hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0491.txt

Episode: 491
Title: HPR0491: Null_Pointer Interview
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0491/hpr0491.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:41:43

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Hello, this is Kudmo and I wanted to tell you about a recent little trip I took.
I got to go to a book signing on October 30th with Ken McConnell on his new book,
Noel Pointer, which I'm calling a geek mystery. Hopefully he doesn't mind that.
I've got Ken here in the shop with me today. Welcome, Ken.
Hi, good to be here. Great. So reading your book, by the way I killed it off over the weekend, really enjoyed it.
It is extremely geeky. I'm assuming that you've got a little bit of a base for all this.
How did you get into the field? I guess I've always liked computers, but I've never really was a computer geek as a kid.
I was doing other geeky things. My interest as a kid was mostly in filmmaking.
This is the day before video, so dating myself, but I was into short films, making short films.
And of course heavily influenced by science fiction. So we made a lot of little sci-fi epics, five-minute variety.
And so one of the final films that we shot as a kid, I think it was in high school, I think.
Well, maybe ninth grade, maybe, was a film called Renegade.
And it was our first live-action, monstrous in spaceships, kind of a deal.
And we didn't have sound, so we had to convey our plot with theatrics.
But one of the things that it did at the end, one of my friends who was a little bit more computer geeky than I was at the time,
actually, probably a lot more, he said, hey, I could do the credits on my computer.
And he had like an Apple IIE, I think. And I said, sure, go for it. So he did.
And what he wasn't able to do the credits, he got distracted, he goes, I'm going to do graphics.
I'm going to do a graphic of our spaceship, and we can cut away to it as a scanner shot.
And I was like, okay, that's cool. We don't have anything like that yet.
So he did a little program that made the screen go blank and then drew an outline of our starship.
That we're using. And we cut it into the film and it looked great.
And my other friend, so I did this with two other friends, my other friend, Jason.
He was rather geeky with stuff. He could program stuff, at least in basic.
And he said, I can do the credits in basic. I'm like, trash 80. And I was like, okay, go for it.
So we filmed the credits. And that was kind of like my first really introduction to computer geeky things.
And based on the computers I talked about, Apple IIE and trash 80.
That was pretty far ago. But I didn't really start getting into computers
probably until I was much, much later in life.
I took film in college and was writing screenplays, things like that.
Again, kind of geeky in towards a more of a, you know, just film stuff.
It was really a film. I knew a lot of different films and wanted to be a film maker at that point.
But I had a lot of ideas. And that was where the Genesis writing came in.
I was like, okay, you know, I got these ideas in my head and I need to get them out there.
But I want to make them into movies. So I spent a lot of my time learning how to direct scripts.
And the studying films, oh my God, I've seen every film.
It seemed like that out of the time. And that was my direction I was heading until well into college.
And I was being funded in my college endeavors by a rich grandmother.
And her money finally ran out. And I wasn't finished. And I was like, okay, I got, I'm going after a degree in film.
Exactly how much money do you think I can make in another college?
So I had to abandon college and go back, go out into life and start making some money.
So with the emphasis to come back, turns out I never did.
But I eventually went into the service and the Air Force and served pretty much close to 10 years.
Wow.
And I was not in a computer-related field, but I was in a field that used computers a lot.
And one of the computers that we used was a mainframe computer at the time,
which was, I think, an IBM 3B, something like that.
Incredibly primitive by today's standards.
But that was our mainframe that we, my career field near force was ammo.
And so we had to keep track of all the munitions that the Air Force used, which was really vast.
From the big fancy bombs you see on CNN down to the explosives that launched the bombs off the plane,
if need be, and the pilot out of the plane.
A lot of stuff.
And we could, we keep track of all this on this big IBM computer,
actually, a little IBM computer, but it was a mainframe.
And it used Unix.
And so I was kind of my first exposure to Unix.
But at the same time, I was getting exposed to Linux because as a computer,
a personal computer user, I was, you know, on Windows like everybody else at the time.
And I kept thinking, you know, this Windows is really sucks.
I kept crashing on me all the time.
And I was trying to do what I thought at the time was pretty simple stuff.
I wasn't editing films or video or audio or anything like that.
All I was doing was making web pages.
Because I realized that, you know, I had this great science fiction store that I wanted to put out on the web.
And this was way long before that was popular.
And I was using Windows 98 and just came out.
And so I was using that.
And I was trying to build this web page in front page 97 or whatever back then.
And I had this really elaborate stuff.
But it kept crashing on me.
I mean, every once in a while, I would get it so complex, so many different pages linking together
that the thing would just break on me.
And it frustrated me.
So I would go to the computer store and say, what else is there?
And that got me looking for something else.
And the thing that I got hooked on at the time was Red Hat.
And I believe it was 5.2.
Red Hat 5.2 was my first one.
So I had an extra PC and I said, well, I'll put this on there and see what happens, you know.
And those are the days.
When if you didn't load just right, you blew up your monitor or your sound card or whatever.
And you'd get these ominous messages, you know.
I pushed this to try, but we stand back, your computer might blow up, you know.
And it was just like scary, you know.
And there was a lot of terms in there, a lot of Unix terms that I had never heard of before.
And I figured, you know what?
If I'm going to make this work, I'm going to have to put some effort and I don't have to study it.
I'm going to have to learn this stuff.
So I started looking for books on how to do Unix, how to do the command line, how to do, how to build programs and things.
And that kind of lured me in.
That's where, you know, you start doing things yourselves and the hammer and nails and you start to realize, okay, you know, that's kind of cool.
So I spent almost as much time dinking around trying to build programs.
Then I did actually building webpages, which is what I started out to do.
But I stuck with Red Hat for a long time all up until I can't set six or seven.
I forgot what versions they were after a while.
When they went to, when they split off and went to Fedora, it was about the time that I picked up on Ubuntu.
And I've been with Ubuntu ever since.
And primarily because after a while I get tired of messing around with it.
I felt like every time I sat down on my Linux box, I was tweaking things left and right, left and right.
And yeah, it was wonderful, it was glorious, but it was huge time seconds.
And after a while I was like, you know what, I kind of ridden rather just to use the computer.
So that's why I gravitated more towards the easy use Ubuntu and said, you know, I'm not going to play with it so much.
You might just want to use it.
You bet.
So I used it.
And it's been working with me fine, you know, ever since.
But that's how I got into the computers.
Kind of an interesting film led to screenwriting led to eventually writing.
And this little science fiction epic that my friends and I came up with back when we were kids turned into quite the story.
I kept it in my head for years, probably 20 years or so.
And when I finally got it to my thick skull, you know, you're kind of creative with the story thing.
Maybe you should be a writer and started to study writing and actually do it, seriously.
That was the first thing I came out of my head was that story that we had on our kids.
Of course, it was really primitive back in your kids.
It's, you know, good guys, bad guys.
And not so shooting and not much of a plot or characterization.
So I had to do that.
And at the time that I had decided to write this as a novel, I had never written a novel before.
I mean, everybody says, oh yeah, everybody can do at least one novel.
And I was like, yeah, I can do that, you know.
And it just so happens out of the time I was in the Air Force and I was deployed.
And I think first off, it was Saudi Arabia or Operation Desert Shield or Desert, yeah.
Whatever the one was where it was after the first Gulf War.
And we were controlling the airspace in southern Iraq.
That was our mission.
So they weren't actually fighting. They dropped bombs occasionally.
But it wasn't a lot of fighting.
There was a lot of, in my career field, there was a lot of downtime where you couldn't do anything.
And you either sat around the tent watching movies that everybody hated and everybody saw a million times.
Or, you know, you got in a card game, you know, it was not much to do.
So I said, what a perfect time to just sit and write.
So I had this really cheap old black and white monitor laptop.
It was like a bell and how something or a packer bell.
It was a 386 without the math go for us.
And I was running Windows 311 or something like that.
But it had a copy of old word on it.
So I was using that and I started writing it.
And the cool thing was that as I was writing it, I let loose that to some of my buddies that I was writing the science fiction story.
And they said, oh, bring me down. We want to read it.
Because there's nothing to do.
So I had a bit of a capital audience for that first draft.
And I wrote probably half the novel on the first deployment.
I was only like a four-month deployment.
And came back to the States, let it sit for a while, was half done.
And I was like, hmm, I had other things going on.
Get deployed again this time to Turkey for the Northern Watch.
And was there another three months.
And I said, you know, I might as well finish it.
So I finished it and brought it back.
And then the story sat on the hard drive for another year or two.
But while I got married, started a family, started doing the things that you do that age.
Those things that just tend to drag down good projects.
That keep you from doing what you want to do sometimes.
So I didn't really think about writing that much anymore.
I kind of considered it done.
And then this was about the time when self-publishing started coming into its groove.
But it was pretty, pretty fringe at the time.
A lot of people were doing it.
I said, well, let's try.
Let's experiment with it.
You see what I can do.
And the first one out there was a company that was founded by the owner or one of the creators of Red Hat.
It's called Lulu.
And I said, well, can't go wrong now.
It's open source guy.
He's cool.
Let's see what he does.
I checked out Lulu and said, sure enough, uploaded the manuscript.
Had a cheesy cover made.
And, you know, ordered a copy.
And there it was.
Ooh, I published, you know.
And that was where it stayed for a long time.
And, you know, I still hadn't made that commitment that maybe I should be a writer yet.
You know, I still like, that was a one-off thing.
Got your one novel out of the way.
Exactly.
And I wasn't sure whether I had enough ideas, you know, because I had been dreaming of that story for 20 years.
And what else is there?
You know, do I have any other ideas?
And I was like, oh, yeah, I got ideas.
I was like, well, let's write them as stories.
Okay.
And then, so I start researching what writers do and how to be a writer and how do they get published and all this.
Now, basically, well down to, you have to write.
You have to put your button in chair and write.
Yeah.
And when you finish a story or a novel, then you put it down and you write another one.
And you just keep going.
Once you did the research to what a writer does, how much different was that than what you put into your previous?
Very little, to find out.
Very good.
And I don't say that by technique.
I say that as in city of my butt and writing, which is how I got through that first novel.
And no, it wasn't perfect.
It wasn't horrible.
It was enjoyable to the military that read it, because it was a very militaristic story.
It was kind of like a cross-frame star trek in Star Wars and had lots of explosions.
Explosions, aliens, it was awesome, right?
So, you know, not much.
But again, I came back to, well, let's, how do you break into it?
You know, you got this novel.
It's probably not that good.
They always say, you know, your first one sucks.
Just put it away and started another one.
So I essentially did.
As I was researching, the most popular thing, the standard advice at the time was,
Star Wars short stories.
They're short.
They're sweet.
You can write one in a few weeks, and you can be experimental with it.
You can change your point of view.
You know, you do all these weird things with it.
And I was like, okay, I can see if I can do that.
So I wrote, started writing short stories.
And the very first short story that I wrote was, here I am, stretching my creative muscles.
It was based on one of the films I made when I was a kid.
The character in that story.
And I basically took that story and wrote it as a short story.
And I thought I was having fun with it because I kind of stretched.
I don't usually deal with things like the occult or ESP or anything like that.
But that kind of doesn't interest me.
So, but I had this, it was a story about a man who had, had some money, got out of a police force,
had some money, wanted to buy his own spaceship, play Han Solo with it, you know,
set up his own trade thing with it, do his own thing, be his own guy kind of thing in the universe.
So the first thing you have to do is find this ship.
And he went to essentially a space of junkyard on some faraway planet.
And he finds a ship that he thinks he can fix up and use and he purchases it.
And then he starts to fix it up.
And he realizes that there's some creature that lives in the engine room.
And he's like, it's just this big, huge bug.
And he's just like, it's just nasty.
And his first thing claims is to clean out, you know, and get it out of there.
But things much bigger than he is and very territorial.
And can speak to him through his head, in his head telepathically.
And so the story about how he gets rid of the sailor.
And it's turned up to be very good.
I thought at the time I was like, man, I don't think I can do another one.
That's good. You know, that's really cool.
And I set it in a bar.
Some kind of a dim, dark bar, you know, like Cantina somewhere.
And he's telling a bunch of other pilots this story about where he found his ship.
And so you have this guy telling the story within the story.
And so I was expanding my, you know, abilities.
This kind of do that, you know.
And I was like, yeah, it worked.
Well, the first place I sent the damn story to was an online magazine called Space Westerns.
Spacewesterns.com.
There's the new one on me.
You just check it out. It's cool, sweet.
It's basically they'll pay, you know, a standard.
I think you're like 10 or 15 bucks for a short story.
But they'll put it out on their website and they'll make it look good.
And it's going to be there forever.
And it's free to read for anyone.
So I was like, all right, that's cool.
You know, I can send all my friends there.
They can read it, you know, online.
So my sent this magazine and lo and behold within about two or three weeks,
I got an email back that said that he liked it.
The editor liked to do one by him.
I was like, whoa, that was easy.
The first place I sent it, I saw the short story.
I mean, while I'm here in all these horror stories,
it collected, you know, bags full of rejection slips.
And here I was selling my first short story.
So I thought, well, maybe I do have something here.
Maybe I can do this, you know.
So that gave me the courage to write more short stories.
Over the next year, I probably wrote, maybe it doesn't.
Short stories.
And these are about three to five thousand word short stories.
And they were all science fiction, the most important.
And not all of them were that great.
Some of them were good, some of them are bad.
I wound up within the same band of the same year.
I sold one other short story to an endology.
Co-Baron Worlds.
And that was a pretty good story too.
At least, you know, it wasn't my favorite.
It wasn't as cool as the monster one.
But it was technically pretty good, I guess, because they bought that one.
So then, you know, within a year after that,
here I am still writing short stories.
It takes a long time for a book to come out.
So if you're in a part of a book, like an anthology is,
it takes them a long time to actually get it out.
And it was a small press.
And they weren't any bigger hurry anyway.
But they finally put it out.
And when it came out,
my name was in a book.
I like that.
A real book.
And when they got published by somebody else, not me.
And I thought, well, that's pretty cool.
And I got to talk in with the editor,
who accepted me on that one through email.
And he said that another author was in the book,
who was also from Idaho.
And I didn't know that.
So I asked him to find out who it was.
It came back. It was Mary Ellen Martin.
And she was in Moscow.
And I was like, oh, I know Moscow.
That's the University of Idaho.
I haven't been there, but that's cool, you know.
So he gave me her address.
And we made contact on email.
And she was coming down to Boise to visit family or whatnot.
Sort of been a year ago in the fall.
And she said, let's do a book sign.
You know, let's say I have, pick your local bookstore.
And we'll order a bunch of copies.
And I'll be in town.
And we'll just get together and have a sign.
Ooh, a sign. What's that?
I've never done that. Or cool.
Yeah, let's do that.
So she did. She came down.
I got to meet her in her family.
And she realized lady.
And it was her first sale too.
And she went to writing.
But, you know, we had got along pretty good.
And I introduced her to the members of my writing group friends here in Boise.
And we all got along really good at a barbecue afterwards.
So it was a good time.
And the signing was good.
We both read from our stories.
And we sold, I don't know, maybe 10 books, 10, 15 books, something like that.
It's about average for a signing.
And it was neat.
I was like, that's cool.
And then she goes, you know what?
You need to come up to Moscow.
And do a signing of it.
My little bookstore right now.
And I was like, okay.
Sure, why not?
So I did. I drew.
I got in my little family station.
And I drove all the way up to Moscow by myself.
And stayed in a hotel up there.
And then the following Saturday did a book signing.
At her little place.
The name of the place escapes me.
I was like the one little bookstore they had down there in Moscow.
Pretty cool place.
And, you know, so that was neat.
It got me out there.
And then that same year I did a reading at a place in Oregon.
And that was through, you know, friends of a friend, you know, other authors saying,
I'm going here, you want to come with me.
And I was like, sure.
And so, you know, I got to do two readings on a signing in the same year.
And I got hooked on it.
I was like, that's pretty neat.
You know, this is this writer thing is kind of cool.
It's me, hobby.
And that's where I was.
And going back a few years before that, I was, I got a job, a programming job,
web programming job at MPC here in, in, in, in Ampa.
And they were using the Microsoft products.
They were using ASP and all that, which kind of just made me go cringe.
You know, I was like, oh, why do we have to use this?
But they had built this huge thing in that there's no way you could change it.
And so I, I, you know, was there within a few weeks in my, my boss at the time
was trying to get to know me over a break at one point.
And she was asking me, so what, you know, what do you like to do with your hobbies?
And I said, well, one of my hobbies is I like to write.
And she was like, well, what are you writing?
And I said, well, science fiction, of course.
What else is there?
What else is there?
Yeah, I mean, that's awesome.
And she said, I hate science fiction.
And she didn't say that particular.
She just said, I don't like that.
And I said, oh, no, sorry.
And the conversation as far as I was concerned.
But she said, well, I asked her, what, what do you like to read?
And she said, I like, I like mysteries.
And I said, what kind of mystery?
You know, what, what's that?
You know, I kind of knew what a mystery was.
But it was like, I'm not really into it.
It's not my genre.
Yeah, it's just not my thing.
And, you know, anyway, it seemed really boring to me.
So she told me, you know, I like this person, that person,
all the family I didn't know who they were.
And I was like, okay.
And then she turned, she turned to me on their regular.
She looked right at me and she said, you have a mystery
and I'll read it.
And I was like, holy crap.
Here's somebody who wants to read something that I'm going to write.
And I haven't even thought of what it would be yet.
And I was like, you're on.
You know, I was like, a dare.
I was like, okay, probably a mystery.
I was thinking short story at the time.
But later I was like, no, it has to be a novel.
There's no short story in the mystery.
There are, but there's very few.
And so I was getting myself into writing another novel.
This would be my second novel.
And that was no pointer.
And so I didn't have a clue what I was going to write about.
But I came back to my desk and sat there for a while and thought.
And I, you know, if I'm going to do a mystery,
I'm going to do something that interests me,
not that something that, you know, not, you know,
a little mable brown who writes the train.
It solves murders or whatever.
You know, and it's not going to be a hard-willed thing.
We're a macho detective as beating people with a face.
And it just wasn't my interest.
So I wanted something a little more cerebral,
or at least I thought.
So I faced it in where I was working.
You know, in a tech field.
And I made the hero programmer.
And I said, well, what if somebody was killed
over their computer?
It was my premise.
What if you're, you come in one day and you're cute for me.
The guy beside you is dead.
And he was killed through his computer somehow.
And that was the premise.
And I wrote about a three-lot-three-four-line,
you know, outline of what it would be.
And emailed it to her and said, what about this?
And she just, as soon as she read it,
she got out of her office,
walked down the cubicles, walked in my cubicles.
You've got to write this.
That's it.
Okay.
That sounds cool.
Let's do it.
You know, so then I had to figure out how you're going to
kill somebody over their computer.
Yeah, you can't just bludgeon them to death
with a model M and call it actually.
So that was, that was tricky.
It took a while.
It took a while for me to dream up.
You know, I know you know what I'm talking about,
because we read the book.
But I don't want to spoil it for everybody.
But it was, it involved a little bit of a leap of faith
in certain areas.
But I thought maybe the audience would probably forgive me for that,
because enough of it was,
be asked good enough to where people was like,
oh, good, possible.
So what I came up with was, you know,
satisfy me to play, we're okay.
I can probably write this.
And then it became a matter of learning how to write mysteries,
because I didn't know anything about that.
I haven't read it to put a spaceship in there
or an alien or something.
And that's not going to happen.
So I had to come up with some characters,
oblatable characters.
And I thought about stereotypes of geeks,
and you know, they're usually stereotype disease,
introverted people,
and they do a lot of, you know,
coding at night and their basement and whatnot.
These are the stereotypes that everybody are kind of familiar with.
And another one was the fact that there's no girls that are geeks.
You know, there's no girls that are geeks.
No girls write programs.
That's a guy thing, you know.
And I was like, what if there was?
What if the guy's here?
What if his girlfriend or future girlfriend could be a programmer?
We wouldn't have to be attracted to a guy.
Well, yeah.
You know, a good looking girl.
Like a programmer would probably be pretty cool to achieve that.
Yeah.
So I was like, well, okay.
So there's two characters.
And then I started coming up with a premise
that I didn't want my hero to be Uber geek.
I didn't want him to be, you know, a hacker type.
I wanted him to be really good,
but more good, or more good.
Be better at going to friends who had expertise
and have them help him solve things.
So he was good enough to understand a lot of things,
but maybe wasn't an expert and say security or whatnot.
And it was secure in the fact that he could go to people
and he knew enough people, right?
He knew enough people that were expert in these areas.
And that kind of was the way I was at the time.
Like, yeah, I knew enough to get drowned, you know,
getting there and get drowned.
But I didn't know how to not be drowned in all the details.
So that's kind of where I was wanting to be.
And I kind of took a gamble with that
because when you do that, your character becomes less interesting
because then, okay, really, he's not this Uber geek.
So how's that going to make him appealing in any way?
And I still don't know if I succeeded in that
with the main character, Joshua.
I think he is less likable than his girlfriend.
I think his girlfriend is a more powerful character.
She rocks.
Yeah.
And I think I developed her a little more than him.
But one of the things that I did to make Joshua
more interesting is I gave him this issue
with his parents having died and having nightmares about it.
And as the story progressed, it turns out that,
well, you know, the bad guy is doing that to him.
And that kind of came around.
And I was like, okay, so that makes him,
that gives him the problem.
I always say, give your major, your major care
for your, you know, you're, you're portagging to something,
some kind of difficulty that he has to work through
other than just a plot.
He's got a drinking problem, he smokes too much, you know,
something.
And so mine was this guy who has nightmares a lot about his parents dying.
And so that was, that kind of made you get into him
just a little bit more than you probably would have normally.
So that was, that was a good help.
And like I said, I had to learn how to write mysteries.
So I had to learn who mystery writers were
and which ones are the good ones and bad ones and whatever.
And so I was asking everybody,
and I came across this group that wrote mysteries.
It was a group of writers and they're called Partners in Crime.
And they're here in Boise and they're a group that is kind of a subgroup of sisters in crime,
which is a national group of writers who are there to promote women in writing.
So at the time that sisters in crime was started over 15 years ago,
I believe there was, was not a lot of female writers writing mysteries.
And so they were created to boost that, boost them up.
And now it's pretty much all women.
There's very few men writing mysteries these days.
They're out there, which you got to find them.
So this club wanted to be a part of Sisters in Crime,
but they didn't want to call it a Sisters in Crime because they thought
that no guys would want to be in the club.
So they call it Partner in Crime.
And that worked for me because I went to a couple of their meetings
and it was all women.
And then they're all older ladies,
and they all knew about everything of mystery and all that.
And I was just like, I'm so out of place here.
I don't know anything.
So, but oddly enough, when I was getting into Linux,
one of the things I did is I went to a Linux user group,
and this is, do you know who Bill Anderson is?
The name's familiar.
Okay, he started the first Linux group here in Boise area,
and this was, you know, back in the Red Hat days.
And I started going to his meetings,
and he was a really interesting individual.
He still has a good friendship bill still.
He's a Red Hat certified technician who works at an HP.
He would hold these user group meetings at his house.
And his family room was like this big room
with a bunch of computers with all their covers off,
and they're all running these obscure Linux things.
And he had this down here,
and he would sit in the middle of like a swami and say,
you know, LS, blah, blah.
You know, I'm just like, what the hell is going on here?
You know, and I first got there.
I didn't know anything that they were talking about,
but it fascinated, it set fascinated,
and he's so much stuck with it.
And that's kind of how I got to know,
really got to know Linux.
And that was the first time I got into really somewhat of programming,
and that was through Python,
because that's what Bill used.
He said, you gotta use Python.
It's easy.
Okay, I'm all about easy.
But, so, when I started getting into the mystery Red Hat group,
it kind of felt the same way.
It felt like I was, you know,
here's a little inner circle of nerdy people
that had their specialty,
and I was trying to break into it and learn about it.
So that's kind of the angle that I took.
And, you know, over a period of a year's time,
or whatever, I took one of these meetings once a month,
and I got to know some of the mystery writers
and how they were supposed to be made and stuff.
And it was very, very cool.
And I still go to their meetings,
and a big part of that was Vice President now.
Recently, Vice President made Vice President.
So, I'm in it for long all there,
but very good group of ladies and guys
and have helped me with my craft of writing a lot.
So, if you're a writer and you're looking to improve,
the best thing you can do is find other writers
to read your stuff and tell you what you're doing wrong
in a positive way.
And that's pretty much what they do.
So, that was cool.
So, you know,
aside from reading books and going to these meetings
and trying to figure out how mysteries come to find out
that mysteries are very formulaic in their own way,
you know, a body happens.
Somebody solves why the body was killed,
and that, I mean, that's the premise of just about every mystery.
And so, once you know that, then it's like,
okay, now, what do I not do to be dealt?
You know, what mistakes can I not, you know,
what do I not have to do?
How do I do this without making mistakes?
And that took a while to get that under my belt.
But when I came up with the first draft of Null Pointer,
it really pleased me.
The geek in me was like, okay, you know what?
This story is really cool.
It's geeky.
It's got everything I'm into.
It's got ham radio.
It's got, you know, computers and what else?
Old hardware.
Old hardware, yeah.
And I was like, okay, you know,
it's very much part of me and an airplane.
The hero has an airplane.
I'm also a love aviation.
So, you know, I had all my buttons pushed on that.
But what anyone else like it, you know,
I was like, you know, I just didn't know.
So, one of the things that this group offers
is a manuscript critique service.
And you give them the first three chapters of your book
and an outline for the rest of it.
And they'll give them 20 bucks
and they'll have four different authors
and a group look at it and give you a critique,
a positive critique about what you're doing wrong,
what you're doing right.
And they'll actually write in their manuscript,
give you notes, hugely valuable to me.
And they caught me where I was doing wrong things
for the genre.
They were correcting me.
And I was like, awesome.
And one of the problems was at the very beginning,
and I'm not going to give away anything in the plot
by saying this, but at the very beginning,
Joshua comes to work, finds his stable mate there dead.
But he doesn't think anything of it
because the guy has some bad habits.
He's overweight, eats a lot of junk food.
They think he just had an architect die.
Nothing foul about it at all.
He was inconvenient, it was kind of gross.
It happened next to him.
You know, as somebody knew, you know,
in that respect, it was different.
But he eventually runs across a piece of code
that he's, when he's checking in his code
to the repository, his friend's code to the repository.
He finds something in the code that tells,
leads him to believe that it wasn't,
he didn't just die of a heart attack.
Somebody purposely killed it.
And that was enough for me as a programmer,
a farmer programmer, and a geek.
That was enough for me reading the story.
You know, okay, I know the programmers are curious
and they like to know how things work.
And if somebody found out that somebody had killed somebody
through here, they wouldn't want to know how that was done.
They could care less whether, you know,
it was a mystery per se.
It was just the fact that how did they,
how did they do that?
You know, what a perfect cry.
You know, how could you, you know,
fool the police, they took the body away,
thought he'd just died, you know?
And so that was how it started in,
and my mystery friends were like,
you're not putting the hair on jeopardy.
You know, he doesn't have to prove that.
He's just proving it because it's interesting to him.
It's like, eh, not dramatic, you know?
And I'm like, okay.
Bring on the sauce.
Yeah, so they're like, you need to put him a jeopardy.
You need to make it, if he doesn't find out how it's worked,
he's going to get it.
And I was like, okay.
So the fact of the rewrites,
and rewrote the first few chapters,
and then, so that one's the way it is now,
where he doesn't bother.
He doesn't jeopardy.
And his friend isn't jeopardy.
So it turns out that now,
the two people that were killed at the beginning of the story
were related to him,
and we're in a group that he,
two of me didn't even know,
or one of me didn't even know was in his group.
And it's like the serial killer,
he's going to get everybody in the group.
So it becomes time compressed now.
You have to find out where you're going to be next, right?
The one odd thing,
I don't know if you picked up on this one.
The one odd thing is throughout the story,
you never,
I never have Joshua say,
to too much of an extent.
You know, we should probably stay off computers,
because we're next.
But you never, he never does get that.
He has to be on a computer to figure out how it's done.
Yeah.
But I mean, the characters that we're talking about,
that's kind of like saying,
you know what?
People are getting this virus from the,
from breathing.
Let's stop breathing, you know.
These people can't do this exactly.
Exactly.
They, they have to be on a computer.
Yeah, and stuff.
So anyway, that's that.
That's great.
Now, like you've mentioned several times,
this, this is,
is set in my hometown,
Boise, Idaho.
And that was something that's,
that's rare to me.
I, I read fairly voraciously,
and,
but to actually read a book
that has your hometown in it.
There's a lot of people who that's second nature to, you know,
how many books are written in New York or L.A.
or, you know, what's right there.
That's, that's, that's,
but for me,
that was kind of a rare experience.
And then to have it to,
to be fairly geeky and,
we've got old cars,
we've got old computers,
we've got the cars out.
We've got hackers, you know,
that's, that's good stuff there.
Yeah.
And that was all intentional.
You know, I could've said it anywhere,
but they tell you to write what you know.
And it,
if I wasn't writing what I knew about enough,
I decided, you know,
and my school said it here,
because, you know what, dang it,
boys is cool.
We got more than just a cool football team.
It's a neat place to be.
It is.
And, you know,
I love it here,
so I thought, you know,
why not?
You know, I,
I could've said it in other places that I lived,
and probably done just fine with it,
but I was also at this time,
I had a pretty clear idea
that I was probably going to publish it myself,
and one of the things
I was going to be doing was getting it into local bookstores,
and I thought,
what would be more interesting for local readers
than a local author writing about
the locality that they're living in?
So that was very much intentional.
You know, I said it in a way.
And once I made that decision,
it was, it was almost easy.
It was like, okay,
what a cool place can I have them have lunch, you know?
What?
You know,
so that,
that is now,
I've decided to go ahead and make a series out of this,
and so every story that I come up with now,
I'm going to all of the play fair places.
I like to go to or going to wind up in these books, you know?
So that's cool, I think.
And I hope that,
just like you experience a connection to it in that way,
I hope other people to do it.
In fact, I hope mystery people do,
who don't know dang it about tech stuff,
can at least relate to the fact that it's set and boysy.
And that was a challenge for the later drafts of this book,
was,
I got to make it appeal to the average readers,
and one of the authors who's in our group graciously decided
that she was going,
well,
she decided that she was going to start editing for money,
becoming an editor for money,
so that she would take guys like me and other people
who have written these books,
and she would be their editor for them.
So you give them,
you polish it up as good as you can,
you give to her,
and for a couple hundred bucks or whatever she charges,
she'll go through and line edit it,
make sure you're not doing something stupid
all the way through,
and fix things,
and then it would be up to you to fix all that, you know.
But if you're self-publishing,
that's mandatory.
You have to have somebody who knows
that they're doing,
edit your stuff,
because that's the way they do it in the real publishing industry.
It's not the writer that edits the thing,
it's somebody else,
and they're grammar Nazis,
they know all the little rules,
and they fix things,
they make it look good,
but you still have to have a good story,
and you still have to have to give them something to work with, you know.
So Angela decided she was going to do this for a living,
and I had told her that she could read my book
because I wanted to get her opinion on it in general,
but I wasn't expecting her to edit anything,
just wanted her,
what do you think of it, you know.
And she said,
just give it to me in word,
give me your word, you know,
a word document,
and I want to edit it,
because I want to see how long it's going to take me to do a book.
So she kind of did it grottis for me that way,
and so she now knows how long it takes her to get through a book
with fixing things,
and I got a fixed book,
so that was cool.
But I forgot where I was not at this.
Well, you've mentioned that you're trying to get it into the local bookstores,
but you also,
you know, you've put some money into this,
you put a lot of time into it,
but if you would go into how it's available for maybe the rest of the...
Okay.
This book is self-published,
it's published through Lulu,
it's my printer.
So anyone, but the way it's published,
the package that I bought from Lulu
enables it to be bought from any store,
anywhere online,
or anywhere in a book,
in your local bookstores.
So if you have a favorite independent bookstore that's in your town,
that you buy your books from, that you support locally,
you can go to the bookstores and say,
I want to buy this book,
and they'll look it up in their computers,
they'll see it,
and they can order it for you.
The first book I put out,
my science fiction book,
Star Strikers,
it was done through a different company called CreateSpace,
and they didn't have that same agreement with the publishers,
and so the only way anybody was going to get it
is that they either ordered it from CreateSpace,
from Amazon, or from me.
But that's different now,
so now anyone can get it anywhere.
You can go into Barnes & Noble,
you can go into Borders,
and say,
they're not going to have it on the shelves,
because that's a business that I don't have any cloud with,
but they can order it for you.
They can sit at their register,
and go out on a book scan,
and find it,
and get it to you.
And it's been done,
I've proven that by some of my friends,
and I go to the store,
and go to that store,
and sitting by,
and it comes in about a week and a half.
So it's not too bad.
It's about as fast as Amazon,
and get it to you.
Right.
And this way you're supporting the local people,
so I encourage that.
Support your local bookstores.
Independent bookstores, please.
I think that today,
the day where we're recording this,
is that's the day to support your local.
That's the theme of the day.
But yeah, it's,
and the book store that's nearest me
is the rediscovered books
that's owned by Bruce and Laura Dillanian.
And they're,
they're,
fantastic people to work with,
because they've really taken me under their wing
and said,
you know,
we'll get you,
signings, we'll get you,
you're booking our store,
and this is what you're doing wrong.
You know,
so they told me what,
what I needed to work on,
and I took good advice on,
you know, hopefully this book will sell well
because of that.
So, really cool.
Well, I,
I think this community we're speaking to now
will really enjoy it.
And I'm,
I'm hoping that they look into it,
and do you want to plug your website?
Um,
sure.
I think most people should probably go to the blog,
which would,
it'd be w0pht,
which is my ham callsign.
.org,
and slash WordPress,
spell out WordPress.
And that is my blog.
And from the blog,
there's links to other,
my other two websites.
I have a website dedicated,
uh, Ning websites dedicated to,
which are social websites,
to the novel,
the null pointer novel,
and to the star strikers.
But,
after the holidays here,
coming up first of the year,
I'm going to consolidate that
all to one domain name.
And,
there won't be any more Ning stuff.
It'll just be one
central WordPress area with forums and stuff,
and it's going to be just one thing,
because it's a lot easier.
And the domain name for that,
if you're listening to this in the future,
we'll be KenDashMaconal.com.
So,
and that's, you know,
branding there,
great on the name.
Okay, well, thank you,
and, uh,
really appreciate it,
and, uh,
appreciate everybody listening
to this episode of HackRepublic Radio.
Thank you for listening to HackRepublic Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net,
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the ARO.NC,
for all of us here.
Thank you very much.