Steven D. BREWER

Shortly after I moved to Amherst, I saw a map that marked the area around the Mill River in North Amherst as “Factory Hollow.” There are no factories there now. Most of the area is conservation land and some has been re-developed. But there are a variety of tantalizing features still remaining to show how it was used historically.

I had spent a while looking years ago to see if anyone had written a history of Factory Hollow, but had come up empty. I was delighted when I found that the Amherst Historical Society has organized walking tours of the Lower and Upper Mill River to talk about the history of the factories and mills that were present. And the people built and worked in them.

Today, I attended a tour of the lower Mill River. It was led by Bryan Harvey, a former administrator at UMass Amherst who I’ve known for many, many years. He did a fantastic job pointing out where various structures were, how they were used, and what evidence remains today. He also pointed out a number of names of families that were involved: Puffer, Dickinson, Jones, Wheelock, Roberts, Hobart, and others, many of whom have roads or features named after them. A few are still active in the area.

We began at Puffer’s Pond. There was a ice house at the site of a current beach used recreationally by families today. Steve Puffer, who was still active in town when we arrived was (I think) the grandson of the men who created the pond that was used to power many of the mills. He was also instrumental in getting much of the land conserved. His grandson was in attendance for the tour and told a number of stories, including that a driving force behind conserving the land was that his wife was “the original NIMBY” and was opposed to having more people in the area.

We walked downstream from Puffer’s Pond and went by the elegant Wheelock house. It sits right on the edge of the dam and is the only house with frontage on the pond. It was originally built by one of the textile mill owners. It is currently owned by Cassandra Clare, a best-selling author.

An oak tree on the property was recorded as the largest in Amherst in 1845, with an amusing story behind it. Supposedly, the owner wanted it cut down, but the son (perhaps on orders from the wife) drove iron spikes into the tree making it infeasible to fell.

The dam that creates Puffer’s Pond is probably the third dam constructed at that location. Earlier dams were probably made with timbers. Although you can’t see it in the picture, there is a round pipe visible at the left side of the dam through which water flowed for a penstock that powered the mills in the hollow below. There were also two mills that were originally situated at the dam: a sawmill on the north bank and a grist mill on the south. In 1863, the dam failed and the resulting flood destroyed most of the mills in the hollow.

The mills in factory hollow were mostly on the north side of Mill River. Currently, this area has been rebuilt as housing, with a set of apartments and a line of single-family homes along the street. When the mills were present, there was a canal along the north side of the river that powered the mills. Little remains of the canal now, except a depression in ground where the canal ran. In some places some stonework can still be seen, but it was not visible from where we were.

The mills sprang up largely due to trade issues related to the Napoleonic wars. In response to British interference with shipping — and impressing sailors to serve on British warships =- the United States passed the Non-Importation Act in 1806. The Act was ineffective, but caused the price of textiles to rise. Local entrepreneurs saw an economic opportunity to make a profit and the first mill opened in 1809. After the war of 1812, the Act was repealed and many of the textile mills became unprofitable.

We walked the Julius Lester trail (named for another local author) that runs through conservation land on the south side of the river to the recreation area. There we looked at a water control structure that directed water into a canal to power the Old Grist Mill on Montague Road, one of the only historic mill buildings still standing in Amherst. Evidently, past this mill there was yet another mill farther down. I know there is a Mill Road in Hadley that is also along the same river probably had yet another mill.

At the conclusion of the tour we walked back to the starting point. I’ve registered for the Upper Mill River tour on November 1st. There is another whole set of mills on the streams above Puffer’s Pond. I’ve walked this trail before and seen the remains of foundations and water control structures. It should be fun!

This morning, I saw a young man driving a truck. Something about his appearance or expression reminded me of myself as a young man. He had a scruffy beard and was wearing a plain jacket. He looked at me and we locked eyes for a moment. He looked dispirited and unhappy.

When I was a small child, I was riding in a car with my grandfather, father, and brother. The topic of conversation was what you would want to be when you grew up. As I recall, my grandfather said he wanted to be an eccentric millionaire. My father said he wanted to be a young man of independent means. I didn’t really understand what that meant, as a child. But it made a big impression on my brother. (I remember being more inclined, like my grandfather, to be an eccentric millionaire).

As I thought about the young man in the truck, I reflected on my own youth.

I was not particularly happy. Those were not “the best years of my life.” I had poor judgment. I did foolish things. And I suffered for it.

I never felt very attractive. I was short and pudgy. I self-conscious and overcompensated, trying to appear happy, funny, and clever.

I was not athletic in my youth either. My efforts to play team sports were not rewarded with either success or encouragement. I did have periods of time when I did some individual sports: running, weight lifting, and cycling. Being more fit however, did not — as far I could ever tell — make me more attractive. One hundred times zero is still zero.

If I had been “of independent means” I don’t think I would have been any happier. I would have still been foolish and had poor judgment. And if people had been attracted to me because of my wealth, well… That sounds like it would have been potentially disastrous.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to value such wisdom as comes with age. As a retiree, my means appear adequate to my needs. I can now look back at my squandered youth with equanimity. I can accept the physical limitations that come with age having few or no regrets.

This isn’t to say I don’t still do foolish things. Or make mistakes. But I’ve become a lot more comfortable in my own skin, warts and all.

Would I want to be a young man of independent means? No, thank you. I would still rather be an eccentric millionaire.

A few weeks ago, I got a private message from someone I didn’t recognize on Discord. They’re a member of the Western Mass Writer’s Guild Discord server. I don’t normally chat with random people on the Internet but I thought I’d see if they were a local writer or what. We exchanged a few messages. They said they were an artist and asked if I wanted to look at their portfolio. They had a dozen or more pieces of digital art where you could see both the original line drawings and the finished, full-color artworks.

I’m not sure why they messaged me. I think they may have seen the posts about starting Elegant Lich and hoped that maybe we would be in the market to purchase artwork. They never really said.

We exchanged a few dozen messages during the following weeks. I made it clear early on that I wasn’t in the market to purchase artwork. But, during the conversation, I also was trying to suss out if they were a human being or a bot.

I asked how they were. “Sad” because they didn’t have any commissions. I asked what they were going, “Nothing much. Trying to get some work.” I made a point of sharing public aspects of my life: the same things I was posting to social media: hanging out with Tanuki, getting a flat tire fixed, getting vaccinated, etc. They said nothing to suggest they had any kind of human life.

Finally, I admitted that I was trying to tell if they were a human being. They haven’t contacted me since.

This was all before SFWA ran their panel discussion today: I Swear I’m Not a Robot — How Publishers Are Handling the Pressure to Confirm Human Authorship. It was very helpful and I took careful notes. The panel included a number of editors that are struggling with the problem of identifying AI-generated manuscripts.

They pointed out that the problem is not just manuscripts. The entire ecosystem is under attack. It includes reviews and artwork and correspondence. “In every space there might be writing, people are using these tools to conduct scams” — M.L. Clark.

All of the editors reported a significant amount of trauma over the experience of having accepted, nearly published, or published AI generated manuscripts — and only learning they’d been scammed through reports from readers. It’s a struggle to extend and maintain trust — especially with new authors who most need to find a receptive, supportive community. What is the community’s role? What is the responsibility of the staff? Where does the buck stop? What do we do? “Dealing with not being able to know is the challenge” — Michael J. Deluca.

There is a substantial debate about the potential role of using automated tools to identify AI-generated manuscripts. Some of the tools seem quite good right now. But it’s an arms race between the AIs and the tools. When do you use them? As a first line of defense, to protect your slush readers? Do you really trust the machine to make these decisions? There’s not a clear answer.

One editor said they might engage the author in a series of questions about their writing process, e.g. “Why did you use this PoV?” I thought, “Oh, no. I’m fucked.” I don’t know why I write the way I do. I’ve never taken any writing classes so I don’t even have the language to talk about why I write the way I do. But other people were careful to point out that the burden of proving they were human should not be on the author but on the editor. Still, retaining artifacts of the writing process, like outlines, rough drafts, revision histories, could all be useful to help demonstrate human authorship.

The moderator commented that Yog’s Law should still hold: Authors should certainly not have to pay to prove that they’re human.

There were a few encouraging points. First, Gen-AI is not good at generating long manuscripts. It can write good flash fiction but, the longer the manuscript, the less likely the AI is to be able to develop and maintain a complex narrative. Many of the people using AI are fundamentally lazy: simple checks can catch many of them. Also, current models are being funded by venture capital. As the true costs shift to the users, it may well not be economically viable to generate AI for the meagre pittance that short fiction writers earn, and discourage scammers from pursuing the “market.”

In the end, the recommendations were for editors to educate themselves, talk to each other, and build stronger networks of human connection. All good recommendations.

People who follow me on social media are already familiar with my characters Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. Lambda, of course, is a NeoBoxer.

I write about them pretty often. I’ve just finished a new novelette that features them and, since I’ve been thinking about them a lot, I thought I might offer a little background for fans.

Note: The picture is of my son’s boxer dog Tanuki. For some reason, the description of Lamba is nearly identical.

Three years ago, when I was writing Better Angels: Tour de Force, I wanted to write a story about Tau that was inspired by Lady and the Tramp, I called it The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau. Tau has learned that a girl NeoBoxer, Lambda, has come to the Truck Stop, but he’s depressed because she says she’s too busy to go on a date. The Better Angels and their allies wage a campaign to keep her partner, Totemo Isogashii, occupied for long enough for Tau to put the moves on Lambda. It’s the sort of fluff that led me to call the Better Angels stories fluffy military space opera.

In the years since I wrote that silly little story about Totemo Isogashii and Lambda, I’ve written dozens — maybe a hundred — little bits of microfiction about them. Here’s one example:

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Totemo said. She and Lambda were laying on the floor in a sunbeam.
Lamba lay on her back with her muppies splayed out. She wuffed, softly.
“I can’t relax,” Totemo said. “I’ve got so much to do and, instead, I’m just laying around here.”
Lambda had persuaded Totemo to sign up for a day-long cat-guided* rest day. Their facilitator was Tama, a fluffy, white cat with blue eyes.
After going out at dawn to hunt voles, they had spent hours just laying in the sun, moving periodically as the light moved across the floor.
Someone rang a triangle in the other room. Tama sprang to her feet and ran toward the sound.
“I hope it’s lunch!” Totemo said.
They arrived in the kitchen where three bowls were set on the floor. Tama was already eating out of one. Lambda took the second.
Totemo considered her options.

*Note: this was inspired by seeing an ad for a “cat-guided field trip” where people would pay money to go follow a cat around in the forest. Really.

Totemo and Lambda also show up in my novelette Bearly Believable, which is scheduled to appear in Hexfiled this month. As I’ve learned more about the characters, I decided to finally write the story of how they meet. It’s set, appropriately enough, on the planet Holufinia, the origin world of NeoBoxers.

I originally wrote about NeoBoxers in the same time frame as some of my very earliest SFF writing, more than twenty years ago. The first working title was “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” As I was writing Better Angels, I pulled out that old manuscript and reworked it as a Truck Stop story. I added some stuff and cut a lot of stuff, and retitled it Hope is a Cloned Puppy. From that manuscript, here is my earliest description of a NeoBoxer:

Tawny, with a black face, Beta was the NeoBoxer that had been provided to assist the crew. Beta was a dog, but not just any dog. NeoBoxers were the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding and not a small amount of genetic engineering. Created to lend their keen noses and stout hearts to any adventure, they also sought to forge strong bonds of loyalty among the crew. Beta gamboled among the crew members nudging them with his muzzle to encourage bonding.

Pascal admired his ability to work with both sides of the crew and his single-minded focus when he found a problem that was within his range of capacities. Beta could sense that there was division in the crew and he worked tirelessly to bring both sides together into a single pack with a common purpose.

The setting, Holufinia, is a distant world in the galaxy that got cut off after a disastrous civil war took down their advanced technology and the wormhole that connected them with galactic civilization. In Hope is a Cloned Puppy, we learn how the planet gets reconnected to the larger galactic civilization, we’re introduced to NeoBoxers, and we learn the origin of Tau, the NeoBoxer that lives on the Truck Stop.

I offered the manuscript as a story for the Truck Stop. But, after Better Angels came out, the publisher seemed to abandon the Truck Stop universe. I don’t believe any story has come out since. He never explained to me why. I was disappointed because I thought the shared universe idea was fun and wrote several other stories for it, including at least three more Better Angels stories.

The working title of my new story was “Totemo and Lambda Save the World.” The finished title is You Can’t Change Just One Thing. I would classify the story as Hopepunk. The book is primarily about the ecology of Holufinia. The title is a riff on Garrett Hardin’s Iron Law of Ecology, “You can never do just one thing.” Anything you do in an ecosystem touches everything else. We also learn how Totemo and Lambda meet, and the ways that meeting changes Totemo’s life.

I really love the characters. Totemo is an earnest, take-charge scientist. She’s abrasive and hard-driving, always working harder and smarter than anyone else. Lambda is the one with a sense of humor. She’s equally smart and capable, but she is always looking out for her human partner and not above using subterfuge to get her to take better care of herself and attend to her own needs. And she’s happy to have a little fun while doing it.

I keep coming back to NeoBoxers. When my oldest son was in first grade, he had an assignment to write every day. And after he’d written something, he was allowed to illustrate it with a picture. The first day, he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY!” and provided an illustration of a boxer dog wearing a cape. The next day he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY AGAIN!” and drew a similar picture. He did the same for every day that followed. Like father like son, I guess.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the story and will shortly start submitting it for publication. I’m hopeful it will find a home soon and I will be able to share it with you.

It’s frustrating how often articles get posted at the NYT that engage in specious, uncritical thinking — especially when it’s in the service of the rich and wealthy. Today’s example is Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I. (gift link) by Steven Rattner. His argument is that we need AI, not just because it is innovation, but because it will drive innovation. I call shenanigans.

He’s primarily focused on growth. He links productivity growth with higher standards of living. Of course, that hasn’t been true since Reagan. In the 1980s, productivity growth has only gone to enrich the very wealthiest and wages have been stagnant. He can fudge his argument by selectively showing periods on his charts.

I really loved the graph cited above. Yes! All of those “Data entry keyers” should clearly get jobs as “Data Scientists”. Problem solved!

Where he really lost me (if he ever “had me”) was when he started talking about innovation. He describes how [AI] “saved me and my colleague, Will McGrew, many hours of prowling the internet to research this essay. That left us with time to do other tasks.” First, the only reason it could save you that much time is because the oligarchs wrecked Internet search to force people to use their stochastic parrot. It was way easier to find things on the Internet before they broke it. Second, if you outsource your thinking to a robot, then you undermine the most important path to innovation.

Innovation is frequently taking ideas from one domain and leveraging them in another. People can do this when they develop expertise in multiple domains. When you outsource your thinking to a robot, you lose most or all of the ability to do that. You can, perhaps, more deeply specialize in your own domain. But without multidisciplinary thinking, you’re less likely to have the transformational insights that drive true innovation.

Most laughably, was his admission that “Thus far, the gains from artificial intelligence have accrued not to workers, but to investors who have reaped soaring profits from the explosive increase in the value of companies in the A.I. industry.” But there are lots of ways to fix that, he assures us. Please. The only way that’s getting fixed is if people organize and fight back. Like they’re doing. Maybe you could help, dude, rather than whining that we need to let the corporations help us grow and innovate.

Where we may be in agreement is in the need for additional regulation. We need to shut down the A.I. companies and let the research be done in public laboratories until it’s demonstrated to be safe and effective to be used. We wouldn’t let pharmaceutical companies release their beta cancer treatments to the public. The AI companies should not be releasing these untested systems to see what havoc they can wreak on the public until we have safeguards in place, and the assurance that they’re safe and effective.

AI may, someday, be shown to be safe and effective. But we should fight these companies trying to jam it down our throats as if our lives depended on it. Because they just might.

Chronic pain sucks. When pain is constant and inescapable, it preys on your mind, makes it hard to do anything, and contributes to depression. I’ve only had a couple of brushes with chronic pain, but they’ve been no fun.

My first serious experience with chronic pain was after I returned from Brazil and strained a rotator cuff in my shoulder. I think it was from pulling a rolling suitcase over rough pavement during a week in Brazil and a weekend in New York. It hurt all the time: no matter what I did it hurt. I found myself straining the shoulder worse trying to find a position where it didn’t hurt, which only made it worse. I got a shot of cortisone, which was totally ineffective (steroids don’t seem to have much effect on me). But I also got a prescription for Vicodin.

The Vicodin was amazing. About twenty minutes after I took it, the pain went away. The euphoria of not being in pain almost made me giddy, but I seemed otherwise completely unaffected and went into work every day like usual. After about six weeks, the shoulder had healed and I quit taking the Vicodin. Then I discovered that I had accomplished essentially nothing in the six weeks. I was “working”, but not actually getting my work done.

Nine years ago, I fell on the ice and injured my knee. It didn’t seem bad enough to require medical attention at the time, but it was never really the same after. I adjusted by taking steps one a time, especially going down. And I now generally use a “mobility aid” — a walking stick that gives me some additional stability.

Most of the time, it’s OK, but every so often, it acts up. It’s been acting up for the past week or two. It aches and is painful at random times. It makes it hard to sleep. Ibuprofen has generally been enough, but I don’t like taking it if I don’t have to.

There may be some kind of trigger, but thus far I’ve been unable to identify what it specifically is. I’m paying attention to how I stand up and do various ordinary activities. I’ve discovered that coping strategies like this can be very helpful to avoid exacerbating problems. I used to kind of throw myself out of bed but when I reached a certain age, I discovered that this was a great way to strain my back. So now I carefully swing my feet over the side of the bed and push myself up sideways. The same with getting out of the car or standing up from a chair.

I remember Philip used to joke that when you hit 30, it was like the warranty ran out. But at 60, you start to run up against the service life of your body’s components. But, like Indiana Jones said, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”

I was interested in the Ken Burns’ series about the American Revolution, but I have a hard time making myself watching things on television, so I was pleased when I saw the companion volume in the library. As with The Raider, it reminded me of familiar events, but provided a lot of additional perspectives which give me a more nuanced understanding of the events. And, once again, I’m baring my soul a bit here to describe my own naivete because my education in history was so meagre.

I first learned about the American Revolution when I was in public school in southwest Michigan. None of the locations were places I had ever visited or known about, which made them hard to picture or bring into any kind of alignment with each other. But subsequently I moved to Massachusetts and visited many of the other locations — even if only driving through on the highway — which now gives me a lot more insight into their relative location and geography. Of course, I’ve also spent many months on a Caribbean island which — though not a direct player in the American Revolution, was fundamental to the forces that were driving the dynamic of the revolution.

The book has chapters to the major episodes of the American Revolution. The stage is set and then the familiar events are described, often by using short vignettes that highlight particular people — all kinds of people — so you see the war not from some top-down perspective, but through the eyes of individuals: Soldiers, to be sure, but also women, enslaved people, indigenous people, and immigrants. Certainly there is a bias toward the wealthy, as they were the most likely to have left behind a journal or record of their experiences. But there is a clear striving for diverse viewpoints that enriches the storytelling.

In between the chapters are a series of essays that offer supplementary analysis that provides different ways for thinking about the events. One by Stephen Conway, argues that Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as fundamentally about America, whereas to the British, it was but one element out of a complex set of imperial events — and was driven less by events in America itself than changes that Britain was making to integrate their colonial empire around the world.

One thing I had never really understood about slavery was the extent to which it was the foundation upon which almost all of the really large fortunes were made in that time. The super wealthy people that everyone talked about when I was young were the robber barons (e.g. Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) who had made their fortunes after slavery. But in the time of the American Revolution, the Caribbean islands produced the truly outsized fortunes for the nations that colonized them. The entire war involved people trying to thread the needle between pursuing “freedom” while keeping people enslaved. The book does a good job of telling that story from multiple perspectives.

The Revolutionary War was also a civil war that divided families and neighbors. This was an aspect of the war that was largely glossed over in my previous education.There were a lot of loyalists who aligned with the British forces and fought against independency. The book has an essay and follows the story of several people who tell the loyalist side of the story. In the long run, things did not turn out well for most of them.

Unlike his series about the Civil War, there were no photographs to draw from to help visualize the scenes. The book uses historical paintings, though most of them were made long after the war and were designed to represent a particular points of view rather than reflect any historical accuracy. Of course, as Werner Herzog has described about the Crimean War, even documentary photographs were often staged for effect.

The book also has historical maps showing the disposition of forces in the various battles. These I found to be more of a curiosity, rather than anything useful as a visual guide. They were often not in English or had the directions reversed, and there was no consistency to how the units were represented. I would have appreciated having interpretive maps of the battles drawn using a consistent style to show how the battles occurred. But maybe I’m just a weirdo.

Reading a heavy coffee-table book was inconvenient. But still recommended. A good read.

The Board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is organizing a series of kaffeeklatsches this fall as outreach to the membership to discuss this year’s Nebula Awards and the new Recommended Reading List. We had our first last night and it went great.

Day Al-Mohamed, one of our newest Board Members, had started offering “office hours” for members to stop by with questions. But in our previous Board Meetings, she had commented that she wasn’t getting much attendance.

Upon reflection, I wondered if maybe “office hours” didn’t sound inviting enough and that maybe we could attract more interest by calling it a kaffeeklatsch and having two Board Members attend so that — even if no other members came, at least she wouldn’t have to sit there alone. She — and the rest of the Board — expressed enthusiasm.

I’m not sure I’d heard the word “kaffeeklatsch” before joining the science fiction community. The word refers to gossip over coffee. In the SFF community, a kaffeeklatsch is an small gathering typically centered around a particular author or personality where people can attend to engage in informal conversation. It’s more structured than simply meeting in a bar or hotel lobby and, as I understand it, was chosen as a term to avoid having the connotation of being associated with alcohol. SFWA also runs an annual silent auction where people can bid to participate in a kaffeeklatsch with prominent authors.

I’ve attended a few kaffeeklatsches, including a particularly memorable one with Neil Clarke. I have to admit that, personally, as an attendee, I tend to like structured events more than unstructured. I always worry about what will happen if nobody attends. Or — even worse — if almost nobody attends. What if I’m there by myself and have to carry on a whole conversation with someone! It’s enough to make me resort to Reverse Imposter Syndrome!

When I first attended my first Worldcon in Chicago, I was given the opportunity to do a “table talk” — that was effectively a kaffeeklatsch. Being new, I signed up for pretty much everything. When the time came, I found my table, among a bunch of others where people were having lively conversations. But nobody came to mine. Eventually, a friend walking by took pity. I didn’t make that mistake again.

We had our first one last night. I had a great time. Day and I were joined by M.L. Clark (the SFWA Communications & Marketing Coordinator) who had set up all the background resources for us, produced a great publicity piece, and came to the first one to make sure everything worked. There were a couple of minor bumps getting everything set up and running. But we got two members to stop by and we all had a nice discussion about SFWA and writing and publishing.

The next several kaffeeklatsches are already posted. We need to get the topics updated. And finish getting Board Members signed up and RSVPed. I also want to make a couple more adjustments to the back end to make it easier for me to support them, but I think we’ll be ready in plenty of time for the next one. I think these can be a great step toward having the board engage more directly with the membership.

I have been looking for books to help improve my background in literature and was excited to find The Emerson Circle that talks about important early-American writers who surrounded Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although this book dwelt a bit longer on their personal histories and less on their writing, it was still a useful introduction.

A number of years ago, an Esperanto friend from Chile and his wife were visiting the Boston area. I drove in to spend a day with them and do a little sightseeing. I thought my friend, who is a bibliophile, might appreciate visiting Walden Pond and the Thoreau museum. I didn’t know much about it, but I had seen signs driving past Concord.

When we visited, we also drove to the Old North Bridge to see some of the Revolutionary War sights. I was surprised to see signs for Emerson’s house. And Louisa May Alcott’s house. I was completely unaware of the connections among these authors.

I did know a bit about Thoreau. My father had read his work and I had at least a passing familiarity with it. But I didn’t know anything about the museum. Or his life. Or the other people in Emerson’s circle. Some, like Nathanial Hawthorne, I was aware of (We read The Scarlet Letter in high school). Others, like Margaret Fuller, I was wholly ignorant of.

After my visit to the museum, I read some of Thoreau’s writing and wrote about it in my blog. I think that post still stands up pretty well, thirteen years later.

I was a bit disappointed with the first half of Nichols’ book. Partly, I think it assumed the reader would know more about the authors than I did. It also had a tendency to dwell on the minutiae of their lives: How many times this child was struck on the palm with a ferule. Which house they lived in this year or that. I found a lot of that pretty tedious.

I was looking for the ideas in their writing and how those ideas were passed back and forth. But the book seemed to expect that of course the reader would have read all their works beforehand. Since I had not, I needed to read between the lines quite a bit until I had picked up enough background knowledge to begin to fill in the gaps.

The second half of the book was closer to what I was looking for. There was more discussion of how the writers were responding to the important issues of the day: suffrage, abolition, the Civil War, etc. And it contrasted the types of writing that the different authors were publishing on the issues.

The book also got me to reflect on the various author’s communities I belong to. This fall, I’m hoping to spend more time reading the works nominated for the Nebula Awards which will help me gain a better understanding of the people in my community. Now that I’m retired, I finally have more time and energy to devote to reading. And I’ll also look for more books like The Emerson Circle to provide me with introductions to other important groups of historical authors.

I rarely read biographies, but this book used the life of Evans Carlson to provide a vast amount of context to the story of China and the war in the Pacific. It truly expanded my perspective on a topic that I might have said I was already familiar with, but showed me how little I really knew.

The full title is The Raider: The untold story of a renegade marine and the birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II. That’s quite a mouthful. It was written by a colleague at UMass Amherst.

When I was an elementary or middle school student, I got excited about World War II fighter planes. My father, whose kneejerk response to anything was to buy a book, bought me several books about fighter planes. One of them was The Flying Tigers. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out which book it might have been, but it turns out there have been a lot of books about the Flying Tigers and search engines are worthless now.

The Flying Tigers were a squadron of American pilots recruited to fly as volunteers in support of China prior to start of World War II. The vision it presented was a rather hagiographic portrayal of Claire Chenault and the pilots he taught to use the strengths of the P-40 to be able to beat the, lighter and more maneuverable, Japanese Zero. It was an exciting book for a young man and I’m sure I read it several times.

What it didn’t really talk about at all were the complexities of China or what the U.S. interests were. The Chinese, when they were mentioned at all, were described primarily as faceless hordes of people who were able to use manpower to replace mechanized work, repairing runways or building the Burma Road. Chiang Kai-shek and his wife featured prominently as elegant and graceful leaders. The ongoing civil war, the communist movement, and Western imperialism were all elided — or perhaps just minimized. As a boy, I was there for the exciting stuff.

The Flying Tigers don’t come up in this book at all. But I provide the above to explain some of the limitations of my understanding before reading it and how it dovetailed with what I already knew.

Evans Fordyce Carlson was the son of an itinerant pastor in New England. He ran away at a young age, tried working at various things, and eventually joined the Army. He served in World War I, primarily in an administrative capacity. He left the armed forces and was unhappy. He eventually decided to rejoin, but they wouldn’t restore him to the rank he had earned, so he decided to just start over in the Marine Corps. The theme of just going back and starting over recurs several times throughout his life.

In part, Carlson rejoined because he wanted to go to China. It’s not clear where the idea of going to China came from, but eventually he got his chance. He remade himself again in China, becoming an intelligence officer and began to educate himself about China and the completing forces that were trying to assert control.

The book does a great job of leading the reader through the various epiphanies he had as came to understand his own country’s role in creating and perpetuating the inequities in China. Carlson idealized Emerson and carried a book of his essays with him that he studied and underlined passages in. He believed in small-d “democracy” and the role of ordinary people in enacting it. As he came to know the leaders of communists, in particular Zhu De, he was persuaded that they were the ones most committed to democracy. He also found their approach to guerilla warfare could be transformative. It broke down the hierarchies among soldiers, emphasized educating individuals to understand the nature of the conflict they were in and why they were fighting. It also empowered them to be able to act on their own initiative in the absence of orders.

Back in the United States, Carlson had the opportunity to meet and form a personal connection with FDR. This ultimately led to him being given license to create a regiment of soldiers — “The Raiders” the book is named after — that were modeled on his approach to guerilla warfare. It was Carlson who coined the term “gung ho” which originally meant just “working together,” but later grew to have the popular meaning it has today. His soldiers distinguished themselves in several engagements in the Pacific island-hopping campaign. Eventually, however, the unconventional nature of the force became too much for the Marine Corps hierarchy to tolerate. He was sidelined and the force brought back into alignment with traditional Marine-Corps doctrine.

The end of the book deals with how thoroughly Carlson was whitewashed out of history. His association with the communists was used to discredit his ideas during the Red Scare. As the book says, nothing is named after him and there are no monuments to him, other than his tombstone at Arlington. In 2014, 70 years after the original Raiders were disbanded, the Marine Corps renamed their special forces unit The Raiders to establish an historical link between the current unit and the first.

This only scratches the surface of what’s here. There’s a lot more about the man, his personal life, and the other fascinating figures he came into contact with during his adventures. But, as I said initially, I don’t usually take much interest in biographies. The context of this one, however, made it well worth my time.

I read Cory Doctorow’s newsletter Pluralistic regularly and this book was essentially an expanded version of a number of his columns. But I found several points insightful.

Recently I cited Cory when I wrote about not being able to speak centaur. He unpacks his “centaur/reverse centaur” model and provides an explanation of what “AI” really is and how we’ve gotten here. This is all stuff I’m already pretty familiar with.

I think his principal argument comes up after he talks about copyright. Basically, he points out that copyright is not going to protect individual artists for several reasons. First, the benefits of copyright have been almost entirely captured by the big publishers and media companies: they can wield it to extract profits from the public, but they pass a smaller and smaller fraction back to the creative workers that created the copyrighted works. And second, because the things that AI companies are doing (when they aren’t stealing works) would not be banned by copyright — or, if they were, it would make many other ordinary activities illegal.

His key insight is that creative workers need to recognize that they are “workers” and, like other workers, need to organize to have enough power to stand up against the big media companies. As a long-time union activist this is a story that is near-and-dear to my heart. I have frequently seen people who look for rules or laws to protect them (like minimum wage, for example) rather than organizing with their co-workers to demand the power to extract concessions from employers directly. He points out that the Taft Hartley Act, that cleverly and malevolently forbid sectoral bargaining, resulted in the high water mark for labor activism in the 1940s, and has allowed the oligarchs to slowly claw back most of what they lost to labor after the gilded age. I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time.

He also talks a bit about what happens after the bubble collapses. Philip Brewer has written a thoughtful essay about that and Cory’s perspective is largely aligned in terms of the big picture. But he goes on to point out all of the cool stuff that small, open-source models can do to make us all centaurs. He cites some examples he’s using himself and points out a bunch of other possibilities that small-scale AI could offer to enable creative workers to do their creative work better.

It’s a thoughtful and insightful book that pulls together a number of Cory’s ideas into a coherent and organized form. It’s worth reading.

On the first day of August, 1996, I arrived in Amherst and undertook my new position as Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center for the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now, on the last day of August, 2026, I am concluding my career in academia.

I had thought I had performed my last professional duty on July 21. That was the last scheduled meeting of the Rules Committee. But a couple of weeks ago, the Secretary floated three dates for the Rules Committee to meet to discuss an issue before the new semester. Two of the proposed dates were in September, but he also proposed August 31 — my last date of employment. And that was the date they chose. It was fun to see my colleagues one last time.

The Faculty Senate and Union are discussing coordinated action. Often, their spheres of responsibility do not intersect, but current actions of the administration are impinging on both. It gave me an opportunity to offer a historical perspective. My perception has been that faculty and departments have been substantially weakened over the time of my career. Of course, it started much earlier: I was hired as part of the wholesale replacement of tenure-system faculty with non-tenure-system faculty that substantially weakened the power and independence of the faculty. It actually started later here than many other places. I told them about the Lazare Commission in 2001 that evaluated the needs of the campus while choosing a new chancellor. In 2011, I looked back on the outcome of the Commission. I had believed they had recognized the value of the faculty as a unique strength — but instead they chose to invest in anything and everything else in order to bring down the quality of the faculty to the same level as all of the other parameters at the University. Similarly, when a subsequent Chancellor tried to develop a new budget model using Responsibility Centered Management (RCM), the effort largely failed — but it did have the effect of siphoning off most of the budgets from Departments and giving them to the Colleges under the control of the deans. Departments are much weaker now than when I joined the Faculty. I wished my colleagues well as they undertake the continue the struggle.

For my part, I began my career with the goal of empowering students to take control of their own educations. I wanted them to come to see every class they took — not just mine — as an invitation to immerse themselves in some new area of study and work to satisfy themselves, rather than slavishly try to merely do what was “required.” This was the actual learning goal of every class I taught and every assignment in my teaching. Few students came in with that perspective. Some were ready to learn it. Others realized it during my teaching. Some did not. But I felt it was the right goal to strive for and was always overjoyed to see the light bulb go on.

I wrapped up one other duty yesterday: a student who took my writing class last spring requested a letter of recommendation. I will probably get a few more of these over the next year. But they will tail off pretty quickly now that I’m no longer teaching. It was always fun when students let you know they were accepted into a new program. But I won’t miss writing the letters.

Someone asked if I was doing anything to celebrate. I actually spent most of the day taking my mother in for a medical procedure. Going through the procedure myself would have been easier than watching her go through it. But afterwards she requested a scoop of ice cream, so I got one too. That’s as much celebration as I need.

And tomorrow, I begin my new life.

I’m having a little FOMO. I decided to skip Worldcon this year. I had originally intended to go. That was why I had signed for LOSCon last year. But I had a somewhat mixed experience last year, so instead I decided to just stay home. I’m not really having much FOMO because I really don’t like going to conventions all that much in the first place. But a little.

Last year I did everything. I did Arisia, Boskone, Watch City, Nebulas, Readercon, Worldcon, and LOSCon. I had signed up for everything since I had a new book coming out! But then my book didn’t come out in December. Or January. Or February. Or May. Or July. Or August. In November, we finally got copies while I was at LOSCon. And I probably should have signed up to do everything again this year to promote my new book. But I couldn’t.

Part of it is traveling. Since I have to use a portable oxygen concentrator to fly, it’s pretty inconvenient. It’s really helpful to have someone to travel with me but I wasn’t sure I could get anyone to go. Often my son has traveled with me, but the semester is about to start. And I really didn’t want to travel by myself.

A lot of people love going to conventions for the parties. Unfortunately, due to my health issues, I can’t really attend parties anymore. I need to wear an N95 mask and I especially try to avoid crowded spaces that have poor ventilation. So I can’t do the parties.

Note: It’s worth pointing out that I hate parties and I would never go to them anyway if I could possibly avoid it. I can’t stand parties and I would rather eat shards of broken glass that go to one. But now I *can’t* so it’s OK.

As an aside, I saw that COVID is high in California anyway, so I’m feeling like I dodged a bullet. Last year, pretty much everyone who worked at my publisher’s dealer table got COVID, flu or both. I didn’t — because I wore a mast the whole time.

I enjoy serving on panels at conventions. I think I’m not bad at it. I used to worry about what I was going to stay, but I’ve discovered that if you stick a mic in front of me, I can babble endlessly. People generally seem to think I have something useful to offer.

I liked selling books in the bookstore I was really surprised to find I was pretty good at that. But after the unpleasant run-in with the other author last year, I was reluctant to do that again.

A final factor that played into my decision was that this is my last week of employment. Monday, August 31, is my very last day. As it turned out, getting all of the paperwork organized and submitted has been unexpectedly complicated. You would think a giant university would know how to manage something like that, that obviously happens literally every day. But they don’t. Which day is my “date of retirement”? My last day of employment? Or the first day after? They don’t know. (It turns out it’s my last day of employment.) I’m glad to not be trying to resolve these issues remotely from California.

In the end, I’m guess glad I didn’t go to Worldcon. I do have a little FOMO. I will miss seeing my SFWA folks and a lot of the other authors I’ve worked with. But I’m glad to miss the travel and the stress.

I do plan to go next year, when it is in Montreal, because I can just drive there. I’ll see you all then!

For months, I’ve been needing to shut down my old blog and archive my old posts. And I finally found a solution: blog.sh!

Although the term “blog” was coined in 1997, I didn’t write my first post until 2002. I started blogging defensively. What happened was that I would start drafting an email to one person, then think “Oh, this other person would be interested too” and add them, but then realize that some of what I was writing wasn’t really appropriate for them, so then I would make two emails and have to copy and paste and edit. Finally, I realized I could just put all of the “public” info — the things I didn’t care if anyone read — into a blog post and only send specific emails to particular people.

I had been exploring wikis at the time, using PHPWiki and saw that there was a mechanism to do daily posts using a calendar interface. I used that for a couple of years but then decided to switch to using Drupal for blogging. My blog resided at blog.bierfaristo.com and my first post was on Dec 14, 2005. By this time I was also getting interest from other organizations who wanted to set up websites that were effectively blogs: the Amherst Democratic Town Committee and Esperanto League for North America (now Esperanto-USA) so I set up Drupal websites for them as well.

I was tangentially involved when the University of Massachusetts Amherst decided to standardize on Drupal as their content management system. I had been using it for a few years at that point. They brought in a focus group and had two presentations: one was by a Drupal consultant and the other was for a commercial product that was a static-site generator. I could see the attraction of using the static-site generator. But I knew that the campus would need to accept content via the web and, their only solution for that was to hand-write one-off PHP scripts. That sounded like a disaster from a security standpoint.

One of the short-comings of Drupal was that it was difficult to update: point updates were pretty easy, but each major update required migrating the content and completely retheming the site. And when Drupal 8 came out they basically threw out all of the expertise anyone had developed by completely redesigning the entire system and made managing the dependencies so complex you needed a separate tool (composer). So, I gave up on Drupal and never updated from Drupal 7.

A lot of other people did as well. Some folks created a fork called backdrop that rejected the changes that Drupal 8 had made. I had initially considered switching to that as well, but they had decided not to support the antiquated “blog” system and it required migrating the content into a different content type. So I didn’t bother making the switch.

During this period of time I had also started using Twitter and eventually also set up a separate Twitter feed for my author work. I quit using it and finally deleted my accounts when Twitter started being run by a Nazi. I grabbed archives of my feeds before I did so. But I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

When I set up my author blog (where you’re reading this post), I decided to use WordPress. Mainly, as I’ve written elsewhere, this was because I could get my hosting service to manage the install and keep it up-to-date. It works OK, although I’ve been worried about security as AI is being used to find vulnerabilities. But I try to use relatively few modules and make sure they stay updated. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Early on, the security in WordPress was execrable, which was in part why I went with Drupal as a CMS. It seems better now.

In the interim, my old blog site still languished on Drupal 7. I hadn’t used it in several years. Even though Drupal 7 had been end-of-lifed a couple of times, people still kept patching it to keep it working. But finally, they said they really, really, really were going to stop. And, in April, I started getting a daily email whining that it really was EoL and needed to be taken down. So I was interested when I saw the announcement about blog.sh that was optimized for building an archive site.

I was particularly interested in a static site generator for an archive because I wanted something that wouldn’t require maintenance. It wasn’t something I would necessarily watch all the time and so I didn’t want to have to think about managing security. I wanted something that could just sit there.

I used it to set up the blog for Elegant Lich and that worked pretty well. So I decided to create an archive site: archive.bierfaristo.com and begin migrating content into it. I migrated the blog posts first. And I was able to import my twitter feeds.

I still have a few outstanding challenges. I tried to migrate my blog from Esperanto-USA, but that blog has been gone a long time: I tried to grab some posts from the wayback machine but have only been partially successful. I was an early user of Flickr and I still have a lot of images there. Phil and I used an early version of lychee to build image galleries. When they switched to a new new system, the upgrade looked complicated, so I never updated that either and it’s kind of orphaned. I don’t see these as high priorities. But things I can work on if I feel like it.

I have lost some things. I think I failed to grab a backup from the brief time I was at mastodon.lol. I don’t think I’ll bother to grab my history from Facebook. I very rarely wrote anything specifically for Facebook. Early on, you could gateway your posts from Twitter to Facebook, but they killed that after a while. I mostly wrote for my blog and then shared links there. They never got much traction because, of course, Facebook’s whole business model is to hide things you post from your friends unless you pay them.

I’m not expecting anyone to be that interested in my old posts anyway. But I can often remember an old post where I mentioned something or linked to something, and I’ll be interested to look things up, link to things, or share them again when they’re relevant.

The author of blog.sh seemed a little surprised at how quickly I found his system and started using it. I think I saw his original announcement at Mastodon: someone must have boosted it into my feed. I’ve identified a handful of minor problems that he’s promptly fixed. And I made one feature request that’s in the works too. (I offered to try to try to write the feature myself, which he politely declined. I really didn’t want to learn how to write in Ruby anyway, but I felt compelled to offer.)

And when this blog has run it’s course, I should be able to easily pull it into my archive site as well. It’s a nice feeling to have this long standing problem resolved.

John Gruber would like you to know that HE isn’t perpetuating the use of Twitter by going there to get “interesting content.” Only the people who post interesting content exclusively to Twitter are doing that.

Bullshit.

Nobody has to go to Twitter. Or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. You just don’t. People who use those services are pariahs as far as I’m concerned.

Your presence there is why those people post things there. And your willingness to go there is how they justify to advertisers to spend money there. By using those services, you are perpetuating their use. You are.

Similarly, I’ve heard a number of people say, “But it’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family members or community!” That’s also not true. They are there because it’s how they can get in touch with you. Your presence is keeping them there.

I remember back when I was using those services, I already realized that it wasn’t healthy. But it wasn’t until getting away, that I came to realize how stressful the constant barrage of advertising and algorithmically promoted content really was. It seems trite, but the world seems quieter and brighter when you’re not staring into a cesspool all day.

The AI slop has made it even worse. Reportedly as many as half of the posts there are written by AI now. The tech-bros have realized that slop is giving their services a bad name. But they’re trying really hard to distinguish between good slop and bad slop. The NYT claims, “Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop.” Uh… No. It’s all slop.

What’s funniest is that services like LinkedIn, that was constantly begging people to use AI to write their posts, is among those who are now trying to crack down on slop. They have a button for people to report content that “seems like AI slop.”

Now Anthropic is talking about watermarking their slop and, all of sudden, people are all up in arms about it. “But I wouldn’t have time to write everything I want to without AI.” No. If you’re using AI, you’re not writing it.

To come full circle, one of those quoted in the article is John Gruber, who calls the watermarking system “a Perversion of Writing“. No. Using AI to write for you is the perversion of writing. Write your own stuff or don’t. Don’t let a robot write for you and try to pretend it’s your own.

My brother shared a post that used the word “eigentlich” (which in German just means “actually”). I said it looked like “elegant lich.” And then a few minutes later, we both said, “That would make a great name for a fantasy magazine!” So we decided to start one.

It also gave me an excuse to try blogsh.app. It’s a static site generation system that runs at the command line. You can do all your editing in markdown using vim and the system builds out static web pages. But it also can post announcements at either Mastodon or Bluesky and direct readers there to leave comments. It’s got a bunch other bells and whistles too.

As an aside, the blog.sh system was primarily designed as a way to gather together all of your old content spread across different services so that you can archive it all yourself in one place. It’s a really cool idea. I’m interested in doing that myself. But this seemed like a low-stakes way to try the system out.

I only ran into one really difficult problem while setting it up. I didn’t uncomment one line in a configuration file and it took me several hours to figure out what the problem was. Other than that, it was just figuring out how things are set up and where the things are. For someone without a strong background in unix, it would be a lot more difficult. But both my brother and I are old hands with unix, so it felt very comfortable exploring and using the system.

It’s been a busy couple of days as we set up the DNS, hosting, software, and social media accounts. I registered the domain name elegantlich.com and we put a placeholder there, where the magazine will actually go. Then we set up a blog at blog.elegantlich.com that we can use for testing and planning. We also created accounts at bluesky and mastodon.

We wrote a few posts. Phil wrote an introductory post and a post about what kinds of fiction we might look for. I wrote a post about creating the graphic identity for Elegant Lich. I was very pleased with the woodcut I found that seems like a good place to start.

Now we can actually start thinking about our project to make plans, timelines, and budgets. We could probably self-fund a very minimal publication, but I think we’re going to explore running a kickstarter. We attended a workshop on running kickstarters at the Nebula Conference and I think this might be a good fit. We’ve already identified a bunch of tiers that we could go for: dedicated web hosting, paper publication, and pro rates for authors.

Feel free to follow along as we conduct our planning in public. And, if you’re an author, start thinking about what kind of fiction you might want to submit to Elegant Lich. We’re having fun and we hope you will too.

I read an essay today: I Wanted to Own the Harness. Then Codex Desktop Won. It is seemingly about someone who has fully integrated AI into their workflow — and their life — and finds it indispensable. Cory Doctorow would probably call him a “centaur”.

Cory Doctorow has written extensively about two ways that people interact with AI. Some people are “centaurs” and use AI to enhance and extend their own abilities. Others, who are not so lucky, are “reverse centaurs.”

Reverse centaurs are people that live in a Taylorized hellspace where the AI is using the person to extend its abilities.

In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.

I say above that the article is “seemingly about someone who has fully integrated AI into their workflow” because I can barely understand what he’s saying.

As a long-time programmer and technical user, I’m generally familiar with technology. However, as an author and educator, I’ve personally avoided using generative AI. I’ve written a handful of posts explaining why. Which isn’t to say I haven’t tried to generally keep up with the field. That said, I found reading this post almost totally incoherent.

I get that he started out looking for a way to maintain control of his his front end and workflow and still be able to switch among back-end models, in order to not get locked into a single vendor. That makes sense. But then he quit worrying about that as a goal because this setup required less of his attention? I think?

I do understand that he has a little dog (a Phalène) on the screen that sounds a lot like the Talking Moose. Except maybe it actually listens to you? I installed an early version of the Talking Moose. It did not measurably improve my productivity.

He goes on to say things like this:

In its own agentic benchmark, Ponytail cut source code by 54 percent across twelve Haiku 4.5 feature tasks and passed all twenty adversarial safety runs. It also used 22 percent fewer tokens, cost 20 percent less, and finished 27 percent faster. Its large wins came when a native HTML input replaced hundreds of custom lines. On irreducible backend work, it barely changed anything. The mechanism is visible in the diff.

What?

My brother said, “Cutting it by 50% would leave you with 102 syllables. Cutting it by 54% would leave you with about 94 syllables.” I guess I’m only familiar with Haiku 1.0.

Anyway, this excerpt is selected more or less randomly. I could have picked any of another dozen paragraphs that are equally orthogonal to anything in my experience and that use a bunch of terms I would have to go off and research to really understand what they mean. (Years ago, I might have used “grok” here, but not any more. Thanks, asshole trillionaire.)

I’m glad it’s working for him, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to speak centaur. Honestly, I’m not sure I really want to either.

In August of 2023, I pitched establishing an online writing group for the Straw Dog Writers Guild, modeled on the SFWA Weekly Writing Date. The rest is history. As we start our fourth year, I’m looking forward to another great year.

I had started attended the Writing Date soon after I joined SFWA and I found it helpful. It was a nice way to meet people and to have some “accountability” for putting a block of writing time.

When we did a survey of Straw Dog members, a theme emerged that people wanted to meet other members and write together. But there was also an interest in having more virtual events, especially for people who don’t want to drive after dark in winter. I realized the writing date model was a good fit.

The program committee liked the idea and on September 16, 2023 I got my first request to join the group. Since then, we have met nearly every week (with the exception of holidays). There was a initially a surge of interest and then the group settled into a steady-state with an handful of participants every week — sometimes as few as one or two, but typically five or six — with new people regularly joining and folks dropping out after a while.

At the end of that first fall, I wrote a paragraph as part of my year-in-writing review:

In the fall, I established Straw Dog Writes for the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild. It’s a program modeled on the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association Writing Date. I’ve gotten about 20 participants (about half of whom might show up on any particular week). And about half are pre-existing members, half new members (who’ve signed up to participate), and a handful of people who are not yet members but who are considering it. This has been about as good as I could possibly have hoped.

And after a full year, I wrote a brief report of my experiences. It was mostly satisfactory, although I periodically questioned whether I had really succeeded in building a stable group that could sustain the group if I wasn’t there every week making it happen. That was true during year two as well. But over the course of this past year, participation has grown. We now typically have more like nine or ten. Furthermore, we have developed a core group of participants that make the group feel like more than just me pushing it along. It’s felt really good to have the group find its audience.

As we now go into year four, I’m looking forward to another great year. Straw Dog is beginning a redesign of their web presence that I’m involved in, so I’m hopeful I can improve how Straw Dog Writes is represented on the web. I think a better graphic identity would help too. I would also like to see Straw Dog Writes have a steering committee of folks interested in helping think through how we can improve.

As always, Straw Dog Writes is open to anyone who would like to try it out. I invite you to contact me to get the Zoom link. And if it is useful to you, please consider joining the Straw Dog Writers Guild to support the activities we do.

When I was a graduate student, I read a book by Wittgenstein: Notes on Logic. It was just a series of brief notes, few of which I can now remember, that represented reflections that Wittgenstein had made on observations, insights, and contradictions related to logic. One was meaningful enough, I used it as my .sig for a while back in the 1990s: “If someone says, ‘I have a body,’ then one can ask, ‘who is speaking here with this mouth?'” This book has the same kind of feel, with many pithy observations, insights, and contradictions about writing fiction.

It’s not a book you can sit down and read straight through. At least, I could not. I would read a handful of notes (they’re numbered from 1 to 280) and then I would need to put the book down for a while.

I got my copy from the library. If I had owned a copy, I would have used a highlighter every few pages to keep track of the bits I agreed with or disagreed with. Or had no frame of reference to understand.

I don’t know whether I would have found the book useful as a beginning writer. And I’m not sure how useful I find it as an experienced writer. I’m not sure “useful” is quite the right word. It reminds me a bit of someone who said that the rules of Esperanto are all permissions. This book is largely about giving you permission to do it your way. She tells you how she does it, but makes it clear that she doesn’t think that’s the only way to do it. Or even the best way. It’s just what she does — your mileage may vary.

I never took a class in writing, in spite of teaching writing for 25 years. Indeed I never took a class in many of the things I became expert at. I never took a class for computer programming, or unix, or the web, or technology of any kind. Yet, I became a kind of computer guru. I never took a course in Esperanto, yet I became an award-winning author and poet. It isn’t as though I never took classes: I did a bachelor’s degree with two majors, a masters degree, and a doctorate. But I always was an autodidact even when taking classes: I looked at classes as an invitation to develop expertise in whatever I was studying. Sometimes the class helped, sometimes it didn’t.

I think this book helped.

As I was thinking about writing this review, I kept thinking of things I would want to argue about. Or agree with. Or highlight — if I’d had a highlighter, I might have done that. But I’m not sure that’s really the point.

278. It’s a long game. That’s all I ever want to impart to my students. What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.

Just keep writing about the stuff that’s important to you, however you can make it work for you. It’s good advice.

When I first moved to Amherst, I discovered La Veracruzana: a Mexican restaurant that had a salsa bar. Included in the salsa bar was something they called “escabeche.” I had never seen it before: a mix of pickled onions, carrots, and jalapeños. It was delicious. I would always get some whenever I ordered from the restaurant. Our grocery stories didn’t have anything like it, so it was something I could only get at this one restaurant.

If you look up escabeche, the word often refers to a dish like ceviche, with fish or meat prepared in an acidic solution, which causes the proteins to denature — like they’ve been cooked — but without killing the bacteria or parasites, like cooking would. Brrr! No thank you.

Several years ago, I noticed at our local farm stand that the jalapeños and carrots get ripe at the same time. Aha! I thought. I wondered how hard it would be to make my own escabeche. Every year, I would see the jalapeños and carrots and think, “I should look up a recipe and try it.” But never would.

This year, I discovered that Walmart carries huge cans of escabeche — for cheap. Walmart caters to the migrant farm workers that come to Hadley to cultivate and harvest their cash crops. Walmart has bilingual signage and a lot specialty Hispanic goods and seem to have locked up that market. The escabeche is good too!

Still, when I saw the carrots and jalapeños at the farm stand this year, I decided it had to be now or never. So I went ahead and and bought two bunches of carrots, four boxes of jalapeños, and some mason jars. Then I started looking at recipes.

I should have looked at the recipes first. It turns out that most of them only keep for 2-3 weeks because they’re not really “canned”. I guess I’m going to be eating a lot of escabeche really fast.

I looked at a bunch of recipes. They’re all similar, but with minor differences. Interpolating, I tried to craft my own.

Here’s what I used for my first batch:

• 2 cups water
• 3 cups distilled white vinegar
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup kosher salt
• fresh jalapeños (quartered), carrots (sliced), and red onions (halved and sliced)
• spoonful of garlic
• 2 bay leaves

I put the jars in an inch of boiling water to sterilize them.

I mixed the water, vinegar, salt, and sugar and brought it to a gentle boil.

I chopped up the vegetables and packed the jars (I should have packed them tighter).

I filled the jars with the boiling pickling brine and sealed them up.

Then I let them cool and put them in the refrigerator. I waited about 24 hours before opening one.

Today I tried the first one. It was good! It’s not the same as the really pickled stuff, but delicious. It’s a total success.

I may try some of the additional wrinkles I’ve seen some recipes use. Some cook the vegetables lightly first. Some use a mixture of distilled and apple-cider vinegar. One uses orange juice as a sweetener. But I’m quite pleased with the results so far.

To be honest, after these experiments, I’ll probably just go buy the canned stuff. It’s hard to beat $1.78. Even one basket of fresh jalapeños cost $2.50. But it’s always fun to try making stuff yourself.

It’s easy to take air for granted, until you can’t breathe. Then you become acutely aware of it’s importance.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition. There were signs earlier, but neither I nor my medical professionals put them together until there was a crisis and I ended up in the emergency room. After a 12-day stay in the hospital, I got out and had to make a number of accommodations to my changed life circumstances. Now, I generally isolate, wear an N95 respirator for indoor events, and pay closer attention to air quality.

I was born the same year the Clean Air Act was passed. The air quality in US cities, which had become nearly intolerable and was lampooned and memorialized in comics and cartoons, gradually improved during my childhood. I spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles during the mid 1980 and you’d hardly notice the haze until the wind changed and you’d realize there were mountains nearby. In other parts of the world, air quality continues to be a problem: I visited Saõ Paulo in 2006 and the air quality was chokingly bad.

I moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in 1996. The Valley has a tendency to funnel air up from New York City and to trap air creating inversions. The result is that the air quality tends to be worse than you would predict from the bucolic, rural appearance. But it was rarely bad enough to be a concern until we started getting plumes of smoke from wildfires in Canada.

During the last intrusion of wildfire smoke, the air quality was bad enough that I wore my respirator while I was outside. I also pulled out my COVID-era Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and set one up in my office and in my bedroom.

To track the outdoor air quality, I did a bit of investigating and discovered the PurpleAir sensor network. You can buy devices to share air quality readings that can appear on a giant map. I kept a tab open on my computer and watched as the readings on the sensor climbed. There weren’t sensors really close by in Amherst. (Well, there’s one, but it’s an indoor sensor, so it doesn’t tell you very much.) There are two or three by the bridge in Sunderland and one in Hadley and one in South Amherst. Among those, I could interpolate to get a pretty good sense for what the air quality was here. But I found it useful enough, that I decided to buy my own sensor.

I bought the PurpleAir Classic – Air Quality Monitor. It was the only one that wasn’t sold out. (And, as of now, it is sold out.) I didn’t need any of the advanced features that the others had. And this one was marginally cheaper.

It arrived yesterday afternoon. It was not difficult to set up. I’ve installed it out in my tent and zip-tied it to the frame. I have power out there — I’m using an old, old Raspberry Pi power supply I happened to have sitting around. It was fun to have it show up on map and then be able to watch the readings change. There’s even a widget I can install to have it’s readings show up as an embed in my website. (I tried putting one on this page, but it breaks the formatting.)

Now I’m kind of waiting for the next plume of wildfire smoke to come this way so I can watch the number go up. Bring it on!

Like most authors these days, I’m getting constantly inundated with author scam messages. As someone familiar with the underlying technology, these are pretty easy for me to recognize, but I realized it might be worth documenting the kinds of features I use to identify them. Some of these are pretty obvious, while others are more subtle.

A great source of information is SFWA’s Writer Beware. Victoria Strauss has been writing about these scams as they’ve developed over the past couple of years. This impersonation scam has already been documented by Victoria — including the particular person being impersonated —which I’ll use here for my demonstration.

This message purports to be from an agent at a literary agent that would like to solicit the manuscript I’m currently querying with. In this case, the agent and agency are both real but this particular message is fake.

A couple of things to note first. One is that I’m using a desktop computer application to check my messages. If you use phone email clients, they often make it difficult to see the email address a message came from — or to consult the full headers. Second, is that my email client is configured to not load remote “content”. I recommend never, ever loading the remote content in email. It’s almost always web-bugged, meaning it uses a filename or server path that communicates to the sender that you’ve looked at the message. You really don’t want to ever do that. It does mean that messages sometimes look broken. But the “design” of email is easy to copy and so you shouldn’t ever let yourself be fooled by a message because it “looks” genuine.

One of the first things I do when I get one of these messages is to determine whether the person referenced actually exists. A quick web search will confirm that Amelia Atlas is an actual agent and that she does, in fact, work with the Creative Artists Agency. But a little more digging will show some discrepancies. First, the email address the message was apparently sent from (amelia.agent.caa@gmail.com) is different than the email address shown in the footer (amelia@caa.com) and both of these are different from her actual email address (which you can find at her agency website).

Note that you can’t fully trust the email address shown in the “From:” line of a email message. Those are possible to forge, so you really need to look at the raw message source and confirm that the email was actually sent through gmail. The mail headers are long and mostly impenetrable, but there’s the relevant piece that shows where my mail server received the message from Google.

Unfortunately, Google does not show us the actual IP address the scammer connected from — just the address of the server they used (74.125.227.130). Otherwise, we might be able to deduce where they are located in the world. But this shows pretty clearly the email address they used and that it did come from Google.

Since agency email addresses are clearly [@caa.com](http://caa.com) and this came from [@gmail.com](http://gmail.com), we can be pretty sure this message is fake. The fact the footer shows an incorrect address — and is in fact not even linked to a mailto: link, but instead to the agent’s page at caa.com is also a giveaway. It’s gotten so that just the fact that it’s sent from gmail.com is, in itself, suspicious.

Note that this a lesson for authors as well: you really should get a domain name of your own and send all of your email from that if you want to appear legitimate. And you should also maintain a web-presence at your domain name with information people can cross-check to confirm that messages from you are not forged.

One other pitfall to be aware of is that scammers sometimes will register domain names that use non-ASCII letters to impersonate valid websites. For example, I could register “𝖼𝖺𝖺.com” (which uses mathematical characters that look like “caa”, but are different unicode characters: U+1D5BCU+1D5BAU+1D5BA instead of U+0063U+0061U+0061U). This is why you should never trust a link sent in email. Go find the server yourself and navigate starting from there. You can type the domain name yourself, or start with a search engine — they mostly won’t be confused.

Double checking information “out of band” is a useful strategy also in other contexts. One time I got a voicemail from someone who introduced themselves as an FBI agent from Boston and left a phone number. I didn’t call that phone number but, instead, looked up the Boston FBI office, called the number, and asked for the agent by name. It really was a valid message. But you should always be skeptical of information provided by a potentially unreliable source.

Finally, the content of the message is also suspicious. Anyone who knows anything about querying knows that agents basically never solicit manuscripts. If anything, they want a well-structured query and would probably want to look at an excerpt before considering the full manuscript. This particular agent’s webpage specifies what she’s looking for:

For fiction submissions, please include your query letter, bio, and the first 10 pages of your manuscript in the body of your email. For nonfiction submissions, please include your query letter and bio and proposal if available.

Most agents use the nagware website Query Tracker to manage queries. A few do in fact use email, and I expect they are among those most commonly impersonated.

One thing I found creepy about this particular scam was that it seems to be that the scammer has been reading my blog, so they appear to know I’m currently querying. I got an earlier scam solicitation that pretended to be a different agent at a different agency that was similar, but I wasn’t yet querying at that time.

One other particular giveaway in this instance for me was that I have in fact queried a different agent at Creative Artists. So I wouldn’t query a second agent at the same agency — and would certainly not expect a different agent to contact me.

Good luck out there. It’s a dangerous world.

Time being limited, you only have so much attention you can devote to things. The more things you try to track, the less depth you can devote to any one. I think it’s worth being reflective every so often about how many different things you’re trying to pay attention to. To begin with, there’s real live people: people in your household, cow-orkers, & friends. Then there are communication tools: telephone, email, and social media environments. Finally, there are a vast number of notifications that are competing for our attention: computer notifications, updates, and automated messages. It’s overwhelming.

There’s a vast scholarly literature about the “attention economy.” Advertisers and the commercial social media companies have been intensely interested in how they can capture and keep eyeballs on their products and platforms. There are hundreds or thousands of articles you can read where people have parsed and dissected the topic a million different ways because there’s so much commercial interest (i.e. money) involved.

Commercial social media companies have conspired to promote the idea that they are unitary “sources” of “content” and that people should be content to scroll through an endless succession of effectively anonymous posts selected by The Algorithm, provided they’re reasonably aligned with their interests. I’ve always found this notion horrifying.

As an aside, let me note that essentially all of the literary agents I’ve queried have had X-twitter, Facebook, and /or Instagram feeds. I think *one* mentioned Bluesky. Personally, I would be embarrassed to be seen with a Twitter account these days. If you hang around in a Nazi bar, who’s to say you aren’t a Nazi… The nagware QueryTracker web app they mostly use seems to only support asking about Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And many of the agents ask if you have a “social media” presence — meaning one of those three commercial platforms. Sigh… Many also ask for my “website” and/or “blog,” so that’s something.

In the 1990s, an anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, proposed a limit to the size of meaningful human communities. His statistic, Dunbar’s Number, suggested that humans can maintain approximately 150 stable relationships at a time. Various other’s have critiqued his methodology and proposed other, usually larger, potential numbers: up to around 300.

In education, there is a similar effect. When there are fewer than 300 students in a school, all of the staff can learn all of the kids’ names. This has profound effects for kids acting out in school: when even the crossing guard and the lunch lady know everyone’s names, students are not anonymous — they’re not just a number. It creates an atmosphere of respect. One schools get much larger than that, people quit trying to learn the kids’ names because it’s impossible.

I’m trying to winnow down my information environment to entities I actually care about and want to follow. I’ve started using an RSS reader to let me follow particular writers. And I’ve begun trying to critically look at social media accounts I follow to decide whether they are contributing meaningfully to my experience. I basically always did that when I followed people at Mastodon: I always check profiles and scroll through the feed to see if they’re adding value. At Bluesky, I clicked a bunch of starter packs and so now I’m following a lot of accounts where I did not thoughtfully make that assessment. But, honestly, I haven’t liked the vibe at Bluesky enough to bother with critically evaluating my feed there.

Note in particular that I’m taking about writers, by which I mean “human beings that write things.” I’m not interested in things nobody could be bothered to write, by which I mean AI. Evidently, somewhere between a quarter and a half of the posts on commercial social media are written by AI now. And it’s even worse on LinkedIn. If a human can’t be bothered to write something, I can’t be bothered to read it.

Today, I got a notification from Google with what looked like a news headline. (I mostly don’t allow “apps” to send me notifications, but I let Google notify me mostly so that when I’m driving, it can alert me to accidents or traffic jams and help me route around them. But, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any way to tell it to be more selective about notifications.) The headline was, “Americans increasingly disillusioned by ‘AI.'” This did sound like an article I might be interested in reading, so I clicked on it. It was not. It was not an article — just some AI summary. I closed the tab.

I have signed the contract for Bearly Believable to appear at Hexfiled, probably in October. The novelette features two non-human biological androids that work at a picnic park on Planet Volpex.

Volpex is a terraformed world with a simplified ecology designed to maximize providing feedstock for the replicators that people use to manufacture everything. All of the people live on one developed continent and the rest of the world is left fallow to be harvested for feedstock — or used for recreational purposes.

I workshopped the characters using Wandering Shop Stories at Mastodon: A ranger who runs the park, an owl who patrols the park for litter, a bear that runs a fire-safety program, and a charming little girl named Brunhilde who is endlessly curious. I wrote a lot of short vignettes as I developed the characters. Some of the vignettes appear in the story, although most of the story is new and it includes new characters, like Lloyd — a penguin who works at Kowareta Nai, a business that sells surplus biological androids.

The story is set in the same universe as the Better Angels and includes some walk-on and cameo appearances of characters from there, including Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. In fact, I have several new Better Angels stories. When I wrote Bearly Believable, I was thinking it might appear in an anthology with the others, but that seems less and less likely to happen.

I submitted the story a few other place and several liked it, but said it didn’t quite fit. When I saw what Hexfiled was looking for, I realized it had found its perfect home:

Our editorial focus leans toward stories where the speculative element shapes the story’s infrastructure rather than decorating the top. We love biological SF, ecological futures, post-human consciousness, weird and slipstream fiction, military SF, and stories where the science is imagined thoughtfully even if it isn’t real. We are less interested in chosen-one narratives and portal fantasy.

We prefer stories that give the characters a selfhood. Not necessarily a fully realized identity if it clashes with the story’s concept, but a sense of interiority as much as the premise allows.

We appreciate stories that make us feel something alongside the imagined weird. We have a soft spot for fiction that is simultaneously absurd and grieving.

I look forward to sharing Bearly Believable with you when it appears!

About two weeks ago, I started to query for a literary agent. I aimed to send out at least one query a day. So far, I’ve exceeded that by almost three to one. I’ve currently sent out 33 queries — and received four rejections.

At first it was hard because the queries required some new thing I needed to write. Some wanted an expanded biography. Others wanted a logline. But I’ve pretty much got these all written, though I continue to polish and adjust. So now, I just need to copy-and-paste.

I also needed to find appropriate break points for requests for different length excerpts: 5 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages, first three chapters, entire manuscript, etc. Now I’ve got those all figured out.

Now it’s really just adjusting the opening to explain how I think my manuscript fits what the agent says they’re looking for. I still have to research each agent to find out what they’re seeking and to see if they have any special requests. One wants to be addressed by first name. Another by Mx.

One unusual special request was to identify a special item I would take on a spaceship. I scratched my head a bit and eventually said I would take a NeoBoxer — a cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog that could pilot a starship if necessary. And I invited them to read Better Angels to learn more. Maybe it will get a chuckle.

I’ve made a few mistakes. I accidentally submitted one letter with the wrong name (the name of the founder the agency is named after rather than the individual agent). I also accidentally sent queries to two agents at the same agency, which is reportedly a no-no. I have a spreadsheet, so I should have caught that. I’m being extra careful going forward. My memory just isn’t what it once was.

I’m also trying to keep track of the agents I consider and reject. One said they were only accepting by referral. One said no “new adult”. One said, “no fantasy” even though the search I’d conducted was for agents that accept fantasy. It’s hard to keep track of everything.

So far my rejections have just been form rejections or one liners. “Not right for me.” “Isn’t the right fit for my list.” “I have decided to pass.” (Nothing as interesting as what this guy has received.)

When I got my first rejection, I shared the news at SFWA. Several people sent encouragement and one person asked what I was going to do to celebrate. One author said that when he gets a rejection he always has Rejection Nachos which are an important part of the process. If I were to get Rejection Nachos every time I get a rejection, it might create a personal health catastrophe.

Instead, I will hold out hope that an agent finds my query intriguing enough to request the full manuscript. And maybe, then, they will offer to represent me. It could happen. Then I really would celebrate.