This isn't a blog about politics and it's not going to turn into one.  That said, I'm mourning the death of Andrew Breitbart today. I didn't get the news until after I'd posted my triffling little book news yesterday, otherwise that post would have been more meaningful.

Just a short update today because work is going to be insane.

I started brainstorming and outlining the new Smooth Charles novel.  The tentative title is Smooth Vengeance, which rolls off the tongue well and suggests certain themes and conflicts.  I was planning on ‘saving’ that title for later but after thinking about it, it makes sense for it to come now.  Revenge is a driving force for Smooth, a duty he feels obligated to pursue, even if it costs him the love and respect of his new partner, even if it costs him his life.

I just started moving the pieces around last night, indeed, I’m still making the pieces.  So there’s a lot that could change even from that bare start of an idea.  Now I have to start thinking about the structure of the book*.  I’m re-reading Donald Maass’ “Writing the Breakout Novel”, the accompanying workbook as well as McKee’s “Story”.

One of the things I have to nail down in the next five days or so is how to begin the novel.  I have a scene or two in mind but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t do a prologue with the bad guys instead. It’s always nice to see the players behind the scenes in prologues, especially since they don’t appear in the narrative itself very much.  Robert Jordan did these kind of prologues well and I suppose that had an influence on me.

Same thing with the first chapter, my thought is to start off in the middle of an ‘errand’, maybe even showing the whole setup, the run, the place where to goes sideways.  Almost a short story at the start of a novel.  This approach to the first chapter will start things out with a bang and set the reader’s expectations about what kind of book this is going to be.  I can also start planting seeds for the overall plot, theme and a subplot or two. I like the idea but a novel is a novel, not a short story. I think everything needs to feel part of the whole and if I write this like a short story, I’m afraid it might stand apart too much.

Sigh. Beginnings are a very delicate time, to quote Princess Irulan**.   But I can always fix things later. The important thing is to get the story started.  Can’t wait. :)

*yes, damn it, I’ve been infected by all those damned books on writing. I’m actually thinking about how books are structured and me, an exploration writer at heart.

** Yes, I know the actual quote is “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” But I actually prefer the movie’s quote.

Like any good sequel, Lab Rat One raises the stakes from the first book, deepens the characters but continues to deliver solid worldbuilding, exciting action and fully-realized characters.  This is definitely a series that does not suffer from ‘saggy middle’.  Cassandra begins to develop powers of her own, in a slow and painful kind of way. Her relationships also deepen.

She also must deal with unwanted fame and the unending surveillance of the Tare State.  Still a virtual prisoner, Cassandra tries to adapt to the world she is increasingly thinking of as her new home.

What I liked:

  The main characters are well realized. The action is good with vivid battle scenes and inventive use of the Setari’s psychic powers.  Cassandra is easy to sympathize with, the first person POV is immersive. The story pulls you along. The stakes are high and you do want the ‘good guys’ to win. 

Cassandra’s new-found power and her struggle to learn how to use it is handled well. She does not suddenly gain great  power and skillful mastery of it.  She is not an action hero, more like a regular girl who becomes important.

The short story chunks of each diary entry keep the story moving.  The worldbuilding is very good, showing a sci-fi world that feels more contemporary than futuristic.  The technology’s impact on this culture is very clearly depicted.

The relationship evolution between characters is handled fairly well.  There isn’t any sudden, grand passion that sweeps the main character off her feet. Though I did wonder from time to time if Cassandra was falling for the object of her desire or if their respective powers were pulling them together, though that thought only occurred to me after I’d finished the series.

What I didn’t like:

Cassandra remains far too passive as character. She is slow to speak up for herself, something even the characters in the novel comment on. (The author’s subconscious speaking to her and us?)  Things mostly happen to her, she rarely makes things happen.  She also seems to spend half the book in the hospital, which sort of makes the ‘Lab Rat One’ reference make sense, though strictly speaking that was more appropriate in the first book, Stray.

The society remains problematic for me. This may well be realistic, when everyone is interconnected via implants and computers, universal surveillance is a wonderful gift to any government.  To the author’s credit, one of the major plot points shows how this can be abused. But there are no consequences to it. The author raises the point but doesn’t follow it through.  Cassandra is a virtual and literal prisoner for the entire book.  First because she is helpless then later because she is valuable. She belongs to the State, not to herself. I could go on at length but I'll stop there.

There is also a LOT of Cassandra longing for Kaoren Ruuel.  I’ll buy that it’s realistic and might ring true to teenaged girls. But I’m not a teenaged girl, I found it a little tiresome, though I know what it’s like to long for someone.

I whole-heartedly recommend this book.  It is an excellent example of a sequel done right (though I suspect the whole trilogy was written as one, large work).  Good characters, great conflict, cool powers and a well-thought out setting.

Sent off my Mad Scientist story to my critique group.  There’s one or two sentences I may cut or change radically but it’s one of the sillier things I’ve written.  I guess I could try to do a serious Mad Scientist story, someone descending into madness could be an interesting challenge to write, but the sub-genre in general seems to have its tongue in cheek.

Lots of submissions this week for us Wordslingers.  Very good to see.  I can’t wait to dig in and read them.   With so many, I’m not going to be able to wait until Friday night, though.  :)  Ah well, the discipline will be good for me.

I also sent off my synopsis to our novel editing teacher, Lois Brandt.  The bloody thing sprawled out to six pages, even cutting some subplots. I may go back to the snowflake method, starting with a one-sentence summary* and then expanding out to a paragraph, then a page.  MAYBE I can go from that into three pages.  We’ll see. I’ll have to do it when I send “The Mageborn Mechanic” out to editors (and Donald Maass Agency) later this spring.

Apart from critiques, I’m also going to start outlining my next novel, which I want to work on at the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat. I’ve decided to go a sequal to Smooth Running.  I’m planning to get a trilogy finished and up on Amazon/B&N/iBooks while I try to sell Mageborn Mechanic to the New York houses.  So I’ll be brainstorming and outlining and daydreaming for the next week or so.  I have a general idea of where the story was supposed to go but I’m thinking I can probably raise those stakes a lot. I’ve learned a lot about plot and story since that first novel.

Finally, I’m going to refresh my memory of Andrea Host’s “Lab Rat One” and get a review up, soonish. I’m really impressed with her writing. I’m reading “The Ranger’s Apprentice”, another , traditionally-published YA novel and her work is at least as good, maybe better. I’d really like to get her book into more people’s hands. Maybe I can convince her to do an interview here. I’d like to do author interviews and help in my small way, other writers.

*An 18 year old with a magical gift for understanding machines gets blackmailed into stealing data from a government server.

I want to get more book reviews up this week but it makes sense to talk about Potlatch while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Potlatch ended up being a small convention, just one panel track.  The writer’s workshop was wonderful, went very well.  The Island of Lost Gods went over pretty well. I’ll go over the feedback again, digesting it and see if there’s any way to fix a few things.  Our organizer, Vylar (http://www.vylarkaftan.net/) kept things moving and we hit our two hour limit right on the money. Too bad, in a way. It would have been nice to talk more with her and with the group. But I did have the chance to have dinner with her, her husband and part of the critique group.

One thing that struck me right away is how old everyone was.  I’m not young at 41 but I felt like a kid compared to a lot of the attendees.  It was a weird feeling.  There was a knot of people around my age, some recent Clarion West grads, but on the whole…wow.  It made for a strange vibe, like nursing home sometimes.  Conventions need new blood, especially science fiction conventions.  There was very little discussion or familiarity with contemporary writers or books. Very strange.

The trivia panel is a good example of what I’m talking about. The trivia was very obscure, which is fine, but I honestly don’t have much of a shot at knowing anything about publishing houses from the 40’s to the 80’s.  Or trivia about Potlatch attendees of years past. Very insular.

I did like the more literary panels. Potlatch has a book of honor each year that they discuss. This year was “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.  I appreciated the opportunity to talk about the book but I wonder if a panel is the right way to do that.  It almost might work better in small group circles all talking about the book. It would certainly involve the audience more, which would be all to the good, I think.

The auction to raise money for Clarion West scholarships was a lot of fun, though I ran out of gas before the end of it.  I scored some Howard Chaykin comics that I overbid on. Sokay, it’s for a good cause.

The hotel in downtown Seattle (literally in the shadow of the Space Needle) was nice.  They were a little anal about not allowing food or drink from the hospitality suite out into the halls. That wasn’t very cool. But the hotel staff was otherwise very accommodating and friendly.

Although post of the panels were interesting or dull, only one infuriated me.  The panel on e-publishing.  Now, a single, 1-hour panel on epublishing is not nearly enough time.   Next time I hope they break that subject up into separate panels. What stunned me was the wave of negativity towards e-publishing in general and self-published authors in specific.  Though Vonda Mcintyre tried to talk a little about how e-publishing was reviving the career of midlist Sci-fi authors, some arrogant, elitist worm of a man ran roughshod over everyone there. No idea who he was, I’d like to look him up though.

Not for that. Just so I can make sure I don’t buy any of his books by accident.

Seriously, most of the panel was him talking about how irrelevant e-publishing was,  how all self-publishing books were crap and how wonderful the ‘taste’ the great editors have and how they should be determining what everyone SHOULD read.  Seriously, that’s what he was saying.  Frell, what I wouldn’t have given for Dean Wesley Smith, J.A. Konrath or Kris Rusch to be there.  The sheer arrogance of the man, the unearned superior tone.  I’m still mad thinking about it.  I wish I’d been on that panel, though it’s probably just as well I wasn’t. I’m not at my best debating when I’m angry.

I’m afraid that panel, on Sunday, colored the rest of the day for me.  I’m still steamed up about it. 

Look, I don’t know everything about e-publishing. I still haven’t finished up Smooth Running for publication and I still need to do an editing pass on Angel Odyssey and send it out.  But I’ve been researching self-publishing and thinking about this a lot over the past year.  But I like the way self-publishing is empowering writers. I like that you can find books for genres that Barnes and Noble just ain’t stocking anymore and that the New York houses aren’t buying. *  Publisher aren’t selling what people want to read. There is a HUGE market for sci-fi action, for traditional fantasy that’s not from some RPG game, for space opera and more.

Yeah, I’ve read a lot of bad books from Amazon. But I’ve also come across nuggets of pure, personal awesome by writers like Andrea Host, Ric Locke, and my friend Luna Lindsey.  There is such a small chance to get the attention of the New York houses. There is a lot of great work out there and how dare anyone tell the readers what they SHOULD read instead of what they enjoy reading.

Good story, deserves a wider audience

There are strengths and weaknesses in letting an author off their editor’s leash and letting them write the story they want to write in the way they want to write it.  I don’t think you’d read a story like this from one of the big New York houses and that is one of the strengths.  The story is told epistolary (or blog post) style, as entries in Cassandra’s diary.  These bite-sized pieces give the book structure and keep the plot moving, which it needs from time to time.

This first book in the Touchstone trilogy starts with Cassandra just trying to survive an expected and unexplained transplant into an empty, abandoned world.  Some readers may get a little impatient with this section.  My advice to them is: stick with it. I enjoyed reading this whole series.

The story takes off in a new direction as she is discovered by a group of psychics, here on a survey mission of this, their abandoned home planet. Where the story goes from there is a long, fish-out-of-water story as Cassandra struggles to adapt to her new surroundings and to get treated as something other than a lab rat.

Her new home is a technologically advanced society and the worldbuilding is one of the best fascinating and horrifying elements of the story.  The author adds a tremendous amount of detail to her worldbuilding.  It feels very real, despite the implanted virtual reality networks, psychic powers and nanotechnology.  All of the fantastic elements are anchored by Cassandra’s reaction to her situation.  She always remains sympathetic and though she becomes the focus (or Touchstone) of her new home’s battle for survival, she never loses her sympathetic qualities. This is not a story about a superhero. This is the story about a girl.

There are some cultural bumps along the way. Australians are not Americans, though we’re close enough for the differences to stand out. I hesitate to generalize too much, so let me focus this specifically on Cassandra and her situation.

I had a hard time figuring out if the setting of Tare is a Fascist or Socialist utopia. 

Cassandra is handled by people with good intentions but with little regard for her rights to her body, her privacy or anything else.  Everything is very orderly, very neat and clean. But the implications of the society bothered me a lot.  In fairness, they seem to bother Cassandra as well, though not to the point of confronting anyone or asserting herself. 

Her relative powerlessness made it easy to sympathize with Cassandra but it also made her a fairly passive character in this book.  I do like that she does make a positive decision to help of her own free will. But her treatment made me grind my teeth.  To the good, it also makes some of the other characters grind their teeth as well, though again, not to the point of standing up for her.

There is some great action in this series, the psychic powers are very cool. But there is a lack of conflict, which is an odd dichotomy. Everyone gets along far too well. This is one area where there is a weakness in being able to ‘go her own way’ as a writer. A great editor might have helped interject more conflict. But, I am very impressed, on the whole, with the author and this series.

Recommended.

I’m off to Potlatch tonight. No, I’m not getting to nosh on communal food (though how awesome would that be if the sci-fi community actually did that?) instead I’m going to a science fiction convention. http://www.potlatch-sf.org/21/index.php

Honestly, I have no idea what to expect but I’m looking forward to it. The convention has some kind of connection to Clarion West and it offered a writing workshop. That is tonight, after work. I submitted ‘The Island of Lost Gods’, the longer version.  We’ll see what people think about it.

One thing that twigged my interest is that they pick a book each year and many of the panels are focused around that book. This year was a blast from the past (pardon the pun) called “A Canticle for Liebowitz”*. 

I hadn’t read the book in decades and frankly the book was hard to find.  No Kindle edition but Half Priced Books came through in the end. It was interesting. One of the more overtly religious science fiction novels I’ve read. Normally that is like the mix of oil and water.  Many, many sci-fi authors are agnostic at best, some are actively hostile to organized religion.  But in ‘Canticle’, we see a replay of the Church’s role from the Dark Ages: preserving knowledge of the earlier, educated days in the hopes of supporting a later flowering of the sciences. Yep, little known fact these days, the Catholic church and their monasteries are the reason we know anything about the Greeks and the Romans. Several of the early scientist were monks as well, Gregor Mendel and Albert Magnus.

The first two portions of the book could easy be read as Fantasy or historical fiction, though they’re set centuries after a nuclear war.  On the last touches on traditional sci-fi elements. But the setting isn’t what this is about. It’s not even about technology, though the efforts to recover and maintain technical knowledge and the correct application of science are major themes of the book. The book is really about human nature. How man doesn’t change.  How man repeats history because of his unchanging nature.  Empires rise and fall and for the same reasons as their rise and fall in times past.

I think that’s what struck me most. There is a passage towards the end of the book that I thought was beautiful and profound. And sad.  I’m paraphrasing from memory but I think it went something like this:

When life is hard, paradise and heaven is easy to embrace. Because we want to believe that something can be perfect and good and that there is rest at the end of a life of toil.  But the more comfortable we become, the closer to perfection that we make our world, the more discontented we become.  Tiny flaws are blown up into huge drama and we stop seeking to be good people. We seek pleasure and pleasure alone and it does not satisfy and we are discontented.

This was written in 1960.  Back then, my parents were living on a farm in Iowa and life was not soft or easy for them.  How much more true those words seem today.

The characters seem real, flawed; noble or practical. But it’s the ideas of the book that make it worth discussing.  It’ll be interesting to see what people pick up on at Potlatch.  Will the focus on the post-apocalypic setting? Will they focus on the struggle between Church and State (Church doesn’t win that one, then or now)?  Will they focus on the arrogance of science? Or will the glom onto the subplot at the end, where euthanasia is vigorously refuted?**

I don’t know. But I’ll find out in a few short hours.  So here’s to Potlatch the 21st, in the year of our Lord 2012.

*Won the Hugo in 1960 and, yes, I had to look up what a Canticle was.  It means hymn or song.

**I disagreed with the Church over this in the book.  They make their case but it felt weak to me.  But even that felt real.

So I’m reading a Pulitzer prize-winning novel and I’m astounded by the amount of navel-gazing and emotional wanking going on.  This, in a book about war.  It reminds me of the differences between genre writing and ‘literary fiction’.  Genre fiction is about plot and story, written with an aim of entertaining the reader.  Literary fiction seems to be all about emotion and description. And this book is far from being the worst offender.  A number of the passages are taken from the historical figures own words, those being the only passages that ring true and avoid blatant wankery.

I want to talk about what the book does well but let me wallow in the trenches here for a moment more.  The repletion of phrases, sentence fragments and aimlessness of the character’s internal dialog gives the book an almost stream-of-consciousness feel.   Done in only one or two places, I’d be willing to let it slide. But half the bloody book is like that.  It makes me wonder, is that what ‘literary’ readers like?  Endless musing instead of action?  Repeated phrases, intended to harken back to old emotions, clutter the book.  The same thoughts, over and over, circular. No conclusions, just a restatement of principles. 

Frell.

But I wil give it made props for one thing: putting you into the moment and making you see it.  The book did that very well. Vivid descriptions, it put you into the moment.  If there was one thing that I wanted to take away from the book, it was the ability to make the reader feel what the character’s felt and see what the character’s saw.  I could have done without ‘thinking what the character’s though’, since that was mostly circular wankery, but it was vivid in places.

The book did another thing well, this growing out of research. It highlighted characters who had pivotal moments in the battle that went unpraised at the time or afterwards.  I can forgive a lot for raising up and accurately telling the story of an unsung hero.

The dialog and action were well done, again the author going back to original sources, reading the letters and accounts written by the participants.  I just wish there had been more of that, dialog and action, and less navel gazing.

There has to be a way to show that emotion and detail but to keep the action moving, to keep the plot in focus.  To entertain*.  That has to be our goal as a writer.   For me, that means storytelling. 

The book disappointed me but only because I had such high hopes for it.  I did learn something, I’d like to apply the author’s gift for placing me ‘in the moment’ while avoiding thoughts that do not have a purpose or following POV characters that are not at the moment of the action.**  Everything we read can teach us something.

*I guess people are entertained by different things but I’d rather speak to people like myself.  If I try to please the literary crowd, I’ll go nuts.

**Seriously, for the last third of the book, we keep following a POV character who is AWAY from the critical moment on the battlefield, who doesn’t even witness the moments of decision. You have to know who to focus on and when.  No matter how in love you are with a POV character, if they aren’t doing anything interesting, don’t focus on them, then.

One of the hardest things to do is to build a new world in five thousand words or less. 

Worldbuilding in general is hard to do, even in a novel. You have to bring your reader into a new world and make it real to them.  The more different the characters and the setting are from our 21st century Western world, the harder it is for many readers to make the jump.

But at least in a novel, you have space. You can build the world a bit at a time.  In a short story, every sentence counts.  You have to do a lot, but not too much too fast, in a short amount of time.  Because in addition to building your world, you also have to tell a story. And that can be a tricky thing to do in short fiction.

A lot of writers will take the easy way out (myself included) by setting their short stories in the modern world or at least a world that is easy recognizeable. We lean on tropes we understand: knights, magic spells, fairies, monsters under the bed.  But let’s say you want to do something different, you want to tell a real secondary-world fantasy or science fiction story and you need to do it by making it under a specific word count.

Here are some things to watch out for and some things you need to do.

Gotchas:  These are problems I’ve had and that I’ve read when critiquing other people (not just Wordslingers but in other groups or online as well).

1.        Too much slang, too soon.  By this, I mean, too much made-up jargon. These can be unfamiliar character names or go all the way into world-specific philosophies, religions and alien concepts.  Often you’ll get a bunch of strange words dumped on you up front in the story as the author tries to build the world before your eyes, before the story truly starts.  This is a serious bump for a lot of readers, especially casual readers. Hard-core Fantasy and Sci-fi fans are somewhat inoculated to strange words. But that doesn’t mean you can get away with it.  If you have more than one strange word per page, it may bump people out of your story.*

2.       Building the world instead of telling the story.  This is an easy mistake to make.  You can spend so much time in exposition, explaining what’s going on, that you forget to tell the story.  Exposition bogs down the pace of your story. But at the same time, infodumps about things that never were and may never be are one of the joys of fantasy/sci-fi. The key is the placement. Get the story started, then tell us the history of the do-hickey of power.

3.       Not telling us what we need to know.  The world in your authorial mind is much more real than what ends up on the page.  As a result, you may be making assumptions about what your reader knows, especially if you are the only person reading your work before sending it out into the great big world.  This is where a critique group is critical. You need someone who doesn’t have your brain to look over your story and see where they get confused.  But you can avoid a lot of problems by only telling us what we NEED to know to advance the story. There are lots of ‘cool stuff’ in your head that you want people to see but they all need to advance the story, otherwise, sorry, you need to cut it. Include all the relevant facts but don’t tell us too much.  See? Hard, isn’t it?

Ok, let’s see about what you should do instead of what you shouldn’t.

1.       Signal right away that ‘things are not like home’. This is useful because it sets expectations and lets the reader know they need to suspend disbelief.  If your story is sci-fi, but something that doesn’t exist yet in your opening paragraph.  If you are writing fantasy, try using titles or kingdom names in your opening paragraph. (just as examples, I’m sure you can do this more elegantly)

2.       Start by anchoring them to something familiar.  Give us a point of reference before you start building your world. Start with the similarities, then when you show us how things are different, you can accomplish more with less.  Let me try an example: Most people get married, one husband, one wife.  If you start off introducing someone and their spouse, that grounds us. Then if you introduce a concubine or second-wife or triad-male, you are telling us about how the world is different but you did it starting from a common point of reference.  Use universal problems, common emotions, the more familiar elements you can use in your story, the more they’ll be able to identify with it even when you toss in aliens or orcs.

3.       Ease in the world-specific words and slang.  Using an unfamiliar word is a good way to signal what kind of story you’re telling. But start slow.  Choose made-up words that are significant to the story, not just different for the sake of being different. And, again, space the strangeness out. Try to keep it to one new word per page or per two pages, if you can. You want to hook your readers, not use strange bait.

4.       Know your story, your conflict and your stakes.  If you need to, start out with a one-paragraph description of your story with none of the fantastic elements.  Know the story first, know the conflicts.  A short story is about one thing, one concept, one twist.  More than that, and you’re into novella or novel territory, which is a whole ‘nother kettle of geeblefish. Think of this as a rehearsal, all your actors are in street clothes, learning their part.  Then, once you have the story clear in your head, dress them up.  Paint the scenery.  Bring in the props.  That doesn’t mean the props and scenery and costume isn’t important, it is. The fantastic elements of a fantasy or sci-fi story should be the key to your story. In fact, without them, you should have no story.**

*I’ve heard that more than 1 made up word per story is too much but I’m not sure that’s correct.

** At least according to our learned elders.  I’ve heard, time and again, that if you can take the sci-fi element out and you still have a story, you haven’t written ‘Real’ science fiction. To that I say ‘Pppppthhhh’.  Story is story. Fantasy and Science fiction is question of props, scenery and costuming.

There is a saying, “Great is the enemy of the Good”.  Or in other words, perfectionism had better be its own reward, cuz it sure gets in the way of getting things done.  In the military, the thinking is, ‘better a bad decision made decisively and a good decision made too late’.  Time is of the essence in battle, more than anything else.*

My point is, that making a decision and then trying to execute on that decision is much more important than trying for the ‘right thing’.  For example, my Mad Scientist short story was going along quite swimmingly, I was having fun reading and writing it.  Usually a good sign.  But around the 3.5k mark, I started dithering.

I couldn’t decide if I should end it right at 4k words with a humorous denouement or if I should expand the story, swing for the fences (probably 7k words) and make the story darker and more disturbing.  I literally couldn’t seem to decide and the story just sat there, unfinished.

Then during my weekend editing class, I had a revelation: It’s up to me to make the decision.  And it doesn’t matter WHAT I decide. I just needed to make a decision and then follow through and try to do it well.

I know, I know.  Obvious.  Mark “Kooky Pants” Edwards took HOW long to figure this out? 

Sigh. All I can say is that I may have started over-analyzing things. This might be an occupational hazard for a want-to-be author.  Too many books on writing, too many classes, too much advice.  It was easier, simpler before I knew all the rules.  I just WROTE Smooth Running. Sure, it has flaws, but it’s a spanking good read.  So to speak.

It is up to us.  We’re the writer. No one can make these decisions for us: what to write about, how to end it, how to characterize someone, what is your story theme.  All critique partners can do is help us by pointing out when the decisions we made didn’t work for them.  That’s all.

We’re the writers. We have the freedom and the responsibility to do the writing, to make the decisions.

So.  Final thought, don’t worry about the decision you’re trying to make.  Just make it, choose something, then write the heck out of it, go full bore, commit to the decision once it’s made. Don’t wait, don’t dither, don’t freeze.  Decide and move on. 

There are so many more stories than we have time to write.  Keep writing.

*Going to stop that there before I get off on a tangent about OODA loops and Col. Boyd.