Posted on March 13, 2023
I Left My Heart in SpaceX – Starbase
One of the unique parts of life in the military is you never really know what your job will be. Sure, you have your specialty code, but ultimately you are a widget they can and will slot into whatever position they need filled. Case in point, my current day job is as a speechwriter for a four star general even though my background is cyber. As part of my duties, I was fortunate enough to tag along on my boss’s trip to SpaceX’s Texas compound, Starbase. It. Was. Awesome.
Let me back-up. I applied to join the Space Force from the Air Force for three reasons: 1) a greater likelihood to stay on the operational cyber side instead of communication support, 2) better odds with good assignment locations, and 3) because space is freakin’ cool. The weight put towards each reason varies day by day, but when I got to visit Starbase, reason #3 rocketed up to 100%.
While a lot of the conversations were either classified or proprietary, the tour we took of their facilities blew my mind. It’s one thing to read about how SpaceX does business, but it’s another to walk into a half-constructed Starship and have the lead structural engineer explain just how massive the scale of their ambition is. I fanboyed hard, to the point where the engineer giving us the tour started talking to me more than the general because he had me hooked like a fat kid scarfing a tray of cupcakes.
While the Starship factory was fantastic (seriously, so cool), equally awesome was the attitude of the folks walking around with us. You could see how much they cared about the project and why they stick around, even with the 24/7, 365 work life. Not only that, but they way they approach the design and production process is so divergent to how things usually get done at that scale. When they need to fix a problem or figure out a design, they don’t sit around tossing ideas back and forth in meetings and committees for months on end. They get the sheet metal out, fire up the cutting torches, and build something. Once they see what works and what doesn’t, they build something new that iterates on the last version. And then they do it again. And again. And again.
That’s what I loved most about it, the willingness to push something out just to see what happens and the humility to learn from the failures. There’s no boardroom of middle management fighting over failed proposals because they staked their personal reputation on some pipedream. Instead, there’s an engineer telling his people that the last thing he wants to see is an idea in AutoCAD instead of in real life.
SpaceX inspires me, and not for the reason you might think. It’s not the fact they’ve basically rebuilt America’s industrial space power singlehandedly (which is awesome). It’s not that they’ve figured out things most people thought was impossible like reusing rockets (which is also awesome). And it’s not even that they’re continuing to break barriers and take space travel to the next level with the Starship (which is also also awesome). It’s that they are so committed to their dream that they are willing to forsake any sort of pride in order to see it through.
I told my boss that if he didn’t see me on the plane later that afternoon he shouldn’t worry—I’d just be back at Starbase, looking up at the stars with the people working hardest to get us there.
Posted on February 26, 2023
The Bomber Mafia: Morals vs Expediency
Commutes suck. We are blessed with 24 hours in a day, and spending one of them driving back and forth from a place we likely don’t want to be in the first place is a drag. Luckily, there are ways to fill that time. Podcasts have served that role for me, and that has led to dabbling in audiobooks. For those that know me and my reading habits, this is almost blasphemous. But the pull to amuse myself during the soul-crushing slouching from domicile to work and back requires sacrifice. That leads me to The Bomber Mafia, an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Bomber Mafia is two things: designed to be listened to rather than read, and a tale about morals vs expediency in war. It’s also fantastic, so apparently it’s three things. Even if you have no interest in World War Two, the story Gladwell weaves is relatable to anyone who admires larger than life characters. Much of the book centers around two generals in the Army Air Corps, Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay. Hansell was the dreaming high-priest of precision bombing, while LeMay was the grounded realist of 1940s capabilities. Both had their chance to prove their way of thinking, and both left tremendous impacts on the United States Air Force.
While better historians than me have argued over the efficacy of LeMay’s tactics, it’s obvious that Hansell’s were a failure. High-altitutude precision bombing just couldn’t work with 1940s technology. The moral philosophy behind it, however, is timeless. If you can drop a single bomb on a single target and destroy a capability without wiping out the city block around it, that should always be your choice. LeMay saw the city block as a bonus.
I left the book with two thoughts (ok, maybe three). First, that it’s amazing how we as human beings can rationalize away our morality. The Americans started WW2 aghast at British carpet bombing campaigns, then went on to do far worse to Japan and later in the Korean War. It wasn’t an overnight shift, but a gradual one until firebombing civilian targets became the norm. Little choices result in seismic consequences in all our lives, even if death isn’t on the line.
Second, LeMay is one of the most fascinating historical figures I’ve studied. My opinion on him has shifted several times. He is my class exemplar from the Air Force Academy, and I voted for him proudly based on his leadership. Later, I turned to thinking he was a monster as I learned more about the firebombing campaigns against Japan. This has vacilated back and forth over the years as I try to balance the leader with the monster.
The Bomber Mafia doesn’t definitively answer the question, but I don’t think any of us can. The firebombing campaigns were objectively horrendous, but his leadership and brilliant tactical developments of bomber utilization saved thousands of Airmen and likely brought the war to a close sooner than it otherwise would have. How does one measure lives taken against potential lives saved? It’s an impossible task, and one best left to the Lord.
The third thing I took away was a story about LeMay told in the book. LeMay had a tremendous amount of accomplishments throughout his life, enough for a dozen men. Yet the mural he chose to have in his foyer was of the botched Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid in WW2. Planned by Hansell, LeMay was the lead for the diversionary portion designed to draw off German defenders. It didn’t work, and hundreds of Airmen died for no gain. When asked about why he had that displayed, his response was that he had lost a lot of good boys that day.
Those are the words of a leader, not a monster. But just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of doing monstrous things.
Updated on February 19, 2023
The Bottle Gymnastics
Just when I think we’ve hit our parenting stride, Ezran winks and says “hold my milk.” His latest passion? Winning gold at bottle gymnastics.
I sent my wife off on a romantic sunset boat tour yesterday afternoon—romantic both for the scenery and the lack of her husband vomiting profusely off the side of the boat—so it was Ez and me hanging out once again. We approached bedtime much like a marathon runner at the 26-mile mark: tired, chafed, and covered in bodily fluids. But the end was in sight, just a bottle standing between our precious little tornado and blissful sleep.
If you need to know one thing about Ezran, it should be his obsession with food. The boy acts like he’s never eaten before every. single. time. he sees something vaguely approaching edible. This has been a boon for most of his life as it means he’s never had an issue taking a bottle, so feedings have been relatively simple. Ezran has since reconsidered this. Not the food obsession, no, just the serenity a simple bottle feed experience produces in his sleep-deprived parents.
We settled into the usual position and things started easily enough. His mouth gaped open like a carp, I plugged the bottle in, and away we went. I took a deep breath and let it out, easing into what I knew would be five to ten minutes of peace, when the boy in my arms decided he wasn’t done being a carp and tried to fling his body in seven directions at once. I managed to hold on, but in the midst of the chaos the bottle slipped from his lips.
Ezran was displeased.
After silencing the rage-induced shriek with the reinsertion of the bottle into his maw of unending hunger, I tried once more to find that oft sought but seldom grasped tranquility all participants of parenthood crave. This, Ezran decided, was the perfect time to practice his vault. He thrust both heels into me and launched himself like the breaching whale my wife happened to see at roughly the same time. Our son, not recognizing the poetry of the moment, released another screech of frustration that I could not rotate my arm 180 degrees to both keep the bottle in his mouth and maintain a grip on him as he flipped through the air.
This continued for the rest of the feeding, a battle of wills between parent and child that I pray does not foretell too much of what the future holds. Though if he brings back Olympic gold one day, I’ll happily pat myself on the back for training him so well in his youth.
Writing continues apace! I’ve finished my initial triage of major, substantial, and minor issues, coming out to a whopping 95. I’m sure many of those will branch into further issues as I address them, making it a Herculean task as I slay the hydra’s multiplying heads. But address them I shall as that’s the next step in my editing process. It’s good to go from identifying to fixing—easier to feel the forward progress that way.
Posted on February 12, 2023
Rock On, Little One
Parenthood is full of joy, wonder, and horrifying surprises. Often, those three facets get tied together in a neat little package that leaks something obscene out of a corner you thought you had strapped down.
Yesterday, my son and I had some quality bonding time while my wife went out with a friend. I had made it several hours without serious incident and decided I was ready to try and make myself lunch while Ezran was still awake. This was my first mistake. You see, my son is still an infant and delights in finding new and interesting ways to express himself. “Today,” he thought, “I will surpass myself.”
Not knowing the horror literally brewing within my child, I plopped him in his activity center we have dubbed the Chair of Cheer and carted him over to the kitchen. My goal was to continue pushing the boundaries of our new air fryer with some potstickers while Lil’ EZ chilled with an assortment of toys. We had rocked out to classic rock all morning, and AC/DC accompanied my incompetent but passionate air frying efforts.
All was well until a realization left me Thunderstruck—my son has made it eight months and not ONCE had I introduced him to the concept of air guitaring. I tossed the ill-prepared potstickers in the air fryer, cranked the tunes, and caught my son’s attention. Then, I jammed.
This was not casual air guitaring, a few half-hearted strums at waist level with a vague indication of fingering chords. This was no holds barred, leave it all on the table, sweat inducing showmanship. I danced, I spun, and I slid on my knees while raising my air guitar to the awe-inspired heavens as I poured years of mild-shame of never learning the actual guitar into my performance.
Ezran. Was. Thrilled.
My son shrieked with joy and laughter, slamming his hands on the Chair of Cheer not unlike Thor demanding more beverages at his table in Valhalla. His smile radiated a level of wonder that only the very young or the very insane can truly convey. Back in Black roared in the background as his little feet splattered on a growing puddle of sickly yellow liquid.
The presentation of a lifetime came to an abrupt stop. My eyes went from being filled with passion to being filled with horror as I realized just what my son was currently squishing between his toes.
In the midst of his excitement, Ezran had decided to unleash a poop waterfall out his diaper and along his leg, leading to the aforementioned puddle of off-colored excrement he continued to dip his feet into. He looked up at me and smiled with his toothless gums and eyes open just a touch too wide. I looked deep within and beheld only chaos as he slammed both feet into the puddle over and over, spreading his joy in one of the only mediums he understands.
It was at that point the air fryer dinged to let me know it had just turned my potstickers into briquettes. Parenthood, as they say, is always an adventure.
On the writing front, I’ve got a draft title for my debut science fiction novel! Artificial Threat will be the first of three novels in the Artificial trilogy, followed (tentatively) by Artificial Uprising,and Artificial Empire. As my wife and I are fond of saying, good things come in threes, and I like how it keeps one of the story’s primary themes consistent across some nice repetition.
As for progress, I’m still deep in Phase Two of my editing process: Strategic Planning. This is where I look over the reconnaissance from Phase One and identify issues of plot, character, and world building. As I document them, I also triage them into Critical, Substantive, and Minor. As is expected from a 100% Gardener book, I have plenty of weeds to yank. I’m up to sixty-seven issues so far, most of them in the Critical or Substantive categories.
While this would have disheartened me earlier in my writing experience, I’ve come to recognize the need to identify these problems before considering my work complete. I didn’t do that for The Mortal Mercenary, and I wasted far too much time trying to push out a subpar product because of it. I’m also learning a lot about how I write and the craft by doing so, which is always a plus. Once I get all the issues documented, then I will formulate a plan to get after them. The most important step you can take is always the next one!
Posted on February 5, 2023
The Infinite Variabilities of Taste
Taste is a funny concept. You can have good taste or bad, acquired taste or popular. The one thing we all have in common is we each have our own taste, be that for food, media, or people. But one thing we think we have but actually don’t is the ability to force our taste on others. And oh, how that infuriates us.
My wife decided two episodes into Andor that she didn’t like it. I, of course, was aghast. After inhaling the rest of the season, I established it in the upper pantheon of my favorites. So is the proper response to judge and berate her for her obviously poor taste? Of course not—she’s entitled to like and dislike whatever she wants. Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells go in depth on this in a recent podcast/video of their excellently named series, Intentionally Blank. Differences in taste should be celebrated, not judged. Not only do those differences allow for interesting conversations, they help push art in new and interesting directions. Creators can look at the vast array of what’s available, find nothing to their liking, and do something new for others to enjoy. There’s value to that, especially as we look down the barrel of a future with mass-produced content generated by algorithms instead of people.
Next time you see that someone doesn’t like your favorite show or their Netflix queue makes you cock and eyebrow, take a deep breath (through your nose!) and relax. Live and let live, watch and let watch—there’s enough out there for all of us.
On the writing front, I’m making decent progress. I’ve made it through the top level summaries of my main plot arcs with their accompanying subplots, plus character arcs for the most important players. Even though I’m not fixing things yet, I’ve got quite a list of problems to address. Next up will be world building, seeing what physical and cultural pillars my setting has established so far.
The few weeks I’ve been at this make it abundantly clear how valuable breaking up the process is to effective editing. My last novel still suffers from structural issues because I never bothered finding out what they were, choosing instead to focus on the line edits—losing the forest for the leaves on a branch of a tree. While this will take make longer overall, I’ll end up with a far better product at the end. Or it won’t and I’ll just dump the whole manuscript into ChatGPT and have the machine give it a go, because why not?
Updated on February 5, 2023
ChatGPT, So Hot Right Now
“A wise man can get more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”
– Baltasar Gracian
They’ve done it. They went and ruined my writing career before it ever had a chance, and they don’t even care. “They” in this case being the developers of ChatGPT, which depending on your viewpoint is either the first step into a beautiful new age of AI-supported utopia or the vanguard of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For how short it’s been on the scene, it’s amazing how quickly ChatGPT has poked the hornet’s nest.
For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an online tool people can chat with to figure stuff out. Think of it like the next generation of Google, or what you wish Siri was actually like. It’s quite amazing how authentic the machine sounds, and it’s capable of some truly fascinating things. I asked it to give me a literary comparison between Hamlet and Sharknado, and after trying to convince me that comparing the two was idiotic, ChatGPT gave a shockingly decent go at it (common themes between the two are revenge and man vs nature, if you’re curious). The most intriguing part for me is how conversational the whole experience was. I typed my questions like I was chatting with a real person, and the machine responded in kind. This is no customer service bot struggling to understand why you’re upset your package never showed up. ChatGPT covers down on anything shy of politics and war, which it is hard coded against at the moment.
Personally, I don’t think ChatGPT has destroyed anything yet, but you can see where it does from here. A lot of the furor online revolves around people claiming the essay as a school assignment is dead, since students can just plug prompts into ChatGPT and copy the results. After playing with it a bit, I think there’s some validity to this concern. It will take a bit to get there, both in terms of the platform’s capability and students’ awareness of it, but the artificial writing is on the wall.
What concerns me more is whether ChatGPT or something like it can take over writing fiction. Would-be authors have already saturated the market, and algorithms churning out decent products at the speed of silicon might mean the death of small time authors. I was hoping people overreacted to this threat, but then I asked ChatGPT to give me an idea for a political intrigue novel in a fantasy world. In a few seconds, the machine spat out a run-of-the-mill—but infinitely serviceable—storyline involving a young champion of the people leading a rebellion against council of corrupt sorcerers desperately clinging to power. It’s not hard to see how this becomes the norm as new authors realize how hard it is to write and lean on ChatGPT as a crutch. Eventually, that crutch becomes an electric scooter and Wall-E becomes a prophetic metaphor for the world of writing fiction.
In the meantime, I want to keep playing with the tool. Sure, it could mean the death of my hopes as an author, but it’s still fun to see what the computer comes up with. I’ve asked it for book title recommendations, help with developing elevator pitches, and idea generation. I want to see just how far I can take it as I edit my current novel and see what comes out of a blending of capabilities.
As the saying goes, work smarter not harder.
Posted on January 22, 2023
Editing Step 1: Recon
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
– Philip K. Dick
I wonder if there are writers out in the world who prefer editing to writing. If so, maybe they can scoop up some of their twisted sense of prioritization and ship it my way, because editing is not my forte. After my productive procrastination session designing a far too intricate editing checklist, I finally got started on the process itself. Step one in my editing process: recon. That’s when I realized just how painful this process will be.
You see, I wrote this entire book in the gardener fashion (or as it’s more commonly referred to, as a pantser). I had some inklings of where I wanted things to go, but that revolved mostly around introducing characters I thought might be fun to write. Once it all congealed on the page, though, it quickly became clear that while things progress from Point A to a conclusion, that may not be Point Z. Or even a point in the same alphabet.
This is why recon is so important to the editing process. Delving straight into line-by-line editing would result in me fixing typos and ignoring the huge structural issues, so it’s best to identify all the ugliness first. I wrote out summaries of each chapter and slapped them into a timeline. General bafflement came next, followed by figurative head bashing against the desk as I saw how many obvious inconsistencies I need to address. That’s the issue with writing a book in manic bursts over several years—you tend to lose one or two threads along the way.
While it was ego-deflating to see those problems, doing this recon now will help tremendously throughout the editing process. I’d prefer to know the ugly up front so I can incorporate fixes into the entire process instead of finding out about it at the last minute and having to start over if the issue is fundamental enough. By understanding what I have to work with now, I can move into the next step (analyzing structure) with more confidence.
I will say this though—I have an intense desire to make sure my next book is thoroughly outlined to save myself this hassle in the future.
Posted on January 15, 2023
New Year, Who Dis?
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
A novel I recently read had a great line about forgiveness. One of the fictional cultures had a practice of stating how one would make amends instead of saying sorry, putting action ahead of words. I failed in producing a Wandering for the past few weeks, breaking my streak just shy of a year. Since this blog is for me more than anyone else, my amends are aimed towards myself: I will ensure I have a surplus of posts ready to go so I don’t let the holidays knock me off course again.
Now that that’s resolved, let’s talk about this new year’s direction. Last year, my Wanderings covered a wide variety of topics. One week would be a movie review, the next would be a think piece on international affairs, and the one after that would be a long-form dad joke. While this served the purpose of making me write consistently, it didn’t translate well into making me work on my novels. Since that’s where I want the bulk of my writing effort going, this proves problematic.
My solution: adopt a lesson from Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work and focus my blog on what progress my novels and writing skills have made. The hope is this will force me to both think more deeply about my development as a writer and serve as a self-induced guilt trip to make me sit down and write. Seeing as I’m a new father, I need to practice doing that anyways—win-win!
That said, I do reserve the right to Wander off onto paths that are sufficiently shiny (The Recruit on Netflix is wonderful and deserves a binge, for example). But those will serve as some of the buffer posts I create to make sure I don’t have a lapse again. My primary effort is focusing on my writing. If that interests you, fantastic! If not, also great! You do you, champ. I’ll do the same.
Posted on December 11, 2022
The Outer Range: Out of my Range of Caring
We live in a post-truth world. Even the certainties of life are under assault—most billionaires laugh at the concept of taxes, and plenty still believe Tupac is alive. But I hold that one truth remains strong: if you’re characters suck, so too does your story. This is what plagues the otherwise interesting Amazon Prime show The Outer Range, a modern Western with a healthy dash of sci-fi. Spoilers ahead, partner.
The show has two primary conflcits that a plethora of subplots leach onto. First, the “good ol’ traditional ranching” Abbotts family is fighting a hostile takeover from the neighboring “corporate ranching sell-out” Tillerson family. Second, those good old Abbotts are hiding how one of their boys murdered one of the Tillerson sons. Both provide plenty of conflict, and both allow for multiple tie-ins to the sci-fi element of the show.
The characters let this story down. I just don’t like any of them. In the first episode, they do an excellent job making the Tillerson’s out to be jerks. Sweet, I thought, here are our villains! But then they have the Abbotts literally murder someone, and now the water gets muddy. Sure, there are positives to having your protagonists taking a darker path, but you have to balance that out in some way to ensure your audience empathizes with them still.
Take Walter White in Breaking Bad. The audience could empathize with his objectively heinous decision to start making meth because they saw the terrible circumstance he was in with an inability to afford medical care—something many Americans have legitimate concerns with. Granted, yes, his frienemy offered to pay for his care, but Walter refusing it was a) foreshadowing how his pride would ruin everything, and b) necessary for the story to go anywhere. The situation gave enough of a reason for the audience to root for him as he took action to fix his problem, even if those methods were terrible.
Contrast that with the Abbotts. The family patriarch, Royal, is a royal pain. He demonstrates little to no redeemable features, shutting out his wife and acting in a domineering way over his entire family as he tries to lie, threaten, and connive his way out of the Tillerson situations. The eventual reveal as to why he’s hesitant to share the Void with anyone else is too little, too late—by the last episode in the season, the audience’s opinion of him is set.
His sons aren’t any better, both two-dimensional vessels of “woe is me” that get roughly no agency of their own as they take orders from their father. Round it off with the wife who goes along with covering up the murder even as she professes to be a God-fearing Christian and a granddaughter who exists solely to find a dead body and become another character in a few years, and you have an unlikeable family in a bad situation. Not fertile ground for great storytelling, that.
When the audience has no one to root for, it doesn’t matter how interesting the plot is. If the audience doesn’t care about a story’s characters, the whole thing turns gray and lifeless. On the other hand, great characters can turn a staid and prosaic plot into a tremendous story that resonates with millions. If I say Harry, Ron, and Hermione, 99% of you will know immediately who I’m talking about. But if I tried to explain their story without any of the usual Harry Potter markers, there’s a decent chance you’d get it confused with the myriad of other good versus evil fantasy stories in the world. “Good magician and co. stop bad magician from conquering the world” is a trope, but great characters turn it into Harry Potter.
I wish Outer Range had been as bold with its characters as it was with many of its other choices, because the sci-fi elements kept me coming back for most of the season. By the end, though, I realized something we all do eventually with old high school acquaintances—if I don’t like these people, why am I wasting my time hanging out with them?
Posted on November 27, 2022
Humility – Leadership’s Most Important Facet
When you search ‘leadership books’ on Amazon, it returns over 30,000 results. I won’t even try to quantify the number of blogs, podcasts, newsletters, sermons, and social media posts on the subject. There must be billions of words on the subject across every language, culture, and people. Leadership is so important to us because we recognize the value in taking a group of people from here to there in a complex world. We should know everything about it by now, right?
Yes and no. Anyone can grasp leadership’s fundamentals, though interpretations and prioritizations vary. Things get messy in execution. Leaders find themselves in an infinite number of circumstances, and no leadership guru can outline even the smallest fraction of them into a convenient checklist. Instead, people offer catch-all phrases that guide efforts in a variety of situations. Leaders Eat Last, Extreme Ownership, and Trust and Inspire are some popular examples today.
But even this wavetop approach can overwhelm a beginner. Do I eat last first, or do I inspire from the front? Does my extreme ownership conflict with expressing trust in my people? Ask ten consultants how to start leading, and you’ll get back eleven answers. If you approach leadership from a first principles mindset, however, many of these books and articles on leadership teach similar core lessons. The most important of these? If you want to lead, learn humility.
You cannot learn to lead if you refuse to learn in the first place. This goes beyond a willingness to peruse the local self-help section in the library. First, I’d bet the majority of people who read books on leadership and self-improvement fail to implement anything from what they read. Behavioral change is hard and we overestimate our own abilities to undertake it. Second, humility does not thrive in a pick-and-choose mindset. You cannot effectively learn from a book on leadership if you choose to ignore the feedback around you. The world already provides the best leadership laboratory you will ever need—itself.
Whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a night shift manager at a local grocery store, or flying solo, every moment presents opportunities for learning to lead. Whether or not you take advantage of them comes down to your level of humility. Recognizing that every one and every thing has something to teach you is the critical first step you must take to becoming a leader worth following. Once you have that humble mindset, all the wisdom written and spoken across countless forums becomes a treasure for you to inherit, and those you lead will benefit all the more from it.
