seemed to be missing. Then we found tracers, data moved around a little. Sometimes that happens when the servers are cleaning up after a reboot. But it can also be a sign that data-mining programs have been rifling through. Very sophisticated ones,” Seth said.
“You are sure it was hacked? And that they got information off of it? Information about Special Projects?” Amos asked. He tried to remember this satellite office in his records but he didn’t think he’d taken care of security for anything like that. Might have been his unfortunate predecessor, if it was set up years ago. It was still his problem now, however and that didn’t help the growing headache one iota.
“Yes, sir.” Michael nodded. “We checked everything multiple times. Someone was in there pulling encrypted information from our partition.”
“These files are what they got?” Amos cued his PUDI to scroll through the files Michael and Seth had sent him earlier before he called the meeting. The files were test results from the first stages of the project. Obviously someone had stored the data onto the remote server as a standard backup procedure.
Amos cursed under his breath. Both administrators intelligently stayed silent. After a few minutes that stretched on and filled the quiet room with breathing and tension, the chief of security refocused his eyes on the two men.
“Can you trace who did this? There were Hunter-killer drones on site, right?” He glanced at another screen where he’d quickly pulled up the security manifests for all the offices. “Why didn’t those get these people?” A small relief there, since the purchase order confirmed it had been done years ago, before his tenure here.
Another nervous swallow. “I don’t know, sir. It was done right there at the site and the reboot from the power failure wiped the tracks. Someone retrieved their programs and the data. I don’t know if there was anything we could have done differently, sir. They should have a hell of a time breaking the encryption though, if they even can.” He looked as though he couldn’t decide whether or not to be proud of himself for that.
“Who else knows about this?” Amos folded his arms. He certainly wasn’t thrilled. These two might be the best of the best, but clearly they were just good enough to cause trouble and not skilled enough to fix it. His headache intensified and he resisted the urge to press his fingers to his temples.
“Just the three of us. Seth discovered the program traces and came to me to confirm his suspicions. We thought we should go straight to you, sir.” Michael said.
“Good.” Amos nodded, mostly to himself. “Thank you both. You may go. If you discover anything else about this, you are to come straight to me.” They both nodded and turned to leave.
“And gentlemen, if anyone else finds out about this, you will be terminated.” Amos’s voice was calm and threaded with steel. The two administrators looked back at him with pale faces and nodded again. It was clear to them that ‘terminated’ didn’t mean fired.
Amos waited until the door had sealed itself behind the two men before he walked slowly around his desk and sat heavily in the greenish-grey plastiform chair behind it. He swiveled around to face the wall of monitors. His brown eyes focused on the upper left hand screens whose cams observed the small labs. A handful of men and women in light green lab coats moved carefully around the sterile manufactured steel tables with vials and handheld dictation devices.
Head pounding like a drunk on a locked door, Amos cued up Dr. Tylour Blanc’s call sign in his PUDI but didn’t instruct it to place the call. He reviewed the pitifully small amount of information his network security admins had been able to collect for him.
“There’s been a breach.” Amos muttered to himself. “Someone got the first testing data files, so they’ll have the basic gist that BioCore is up to more than just making pharmaceuticals, sir. Oh, and by the way, we have no idea who got into the server, how much they might be able to extrapolate from these files, and absolutely no way to find out the answer to any relevant questions you might have, boss.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “Oh yes. That would go over so well.”
Dr. Blanc was the head of the BioCore and more importantly for Amos, the brains behind the Special Project division. Amos didn’t ask questions, but he knew that what was going on in those labs wasn’t legal or likely very nice. Dr. Blanc had high ambitions and he was a ruthless man who’d made it clear to his head of security that getting in the way of those ambitions would be the last thing anyone ever did. It was equally clear that what was good for Dr. Blanc would be good for Amos.
“A rising tide floats all shit,” he murmured and shook his head.
Amos leaned back in his chair. If he was going to keep this quiet from his boss, he’d have to eliminate the two administrators and any data that could trace the breach or lead back to him. It was a hard choice to make, either way. Telling Dr. Blanc would almost certainly get him fired and likely killed. Not telling him would cost two lives.
Either way the two network administrators would die. It wasn’t so hard a choice, after all.
Amos sighed again. He’d have to get his own hands dirty since he couldn’t trust anyone else to remove the two in a way that wouldn’t trace back to the Chief of Security. He’d take it slow though. They weren’t likely to cause him much trouble yet. It would be best to see how things played out in the next week or two.
After a few more minutes of processing his options, Amos rose slowly. He deleted the unmade call to BioCore’s President from his PUDI. Running a gloved hand through his close-cut, graying hair, he walked out of his office. There were two accidents to plan and a security breach to cover-up. It was going to be a long month.
Kat: I’m Kat Otis and my genre is speculative fiction – everything from historical fantasy to urban fantasy, with the occasional bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure.
What’s your Race score? (1 pt for every short story out to market, 3 points for every novel query (1 per novel only), 8 points for every full (once per novel only also) )
Kat: Alas, only 2! I’m currently revising a novel, so I haven’t had as much time to devote to short stories, recently. I expect that number to shoot up again once I’ve started querying and have time to revise a few shorts that are almost-there-but-not-quite.
When did you “get serious” about being a writer?
Kat: I started submitting to Writers of the Future on a semi-regular basis in 2005, but I think I really “got serious” in 2009. That’s when I decided to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak, and attended Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. In an usual-but-awesome series of events, that’s also where I sold my first story.
What are your goals with your writing?
Kat: Get as many stories as possible out of my head and onto paper. Or e-ink.
I’m one of those people for whom the ideas never stop flowing, and if I don’t write them down then my characters follow me around and whine. There are a lot of those characters who really do deserve a novel of their own (but don’t tell them I admitted it!) so my long-term writing goal is to someday have published a whole bookshelf’s worth of my novels.
Where do you see your career in 5 years?
Kat: I would love to have a novel (or three, hey, a gal can dream) out within the next five years.
Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?
Kat: I really want to write an historical fantasy about Juana La Loca. I’ve got most of the plot figured out, I just need to do scads and scads of research on the milieu. Now if only I could figure out how to survive on no sleep….
What are your hobbies outside writing?
Kat: And outside of reading, too, right? 🙂 Singing, hiking, photography, Girl Scouts and whatever else happens to catch my fancy.
What’s your writing process like?
Kat: I’m definitely a “pantster.” My process generally goes along these lines:
1) Something sparks my interest
2) so I jot down a note and generally forget about it
3) except for when I start daydreaming about a character and all the trouble they could get into
4) so I open up a Microsoft Word file and start writing
5) until I get stuck
6) so I wander off and sometimes forget about it
7) but more often I daydream some more and eventually figure out what happens next
8) so I repeat steps 4-7 until I finish
Then, of course, we get to the editing process, in which I analyze the story to discover what I was *really* writing about and just didn’t realize until afterwards.
What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer? How do you keep yourself going?
Kat: Balancing my writing and my day job, both of which draw on the same mental circuits. Though a close runner-up is Shiny New Project Syndrome. 🙂 I cope by making myself to-do lists and schedules, most of which I promptly ignore but at least the process of making them helps me figure out where my current priorities need to be. Also, it’s so much easier to feel like I’m making progress, especially on a big project, if there’s lots of tiny “to-do” steps I can cross off a list.
Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?
Kat: Retro-outlining! Because I’m a pantster, I don’t outline before I write, but I do outline after I’ve got my first draft written. I find it extremely helpful to go through the manuscript and find all the key plot developments, character arcs, etc. Once I’ve retrospectively figured out my structure, then I can revise to bring out the strengths in the story.
And finally, got anything you want to pimp?
Kat: I’ve got a story in Sword & Sorceress 26, which is coming out in November. You can see the list of contributors and the cover art at http://www.mzbworks.com/S26.htm
