My best craft advice is "Put a giant worm in it." You can never go wrong with a giant worm. Sci-fi: Giant worm on an alien planet Fantasy: Giant worm in mountain sitting on a pile of gold Horror: Giant worm (eats people) Romance: Giant worm causes third-act breakup Mystery: Giant worm investigates

I love this. Says so eloquently what it is hard to explain. There’s a horror in subversion, in seeing something meant for one message used for its opposite.

Today I learned about Rebecca Heinemann. What a shame to learn of someone only when they pass. Read this: an amazing interview, and she was truly impressive, both in abilities and strength through personal life. corecursive.com/doomed-to-fa...

Google Antigravity: when I saw the headline I genuinely thought, for just a hopeful moment, that a research lab in an admittedly evil corporation had made a world-changing breakthrough. But no. It’s another AI-focused VSCode clone.

On August 12, 1971, 16-year-old me mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission to my dream market, F&SF. My tale was quickly rejected. On July 17th, 2025, I finally sold a story to that magazine. Here's why I felt I had to withdraw that story. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...

I’ve seen agents advertising here on 🦋 who don’t seem to have sold a lot of books and I worry about their effort. Finding an agent is hard. I’ve been selective; doesn’t make it easier. No acceptance yet (in a whole month :))

Conflicted here — the lyrics are her own. She’s using AI to sing them. So half of it (the most original half, the singing voice sounds generic) is human. I read one comment that she should be a songwriter… but writers don’t get public credit the way a singer does. I understand trying to be direct.

This reads like a litany of poor leadership in companies in general. I could feel my heartrate speed up as I read it.

A good post on the growing menace of AI-generated PR scam solicitations (I wrote about this type of scam a couple of weeks ago). Included are helpful practical tips on identifying these scams and protecting yourself todnewman.com?p=1656

Right NOW as I write this an entire church is being moved several hundred meters, in Sweden. Livestream here: www.youtube.com/live/mTuVp4o...

A really thoughtful essay on Murderbot: ‘Even If They Are My Favourite Human’: Murderbot Just Explained Boundaries countercurrents.org/2025/07/even...

I cannot recommend enough replacing a lot of your normal news consumption with Fix The News, a newsletter focused on serious, deep good news from across a broad swathe of human achievement. We can’t and shouldn’t ignore bad news, but this really helps give me perspective.

Fascinating and terrifying look into a probable goal: corporate-style (CEO as king) or actual corporate governance. Think cyberpunk dystopias.

This is what the government did with 120K+ Japanese Americans in 1942. I know. I was there in those camps.

Malevolence. It’s a cli-fi story where the rising sea has drowned a lot of the city. Sea creatures are mysterious and horror-like, rarely seen, lurking under the water. Sailing is dangerous and buildings are sealed overnight. There’s an underlying sense the sea itself is a creature/aware. #sffchat

Writers of #bluesky, is it normal for publishing houses to ask for unagented manuscripts? I thought an agent was a filter for low quality (ie they’d be inviting a huge pile of rubbish to their desk) plus a safety net for authors re financial aspects (ie no publisher ‘should’ sign unagented)?

The struggle is real.

Vibes.

This is probably the saddest news about an app that I will ever share. Delicious Library was a thing of beauty, joy, playfulness, when it only needed to be utility. mastodon.social/@wjs/1135393...

Post-apocalyptic flooded city novel now has 3000 words on what money actually is. By way of fish and octopus. This was not intentional. I feel I went a bit Neal Stephenson.

#authors #writerssociety #wip #writer #writing

If you see this, post a photo of a beach from your camera roll.

New blogpost: deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/11/why-...

Hi friends! I just wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest website on the internet. The long and short of it: We won the auction and — you're not going to believe this — the previous InfoWars folks aren't taking it well.

This is it. AI as assistant, AI as creating a new sentient lifeform: incredibly exciting. But AI as replacing art and writing, the best of human endeavours: _awful_. If tech creates tools they should be new washing machines: remove the grind. Not tools that displace creativity and humanity.

A local opinion piece here: ‘The age of the liberal world order ends with Trump.’ Strong statement. Possibly right. Terrifying. We can hope for a united Europe. news.err.ee/1609519429/e...

I asked a neuroscientist (and AI programmer) of my acquaintance about this and his response was a pretty succinct “no” open.substack.com/pub/webworm/...

Love this. Insightful about how humans work.

‘She marked 1(a), that the sea was the enemy, and hoped that voting truly was anonymous.’

I’m an Australian who lives in the far north of Estonia. Working on Cathedral City: cli-fi adventure/horror set in a post-sea-rise flooded Tallinn. More about the politics of the non-flooded island villages left over, with the inescapable dream-like presence of the malevolent sea. #SFFTalk

Using PHP for the first time in 20 years. It has a package/dependency manager (composer.) Definite structure where I recall PHP being a free-for-all. I am a newbie again. Trying to do anything advanced, like package up dependencies for a WP plugin so they don’t interfere with other plugins? Hard.

How to build a copilot / coding assistant! The first post in a series. parnassus.co/building-a-c...