Internet has this funding myth that it's a very decentralized thing, but if you look at the actual usage today, much goes through a few centralized commercial entities like Google or Amazon or Facebook. And there are many single points for authorities or other interested parties to throttle or censor access to content. Our speaker, Will Scott, who is a recovering academic who has worked on distributed systems and security, among other things, thinks that the Internet should not have these central points of control and wants to tell us about the building blocks of decentralization that will allow us to build another Internet that is less centralized and more resilient to central attacks. Have fun with the talk. Great. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm really happy to be talking today, and it's been great to see so many people at RC3, even if just through my screen. In reflecting on this talk, I think there is a couple of messages, and the primary one for me has actually been really hopeful that when I think about what we have with decentralization and what's getting built, the trajectory actually looks promising in a lot of ways. And I think the second message is that when we think about the technical building blocks or decentralized systems, we really are at the very beginning that there's a lot left to do and there's a lot of work ahead of us. So I want to start with a story. And that story is a story of community and of building new systems. And the first step and the first question is how do you build that community? How do you find that community? And I think the answer that we have is things like this event. And this is one that maybe we don't have all the systems of discovery. And there's a whole talk here that maybe we don't have time for, which is how do you find the people who share similar interests? And the place where we can start to think about decentralized technologies is instead that you've got this community and you want to sustain it.  So we can find our community and we can talk with federated systems like Mastodon. We can have video chats with Jitsi. We can host our own files, store our own data. We can collaborate on software projects by running GitLab. And so when you think about decentralized systems to help a community be self-sustaining and independent, we have a set of fundamentals that do this well. And what we're doing is not developing new things, but it's reducing the barrier of entry. And so when you think about the sorts of things that are happening today is you're finding things like instead of having to find someone to run a server and run a complex thing like GitLab, you have new systems like Radical that can make that easy. So people just run a piece of software and they don't need to worry about the complexity of deployment. So we're reducing the barrier of entry, but we already have a set of building blocks that allow a community to do this. So you've got your community, you've around an idea, around an ideology. And you can build software and you can start to make this idea grow. And so when you think about that, the next step is how do you make services, how do you make ways for that idea to get to more people? And once that stops being a thing that you can just self-post that you would run on your own servers, we have building blocks now. We have underlying systems and design patterns for how do you take your service and allow it to scale while maintaining independence. And these are somewhat less developed. I think we'll go through this in a little bit, but the user bases are maybe one or two orders of magnitude smaller than the previous ones. But you can have files go on a decentralized CDN like IPFS or a number of others. You can use distributed database abstractions, be they a gun or a star or hyper swarm or others, that will allow messages to get passed in a decentralized way and allow for some amount of synchronization and collaboration. So that a service can go out to millions of users without needing to fall back to centralized technologies like Google or Microsoft or Facebook or et cetera. And so you can, I think, not only have things that support your community, but can then reach other communities. And so we're sort of following the trajectory. This is less developed. And then we can go to the next step that's even less developed. And this is now not only touching a virtual service, but starting to interact with the real world. Because when we think about the successful technologies that are the Google's or the Facebook's, the world, they're not purely digital. They go into our real lives. And this is a part that's still very much in development, which is cryptocurrencies are a whole thing. But the thing that's maybe interesting is they help us bridge into the real world financial system. And so our services still maintains independence while being able to touch that aspect. And likewise, the promise of the DAO or of decentralized autonomous organizations is that you can maintain decentralization while interacting with real legislative, political, et cetera systems. And so the thought is rather than having some core owner who has to have power, you can encode beforehand a contract of how this organization will work based on the principles and have that power remain decentralized in that there's not a single person that the existing real world regulation systems see as the source of all of this accumulated power and go after and are able to then influence or manipulate apart from what the community wants. And so this takes the form of these evolving and developing systems like oracles, how you have something that exists in a decentralized way and then have it be able to interact with existing real world systems. And, you know, the answer ends up involving both advances in cryptography and in sort of thinking about how you find hooks that you can make these bonds of interaction. So what I want to go through in the rest of this talk is start with a grounding on a set of things that I would consider decentralized systems to give us a sense of scale and help ground us. And then I'm going to abstract one layer to talk about the underlying models and technological systems that are common to a lot of them. And then talk about sort of two ways to think about the limits there. One is, you know, as these things grow, what are the emerging pain points that we see that we know of that are in terms of sort of the existing technologies will, you know, are running into pain points. And then the other one is the more model properties. So these already are failing us in some ways. And so how do we how do we think about whether there are alternatives that do not have those same properties? Are these things that we can bolt on or do better with in the current systems? And how do we do that? So in terms of existing systems and where we are, BitTorrent remains probably one of the largest decentralized systems, in a sense. There are, you know, three million, four million active users out there on any given day. Which which starts to reach like meaningful percentages of the global population that are actively using BitTorrent. We can think about one other aspect of BitTorrent that's sort of interesting, which is you've got a lot of users. But then you've also got this this sort of metadata layer of finding new torrents and that finding new torrents core that needs to exist to allow you to discover the peers that you are in in your specific federated instance of BitTorrent comprises of something on the order of 400 open torrent trackers that will maintain metadata, but also be a Cademlia DHT, which is a distributed hash table that is made up by more normal peers that store metadata. And there's roughly four million torrents that are contained in that distributed hash table of metadata about who is participating in which torrent. Another federated system that's had a great year is Mastodon as a exemplar of activity pub protocol and the Fediverse more generally has on the order of three million users. The activity pub Fediverse more generally is something like 50 different projects. There are on the order of 5000 activity pub servers. There this fall, I guess, there's been measurement from the community data science collected academic group looking at activity on Mastodon specifically. They find something like 70,000 tooting users who collectively to roughly 30,000 times per day. And this measured activity versus total users is not an unexpected ratio. On pretty much any social network, you would expect that the majority of people there are consuming or not posting public content. More broadly, when we think about federated things, there's a lot of even foundational internet technology like email that is federated still. There are on the order of 6 million email servers, so different IP addresses running the SMTP protocol.  Jitsi reported this year that they have on the order of 20 million users of their primary service infrastructure. They didn't say how many independent installations there are because that's much harder to measure. And Matrix had a great year and has grown to two and a half, three million users and has at least 11,000 independent instances. Moving again on this graph towards external impact IPFS, past 2 million users this year. They have a DHT using the same Kedemli protocol as BitTorrent, but self-select a smaller core of active nodes to participate in that DHT as a way to try and provide better latency and availability guarantees in it. And so their DHT is composed of somewhere in the 5,000, 10,000 DHT nodes. Of those 2 million users, somewhere around 20% or 100,000 are running sort of a desktop instance where they're staying on and are not being accessed through a web browser. And then participating in the DHT, one finds something on the order of 20 million different pieces of content that are being stored in IPFS and in a given day, something like 8 million that are being retrieved through that DHT or finding metadata about who has them. Secure Scuttlebutt is an offline first decentralized network. It's got a order of 10,000 users and it uses public servers as a mechanism for storing and forwarding when users are offline. And it has on the order of 100 of those. Previously I mentioned Earth Star that uses a similar partial replication and this network is really going further on the decentralization and meant for small independent collectives than many of the others. And then finally, Bitcoin has only about a million active addresses or accounts and about 11,000 nodes that are running the full Bitcoin protocol and this is not a dissimilar ratio to what you'll find on all the other projects of this type. And so again, you've got this fairly large gap between users and servers or the elevated nodes that are doing more of the work in coordination. Part of that we can see in the Bitcoin case is that in order to validate and run the full protocol, you need to have all the historic data which is up to about 300 gigabytes in this case. So the cost of running this full node is nontrivial. It's not something you can run on a phone or even really on a local desktop necessarily. So from these we can then say what are the commonalities that a bunch of these systems share? And I want to start by, I included in that you might notice a lot of federated systems and we can think of federation as this partial decentralization perhaps that we've gone from a central Facebook or Google where there's one entity to these federated systems, Matrix, Jetsy, etc. etc. where there's a lot of instances of a server but the server is distinct from a client and we can then there is this distinction to be drawn of well okay there are things like BitTorrent perhaps although BitTorrent has again a tracker that's sort of like the server that's separate from the the clients although the tracker is you know getting phased out to the DHT. And so the point is and this is you know I think why I think of federation as a lot of the part is that what federation is doing in some sense is it's extra externalizing the heterogeneity of resources which is you've got some nodes that are more powerful that are going to be always on that have bandwidth and in a federated system we we sort of explicitly run a different software on them and that indicates that that is this is the server software and in systems that we think of more traditionally as you know true peer to peer within the software there end up being heuristics that try and do the same thing that try and guess should this node take on more of the coordination work because one of the things that all of these networks want to do is make efficient use of resources and those resources are not evenly distributed right some some nodes have more disk space have more bandwidth have better availability and your system is going to perform better if you're able to take advantage of that and so we can and and I think you know it I don't know if I think of this as cheating but you can think of these as two different problems which is there's one problem which is how good of heuristics can I have to self-select nodes into being servers versus clients and then how do I make decentralized protocols and those are those are somewhat different and and and as a result you can say do I need to figure out how to have good heuristics or do I just start with federation which seems to be getting us a couple orders of magnitude more users and more success and then I can make packaging and make auto selection of client and server and and opting into those positions be a thing that happens independently of that or happens later as a different problem to solve the counter right is is that you you think of message passing and and and how your communication model will happen purely in terms of a single node and this is this is you know the the natural thing that you end up with when you when you do that and you go on the full sort of I'm a node and there are other nodes like me but let's let's take the view of a single user or single node is you end up with something that looks like gossip this is what secure Scuttlebut uses in a sense or is based on initially and and the basic concept here is I get a message and I want to then send it out to everyone else I'm connected to so that message is sort of disseminate through the mesh through the decentralized mesh and we have a bunch of optimizations on that initial concept so things like I will then send out you know an identifier of the message to see if the person I'm going to send it to has already gotten it and then if they have I'm not going to send it so that I don't waste the full bandwidth of sending that message over every edge but one of the things that's true when you when you start there is there's no concept of the structure of the network itself right because you're you're sort of considering a node in isolation what you what you don't have is any ability to then pull back from there to look at the the full network and start to say useful things about that and so one of one of the things that is tough to say is like will a message get to its recipient how quickly will it get to its recipient because these are all questions that aren't about the single node but are about the the structure and the connectivity of the network more broadly and so it becomes hard to mesh this sort of communication with things like when should I form additional communications or additional connections who should I remember and questions about how you maintain a strong network topology and I think I think one of the things that we maybe need to be thinking about is how do you combine those two together so that you can start to have better guarantees and better understanding of the actual dynamic properties of these decentralized networks because we end up with very few properties that we can say useful things about in this sort of system of message passing by itself in isolation to give a sense of a somewhat more concrete building block that ends up being the other one that we get used that that's distributed hash tables and so distribute a hash table which which many of you have probably seen at least in passing is that we've got a bunch of data and we've got a bunch of computers or participants in our network and we're going to come up with some identifier maybe a hash of both participants and content and we're going to put them in the same name tag so it's the same hash right and then the the different nodes the different computers will store the content that is close to them so so you know I'm you know you know person at position three I'm going to store all of the content that hashes to four five six until there's some other node so so I get some section of the you know space of content based on where I hashed to and then when I went to find content I find the node that I know about that is closest to that content and I ask them and if they know someone closer they'll forward me on to that person and so I end up finding the node that is responsible for that content and this as an as an algorithm there's a few different implementations and and dashes are in wide use one of the nice things is that it's an abstraction that you know from outside you can sort of think of it as a central database a centralized database that that I can put stuff into it and I can get stuff out of it and I don't have to think about the dynamics within and it has this nice property that it sort of grows as as you have more users you can expect the users to each bring data but but that the data per user isn't necessarily growing and so it's you know efficiently keeping data across all the different users the other building block that we have here is coming up with consensus how do a set of decentralized nodes agree on something right this is this is what we pioneered or this is this is what cryptocurrency really is relying on is is you have a bunch of nodes that want to all agree on something but but that's you know a much more general problem we've had this problem and have a set of systems for it in centralized systems for a while and it turns out that's more efficient but when you think of what the problem for consensus is in those cases they've actually been able to get away with a weaker threat so paxos raft these are protocols for consensus that work within a threat model of fail stop and what that means is nodes that are broken may not respond they may delay they may freeze they may crash and despite some threshold of nodes failing or crashing or not responding the system guarantees that the other nodes that are still working will agree on an outcome but in a decentralized world that that ends up not being quite enough that what you want is a stronger notion of what a bad node looks like and so that's what gets called bft Byzantine fault tolerance and that is tolerant of Byzantine nodes Byzantine nodes being nodes that can act maliciously so they can do they can send arbitrary messages so it's not that they just fail to send a message it's that they send a message indicating you know a different thing than they should have and so bitcoin came along did proof of work in proof of work you are using sort of the scarce resource of computation so how many times you can hash something as a sort of a race that gets used to as long as the you know majority of the network is all following this protocol even if someone is trying to do malicious things they don't have enough power unless they are the majority to mess that up and that's that switch now I think because of you know environmental concerns and so forth to proof of stake primarily and proof of stake is instead of using computation as that scarce resource that's using how much of the existing resource you have as that and one of the and so this is you know the there's a whole theory in here about things like if you already have a bunch of it you don't want to lose it and so you're more likely to not do something malicious but in both of these cases these are not systems that lead towards additional decentralization and and one of the things that that I think you know is at the heart here that of a lot of the problems for decentralized systems is this question of symbols and identity which is within the system itself we don't really have any firm notion of identity so like who is a user what you know is some entity you know or some collection of users acting on behalf of one user or are they multiple users we can't meaningfully enforce that when you think about how you enforce it even for centralized systems like the facebook or google they go to governments and they go to you know this like I'm going to identify you as a citizen or a person with some you know a driver's license and if you don't have that external authority that that stops making sense as a way to like appeal to authority and so instead a lot of effort goes into trying to think about incentives and trying to make the system not make it worthwhile to appear as multiple users when you are in in fact only one but but the flip side of that is that the incentive actually incentivizes centralization because it it ends up meaning that it is better to be a single large entity than many small entities and so that means that if it's better to be the single large entity that single large entity becomes more and more powerful over time okay so that was a set of building blocks let's let's go through limitations on these building blocks so DHTs are something that we have and they do grow with users however so as you get more users you can have more content and the load and burden on each user in the DHT does not increase however there's a set of applications that you just can't really do with our current understanding of DHTs so if I want to do web search and put identifiers for all of the web or for really any you know many millions of identifiers suddenly that's a lot of load that I would be needing out of each user on the DHT right so you know we can do something like a few million torrents total based on that user base but are you going to be able to store hundreds of millions of items you know all of the individual files and make those individually addressable that suddenly becomes really hard and so this is a question of naming and thinking about you know what is an identifier that I want to be able to search for or look up what are the things that I'm putting as the sort of entry points for lookups the other one is an interesting or limit here in terms of scale that these things don't don't sort of fully scale is that a lot of the applications that we want are are interactive in nature so we want to be able to look up something and get a response in an interactive way that is you know compatible with web browsing or some sort of you know I'm there as a user and DHTs take something on you know asymptotically log in lookups to find content so I find the note I'm going to do that's closest to it they tell me someone who's even closer as a DHT grows that goes from two or three people that I need to talk to two three or five and if each of those is taking you know 100 milliseconds that starts growing quite a bit to a point where even though it is log in which is great it's it's more than constant and it stops being competitive with with our centralized systems the second limit is gossip as a gossip network grows larger we start to really find ourselves in a situation where we don't expect messages to necessarily end up going all the way across it and so we stop being able to say things about like you know I'm in a local neighborhood but I can't necessarily find a friend through the network because it becomes way too expensive for all messages to go to the whole message the whole network and so there there is something about network structure and about how you think about things beyond gossip that we need in order to scale those networks and the final one is is an infrastructural one which is that there continue to not be real world incentives that are pushing the infrastructure that we have to support decentralized technologies so it's still true as it has been for decades that a normal user's upload bandwidth is about half of their download bandwidth this this is true this is a broadband fixed line one but it's also true for for mobile but but likewise when you think about like latency between end users when I think about a centralized system the latency for me to get there keeps going down because they keep building edges closer to more of their users and so on average they actually end up getting closer to their users and and lower latency but when you look at and this is a ripe Atlas probe you know 2015 or 2010 till now the the latency doesn't actually go down much like it it goes down and this is this is a bunch of nodes trying to get into Europe and the latency from from Russia goes down a little bit but India is staying about the same and we don't have money that's getting invested into the the links that are are getting translated for traffic between two different end users because that's not something that there there's money that is incentivizing and so until we figure out a way to solve that we're going to end up with a very sort of static latency and bandwidth profile okay I'm gonna I'm I think running into question time but I will finish with sort of the the more meta properties rather than than these scaling limits that we need to think about the first is coming up with a much stronger model of metadata exposure and privacy we have end-to-end encryption we're able to protect the contents but we don't typically protect either the size or communication patterns of who's talking to whom and without servers and intermediaries I think basically all of these decentralized systems less so federated but even there end user IP addresses and and the you know identity of of where they are and what they're connecting as ends up being something that is used for the disintermediation and and as such there's no real guarantee about how private you are or who could learn that you're participating or who you're talking with and so coming up with models where we get some limits on the retention so being able to say things like you know at some point after you have stopped talking the system will not continue to hold on to your IP address or who you've talked to your communication patterns is important and is not part of any of these models and so I'll end with two things that that I go back to when thinking about this the first is a paper on the impossibility of full decentralization in permissionless and this is on blockchains but but persistent permissionless consensus which basically it is the impossibility result that I brought up earlier when when talking about how in order to disincentivize symbols we move towards we move towards in encouraging centralization and I think this is a framing question which is the the incentive to decentralize is actually a an incentive that happens in a larger picture it's not the system itself but it's the entities around your system that that are the incentive to not have centralization right it's the government it's the regulations and and it's it's the other dynamics that that are why you would want to not be centralized and we don't have that in our model and likewise the tech policy perspective is a is saying essentially there are these very powerful existing entities that will attempt to identify the points of power and regulate them and that ends up being why we need this decentralization in some sense is to prevent being co-opted by existing systems of power that that's that's where we find the motivation for decentralization so I will end there I guess we have maybe a couple minutes for questions you're muted for me yes thank you we have a few questions from the audience the first is what do you think is the future for decentralized social media will there have to be a major event for decentralized social media to gain more traction it's a good question right so so social media I mean is an interesting and problematic beast in its own way right which is this is this is something that we haven't really traditionally had in the same way and and so one of the questions maybe to step back is is what what do you actually want having the the the part of social media that is you and your community is in your friends I think we already can do and we'll continue to see more sort of localized things because they they give us the same experience figuring out how you broadcast a celebrity or these these sort of more large-scale zeitgeist ideas is is where we are much less developed and so part of that less developed also means that there is more potential for further technological development to make that more possible so I'm optimistic that we get there but I think that's further off okay and another question related to that but probably more into direction of user experience can we abstract the decentralization decentralization to ease the use for the average user yeah I mean and and there's a couple of things there right which is we are certainly have libraries and patterns that other developers can build better user experiences on I think we're seeing also that there are easier to use sort of end-user compatible systems that that are views into decentralized networks so be that the things like manyverse or planetary which are mobile apps that came out this year for secure scuttlebutt or radical and these just sort of desktop apps that provide get or other types of decentralized network views that that don't require setup or work we're getting better user interfaces and and we're having building blocks that that are not themselves particularly visible or required configuration and a more technical question that just came in what do you think of the trade-offs made by single hop DHT's and their huge local routing tables right so this is this is an interesting question and it's it's where a bunch of thought is being put right now and so so one of the things you could say right is in the same way that a federated system is externalizing this this disjoint resource or resource heterogeneity between sort of highly available nodes that might make up your DHT and the sort of end-user more transient nodes that that are querying it you could have a DHT that tries to self-organize in a to to take advantage of even more heterogeneity so you find nodes that are you know more powerful and you have you know multiple players or or a hierarchical DHT where some DHT nodes forward queries into a smaller center that's that's more powerful and you end up with something where you probably can get rid of some of these like log n style latency things to to make them be able to scale more at the expense of something that starts to look like more centralization that there end up being a smaller number of nodes in the center that if they do go down or if they decide to send their things they actually can have really they end up with a lot of power in the system which is starting to be scary so so there's a trade-off there and next question given the popularity of cadamlia have probabilistic probabilistic models one the decentralized architecture or are they better suited to decentralization it's a good question um i think cadamlia i don't know if it won just because it's probabilistic i think it has something to do with uh it's fairly simple to conceive of right like we often uh say these you know these distributed systems are really hard to reason about um and in some sense that's like this you know i've done one thing and it was uh and and i'm out of ideas um that they're they're you know one thing that i took away at least from that set of building blocks that i presented was there were only three or four things that are underlying all of these things we really have not looked through a lot of this design space uh and so i am not at all unconvinced that trying something radically different we can find other models of decentralization that are more performant and that have different properties and we just haven't explored enough so i think that's a no okay the last question until now do you think decentralized writable storage like ipfs is threatened by toxic data sets like libgen no okay so so there's an assumption that libgen is a toxic data set but uh beyond that um i mean i think there's a there's a very reasonable story for any of these systems for how you sanitize them or make them compatible with external power structures um and so in an ipfs like thing uh users are opting into pinning or storing uh data uh as notes so so it's only either you've um you've decided to pin uh data in order to make it reavailable to others and so um there are you know as a node if you get a dmc complaint or you get a complaint that something is is illegal you can blacklist it you can say i'm not going to pin or reserve that data and so there's a way for each individual user in the system as they get complaints to um not make that data reavailable and limit their liability so so you'll get you know as as there's different uh regulatory environments people will be able to comply with their own regulatory environments um and and so i i i think that you know is probably enough you know um the the the the bigger question is like okay does that cause the software to be seen in the same light as bit torn and that's that's uh i think a more philosophical question um and and is as much a like a perception and finding good uses that you can counter things with as anything else okay thank you look for the questions thank you for the interesting talk and for being here answering the audience questions thank you this is great


Well, knowing it's a small group makes me feel a lot more comfortable. Thank you, Phyllis. Yeah, I've been, I started here when I was doing research for the Bell and Oyster Bay. It's an 18th century novel. So I needed to know what an 18th century home looked like. So I came here to the homestead to take a look at the house. And the executive director we had at the time, Dan O'Neill was so good that when I came here, he did the tour with me and he toured me through the house. And by the time I left, I was a volunteer. I've been here since 2017 and I have loved every minute of it. So, but you're not here to find out about that. You want to know about writing fiction. And as you can see, that's what I do. So I have a contemporary series that I'm working on right now, because I kind of need a break sometimes from history. But I am working on, I'm starting the idea for a new book that will take place during the Salem Witch Trials. But what I want to do, what you can do with historical fiction that you kind of can't do sometimes with contemporary is take today's issues and problems and put them in a historical time period and get a message across that way that you wouldn't be able to do in a contemporary because the more things change, the more they stay the same really. So that's why a lot of people choose to write historical fiction so that they can get that message out in a way that people will accept it. But let's start with what fiction is. Fiction as a noun is literature in the form of prose, especially short stories or novels. And they describe imaginary events in people. You might hear the term novel or stories or creative writing, imaginative writing, works of the imagination, prose literature, narration, storytelling, romance, fable. It's all fiction. I'll just put it under that one umbrella. There are two, I call them the forks in the road. There are two kinds of fiction, of genres of fiction. One is commercial fiction. That's your Tom Clancy or your John Grisham or Danielle Steele or whatever. And then there's literary fiction. And those would be more lofty books like Brooklyn by Colm Toybin or The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I think his name is the slower paced, more internally driven kind of stories that don't have a whole lot of action. They deal more with relationships or personal growth or things like that from the protagonist. Here's a fun fact. You've all heard of pulp fiction. In fact, there's even a movie called Pulp Fiction. But pulp fiction actually comes from a term that originated from the magazines of the first half of the 20th century. They were printed on cheap or pulp paper. And that's how they got the term pulp fiction. And they published, they were stories of fantastic escapists fiction, general entertainment for the mass audiences. Think of the stories where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks and the guy's got to jump in and rescue her just as the train zooms by. That's your pulp fiction. And this can be fun to read, but we'll get that page turned. There are genres and then there are subgenres in fiction. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but when you think of genre, most people think if I'm going to walk into a bookstore, where do I find the book I want to read? And what shelf and in what area of the store? That's what we think of generally when we think of fiction, you go in, you know, you want to read a historical. So you go to that historical genre section and you find the book you want. Genre subgenres can be within those categories further down. Say, for instance, you're looking for an action adventure story. There are in the writing world, genre goes a little bit deeper than just where you're going to find it in the bookstore. What you're going to look for. And when you're writing genre, the things you need to think about are controlling ideas of the story, the core emotion you want the reader to feel. Believe it or not, genres have obligatory scenes and conventions. And if you're writing, say, an action adventure story and you don't have the right conventions in there, your readers are going to go, this isn't what I wanted. This isn't the book I wanted to buy. So you have to be sure when you're writing in a genre that you know what you need to meet the reader's expectations.  So for instance, an action adventure, you want to write a book that's person against nature, like Jurassic Park is a good example of that. Action duels, person against person, such as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid or A Fistful of Dollars, those kind of books. Action epics, a person against the state, Star Wars, The Born Identity, those kind of books. Action against, the action clock, person against time, like Ransom, the Andromeda Strain or this fun one, Back to the Future. Most people don't think of that. So for historical fiction, you're comprising narratives that take place from the past and you characterize them chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction of historic events and personages. You can, that means in plain language, you can have a fictional character and put them in an actual time and place and put them up against characters like, say George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Or you can have an actual person from a time period and make them into a character. They were actual people who live, but you're making, giving them a character and then you're presenting their life and their time period and how they would have moved through, how you imagine they would have moved through that lifestyle. Fiction can come in many different forms of length. So if you're writing a novella, which we call a short novel, you want to look at maybe keep your word count between 17,500 to 50,000 words. That could sound daunting to somebody who doesn't write, but like a friend of mine once said to me, a thousand words a day in 90 days, you have a novel. So that breaks it down for you, makes it a lot easier. Young adult books, if you want to write a young adult, 50,000 to 80,000 words. Romance novels, 50,000 to 100,000 words. These are what they call industry standards.  And if you say, I wrote a romance novel and it's 150,000 words, they're going to tell you cut 50, cut 75, because you've gone over the length that they want to publish. Historical novels, generally 80 to 120,000 words. And why is that? Because you have to do something called world building. You have to create the place where they live and your reader has to believe that that's where they are. So it takes a little more time and words to do that. So that's why a historical novel will generally give you a better leeway when you're writing a full length manuscript until you write the end.  And we also call them a work in progress or a whip. If somebody asks you about your whip, that's what they mean. It's a work in progress. Your full length manuscript is not a book until it is published. You can use the terminology interchangeably when you're talking with your friends, when you're talking with your writing partner or your critique partners, but know deep down that your manuscript is a manuscript until it has a book cover and you're selling it. It's a rookie mistake. We all make it. Don't worry about it. You can change or be against or editor specific. Oh, I'm sorry. This may change or be agent or editor specific if stated otherwise, but manuscripts are always, you have a Trinity. They are always in Times New Roman or Ariel font. They are 12 point type and they are double spaced. Otherwise, they'll just send it back to you and say, no, this isn't what we want. They won't tell you that. They won't tell you what's wrong. So you need to kind of glean. So knowing some of the industry standards before you send out your manuscript is always a huge idea. You want one inch margins. You don't want extra spaces between paragraphs. These all seem like silly things, but they're things you need to know. Single space between sentences after periods. Those of us who grew up learning how to type on a typewriter, no more period double double. No, it's period space and then move on and they will ding you for that, believe it or not. They will send it back. Indent new paragraphs and each new section of dialogue with the exception of your opening paragraph that is always flush and then or your scene break at the beginning of a chapter or the beginning of a scene, it's always flush after that you indent. Indicate your scene breaks by inserting either a blank line, a single centered hashtag or triple hashtag, but that's just tunes in the reader that, okay, we're making a break here and it's time to move on to another one. I usually use the single hashtag. I think it's messy to do more than that, but that's me. So whatever you choose to do. Begin new chapters on new pages and center the chapter title even if it's only chapter one or you write chapter one using the number. Go down about a third of the page. This is a formatting step that usually in later stages of editing and formatting, but most writers expect a new scene or chapter to begin at the top of the page when it's still a whip. So you have to remember to move it down. Format the header to include your last name and the title of the book. The page number that you're on, that's very important because if something, a page gets out of order and you haven't numbered them, it's murder to try to figure out where it's got to go. And then also your title, your last name, the word count, the genre. If you're sending it to an editor or an agent, that's what they want to see. So they know what they're, and then make sure you include the page number. So that's just the nuts and bolts. So let me give you some quick and dirty, a little writer vocab and see how you do with it. Craft. When we talk about craft, that's the technical aspect of writing. That is the knowing how to set up, how to format, how to write a chapter, editing, craft, writing craft, whether it's a pro antagonist, antagonist, it's kind of the jargon and also the how to of writing a book. Your voice, that's the author's style and it's as unique as your DNA. The voices, and I used to get this a lot when I would send my manuscripts out to editors or out to contests, they would come back and they would say, I can't hear the writer's voice. And I was like, this is the hardest thing to learn. And I was like, I don't know what that means. And luckily one time I was in a writer's group and I got that kind of feedback back from a contest and I said to my writer's group, okay, I've had it up to the eyeballs. What does it mean when they say you don't have a voice? And one of the people said, oh, that's easy. I can fix that. I ran through that all the time. I've learned what it means. And she taught me how to write. My characters will speak, your characters will speak in a specific way. And that is their voice. That's what you have given them to write to say. And when your readers are reading them, they will recognize them instantly. That's what they mean by a voice. A beginner is someone new to learning the craft of fiction and or the publishing industry. It's not an assignment of quality or status. It is simply I'm starting out. Read your tension. That's something that is hard to do until you learn your voice. And then you can learn how to ramp up your tension or slow it down as you need. It's also called pacing. Sometimes they'll talk about pacing. But your reader tension is how fast do you want, you know, are you with Tom Clancy when you want your readers to flip in the page as fast as they can to get to the next thing? Or do you want to slow leisurely Howard Zen kind of read where you're just going to the next and just enjoying and relaxing as you're reading your book? That's reader tension. GMC or goal motivation and conflict. Good scenes and novels are filled with goal motivation and conflict. What that means is your character has to have a goal. They need a motivation to get that goal. And you have to do everything in your power to throw conflict in their way so they can't achieve it. So it sounds counterintuitive, but that's actually how novels work. So pacing, like I said, do you want a fast page turner? Or do you want maybe a slow, enjoyable read? Or do you want something in the middle? Pacing if somebody if you've written a manuscript and somebody says it was really good here, but I really kind of was like bogged down here, then you have a pacing problem that you've slowed your book down too much and or you've added too many things at the same time and your characters literally don't know what to do. That's a pacing problem and it's easily fixed. It's easily edited out. You just have to recognize that that's where you are and then fix it. Sounds easy to say, but once you get going and actually writing a lot, you'll recognize it instantly and you'll know what to do. Weasel words and pet words. I'm big on those. That just fairly seems, thinks, looks, could, should. Those are mine. And when you're writing, you're going to have your own words fairly as a word that I use a lot. I don't know why that is, but you have these specific words that come to your mind and you use them a lot. Some people use words like that have a lot of essence to them. Other people use like short snappy, but the same words over and over again. And those are weasel words. You want to go through your manuscript and once you recognize what they are, circle them so you can remove them or use your search and find in Microsoft, type that word in, read the sentence first because sometimes you need that word, but most of the time you don't and you can easily bring down your word count by getting out, getting those words out of your manuscript. A contrivance is considered a deadly sin in the writing world. This is when you've written your character into a corner and you don't know how to get them out.  Your readers are going to go, if they read that, that was like no way. And we've all read, stories or seen movies where we went, no way. No, that should not have happened. Then you recognize that that was a contrivance and it's lazy writing to not figure out a better way to do that. And then word count, we talked about that a little bit and that's pretty much how we measure everything. Your progress, your story form, your genre expectations, it is literally the number of words it takes to tell your story. So let's talk about the journey. As fulfilling and necessary as completing of a manuscript is and releasing it out into the world, the journey from here to published novelist has two things, high points and low points. Your high points are going to be your first three chapters. You get those done and you're going to feel like you're on top of the world. I wrote three chapters. I finally did it. Yes, I did that. Connecting with other writers and finding your community and your tribe, it is very important. I can't stress enough how important it is to have a writing network.   They're going to read what you wrote and they're going to come back and they're going to have questions. They're going to have comments. They're going to have suggestions, but all of them should be couched in loving terms and they know because they know how scary it is to give that stuff to someone too. They have to do it too. They're going to say things like, I don't understand why your character is doing this or I like that but I didn't like this or they'll point things out to you that you probably weren't even aware of but that you need to be aware of. Your writing partners and your critique partners are very helpful. A little rule of thumb though. If one person says, I didn't like XYZ, then you can take their opinion into account but if nobody else says that, then that's their opinion. But if that person and that person and that person said, I don't understand why, then you have a problem and you need to fix it. So just something to keep in mind. The euphoria of typing the end at the end of your manuscript. The first full novel I wrote was in 1993 and it took place here in Burlington, Vermont. I was watching the news story one day and they were talking about how they were replacing gas tanks from a gas station on corner of North Avenue, which I don't think the gas station's even there anymore, but they were replacing the gas tanks and they came across this pile of bones so they had to call the police and they came and they were able to the medical corner showed up and they were able to deduce that those bones were more than 200 years old. So where did they come from? Well, from there I was fascinated. When the War of 1812 was happening, there was an encampment here in Burlington where Battery Park is now, that was an encampment. They had disease that went through that camp and any Civil War historian will know about disease in the early times of the wars. The same thing, smallpox or something, I don't know what it was, but running through that camp and people were dying so fast that they were just digging holes and throwing the bodies into pits and then burying them and they were forgotten. So there was an idea for a novel and I wrote this book in 1993. The best thing I ever did was write the end, but the book wasn't, I didn't write it for publication. I wrote it simply for the whole idea was to prove to myself that I could write a full book and it never went anywhere. Went into my drawer and stayed, in fact I think it's still there. I have no intention of publishing it. That was my proof that I could do this. So, and if that's what you have to do, do it. It's really helpful. So your first proposal from a or a request from an agent or an editor, that's an exciting thing. That means that, oh my gosh, I'm so close. I can do this. I can do this. Your first rejection letter, believe it or not, celebrate them because that means that they were actually intrigued enough to read enough of your book to know whether or not it was going to work. The frustrating thing about rejection letters is they don't actually tell you specifically what's wrong. They'll just say well it's not right for us or maybe next time or something and you have to kind of read between the lines to figure it out. That's really frustrating. But a good editor or a good publisher, if you get that letter and you reach out to them and you say well you said it's not right for you this for me or for you this time, can you tell me specifically what I need to work on? 99% of the time they will write you a very detailed letter of what they saw that they wanted to see fixed. But they haven't got the time and the resources to do that because they get thousands of manuscripts a month that they have to weed through. So if you reach out to them and you ask them they will tell you. And I didn't know that when I first started writing and I would just get so frustrated but I finally figured it out and did that and I got a very nice letter back saying what I needed to work on and that was so helpful. So rejoice in your rejection letters and reach out and find out why they rejected it. They'll tell you. When you receive that call, hello, we would love to publish your book. We enjoyed it ever so much. That's do your happy dance, jump up and down, scream, holler, do whatever you have to do, take yourself out to dinner, whatever and then get back to your computer, start writing. The hardest part of writing a book is not actually the writing process. It's the editing process. It's the rewrite. Stephen King says it all the time. I can write anything I want to write. The hard part is rewriting.  You get attached to certain things that you've written and you really like it but it doesn't serve the story and you kind of know it doesn't serve the story but you don't want to get rid of it because you liked it so much. That's a darling. Kill it. Get it out of your book. It doesn't need to be there. The low points, self-doubt all the mode. That is me. I feel like an imposter every time I write a book like that was just a fluke. That was the Bella Voistor Bay. It was terrible because no safe haven did pretty well and then I was like, I can't do this again. I can't read. I can't. Lightning struck. That's not going to happen again. I can't do so. I really struggled with self-doubt and the imposter syndrome. Writer's block to me that's an excuse not to write.  You don't have an idea. You don't know what you're doing.  Realizing your masterpiece isn't just yet but it will be. Feedback that wounds and you will get feedback that wounds. Basically, take your ego out of your story. It is hard to do and we all added in there. We don't even know we're doing it but take your ego, put it in the corner with writer's block. When you get feedback that wounds, be hurt, feel it and then go back and go okay well what are they really saying and is it valid and should I be listening to that and do I really have an issue that I need to fix and then fix it if you do and if you don't be like okay well that was that person and fine move on. Having to answer no for the millionth time to the question from your friends and family have you gotten your book published yet? No. Losing all your work. I'm ashamed to say. Losing all your work because you did not bother to do a backup and your computer goes blue screen and everything and you are maybe three chapters from the end and it is gone. That is a definite low point. Back up your work. There are programs out there now that you can get like Scrivener. That is a wonderful program. It backs up every time you close. It does a backup. It will back up every 10 or 15 minutes however you want. So even if like last year I had to replace my laptop, I went out and I bought a laptop and I went oh my gosh I'm not going to have Scrivener on here but I downloaded it from the program from the company and I had my key, my manufacturer's key and I loaded that in and I went in there and there was my book and I was like oh thank god it was that book and I was three chapters from the end so yeah. Scrivener is a good one to have. And one star reviews and reader rants. Don't pay any attention to them. One star reviews, those are, I've decided one star reviewers and reader rants are people who wish they had the guts to write a book but don't and they want to pretend like they're an expert so don't even pay attention to them. Spend a few minutes considering two adages I want to give you. The first is finishing your manuscript will be the hardest thing you ever do and the second is a finished manuscript is the easiest part of getting published. And if you think new writers are, you have an idea if you're a new writer I was talking to this lady she's got a book that she wants to write about a character a woman an actual historical figure right and she's read other books about this woman so she could easily say to herself well you know people have already read written about her what would I have to say but think of Asha Dornfest who said I think new writers are too worried that it's all been said before it has been but not by you so write it. Character plot and setting these are three things that are very important to every story may sound like and I may be you might be sitting here going why are you telling us this of course we know all this stuff it does seem intuitive but you also need to understand that a lot of people don't understand so these are things that you need to think about when you're writing your book characters from concept to creation to maturity your characters drive the story they drive the plot within the setting of the story so if somebody comes up to you and says well is your story character driven or plot driven the answer is yes because you can't have a plot without a character and you can't have a character without a plot so it doesn't matter if your story is plot driven or character driven the answer is yes it's both some writers build character sketches and assemble their hero heroine and villain etc from a box of character traits like a mr potato head and if that works for you fantastic do it other models others model them after a real person they know some people do a hybrid I use a program called 16 personalities and it's one six personalities calm it's the online version of the Myers Briggs tests and I use one stop for writers calm so what I do is I go on to 16 personalities and I find okay this is kind of the type of person I want to write about these are the personality styles I need to look at and then I go to one stop for writers and in there they have backstory that you can fill in siblings family structure where they are in the birth order what their dreams are what what traumatic event might have occurred to them as a child or a young adult or these sort of things and you build a deeper person from that program I have found using one stop for writers for the character things it's been essential for me because I tend to character development for me has been a very hard thing to learn how to do and my characters tend to be inconsistent because I don't write to a I don't write to an outline and what they call a pancer so I just kind of let the story evolve as I write it but that means my characters evolve as I write them so when they started out this way and they end up that way that's a character inconsistency and it gets me every time one stop for writers once I've built that character I can go back and reference it oh yeah they would not do that or they would do that okay and I can write it that way so it keeps my characters consistent and it's really been a huge a huge gain for me so you have three you have two kinds of characters actually you have your protagonist and you have an antagonist and these days with gaming getting so popular they're also starting to call protagonists and antagonists avatars which can be confusing but that's the new term so I'm going to throw it out there for you your protagonist or your avatar protagonist is your hero or your anti hero he is the main character he or she is the main character of your story your antagonist is the villain or the person who's throwing obstacles in your protagonist's way to keep them from getting that goal or that motivation whatever it is that they want to achieve at the end of the story it's the antagonist's job to see that they don't get it so those are the two major characters you have minor characters also that are filtered in because nobody lives in a vacuum they all have friends and family and things like that and they can also be people who are preventing your protagonist from getting where to where they want to go or they can be called what is called helpers or hindrances so they can hinder the main character and stop them or they can be their helpers and help them get what their allies and help them get to where they need to go your character should be as dynamic and complex and as rounded as possible you don't want descriptors for your characters to be you don't want people to say this character bored the crap out of me nothing they didn't react to anything they're flat they're static they don't you don't want that you want like oh my gosh I just loved it when this happened and she blew a gasket that was so cool that's what you want your readers to to feel when you're doing your characters and if they're like meh then you need to go back and work on your characterization but beware stereotypes we all write them and we don't even realize we're doing it and you can sometimes it's okay to have a stereotypical character if that's your intention if you want that character to show a certain attitude that maybe we don't want to reflect anymore and you want that character to kind of really point that out that's okay but if you're gonna go with the dumb jock or the vain cheerleader or the religious zealot the bad boy biker the town gossip the rock star the rich socialite the clumsy waiter or the noisy neighbor have a specific reason for doing it if you don't it's a stereotype it's what they call a trope and you want to get it out of your book um and the question people would say well aren't stereotypes bad they can be like i just said but you have to be very careful and intentional and respectful when you use them um particularly when one is of a religious ethnic or other community group either collectively or as an individual wherever you are on the spectrum between the thought police and you overdo reform as an author an individual be wary of the way in the manner in which you choose or choose not to include a diverse cast when in doubt stick to the wisdom of the adage write what you know and if that person happens to be stereotypical write it but what defines your character and how does the reader get to know them through appearance mannerisms habits speech think of a caricature artist that pulls out specific features on your face and then kind of exaggerates them that's what you're looking for when you're writing a mannerism certain characters i have the character in my contemporary she's she likes to be honest but she doesn't like to hurt people's feelings so she'll always preface what she's going to say when she thinks it's going to be hurtful with can i ask a question or can i tell you something that's a mannerism how to how to imply that to your story here's a couple of examples i wanted to give you mr and mrs dursley of number four privet drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal thank you very much they were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn't hold with such nonsense that tells you a lot about the dursleys they are the moguls mogul uh they don't hold with nonsense they like everything to be prim and proper and you you get all that just by reading that little blurb here's another one the school gymnasium was so loud that fern had to lean down next to bailey's ear and shout to be heard bailey was more than capable of maneuvering his wheelchair through the teaming student body but fern pushed him so they could more easily stay together so that tells you two things about bailey and fern bailey is very self-sufficient he can do these things but fern is very caring and wants to help him whether he needs it or not she's also kind of pushy because she knows he doesn't need it but she's going to do it anyway um plot that's something that you need to know about every story has a plot it's got it's going from a to z through your story um the definition from the dictionary plot is a work of fiction as as its storyline the ordered number and sequence of events that make up the story the story's climax or turning point is a crisis moment of high tension and emotion in which the main characters solve the conflict and learn important things about themselves other people and the world the definition from the editor's the editor's blog courtesy of the editor's blog a simple definition of plot is that it's the storyline of your novel plot is what the it's the what of the story plot might out of necessity include who and when and where but it's the story events that truly define the plot it can be a one-liner a guy has to prove he didn't kill his wife or plot can be that rambling explanation that 20 minute explanation when you're trying to tell your best friend about that great movie you saw last night how do you make a plot there are lots of ways if you're what they call a plotter jk Rowling is a perfect example of that she plotted out every single book all seven of them before she even began writing book one you can do that or you can be what you call a pancer that's me a pancer is somebody who has kind of a general idea of how they want the story to start how they want the story to end maybe something that goes on in the middle and you can write to the middle and then figure out the rest as you go that's me that's one reason why my characters are never really they tend to be inconsistent because I my story evolves my characters evolve and it's a mess you can be somewhere in between you can plot and then write you know to and pants it as you write I've tried to do that but usually when I end up going back to my plot to see where I am I've already written like five pages or 500 pages ahead of that so then I'm like okay that doesn't work for me and I just keep going but if whatever works for you whatever is comfortable for you that's what you should be doing setting is where the story takes place and much more than that it is the time it is the locale the weather believe it or not can be a setting objects the era the time period the culture the geography those all make up your your settings so the who the what where and when of a story as your setting don't let your story take place in a white room and if a reader reads it and they say well I couldn't really see what was going on or I kind of felt like everything was white you don't have your setting down you need to work on that it can be something as simple as two people are walking around or talking and one goes over moves the book from this end to that end that's a setting but you gave your character something to do that your reader could see so you want them to be able to visualize the scene in their head as they're reading it and if they can't then you you have problems with your setting weather is one I tend to forget a lot most writers do it's just not something we think about when we're writing and in my one of my contemporary romances I had a traumatic scene where I seen where this woman had to confess a traumatic event that happened to her and as I wrote it the first time it was really kind of white roomy so I rewrote it and I put them on the street and I made I had cars going by and this and that it was okay but as I was going through and editing that section again there was a thunderstorm I could hear approaching us so I wrote in the thunderstorm and just made that scene come alive so don't be afraid to use the weather it's a great way to get your setting firmly in hand culture a lot of people don't think about that either it's the laws the social practices the societal taboos the societal expectations politics and government entertainment and games religious practices education war mores and technology and if you're writing a historical fiction that is absolutely important you need to have the culture of the time in there and don't be afraid to immerse yourself into that time period and have your 21st century readers go but that's not the way it is well you're right today it's not the way it is but then it was and I have to write to that not to your expectations so make sure that you know what your culture is and immerse yourself in it and if that means you have to read a whole lot of nonfiction to get there read it point of view there are three kinds of ways you can write a book and they call it POV or point of view there's first person in which we use the I or the we think Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games she wrote that book in first person second person is you almost nobody writes in second person point of view it's not a popular way to go there's only one book that I've ever heard referenced and that's Bright Lights in Big City by Jay McInerney he's the only one that I know of that most experts know of who wrote in the second person point of view and then there's third person he she they that point of view and if so first person is like someone is telling you their own personal story second person is the you you walked into a store you bought a bag a bag of potato chips you went home and watched TV I would not want to read that kind of book most people don't that's why a lot of people nobody really writes in that point of view third person narrator can be highly subjective and that's okay so you have to decide which point of view that you want to write in now if you want to go into deep point of view changing it from a third person to a first person does not necessarily give you a deep point of view just so you know that a lot of people make that mistake but whichever is most natural for you that's the best for the story it becomes about perspective and about how you would experience the story through your point of view character or characters so first person point of view has the least amount of narrative distance you are that character um and they live within that you live within the character and the character relates all their thoughts and experiences the drawback to this is and it's actually not a drawback it's a it's a good thing you can't head hop if you are the main character um and by head hopping we mean by jumping into another person's point of view third person limited is the he she and this is the most common for commercial fiction because most people are used to it and they and they understand it so a lot of people write this way um it remains limited to what that character knows and experiences and the again you can't you shouldn't be head hopping you can't head hop into another point of view and you have to establish in every scene and chapter who the point of view character is if there's more than one character in your story so for instance in the bell of oyster bay i have two main characters sally and john and this is ultimately a failed love story they do fall in love with each other but they don't end up together spoil alert but there's a lot of good stuff in here so if you decide to buy it please the homestead benefits from it so but i wanted to read you a couple of points of view one from sally one from john so you can understand how you would start a chapter with a new point of view so this is from sally's point of view saddlebags overflowing with osnaburg linen sugar cones tea and a choir of paper sally towns and set off for daniel and susannah young's farm on cove road such a beautiful morning with a hint of building summer heat the salty ocean breeze rustled through the trees and blew soft on her brow teasing her hair she lifted her face to the sun as she swayed to the movement of farmer girl beneath her chores waited for her at home but she wrote at a slow and steady pace enjoying her rare solitude so that tells you a few things about sally um and that you know that that chapter is going to be in her point of view so we're going to go to john and this is in chapter two if lucifer claimed a home captain john grave simcoe was positive statin island was the place surrounded by water the saturated air suffocated like steaming wet wool not only stifling during the day and cold and foggy at night but the place stank from manhattan city's rubbish he couldn't decide which reeked worse the pigs rooting in the refuse or the constant stench from the heap called pig hill so you know that you're going to be talking about john you know that he hates statin island and apparently that hasn't changed in on 200 years um and that manhattan dumped all their rubbish on statin island and it stank constantly and when i wrote that and i was in a writer's group i wrote that a one woman in my group wrote back to me she goes oh mg i grew up on statin island and it's still that way and it still stinks and it's still hot and sticky so i was like oh okay i did that right we also know about sally she doesn't get much solitude she loves to ride her horse she loves being outdoors she goes on these delivery journeys for her father just to get out of the house and get away from the chores for a while so we've learned some things about characterization through point of view third person omniscient that is think jane austin where you can hear everybody's point of view you can hear what everybody's thinking this was more popular in the late 19th well early 19th to the early 20th century this was generally the way books were written the author was allowed to bounce from point of view to point of view from any character within the scene what we call head hopping to capture the inner thoughts of all the characters as they happened there is a narrator present who functions like god and can tell us everything about every character present in fact they do call it the god mode um so for instance like i said in the hunger games uh listen to what uh susanne collins writes it's this detail the untucked blouse forming a duck tail that brings me back to myself prim the strangled cry comes out of my throat and my muscles begin to move again prim i don't need to shove through the crowd the other kids make way immediately allowing me a straight path to the stage i reach her just as she is about to mount the steps with one sweep of my arm i push her behind me i volunteer i gasp i volunteer as tribute so that's your first person second person bright lights in big city by j mac and urney you have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self you have avoided them of late your soul is as disheveled as your apartment and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside and that's kind of an uncomfortable narration and then third person harry potter in the sorcerer stone by jk rowling something very painful was going on in harry's mind as hagrid's story came to a close he saw again the blinding flash of green light more clearly than he had ever remembered it before and he remembered something else for the first time in his life a high cold cruel laugh hagrid was watching him sadly and you can hear that third person pride and prejudice by jane austin the god mode elizabeth having rather expected to affront him was amazed at his gallantry but there was a mixture of sweetness and archeness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody and darcy had never been so bewitched as by any woman by any woman as he was by her he really believed that it were it not for the inferiority of her connections he should be in some danger so you heard from elizabeth and then you heard from darcy point of view is technically the most difficult craft to learn and for to understand and then to master um and i haven't yet encountered a writer for whom that wasn't true excuse me but once you spend time with that concept and you learn how to deepen your point of view you're going to find that your your writing improves exponentially as you're deepening your point of view you're actually adding to your word count and that's something like hey when i was learning how to do it it was like um okay um i'm actually writing more i'm adding more and i shouldn't be and they were like no no no that's what you want to do because you're going to take it out in different places so it's okay my girlfriend Nancy she's my writing partner she gave me these to to go with and i'll just do one because i'm running out of time this is a good point of view and this is from her book unseen love um and the character is leila and the first good point of view father Naomi is slave enough for our house and we can hardly afford a second then her father slapped her hard enough she stumbled sideways she hated him that's pretty good but we can make it better father Naomi is slave enough for our house and we can hardly afford a second she tumbled sideways from the slap he gave her she straightened hoping the loathing in her heart didn't show on her face that gives us a deeper sense but the best father Naomi is slave enough for our house and we can hardly afford a second pain exploded along her jaw as she stumbled sideways she straightened fighting the urge to rub the ache in her lip for the thousandth time she wished her father was dead and it's so much stronger um so work on your point of view if you don't get that you need to get back to work so and you can think of it as the glass is half full or the glass is half empty or maybe it just needs resizing um traditional publishing versus indie publishing i don't have a whole lot of time to go into that but it's something to think about just know that um there was a time when you could go to any publishing company there were thousands of them the big five is now down to the big three they merge constantly and they drop authors and they pick up authors they get hundreds of thousands of submissions every year and because there are so few of them now they only publish maybe three to five books a year so your odds of being published by a traditional publisher are almost non-existent so you can try it and i have heard of people who i'm very jealous of the people who write i just wrote my first novel and i got a three book contract and i'm like i freaking hate you um because i've been trying i tried for years to get published indie publishing there are two kinds there's indie where you do it yourself you load it up to amazon i recommend ingram spark um and you but you are in charge of all the expenses for the book cover design and the marketing and the uploading and making your website and doing all of that stuff you are responsible for at all or you can go hybrid where they'll do all that stuff for you but you're still responsible for paying for it all you're also responsible for your marketing and all they do is give you a published by x y z publishing company and if that's what you're looking for fantastic do it if it's not then go indie i i recommend it because you are more in control but copyright your work go to copyrights.gov and get a copyright for your book because there are any number of pirates out there who will take your novel if they can and publish it as their own and then you're wondering where all your royalties went when they're going to someone else but if you have that copyright they can't do that so okay so i just did the quick traditional roadmap first thing you have to do though is finish the manuscript you can't talk to a publishing traditional publisher company because they're going to say send me your whip and you'll be like oh um it's not complete is that a yes that's a problem thank you very much and you've just lost your chance so make sure it's completed same thing with indie or hybrid publishing if you want to go that route make sure your your manuscript is complete if you're going to indie publish find an editor it's like doctors can't work on themselves lawyers can't be their best clients writers can't be their best editors you can edit there are some great editing books out there and i recommend a few like um self-editing for independent for um independent authors i think that's what it's called um let me see if i can find that real quick um i've lost it um self-editing oh self-editing for fiction writers how to edit yourself into print by brown in king that is an excellent book on learning how to to edit yourself and it's something you should know as a writer anyway but then once you've done that and your book is done and you think you're ready to publish it find an editor that you have to pay for because they are going to go through that book with a fine-tooth comb and they're going to get it back to you and you're going to go oh it wasn't as good as i thought it was was everybody goes through that because we can't see what you know after a while it's like i used to have a boss that used to say a sign on the wall becomes the wall you can't see it after a while so you need somebody who can and will point out to you the things you need to fix so that's my um my advice to you and if you want some of these um uh craft um book recommendations i'm happy i've got them all and i'm happy to share with you what they are um a website is also important to have wix.com that's where my website is angelaimoudi.com it's very easy to set up you need four things and about you um a bookstore page where people can order your book um a little blurb on a page that's a blurb on you and um how to contact you so that they can ask you questions about your book or whatever so um i know i talked about fiction in general but fiction in general is also historical fiction and um those are just some of the things and if you have questions i'm going to be hanging out here please feel free to contact me um and also if you just want me to get a take a look at your maybe your first three chapters or something i'm happy to do that too and you can talk to me about that after so thank you angie for having me here i hope you enjoyed that


We have recently published a new study, a new report on the opportunity for e-commerce in Africa and for this study We have interviewed a thousand five hundred MSMEs across six markets in Africa So it's a very extensive study that really looks at the challenges as well as the opportunities to scale up e-commerce solutions in the region So this study very well portrays some of these challenges So first and foremost one of the main issue that comes up is access to finance So MSMEs really mention in open-ended questions the need to get more and better as well, financial instruments e-commerce can be a solution particularly when it comes to e-commerce platforms that can provide end-to-end solutions to MSMEs So this is really the value of Amazon-like type of solutions which onboard MSMEs and provide end-to-end not only access to markets but also access to delivery services and payments There is also an opportunity for the postal network to contribute to the delivery challenge in particular and in particular to reach out customers and users and MSMEs in rural areas Then the other challenge that we are seeing emerging is certainly the quality of mobile infrastructure and in particular the quality of the mobile internet So mobile internet is widely available for MSMEs across Sub-Saharan Africa but at GSMA we talk about the usage gap So there are about 600 plus million population who are covered by the mobile broadband network in Sub-Saharan Africa but are not using it So there is really an opportunity to leverage e-commerce solutions as a relevant service that obviously provides access to markets to MSMEs to really drive that usage because customers and MSMEs need relevant services so certainly access to market linkages is a relevant solution And then of course other challenges that we are seeing are the availability of affordable phones particularly smartphones and also the cost of mobile data This is something that the industry and the government need to work on to really drive those prices down Sometimes taxation is an issue for affordable devices, affordable data services and this really can hinder e-commerce adoption by MSMEs Another point that is really important to mention is that if we look at e-commerce in Africa it is mostly experienced by a social media platform So social commerce is dominant 60% of all MSMEs we surveyed across the six African countries that we surveyed for this study experienced or used e-commerce solely purely on social media and this is very actually informal It's an informal use of social media platforms whereby an MSME, a micro-entrepreneur for example, my updates on a daily basis, their WhatsApp page with information about the product that they are selling and then informally sells the product through the platform and delivers the product or the product that gets picked up at the seller's location So it's an entirely informal process Also most of the time cash is used for payments So this is really what we are looking at in terms of e-commerce adoption in Africa The use of social commerce is predominant We are seeing more and more MSMEs now also using e-commerce platforms that can provide more of an end-to-end value proposition but then of course there is a cost associated to e-commerce platforms So supporting more affordable mobile data services enabling access to more affordable phones can also support the adoption of e-commerce solutions by MSMEs


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Hello, welcome to SSUnitec Social Decide and this is continuation of PySpark tutorial. So in this video we are going to see how we can read any CSV file with the schema option. So before going forward, if you haven't watched the last video of this video series, so I would strongly recommend to watch that video where we have seen how we can create the schema. So it means how we can create the table. So let me quickly jump to the browser and we will try to implement it in practical. So here we are having this file which is the sales.csv file. So first we will be going to read the data from this file directly and then after we will be reading the data by using the schema option and we will also see the difference. So let me jump inside the Azure Databricks and here in this notebook, let me try to read the data from the sales.csv file. So as we have already created the mount point for the same, so let me try to read it directly. So for reading the data, we should be going to use the spark dot then we need to use the read. Then we have to specify the option and under the option I am going to specify header value as true because this file is having header. So let me make it as true. Next we have to specify like from which format we want to fetch the data. So we want to fetch the data from the csv file. So we have created the mount point which is the mnt then input and then we have the folder which is the sales and then sales dot csv. Make sure you are typing this name correctly, it means it's the case sensitive. So I want to put this inside a data frame, so let me try to execute it. So we should be going to see this data frame will be holding all the values from this sales dot csv file. So command completed, now let me try to see whether we are able to see the data from this data frame or not. So we can simply use the display command. So as we can see sales order id, date, item, name, quantity and value. But let's try to see what is the data type of all these. So we can use the df dot schema. So this schema option will be going to display the schema for all columns. So here as we could see sales order id, so which is the string type. So we can also see the date which is again string type. So all these are in string type. So it means when we are trying to fetch the data directly without specifying the schema, so all the columns data type will be string only. It will not have any other data type. So we don't want to specify string by default. We should be going to specify the exact data type what we are having inside the columns. So let me try to create the schema first. As we have seen in the last video, we should be going to import few functions. So for those we can use the pyspark dot sql dot type. So actually we are required to fetch the types and the type if we are going to specify as a stick, so it will be going to import all the types. But we can also specify the required types. So first type that is the type. Second required type which is the stock field. Next is the integer type. Next is the string type. Next is the date type. So this should be in capital letter and type t will be in capital letter. So all these are required for this schema. So let me try to add a schema here. So let me add a variable which is schema and for creating the schema as we have seen in the last video we should be going to use the stock type. And inside the stock type we should be going to specify these brackets. Now next we have to declare all the columns. So those columns will be declaring by specifying the stock field. So stock field we can specify we should be having total three parameters. First will be the name and second will be the type. So here we have the integer type and the last parameter that will be indicating whether this id will be having null value or not. So we don't have the null value over here so we can use the false. Now let me try to add another column and this column for the name as we can also verify from here. So we have the SOID is the first column. So let me use the SOID instead of the id. Next will be the SO date. So let me use the SO date instead of the name and this type should be date. Now let me add another one and let me copy this, paste it here. So next is the item code. So here we can see it is having the space between item and code. But we don't want to put any space then simply we can use and replace this space. And this item code is having the string so we can specify the string type. Next let me use the item name. So we can simply copy the item name from here and instead of item code it should be item name and will be also deleting the space from here. Next we can see quantity. So quantity is an integer value. So the data type that should be integer and the last one which is value. So we can use the value and we can remove this comma. Let me try to execute it. So here we have wrongly typed the integer. So let me try to correct it. Now let me try to execute it. So we can see command is completed with success. So this schema we have created. Now we need to bind this schema while fetching the data from the CSV file. So we can use the same command that we have used earlier. But here we should be specifying the schema option. So for that here we can use the schema. So under this schema we have to specify the schema name. So that is the schema again. So this is the thing that you have to do. And let me call this data frame as data frame new and let me try to execute it. So it is executed successfully and if we can expand we should be able to see the data types over here. So SOID is having integer, SODate is date, then item code, item name. Then we can see integer, then integer for the value. So let me remove this backslash. So everything is working as expected. So let me recap what we have done. Here we have seen while fetching directly data without specifying the schema. By default it will be having the data types as string. Next if we are going to declare the schema and binding that schema while fetching the data from the CSV file, it will be picking the actual data types which we have specified inside the schema along with the column names, those column names we are specifying here that we will be going to return as an output of the data frame. So I hope guys you have understand how we can read the CSV file with the schema option. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you like this video please subscribe our channel to get many more videos. See you in the next video.


Two or three seconds, split the shot clock and game clock as McCollum gets down low, finds Nance Borsengas says get that out of here! To go quickly, three seconds in the second quarter. White's gonna have a look, good if it goes! Yes, sir! And the Celtics take the lead for the first time today.