AI & TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING: A SURVEY I was curious about how people in traditional publishing are feeling about AI. I would love input from authors, editors, agents, booksellers, translators, narrators, designers and more. Thanks for sharing and participating!

good dog / bad dog clarkesworldmagazine.com/fordwalker_0...

In the New Yorker, @notquitehydepark.bsky.social (Stephanie Burt) on @lateonsetgirl.bsky.social (Cameron Reed)

Genuinely could not be more excited for all of you to meet this book next week. WHAT WE ARE SEEKING is luminous, transformative, life altering, and frequently very funny.

yeah, this is just a straight-up lie. (i used to think that this was conflating the amazon "indie" market and other professional writers. but i'm increasingly becoming convinced that it is just a lie promoted by the marketing departments of LLM companies.)

someday i will learn that Stephen Knight and Stephen S. DeKnight are in fact two different producers. but not today, apparently.

(1/4) Concept: D&D scenario where the party stops for the night at a village inn where they seem to be the only guests. When they try to leave in the morning, they discover the entire village is under a spell that causes departing travellers to become confused and end up back where they started.

love to refer to behavior from five years ago as "period-typical"

Happy trans day of visibility! I'm grateful to get to work with some exceptional trans writers, and I always want to be helpful to trans writers finding their way in. If anyone has questions about traditional (SFFH) publishing while trans, drop them here, and I'll answer as best I can.

mission statement.

wow, killing eve season 2 is so much worse than season 1.

Writers, take note. The Anthropic filing deadline is today!

that BUTTERFLY "moves with the energy of a bar fight. It is fast, brutal, and intimate.... The magic feels like it is bleeding out of the cracks in the pavement... Lee is interested in the idea that feminine rage is a resource. It can be hoarded, stolen, or used to burn the whole city down." ❤️

1/4 of the way through the Neapolitan Novels and it's so good that it's driving me to despair.

apparently today is just a "spend all day thinking of my favorite stories and getting nothing done" day.

this story is so normal. everything is okay and no events occur.

thinking about isabel kim's "freediver" again today. the particular intimacy of doing specialized, dangerous, physical labor together, the ways that intimacy is and isn't personal. reactormag.com/freediver-isabel-j-kim/

thinking about mkalis again.

had a conversation the other day with another queer writer about submission strategy, thought i would share. writer had submitted to a number of explicitly queer venues and got rejected. their feeling was that, if the queer venues said no, there was no reason to bother with the mainstream venues.

Successful authors sometimes incorporate for tax reasons. But Sanderson's corporation is a _real corporation_ which has its own CEO (and, in a very smart move, the CEO is not him) and large staff and departments. It is by all accounts a really good place to work, too.

the WHEN THEY BURNED THE BUTTERFLY paperback will come with a bonus story set in 1961 about a mother, her fire goddess, her sworn sisters, her feral 5 year old daughter, and the most consequential fire in singapore's history. and it's 25% off now at B&N!

one of the worst parts of being a professional writer is that you read your peers' unpublished novels and fall in love with them and there is no one else in the entire world who you can talk with about it. anyway thinking about Talon from "Speaker of the Sacred Falls," a book none of you have read.

Confucius, over 2000 years ago, describing a Kind of Guy that you can regularly find today: When the state was well-governed, Master Ning Wu was wise, but when the state was ill-governed, he pretended to be foolish. His wisdom can be surpassed, but his foolishness is unsurpassable.

I have written more than 30 novels. A fair chunk of them have been on the NYT bestseller list. When I come across a writing advice book that advocates invisible narrators and simple, robust language, I can formulate a largely Anglo-Saxon reply just fine, bub. Fuck.

The first BIG balance pass for Slay the Spire 2 is now out on the beta branch!! (Sorry infinite build lovers.) It also includes a Phobia Mode, lots of bug & crash fixes, and some cool new art and VFX! 💫 Patch notes: store.steampowered.com/news/app/286...

so i know a ton of agented writers (and am one). among them, there are exactly two ways that they've signed with agents: * Submitted through the regular query process. * The agent read and liked some of their short fiction and reached out to ask if they wanted to work together on a novel.

LRT: for what it's worth, I spend $0 (but plenty of time) querying agents. a better approach to querying agents is to read the entire archives of Query Shark (RIP Janet Reid, truly one of the greats): queryshark.blogspot.com

This guy’s argument is absurd.

the goal, as always.

yes, and voice: when (narrative) art is making its greatest contributions to politics, philosophy, Discourse, etc., it SHOULD be "muddled, without a clear and simple message"

this story is so good! incredibly well-deserved.

I'm a Nebula finalist!!!!! "The Name Ziya" is a story I wrote at 22 for my Clarion West application but also to grapple my own thorny relationship with cultural names & assimilation. It took 3 years to publish; I am so proud it's my first award nom and so so thrilled to share space on this list 🥲

in today's "well that sure was a science fiction story ~50 years ago" news, CostCo is getting into IVF: abc7.com/post/costco-...

was watching a favorite old show from the 00s last night and it is astounding to me how constant the drumbeat of homophobia is and the degree to which despite personally living through it i've forgotten it.

was reminded of what a great movie "dungeons and dragons: honor among thieves" was. gosh, that was a great movie. after decades of terrible and just-okay d&d tie-ins, a movie that actually felt like a good session of a d&d game (except the combat was more interesting.)

appreciate that in slay the spire two you can sell your first turn to the devil for more power.

that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God

i can always tell when a venue is too fancy for me to submit to when it has a "/" in the title

Anyway I'm going to take this opportunity to spread a little love. So! It's International Women's Day! Reskeet with a book recommendation by a woman or enby/genderqueer person! Mine is THE FORTUNATE FALL by @lateonsetgirl.bsky.social. A classics of 90s cyberpunk and a formative work for many.

i have a suggestion

Graff and his crew face a particularly nasty challenge – an opponent so low-tech they might just have the advantage in this fight. Next week. "Blade Through Your Heart" by @carrievaughnco.bsky.social! Art by Eli Minaya Edited by @annvandermeer.bsky.social

it is genuinely very cool that Neil is doing this.

excited! (whenever steam gets done processing my transaction)

This chart also applies to writing fiction, FYI.

i feel like if you are reviewing a salad, and you spend the whole time talking about how you hate vegetables and there are too many vegetables and the salad would be better if it were a steak, you're not really productively engaging with that salad in an interesting way.

We're heading to AWP in Baltimore this week. If you'll be there, drop by booth #442 and say hi.

after years of people wishing Apple would bring back their bright colors of the late 90s and early 00s, they finally released a line of laptops (only the cheap ones) with some color options, and they're... fine? i mean, better than no colors. but they're metallic or desaturated. not bright. no pop.

Tomorrow. ⚔️

if we're going to have a logo for human-created art, it should be a handprint. something like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_d...