John Kusters Jr.

Welcome to my Writing Adventure

Page 5 of 6

The Immediate Future

2023-06-06 /

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve left my high tech job to pursue my dream of being published. That’s a lofty goal, but how does one achieve it? Well, being an engineer by training and aptitude, I’ve planned out a possible future, and am beginning my steps along it.

There are many ways to become a published author. Self-publishing is one path that many have taken. Traditional publishing is another. My personal preference is to start with traditional publishing. Not many self-published authors wind up with books on bookstore shelves, and that has been a driving image for me (possibly because my dream started nearly fifty years ago when I first discovered the magic of bookstores).

One of the major milestones I wish to make on my journey is to become a member of the trade organization for my preferred genre of science-fiction and fantasy, namely SFWA, The Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. When I first started looking into joining SFWA, the eligibility requirements were very specific: an author could apply for membership after having three short stories published in qualifying magazines or websites, or one novel published by a qualified publisher. A couple of years back, they changed the requirements to simply being paid a set amount across all of the various ways to get paid for writing fiction in the genre, but the original requirements are still a pretty good guideline to me.

Here is where my engineer mind kicks in. What is the most cost effective way to earn $1000 (the current threshold) by writing science fiction and fantasy? I believe it is to write short stories and submit them to the various paying markets. A short story is generally 2000 to 15000 words. My average tends to be just shy of 5000. A novel in the genre is typically 90000 to 120000 words (though epic fantasy often clocks in with much heftier word counts). In the time it takes to write a novel, one could presumably write 20 to 30 short stories, each one having a chance to be published.

Now, I’m fairly practiced at writing novels. I’ve been working on writing novels for years, and have several in various states of completion. Writing short stories uses many different skills than novels, and I’ve not developed those skills yet. But I imagine that the skills I need to develop for writing short pieces will in the long term benefit my long form writing, especially skills related to packing a lot of description in short sentences, and getting to the point quickly.

Another reason to focus on writing short fiction right now is that it would look good on my writing resume (or in my query letter to agents) to have a list of published works I can cite. Which is an agent going to take more seriously, a novel from someone who’s never been published, or a novel from someone who has a record of publications in various magazines? My money is on the latter.

In the final analysis, it seems much more beneficial to me at this state of my new career to focus on writing and publishing short stories. It will probably make me eligible to join my desired professional organization sooner, I’ll have more chances to get my writing in front of paying eyeballs, and it will help develop skills I can leverage in my novel writing. So, for the time being, my focus will be on writing short fiction.

With that in mind, I’m looking at some other statistics, namely statistics around my own performance. I find that when I’m focused, when I have the story clearly in mind, I can crank out 500 works in 30 minutes. I’m generally happy with that output as a first draft. In theory, if I were to be focused for my entire writing day, which I currently plan to be six hours per week day, I would be able to write 6000 words each day. I do not believe that rate is sustainable, but 2000 working words per day certainly seems to be. Given that, over the span of five working days, I should be able to brainstorm, develop, write, and edit a 3000-5000 word short story every week. I think this is doable. Will all of the stories be worthy of submission to magazines? I doubt it. But in 52 weeks, will some of them be? I’d like to think so.

So that is my plan. A short story a week every week. And when I can, a little more so I’ll have something to count as a completed story during those weeks I’m on vacation. The hardest part, naturally, will be coming up with enough ideas to support the plan.

Time to start brainstorming!

Thoughts about Modern Software QA

2023-06-05 /

I recently retired from a career in High Tech that spanned over 40 years, with the last 25 or so focused on Software Quality Assurance (SQA). There were several reasons behind my decision to retire. The most prominent one was my desire to pursue a childhood dream. However, I must admit that another factor was the evolving nature of Software QA in modern times, and my inability to keep up with the changes.

As we age in the High Tech industry, many of us struggle to keep pace with the latest advancements in software engineering. During our youth, particularly in college, we dedicated our days to learning and applying new concepts. Our minds were sharp and receptive to absorbing new information. However, after a decade or more, it becomes increasingly challenging to stay up to date. Non-learning tasks consume a significant portion of our time, and falling slightly behind leads to a snowball effect where catching up with the latest developments becomes overwhelming. That’s precisely what happened to me.

I found myself surrounded by young and brilliant software engineers who continuously produced astonishing frameworks and libraries. These advancements were both inspiring and intimidating. Unfortunately, just as I would start grasping one set of testing protocols and APIs, another would emerge and replace it. Each new paradigm was cutting-edge and had the potential to catch me off guard. I was certain that within a year or so, I would be unable to keep up, and my relevance would diminish. Retiring on my own terms was a privilege, and not everyone in my position could afford to do so.

Another concern of mine revolves around the excessive focus on software testing automation as the defining role of Software QA. Leaders in software companies, regardless of their size, increasingly view test automation as the key to maintaining high product quality while incorporating an ever-growing number of features. Admittedly, when test automation works, it excels at detecting certain types of regressions in products. Consequently, companies adopting this approach end up replacing traditional QA engineers with software developers who hope to transition into product engineering. However, software engineers and Quality engineers have fundamentally different priorities. Software engineers are primarily focused on making things work, especially through clever and efficient implementations. On the other hand, good Quality engineers concentrate on uncovering issues with the product—issues that Software engineers may not have anticipated. The best QA engineers possess the ability to envision the various ways users might utilize and potentially break the product. They excel at identifying logic flaws and ensuring that potential crashes and data problems are resolved before customers encounter them. This level of thoroughness cannot be achieved through testing automation alone. It requires humans to think creatively and deviously, a trait that software cannot yet emulate.

Hence, I observe the growing trend toward software testing automation with a certain amount of unease. As hands-on QA roles diminish and “software engineers in test” positions increase, who will be the ones scrutinizing the finer details? In my experience, software engineers tend to focus on testing the expected paths and often overlook testing for error conditions or deliberately pushing their products to their limits. Unless software firms recognize the need for some level of hands-on QA involvement, driven by individuals who find joy in discovering the most elusive bugs before customers do, software quality is bound to decline.

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.

A Necessity For Mutiny?

2023-04-26 /

It seems to me that there is something inherently corrupt in how the upper eschelons of Starfleet operate. It perpetually has rogue Admirals, whether power hungry on their own or subverted by outside aliens. These Admirals all seem to wield enormous power. Plans for genocide, experimenting with technology made illegal by treaty, conspiring with the enemy to prevent peace talks, and facilitating the destruction of Earth itself. One wonders what the “good” Admiralty is doing beyond twiddling their thumbs (or thumb-equivalents). It practically requires that there are always a handful of Captains and crew who have strong moral compasses and a willingness to challenge authority when it serves a greater good. Nearly every crew featured in a series is full of rule-breakers and those willing to step outside the lines. It’s been going on since Archer’s days and continues unabated through the 35th century. Starfleet and the Federation continually has its bacon saved by crews of individual ships.

(Yes, it’s an product of the writing, you don’t need to tell me that. But it does make for a very strange fictional power structure.)

Character Deep Dives

2023-04-25 /

I’m finding myself diving deeply into my characters’ backstories as I do the prep work for the novel I’m planning. For my typical action-oriented stories of novels past, a page or two of notes has usually been sufficient (or so I’ve thought). Since this novel’s main story is heavily influenced by romance novel tropes and structure, I figured I needed to know more about each of my three main characters, the two love birds and the evil person determined to obliterate a star system. (Oh, it’s primarily conceived as a space opera, in case that wasn’t clear before now.) Each of the two protagonists have elicited 5000 and more words of backstory and personality notes, and the villain is threatening to exceed that amount. The further I go, the more I have “aha!” moments about them, and the more complex they get. (For example, during today’s writing I “discovered” that the name of one of my protagonists is an assumed name, something I had never considered before, but which gives him additional depth and secrets to protect.) I usually am too eager to start writing the novel but find myself having large gaps in my novel outline, especially in the “muddy middle.” “Something happens here!” But as I add depth to my characters, certain scenes suddenly demand to be added to my outline. I’m totally fascinated by this.

Thoughts on a Polite Society

2023-04-20 /

An armed society is a polite one!

Ralph Yarl shot in the head after mistakenly ringing the doorbell at the wrong house.

An armed society is a polite one!

Kaylin Gillis killed after pulling into the wrong driveway by mistake.

An armed society is a polite one!

Two Texas cheerleaders shot after one mistakenly got into the wrong car.

As the number of guns in our society skyrocket, I just have to ask: When the FUCK do we get to the POLITE part of the aphorism frequently quoted by gun lovers? When did making simple mistakes, mistakes all of us make at one or more points in our lives, become a crime punishable by being shot at or even killed?

Doing The Scary Thing

2023-03-24 /

I have done the scary thing. I have submitted my first story for publication, namely to the biggest name out there, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

While I certainly hope the story will fit what they are looking for at the moment, my expectation is a rejection letter. But this is the first step at becoming a published author. Every traditionally published author has stepped through this gateway. And now I have done the same.

And if they do pass on the story, there are many other magazines and web sites out there to submit to. And if any of them give me editorial comments, I’ll definitly incorporate them before re-submitting. But I’m proud of myself for taking this first step. I’ve been hesitant to take this step for too long.

Yay me!

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