Coming Attractions

I have been on a long hiatus from the blog. Yes, “hiatus” in this case just means that I have been procrastinating or slacking off or just plain too busy to get to it. The good news is that I have been hard at work on a few projects and I am happy to report the following:

A sequel to the first Auggie Spinoza book will be released this spring under a new imprint. More about that last bit in a future post. All you secret agents out there probably know that this was originally scheduled for late 2012. Sorry about that. I wish I could say there was some sort of cloak and dagger element involved in the delay but I don’t own a cloak and I am afraid of daggers. There were some delays in working out the publication details but everything is on track now and you can look forward to a shiny new cover preview in the near future. 

Also, the first book in my new series, Spy Factory, is nearly complete and will also be released this spring. Get ready for more code-breaking.

On a separate note: I am not one to check the bestseller lists very often but as I sit here at 1:00 p.m. P.S.T on January 25, 2013 I see Auggie Spinoza is among the top 20 bestselling books in Amazon’s Children’s Mystery and Spy Stories category. Also hanging in the top 100 in the Action/Adventure category. Pretty cool. I am trying not to blink.

 

Auggie Learns Latin

It is back-to-school time for Auggie. He has been on vacation all summer. No secret agent stuff, no code-breaking, no time-travel; just a bit of rest and relaxation.

Now he is ready to learn something. Summer is almost over. The Ticonderogas are freshly-sharpened, a stack of fresh notebooks is already waiting by the door, and the new lunch box is ready to go. Unfortunately for Auggie, the first day of school is still more than a week away.

What a great week, then, for a review of The Absolutely Amazing Adventures of Agent Auggie Spinoza to appear on This Kid Reviews Books. For one thing, “This Kid” (A.K.A. Erik) is one sharp ten-year-old. He and Auggie would get along great. They would spend their days cracking codes and their evenings reading books. It would be fun.

For another thing, it was a great chance for Auggie to learn something. Erik, you see, inserted a clever latin phrase in his review. Check it out HERE and feel free to let Erik know what you think of the review.  He assigned the book five out of five bookworms, which made Auggie feel great.

Hiding Out

I have been hiding out at an undisclosed location for most of the summer. Spy stuff. Very top secret. Every spy needs to hide out every so often. It’s the nature of the job, really.

However, I did get a chance to sit down for an interview with Alison at The Cheap Reader. What a great time we had! I’m a big fan of her blog. If you enjoy middle grade fiction, you should be, too.

Let me warn you: do not try to pry information about my secret location from Alison. She is every bit as clever and crafty as you are. She will not give in to pressure. I suspect she was raised by secret agents. Either that, or she is one. Either way, things will not end well for you if you attempt to find me through her. Seriously.

Best to just relax, sit back, and enjoy all the wonderful content she has on her blog. Trust me, it’s for your own good.

Cool Secret Codes for Kids: The Mix-O-Matic

The key to a really useful secret code is simplicity. Spies are busy people. They have secrets to uncover, death-defying acts to perform, and super-powerful spy gadgets to deal with. The last thing most spies need is yet another thing to complicate their lives. That’s why, if you took a poll of spies, you would find that a large majority of them, in a pinch, would rather use something simple that they can remember than something difficult that takes time, effort, and an elaborate key to encode and decipher.

In my last post I discussed substitution codes. There’s nothing more simple than a substitution code, but sometimes a secret agent might feel like exercising a little variety in her choice of codes. Just like we all like to eat something different for dinner every day (well, most of us do), most spies like to have a few options when sending secret messages. Otherwise, life can get boring.

So for the secret agent seeking variety and simplicity, let me present a code that I call The Mix-O-Matic. There’s nothing the mix-o-matic can’t do. It can slice and dice, mix and chop, blend and puree. And in the end, it is as reliable as any other secret code. Your results, of course, may vary.

Using the mix-o-matic is like making a smoothie with a blender. Take the primary ingredient, the sentence you wish to encode:

i like spumoni ice cream

Now, decide what flavor of code you want by picking a single letter from the alphabet. I have a craving for the letter “e” today, so I’ll choose that letter and I will add it to the end of each of the words in my sentence. Now it looks like this:

ie likee spumonie icee creame

Then I hit ‘blend’ and smash all the words together like this:

ielikeespumonieiceecreame

That sentence is already looking hard to read. I’ll make it more difficult by hitting ‘chop’ and chopping that super-long word into 4-letter segments like this:

ieli kees pumo niei ceec ream eqwr

You’ll notice that I had an extra ‘e’ at the end, so I just added a few random letters to the end. My fellow agents do that sort of thing all the time. Now, we have a pretty good secret message. We could send it like this. Or, we could make it more complicated by putting the four-letter segments in reverse order and then blending them back into a single long word like this:

eqwrreamceecnieipumokeesieli

Now, all another agent needs to know is the number of letters per segment (4) and the fact that I’ve reversed the order of the segments. That’s easy enough to remember, and makes for a pretty tasty secret message. Yum.

 

Cool Secret Codes For Kids: Substitution Codes

There’s no getting around it: secret codes are cool. Spies use them to protect secret messages and that is very cool. George Washington used secret codes during the Revolutionary War, and there is no doubt that a white-wig-wearing future President of the United States writing in secret code was mighty cool. I feel cool just writing about secret codes.

Spies and secret agents use codes for a clear purpose. They have information to protect, intelligence they don’t want to share with an enemy, or sometimes even the fate of a nation to safeguard. But those of you who are not yet spies or secret agents can use secret codes just for fun. And what is more fun than disguising a message in a secret code that only you and a trusted friend (or perhaps a fellow agent) can understand? That’s right: nothing.

Here’s something I don’t need to write in code: this month’s topic is secret codes. You probably figured that out already. Very smart, you are.

One of the easiest codes to learn is a simple substitution code. To convert your message into a secret code using a substitution code, you simply replace each letter with a letter or number using a consistent pattern. For example, a very simple approach would be to replace each letter with a number corresponding to its place in the alphabet. So ‘A’ would be replaced with ‘1’, ‘B’ with ‘2’ and so on. To say ‘Hello’ in this code, I would write this: 8-5-12-12-15.

That is a simple example. The code can be made much more complicated. There is no need to start numbering at ‘A’, for example. A super smart spy could start with the letter ‘X’ as ‘1’ and continue until the end of the alphabet, wrapping around and continuing at the beginning of the alphabet. An even more super smart spy could number backwards. The smartest of super smart spies might even substitute letters, such as replacing each letter with the one that follows it by 3 letters in the alphabet.

The secret to deciphering all these codes, though, is knowing the key. It does a spy no good to send a coded message if the person on the other end cannot decode it. That is why spies often agree on a secret code and memorize the key in advance.

That way, when one spy sends another spy a message like this:

IBWF B OJDF EBZ

The other spy knows that it means…. (oh, come on, you can figure that one out, can’t you? Here’s a hint: A=B)