Steven D. BREWER

Review: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:36:18 -0400

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.

Review: A Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:40:33 -0400

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.

Last Day Employed

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:38:52 -0400

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.

Skipping Worldcon This Year

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:24:25 -0400

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!

Building an Archive

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:15:52 -0400

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.

The Slop Machine and its Enablers

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:14:51 -0400

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.

Elegant Lich: Refined Fantasy for a More Civilized Age

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:32:52 -0400

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 Don’t Speak Centaur

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:22:55 -0400

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.

Straw Dog Writes: The Little Writing Group That Could

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:26:41 -0400

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.

Review: Long Game: Notes on writing fiction by Elizabeth McCracken

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:59 -0400

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.

Escabeche: a spicy summer treat!

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:50:23 -0400

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.

Tracking Air Quality

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:03:26 -0400

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!

How to Recognize Author Scams

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:03:36 -0400

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.

How many things are competing for your attention?

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:35:33 -0400

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.

Bearly Believable Accepted for Publication

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:18:59 -0400

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!

My Querying Journey

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:53:46 -0400

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.

Bread and Butter

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:31:04 -0400

Every morning, I take my 93-year-old mother for a walk. We almost always walk along Montague House that has a sidewalk beside a metered parking lot. The sidewalk used to be wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, but now that she uses a rollator, it’s a little too narrow. We sometimes walk single file, when there are parked cars. But, on a Saturday in the summer, the parking lot was empty.

In any case, this morning I stepped into the empty parking lot and walked along the curb. As we passed on either side of the parking meters, my mom said, “Bread and butter.”

I, of course, immediately replied, “Bread and butter!”

I remembered how we did this when I was a child and I asked her whether she could remember how she’d learned it. But she couldn’t — I assume it was from her childhood as well. So I looked online for the answer.

At first I found nothing, in part because Internet search sucks now and also because bread-and-butter is a ubiquitous phrase with many practical and idiomatic meanings. But it turns out there is a Wikipedia page for Bread and butter (superstition). What would we do without Wikipedia?

Most of the page is drawn from a 1923 article in the American Journal of Folklore, Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls that claims it wards off bad luck (or prevents a quarrel). Interestingly, it is also the specific charm for when two people go to dry their hands on the same towel. Who knew?

Review: The Spy in the Archive

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:12:53 -0400

I’ve always been partial to non-fiction accounts of spies and espionage. I picked up Gorden Corera’s The Spy in the Archive and found it readable and informative, though with certain deficits.

Vasili Mitrokhin was a retired KGB colonel who spent most of his career as an archivist first in the Lubyanka and then, when KGB expanded to a new building, Yasenevo. He was the one tasked with moving the files — some 300,000 of them from one building to another. This gave him unique access to many of the KGB’s most closely guarded secrets.

The book dwells on Mitrokhin’s motives for defecting. Mitrokhin had become disaffected with the Soviet system, but was always guarded about his own history. The book provides what evidence is available and tries not to speculate overmuch. But the result is a bit unsatisfying since so little is really known.

What he specifically targeted was the “cheka” system of secret police using informers to maintain ideological compliance. Although the Russian intelligence service has changed its name from Tsarist then Bolshevik then Soviet then Russian times, it’s culturally the same. Now wielded by Vladimir Putin, although the individuals have changed, the practices have not.

Mitrokhin used his unique access to take notes about tens of thousands of files and to sneak them out hidden in his shoes. He spent years assembling the notes into a highly compressed form until he retired in 1984. He made approaches first to the Americans, who rejected him, and then turned to the British. Eventually the British brought him and his family in. The revelations contained in his notes shook the foundations of the intelligence community around the world.

Mitrokhin had seemingly been unhappy with his life and career. He was not much happier after his defection. He was frustrated with his efforts to publish and publicize his work. He passed away in 2004, still fighting to get his vision out.

The book, which intersperses the sketchy personal history of Mitrokhin with the events of his defection and some history of the origins of Soviet intelligence service and its practices during the Cold War, often felt a bit jumbled to me. But Mitrokhin is an interesting, if mysterious, historical figure and I enjoyed learning more.

Boxer Dogs are the Best

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:47:50 -0400

When I was about seven years old (circa 1970), my family got a boxer dog. I recollect that we paid $100 (about $860 today) for a flashy fawn from a breeder, who let her go because she was the runt of the litter. But she was very pretty and adorable. Her official name was “Miss Meerschaum.” My father was a pipe-smoker and meerschaum is a kind of light-colored wood used in pipes that gradually turns a boxer-colored brown as it’s used. But we just called her “Miss Boxer” for short.

We got a dog primarily for my father. One of his students had committed suicide and he’d become very depressed. He spoke with a therapist who recommended several things, one of which was to get a dog. I think my father fell in love with boxers after reading about Malabar Farm. My father was an ecologist/environmentalist and Louis Bromfield, who was considered the father of the environmental movement, famously had boxers.

Miss Boxer was the first of three boxers my father had. Boxers, like most large, inbred dogs, don’t live very long. After Miss Boxer, we got Sunny and then, after I had left home, he got Beau (whom I called Beauzeau because he was such a clown.)

Once I was out running in the countryside with Sunny. We lived in the country and she ran off lead most of the time, ranging around. She was usually pretty far out in front. She was amazing in that as we came to a decision point — a corner or fork in the trail — she would look back and with a gesture, I could tell her which way we were going to go and she’d head off that way.

Boxers are described as being protective. Running along the road, I approached a truck that had four or five young men standing around the tail gate drinking beer and laughing. I didn’t think much about it, but something must have seemed off to Sunny. She came alongside me and interposed herself between me and them. Then all the fur came up along her back and she ran with a really stiff-legged gate. The young men fell silent and watched us go past. Then she just went off ranging around as usual. My respect for boxers as guard dogs went way up after that.

When I had a family, we decided to get a dog. I, of course, held out for a boxer dog. My wife was skeptical and did extensive research on dog breeds, looking at all kinds of weird things, like otter-faced dogs. I would also conduct oppositional research to point out all of their negative characteristics, e.g. “It says they bark incessantly. Did you hear that? INCESSANTLY.” Finally, I wore her down and we got a boxer puppy.

Boxers are a little weird. They look weird and they act weird. Their short muzzle is thought to be a neotonic (puppy-like) characteristic and their behavior is also puppy-like their whole lives. Their forward-facing eyes give them a very human-like gaze. Their wrinkly face is incredibly expressive. And their jowls (which my brother and I called “muppies” as children) are soft and velvety.

When we got our first boxer, my wife would just shake her head and say, “Boxers look weird!” And then about 6 weeks later, she shook her fist at me and cursed, “Now other dogs look weird!” It’s true. Once you get used to boxers, it’s the long-nosed dogs that look weird.

My family had two boxers. I set up a website to share our boxer experiences. Our first boxer died young, at 6, from canine lymphoma. (Like all inbred dogs, boxers are subject to a variety of health problems, like cancers and heart conditions). The other lived until she was old and grey. I kind of wanted to get another, but my wife resisted because we’re getting too old to manage a big dog and we have my elderly mother living with us, who is too fragile to have a crazy boxer dog jumping on them. And for several years, I was without boxer companionship, which I missed terribly. But then my son got one.

When my son got an apartment, he decided to get an emotional support animal and I was delighted that he chose to get a boxer dog. I got to go with him to pick out the puppy from the litter. Then to go with him to bring her home. I’ve gotten to see her pretty much every day as she’s grown up. She is adorable and I love her to pieces.

Boxers are also reflected in my fiction. In my collection, Better Angels: Tour de Force, one of the protagonists is a NeoBoxer — a genetically engineered, cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog. NeoBoxers just look like dogs, but they have human (or better) intelligence, are able to pilot star ships, and can make themselves understood by (most) people just by barking.

There are actually two NeoBoxers in the stories, Lambda and Tau. (One of the stories is a riff on Lady and the Tramp.)

When the artist first drafted the cover, she thought the character must be humanoid with a boxer head. I explained that, no, he just looked like a fawn boxer dog. “Oh, that’s way easier!” she said.

I’ve actually got several more stories that feature NeoBoxers, but since the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy seems to no longer be a focus of the publisher, it’s not clear that these stories will ever see the light of day. It’s kinda sad.

Other dogs are okay too, I guess. But boxers are the best.

Another Retirement Milestone

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:10:41 -0400

Today I believe I performed my last professional duty as a faculty member by attending a Faculty Senate Rules Committee meeting with the Administration. The Rules Committee, which sets the agenda for the Faculty Senate, meets monthly with the Chancellor, Provost, and the Campus Leadership Council. I made a few small contributions at the meeting and, with that, I don’t believe I have any more official duties until I formally retire at the end of the August.

I first got involved with the Faculty Senate shortly after I was hired in 1996. I began by serving on one of the committees: the Faculty Senate University Computing and Electronic Communications Committee. In 2004, I became Chair of the Committee. I also served on several other councils and committees over the years. I’m not sure when I became a Faculty Senator, but in 2013 I joined the Rules Committee for the first time.

In the early years I was more focused on union service and there was a strong bias against the union among the leadership of the Faculty Senate at that time. Although the union had been voted in 20 years before, it had been a divisive vote and a number of the anti-union people bore a grudge for the rest of their careers. Several of them were among the leadership of the Faculty Senate.

A big part of why I pursued Faculty Senate leadership when I did was because the administration began trying to centralize and outsource all of the IT functions. After a lengthy selection process, with good faculty participation, the campus had selected a Learning Management System. Just after all of the faculty had migrated their content to the new system, a Dean wanted to chuck it and force everyone to use a different (worse) system that was supported at the system level. We fought that off. Similarly, a misguided Chancellor wanted to force all of the faculty into Exchange, even though the students were all in Gmail. This was a spectacular flameout because the Chancellor hadn’t bothered to check how much it would cost and the campus couldn’t even afford the costs. We slowed down the adoption long enough that the Chancellor left and, afterward, leveler heads prevailed.

After I rotated off the Rules Committee as an at-large member (term-limited), I next served on the union bargaining team for several years. As that ended, I allowed myself to be recruited as Presiding Officer of the Faculty Senate, which I began in 2020. And I served for the last six years of my career.

I began during the depths of the COVID response when the Senate meetings were being held remotely via Zoom. When the campus returned to face-to-face meetings, I continued to preside remotely, since I had by then been diagnosed with a chronic lung condition and wanted to avoid the poorly-ventilated, densely-packed room. It was a little strange to have the auditorium directed by “big brother” on a screen, but people were generally supportive and made allowances for the things I could not easily do.

In point of fact, I pushed for us to continue to hold Faculty Senate meetings remotely. I was unable to persuade the Secretary to actually share the data, but I’m pretty sure we had better attendance, better participation, and more discussion when we were using Zoom. But he (and others) felt it was very important to bring people together in a room.

As Presiding Officer, I was also called upon to preside over an extraordinary meeting of the Faculty Senate and two General Faculty meetings. When the Chancellor called police to haul away student and faculty protestors, there was outrage. The Faculty Senate called an extraordinary meeting to give the Chancellor the opportunity to explain and for the faculty to ask questions. When many faculty were dissatisfied with the Chancellor’s response, they called fora General Meeting of the Faculty to vote no confidence. It was a giant hybrid meeting in one of the largest spaces on campus with overflow via Zoom. In the end, the faculty did vote no confidence in the Chancellor. The second General Faculty meeting was to have the faculty adopt a resolution calling for solidarity in higher education in response to the attacks being brought by the federal government.

Serving on the Rules Committee gave me a perspective and insight into the University — and its governance — that many faculty never see. I remember meeting with a Board of Trustees member that really summarized how they see the University. I don’t recall the specific issue he was talking about anymore, but I summarized for people by explaining that they would look at parameters — like the number of light poles per square mile — and the compare us with our peers, then say things like, “Well, Stanford has 15 light poles per square mile, but we have 19 — therefore we need to cut down four light poles per square mile.”

As my wife was on the Select Board, I frequently was invited to attend soirees at the Chancellor’s House as part of a town-gown initiative. I suspect I attended events at the Chancellor’s House more than any other faculty member in history. I remember I had been telling my wife about a particularly prickly chancellor and she said, “Oh, you must be exaggerating!” We arrived at the event and the Chancellor was greeting people at the entrance. I said, “Hi, Chancellor. We missed you at Faculty Senate on Thursday!” He drew himself and said, “I’ll have you know I was on Beacon Hill advocating for the funding for this campus. PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH TIME I HAVE TO SPEND TRYING TO SECURE FUNDING FOR THIS CAMPUS!” I plastered a smile on my face and nodded. Afterward, my wife said, “Okay. I get it. You were not exaggerating at all.”

Perhaps the most discouraging experience I had was when this chancellor presented their “Framework for Excellence” to the Faculty Senate. It was like a presentation to that Board of Trustees member. He had constructed a value-function graph for every parameter on the US News and World Report rating system to estimate the slope of the line where we stood as compared with our peers and proposed to spend money every place where the slope was steep, hoping to jump us up in the ratings. I was scathing. My proposal would have been to identify problems on the campus and try to address them. But, when that chancellor was forced out and the next chancellor came in, the campus unexpectedly jumped up several places in the US New and World Report ranking. The new chancellor crowed about how his policies had resulted in this historic rise, but I knew better.

I was not great as Presiding Officer. But I like to think I did okay. I was able to stay calm, mostly keep track of what was going on, and use Robert’s Rules to keep the meetings on track. I was pleased to find a role that I could perform usefully. And the experiences were all useful for my writing, But I don’t mind letting it go.

Starting to Query for a Literary Agent

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:10:59 -0400

This month, I have started to query for a literary agent to publish my next book. It is an odious process which is qualitatively worse than submitting manuscripts for publication. Most “markets” that you submit a manuscript to at least pretend that they will respond to let you know if they’re going to reject your manuscript. But agents — universally as far as I can tell — say that you can expect your query to vanish into a black hole, and that if you haven’t heard from them in two or three months, you should assume that you never will.

Don’t call us, we’ll call you. —All Literary Agents

Last fall, at WriteAngles, I attended a panel of agents that talked about their role in the publishing process. Agents are fundamentally a kind of parasite that act as gatekeepers for the publishing industry. Basically none of the traditional publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts, so you need an agent to even have your work considered. Agents see themselves as indispensable, of course. The agents on the panel suggested that you should query for at least six months before considering alternate routes to publication (i.e. small press or self publishing). Since I’ve already done those routes, I thought I would investigate finding an agent this time around. To find an agent, you need to engage in this activity called “querying”.

Querying requires a vast amount of research. I’ve attended several workshops to learn about the process. To begin, you need to draft a query letter, identify “comp titles,” and provide a preview of your manuscript. Of course, there’s no consensus about what any of these things represent, so you also have to study the submission guidelines for each agency. Some agencies also require other things (like a logline). Others put varying and unspecified arbitrary constraints (length of query letter, length of preview, etc).

One Straw Dog Writers Guild workshop I attended, provided a very nice overview of the query letter. A few takeaways: Address agent by name and be sure to not misgender. Indicate your reason for querying this agent: have you met before? Do you have something in common? Introduce your title. Identify the genre and wordcount. Craft a three paragraph pitch: The protagonist, the obstacle, and the stakes. Identify recent comp titles. Provide a short bio that focuses on your writing accomplishments. Finally, wrap up with a closing. Of course, as I said, some agencies want something different, so you still have to check the submission guidelines.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge for me was to identify “comp titles.” These are books with similar themes that have sold in the past few years. Before the workshop I had tried looking various places (e.g. Amazon and Goodreads) with little luck identifying good choices. But the workshop introduced me to NoveList a search engine that lets you search for recent books and find related titles. Luckily, my local library provides free access for library card holders. Using that, I was able to identify some recent books with similar themes.

Once I had the pieces mostly in hand, I started the most difficult part: trying to identify agents that my book might appeal to. There is a nagware website, querytracker, that many agents use for query submissions. The “free” version is intentionally crippled in a bunch of ways so that they can try to get you to pay for a higher tier. The website purports to have information about agents, but I’ve found that it has basically nothing and, what it has, is out of date. But it does have a bunch of agent listings so it’s not a bad place to start. Starting there, I investigate the literary agency’s website and study the page about the agent there to learn what kinds of things they are looking for. After exhausting querytracker, I will start studying Locus, which lists which agents sold speculative fiction books each month. That may well be more a profitable course of action, but querytracker — though not very useful — is easy and seems like a good place to start to practice, as I polish my letter and my pitch.

Lady Cecelia’s Journey is a sapphic, romantasy, road story. It is written as a series of six novelettes (that can serve as chapters in a collected edition) that, including a seventh “omake” story, totals 74,000 words. It is set in the same universe as my debut novel Revin’s Heart, but at an earlier point in time. That said, this is is a fully independent story.

Lady Cecelia is an aristocratic young woman attending the Westland Finishing School in a conservative part of the island of Belleriand. She has begun to realize she has feelings for women, but grew up in a sheltered environment with no opportunity to explore her sexual orientation. Her wealthy parents, who unbeknownst to her are the leaders of an organized crime syndicate, intend to place her in an arranged marriage to benefit the family politically.

Cecelia falls in love with Kasseh, a commoner who is attending the finishing school due to the patronage of the Baron. After they are are expelled for “conduct unbecoming a lady,” they flee together toward the capital, where — with the Baron’s support — they hope to be able to live together openly. Her mother takes a dim view of her rebellion against her authority and aggressively pursues her.

I’m aiming to send out at least one query per day. Recently someone at SFWA said they had submitted 150 queries before finding an agent. So that at least gives me some ball park figure to think about as I pursue this path. It’s a journey of my own that I’m undertaking one query at a time.

Oh. And if you’re an agent, I was kidding about the whole “parasite” thing. Really. Ha-ha-ha.

Review: The Future of Truth

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:02:10 -0400

I saw a thin book at the library by Werner Hertzog, The Future of Truth, that caught my eye and spent a few hours today reading it. It’s not really a coherent book: it’s a series of reflections an anecdotes, often interesting and occasionally provocative, that are loosely about “truth” as we move into the age of AI. I enjoyed reading it and found it time well spent.

It reminded me a bit of the first class in philosophy I ever took. (Note that Werner very specifically denies his is a book of philosophy). The professor of my undergraduate philosophy class asked us to write similar undirected essays, however. I really struggled with the class during the first half of the semester. I had no idea what to write. I was used to writing to achieve some purpose and with no direction I wasn’t sure what to write. I definitely failing the class at that point. But then I discovered what to do: I could just write bullshit. I started writing a torrent of bullshit and turning it in. The professor was ecstatic. In the end, I think I got a C in the class. It probably was as useful as any class I took as an undergraduate, though I can’t point to any other really specific thing I learned in the class.

Actually, that’s not true. He also clued me into the importance of feelings. As a child of a scientist, I had a tendency to think of empirical science as the best source of truth about the world. My father, when he was teaching introductory biology would ask his students about to undertake the dissection of a cat to determine the sex of their specimen. When they asked how to do that, he put the questions back to them, “How should we decide? Should we vote? Why don’t you have everyone in your group vote.” Then he would direct them to dissect the cat and inspect whether it had testes or ovaries, as a lesson in empirically finding things out, rather than other means. But, of course, as a society we do use voting — for example, on juries — to determine truth. And feelings, as broad integrators of how we weigh up all of the evidence, end up being key.

When I was a doctoral student, I took another philosophy class. I was really ready for it then and immersed myself in the history of philosophy of science. It was taught by a young woman who had been a practicing, tenured biochemist. She decided to leave it all behind and went back and got another PhD in philosophy and was starting over to get tenure again. (Tragically, she passed away from breast cancer scant years later). Her office was at the other end of the hall from my office, so I would walk down frequently to chat with her. One day, I told her about my brother’s friend who liked to read the bible. He said it was important because it contained the true words of Jesus as well as a bunch of other nonsense. But that he could tell which were the things that Jesus actually said. She applauded my use of this rhetorical device. But I assured her that, no, this person actually existed.

The book is a bit uneven. One chapter is a single page about a pig that got stuck in drain. Another chapter is a single paragraph of two sentences. It meanders through history and personal experience, from opera to film, from America to Europe, from Rome to Potempkin Villages. From fraud to ChatGPT.

A lot is about people’s intentions and goals. He describes many instances of people using small lies to reveal a greater truth, which he distinguishes from people deceiving themselves or seeking to deceive others.

I had an undergraduate student once who couldn’t understand students not knowing what they wanted to do. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and had been striving toward it for his whole university career. I pointed out that it required a lot of courage to really pursue your dreams. Some students might know what they wanted to do, but be too afraid to actually try because, if they failed, they would have lost their dream. If they never really tried, they could go through their life telling themselves they really could have been an astronaut or whatever, if they’d really tried. He thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. In the end, rather than doing the thing he’d always wanted to do, he found a completely different kind of profession and seemed very happy.

Toward the end, Werner looks at the implications of generative AI and deepfakes on our growing inability to distinguish truth from falsehood. He tries to balance the amazing things that AI can do in specialized domains with it’s undermining our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

In the end, his main conclusion is that truth ultimately isn’t something that can be apprehended by people. But the striving for it is essential. He advocates spending more time walking on foot, out in the world. And reading books — like his no doubt. No lie there.

Whose Time Is It?

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:03:30 -0400

I’m closing in on retirement. Although I’m still nominally employed until August 31, I’ve been effectively retired since the end of May when my “period of irresponsibility” began. In spite of that, I’ve felt busier than ever — and somewhat resentful of it. Today, I had an insight that helped me explain why.

For thirty years, my time has not been my own. In return for a modest wage and benefits, I accepted responsibilities to conduct various programs for my employer. As a faculty member, I was effectively never on the clock. (I have worked jobs where I needed to punch a clock, so I’m intimately familiar with what that’s like.) Instead, I agreed to take responsibility for various projects (like set up and manage a computer center, provide software resources to faculty, teach classes, coordinate committees, etc). Throughout my career, this often meant checking email and messages beginning in early morning (indeed, around the clock) and being willing to work very long hours when necessary. Even my normal working hours represented a substantial commitment of time.

I generally aimed for around 50 hours per week. It was hard to count exactly. And a lot of what I did overlapped with my personal interests, so it wasn’t clear how much of my research, about technology say, was solely for work and not something I might have done on my own anyway. But it was generally a lot more than 40 hours a week and I tried to not let it grow to 60 hours a week. (A lot of faculty report working 60-65 hours per week). And, even though I wasn’t being paid during the summer, I was usually extremely busy then working on updating computer lab hardware and software, supporting curriculum development, or even conducting tropical field biology.

Over the past several years, I have needed to devote more and more hours to elder and family care needs. Of course, when my kids were little, I spent a huge amount of time on parental care. While I was finishing my dissertation, I was also caring for an infant. Those days were long indeed. But, between the time my kids started school and quite recently, my non-work time was my own. Recently, however, that’s changed.

Now, I find that I’m spending something upwards of three or four hours per day devoted to family care issues, doing things for other people: fixing meals, taking walks, washing dishes, doing laundry, going on doctor’s visits, etc. I was already doing this before I effectively retired, too. But I noticed recently, I felt like I was resenting it more. I think I’ve now realized what it is: I think, even before retirement, I’ve been taking this time from my “work” time. Since my job responsibilities changed and since I went to half time, I was spending less and less time on work anyway. And that was the time I was mentally redirecting to these other activities. But now that I’m no longer employed, that time feels like MY time that I’m having to give up.

Mental accounting is funny.

Now that I know what’s going on, I think it will help me move on and begin enjoying my retirement more — even if it’s not just my time.

Pushing Back against AI

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:50:31 -0400

Most of the giant corporations have gotten the memo that their oligarchic overlords want them to shove AI into everything, whether people want it or not. I’ve written previously about my position vis-à-vis AI and how I avoid using AI for anything. The net result is that I have to spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to turn AI off in things.

It’s a constant battle. Last year, at least twice, I had to go into the settings of Zoom to turn off every single AI setting so that Zoom would not constantly try to beg participants in any meeting I hosted to turn on their spybot. And that happened yet again when they added some new chatbot and a note taking service. I’ve discovered that some people have no idea how dangerous these things can be. There was a local story about a school committee that went into executive session to candidly discuss litigation where one of these tools was running. It helpfully mailed the transcript to everyone, including members of the public. People treat Zoom sessions as an informal discussion — not a place where every word will be recorded and shared publicly. (After I succeeded in turning it off, I noticed a page that suggested they were going to start charging $10/month for it. I wonder how many people will use it if they have to pay for it…)

Some companies have gotten the memo. I was pleased when DuckDuckGo created a NO-AI search landing page. I have set my default engine everywhere to it. It’s nowhere near as good as search engines used to be, but at least it doesn’t have AI summaries. Last year, DuckDuckGo ran a survey to ask whether people wanted AI in search results or not. They gave away pins to some people who responded and boosted the survey in social media, and I got one! It’s pictured above. I wear it proudly.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of AI junk that’s hard to avoid or turn off directly. That’s why I was so pleased to discover the Disable AI WordPress plugin. When I first discovered it, it was still in a very early version with hardly any installs. I did my due diligence to inspect the source to figure out what it was doing (and make it sure didn’t appear to do anything nefarious.) It basically uses CSS to set the visibility of AI buttons and interfaces to false, so they don’t show up in the interface. It’s awesome! It’s unfortunate we have to depend on adversarial coding, but thank goodness for Free Software that makes that possible!

To be clear, there are many domains where various kinds of machine learning have already been effective and will continue to be transformative. But that doesn’t mean I want to be forced to ever use it. So I’ll keep doing whatever it takes to push back.

The Silver Tongue at The Freak!

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:49:27 -0400

On September 27, 2021, I submitted a new story, The Silver Tongue, for publication. And on September 28, I received a rejection. I submitted it several more times in 2021 and it got rejected as well.

My brother Philip was surprised. He said that if Gardner Dozois were still around, he would have accepted it instantly. Having never met Gardner, I couldn’t say. But it is kind of weird story and probably needed a weird editor to appreciate its merits.

I generally try to avoid editing manuscript after I’ve written them. I try to use whatever energy I have for writing new stuff. But at some point, I went back to look at it to see if there were obvious defects or changes I might make. I was kind of shocked to find that it really felt like a pretty tight story to me, without much additional cruft. It was good!

After a while, I gave up trying to keep it out to markets. A lot of the the top markets turn manuscripts around pretty fast and notify you when they reject stuff. Others take a long time and/or never get back to you. Every so often, I’d remember it and send it out. I submitted it twice in 2022, twice in 2023, twice in 2024, once in 2025. Then I saw The Freak!

“Huh,” I thought. “The Freak! They might like it.” And I sent it off.

It got accepted!

You can now read The Silver Tongue in Issue 4 of The Freak! Enjoy!