Unsolicited Transmission #3

Situational Awareness, or; monitor thy domain.

For those of you who are more observant than the average (sometimes this includes me) you may have noticed the switch of this website from .com to .net and wonder how that happened.

Ah, well, funny story... I made an egregious error in the management of this website. When I renewed the hosting, I forgot to also renew the domain. That means some scalper somewhere snatched it up and I'm sure they're going to demand a ransom (a small fortune or a limb, perhaps) to return it to me.

I stand by the whole "never negotiate with terrorists" thing. Sure, the scalper's gotta make money too, and while I can't confirm if they are a terrorist or not, I feel slighted just the same. Of course, I have no one to blame but myself.

Lesson learned. Attention to detail is paramount. Double-check, then triple-check. Trust but verify.

This applies to storytelling as well.

I was a huge fan of The Walking Dead, for instance. A huge part of why I liked the comics and the show on AMC was because the details mattered. Little things were usually faithfully revisited in later episodes or seasons. This of course changed in the later seasons (starting with season 9, if I remember) and I lost interest in the show after the departure of Rick Grimes.

Frasier comes to mind, here. Originally a supporting character in Cheers, then spun off into his own show, and the show made a point to poke fun at continuity errors like Frasier telling everyone at Cheers his father was dead (he was a cop in Seattle, and very much alive according to the new continuity established in Frasier).

The little things matter.

In books, some of those little things can lead to some really fun tangents, or even spawn their own books entirely. They are most effective when some minor detail that gets overlooked is suddenly dredged up and dragged onto the page with some greater meaning.

I love exploiting this in my own writing. I did it with Cultist Bounty in the Space Hunter War series, and I did it in my own Brutal Edge series, though the full fruit of that development won't show until book 4.

Key takeaway: it pays to pay attention.

I got the opportunity to learn that lesson again, and hopefully reading this will prevent you from making a similar mistake.

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An excellent book that gets the big things AND the little things right is Against All Odds by Jeffery H. Haskell. Highly recommended if you're into Navy-flavored Military Science Fiction, or if you just like reading about great characters with strong morals.