My novel based on my career at the National Security Agency is now available--guaranteed to be one of the two best NSA novels by a former employee ever!

Do you get it? Because there have only been two. 

I’ve decided to go ahead and self-publish my NSA novel, the one I’ve been trying to get published for almost a decade now. It is not without a certain sense of shame and failure that I do this. Although there are plenty of authors now doing just fine in self-publishing, and some are even wondering, with traditional publishing in so much trouble, whether it might be the only way forward for authors, I can't get over the feeling that self-publishing is for amateurs who weren’t good enough to get published for real.  

But so be it. After sending out query letters to possibly as many as a hundred agents, and paying the money to go to a literary conference to meet agents, after having several say they admired it but it wasn’t for them, and after struggling to understand how something that meant so much to me could mean so little to the profession’s gatekeepers, I’m resigned to this. It’s too important to never share with the world, and if the world doesn’t want it, then I’ll have to live with that. There's a public service in publishing it, and I feel compelled to do it in whatever way available. 

A talented cartoonist, Jerry King, very kindly made the cover art for me.

I’m reminded of the example of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s alter-ego sci-fi writer who appears in many of his novels. Trout had great ideas but poor execution, and both he and his works live in ignominy within the universes of the novels he appears in. Characters find Trout’s novels only by the greatest of coincidences. When they do find them, though, it always causes something that changes the whole plot, and often the whole world along with it. If Trout can live with the shame of being a failed writer who still believes in himself enough to get his stories out any way he can, then so can I. What happens with it from here is up to fate and whatever author there might be behind the big show.

There are some possible benefits to self-publication. As a former NSA employee writing (albeit very loosely) about analysis at the agency, I’m required to go through a pre-publication approval process for this book. That means some poor guy in the pre-pub office has to read all 80,000 words of this. I have no doubt this book is unclassified; I’ve gone to great, possibly absurdist, lengths to make it so. When I get back my approval from NSA, though, it will come with a note that says that if I change anything, I’ll have to get it approved all over again. If I worked with a publisher, there would be many rounds of editing, which is suffering enough for normal writers, but in my situation, having to work with my former employer working at my former employer’s pace, would be unbearable. Also, any interviews I might do would involve questions that, however reasonable seeming, might make me nervous. I might claim to be a bad boy, but at heart, I don’t really like to risk running afoul of authorities, especially not authorities I’ve finally gotten away from by way of retirement.

So this blog post is likely to be my only extra-textual commentary on the book. It’s perhaps a little unusual for an author to offer up an interpretation of his own work; for the most part, authors are authors and critics are critics, and if authors wanted to go around trying to say what stories mean they’d do that instead of writing the damn things. Since so much of this blog has ended up being about reading well, however much I started it with the intent to make it about writing well, I’ll offer my own take on what the novel might mean.

NSA has been criticized for being too intrusive. In my personal experience, it has resolved the balance between security and privacy in different ways over the past three decades, but in general, it has never been so far to either side that it wouldn’t have been within the lines of what most people would consider reasonable, if most people had the access to know what the agency really does and how it does it. In recent years before I retired, it might have even gotten a little bit deferential to privacy, to the detriment of its ability to do its core functions. If NSA were meant to be a backdoor to eavesdrop on Americans, it would be a miserable failure.

I wouldn’t die defending that understanding, but to me, the danger of an advanced surveillance program like NSA’s isn’t the risk of an omniscient despot using the knowledge to control subjects. The danger is in a country that lacks the self-knowledge to know what to do with the information it gets, no matter how much it gets. Knowing our enemies does us no good if we don’t know who we are, what we believe, and what we want. In fact, it will only confuse us.

I am only too well aware now of the faults of this novel. Its original creation was a blur, a true Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. I’d been at the agency a little over a decade, and I’d just met a group of enormously intelligent co-workers who, for some reason, let me attend their weekly gatherings. It felt like thoughts were all coming together at once. I was also blogging on the agency’s internal system, and the reaction from fellow employees was positive enough to give me a false sense of having something to say. My employer was either tolerant enough or didn’t care enough to let me become a minor celebrity within out little world, and I thought it time to share my ideas outside the walls of Fort Meade.

Once it was written, I realized I had the “shitty draft” that all the writing books say is the sole goal of a first effort. Fine, rework it, they say, but once I had the world of Zendia in place and the person of Tom Williams and his family, I found myself unable to see it differently. My provisional draft ended up being hard to overrule, even when I was confronted with many passages that made me wince, and I probably pruned where I should have replanted.

Even with all the faults in the novel, I still think it’s worth putting out into the world, however humble its entrance may be. And I think it’s worth you buying, reading, and hopefully commenting on the book, for two reasons. One, it’s only three dollars. It's the lowest price Amazon will let me get away with, and I don’t want price to be a barrier for anyone. This is a public service, not a way to make money. Secondly, even with its faults, it’s important to support a former agency employee trying to share something about the work there. Because of the difficulty in pre-publication and the concern about what might happen if we try to publish something wrong (a frequently heard threat is that the agency will come take all the devices from our homes if we write something on one of them that they deem to be protected information), hardly any former employees ever say anything about the work there. The only ones who do are usually either disgruntled or they’re former executives who are kind of homers, meaning the voices aren’t very balanced. I'm neither anti-NSA nor excessively a fan. I am forever grateful to them for taking a chance on me when they hired me and for allowing me a voice--often a voice of rather strong criticism--while I worked there. The fact that was able to voice so much criticism and still have what by any measure was a very successful career says a lot about how NSA is a place that at least sometimes values truth over being told what it wants to hear. Still, all those criticisms I made had a source, and I couldn't help but see the glaring weaknesses I saw there. The results is that I’m as balanced a voice about that place as you’re likely to get, and your support of this book will hopefully encourage other, more polished voices of reason to share their stories.

 

Kilgore Trout’s tombstone read

 

Some Guy

Some Time to Some Time

He tried

 

That’s how I’d like this book to be read. Up against a lot of odds when it came to trying to write about my very secret workplace and what message I think the rest of the country should get about it, I tried.