Joseph Dooley Fiction

The mystery box is empty

Say what you want about the Jack Reacher series. Lee Child's explanation for how to write page-turning thrillers is brilliant:

How do you create suspense? I’m asked that question often, and it seems that every writers’ symposium has a class with that title. It’s an important technical issue, and not just for so-called suspense novels. Every novel needs a narrative engine, a reason for people to keep reading to the end, whatever the subject, style, genre or approach.
But it’s a bad question. Its very form misleads writers and pushes them onto an unhelpful and overcomplicated track.
Because “How do you create suspense?” has the same interrogatory shape as “How do you bake a cake?” And we all know — in theory or practice — how to bake a cake. We need ingredients, and we infer that the better quality those ingredients are, the better quality the cake will be. We know that we have to mix and stir those ingredients, and we’re led to believe that the more thoroughly and conscientiously we combine them, the better the cake will taste. We know we have to cook the cake in an oven, and we figure that the more exact the temperature and timing, the better the cake will look.
So writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combination. They’re told they should create attractive, sympathetic characters, so that readers will care about them deeply, and then to plunge those characters into situations of continuing peril, the descent into which is the mixing and stirring, and the duration and horrors of which are the timing and temperature.
But it’s really much simpler than that. “How do you bake a cake?” has the wrong structure. It’s too indirect. The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?”
And the answer is: You make them wait four hours for dinner.
As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. (Which is what I did here, and you’re still reading, right?)

I found this quote by way of this video critiquing JJ Abrams's mystery box method:

The takeaway from this is, as a writer, you shouldn't be in the same boat as your readers. You're the storyteller. You should know the answer to the questions you're asking, and you should know how to string readers along. It's okay if your first draft doesn't have that. But a finished work should.

Abrams is said to be a fan of the franchises he's rebooted. Perhaps that's why the Star Wars sequel trilogy sucks. He emulated a feeling he had when he watched Star Wars. That feeling comes from having a layered story slowly revealed to your imagination. When the creator himself doesn't know where a story is headed, he's reduced to gimmickry. Sure, he may be excited and motivated throughout the creative process as a fan, but it has to culminate into something tangible for the audience to feel invested.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can.

I have made available the first 4 chapters of my second book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. For a free digital copy of my debut book, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here. I appreciate the support!

Beat this bug

I can't recall a time like this since 9/11. I'm anxious, and I've been praying a lot more. The threat from the coronavirus is real. My concern is those poo-pooing the crisis and demanding we all get back to work will create a second wave of cases in April that will dig a hole 10 times deeper than the one we find ourselves currently in. These arguments may hold sway over the president, but so far as I can tell the governors are singing a different tune. (Although Governor Cuomo's talk about New York enduring 9 months of quarantine isn't helping the case for containment.)

At this point I'm not counting on the federal government for economic relief. Their responsibility is and should be disaster response. Let the American people take care of each other. The social bonds of church and neighborhood will bear up many people through this crisis.

It's a cliche that the night is darkest before the dawn, but it's true. When things are at their worst, they can only get better. It's in hindsight that you recognize how you composed yourself during the worst of times was what carried the day. Weeks and months from now, we'll see in hindsight that our actions today saved millions of lives.

How? you may wonder, and with good reason. How we do this is not at all obvious. But you must understand we will pull through this.

I'm fond of CS Lewis's Space Trilogy. In the second book, Perelandra, the hero Ransom musters up the courage to literally fight the devil:

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. If you're looking for something to do while social distancing, I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of my new book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

Tradpub vs libraries part 3

For context, here are parts 1 and 2.

Last week, Macmillan blinked:

“There are times in life when differences should be put aside,” Macmillan CEO John Sargent wrote in a memo to librarians obtained by Publishers Weekly. “Effective on Friday (or whenever thereafter our wholesalers can effect the change), Macmillan will return to the library e-book pricing model that was in effect on Oct. 31, 2019. In addition, we will be lowering some ebook prices on a short term basis to help expand libraries collections in these difficult times.”

It was a futile and pointless fight to begin with. I think Macmillan knew this and they were waiting for something they could blame for backing down. The coronavirus epidemic allows them to save face.

Since theaters are closed and millions of people are furloughed from work, people are looking for cheap entertainment to fill their free time. This is a big moment for ebooks, whose supply chain capacity is limitless in good times and bad. Libraries and digital vendors are well-positioned to fill that void.

Consider this. Macmillan is headquartered in downtown New York, so their doors are shuttered. The overhead required to run a company of that size is in millions of dollars per day, on top of printing costs and paying author contracts. For the time being, it's good sense for Macmillan to go into hibernation and subsist on existing ebook sales and licenses. I guarantee their new releases on tap for the next month are a drop in the bucket compared to their current catalog, both in sheer numbers and in quality.

When money's tight, few people want to pay double or triple the average ebook price for a new release. Quality is too variable to sink that much into a single book. Both my books are available for just a dollar. For the sci-fi nerd, Tendrils to the Moon tells the story of the first commercial expedition to colonize the Moon. I tried to make it as scientifically realistic as possible. Seeds of Calamity, my second book, is an action-adventure story set in space, with a wild detour to Mars.

As always, leave a comment below. I'll respond to you as soon as I can.

It's not an overreaction

Up until a week ago I was poo-pooing the coronavirus in private. Even as sports leagues canceled games and suspended operations, I still thought their caution was much ado about nothing.

This past week I have performed a complete 180. The more I learned about the virus and how it spread, the more I came to respect and fear it. I don't want people to make the same mistake I made ("It'll kill fewer people than the flu!), so I've been downright evangelical lately in sharing what I know.

And here's what I know. The coronavirus has a kill rate much higher than the flu. Recovery from life-threatening symptoms requires up to a month in the hospital. Ventilators are limited. Because of the 2-week incubation rate, any effort to contain the coronavirus cannot be evaluated for effectiveness until 2 weeks after implementation. The problem with that is, because of exponential growth, 2 weeks is too long to wait. If your strategy fails, you've lengthened the growth curve by 2 weeks, as well as added more time on the flip side to eradicating the virus.

We can now read the Imperial College report on COVID-19 that led to the extreme measures we've seen in the US this week. Read it; it's terrifying. I'll offer a summary in this thread; please correct me if I've gotten it wrong. https://t.co/AwE2cHIbeJ
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020

The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China/Korea/Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what happens if the US does absolutely nothing -- if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course?
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020

It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020

So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020

On March 13, when the panic button was pushed, we had 550 new cases. On March 20, we had 5,854 new cases, nearly a tenfold increase. How many new cases will we have on March 27? Based on the growth trend, it could be as high as 60,000. I honestly don't think it will be that high, but what if it's 30,000? Can we afford to wait until we have 30,000 new cases per day for a containment strategy that we know will work?

Officials decided we couldn't wait that long. The measures implemented so far may seem draconian: shuttering and otherwise discouraging all public face to face interactions. The economy, in the short term, will tank. But in the real world, people without emergency funds or safety nets will need help to pay rent and put food on the table.

Frankly, the containment measures are worth it. An out-of-control epidemic could kill millions of Americans, sowing chaos. England was under constant bomber threat from Germany for 5 years during World War 2. We need only have that kind of vigilance for a month to snuff out the coronavirus.

By March 27, we'll know how effective current containment measures are. The turnaround will be evident in a decline in daily new cases. The total number cases will continue to rise, but at a slower pace. Most importantly, the number of silent carriers in the general population will fall dramatically. At that point, momentum takes over.

On May 8, 1945, the Allies celebrated victory over Germany in the greatest war of all time. On May 8, 2020, I believe we could be celebrating victory over this virus. Pray, and stay vigilant. Help others, and never fear to ask someone for help.

I also recommend this free ebook anthology, released today, put together by some lusty, dragon-slaying writers of dubious repute.

UPDATE (July 2021): Suffice to say my sense of danger from COVID-19 has changed since last spring. I should have trusted my earlier skepticism. I haven't felt this burned since I was convinced bailing out the banks in 2008 would prevent financial apocalypse. I apologize for my naiveté and credulity.

Social distancing

Officials across the country have ordered assemblies of varying sizes to not meet. Here in San Antonio, the mayor ordered assemblies of 500 or more to not meet, with exemptions for schools and churches. My church regularly has beween 700 and 900 congregants, and Friday night the elders scrapped Sunday service. It was a wise decision.

As of this morning, American coronavirus casualties numbered 93 deaths out of 4,748 cases, a mortality rate of almost 2%. I coded a simulator to predict the infection rates and mortality rates for large gatherings, assuming 100% transmission. Here are my findings:

Groups of 25

Chance of outbreak: .0126%

Groups of 50

Chance of outbreak: .0462%

Groups of 100

Chance of outbreak: .1288%

Groups of 250

Chance of outbreak: .3492%

Groups of 500

Chance of outbreak: .7136%

Groups of 1,000

Chance of outbreak: 1.4364%

You'll notice that, for large groups of people, the second-most likely outcome after no virus transmission is a high number of deaths. Imagine walking into a worship hall of 500 people knowing there was a .7% chance there will be an outbreak. Furthermore, if there was an outbreak, it was 3 times as likely to kill 10 people than 5. Would you still go to church, or would you stay home?

These are the numbers officials are looking at. And, since I'm assuming total randomness in the distribution of infected, it's going to look worse in areas like Washington state, where there is a high concentration of cases.

The simple fact of the matter is, if you have the virus and don't know it, you're going to kill 2 percent of the people you come into contact with. And since you can go days without showing symptoms, avoiding large groups of people is simply the prudent thing to do.

Now that the country is on alert, I predict in the next week the growth curve for the number of cases will invert, while deaths will rise disproportionately to case growth. The final mortality rate will settle in between 2% and 3%.

For a free digital copy of my debut, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here.

UPDATE: In the time it took to write this, the number of coronavirus cases rose to 5,243, and deaths rose to 94. Get the live numbers here.

UPDATE 2 (3/18):I found a flaw in my predictive model. The number of coronavirus cases that we know of does not reflect the true number of people carrying the virus. Since we are still seeing exponential growth in the number of new cases (1,748 just yesterday, up from 983 on Monday), it's safe to assume there are tens of thousands of people carrying the virus who don't know it. That drastically increases the risk of assembling in large groups.

So I ran the simulation again using the current mortality rate of 1.588%. Instead of looking at the probability for each possible outcome, I devised a new metric that averages potential mortality rates. Here are the results:

	# of infected in general population
Group size	10,000	20,000	30,000
25	.00033	.00059	.00093
50	.0013	.0025	.0036
100	.0048	.0096	.014
250	.030	.060	.090
500	.12	.24	.35
1000	.47	.93	1.4

Notice the linear growth in mortality as the number of infected increases, contra the exponential growth in mortality as the group size increases. Limiting group size is an effective way to limit the virus's mortality.

Assuming 30,000 people in the general population are infected, the expected mortality in a gathering of 1,000 people is 1.4. It seems low because 91% of those gatherings won't experience an outbreak (assuming a random distribution of infected people). The 9% that do, however, will probably see between 8 and 24 deaths. Of course, an outbreak among a church or school body of 1,000 people means you have 1,000 new carriers of the virus who won't show symptoms for 2 to 14 days.

That's another part of what makes the coronavirus frightening. It's why I think it'll be 2 weeks from March 13, the day we basically went on high alert, before we see the growth in the number of new cases start to taper.

UPDATE 3 (3/19):I'm learning more about the coronavirus every day, and I'm becoming more ashamed of my willful ignorance in the lead up to last week.

This morning I ran an exponential regression on the last 3 weeks of diagnosed cases in America. The equation it spat out has an r value of .995, which in statistics is as close to a guarantee as it gets. If we use the equation as a predictive model, there will be 93,610 cases by March 27, at which point I think the number of daily new cases will start to decline. That means there are over 80,000 undiagnosed cases currently in the general population. So the 10,000 to 30,000 cases in the general population I simulated yesterday paints too rosy a picture.

So I ran the simulation again with more realistic infected numbers and the current mortality rate.

Expected mortality and outbreak probability
	# of infected in general population
Group size	60,000		80,000		100,000
25	.0018	.15%	.0025	.21%	.0031	.26%
50	.0075	.51%	.0099	.68%	.012	.82%
100	.029	1.5%	.039	1.9%	.049	2.4%
250	.18	4.4%	.24	5.7%	.30	7.2%
500	.71	8.7%	.94	11%	1.2	14%
1000	2.7	17%	3.5	22%	4.3	26%

Look at those outbreak probabilities! How can you not cut out restaurants, the gym, church, school, and office buildings? Isolate yourself now, especially from older folks whose mortality is an order of magnitude higher than the average.

UPDATE 4 (July 2021): Suffice to say my sense of danger from COVID-19 has changed since last spring. I panicked and advocated for radical measures based on incomplete and incorrect information. I apologize for my naiveté and credulity.

Embrace tropes in your writing

I've written about stereotypes before and how my writing would benefit from using them. I came across this writing advice video about fantasy tropes and thought it deserved a response.

Many of the character stereotypes, or tropes, she hits on apply to Harry Potter. Let's say she's right on all of them. You'd think, if tropes were a bad thing, this would have held the Harry Potter series back.

Why didn't it? Because JK Rowling used these stereotypes to create an identifiable and memorable character. She didn't just use tropes to construct Harry. Hermione, Ron, Snape, Dumbledore, and others are etched into my generation's cultural memory in a way that Luke, Han, and Leia are etched into the cultural memory of my father's generation. It's an achievement that deserves in-depth analysis, not scorn.

The best advice with regard to tropes is to study them to understand how they work so you can create the effect you want for your readers. If you don't give readers something they recognize, they can get lost and confused, if not upset. Furtheremore, there's a ton of wiggle room to mold a stock character into a fully fleshed person. No one mistakes Harry Potter for Pip in Great Expectations because they're both orphans.

Funnily enough, the writer/former literary agent giving this advice admits at the 19-minute mark that a lot of readers like their expectations to be fulfilled (i.e., they like tropes), but you're not going to snag a agent unless you shun tropes in your writing. That's the failure of tradpub in a nutshell: middlemen refusing to give readers what they want.

In my last book, Seeds of Calamity, I brought more craft to my characters and plot. This included intentional use of tropes. My hero is, you guessed it, an orphan. He's also kind of a hothead. His older brother is more mature and deliberate, a point of tension between them. Their best friend is a sage/surrogate father type. The two main bad guys are an officious weasel and a cunning rogue. Someone the brothers are forced to work with is a driven career woman and love interest.

These tropes serve as markers for the reader, which I think is more important in fantasy and sci-fi than in other genres. I don't have to explain the character dynamics for you to understand them. The act of explaining would just dull the emotional edge. You can predict how the characters get along in the beginning, but you can't as easily predict how the plot will change those characters and their dynamics.

Read and see for yourself. I've made the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity available for free here. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

As always, leave a comment below. I'll respond to you as soon as I can.

Toilet paper and the tragedy of the commons

I've held my tongue on the coronavirus outbreak because frankly I don't know what to make of it. I've found both the argument for taking precautions and the argument for doing nothing convincing. My attitude is to err on the side of doing nothing.

Back when I used to listen to Ric Edelman, he said something that stuck with me: "Don't just do something, stand there!" In the original context, it meant don't react to one bad day or one bad week in the stock market. In a general context, it means any decision you make in the moment will probably be the wrong one. Also, during my formative years in Maryland, the overhyped swine flu and overhyped Hurricane Irene taught me I didn't need to concern myself with stuff the media told me to be concerned about.

Now here we are, a day after all the major sports in America postponed or cancelled games, when many schools and colleges either extended Spring Break or canceled classes. I don't know whether we'll all be laughing about this on Tax Day, or we'll be talking about the Dow Jones slumping past 15,000.

I personally have not been affected by the coronavirus or the public reaction. Work is the same, church is the same, family life is the same. Writing is the same (i.e., really hard). If it's not in front of me, how can it inconvenience me?

It would be overstating it to call the reaction to the coronavirus in America a "panic." It's merely a significant number of people taking precautions, like when an unpredictable hurricane bears down on you. But let's apply "panic" loosely. When does panic become the rational choice? When does it become my best interest to react not on my instincts or reason, but on the actions of others?

Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine a pot of money in the middle of a large group of people. Each person puts in a hundred bucks. Every minute, the amount of money in the pot increases by 2 percent. This happens until an hour is up, whereupon the group will divide the money evenly, each person earning a 200% profit for standing there and doing nothing.

I would probably be that guy telling everyone, "Nobody take money out, and in an hour we'll all be rich." I have that kind of temperament. Of course that's factually true, but this scenario isn't testing our math skills. It's testing social trust. If you're one of those people, do you trust the others? More importantly, do they trust you?

Here's how the experiment will break down before the hour is up. Someone takes money, then someone else, then three more people, then it becomes a free for all. At the beginning, almost everyone trusted each other to wait. But for the experiment to reach the end of the hour, you need everyone to trust each other. No group acting collectively is more trustful than its least trustful member, which is why most groups don't make it to the end of the experiment. It's a negative feedback loop: The less money there is in the pot, the more I want to take. This is called the tragedy of the commons.

Let's apply this to the most visible example of the so-called panic we've seen so far, the oft-memed toilet paper shortage. There's no shortage if no one hoards toilet paper, right? So why doesn't everyone behave like good little rational robots for the common good? Because people aren't robots, and once there's a whiff that some preppers cleaned out Costco, there's a run on toilet paper because no one wants to wipe their butt bare-handed.

When a run is in progress, it's silly to go around squawking that if everyone just acted rationally, there'd be nothing to worry about. My rational observation is that people are irrational, and sometimes the rational act is to act irrationally.

In other words, if you see toilet paper, buy it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply to you as soon as I can. If you're looking for something to do besides watch basketball or hockey, I invite you to read the first 4 chapters of my new book, Seeds of Calamity, for free. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!

For a free digital copy of my debut, Tendrils to the Moon, sign up for the mailing list on the right side of the blog page. Or, if you're viewing this on the mobile site, click here.