I have crossed the Rubicon and am now fully retired. I began my phased retirement two years ago but yesterday was my very last day. I am now happily unemployed. :-)
It’s been a stressful series of weeks as we checked and double-checked all of the decisions we wanted to make before I retired. I ended up staying home from Worldcon, which happened at the same time. This was probably a good decision, although I did have some FOMO (see below).
Now that I’m fully retired, I have a few new writing and publishing projects underway, the most ambitious is Elegant Lich (also as described below). I have also been querying for a literary agent. Initial results have not been encouraging, but I did get some recent feedback on my query letter that will help me revise. Then I will undertake round two.
As always, these are only the most writing-focused posts I wrote in the past month. There are more posts at my blog: https://stevendbrewer.com that include reviews, recipes, and more.
See you next month!
How to Recognize Author Scams
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.
Review: Long Game: Notes on writing fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
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.
Straw Dog Writes: The Little Writing Group That Could
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.
Elegant Lich: Refined Fantasy for a More Civilized Age
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.
Skipping Worldcon This Year
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!
