Universal Basic Income doesn’t make people stop working. It makes people stop panicking. Panicking about rent. Panicking about bills. Panicking about choosing between medicine and food. Imagine what America could build if survival wasn’t our full-time job. #UBI

I had a lot of fun on this panel! I’m still thinking about some of the things we discussed here. My favorite thought I had was that magic is anything that destabilizes dominant knowledge, & speculative fiction is fundamentally a question about our relationship to reality. This is why I’m here.

Huge thank you to @sillysyntax.bsky.social, @awprihandita.bsky.social and Zig Zag Claybourne for a wonderful talk. Read their work!

I’m at that stage of physical development (read: degradation) where “writing gears” necessarily include a pair of ice packs.

Gonna go even further: don't refer to it as "consuming media" when doing this. You aren't a consumer - it's not a product. You read books. You look at art. You watch movies and/or videos. Be careful about word choice. Reject "consume" and REJECT "CONTENT." IT IS ART. YOU ARE ENGAGING WITH ART.

Umm… I suddenly have a pretty solid idea for a new short story (that is probably a novelette, hopefully not anything longer than 17.4k sigh). I think this story is pretty fucking cool, but also I’m already overwhelmed by all the things I have to do rn, I don’t need an extra project! 😭

Today my physical therapist used the phrase “pathological mechanics” to describe me and this made me feel like I don’t even have the basic skills for being a functional mass of muscles and bones; how the hell can I succeed in anything in life??? 😭

Bluesky now has a bookmark function?? How long has this been here?? Gosh I am so not online.

PROTIP: once you start writing the horse, the rest of the horse will start to come into focus, but nothing happens until you start making the horse exist

tbh I get why we got frustrated with it BUT it would behoove us all to bring back "anything can be queer unless explicitly stated otherwise" as opposed to the current wasteland of "it's only queer if the character fucks somebody of the same gender on screen and then says "I did it in a gay context"

somebody asked so yes all three of them are queer. it's 1994 and they're 15-16 so one is a super closeted bully, one is bi and nonbinary and doesn't know the words for either yet, and one is a lesbian who has never kissed a girl but has a feeling about it

I saw a thing the other day that basically said “no matter what prompt you give it, the question an LLM is answering is ‘what would a plausible response to this prompt look like?’”

Update: we just received a statement from Macmillan/Tor taking full responsibility for failing to register copyright, promising to make us whole and pay us any settlement money we lost out on due to that error, and promising to find & correct the lapses that caused this. Every pub should do this.

I've been told the Authors Guild and plaintiffs in the Anthropic AI class action had no choice but to use a narrow definition of affected works. That if the group of writers hurt by Anthropic were too wide & diverse, the class action would've failed. Bullshit! 1/ www.patreon.com/posts/genre-...

there's weird/horror fiction about india written by white dudes. and then there is this. please support us 🙏 www.kickstarter.com/projects/bla...

We need your support in the next 3 days, before the fall of eternal night. Help us breathe new stories that keep us alive, each word and phrase building the monster’s body, the one who rends and tears and protects us from darkness. kck.st/4mIkEm1

Haha this is giving me flashbacks of those days when I’d get phone calls or texts from my boss at 1 freaking AM. Academia, managerial side. As rotten as the scholarly side, and maybe even more. 😔

L.A. and area folk. @thomasha.bsky.social is in conversation with Brian Evenson, Sept. 20 at 7 pm. Event is free, but please pre-register. Looks to be a fun evening. www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launc...

the book is an Editors' pick for Best SFF in September w/ about a dozen books over at the big river commerce site. don't know how that gets decided or if it's significant. Scalzi, Kuang, lots of novels in group. might be the lone short story collection nestled in, don't know. go short fic go.

I’ll be paneling at VICFA with these amazing folks!!!

Do I wanna count all the diff iterations? No, but: • Original novella version • “Lemme just stretch this into a novel…” • “New magic system, who dis!” • “I like these randos lemme throw them in…” • “…Actually no” + “Let’s change the comp” + “FAMILY!! *Elmo on fire dot gif*” Fifth time the charm! 🤞

Three thousand per book is not nearly enough for this level of piracy, especially if they're allowed to keep using their chatbot trained on our stolen material.

🧵I’m putting the MRM contract ordeal behind me to focus on making more art, but I just had 1 more thing to say related to this. Throughout the past several months many writers have reached out to say things like, “I wanted to push back, but I’m a nobody” or “my piece was just a little poem.” 1/5

It's my birthday. The best birthday present you can give a writer is buying/borrowing/reading their books. This one's a mythic realist tale of a fading extradimensional diaspora set in 90s/00s Calcutta. It won a British Fantasy & Subjective Chaos Kind of Award:

Starting to re-realize there was a reason why I walked away from this project. Good freaking lord. Maybe this would be easier if I approached it as a paint-by-number with a random number generator. Who the hell knows anymore.

My Nebula Finalist short story "The Witch Trap" is now free to read in The Dark! The entire issue is stunning and I'm so pleased to have a place in it! www.thedarkmagazine.com/the-witch-tr...

Lots of discussion lately about increased interest in short fiction, and we love that. We have 25 years of horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction stories for you to read. And we would love to do 25 more, if you can help. kck.st/4mIkEm1

Today’s the first time I pulled a 6hr work day since my injury! Am applying hot/cold compress rn, but overall I think I’ve survived pretty much unscathed. Was working on characters & conflicts for the ecohorror novel (don’t ask why I switched projects). Very satisfied with the progress made. 🥰

Is science fiction dying? I think that the world is science fictional and a lot of the near-future satires that would have previously been published as SF are now published as realist fiction. There's also a bulge in fantasy publishing. But the drive toward shorter books will lead to more SF soon.

“Generative AI content is, by definition, a great averaging of what's in the world. An embrace of this output is a kind of capitulation to the machine, rather than staying true to our nature as creatures." (p. 256) #AI #goodread bookshop.org/p/books/more...

lots of people saying science fiction "is" something or other. in my experience, genres are not that sort of entity. they are much mushier and more flexible.

Don’t you just love (read: hate) it when you quit Project A and started Project B because you don’t know what to do with Project A, and then when knee deep in Project B you get an Irresistible Epiphany for Project A that leaves you with no choice but to pause (read: quit) Project B? 😒😒😒

Went to my first physical therapy appointment today and it made me feel hopeful!! I am already feeling less like my whole skeleton’s about to collapse on me lol.

❤️🔥 House of Dusk is out today ❤️🔥 If you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of this romantic epic fantasy that features a fire-wielding nun grappling with her dark past and a young spy caught between her mission and a growing attraction to an enemy princess. buff.ly/2J5wroz

Why do people already talk about summer in the past tense omg please don’t freak me out. Time CANNOT be moving that fast.

This is the coolest thing ever!

I’ve sent this out. Not bc I think it’s good, but bc I’ve grown frustrated and my shoulder is hurting AGAIN after wrestling it the whole day, so for my own mental and physical health it needs to be banished from my desk / and onto someone else’s desk. Good fucking riddance you bitch (literally). 😤

If anyone is interested in reading the 2025 Hugo Award recipient for Best Related Work, it can be found here affordably, right from the source: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791708...

I think I have reached that stage of revision where I’m doubting every word I’ve ever written and getting increasingly convinced that I, in fact, know nothing about writing and will never amount to anything more than a one hit wonder.

This Saturday, August 30, I will be signing at Dragoncon from noon to 1 at the Missing Volume (booth 1300). Come see me!

…….what the hell is a niche.🧍🏽‍♀️ (Every single one of these sounds good btw idk how this is a problem 😭)

AI this, AI that. I want a cubicle that will instantly fix everything that’s wrong with my body.

Also-- Writers, unite! You do not need to be SFWA to be eligible for a lawsuit under the LibGen & PiLiMi Pirated Books Class - but you do need to act soon! Deadline: September 1, 2025. Read more about it here, and spread the word widely: www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...

Dumbasses: Artists are gatekeeping their skills. The bourgeoisie look down from their canvas castles on us poor middle management stockowners! Every artist i know: I'm behind on rent again, please help

@ymresnik.bsky.social 's THE ELYSIUM HEIST: a sapphic, SciFi OCEAN'S 11! Psalome is a Dazzler, a hostess working the floors of the galaxy’s most decadent space casino, and a prisoner to the debt she inherited from her father. Now, freedom is only a dice roll away... geni.us/elysiumh

Extend your Worldcon! About 120 replay videos are live now (panels, talks, performances & The Head!!! That Wouldn’t DIE!). More coming soon! In Guidebook, filter for “Replayable.” Login via the Convention Portal. Available through Dec 31! #SeattleWorldcon2025

I mentioned last night the flattening of culture. There’s also the flattening of language and the anesthetizing of the arts happening & so much stylistically is being replicated & it’s largely because of algorithms. True creativity is breaking out of that replication. youtu.be/MhDE4s2rO5M?...