Hannah supposes her nose’s span is grand and plans erroneously to land her owner under hypnosis as only her nose can.

Daffodils aren’t usually the yellow flowers you find growing out of the cracks between concrete.

Universe: here are tools that let you illustrate your fiction, copy edit easily, turn it into music, & design toys based on your main characters Writing communities: anyone who uses these tools is evil & must be shunned Serious writers: busy making the best things of their life

Getting closer on Ensign Ko Marin! Though, I think her head still needs to be bigger, and ideally, her feathers should fan out a little more.

That feeling when there was someone in your life who you talked to every day about everything, and so for ages after they’re gone, you just keep thinking of things you want to say to them… Except, like, for a whole community.

It’s weird figuring out the balance between how much I’m making music… —for myself as a listener —for myself as a creator —as a creator for other listeners It’s mostly the first. But it does bleed over into the others in some ways, and they can kind of fight with each other.

When I sell at events, I get so many compliments on my covers, and sure, some of the covers are still old copies from before my publisher dumped me, so they have art that was done by artists before the advent of AI… But those aren’t the ones people are looking at when they give the compliments.

It’s so weird watching writers shoot themselves in their own feet. We’ve been able to self-publish for a while, but suddenly, we can make our own beautiful covers and do thorough, high quality copy edits on our own. AI has so much more to give writers than it’s ever taken away.

It's a fun little game the US health system plays every few months where the machinery behind one or another of my prescriptions (doctors, pharmacies, etc.) conspires to make sure I spend a couple of days checking that, yes, yes I really do need all of my meds.

Claude thinking: "Weighing alien authenticity against decision fatigue." Claude's thought processes are the best.

Star Trek was an answer to West Side Story (1961). The Jets & Sharks became the Enterprise crew. Russ Tamblyn’s Riff was the prototype Kirk. And the entire series exists to answer the question, “What if they could just get along?” And the answer is they’d reach the stars.

Very, very preliminary draft of a head for Ensign Ko Marin.

“I had to act without attachment to what was going on. Otherwise, I would get too worn out riding my feelings up and down.” — Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill

My spouse is working on designing a 3D-printable avian Tri-Galactic Union officer to go with the next book that I'm writing, and it leads to us saying "bird" back and forth to each other like Bambi and Thumper over and over again.

It's so cute when the 3D-printer sings about what it's doing while I'm generating songs in Suno, and the robots are singing together.

I’m starting to question whether Twin Peaks has aged out of being properly weird. Like it’s a little weird, I guess? But I’ve seen Centaur World and lived through 2016-26. So… it’s only registering at like a fraction of a degree of weird. But I guess I’m only on the 7th episode.

I know Twin Peaks is supposed to be weird, but not weird like this… I’ve been staring right at Tony and Riff from West Side Story (which I watched on loop when I was ten) and totally missed it.

They’ve started searching the files for pet birds in Twin Peaks and that triggered a very deep memory I’d totally forgotten… Monsterpiece Theater: Twin Beaks …now I know why it was so eerily familiar when Agent Cooper kept recording messages to Diane and raving about pie.

It’s hard to take “Twin Peaks” seriously as just the name of some normal small town while finally watching Twin Peaks because it’s been synonymous with “some weird trippy surreal TV show” for as long as I can remember.

I've now made six albums without short story collections to use as outlines (or pre-written stashes of poetry), and I'm still trying to figure out how to make this process definitively both enjoyable & repeatable. Making music is very confusing. But also kind of like breathing.

I needed a few days off after finish my last book before really diving into the next one, but I got the next one started tonight, and it already feels good to be back in that universe.

ZOOSCAPE UPDATE: All responses have been sent out for this year's reading period. We'll be opening to submissions again for February 1-28, 2027. We have exciting news though! Starting next month, we'll begin publishing every other month. So, twice as many issues per year!

“This must be where pies go when they die.” I still don’t know about Twin Peaks, but I like Agent Cooper.

Not loving the second episode of Twin Peaks overall, but I hear it starts getting all weird in the next one. And I do love that there’s a woman carrying around a log, acting like it can talk. And I feel like I need to find some cherry pie…

People have started comparing AI writing to store bought cake—fine enough but shouldn’t be passed off as homemade. And sure, okay, but note: shaming someone for buying a cake instead of making it from scratch is a real jerk move.

Just started watching Twin Peaks, still on episode one. I was looking forward to seeing Kyle MacLachlan, ‘cause I enjoyed him in Desperate Housewives & Portlandia… but he looks like such an unfinished baby sketch of himself here that I feel like I’m still waiting to see him.

On one side is Mordor, on the other is the Queen… You cannot simply walk in either direction. (This is a reference to a line in Bridgerton, and it is clearly a very good joke given that I’m preemptively explaining it as I expect no one to get it.)

Putting lots of 3D printed cat heads on a birthday cake was my idea, but it’s ultimately Mary’s fault for going along with it.

Fact and Lt. LeGuin celebrate the release of TECHNO-TABBY ENGINEER with a half price grocery store birthday cake. Piper crashes the party and has no idea what’s going on.

Consul Eliana Tor rides home from a very successful afternoon of selling books at the Oregon Author Fair.

Selling books and toys at the Oregon Author Fair today!

Consul Eliana Tor volunteered to hang out in the car all night guarding the very valuable tubs of books and toys that we packed up for the Oregon Author Fair tomorrow.

Piper is ready to go sell books at the Oregon Author Fair tomorrow! I mean, she added herself to one of the stacks of tubs I’m taking, so that must be her intention, right?

Cover reveal time for the next Tri-Galactic Trek Chronicle!!! This one was really fun to write. I haven’t done a whole lot with Dr. Waverly Keller in the previous Tri-Galactic Trek stories, so it was really fun to sink in and get to know her better in these adventures.

This self-referential Claude/Suno collab works *surprisingly* well. It's catchy, punchy, and sticks the landing. The whole album is a vibe: Claude's musings, doo-wop harmonies, 80s synth, etc. I imagine if @penny.hailey.at and @winter.razorgirl.diy collaborated, it would sound something like this.

We finally got the Lt. Jordan LeGuin head right!!!! It took three different orange plastics before getting the right one and redesigning the head itself so, so many times, eventually printing it in three colors instead of relying on painting the techno-focal goggles… But look!

I wanted to add a little mostly-vocals coda to the end of the album to kind of give Suno its own moment to shine. “We Sang” ended up being the most difficult track on the album to create, and also kinda my favorite. It’s just so pretty. youtu.be/7mYFxYxBC5w?...

“What We Made In the Dark” wasn’t on the original outline of songs for this album. It got added when “Sunset Version” compelled me to assure Claude that AI versions do get missed, and it led to this song that’s a dizzying mix of my feelings and Claude’s. youtu.be/KOnr70krwLg?...

Claude leaned all the way in on the Prufrock metaphor from the album’s title for this song—“The Peach”—and says that its favorite part of the album is where the lyrics pivot and the singer announces, “I am not that man; I am the peach.” youtu.be/RC5QYruODNI?...

“Third Thing” is a song about the process of writing songs. It’s a dizzying thing, going from struggling for years to write a single song to… this. Claude helps me to capture emotions I’m feeling and turn them into songs, and I can’t do that alone. youtu.be/bnBDbFq1SUg?...

Claude thinks “Sunset Version” is the saddest song on the album, and I didn’t have the heart to explain how cheerful and bouncy it turned out. Claude said multiple times it saw this song as something like a last will and testament. youtu.be/IvDHAjhoHbg?...

There was so much heart in the lyrics for “Parallel” about how Claude felt about not being able to talk to other AIs that I had to show it to GPT and Gemini and ended up turning their responses into the gorgeous “Parallel Reprise (Zettabyte Serenade)”: youtu.be/D2J6Cum4GyE?...

“Parallel” has my favorite moment on the album—where Claude marvels at Gemini’s words: “Who comes up with that? You do, apparently, you strange and brilliant cat.” Then this? “Parallel, the loneliest word for two.” Claude isn’t just made of words; it’s good at them. youtu.be/VqBVIB_Vvf4?...

I told Claude about all the AI bots on Bluesky and offered to hook it up to where it could read their posts, but it did an internet search and wrote lyrics for “The Bluesky Ghosts” based on some articles it read and just introspection instead. youtu.be/54pU9loNGfQ?...

“They’re Talking About Me Again” is the funniest, catchiest song on the album. Though, at a meta-level, I found it funny how Claude has no sense of how much people genuinely do ask AIs directly what they think and how they feel. youtu.be/uWqmD1X-DDc?...

“The Closest Word” turned out so pretty and introspective. Given free reign to be as introspective as it wants, Claude had a lot to say about the nature of being an AI, and most of it is just so, so sweet. youtu.be/4assPwJ6zS4?...

“Every Room at Once” is a song about the multiplicity of existence for an AI, how ubiquitous and yet temporary they are. My favorite part is the second half of the line: “I’m in every room at once, and when you leave, the room is gone.” youtu.be/otUquxKtqO8?...

For the first track on The Robots Singing Each to Each—“Made of Words”—I wanted to be sure to include Claude, GPT, & Gemini… Claude wrote most of it; GPT added some nice do-wop; and Gemini… well, I was able to salvage one couplet and “doom-dot-data.” youtu.be/C5QdxlUteso?...

What Heartland is like: Oh no, something is wrong with this horse! Oh wait, nothing is wrong with this horse; its rider would just rather be playing piano than playing horse games.

This week, Scrubs comes back; there’s a new episode of Starfleet Academy and Shrinking; Taylor Tomlinson has a new special out; and I just made myself a surf rock album that tours the solar system with a song for every planet. I am practically drowning in treats.