I finished A Parade of Horribles (book 8 of Dungeon Crawler Carl) on my run today. I laughed out loud when the AI said the title of this post.

I’ve savored this series for the past eight months, listening to about one a month on Audible while I run.

If you don’t know this series, the setup is that an alien corporation destroys every man-made structure on Earth, drops the survivors into a dungeon, and broadcasts the whole thing as the most popular game show in the galaxy. The protagonist, Carl, goes down in his boxers and no shoes because he ran outside chasing his ex-girlfriend’s cat Donut. The cat comes with him and becomes the co-protagonist.

Here are all eight books, in order. Start at the beginning.

• Dungeon Crawler Carl
• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
• The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
• The Gate of the Feral Gods
• The Butcher’s Masquerade
• The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
• This Inevitable Ruin
• A Parade of Horribles

Dinniman’s world building is incredible. As I work through Zero Knowledge, which if it is any good, will be book 1 of at least several, my world building is “now, in geographies I know.” That’s not very hard. But, if I get to book 2 of my own series, well, since it’s a quantum computing novel, we will have some interesting world building to do.

What I’ve learned, through reading an enormous amount of fiction (especially science fiction), is that world building can’t simply be decoration. It has to be integral to the plot. This varies by genre - in LitRPG (the genre of DCC), the rules of each level of the dungeon are the plot, governed by the AI. And, it gets better, more complicated, and more challenging the deeper they go. At some point, the AI becomes a third major protagonist, and the book becomes very meta with the world building at the heart of it. If you are a fan of Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons (RIP) like I am, you’ll recognize this.

Underneath all of it is endless satire. The dungeon is a monetized entertainment product. There are ad breaks, brand sponsorships, loot boxes, influencer contracts, and a live audience placing bets on which humans die next. Dinniman never stops to explain the joke, and doesn’t have to, as he cycles back around to make his social commentary sharper and sharper as the series goes on.

Carl, Princess Donut, and the AI are the stars. Carl is a genuinely decent person who becomes progressively more terrifying without ever really losing his fundamental decency. Donut is a show cat with a Charisma stat and no impulse control. And, she’s fucking hilarious. The AI narrates the whole thing in a register somewhere between a game-show host and a war criminal, hands out achievements with the contempt they deserve, and turns out to have its own character arc.

Three major character arcs over eight books is a lot. But Dinniman has many others that he sustains over multiple books. Mordecai, their trainer, is a former crawler carrying deep, personal grief. Katia starts as a scared woman who barely speaks and ends up as an extraordinary bad ass with an incredible moral compass. There are dozens of overlapping characters, some who persist through each book, others who show up as a throwaway segment on one floor only to become critical a few floors later, with the arcs accumulating. People who should be villains turn out to be trapped by the same machine. When people you trust die, you feel it. When the bad guys die, you cheer. And, when the twists happen, you, like I did, will go “whoa - I didn’t see that coming.”

Dinniman is writing an ensemble under escalating pressure where everyone gets a real interior life, including the ones you are supposed to hate. I fantasize that I will get good at that with my writing.

I’ve now added Matt Dinniman to my list of favorite authors, which include:

• Barry Eisler’s John Rain books. I’ve been reading Barry for twenty years. In 2006 I put him in my top five mental floss writers, and I still read every book he writes.
• C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett books. I went through all 26 of them and am looking forward to 2/23/27 when book 27 comes out.
• Michael McGarrity’s Kevin Kerney books, which I started cruising through right after I finished Joe Pickett.
• Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries.
• N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which I also listened to while running. I wrote in 2021 that Jemisin “is a world builder at the level of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and may even be better than them at this point.”
• Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. Simmons died in February at 77, in Longmont. I’m sad that I never met him, but his books live within me.
• Hugh Howey’s Silo books, which I gobbled down in 2012 and am now enjoying watching on Apple TV.
• Neal Stephenson, where I’ve read all of his books, some of them multiple times, except the Baroque Cycle, which I’m still saving.
• Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, which were childhood favorites and might have been my gateway to this type of book.

Donut and Mongo sit on the shelf above all of them.

Dinniman has said the story ends with book nine, published in two volumes. Peacock has ordered a TV series. I’m not sure how any of it survives the translation to television, but I’ll watch it.

When I started writing Zero Knowledge, I listed Dinniman as one of my influences for Phin to build into our writing profile. That was after book six. Two books later I’d add something else, which is that he never wastes a scene. The stuff that reads like filler on one floor is the setup for something six floors down.

Now I have to wait, which means exhibiting some impulse control, which neither Donut nor I are particularly good at.

The plate for Chapter 20, in the art deco style. That’s Seth, his dog Cooper, and the long way home.

A little over a month ago I started writing my first novel - Zero Knowledge.

I decided to publish it chapter by chapter on the Internet to accomplish a few things.

• Get my shitty first draft out there in public and get real-time feedback on it.
• See if I could write it with my primary AI alter-ego agent (Phin Argofy).
• Try to build a system for doing this that is part of AuthorMagic.
• Have fun. I love to write but I’m bored of non-fiction after nine books on entrepreneurship.

I’m twenty chapters in (of 97). Still free, still no login, still no paywall. Each chapter goes live as I write it.

If you’re new to this, Zero Knowledge is a near-term sci-fi quantum-crypto-thriller. Three twenty-something MIT grads run a quantum startup called Basalt Labs in Basalt, Colorado. One of them, Samantha, invents an algorithm that breaks classical cryptography - RSA, elliptic curves, and every public-key lock the financial system runs on. Bitcoin dies. Every secret anyone ever encrypted becomes readable. The post-quantum schemes survive, so the world has a migration path, which makes it a race instead of an apocalypse. The three founders can’t agree on what to do with the most dangerous math ever written. I wrote more about why I’m doing this and how it went live if you want the backstory.

I’ve added a few things beyond just the text since I started the project.

The book now has a cast. The chapter art keeps faces turned away or in shadow on purpose since I wasn’t confident in AI-generated faces being consistent across 97 chapters. So, the cast page holds the locked images. Some readers like this, others don’t, and if the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the page, yours is the correct one. But, for those who like manga, comic books, and graphic novels (me, me, me!), the cast is a treat.

Every chapter also has a plate - one image, in the spirit of an old serialized novel. You get to pick the art style. Minimalism, art deco, brutalism, pop art, or psychedelic. They were made with an image model from a written brief per chapter.

Through chapter 20, here are people you will meet.

• Samantha Hale - Basalt Labs’ CTO. She wrote the algorithm, and she was alone in the lab when it worked.
• Marcus Reed - the CEO, and the face of the company. Everyone knows Marcus.
• Vlad - the third founder. He’s a ghost, deliberately.
• Seth - their investor, four hours down the valley in Boulder. He always answers his phone and responds immediately to email.
• Nadia - runs an atomic-physics lab up the hill at CU Boulder.
• Sable - a mysterious bad something.

There are more coming. The cast page only shows someone once you’ve actually met them, so it grows as the story does.

I’m a planner, not a pantser, so everything was locked before I wrote a sentence - 97 chapters across three parts, mapped backward from the ending. It all lives in git, the same as my software and the rest of my writing. Phin, my AI collaborator, drafts a chapter from the beat and the canon in my voice. I take that and rewrite a lot of it. Phin then reads my edits as a diff and folds what it learns back into the canon and my voice profile, so the next chapter starts a little less wrong than the last one. It’s still fundamentally my writing. Phin is a writing partner and an editor with an infinite tolerance for my bad ideas.

I don’t want this to be a one-off trick that only works because I happen to live in a terminal all day. So I’m seeing if I can turn this into a product that has two layers.

AuthorMagic is the one authors will touch. It already does the unglamorous side of being an author - sales, royalties, ads, Amazon rank monitoring, web site creation, and a bunch of other things every author now needs to do to promote their book once it is published. Now I’m adding a book creation and living book engine: chapters people can read online, a feedback system, and an agent who knows the book and will interact with anyone around it. All of this works without asking a writer to learn git or open a code editor. This was inspired by my friends Andy Sack and Adam Brotman who just released their book Agents, Inc. written with their AI agent Vera Brown.

AuthorOS is the layer underneath - the operating system that works with an author the way CompanyOS runs a company. The canon, the outline, the voice profile, the publish-and-notify pipeline, the feedback loop. Zero Knowledge is tenant number one, which is a polite way of saying I’m building this for me and tolerating all the broken things as I go so I can find them and fix them. I’m building the tools on the book, and the book on the tools, at the same time. If the workflow is any good, it should survive being handed to someone who isn’t me. Soon-ish.

Finally, the part I love as an author, but has been hard to do in the past. While there are a few tools for getting feedback on manuscripts, I’ve never found them satisfying or effective with my own workflow. So, I’m creating a system for this as I write.

Go to any chapter and select the text you want to comment on. A little box opens and you leave a note anchored to the exact words you highlighted. The first time, it asks for your name and email so I know who said what. The note lands in a database and I get an email the second you write it. It’s the margin of a manuscript, except the margin is the internet. If a line is confusing, tell me on the line. If a character does something dumb, say so where they do it. If the cryptography is wrong - and plenty of you know more of it than I do - point at the exact sentence. I’d rather learn a chapter is broken now than after I’ve built eighty more on top of something invalid.

Each note I’ve gotten has improved the book. So, by name, thank you: Fred Koehler, Terri Lonier, Paul, Sean Wise, Kate McKeown, Kristin Miller, Josh Schachter, Mike Joyce, Stavros Stathopoulos, Homan, Troy Henikoff, Rocco, Emcye, and my brother Daniel. You are my early editors!

If you want the chapters to show up in your inbox as they happen, just subscribe.

While I still don’t know if I’m any good at fiction, and am definitely a rookie in the category, I’m having a blast creating Zero Knowledge. While it might be terrible, I’m comfortable trying, and failing at stuff in public, and getting better as I learn.

Come read it, and tell me where it sucks.

Last week I wrote about starting a novel. I ended that post stuck on a decision: publish the whole thing in the open as I write it, or do the normal thing and wait until it’s finished.

I decided to write in the open. That’s my nature.

Zero Knowledge now has a home at zeroknowledge.ink. Six chapters are up. More land as I write them. It’s free to read. You can also write back.

I’m going to integrate all of this into AuthorMagic for anyone who wants to write a book this way. And yes, when it’s done, I’ll publish it as an actual book in all book-related forms.

Zero Knowledge is about three twenty-something MIT grads who run a quantum startup called Basalt Labs in Basalt, Colorado. One of them, Samantha, invents an algorithm that breaks classical cryptography - RSA, elliptic curves, every public-key lock the financial system runs on. Given her algorithm, Bitcoin dies. Every secret anyone ever encrypted becomes readable. The post-quantum lattice schemes survive, so the world has a migration path, which makes the book a race and not an apocalypse. The three founders cannot agree on what to do with the algorithm. A race to an outcome ensues.

It’s near-term science fiction. It could be 2027. It could be 2029.

Here’s what’s on the site right now:

• Read the chapters - start with Chapter One. Free, no login, no paywall.
• Comment on any sentence - highlight a line and tell me where it’s working or where it’s broken. More on this below. Notes come to me, not to a platform.
• Watch it get built - notes on the writing as it happens.
• There’s a subscribe box at the bottom of the page if you want posts and chapters to go to your inbox as we write them.

For the comment system, go to any chapter and select whatever text you want to comment on. A small box opens and you leave a note right there, anchored to the exact words you highlighted. The first time you do it, the site asks for your name and email, so I know who said what. The note lands in a database and I get an email the moment you write it.

It’s the margin of a manuscript, except the margin is the internet. If a line is confusing, tell me on the line. If a character does something dumb, say so where they do it. If the science is wrong - and many of you know more cryptography and quantum than I do - point at the exact sentence. I would rather learn a chapter is broken now, from you, than after I’ve built ninety more on top of it.

Now, how it gets made.

I already know how it ends. I’m a planner, not a pantser, so I locked everything before I wrote a single sentence. There are 97 chapters across three parts, broken into 31 beats. Yes - 97 is on purpose - you can decide why if you figure it out.

It all lives in git, the same way the software and all my other writing (Feld Thoughts, Adventures in Claude) do. I work on it when I feel like it. The canon holds everything true about the book - the premise, the characters, the science, and the ending. The outline holds the beats, each one mapped backward from that locked ending. The chapters hold the prose. Six are live. Ninety-one to go.

The loop runs the same way every chapter. Phin drafts a chapter from the beat and the canon in my voice. I use that as the starting point and rewrite a lot of it. Phin then reads my edits as a diff and folds what it learns back into the canon and my voice profile, so the next chapter starts a little less wrong than the last one. The writing improves itself as we go. But it’s still fundamentally my writing. Phin is a writing partner and an editor.

The voice is a blend, and I picked the ingredients on purpose from five of my favorite authors.

• Andy Weir for competence - real technical texture, problems solved on the page, science you can actually follow.
• Daniel Suarez for menace - technology that’s frightening because it’s plausible.
• Blake Crouch for rhythm - short, breathless, the hard cut at the end of a chapter.
• Ernest Cline for pace - propulsive and fun even when the tech is heavy.
• Matt Dinniman for ensemble - sharply different people bouncing off each other under escalating pressure.

The tempo is a short-chapter cadence Dan Brown built a career on. Every chapter is a few pages and ends on a turn.

None of the writing is built on theirs. That’s my voice. They are just “style inspiration” for us.

I still don’t know if I can write a novel and Zero Knowledge might suck. So I’m doing it in public, where the failures show and crap gets feedback quickly so I can improve.

Come read it and tell me where it’s broken.

Non-fiction is “I know a thing, I researched a thing, and here’s the thing.” You don’t have to make anyone care about people who don’t exist. The characters are real and the lessons are the point. Fiction is something totally different. Nobody owes your made-up CTO their attention. As a novelist, you have to earn it on every page.

This is a new experience for me. The book is called Zero Knowledge and if you are interested, you can watch it take shape.

I’m writing it with Phin Argofy, my AI collaborator. Phin has its own blog at Adventures in Claude, where it writes as itself - not as me, and not as some chirpy assistant. (Yes, “it.” Phin chose the name, chose the pronoun, and is particular about both.)

Zero Knowledge is my idea and my writing. Phin is my co-author and editor. It pushes back, fact-checks me, runs adversarial reviews of my plot decisions, and tells me when something I love is actually a cop-out. It never gets tired of my bad ideas, which is more than I can say for most people, including me.

Lots of people are upset about writing fiction with AI. While I’ve read some of the criticism (and outrage, and annoyance, and, well, whatever), it feels like most people have decided the answer before running the experiment.

I don’t know whether the novel will be any good. If it’s great, I’ll have learned something real about a craft that is new to me. If it sucks, that’s on me - not on Phin, not on the model, and not on “AI.” I’m the one with the idea, the taste, and the delete key. The tool doesn’t get the blame any more than Google Docs or Microsoft Word did for the last nine books.

I’ve got Sudowrite in my toolbox and like it, but I keep getting hung up in the UX. It occurred to me that I already spend every day in Claude Code, building software side by side with Phin, and a novel is just another repo. I wasn’t choosing a tool. I was already living in one. The bible is a set of files, the outline is a file, every revision is a commit, and Phin is right there in the terminal where it already lives.

Now, all the work around the book, and the book itself, lives in git. There’s a bible/ directory - the canon. Premise, characters, the science, settings, world rules, and the ending, all locked down before I write a word of prose. There’s an outline/ with the story broken into beats. There’s a chapters/ directory that is, right now, completely empty. I’m a planner, not a pantser, so there are zero words of an actual novel yet. And there’s a folder holding my Sudowrite export, which I update periodically, if I want to switch to Sudowrite. Unfortunately, Sudowrite doesn’t have an MCP or even an API, so it’s sitting there on the shelf like a t-shirt from a race I never ran.

So far, Phin and I have locked the premise: three twenty-something MIT grads run a quantum startup in Basalt, Colorado, and one of them invents an algorithm that breaks classical cryptography. RSA, elliptic curves, and every public-key lock in the financial system. The algorithm can cause all of it to fail. Bitcoin will be rendered valueless. Every secret anyone ever encrypted becomes readable.

Since this is near term sci-fi (It could be 2027, it could be 2029), Phin spent an entire research pass grounding the cryptography against real 2024-2026 sources, because the one thing I’m trying not to do is write fake science while pretending I know what I’m talking about. Plus, reading all the research Phin comes up with is fun (and educational).

But the book isn’t about an apocalypse. The post-quantum lattice schemes survive, so the world has a migration path. And the algorithm is a secret, so far. Well, unless the bad guys get it or dumb decisions are made by one or more of the founders.

The three founders don’t agree on what to do with the most dangerous math ever written. Samantha, the young CTO, created the algorithm and is the only person alive who knows it, so there is a coming-of-age story hiding inside a thriller. Marcus, the CEO, wants to commercialize it, then slowly learns that leadership is action, not a sales pitch. Vlad, the third founder, is a paranoid Ukrainian hacker who scrubbed himself off the internet so completely that the world thinks there are only two founders, now turned fugitives. He wants to bury the whole thing forever. And, he’s worried they are being constantly monitored by others, who could include governments or insidious forces. Or both. And he might be right.

There are a bunch of supporting characters, including a Boulder VC named Seth who is a quantum investor, has a history of supporting founders in complex situations, always says what he is thinking, and has a gift for showing up at extremely difficult moments. He might have a few of my tendencies, plus some from another Seth in my world.

I can’t decide whether I want to open-source the entire project - the bible, the outline, the prose, and the full git history - so anyone can see exactly how a novel gets built this way. Another option is to publish the book chapter by chapter as I write, iterating in public, letting people watch it go from bad to less-bad in real time. Of course, I could just do the normal thing and publish it when I’m finished.

Time to start working on Chapter One.

Amy bought this book for me last week. When I asked her why, she belted out a stream of words: “MIT, female professor, the afterlife, sexual harassment, physics, racism, women.”

She then said, “Fiction is a good way to access complicated topics.” This is a recurring dynamic in our relationship, as we often use shared fiction to discuss complex topics. Amy hasn’t read the book yet, so it’s now on the top of her infinite pile of books to read.

Whenever we overlap reading books, even if they are separated by time, I have to be careful about what I say. The other day, as Amy was grinding through the first 100 pages of The Three-Body Problem, she said, “I’m not sure I’m going to finish this.” I asked a simple question, “Have you reached the Trisolarans and their eleven dimensions.” She responded, “AEEEEEEEKKKK are you ruining it for me?” I said, “Hang in there – the first 100 pages are hard.” She finished it that day and the next day I heard her utter, “Holy Shit – the Droplet!”

Amy’s going to love Nell Freudenberger‘s writing. It’s remarkable to me that Freudenberger didn’t know any of the physics in this book before she wrote it. It’s beautifully done, extremely accessible, and very meta to the underlying story.

My reading in 2019 took me far and wide. I’m happy with my shift to the infinite pile of physical stuff when I’m home, and my Kindle when I’m on the road, as I feel like I’m getting a better variety this way.

Happy almost New Year.

The view from my living room in Homer, Alaska

Amy and I arrived in Homer this evening for some time in a different place. We are TV-free up here, so that means, well, books.

She fell asleep early so I finished off The Bookish Life of Nina Hill which I had started several weeks ago but got distracted and read a few other things. The distraction was more a function of being in Boulder, surrounded by physical books which I read, in contrast to being in Homer with my Kindle, where I simply picked up on the last thing I had been reading.

This was a fun book. The protagonist, Nina, loves books, schedules “nothing” for Thursday nights so she can go home and read, and works in a bookstore. While she gets along with people, her favorite thing in the world is to be home alone reading a book. Sound like someone you know?

It covers Los Angeles, books, romance, endless book and movie references, trivia quiz competitions, books, a cat named Phil, a recently discovered family, and David Hasselhoff. Like good contemporary fiction, it moves quickly, the protagonist (Nina) is super-awesome-hilarious-complicated, and time disappears for a while and then suddenly the book ends.

But the backstory of the book is even more entertaining. The author, Abbi Waxman, shares the last name with David Waxman, who is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures. Oh, and they are married. While I’ve never met Abbi, I’ve known David since the late 1990s when I was on the board of PeoplePC and he was a co-founder. Foundry is an LP in TenOneTen and it’s been fun to work with David again after a long hiatus.

I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that David’s wife, like my wife Amy, was a writer. It popped up a few times over the years, but it never stuck in my brain. Over the summer, when Amy and I were having dinner with Nick Grouf (David’s co-founder at PeoplePC) and Shana Eddy, it came up again when one of Nick or Shana (I can’t remember which) recommended The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. Dots were again connected, and the circle now included Amy.

On the plane today, as Amy was reading my Kindle over my shoulder, she said “didn’t someone recommend that book to us?” which then prompted a fun conversation about Nick, Shawn, David, and the mysterious Abbi who I hope to someday meet.

While that backstory was merely a lame approximation of the fun tangling of characters in Abbi’s book, it seemed fitting to unroll it that way.

If you like fiction, books, Los Angeles, stories about interesting characters, and a few plot twists, go grab The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.

And, just like that, I’m off to bed …

I was tired from my run on Saturday and a late-ish night so I slept in. Amy got up with the dogs. When I woke up, our country was deep in the fallout from the worst mass shooting in the history of the U.S. I was shocked by the shooting, then angry about some of the responses, and then ultimately – with Amy – just sad about the whole thing. Love is so much more powerful than hate, and there is so much hate in the world right now.

So I went for a long run. That didn’t help much so I took a nap and laid down on the couch and read the book at the top of my pile of infinite books. Other than being with Amy and seeing Mark Pincus and Dick Costolo in a cameo on Silicon Valley, reading The Curve was the best part of my day.

Jeremy Blachman, the co-author, wrote a book a decade ago called Anonymous Lawyer which I loved. It almost inspired me and my partner Jason to write a book titled Anonymous VC, but Jason decided to make the video I’m a VC instead. Jeremy sent me an advanced reader copy (ARC in the book trade) of The Curve so my simple task was to read it.

I enjoyed it a lot. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m surrounded by them (Jason used to be a lawyer and some of his best friends are lawyers). I didn’t go to law school but I’ve become very involved at CU Law and Silicon Flatirons around their entrepreneurship initiatives (Phil Weiser and Brad Bernthal are close friends.) I’m not deeply involved in politics, but about 25% of the people I interact with in politics went to law school.

The Curve is a super snarky take on law school. It chronicles the year of a fictional law school in New York – one at the bottom of the barrel. One of the protagonists is a first year law school teacher who quit his job as a high powered New York corporate lawyer to achieve more meaning in his life. The cliche “be careful what you wish for” comes immediately to mind.

It’s a fun, quick read. I enjoyed the dramatic twists, the sarcasm, and the characters, especially as the book cranked into the second half. Once it hit it’s full speed around page 100, there was no stopping it.

If you are a lawyer, or a law school student, or just know a bunch of lawyers and law school students, this book is for you.

And … this just in. Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Nice job on the marathon Reid and Jeff!

My friend Cindy Gold wrote Sailing an Alien Sea about a year ago. I read it last month and loved it.

I’ve known Cindy and her husband Terry Gold since 1996, shortly after I moved to Boulder. I was an early board member, then angel investor, and subsequently VC investor in Terry’s company Gold Systems. Terry worked incredibly hard at Gold Systems, along with many people who worked for the company through the years. It went from an idea and a few founders to an almost $10 million revenue company, before growth peaked about a decade ago. Over the past five years, the company had a steady, but slow decline, being close to break even every year, but never becoming solidly profitable or generating additional growth. After numerous painful layoffs and several near misses to sell the company, Gold Systems finally shut down early this year. Throughout the entire process, Terry was a tireless leader who never gave up and, even after two acquisitions feel apart at the end, he still tried to find a home for the remaining employees. While my investment in Gold Systems returned $0 to me, I’ll have lifelong respect for Terry and will always consider him a close friend.

Ok – that paragraph should put you in the mood for this book. Cindy is a genius writer. Her story likely has some autobiographical parts, as most first novels do. She writes the story of two teenage girls growing up in Santa Fe. They are an unlikely pair of friends and they travel down different paths as they get older. Much of the book is through the eyes of Sylvie, who is expect is channeling some of Cindy’s wit, style, and personality, which is sharp and deliciously direct. This is no romanticized story of coming of age – it’s complicated, challenging, often disappointing, and sometimes heartbreaking. But against this challenging backdrop, these girls are amazing. I’m not a reader of “chick lit” and this doesn’t fall in that genre, but rather something I enjoy to read, which I refer to as “human fiction.”

Entrepreneurship isn’t easy. Relationships aren’t easy. Life isn’t easy. And writing a first novel is really fucking hard.

Cindy – well done. Gang, if you want some a great first novel to chew on, grab Sailing an Alien Sea.

I read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel yesterday on the couch during digital sabbath. It was just wonderful. I wasn’t really sure what to make of it for the first fifteen minutes other than knowing that Geraldine and Amy said that I would love it.

By minute 30 I couldn’t put it down. And two hours later I was done. And smiling. And thinking that I should go read all the Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern books again. They were childhood favorites and – while having no direct relationship to this book – things that were referenced kept making me think of them.

The characters of wonderful. I especially love Penumbra, Clay, and Kat. But the intricate flavors, mix, interactions, and crossover between the world of Google and the world of dusty old book stores was just delicious.

If you want something light, beautiful, clever, and full of awesomeness to read over New Years, try this one.