Time to re-edit Black Hat Magick vol 1 Dread Vote

I’ve finished vol 2 of Black Hat Magick, which means its time for me to get back to work on vol 1 and make sure that it’s up on Amazon.com as an e-book.

I didn’t really like how I ended vol 1—I’m not going to go into that here because the end of the story is entirely a spoiler. I did what I needed to point the readers (and Elaine) in the right direction, but there’s a long laundry-list of things that were just kruft and not really displayed as much.

When I went to vol 2, I had learned a bit more about how to plot the short of story that a BHM story is.

Now I’m thinking bout vol 3 and that might mean League of Legends players, gold sellers from MMORPGs, and potentially a serial thief stealing virtual items. It’s a good time to bring up Bitcoin again—something I expect Elaine to intersect with often—but I don’t think it’ll be about that technology entirely.

I’ll let everyone know when I finish editing vol 1 and vol 2 and have them on Amazon.com.

I do look forward to starting on vol 3.

Thanks for keeping up and be sure to check out Invincible and Vulnerable on Amazon.

Upcoming covers for Black Hat Magick Kindle-edition short stories

I am slowly working on filling out my Kindle store with e-book editions of stories I’ve written. I have quite a few and from what I’ve heard, the critical mass is about 30. That might take me a while to reach.

So here’s a pair of covers to enjoy as I work towards getting them into the Kindle store.

Black Hat Magick gets better navigation via moi Photoshop skills

Behold my nascent and rusty Photoshop skills! I have added some extra navigation to the Black Hat Magick website to make it easier for people to find their way to the salient portions of the story—namely the beginning and the most recent short story.

I know that I had something better before (like a TOC) but the crash really left me in a lurch.

So we’ll all have to suffer with these lovelies on the home page.

Link, via Black Hat Magick.

Why I will keep using DropBox

There have been some “privacy scares” in relation to the cloud-storage desktop application DropBox recently that may have shaken confidence in the product; however, I am not going to leave them just because of these issues. These problems even triggered possible FTC scrutiny into their activities.

First, not too long ago it was revealed that even though DropBox touts the fact that they encrypt the contents of your shared data, the crypto key is available internally to employees—this means that they can decrypt your information and look at it anytime they want. The reason for this is that the only way that they can enable a user to retrieve the contents of their box if they lose their password is to keep the key in house. Otherwise, a user who forgets their password loses access to their data forever.

The second scandal happened recently when DropBox accidentally opened up everyone's storage to access via any password. This meant that anyone connecting to any DropBox account could have pilfered the contents for the four hour period it was open.

Why am I largely unconcerned?

I don’t store anything in my DropBox that I don’t already allow to be publicly accessible. Certainly, I do keep some secret information in there that I’d rather not people see (such as manuscripts for upcoming novels) but I do the second-best-thing that I do for anything I put into the cloud: I encrypt it.

Any passwords, sensitive information, or secrets that end up in my DropBox are encrypted and often named things that make it difficult to discern what’s in them. An attacker who manages to break DropBox’s security (or gets in when its down) will have to content with a second layer of defenses—my defenses—and certainly it’s not about to stop a determined attacker to copy and attempt to decrypt my information; but at that point I wouldn’t be able to do much to stop them anyway.

Using encryption on top of my manuscripts and secrets doesn’t just protect them from potential prying eyes, but it also means that I can be reasonably certain that they haven’t been tampered with. Attempting to change one of my cryptographic files would ultimately destroy it and render it useless (annoying to me but I keep backups.)

If you use any cloud service (backup, sharing, etc.) don’t expect that their security is ever secure enough. “Always padlock your own fscking data,” as Elaine Mercer from Black Hat Magick would say.

Something of a weekend: Black Hat Magick, LulzSec, America McGee’s Alice

…oh and a Samus Aran Zero Suit edition Let’s Play of Saints Row 2.

Not a big update right now, but it goes like this: the website for Black Hat Magick is down because the server that normally would run the webserial had its motherboard melt.

It’s now non-operational; however, I did have the werewithal to get different hosting and now there’s a page explaining the situation on that domain. Refresh the page a few times, see what happens!

My good friend, Omni, also went out to the local Fry’s and bought a copy of America McGee’s Alice 2: The Madness Returns for Xbox 360. The dragon is playing it right now.

Plans are to turn it into a Let’s Play for YouTUBE.

Get Ready. A new Black Hat Magick / Mill Avenue Vexations crossover comes out Monday

Calling all cars, calling all cars. Especially taxi-driver and geek grrl enthusiasts, there’s a pair of short stories coming out for Black Hat Magick and Mill Avenue Vexations starting Monday.

You can catch up with everyone else about these facts over at the Mill Ave news and the article on the subject:

I’m tentatively calling this story Hadaly’s Day Out (feat. Brother Jed) and hopefully it will bring some light and amusement to those who already suffer this celebrity’s presence on the campus.

Immediately after that story is published, a Mill Avenue Vexations short-story and extension of that self-same story will publish here. I will not be announcing its name until it’s time for it’s publication. And you don’t need to read one to enjoy the other—although they’re probably both pretty fun.

Spread the news! Expect us.

Link, via Mill Avenue Vexations.

“Invincible” by Kyt Dotson

Go check out my short story, “Invincible” at Black Hat Magick.

This one is just geek-action-cheesecake for people who happen to like Hadaly, the AI from the Black Hat Magick series.

Wordpress and Twitter Tools 2.0

Well, it’s that time again. I am getting used to using Wordpress and all the wonderful things that come with it – for example: Twitter Tools.

Twitter, like any other social media concept, provides a method for promotion like nothing else. It also creates a huge time sync, watching people, waiting for responses, re-tweeting, and actually tweeting content that I want my followers to know. But, with the advent of this Wordpress plugin, we can see less difficulty for tweeting—a great deal less.

As it will automatically tweet blog posts for me.

I’ve already tested it out with Vox Ex Machina (@voxexmachmedia) and I have also installed it on the Pets 911 blog (@pets911com). These are setups that already get a lot of visitors to the blog (Vox especially gets almost 2k visitors a day now—granted, that’s mostly because of nude and sexy mods for things like Fallout 3.) Pets 911 not so many, but we do have 57 followers now, and that’s only two days after setting up our Twitter account.

Now if only we had a working Facebook account.

The last thing that I did was also set up Twitter for Black Hat Magick via my normal account; it will be tweeting posts as they go live with the Twitter Tools 2.0 (by the way, it’s an excellent upgrade, adding lots of excellent changes. I wholeheartedly suggest it even over the previous version and over TweetSuite.) This way I can pre-load a set of chapters, and then just have it update for my various readers—and my Facebook account—even while I’m away being sucked into book signings.

Be sure to check me out, and take a gander at all of my upcoming work.

I’m going to be out of touch for a while after Friday, but there’ll still be updates…

Follow me on twitter!

Project Wonderful fun

Well, my registration for publishing ad space on my newest webserial, Black Hat Magick, went through. So things are looking good. Certainly, it may take some time to get enough notice to make even a few cents a day—but, hell, anything is going to be helpful to pay for hosting and other things.

I just started into Chapter 8: Vote Early this week; this is where things get a little bit fun, I’m playing around with the concept of student elections. I even got a kind and wonderful comment!

Think the story is ghostbuster-esque?

I just realized that, in fact, I don’t have any jokes in the story from Ghost Busters! What am I doing ignoring such an important icon of geekdom? I must rectify this situation.

Now, I just need to convince people to review the story on Web Fiction Guide…

Sketches: Black Hat Magick, Elaine, Hadaly, and Frog

Rebecca Gunter from SOAP has been working on some new character portraits from some of my work, and here are the preliminaries that we’ve been working with. It may be a week or so before we have color versions, but those will be posted slowly onto the Black Hat Magick website.

Elaine is the main character, geek extreme; the next girl is Hadaly, an Artificial Intelligence seen in her android body; and finally is Frog—yes, that’s just a nickname—with her fencing foil and Dungeon & Dragons nerd t-shirt, “Yes, they’re natural” d20s.

Do AIs Dream: 2 - Imperfect

Monday, being Memorial Day, suffered from a significant lack of visitors when the newest strip of Do AIs Dream: #2 - Imperfect.

Working my way into the narrative of the strips. Pretty much, this is a way for me to introduce the story to people by talking about one of the characters. It's almost half-way done.

Go check it out.

Do AIs Dream: Second Strip

Friday, I posted the second strip to Do AIs Dream, #1 - The Edge.

Already elicited some pondering comments about how epilepsy could be similar to a computer reboot and random interest. So thou could come along also and take a look!

Do AIs Dream?

About a year ago I envisioned a spin-off for Mill Avenue Vexations in the form of a spunky, geeky college student story and now it’s coming. Introducing the beginning strokes of Black Hat Magick.

Black Hat Magick is a series of occult noir detective fiction webserial novels written by Kyt Dotson. The stories follow the exploits and adventures of college student, computer geek, and occult detective Elaine Hadaly Mercer. She begins her career as an undergrad at Arizona State University majoring in Computer Science and Engineering; but comes from a long blood line of dabblers in the arcane arts with a strong bent for the scientific—hitherto that strange alchemy of genius courses through her veins and neurons.

It is going to start off with a miniseries webcomic called “Do AIs Dream.” The very first strip published this morning.

Wander on over there, let me know what you think, subscribe to the RSS. Let’s make an event of this new webserial!

Also, I think it would be interesting if people would like to write messages to the individual characters. I might even run a tiny contest (where people could win signed back-copies of Vexations.) So, during future posts, feel free to write commentary to characters in the story. We’ll have to see how that might run.

Do AIs Dream? a miniseries webcomic for Kyt Dotson’s Black Hat Magick occult detective noir webserial.

The long silence, coming to an end

I apologize for the long, strange quiet. I have been rather busy with several things going on between my continued work on editing the first book of Black Hat Magick, finding a Canadian publisher/distributor for Mill Avenue Vexations, and getting my hands sunburnt...

Yes, yes, I know. I should carry a parasol when I’m in the sun or something. Either that or I'm just going to have to wear gloves when I intend to spend such a long time out during daylight hours. At least I don't bloody sparkle like some vampires I know (no, I am not a vampire.)

The experience with Brother Jed on ASU campus was nothing short of sublime. We had a visitation by Normal Bob Smith—who even dressed up in the contemporary image of the Christian mythological deity Satan. Then got to talk to many lovely people, found at least two who are now fast fans of Vexations. Good start. Jed has always been excellent for that. I also had a chance to read through a review of his book—with variously unfortunate results: Who Will Rise Up by George Smock, a review.

It'll take me some time to get a lot of my work down for Mill Avenue anthropology and my ready readers. Also there’s lots of things going on in the fiction department as many may guess. Volume 12 is preparing for release next month—and I’m still trying to get Volume 11 out on the web ASAP.

Much to come.