I finished Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Deception. Very interesting book and a rather interesting approach to structuring the book so he doesn't admit to having done anything that would get him into more trouble. It's a scary book for anyone in Info Sec. All their PIX Cisco routers are useless against someone like him. I think my favorite story was the one where he and a friend were at a tradeshow and saw a reward offered to anyone who successfully "hacked" an unhackable box sitting there on the floor. So instead of doing keyboard hacks for OS or other security holes, they waited till the booth was not appropriately manned and then picked the lock on the cabinet that gave them access to the cables. Once appropriately switched around, they had full privileges to the box and access to the source code, which they were printing out when the guys came back from lunch.

And now, I will brilliantly bring this around to writing. The trade show guys assumed their box would be attacked by someone sitting at a keyboard somewhere. They never thought of the physical security. Assumptions will keep a writer in slush forever. Assumptions make you blind, deaf and mute to what's really needed in your story. What have you assumed about your story? For me, I often find that I have assumed that certain events MUST happen in a certain order. But, is that true? Really, really true? Once you permit yourself to question your chronology, sometimes you see another way. What about your characters? What have you assumed about your characters? I am so tired of writers (always unpublished) who have, in fact, solicited my opinion and then get upset when I question an event in their story. "Oh, no, Hero Hunk has to do that because fill in some overly sensitive over-explained in the narrative emotional crap. Same for the heroine. OK, so maybe that's not really an assumption unless you count the assumption that lack of real motivation can be cured by sufficient narrative explaining why the motivation isn't really weak. B.S. Since I'm on a roll, I also get irritated by writers who won't even try to give up adjectives and modifiers. Lazy, lazy lazy. (Originally, I had six "lazys") You deserve to be in slush you modifier addicted hacks! Try it. Watch what happens. Sometimes (hell, often!) the writing pops. Do without so you can tell when to use them so it counts.

I started another of the books in TBR, but the opening is a thinly disguised prologue (see this about prologues) and it's doing just about all the bad things prologues do to otherwise good stories. It's not diguising gender, thank goodness, otherwise I'd just throw the book away. But I'm only on page 2 and I know that the little relic a character just put back in the box while he thinks in flashback, will be the cause of havoc to come. Oh, man, why? Why? Anyway, I'll give it a few more pages...