We had bitter cold last week Now there's thunder. Go home, Ohio, you're drunk.

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

Just two weeks left on Nebula nominations and a few days for the BSFAs. If you’re still reading short stories for these awards, I’d be honoured if you’d consider this one.

Goooooood morning BosKone #boskone2026

The March for Life bringing measles to DC feels like another thing that would be written for a satire but since satire is dead it's reality.

The shaman flings a handful of powder into the fire. The flames pulse, casting a weird, #lambent glow across the cave walls. The crude renderings of animals shift and writhe, and the clan gasps as new images form. Vast herds of prey, a clear direction, an end to hunger. #vss365 #microfiction

The Dream Waterfall casts its own light, #lambent, and full of rainbows. Each refraction offers a potential tomorrow, ephemeral as ripples. I spent hours there in my cloudy youth, drunk deeply from fancy, until we met. Not dreams, I realized, but future memories of you. #vss365 #microfiction 💙📚

❤️

Your #vss365 #prompt for Feb 4 is #ghost "But that isn’t all. Some of my ghosts are planets. Not bright. Not young. Spiraling deep in the dusk of my body as saucers or moons pleased with their belts of colored dust & hailing no others." 'Ghosts', Kiki Petrosino #4

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

The contract gig is a messy one. There’re no guarantees, no absolutes. I don’t promise my clients I'll get their man. What I like to say is every target has a #ghost of a chance, even if, most of the time, that just means they’re gonna get every opportunity to BE a ghost. #vss365 #microfiction

Bits of your soul leak into the screen, transmuted into ones and zeroes. Far-flung in undersea ley lines. After you're gone, I open the dull machine in the dark morning, read your remnants circling the singularity. An accretion disk, regurgitating the #ghosts of who we are #vss365 #microfiction 🪐📚

And we talk about #pain on a scale from one to ten and point to a drawing of a face that's meant to show how much we're breaking behind the mask we don't admit to wearing and everything is fine we're fine it's fine it's one long run-on sentence and we hide our bitten nails in our sleeves 🏷️ #vss365

Dying hurts. No one tells you that. There’s #pain from whatever killed you, sure. Cancer, car wreck, a hail of bullets, but it’s getting ripped out of one state of being and shoved into the next that’s the real agony. In other words, ghosts don’t moan because they’re sad. #vss365 #microfiction

Tomato soup simmers on the stove. Basil, sugar, acid. We'd go on lunch dates. Me, 7, you 70. Grilled cheese and BLTs. I can't remember your crooked smile, our checkers games in April. Just you on the hospice bed. Purple veins, paper skin. Nothing behind your eyes but #pain #vss365 #microfiction

Little Junie had the #soul sight. She’d point to nice Mr. Hayward at the grocery and yell, “Cupcake!” When she saw Mrs. Patel at the daycare, she’d clap and coo, “Ice cream!” But when Ms. Ash, the landlord, came around, she’d hide her face, crying, “Broccoli! Broccoli!” #vss365 #microfiction

The valkyrie descends from the heavens, gathers the dead in her longship. Infantry, officers, bodies gaping open. Blood soaks the deck like rain. I approach, but she bars my way. "Are you not the #soul - gatherer?" "Yes," she replies, "But you must have one to come aboard." #vss365 #microfiction

My first serious proper book, coming soooooon!

When it comes to documenting ICE activity, remember what Eisenhower said at the end of WWII. "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."

Please could the whole world stop exploding

Now is really good time to pick any org or fund from this list and give what you can. www.standwithminnesota.com

*deep breath* Fuck I.C.E.

Awful news. Wishing Sheila a complete and swift recovery. There’s a link to a google form here through which those who want to may share memories they have to be passed on to Sheila and her family. locusmag.com/2026/01/shei...

For those who submitted in the last window: thank you for your patience as we work through the stories. It's been a little challenging for this time of year but are making progress!

Timezones are so weird. Australia is in 2026, Canada is in 2025, and the United States is in 1939.

I'm not a big holiday person, but NYE always surprises me with how significant it feels

BREAKING: Democrat Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, taking the oath of office at an historic subway station in Manhattan.

A Christmas Carol: a true story about how rich people require intimidating before they consider sharing their wealth.

It’s live! “Wheel Dog” is up over at @tractorbeamearth.bsky.social with annotations by @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social. I’m so stoked to end the year with a hopeful cli-fi piece in such a cool, optimistic mag. If you like dogs, sleds, or sled dogs, check it out! www.tractorbeam.earth/story/wheel-...

Give the gift of crippling self-doubt this holiday season and encourage someone in your life to become a writer. (Form rejections not included) 📚🪐

Adding my take that no one asked for into the SFWA AI Drama: Maybe just don't use AI? Don't use AI in the missionary position, don't use AI standing up. Just don't use AI. Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing, but we're an AI-Abstinence-Only-Operation on this account.

If you haven’t spent time on @inkfoundry.bsky.social lately, you’re missing some great new features. Here’s my page which currently links to 11 of my free reads (more to come soon!). Check it out! inkfoundry.net/writer/p-a-c...

And just like that, SFWA capitulates. Keep fighting. It works.

For the record, I've never used Midjourney or ChatGPT or any other LLM or art-mangling AI. I gave up on Google and use DuckDuckGo with the AI functions and images turned off under the Manage AI setting. I use spellcheck in Word because my spelling sucks and I visit the Merriam-Webster website a lot.

‘The most daring idea is to refuse.’ Fuck. Yes.

This is so super exciting. You should deffo check it out!

@radonjournal.bsky.social produces a great magazine, has great editors, and has cultivated a great community of authors on their discord server. One of the few truly "author first" mags out there. Submit your best anarchist, transhumanist Sci-fi

If you're an author looking to get into Radon's first 2026 issue, we suggest submitting in the next week or two. We'd like to lock in the issue by Christmas and have plenty of time in January for editing

I did the @apexmag.bsky.social flash fiction contest for a year and it ended up jump-starting my writing career (even though I didn't win it) Rebecca and the read team does a great job. I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking to write flash fiction 📚🪐 #writingcommunity #fiction #shortfiction

It’s that time of year when everyone goes ‘Omg I gotta tell everyone all the things they can nominate me for’ and then sits around wondering if anyone actually will. Feel free to nominate my stories for a Hugo, Nebula, Stoker, BSFA, Pulitzer, Nobel… But, equally, I’m thrilled if you just read them.

How a mag reads through their submission queue is EXTREMELY subjective. It depends on organization-level guidelines and also sometimes even specific readers. But I can dig deeper into how to we read through the queue at Augur—and why the queue number is mainly aesthetic.

Libraries exist to provide free access to knowledge and community services. They don't exist to be a mouthpiece of your particular religion or moral code. We certainly aren't trying to "recruit trans kids" (wtf?). We aren't out to "attack Christian morals." We just want to do our jobs.

Since it is making the rounds with publishers today, here is our clear statement. No AI ever. No AI artwork, no AI for submission review or editing on our end. If we detect you sent us an AI story you will be blacklisted.

Drumroll for our Best of the Net nominees @virtualpowerpoet.bsky.social @andrewkozma.net @hollylynwalrath.bsky.social @fictionaljosh.bsky.social @thomasbehan.bsky.social @haywall.bsky.social

'25 Peppercorns' is out now with @mythaxis.bsky.social. This has been a particularly difficult story for me to publish, both personally and in finding a good home for it. It is deeply personal, but it's also political. mythaxis.co.uk/issue-43/25-... 1/...

I know things are hard right now. But just hold on, because soon we’re going to lose an hour of sunlight every day and it’ll all seem so much worse.

I’ve made an update to this situation. open.substack.com/pub/pacornel...

Now live, both the print and audio versions of my story, “Through the Machine” (As featured by Gizmodo—link threaded). Again, If you only read one of my stories this year, let it be this one. And if you like it, please share. www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/thro...