A debut author I was supporting in my day job received one of these and asked me if it was real. I was so impressed they had the insight to sense something was off, and ask a trusted person in the industry. And also so sad for all the authors who don't have someone to ask.

My latest column features novels, novellas, and short fiction! Featured writers include Del Sandeen, @joshmalerman.bsky.social @erikatwurth.bsky.social @casskhaw.bsky.social @clairehumphrey.bsky.social and more!

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

Congratulations to this year's Hugo winners, and to the Lodestar and Astounding winners, too! locusmag.com/2025/08/hugo...

Montréal in 2027 Worldcon Bid Wins Site Selection Vote file770.com/montreal-in-...

Knock knock. Who's there? On. On who? ONLINE BID PARTY! (I'm sorry, I'm really tired. Anyway the party starts soon. Details below) www.edmontonin2030.org/bidparty

Worldcon! Get to know what Canada has to offer including a reading from me today: www.edmontonin2030.org/bidparty

Let's talk about the #GenCon panel on AI I I did with @bradymcagent.bsky.social @jasonsanford.bsky.social and @johannah.bsky.social who moderated. This was a difficult conversation b/c we realized a # of people came looking for HOW to use AI in their creative writing. That's not what they got.

Hit the backlist hard this month and found a ton of amazing stuff! Check it out, or stick around for the thread of favorites 🧵

“Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves” by @clairehumphrey.bsky.social is not as grotesque as the title sounds but twists the interpersonal knife www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/wood...

📢 It's here! The Strange Horizons Fund Drive 2026 has begun! 📢 Help us raise the $20,000 we need to fund our fiction, poetry, and non-fiction for next year! Beyond that are our stretch goals including some compelling special issues! Donate at the link ⬇️

2025 has been a hard year so far for Apex. In the interest of transparency, we want to share what happened, the current state of things, and how you can help. We're determined to keep publishing great stories for many years to come, and your support is what will make that possible. 🖤👽

10/10, which is good cuz my self respect was on the line. I would like to discuss some of what tipped me off as it is several times, not what they emphasized.

ok so an important thing i really think people on bluesky need to hear about the anti-trans megabill the tl;dr is that you could actually turn the tide of trans rights in america right now but if you don’t act now, then we’re all cooked indefinitely please read on 🧵

"It just really comes as a shock that such accomplished intellectuals, who’ve spent their entire careers pushing the upper bounds of human achievement, could be judgy about a machine that runs the entirety of human imagination through a shredder and glues together what comes out."

I see once again I’m going to have to beg pundits who haven’t lived outside of Toronto in decades to stop opining on how useful Canada Post is. I don’t care how little you personally get or send mail. A public postal service with a mandate to get mail to every address in Canada is a public good.

I've said this before, but the problem is that the acceptable rate of wrong answers depends *heavily* on the task in question. Counterintuitively, the simpler and less important the task, the *lower* the acceptable failure rate!

I spoke to the person who AI-generated the Chicago Sun-Times reading list. Says he's very embarrassed. This was part of a generic package inserted into newspapers and other publications, so likely to run elsewhere. He didn't know it'd be in Chicago Sun-Times www.404media.co/chicago-sun-...

Ugh, the Chicago Sun-Times AI-generated Summer Reading List of 90% totally fictional hot new fiction is so disheartening and disturbing on many levels. As a novelist, being included in this kind of round-up in a major publication means the world, for sales, for your career, for finding readers.

Another example of people using AI as if it's a combination of research assistant and writer. It isn't. It does something that *looks like* research and writing, but isn't either one. It's not even lying, because to lie one must know the truth. AI does not know, or think. It can't help you.

Now that I have finished the very rough semester, and while I am still semi-away catching up on stuff: 📚 Please tell me about 2025 queer speculative fiction anthologies and short story collections! (I want to read them) 📚 Advertise yourselves too! Your friends! Everyone!

So the reward for beating a Tkachuk is another Tkachuk

Going to bed in the Canada I recognize: priceless.

I worked for the federal election in 2019 and let me tell you: if you're a Canadian citizen there is almost no situation in which you show up and they don't let you vote. Go vote!!!!

An autism "registry" culled from private medical records could potentially violate federal privacy laws and runs the risk of abuse. It also harkens back to a time when disabled people were labeled, segregated, and excluded. We won't go back.

💥THIS IS NOT A DRILL!💥 The new Japanese translation of AUGUST KITKO & THE MECHAS FROM SPACE drops soon and LOOK at that cover!!! Want your own? Get it here! www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4...

I've been thinking about how empowering it is to get into weightlifting. I mean, yes, literally. But also psychologically. As women, society tells us we need to be small, and that if we are not small, we must buy products/services to be smaller. And then one day you think... what if I get BIGGER? 1/

I read through the latest draft of a book that we'll be publishing at work. It is so touching that it made me cry. The author/illustrator has done such a beautiful job bringing her heart to all of you and I can't wait to share it.

This is very good: newsocialist.org.uk/transmission... and related Acid Horizon podcast: bsky.app/profile/acid...

the comment "America broke the Bloc" just killed me. Or someone saying - you have to pay me in poutine now. our resistance chant is from hockey. People often say there's no culture here but that is not true at all...it's very hard to explain. But if you get it, you get it and it's wonderfully weird.

Seeing all the things Canadians are doing as resistance...it's such a dire upsetting situation that fills me with visceral terror but also we are such a funny country and I see things about toilet paper, and the bloc saying: buy Canandian, and the government of Canada jingle, heritage moments and ❤️

Want to know the difference between writing a character hiding the truth from the reader and one hiding the truth from themselves? Wondering how to let your readers know what's true when your narrator can't stop lying? Let's get into it this Monday with a deep dive on writing unreliable narrators!

Fabulous flash fiction about who you know and who you choose to know by the fabulous @marissalingen.bsky.social : www.nature.com/articles/d41...

But it's okay for the richest company in the world to let you use their products on a subscription model. Who's the landlord here? I pay to use a word processor, but they won't pay to use my words?!?

And GODDAMN, don't ever call authors "idea landlords" for wanting to get paid for their labor, or bitch about having to spend the price of a fancy latte for a book that took a whole fucking year to write.

Writers are talking a lot about how broken publishing seems. You don't write fast enough? You disappear. You don't hit with your first book? You disappear. You don't have a series ready to go in one fell swoop? You disappear. And then you discover your work has been stolen by LLMs/AI bots.

Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was being pranked and then realizing he was actually just in the war plans group chat is such a good microcosm of how it feels to be alive right now, everything seems fake until you realize it’s actually real and incredibly stupid

So when the US hockey team planned their Four Nations fight in a group chat that was just, like, an America thing?...

So it really is worth reading the whole article, FYI. Having done so, I have more thoughts on the security breach here. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Meta used my novel and some short stories of mine as well. (And also a medical article about probiotics with an author who shares my name.)

Canadians, part of the proposed tariffs for April is a 25% tariffs on books. This would be devastating for Canada's book industry, with very little impact on the US. You can voice your opposition to this particular tariff using the form below: forms-formulaires.alpha.canada.ca/en/id/cm7upm...

Canadian writers, read this back to back with Jasmine Mooney's situation and tell me you would still consider going to a con in the US.

Powerful piece from a Canadian detained by Ice for two weeks: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Time for our next read, we hope you join us in April for A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe! 🌌🔭

Use Signal. Donate to Signal. The ability to send messages that can only be read by the sender and recipients is crucial to free expression:

Sidney Crosby has one goal today, his 611th, passing Bobby Hull for 18th most in NHL history. Sidney Crosby has two assists today, reaching 1,050 and passing Gordie Howe for 10th most in NHL history. Crosby passes Hull and Howe in the same game in two categories. #Pens

Looking for a lovely little read? New story from @angrykem.bsky.social theorangebee.substack.com/p/made-to-be...

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.