Steven J. Pemberton's Blog, page 9
October 1, 2019
September's Writing Progress
I haven't done much with The Dragons of Asdanund this month, as my writing time has been mostly taken up with a side project that I hope to be able to tell you about soon.
I finally started editing the audiobook of Escape Velocity and am up to chapter 14, which is about a quarter of the way through. So far I've identified only one pickup (technical term for a short section that needs to be re-recorded, because it contains a mistake). Either my speaking has become much more accurate since the last audiobook, or I'm not listening as carefully as I should...
I finally started editing the audiobook of Escape Velocity and am up to chapter 14, which is about a quarter of the way through. So far I've identified only one pickup (technical term for a short section that needs to be re-recorded, because it contains a mistake). Either my speaking has become much more accurate since the last audiobook, or I'm not listening as carefully as I should...
September 1, 2019
August's Writing Progress
I wrote about 8,000 words of The Dragons of Asdanund in August, so the first draft now stands at 73,000 words.
I still haven't started editing the audiobook of Escape Velocity.
I took over as editor of the One Million Project's blog, which (so far anyway) means I schedule posts to go live and chase people who haven't sent me an article they promised.
I finally got to meet one of my long-term critique partners, Terry Odell. She and her husband are on a whirlwind tour of the British Isles for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and were in London for a couple of days. She doesn't read the sort of books I write, and I don't read the sort of books she writes, but I've long believed that most of what constitutes good writing is the same in any genre. I've learned a lot from her about story structure and character arcs, and how to concentrate on the things that are important for the reader's understanding and enjoyment. In return, I point out her continuity errors and places where technology doesn't work the way she's written it.
(I still need to remember to concentrate on what's important for the reader. Our critique group has an abbreviation for places where the writer is being overly detailed or is spending words on something that doesn't look as though it will be important later. The abbreviation is STCP, which stands for "Steven the computer programmer." Wear it with pride :-) )
I still haven't started editing the audiobook of Escape Velocity.
I took over as editor of the One Million Project's blog, which (so far anyway) means I schedule posts to go live and chase people who haven't sent me an article they promised.
I finally got to meet one of my long-term critique partners, Terry Odell. She and her husband are on a whirlwind tour of the British Isles for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and were in London for a couple of days. She doesn't read the sort of books I write, and I don't read the sort of books she writes, but I've long believed that most of what constitutes good writing is the same in any genre. I've learned a lot from her about story structure and character arcs, and how to concentrate on the things that are important for the reader's understanding and enjoyment. In return, I point out her continuity errors and places where technology doesn't work the way she's written it.
(I still need to remember to concentrate on what's important for the reader. Our critique group has an abbreviation for places where the writer is being overly detailed or is spending words on something that doesn't look as though it will be important later. The abbreviation is STCP, which stands for "Steven the computer programmer." Wear it with pride :-) )
August 11, 2019
Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security at the Science Museum
Top Secret
is a new exhibition at London's Science Museum, about codes and code-breaking, and their relevance in the modern world. It's presented in association with GCHQ, the UK’s Intelligence, Security and Cyber agency, and contains many documents and artefacts from their collections. The presentation is mostly chronological from the First World War to the 1980s, and then thematic as it comes into the present day.
Until the early 20th century, codes were relatively weak, as messages had to be encoded by hand, which is slow and error-prone, and anyone who intercepted a message had to break the code by hand too. Intercepting messages was difficult when they were written on paper. The invention of the telegraph in the 19th century provided more opportunities for interception, but still required physical access to the network. The Zimmermann telegram, by which Germany tried to persuade Mexico to declare war on the USA, to deter the Americans from entering the First World War in Europe, is perhaps the most famous example of this. As soon as the war had started, the British had cut the German-owned transatlantic cables, meaning that telegrams from Germany to North America had to go through British-owned cables. The Zimmerman telegram was encoded, but was in a code that the British had broken. The British realised they could use the telegram to convince the USA to declare war on Germany, but it had to be done carefully. The British didn't want the Germans to know that they'd broken the code (because then the Germans would stop using it), and so had to contrive a cover story about having stolen the decoded telegram in Mexico. Initially, many people in the USA believed the telegram was a British forgery, but then Zimmermann (the German civil servant who'd sent it) admitted it was genuine.
The advent of radio made it much easier to send messages, but codes had to become much stronger, because messages can be received by anyone within range, not just the intended recipient. The Germans thought that the Enigma and Lorenz codes that they used in the Second World War were unbreakable in practice (meaning that they could be broken, but it would take so long that any information in the message would no longer be useful). But they underestimated British resourcefulness in stealing their codebooks and building machinery to automate the work, the British willingness to throw people at the parts that couldn't be automated (as many as 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, the main site for code-breaking), and their own soldiers' ability to leak information. For instance, it was common for German outposts to send a weather report to headquarters every day at 6AM. So Bletchley Park would often start decoding the day's messages by assuming that messages received at 6AM started with the word "weather" and seeing how far they got on that basis. Curiously, the British used codes that were very similar to Enigma, and the Germans knew this, but didn't bother trying to break them, as they thought it would be a waste of time.
The exhibition moves on to a recreation of part of a house used by the Portland Spy Ring, a team of Soviet agents who stole a lot of information about British nuclear submarines and their weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They used microdots to smuggle out drawings, but also had a radio in their attic for sending Morse code to Moscow. They would prerecord their messages on tape and play the tape at high speed into the transmitter, in an effort to reduce the chances of the British detecting the signal.
GCHQ has two main roles, firstly to provide the UK government with relevant and timely information on what Britain's enemies are doing, and secondly to keep the UK's communications secure from enemies. There is some conflict between these roles, partly because many of the UK's enemies use similar codes to the UK, and partly because some enemies are already in the UK (terrorists and members of criminal gangs). It doesn't help that criminals have a motive to try to break into other people's communications, to get money or information they can exchange for money. Every so often, a politician who doesn't understand mathematics suggests or demands that codes used by the public to keep their online banking and messages secure should have some weakness or back door for GCHQ or MI5 or the police to use. Unfortunately, there's no way to be sure that only authorised people know about or can use the back door. Because the back door has to be in the mathematical definition of the code or in the computer program that implements the code, sooner or later, unauthorised people will find it. Besides, if you were a criminal or a terrorist, would you use a code that you knew or thought the government could read?
(There is a conspiracy theory that the reason encrypted email is so difficult to set up and use is that if only a small amount of email traffic is encrypted, it stands out, and it's relatively easy for the government to store and decrypt all of it. If most or all email is encrypted, it's much harder for the government to figure out which messages are important, and so "they" make sure it's too inconvenient for the casual user. Of course nowadays, most online communication is done through websites and apps, which usually come with encryption built in... but how can you tell if the encryption is really as good as it claims to be?)
Overall, the exhibition gives a good account of codes and code-breaking, and how they've affected the UK in the last hundred years or so. Explanations are pitched at a level that most adults should be able to understand. (Public-key cryptography is hand-waved with a statement to the effect that "the public and private keys are mathematically related.") I was pleased to see all the interactive pieces for small children are tucked into an alcove near the end - scattering them throughout the tour would probably have made it too cramped.
Top Secret runs until 23 February 2020. Admission is free, but advance booking is recommended. Allow an hour to an hour and a half to go round.
Until the early 20th century, codes were relatively weak, as messages had to be encoded by hand, which is slow and error-prone, and anyone who intercepted a message had to break the code by hand too. Intercepting messages was difficult when they were written on paper. The invention of the telegraph in the 19th century provided more opportunities for interception, but still required physical access to the network. The Zimmermann telegram, by which Germany tried to persuade Mexico to declare war on the USA, to deter the Americans from entering the First World War in Europe, is perhaps the most famous example of this. As soon as the war had started, the British had cut the German-owned transatlantic cables, meaning that telegrams from Germany to North America had to go through British-owned cables. The Zimmerman telegram was encoded, but was in a code that the British had broken. The British realised they could use the telegram to convince the USA to declare war on Germany, but it had to be done carefully. The British didn't want the Germans to know that they'd broken the code (because then the Germans would stop using it), and so had to contrive a cover story about having stolen the decoded telegram in Mexico. Initially, many people in the USA believed the telegram was a British forgery, but then Zimmermann (the German civil servant who'd sent it) admitted it was genuine.
The advent of radio made it much easier to send messages, but codes had to become much stronger, because messages can be received by anyone within range, not just the intended recipient. The Germans thought that the Enigma and Lorenz codes that they used in the Second World War were unbreakable in practice (meaning that they could be broken, but it would take so long that any information in the message would no longer be useful). But they underestimated British resourcefulness in stealing their codebooks and building machinery to automate the work, the British willingness to throw people at the parts that couldn't be automated (as many as 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, the main site for code-breaking), and their own soldiers' ability to leak information. For instance, it was common for German outposts to send a weather report to headquarters every day at 6AM. So Bletchley Park would often start decoding the day's messages by assuming that messages received at 6AM started with the word "weather" and seeing how far they got on that basis. Curiously, the British used codes that were very similar to Enigma, and the Germans knew this, but didn't bother trying to break them, as they thought it would be a waste of time.
The exhibition moves on to a recreation of part of a house used by the Portland Spy Ring, a team of Soviet agents who stole a lot of information about British nuclear submarines and their weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They used microdots to smuggle out drawings, but also had a radio in their attic for sending Morse code to Moscow. They would prerecord their messages on tape and play the tape at high speed into the transmitter, in an effort to reduce the chances of the British detecting the signal.
GCHQ has two main roles, firstly to provide the UK government with relevant and timely information on what Britain's enemies are doing, and secondly to keep the UK's communications secure from enemies. There is some conflict between these roles, partly because many of the UK's enemies use similar codes to the UK, and partly because some enemies are already in the UK (terrorists and members of criminal gangs). It doesn't help that criminals have a motive to try to break into other people's communications, to get money or information they can exchange for money. Every so often, a politician who doesn't understand mathematics suggests or demands that codes used by the public to keep their online banking and messages secure should have some weakness or back door for GCHQ or MI5 or the police to use. Unfortunately, there's no way to be sure that only authorised people know about or can use the back door. Because the back door has to be in the mathematical definition of the code or in the computer program that implements the code, sooner or later, unauthorised people will find it. Besides, if you were a criminal or a terrorist, would you use a code that you knew or thought the government could read?
(There is a conspiracy theory that the reason encrypted email is so difficult to set up and use is that if only a small amount of email traffic is encrypted, it stands out, and it's relatively easy for the government to store and decrypt all of it. If most or all email is encrypted, it's much harder for the government to figure out which messages are important, and so "they" make sure it's too inconvenient for the casual user. Of course nowadays, most online communication is done through websites and apps, which usually come with encryption built in... but how can you tell if the encryption is really as good as it claims to be?)
Overall, the exhibition gives a good account of codes and code-breaking, and how they've affected the UK in the last hundred years or so. Explanations are pitched at a level that most adults should be able to understand. (Public-key cryptography is hand-waved with a statement to the effect that "the public and private keys are mathematically related.") I was pleased to see all the interactive pieces for small children are tucked into an alcove near the end - scattering them throughout the tour would probably have made it too cramped.
Top Secret runs until 23 February 2020. Admission is free, but advance booking is recommended. Allow an hour to an hour and a half to go round.
August 1, 2019
July's writing progress
I wrote 7,000 words of The Dragons of Asdanund, so it now stands at 65,000 words.
I finished recording the audiobook of Escape Velocity, and was hoping to be most of the way through editing it by now, but haven't started that task. It's been too hot lately, that's my excuse...
I wrote another little short story. Technically it's science fiction, in that it's about things that haven't happened yet, but I suspect they will happen within a few years if various people who ought to know better are sufficiently determined to save money. If I add together all the short stories I've written over the last few years, they come to about 25,000 words, which is only a few thousand short of being enough for a slim book.
Our local writers' group attended a few events to sell our books and raise money for various charities. At the last of these, someone bought all four books of The Barefoot Healer - a pleasant surprise!
I finished recording the audiobook of Escape Velocity, and was hoping to be most of the way through editing it by now, but haven't started that task. It's been too hot lately, that's my excuse...
I wrote another little short story. Technically it's science fiction, in that it's about things that haven't happened yet, but I suspect they will happen within a few years if various people who ought to know better are sufficiently determined to save money. If I add together all the short stories I've written over the last few years, they come to about 25,000 words, which is only a few thousand short of being enough for a slim book.
Our local writers' group attended a few events to sell our books and raise money for various charities. At the last of these, someone bought all four books of The Barefoot Healer - a pleasant surprise!
July 18, 2019
Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection
We now return to my occasional series, "Exhibitions Steven has enjoyed"...
Smoke and Mirrors is a new temporary exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. (That's magic as in sleight-of-hand, not the kind of magic I write about in my books.) It asks "how our biases affect our perception and whether our senses can be hacked." It examines these questions both in the original neutral sense of "hack", meaning to find a clever way of making a system do something it wasn't designed to do, and in the newer negative sense of "exploit flaws in a system for (financial) gain."
The exhibition has a lot to say about spiritualists and mediums of the 19th and 20th century, as well as how they were debunked or exposed - often by stage magicians. Many of the techniques used in seances are the same as for card tricks or sawing a person in half. Indeed, some magicians found success by holding a seance in the first half of their act and then revealing how they'd done it after the interval.
The exhibition then moves on to look at some of the techniques that magicians use. Most of these are demonstrated in short videos that loop, so you can let yourself be fooled and then watch again to see what the magician was doing when your attention was elsewhere. It's surprising how much of magic relies on the fact that you can't watch everything that's happening in front of you, and your attention can be quite easily guided to where the magician wants it to go. There's a copy of the tape used in a famous experiment on selective attention, where some people pass a basketball among themselves for a few minutes, and the subjects are told to count how many times someone in a white shirt passes the ball. In the middle of the tape, a person in a gorilla suit walks on, stands in the middle of the picture, waves to the camera, and walks off. About half the people who watch this tape say they didn't see the gorilla. When shown the tape again to prove the gorilla's presence, some subjects accuse the researchers of substituting a different tape...
For the most part, the exhibition is honest about what it's showing you, but like all good magicians, it keeps some secrets to itself. The finale is a video about a mind-influencing machine - a mock-up of an MRI scanner that's completely non-functional but that's claimed to be able to implant a number into your thoughts. The presenters allude to the placebo effect, as the machine can also help children with various forms of anxiety. But how could it do something as specific as making you think of a particular number? Maybe it really is magic...
Admission is free, and the exhibition runs until 15th September 2019.
Smoke and Mirrors is a new temporary exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. (That's magic as in sleight-of-hand, not the kind of magic I write about in my books.) It asks "how our biases affect our perception and whether our senses can be hacked." It examines these questions both in the original neutral sense of "hack", meaning to find a clever way of making a system do something it wasn't designed to do, and in the newer negative sense of "exploit flaws in a system for (financial) gain."
The exhibition has a lot to say about spiritualists and mediums of the 19th and 20th century, as well as how they were debunked or exposed - often by stage magicians. Many of the techniques used in seances are the same as for card tricks or sawing a person in half. Indeed, some magicians found success by holding a seance in the first half of their act and then revealing how they'd done it after the interval.
The exhibition then moves on to look at some of the techniques that magicians use. Most of these are demonstrated in short videos that loop, so you can let yourself be fooled and then watch again to see what the magician was doing when your attention was elsewhere. It's surprising how much of magic relies on the fact that you can't watch everything that's happening in front of you, and your attention can be quite easily guided to where the magician wants it to go. There's a copy of the tape used in a famous experiment on selective attention, where some people pass a basketball among themselves for a few minutes, and the subjects are told to count how many times someone in a white shirt passes the ball. In the middle of the tape, a person in a gorilla suit walks on, stands in the middle of the picture, waves to the camera, and walks off. About half the people who watch this tape say they didn't see the gorilla. When shown the tape again to prove the gorilla's presence, some subjects accuse the researchers of substituting a different tape...
For the most part, the exhibition is honest about what it's showing you, but like all good magicians, it keeps some secrets to itself. The finale is a video about a mind-influencing machine - a mock-up of an MRI scanner that's completely non-functional but that's claimed to be able to implant a number into your thoughts. The presenters allude to the placebo effect, as the machine can also help children with various forms of anxiety. But how could it do something as specific as making you think of a particular number? Maybe it really is magic...
Admission is free, and the exhibition runs until 15th September 2019.
June 30, 2019
June's writing progress
Progress on The Dragons of Asdanund has been a bit better this month. I wrote 12, 000 words of the first draft, so it now stands at 57,000 words.
I've nearly finished recording the audiobook of Escape Velocity. It would've been complete had I not had a week-long bout of hay fever that left my voice sounding too throaty.
Our writers' group performed some of our poems at the Bushey Acoustic Festival. We had a float in the town's annual parade, winning third prize. And we romped home with first place in the town's annual quiz, scoring 97 points, 18 points ahead of the runners-up. We did rather better with the book-related questions this year than last year. There was one question whose answer I knew only because I looked it up while I was writing Escape Velocity!
I finally uploaded a new bonus short story for subscribers to my newsletter. It's called Provisional Report on Laniakea Alpha. It's separate from any of my other stories, and so is spoiler-free. Go to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX to sign up. The welcome message will tell you where to find the story.
I've nearly finished recording the audiobook of Escape Velocity. It would've been complete had I not had a week-long bout of hay fever that left my voice sounding too throaty.
Our writers' group performed some of our poems at the Bushey Acoustic Festival. We had a float in the town's annual parade, winning third prize. And we romped home with first place in the town's annual quiz, scoring 97 points, 18 points ahead of the runners-up. We did rather better with the book-related questions this year than last year. There was one question whose answer I knew only because I looked it up while I was writing Escape Velocity!
I finally uploaded a new bonus short story for subscribers to my newsletter. It's called Provisional Report on Laniakea Alpha. It's separate from any of my other stories, and so is spoiler-free. Go to http://eepurl.com/_5EDX to sign up. The welcome message will tell you where to find the story.
May 30, 2019
May's Writing Progress
The audiobook of
The Reluctant Dragonrider
is on sale from Amazon, Audible and iTunes. You can listen to a sample of it here (the start of chapter 5, where a dragon rescues Tiwan from drowning).
I made better progress with The Dragons of Asdanund this month - about 7,000 words, so the first draft now stands at 44,000 words.
Breda is in Ireland for a couple of weeks, so I'm going to take advantage of the quiet to start another audiobook. This one will be Escape Velocity.
I made better progress with The Dragons of Asdanund this month - about 7,000 words, so the first draft now stands at 44,000 words.
Breda is in Ireland for a couple of weeks, so I'm going to take advantage of the quiet to start another audiobook. This one will be Escape Velocity.
April 30, 2019
April's writing progress
I finished editing the audiobook of
The Reluctant Dragonrider
and recorded the pickups (fixes for mistakes I didn't notice while I was recording). I'll edit those in over the next few days, and then it should be ready to go to the distributor.
I didn't do much with The Dragons of Asdanund this month - a mere 1500 words, so the first draft now stands at 37,000 words. Since I'm nearly done with the audiobook, I should make more progress on the novel next month.
I recorded a few short videos, two of which are now on my YouTube channel. The first, Helpdesk, is a "poem" inspired by one of the frustrations of my day job. ("Poem" is in quotes because it doesn't rhyme and doesn't scan, but is written in lines that don't go right to the edge of the page, which counts as a poem in my book.) The second doesn't have a title, but is an anecdote about accents based on something that happened to a member of my family some years ago.
I didn't do much with The Dragons of Asdanund this month - a mere 1500 words, so the first draft now stands at 37,000 words. Since I'm nearly done with the audiobook, I should make more progress on the novel next month.
I recorded a few short videos, two of which are now on my YouTube channel. The first, Helpdesk, is a "poem" inspired by one of the frustrations of my day job. ("Poem" is in quotes because it doesn't rhyme and doesn't scan, but is written in lines that don't go right to the edge of the page, which counts as a poem in my book.) The second doesn't have a title, but is an anecdote about accents based on something that happened to a member of my family some years ago.
April 1, 2019
March's writing progress
A little later than planned, here's what I did in March...
I wrote another 6,000 words of The Dragons of Asdanund, which now stands at 35,000 words.
I'm about four-fifths of the way through editing the audiobook of The Reluctant Dragonrider. I'm gradually getting better at this - I find that I can now create good versions of a sentence by cutting together two takes in the middle of a word. (It helps that the performances don't usually vary much from one take to the next.)
I wrote a couple of very short "performance pieces" (pieces of writing meant to be listened to, more so than read silently from a page or screen). I might get around to making videos of them before the end of the year...
I wrote another 6,000 words of The Dragons of Asdanund, which now stands at 35,000 words.
I'm about four-fifths of the way through editing the audiobook of The Reluctant Dragonrider. I'm gradually getting better at this - I find that I can now create good versions of a sentence by cutting together two takes in the middle of a word. (It helps that the performances don't usually vary much from one take to the next.)
I wrote a couple of very short "performance pieces" (pieces of writing meant to be listened to, more so than read silently from a page or screen). I might get around to making videos of them before the end of the year...
February 28, 2019
February's Writing Progress
I wrote another 8,000 words or so of The Dragons of Asdanund, which now stands at just under 29,000 words.
I finished recording the audiobook of The Reluctant Dragonrider, which took just over a month. Now I have all the fun of editing it to look forward to.
I wrote a new science fiction short story to perform at an open mic night. I wouldn't normally have bothered writing something specifically for an event like this, seeing as most of these people had never seen me, but there was some confusion beforehand over how much time each performer would have on stage, and I wanted to be sure they wouldn't cut me off in the middle. It's the shortest piece of fiction I've ever written, at 826 words. The event was videoed, and I hope to get hold of the recording to post online at some point.
Our writers' group had a sudden influx of new people turn up to our most recent monthly meeting. This might've been because of an article I wrote for a magazine that the town council publishes. You can read the article here: https://www.facebook.com/StevenJPembe... Here's hoping at least some of them liked us enough to want to come back next time!
I finished recording the audiobook of The Reluctant Dragonrider, which took just over a month. Now I have all the fun of editing it to look forward to.
I wrote a new science fiction short story to perform at an open mic night. I wouldn't normally have bothered writing something specifically for an event like this, seeing as most of these people had never seen me, but there was some confusion beforehand over how much time each performer would have on stage, and I wanted to be sure they wouldn't cut me off in the middle. It's the shortest piece of fiction I've ever written, at 826 words. The event was videoed, and I hope to get hold of the recording to post online at some point.
Our writers' group had a sudden influx of new people turn up to our most recent monthly meeting. This might've been because of an article I wrote for a magazine that the town council publishes. You can read the article here: https://www.facebook.com/StevenJPembe... Here's hoping at least some of them liked us enough to want to come back next time!
