It's October! We're all wearing our SpOoKy hats now, right? Right? #SpookyHats

Had the honor of being on a death care in science fiction panel with @morbidloren.bsky.social at FOGcon a lifetime ago; this event looks great!

SF Bay Area Horror fans! I’m going to be reading with other members of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the @horrorwritersassoc.bsky.social on October 25! www.litquake.org/litcrawl for more details!

Do you like cemeteries? Are you on Goodreads? Enter to win an ebook of my cemetery memoir Still Wish You Were Here: More Adventures in Cemetery Travel on Goodreads! www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

Important info on scams for authors here.

A friend writes: I saw someone's post somewhere that talked about how their nine-year-old and all his friends have started using "That's AI" instead of "I don't believe you." Mom: "We're having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight." Kid: "That's AI."

Return of the Nigerian Prince Redux: Beware Book Club and Book Review Scams writerbeware.blog/2025/09/19/r...

Hope something good happens to you today.

You could hardly find a more on-brand October event: Me, Amy Shea and @morbidloren.bsky.social at the SF Columbarium on Oct. 16. Registration link below! www.eventbrite.com/e/a-book-tou...

Great jumping Joshua. This is an absolutely killer line-up (no pun intended.)

Too Poor to Die Free online book seminar with Amy Shea Still time to sign up, one week to go!

The primary diff between writing fiction and nonfiction is when you write nonfic, you research a topic for 2 weeks and then write 1000 words on it and when you write fiction you research a topic for 2 weeks and get one sentence out of it.

Robert Redford playing a gentle incarnation of death, coming for a frightened old woman in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" (1962). An extraordinary performance then, terribly bittersweet today

❤️

My latest for @newrepublic.com: I went back to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 book “The Denial of Death” to see if it had insights in an age of AI, nightmare tech bros, and the return of Trump in the wake of Covid-19. Turns out it does, though not in the way Becker quite foresaw:

For real, if you've ever been considering reviewing / interviewing / etc. someone but stopped yourself because the book was released months ago... do it! We love getting coverage after pub day.

If you've been wanting to read a chapter from "San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries," now's your chance. "Historians aren’t certain how many graves remain at City Cemetery. Researcher Alex Ryder believes it’s at least 10,000 but is probably closer to 20,000 or more."

“I watched Snow White when I was a kid and I ain’t gave a bitch a poison apple yet” is art and belongs in the Louvre

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

Filling a form on how many of my books LibGen contains so that other people could train AI on it without my consent is a whole mood

Maps used to be so much better in the old days, because they would show you where the monsters are. Now, we have to stumble upon them ourselves.

Don't be shy about expressing yourself to those you care for. Say the thing your heart feels. Give that hug. Tell them you love them before letting go. Hold their hand. Share a memory. Shed some tears. Ask the questions. Dance. Revel when you find your people. Treasure friends with all you've got.

The biggest trick the devil ever pulled is to call LLMs “artificial intelligence.”

Bees & butterflies were believed to be intermediaries between this world and the otherworld They embodied the souls of the dead - becoming the celestial messengers of the gods #Folkyfriday 💫 📸me #nature #insects #photography #folklore #legend #celestial #lore

To be an author, you must write. There is no way around or under. There is no cheating the devils in your hand or the ones in your head. You change the blank page and be changed by it. If you are not doing that, then why are you even here?

A Clockwork Orange

It was the omg what now of times, it was the seriously wtf is happening of times

My favorite comic book character turns 40!

Let’s write.

A tombstone in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, photographed by Andy Darby. Note the border inscription.

This made my morning!

Down to the last 12 hours... Every backer who purchases a copy of my cemetery memoir Still Wish You Were Here will also get the updated ebook of the first volume in the series, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. Two books for the price of one!

What could go wrong?

For the morning shift…

It’s the final week for my friend Loren Rhoads’ (@morbidloren.bsky.social) Kickstarter for her new book, Still Wish You Were Here. It’s a cemetery memoir unlike any other: part travelogue, part love letter to the world’s graveyards, and entirely full of Loren’s signature humane voice. bit.ly/4m14sMC

Do you find beauty in cemeteries? Do you like to smell the roses in graveyards? Do you visit tombs at religious sites on vacation? Are you death positive? Have I got a book for you! www.kickstarter.com/projects/lor...

[reads another comment re: being surprised about another instance where ai is secretly powered by humans behind the scenes like that house in the movie Parasite] y’all, stop what you're doing and look up mechanical turk. read the history of ai. it’s always been this way.

I want to spotlight the clarity and beauty of the language Kelsey uses: the dead have a right to stay dead. They do. We're going to need to develop standardized, universal, opt-out-only legal means to allow them to. To allow /us/ to, for we will all be citizens in the kingdom of the dead in time.

Write about your main character today. #writingprompts #writerslife #writing #write #happywriting #create #justwrite

I'm delighted to reveal the cover of my new book, Upon A White Horse: Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland. It will be published by @headlinebooks.bsky.social on 11 September. Available to pre-order here: linktr.ee/UponAWhiteHo... If you are happy to share this post, please, I'd be grateful.

this is an excellent resource -- thanks for sharing, and let's spread it, #kidlit friends!

Writers should never modify their own prose as a reaction to what stupid fucking generative AI is doing -- that shit stole from us, and it stole poorly, incompletely, and has none of our magic and zero of our humanity, our experience, our wonder and fear, and it never ever will. Fuck AI. You do you.

What authors inspired your most recent book? I read a bunch of cemetery memoirs before I realized I was writing one. Still Wish You Were Here was inspired by @ericabuist.bsky.social @peteralanross.bsky.social Rachael Hanel, Greg Melville, and Caitlin Doughty.

I THINK Kickstarter just sent the ALERT email to the people following the campaign. Feel free to also alert whoever the heck you want: www.kickstarter.com/projects/jpl... We we make $1444 in 47 hours?! I know other campaigns have, and we do have a lot of cameo options, if anyone is feeling FRISKY!

My exploration of visiting cemeteries as a tourist was chosen by Kickstarter as a "Project We Love." You can check it out for yourself at www.kickstarter.com/projects/lor...

"I am the OG vibe shift." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

A serene Sunday scene. Have you seen our beautiful hydrangeas yet this year? 🦋

I'll take "Movies that Don't Need to Be Remade" for $1000.

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

As @gregpak.net has noted, unless there was a specific clause in all the contracts that allows for this, they can't go back and retroactively amend contracts without the author's consent. This is a class action suit waiting to happen.