Just FYI, administrative warrants (like the ones used by ICE) are not judicial warrants (used by cops, signed by a judge). You do NOT legally have to open the door for an ICE officer with an administrative warrant *no matter what the ICE officer says.*

Hello Writing Community! We are delighted to announce our First Official Bluesky *** #MSWL Day *** February 12, 2025. 🎉🎉🎉 Agents + editors can post what they ✨wish✨ they had in their inboxes; writers can find their next best fit for querying. Learn more here: manuscriptwishlist.com/the-next-off...

Anyone have a debut book coming out this spring? Tell me about it — it’d be nice to hear about something nice! Your first book only happens once, friend!

today's installment: "malingering"

Alrighty, we broke. After a bunch of kicking and screaming, and the usual feet dragging that comes with joining a new form of social media, Handspun is now officially on Bluesky!

We love booksellers, but don’t do this.

One thing I'm particularly pleased about re my career to date is having helped murder the rote habit of setting all non-English text in italics.

no time to explain, jump in the Haikubaru

Mundane Halloween is back! Today is the "Mundane Halloween" contest in Japan, sponsored by website Daily Portalz The idea is to dress up as something incredibly ordinary. Here is a thread of some of my favorites from this year!

Here's the cover for Love Lies, and Cherry Pie! 😍🥧 Coming May 7, 2024 from Atria/Emily Bestler Books. jackielaubooks.com/books/love-l...

would love to abolish the notion that making your audience feel joy is inherently intellectually and artistically inferior to making them feel pain, a cheap and cynical attitude which poisons everything from misogynist disdain for romance to why it’s harder for comedies to win Best Picture

Folks, look, Scholastic is only a billion-dollar juggernaut that dominates the children’s book industry. What are they supposed to do about fascist book banning and censorship in the face of 11 racists sending angry emails? Whatever they want because they literally can? C’mon. Be reasonable.

In the hands of the biggest media corporations, the term 'diversity' has become a poison pill. A way to silo and minimize the contributions of the historically marginalized. There are *real* books and 'diverse' books, which you can safely ignore. At conferences, real panels and 'diverse' panels. Etc

Happy Indigenous People's day, the crimes of the conquistadors were known and recorded not just by their victims but by their cultural and linguistic contemporaries.

As WGA leaders meet today to finalize our deal, we begin a new era for writers — and for labor in our industry. But we also begin to face the final and most insidious form of unionbusting propaganda: a years-long effort to sell the lie that our strike was not worth it.🧵

the next time an editor asks "are you sure you want [word] and not [more commonly used word in that context]?" I'm going to embellish my STET with "you wouldn't want people to think an AI wrote it, would you?" Write weird. Comprehensibly, vividly , humanly weird.

"But writing books all by myself is hard!" YES. I KNOW.

This is a great example of what I meant when I said "people co-opting the language of specific channels of professional or academic discussion into the public discourse" because we have AI dorks co-opting the language of social justice, of disability, of therapy to justify theft at scale.

I know others are also saying it, but a reminder that the WGA's tentative deal couldn't have happened without the support of other unions like SAG and IATSE. We should and will support them the same way they supported us.

A fun thing about me is that even though my education is all humanities-based and I have worked a job for 20+ years where the top criterion is that you have to be good with words, I still have to look up a definition a minimum of once a day because what if I've been using it wrong this whole time.

sure do feel some kind of way about the idea of writers going to work to help chatbots put other writers out of work

It used to be that I only struggled to tell the difference between real news and The Onion when I hadn't had enough sleep but

YAY CHARLOTTE! I absolutely FLIPPED over just the sample pages for this-- I cannot wait till everyone gets to read this. 😍

Pleasing.

I see many people are surprised that governments pay artists to make art. In Iceland the government also supports publishers financially and funds theatres and the symphony orchestra. In my opinion that is just what a government is supposed to do.

Happy pub day, @kjcharles.bsky.social! 😘

Eyo, just a little heads up for artists. 👀 When someone comments under your post "What is this artstyle called?", do not answer it in a serious manner. They're asking for prompts they can put in midjourney to generate art. I've seen it a lot on pinterest and twitter. just block them, if possible.

companies programmed us to refer to art, music, video, and writing as "content" to make it seem like it comes from the website and not from a person who had to think of it and make it

Someday the IRS will let me schedule these in advance the way my state does and I will stop needing to rely on the Social Media Quarterly Tax Payment Warning System, but here is my contribution to the Q3 SMQTPWS

I was grateful for Harpers Bazaar for giving me a chance to talk about the significance of a an exp I had with Scholastic (spoiler, it sucked) this past Spring. I hoped and hope that what I did then will embolden others to refuse these kinds of offers. www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/a448...

PSST the sale doesn't officially start until Friday (when it will be at all retailers) but Kindle already dropped the price of my high holidays m/m romance novella "Sailor's Delight" to $1.99 #romancelandia 🍏🍯😘 L'shanah tovah! amzn.to/3RdnxPn

The received cultural mythology of 9/11 is so far from my actual lived experience of being an adult New Yorker on that day that it breaks my brain (and my heart) to even try to reconcile the two. For those who are younger, question nearly all of the political framing you hear about that day.

This show will last like two seasons. The reputation for being a scab lasts a lifetime.

Call your reps.

Reminder, if one is still needed, that you should NEVER pay someone to publish you. Ever. Vanity presses are scams, full stop.

"You're overreacting," they said. "If you want an abortion you can just travel to another state," they said...

In case you were wondering how contagious the strain of COVID going around is. This is from a steakhouse in Arkansas. Bottom post announces closing for 2 days due to 14 staff out sick. Top post announces they can't find ANY Covid Tests ANYWHERE. Wear a mask again indoors. Get a booster soon.

Attempting to get online info on gas lighting (as in domestic illumination of the nineteenth and twentieth century) and it's flipping impossible. You might think someone was trying to persuade me it didn't exist.

A bookseller told me they’d sold a copy of my sapphic beekeeper romance to a customer, and that customer later found a swarm of bees in her yard — and she recognized what they were doing and was able to get them properly hived! This bee book saves bees! #romancelandia

"The United States has always been a terrible place to be sick and disabled. Ableism is baked into our myths of bootstrapping and self-reliance, in which health is virtue and illness is degeneracy." Devastating article: https://wapo.st/3s1vP2i

Benji Smith: "I incorporated the prosecraft analytic tools into the Shaxpir desktop application" If the books, used w/o consent, developed this app, the app also has to go.

Follow-up context. Basically, the guy obviously tried to fool everyone into thinking it was over. He’s still making money off AI trained on the books he stole. https://bsky.app/profile/datlow.bsky.social/post/3k4fnyh7anp25

I'm so out of practice with this stuff. Hi, hello, how is everyone. What was the last book you absolutely loved? Tell me so I can immediately buy it and then not read it for at least six months.