A Response To A Testing Challenge

(Hello again blog! Sorry to have neglected you for ages and ages. Say, would you publish my response to a tweet that’s far too long for twitter? Thanks, blog. You’re a good blog.)

I saw a testing challenge from Matt Heusser on Twitter this morning:

https://twitter.com/mheusser/status/342639788005941249

Test Challenge: MyBizApp stores PO # as 10 [any] char field. How would you test sort invoices by PO#?

I’m looking for some inputs and some expected outputs, but you could always surprise me :-)

Explore the test the way you want to – perf, security, wherever your interests take U.

For this challenge, I gave myself fifteen minutes to come up with a plan, and fifteen minutes more to refine its presentation and get it posted. There had already been some discussion about it, good questions raised, etc. So I read through that. I saw questions (especially about what the customer wanted), but no one proposing testable proposed answers. The question of how it should be sorted came up. And of course, we don’t know – but we can guess, and then try to test those guesses.

So if a customer doesn’t know how they think the POs should be sorted, can we propose something, an explicit Oracle that they can look at? For instance, could we use an existing, common product that sorts things? A product that it’s possible or even likely that the customer is already using to handle this kind of information, especially if they don’t yet have specialized software to do it? (There are assumptions here, but they may be easy to check by simply talking to people.)

Say, maybe, Excel? Yeah? So let’s see how Excel does it.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/default-sort-orders-HP005199669.aspx

This seems like a good start (at least for ASCII, which Angela Harms, who investigated the parameters of this challenge before me, determined was the character set). Although… I immediately wonder how upper-case vs. lower-case letters are handled. This is something that would be easy enough to find out. The way I’d find out, and check my assumptions with stakeholders, and generate test data, is to create an Excel spreadsheet containing the set of characters from that support article plus a full set of lower-case letters. Let’s call that set a. I’d add cells containing the Cartesian product of {a X a}. (This would probably be more efficient to generate with a quick script than by hand.) And, if I had it, I’d use any actual or representative data that might be available for testing purposes. This would give me a set of inputs (and expected results) to select from for initial testing, a set of data to show to stakeholders to find out if it sorted the way they expected, and a script that could be modified to extend my test input set as I came up with more tests.

And I would come up with more tests. I already have, but my timebox doesn’t even allow me to write them down! The question of running them, however would depend on a lot of things, not least the results of initial testing and the general priority of testing this sort function over investigating other areas of the software. It’s kind of a cop-out to say that the general context of the testing would matter too (of course it does! what specifically matters?) But I am entirely out of time now.

I’d love feedback on what I’ve got, though.

Post-deadline edit: (I just couldn’t help myself.)

Wikipedia’s page on ASCII has a section on ordering. This nugget here could be the basis around which I would design additional tests:

ASCII-code order is also called ASCIIbetical order.^[45] Collation of data is sometimes done in this order rather than “standard” alphabetical order (collating sequence). The main deviations in ASCII order are:

• All uppercase come before lowercase letters, for example, “Z” before “a”
• Digits and many punctuation marks come before letters, for example, “4” precedes “one”
• Numbers are sorted naïvely as strings, for example, “10” precedes “2”

An intermediate order — readily implemented — converts uppercase letters to lowercase before comparing ASCII values. Naïve number sorting can be averted by zero-filling all numbers (e.g. “02” will sort before “10” as expected), although this is an external fix and has nothing to do with the ordering itself.

 

Where The Magic Happens

It’s been too quiet around here for a while; a major factor in this was my participation in the Association For Software Testing’s Black Box Software Testing Foundations course.

I’m not a software tester in the professional sense. My sister Aubrey is, and has encouraged me to look into it for some time – besides which, I’ve been very impressed with James Bach’s blog and books. The culture of software testing seems inviting, a place where someone who likes to think, construct and test theories, argue, abstract, concretize and analyze can fit right in. So I took the course.

That was a really good call. If you’re interested in testing, or work with testers, or get information from testers you don’t really work with, or are simply interested in systems or computers and want to take a really solid, well-done online class with interesting people, I highly recommend it.

Now, when I signed up for the class, I didn’t carry any particular intention of trying to get into software testing. I was doing it to take an online class with my sister, get more familiar with her world, learn interesting things and challenge myself. I accomplished all those things, but I also got a couple of other benefits out of the bargain. For one thing, I was captured by the idea of working as a tester, and I’d definitely like to do that at some point in the future. Aubrey thinks it should be, oh, tomorrow. Maybe she’s right, but I’m more comfortable with the idea of that particular change being a litte further off in the future. Another good thing was that I met Ilari, who also happened to be taking the class.

Ilari has pushed me to investigate and pursue further testing education in a way that I otherwise might not have. I have a Twitter account now because he pushed me to get involved in the context-driven testing community on Twitter, something I’d never really considered before – though I’ve not actually done anything with it yet, I should point out. Still. As he persuasively put it:

He also helped me arrange a coaching session with James Bach, which is coming up this Friday morning – that’s definitely outside my comfort zone, too. Actually, the whole class was – I spent maybe ten to fifteen hours a week on it all through May – it was a bigger commitment than I thought I was biting off. As I said, though, I’m exceedingly glad that I did. I got a new perspective, an new way to think about possible futures, new vocabulary, new examples of my professional/business writing that I can use to demonstrate my skills and understanding, and a pretty nice LinkedIn recommendation from a reputable member of the Context-Driven Testing community. I’ll write more about the specific experience of the course in a bit; I don’t think I’m done talking about it yet.

I’m signed up to take the followup course, Bug Advocacy, this fall. My sister (and another friend of ours who took the course with us) and Ilari are also signed up, and I’m sure the other participants will be great, too. I’m really looking forward to it, and in the mean time I’m going to try and get involved in the community on twitter, read a couple more computer-science books (I’m working on Code, which was recommended reading for the course, right now – it’s excellent, I’ll do a post about it when I’m done) and generally try to keep exploring to find out what it’s like outside my comfort zone.

I want to be where the magic happens, you see.

 

An Approach That Didn’t Work

I wanted to write an essay that claimed that “One metaphor often used to describe the relationships at the gaming table is that the Game Master is the author of the novel, and the Players control the protagonists.”

Even as I wrote this, a subconscious alarm must have been sounding, because I followed it with this:

“Even if this metaphor is not explicitly invoked, it is often the unspoken paradigm under which games are designed – and often, consequentially, the paradigm under which they operate. The metaphor is facile; it seems plausible only if hardly examined.”

Twenty-two hundred words in, I found that I didn’t know where I was going. I wrote something else to give it space. I tinkered with it for a while, feeling at once like I had a lot of good stuff and that it was no good. I began to realize that something was wrong, that I couldn’t get anywhere. I decided to check my premises.

I started by looking for texts that explicitly stated the metaphor I was railing against. I checked likely sections of literally a dozen games.

I learned something. I couldn’t find a single explicit statement of the author/character metaphor in any game text I searched. So, I turned to the internet for examples, and I learned something else – not only is this discussion out there already, but it’s so well developed it even has a name. It’s called “The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.” Ron Edwards named the idea as part of his excellent, extensive analysis of role-playing.

He’s done an incredible amount of writing on this subect, and it’s smart. I lost all desire to finish my essay. But why should I stop wanting to say something just because someone else has already said something about it? If that was enough to stop me, I’d never write anything!

My first reason for writing about the subject was to learn more about it. For the moment, for me, right now, Ron Edwards’ existing work is a much better tool for that than an exploratory essay of my own.

Further, my approach was bad. I started by claiming things that either weren’t true or that I couldn’t know and certainly couldn’t prove – like what paradigm games are designed under. This coupling of arrogant tone with exploratory intent was unworkable. When I found an intelligent approach to the topic, I realized how bad mine was. I dislike those first two paragraphs intensely, now. For all I claim my first reason for writing was to learn, my tone contradicts that. My tone says my reason for writing was to attack, to demonstrate superiority. I became lost as I got deep into the project because what I intended to write was incompatible with the way I started writing it.

I’ve been writing a lot about failing. This is good news, because it means I have been writing a lot and if it has been about failing, it is because my intention to give myself permission to fail has been successful. If anything, I have been excited and relieved to realize I have failed and must step back; it gives me something very personal and immediate to examine. Discussing and learning from failure reminds me that failure is valuable. I am getting better at producing it instead of avoiding it. There’s a metaphor here somewhere about digging for gold and striking oil; I leave the specifics as an exercise for the reader.

The other good news is that I wrote some useful, interesting things in my failed essay, things that I still want to explore. I’m going to try to rework it by applying the “Energy Principle” described by Gerry Weinberg in The Fieldstone Method. Actually, I’m going to take it a step further and modify the exercise he introduces immediately following the principle itself: I’m going to read what I have, copy by hand the parts that are energetic to me, write down what I learned by copying them, and then re-write the whole piece, informed and directed by the results of that exercise – and, of course, this exercise.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

Anything Interesting Is Educational, or, Abstraction Is For Experts

It takes me a few days to work through a concept sometimes. I have an essay about the central metaphor of gaming groups, for instance, that I had planned to put up last week – I’d say I understand about eighty percent of what I am trying to say, and the text still needs some reworking. Fortunately, I have a mini-insight, a shorter-order idea I can put up in the mean time.

I collect a lot of important concepts in my daily life. Some times, I notice it more than others. Recently, I was digging around in the blog of the game designer behind the recent kickstarter project about a lego-robot tabletop war game, Mobile Frame Zero, and I happened across an entry on trying to sell genre-appropriate roleplaying games at a horror convention, without success.

You can read the entry I’m talking about here, on Vincent Baker’s blog. It’s an interesting read, and I learned about some games I’d like to play – but the real treasure, for me, came in a followup post linking to another blog’s take on what might be done to improve the salability of such games to the horror-convention set. You can find this insightful post here.

The key insight, the thing I’m most glad I learned, is this:

It’s not just that specific situations are more engaging – they’re also much more useful for people to learn from.

Abstraction works for experts, because experts already have the mental framework to interpret and understand the abstract ideas being presented. They also have a mental bank of examples to draw from, so the abstract ideas very quickly get fleshed out in their minds. Novices have neither a mental framework nor a rich set of prior experiences, so the abstractions remain just that.

Friends, I have been struggling with an abstraction is for experts problem for a few months, both at work and in the consulting I’ve been doing for Alpine Valley School. If you have been involved in either of these settings – or if you are one of the people I vent my frustration on this topic to – you may be able to guess what I am talking about.

There is a vital distinction that underlies some important thinking about elements of an organization that are not working, and it is my tendency to communicate this distinction as an abstraction in the hopes of being able to use it immediately in discussion. When I do this, I say something like, “There’s a difference between process and procedure, you know. A process is what actually happens – a procedure is what we write down, or what we say happens.” This comes up because while one can “follow” a procedure, if you say someone is “following” a process, I believe it means follow as in “he follows politics closely” or “follows what I’m saying” – or doesn’t, as most often seems to be the case when I bring this distinction up.

A process includes elements you can’t control or maybe even perceive, or at least haven’t yet. A process is something you can study, observe, model in your mind, design and then attempt to implement – but it is not something you can “follow” in the rote sense of doing the proscribed steps. Digestion is a process. Construction is a process. Learning is a process. Following a standard set of steps in a standard or expected situation is something else. Standard Operating Procedure covers it – this is something I abbreviate to just “procedure.” You can be following procedure, or not. These are valid constructions that invariably mean what people think they mean. Procedures are part of, and describe and influence, some processes. But they are not the same.

The reaction I typically get when I bring this up is, “Oh, that’s just semantics.” People resent being distracted from what they’re trying to fix or plan, want to get right to do the doing, and are more than happy to dismiss the distinction I’m trying to introduce as a waste of time. This can be incredibly frustrating; here I am, working with smart, interested people, and I need to make some important points about what we’re discussing – points that I believe they will find useful – and I can’t, because they are uninterested in the distinction that enables understanding of the points I want to make.

For instance, changing the procedure doesn’t necessarily create the change you want in the process, and in fact the process as it happens right now may not even closely match the procedure you are trying to assess and modify. These are ideas that can lead directly to stronger understanding of a situation, and to a better grasp of where processes are breaking down, especially when people are using the same word – “process” – to refer to both what we say we do and what actually happens. Ideas forced to live together under the same title tend to merge and become difficult to extract, to come to have reduced distinction in the mind of the individual co-titling them.

Here is where the insight that abstraction is for experts comes in. It’s not that the people I’m working with don’t want the point, necessarily; it’s that the abstraction is, at best, interesting but unrelated when I introduce it in this way, and the “just semantics” reflex closes off further exploration with a wave of exasperation. People don’t want to waste time in meetings, and most people identify semantic discussions as a waste of time. I don’t happen to share that particular valuation, but that doesn’t mean I can get an exemption from it.

In discussing this problem with Aubrey (a damn fine software tester/quality analyst who happens to be my sister), I found that while she recognized my irritation, she steadfastly refused to validate my frustration. I wanted very badly simply to complain – perhaps because I saw the problem as tragic but inevitable. Aubrey knew better – she understood that it wasn’t that the idea was impossible to communicate, it was that it wasn’t concretely connected to the discussion in the minds of the people I was trying to help, and so felt like a distraction.

I bristled. I tried to prove her wrong in a brief role-play in which I took the role of the (I was sure) unassailably uninterested party. Aubrey was right, and I was wrong; she was able to communicate the points I had wanted to make without having to present the abstract semantic distinction up front. By sticking to specific, concrete points that edged around the semantic issue and using alternative language like “what we have written down” and “what we are actually doing,” she presented her ideas in a way that left no opening for my prepared rejection of semantics to even enter the conversation. By maintaining the distinction between process and procedure in her own speech without calling explicit attention to it, she laid the groundwork for introducing the abstraction of the semantic points to people who would already have specific, concrete ideas to attach the floating abstraction to – if, points having been made, it was necessary to bring the abstraction back into it at all.

I was the one who introduced her to the idea of the distinction between process and procedure in the first place. (To be fair, she was the one who introduced me to the work of James Bach, which is where I got it from.) When I introduced it to her, I simply gave her the abstraction. I wanted to tell myself that the reason that worked with her and it didn’t work with my colleagues was that she was an Alford, and Alfords are better at this stuff – but of course, it doesn’t work that way. She just happened to be an “expert” in semantics and testing, areas rich with experience and mental frameworks directly related to the concept I was communicating – so the abstraction worked for her. The other people I was trying to communicate the abstraction to were not experts in related areas, and lacked these resources – so my attempt to communicate an idea that I understood so vividly collapsed, because they simply couldn’t see the relevance.

This was my fault, which is the conclusion I did not want to reach. Had I considered or intuited the idea that abstractions are for experts, perhaps I would not have needed to consult Aubrey’s hard-earned expertise in communicating these sorts of concepts.

Aubrey had solved my immediate problem, but I didn’t understand why I had the problem in the first place until I happened on that passage in a post by an author I’d never read before about selling horror roleplaying games to non-gamers.

This is how a great deal of learning happens: by accident in the specific instance, but by design in the general habits. I did not intend to learn this particular thing (how could I have?) but my habits of analyzing my problems, discussing them with smart people I respect, and deeply pursuing any subject that catches my interest allowed me to make a mental connection that I hope will be of great utility to me in the future.

 

writeSomething()

writeSomething(“a heuristic for writing when it feels like I’m not able to, expressed as a function”, “10:00 PM”, unspecified);

I have a lot more ideas for posts and essays than I have posts and essays. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, and it is certainly not necessarily a bad thing. What is a bad thing, however, is that I often neglect the opportunity to turn an idea into an accomplishment, even when I want to. Too often, I go eat a sandwich or fuss with the internet instead. Today, I am going to try to give myself a tool to help combat this problem, and to continue a theme from my last post, I am going to use the programming idea of a function to do it.

Here is my function, expressed in the approximate syntax of JavaScript:

function writeSomething(topic, doneBy, length) {

your.status = "Writing using a computer keyboard";
your.thinkingAbout = topic;
your.allowDistractions = false;
something{
	topic: topic
	status: "Conceived of but unexpressed"
	text: ""
};

while(something.status != "Expressed"){

var newText = Create.sentenceAbout(topic);
something.text = something.text+newText;
var completion = Evaluate.forFullExpression(something);
if (completion === true){
	something.status = "Expressed"
};

if(currentTime===doneBy){
	if (ideaStatus = "Expressed"){
		your.functionComplete("wroteSomething!");
		return something.text
		};
	else{
		your.writingGraveYard[wGraveNextPosition] = something
		your.functionComplete("didntWriteSomething");
		var wsDebIns = ""
		var wsDebrief = ""
		while(wsDebIns = false){
			var newDBText = Create.sentenceAbout
			("Why I didn't writeSomething");
			var wsDebrief = wsDebrief + newDBText 
			csDebIns = Evaluate.forInsight(wsDebrief);
			};
		return wsDebrief
		};
	};
	your.functionComplete("wroteSomething!");
	return something.text
};

}

Now, you may not learn much reading that, especially if you’re not familiar with JavaScript in particular or programming in general. That’s not really the point, though I hope you read on, because there may be value for you in this yet. (And if you are familiar with JavaScript, you might notice that I called functions and changed variables not defined in the snippet. Assume this is in the context of a working program, and that the methods I call somehow accomplish what it sounds like they ought to. Or you might notice a problem with the syntax that I didn’t, in which case I invite you to point it out to me.)

I learned a lot writing it, though. I learned some things about programming (for instance, I was able to cut a bunch of stuff involving previous status and setting status when I was done that made the code really hard to read once I realized that stuff belonged in another function), and I learned some things about posting code on WordPress (it’s not easy to work around the visual text editor, which is inclined to collapse indentation and ruin the formatting, even if you know how to format your post in HTML, and it works well to write the code in a program like Notepad++ or TextWrangler, but even so, just to get the code to display in the narrow text column, I had to compress the indentation a couple levels).

But more importantly, I learned something about how to structure and express even a simple idea, and I learned that my initial understanding of that idea was so incomplete that I had to redesign it a few times before I could really express it in psudo-programming language. I learned that I didn’t understand my idea, and I came to understand it better by writing it out like that, even if I’m not all that satisfied with the way it turned out.

That, by the way, is the purpose of writeSomething() in the first place: to understand the topic better, to find out what I don’t know about it – to give myself permission to write about something I don’t yet know how to write about, without evaluating its correctness or value to anyone besides myself. To let me make mistakes so I can learn from them. writeSomething(), only asks one question as it writes: am I done saying this?

An idea expressed in the style of a computer language can be as significant in what it omits as what it includes. My normal writing process would have lots of things that aren’t in this one. It would constantly be checking what I was doing for originality, for truth, for value. These checks can be important for good writing, but I believe fear of coming up short of my own standards, and the standards of others (and more explicitly, the pain I experience when that happens), is one of the things that leads to missed opportunities to accomplish something valuable.

To return to the programming metaphor, writeSomethingGreat() is broken; sometimes it doesn’t return anything at all, much less something great. To help me figure out how to fix it, I’ll use writeSomething() instead (for now) when I find writeSomethingGreat() === undefined.

So far, it seems to be working, though it sure did return something strange.

 

CodeCademy and Code Year

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine shared an article about Code Year on Google+. The idea of learning to code with a year of straightforward online lessons was appealing, and so I signed up – and I am exceedingly glad I did. It has changed the way I look at computer programming, and the world. The timing was just right, for me – I had just finished reading Jerry Weinberg’s excellent An Introduction To General Systems Thinking, which I did not realize had prepared my mind to eagerly grasp the potential benefits of learning to code – even in a relatively simple, limited language like JavaScript, which is what Code Year is currently teaching. I couldn’t wait for the lessons to arriving by email – so I jumped ahead to what the people putting on Code Year, Codecademy, had going on already.

I discovered one of the most friendly and inviting self-education tools I have ever seen. It gave me an achievement! I love achievements. I want someone to give me achievements for writing fiction! Well, maybe not. At any rate, I swept through the lessons they already had available, enjoying each lesson more than I ever would have suspected. And then. When the first email arrived, with a link to that week’s lesson, I though I’d already done everything they had; I was wrong. Each week they are putting out a significant amount of accessible, quality educational content, and they’re doing it gratis.

I also learned something about programming. Writing computer code is not an exotic behavior, or a specialized talent that only a few can even comprehend. It is a basic, accessible human skill. I should have known; Heinlein told us as much in Time Enough For Love:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I will admit that I have not put much practice into dying gallantly, though I hope I would be up the task if that’s what was called for. I have been putting a fair amount of attention into learning programming though, and it has been enormously rewarding. If you are reading this paragraph, it would probably be rewarding for you, too.

I don’t intend to work as a programmer for a living, though it might be nice to have the option some day. I don’t intend to write my own software for daily use. I am learning programming for essentially three reasons:

1: It is surprisingly easy to learn.

2: Working on programming problems helps me exercise the analytic parts of my brain that I rely on to live a good life.

3: It may help me solve a problem in some other endeavor later in my life, either directly (giving me insight into what’s may be happening under the surface of software I’m testing, for example, or allowing me to write a quick script to help me accomplish a rote task) or indirectly (software design and the behavior of computers, as with so many other apparently narrow disciplines, are enormously useful sources of metaphor that can be applied to many other areas of life).

If you are not convinced, the home page of Codecademy may yet convince you. I accidentally completed a lesson and was awarded an achievement within minutes of landing there, and was hooked. You can track – and publicize – your progress with a public profile page. Mine’s http://www.codecademy.com/profiles/jjarro.

If you sign up, or if you’re doing it already, drop your profile page in the comments and let me know what you think of Code Year!

 

Review: Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar

I could say that this book changed my life – but that’s something that every book worth finishing will do, and so that is not especially notable.
I could say that anyone interested in education, either for themselves or for their children or friends, will find a lot of very important thoughts that I think they need to hear in this book – but that’s too general and lacks specificity, and I wouldn’t respect a recommendation so vague without knowing the reviewer.
I could continue the “I could say” format – but I don’t think it will help me finish what I’m trying to say.

What I might say, then, if I were forced at gunpoint to provide a negative review of this book, is that the buccaneer theme and analogies found throughout the first half of this book were perhaps a little taxed as an organizing concept. I would explain that it feels a bit pedantic, almost like it’s trying too hard to take very useful advice and interesting concepts and dress them in the sort of rugged pirate garb that the author hopes will make them appealing to youthful readers. I hope he’s right – because the “young adult” set can get a much out of this book as anyone else.

Since no one is coercing me, what I will talk about instead is the intense, concentrated value of this book for me, an adult trying to thrive in the working world.

When I discover a field of endeavor, one thing that’s very important if I am to sustain my interest is the discovery of a philosopher, someone who understands not only what we’re doing, but why. When I got into writing, it was Ayn Rand and John Gardner. When I got into shooting, it was Jeff Cooper. I discovered in these people not so much a new way of thinking, but a developed understanding of much in myself that I had not yet integrated and understood. In each case, it was like finding a new grandparent, a patron saint, a mentor – that stood for that part of myself that I had yet to truly delve into.

James Bach has done this for me for self-education and professional thinking. (I suspect that Jerry Weinberg did something similar for him, and his recommendation that you read everything Jerry has ever written is worth the price of the book. I’ll review some of Jerry’s books soon.) Like the other members of my personal pantheon of author-mentors, James Bach can do more than give advice – he can help you understand how he came to know and believe the things he does, and how you might come to do something similar.

You can and arguably should get a taste of Bach’s work on one of his two blogs, about software testing and education, which can be found at www.satisfice.com/blog and http://www.buccaneerscholar.com/blog/ respectively. (I am adding both of these to the Blogroll, so this post is something of an Introduction, too.)

I suggest this post as a starting point for Satisfice: http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/483

Likewise, http://www.buccaneerscholar.com/blog/archives/134 might be a good point to start on the blog about education.

Now, you may not care about software testing at all. That’s fine – but still go look at that link up there. If, as I suspect, the post you read is smart, useful and thought-provoking even through you don’t care about software testing, poke around a little, see if you can find something else of value in those archives. I know I did – and that I came to care about software testing. That’s something else a philosopher is good for – making a particular field of endeavor interesting even to the non-specialist, giving someone approaching as an initially disinterested generalist the view they need to understand why they should care about something they would have never thought twice about before, something that can provide them enormous insight and value, even if they never design a software test strategy, or shoot to protect what they love, or write a novel – as the case may be.

I should also note, for any Sudbury or AVS type people who might come through here, that this book is now my habitual answer when it is suggested that graduates of a Sudbury education have mysterious powers of intelligence and insight, and that no one knows how they do it. Well, maybe some people don’t know how they do it, and maybe some of them do it differently – but this book can help anyone get a handle on understanding how I do it, and I suspect anyone either at AVS presently or having come up in such a place can get just as much value from this book in explaining their own processes and abilities as they can learning new heuristics and taking comfort in the tale of a man who was successful at self-education.

For AVS people in Colorado, I have purchased a few copies of Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar and donated them to the school for PR and training purposes, and of course to make them available to the students. They are available as loaners – but I suspect you’ll want your own copy, when all is said and done.

 

The Tower Of Thunder Beta – Chapter Three

Here it is, Chapter Three of The Tower Of Thunder. I expect I’ll have chapter four ready for you by the end of the week.

Please let me know what you think! Part of the point of releasing this publicly is to get feedback. Also, I am no wilting flower – if there’s something you don’t like about the story, or something you think should be done better – I want to hear about it. So please, leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Here are all the chapters posted so far:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

A note on copyright: I am releasing these under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial License – which you can read both in a human-readable and legalese format here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

So, please feel free to share and distribute my work, tell your friends about it, finish my book for me, write spin-offs, ect. – but make sure that if you want to use it for commercial purposes, or apply a more restrictive license for your work than I’ve used for mine, or not attribute the source material to me, you ask for my permission.

 

The Tower Of Thunder Public Beta – Chapters One and Two

I’ve been beset by last minute technical problems, and Scrivener and I are fighting over the indentation in the first several chapters – which were originally written, long ago, in Word. Naturally, I blame Word. I will post a revised version of this file when I figure out how to get Scrivener to play nice with my formatting requests. Until then enjoy this, the revised and reworked opening to The Tower of Thunder, now with totally incoherent indentation!

UPDATE: Here are the revised files. I have purged the last of Word’s crimes against me from these documents, and they are now formatted correctly:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be putting up the next three chapters.

The opening, just to get you started:

When a man decides to join the Legion, he should make damn sure it’s for the right reasons. For instance, it will be helpful to be deeply in love with long, dreary marches through heat and cold alike. He might be eager for a career in digging ditches and dragging gravel around. Better yet, he might just not want to make decisions anymore. Where to stand, where to sleep, what to carry, where to take it, what to wear, what to say, who to hate — these are decisions better made, for some, by the officers. Of course, one might also join up if he enjoys the prickle of sorcery on the back of his neck, or has a passion for that feeling a man gets when he knows there’s to be lightning, but can’t get off the mountaintop.

Me, I joined the Legion to get out of the city, see the world and get rich. No one
told me, but that is not what the Legion is about. The Legion is about roads, and
camps, and drudgery compelled by various maniacs who have nothing better to do. This high life is punctuated by opportunities to have an enterprising stranger stick some steel in you. Generally legion training will makes a legionnaire better at the unpleasant business of battlefield butchery than whatever distinguished gentleman-conscripts the latest rebel baron has made out of his peasantry. Still, combat is not without casualties, and no man is exempt.
Don’t get me wrong; the First Legion of the Empire Of Eternity is a crack outfit. They march better, turn sharper and shine brighter than any rag-tag bunch of lowlifes and idealists out there. Imperial history is replete with instances of their mere appearance on a battlefield ending an uprising or dispute. This doesn’t change the fact that their generals are maniacs, their imperator is worse, and in the absence of an emperor, it’s looking more and more like they’ll end up crossing swords with some other Imperial Legion at some point. I don’t envy any soldier on that field, I’ll tell you that much.

What will make it worse, of course, is that each imperator has been quietly courting sorcerers to give themselves an edge in the coming wars for the throne; those black old evils are — to a man — at least half-way crooked, spooky, dangerous and crazed. I myself spent my time as an imperial officer courting one such sorcerer, and the mark it left on me will never be obscured.

 

Introductions: Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries

Progress is being made on The Novel, but I thought I’d take a quick break from that to remedy a grave wrong – I had failed to link to Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries. Now, it’s not really a blog – and it’s certainly not updating anymore. Unfortunately, Jeff Cooper died in 2006, and I never had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.

He is my hero.

I do not necessarily agree with everything Jeff Cooper said, taught or did, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that the man revolutionized the way pistol shooting was taught and the way firearms training was thought of, had a keen understanding of history and the mind of man, and expressed himself with force and elegance. His training saved some of his students’ lives, and continues to save lives today. His ideas – many of which, by the way, I do agree with most emphatically – are not only interesting, insightful and powerfully put, they are entertainingly written. Jeff Cooper’s books shouldn’t be missed, either. The Principles of Personal Defense in particular is invaluable, but if you read anything the man ever published, you will come away better for it.

Jeff Cooper mentored me as surely as anyone could on the subjects of firearms, hunting, training, and personal defense – and he was dead by the time I took up the subjects. Jeff Cooper proved that mysticism and Jedi ghost powers are unnecessary in order to teach your students from beyond the grave – one needs merely to have written it down and left those behind who can teach what one has learned.

Back to the Novel Mines of Moria, for me – but you should go visit the ghost of the late, great Lt. Colonel John Dean Cooper.