John Kusters Jr.

Welcome to my Writing Adventure

Month: May 2023

Before the Internet?

2023-05-30 /

Do you remember life before the internet?

What an interesting question, because many people mean different things when they say “the internet”. I believe most people believe “the internet” is synonymous with the World Wide Web, which came into popular use in the mid- to late 90s, after getting its start in academia in 1990. But the protocols and connections that underlie the World Wide Web, the thing actually called the Internet was born two decades earlier when Kahn and Cerf published their paper on packet-based intercommunication in 1974.

1974 is definitely before my first usage of internet technology. But in the mid 80s, I was definitely partaking of the BBS scene in the Bay Area, exchanging messages with other anonymous users, and downloading files over my mighty 1200 baud modem. I also dallied with the large commercial network services like CompuServe, GEnie, BiX, and AOL. I was a poor student living on my own, and certainly couldn’t afford to spend much time on those systems but I did see the shiny promise of a thoroughly connected world they held up.

My first encounter with the internet came in 1985 (before the WWW) when I took an internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center. There I had an email account and could exchange email with researchers and computer scientists around the world using “bang paths” where one would manually specify each server the mail should pass through. I used various internet protocols such as gopher, telnet, and FTP to get information and exchange data. I remember there being many other services accessible via internet protocols that are not in common use today.

By the time I started studies at Cal Poly SLO, BBSes still existed but so,e of them had moved to internet-based interfaces. And shortly after I started, the World Wide Web burst onto the scene, though it would be years before it would become as ubiquitous as it is today.

I guess this is my long-about way of saying that I do remember the internet before it became synonymous with the WWW. I fondly remember those years of being in the “cool club” with secret handshaking protocols. 😉

On Transitions

2023-05-29 /

This evening I wrote my “farewell” email to my coworkers and colleagues at the place where I’ve worked the past sixteen years. At the end of this week, I will no longer be employed there. As of that point, I become a full-time writer.

As many who are raised in the American society do, I often feel defined by my employment. “Who am I? Oh, I’m a software QA engineer working for such-and-such company. And you?” As of Friday afternoon, I’ll no longer be employed. Or rather, I’ll be self-employed, a state I’ve never experienced before. To some degree, until I get paid for my writing (still waiting on a response to my first ever short story submission!), I’m not really “employed” as a writer, am I? I suppose I’ll be an unpaid intern till then.

The reason I’m making a distinction is because other people already have. When I’ve told people I’m a writer, the immediate question is “what have you published.” When I say “nothing yet,” the posture changes, the voice alters, and the obvious message, intended or not, is that one is not really a writer until they are published. Until one is making money from their profession, it doesn’t count I suppose.

So I’m transitioning from someone who is gainfully employed in a high tech career at a world-famous corporation to someone who by our society’s standards is simply not employed. And I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a part of me that is bothered by that change. Societal programming runs deeply in the psyche, and bucking the norms is something we’re all trained to avoid (not that the training is always effective). In a country that seems to venerate “rugged individualism”, striking out by one’s self to follow a dream without the safety of a paycheck often seems to be considered an aberration. I’m still working through how that feels in my own head and my own experience.

Still, I’m excited by the upcoming transition. It literally has been a dream since childhood. I’ve been writing on an off since well before high school. (And the less said about the cringy fan-fiction of mine that my High School’s “literary magazine” published the better.) I’ve been practicing my craft for decades. It’s time to see if I can make something real and lasting of it.

On LLM “Artificial Intelligence”

2023-05-29 /

As I toddle off to bed, I’m pondering why we are calling LLM tools “artificial intelligence”. They don’t really show any kind of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. All they do is put millions of texts into a blender, hit the “frappe” button, then pour the slurry back out and feed it to you. There’s no verification of presented data, no discernment between fact and fiction, just stochastically stringing words together in a way that resembles other text it has seen. The appearance of coherence is merely a factor of how much data it has consumed. The coherence is an illusion. And yet we have people out there that are convinced systems like ChatGPT are some kind of oracle, infallible and wise. That’s truly frightening.

On Writing Self-Help Books

2023-05-27 /

I’ve always enjoyed reading self-help books on the craft of writing. From Stephen King’s “On Writing” to Ursula Le Guinn’s “Conversations on Writing” to David Gerrold’s “Worlds of Wonder”, all have inspired me in different ways, and gave me plenty to think about as I sit down to work on my own craft.

But lately I’ve notice an interesting trend. As I scan Amazon and Apple Bookstore for new interesting reads in this particular field, I find plenty of books that seem interesting and get fairly decent reviews. But if I go and try to find books or short stories published by the authors of these “how to write” books, it’s amazing how few books I tend to find.

One popular Mystery writer’s YouTube channel is full of authoritative advice on how to plot your murder mystery novel, how to use cliches in new and interesting ways, how to hide your killer’s motives so that they result in a satisfying ending, and so on and so forth. She’s published exactly one novel so far, and is working on a “how to” book based on her YouTube videos. Now, she has a LOT of interesting things to say, and I find her insights useful. Every minute spent watching her videos has been a smart investment in my own craft. But still, only one novel (and no short stories that I could find).

In another case, I found someone who is selling probably a dozen or so short books on various aspects of the craft of writing short stories and other fiction. Each is $2.99. Many of them get great reviews. As far as I can tell, she has no fiction sold under the name she uses to write these books. It seems strange to me not to bank on your own name if you’re successfully selling fiction.

Maybe all of these authors are actually publishing under different names, and thus actually do have the experience to tell prospective writers the right way to go about crafting and marketing their own work. I don’t know, I didn’t dig deeply into the authors I found. And of course, if the advice resonates, it’s undoubtedly useful to one degree or another.

It just looks strange to me when someone is publishing a fiction writing self-help book with so little apparent experience in actually writing fiction.

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