Steven D. Brewer
At Poet’s Seat in Greenfield

I am running for re-election as Secretary of SFWA. I have been serving in this role since the special election in November 2024.

My overriding goal as Secretary is to make sure that decisions of the Board are communicated to the membership clearly and in good time. Beyond that, I hope to continue to serve the organization while it navigates a complex transition to new leadership and a more solid foundation during a period of extreme political instability. 

When the previous Secretary changed positions last year, another candidate initially stepped forward and I thought, “Great! Someone else wants to do the work!” When that candidate withdrew after the deadline for announcing oneself as candidate, I proposed myself as a write-in candidate and was elected.

I am familiar with the role of Secretary in a non-profit, having served multiple other non-profits in various roles including as Secretary, Vice-President, and President. I believe I am generally effective at working within organizations for positive change.

The most important thing the volunteer Board needs to accomplish first is simply to restore the normal functioning of a member-led organization that has been riven by change, with nearly a complete turnover in staff and leadership over the past year. Restoring and then maintaining normal functioning is a necessary precondition for restoring trust of the membership. I share the frustrations of those who want us to move faster, and I want us to do that effectively by working from a solid foundation.

I am always an advocate for greater transparency, and have proposed the Board consider open meetings. I live in a state that requires open public meetings and I am very familiar with the trade-offs.. At minimum, there need to be clear definitions of what must be discussed in Executive Session and what must be discussed openly. Whether those definitions continue to be done by policy, or via bylaw changes, is important for the membership to consider.

I have already suggested we undertake a bylaws review. This is often a dull, tedious task that may seem to consume a vast amount of time for relatively little direct benefit, but our bylaws are out of date and at variance with how the organization now operates and should operate.

At the same time, SFWA needs strategic planning. We need to assess the current state of the organization, make decisions about what we want to see as a future state, and then develop a plan to move from where we are to where we want to go. By restoring normal functioning and reviewing the bylaws, we can develop an assessment of current state. Then we must engage in the long-range thinking necessary to envision the future state for the organization. Only then can we develop a plan for how to get there.

I would be honored to receive your vote to continue as Secretary of SFWA. I will do my best to work in the best interests of the organization.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, has changed their moderation policy to permit users to post statements that allege “mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” It’s open season on LGBTQIA+ people.

When I was a teenager, people routinely used slurs to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. I was terrified of being labeled as queer because I saw what happened to people who were. I was horrified to see people making social and environmental decisions based purely on dogma and prejudice. This was why I dedicated my career to science education. I hoped that people might learn how to use the best available information and multiple perspectives in order to make better decisions. To see the country moving back toward ignorance and superstition is profoundly discouraging.

I began using Facebook pretty early because one of my students invited me to join. I joined on Jul 23, 2007. I honestly never really liked Facebook all that much: most people didn’t post interesting stuff they created. It was always mostly “copypasta” garbage. Now, of course, it’s mostly ads and “suggested content” that Facebook tries to jam in front of your eyeballs to conceal the copypasta your “friends” share. And they’re experimenting with bots that will pretend to be people posting copypasta.

As it became more and more enshittified, I had basically quit using it. Then my publisher encouraged me to set up an author page as part of my book promotion efforts in 2021. Since then, I’ve posted snippets of my writing and even spent some money to experiment with advertising (i.e. the only way to get Facebook to not hide most of your posts.)

Before then, I had never even set up an Instagram account. When they created Threads, you needed an Instagram account to try it. So I set one up to experiment with. Instagram doesn’t allow you to disable autoplay, which results in frequent unrequested motion on pages. The same is true of Threads, which uses the Instagram codebase. Due to a mild vestibular disorder, it’s very uncomfortable for me to visit pages with unrequested motion. And I found Threads to be uninteresting anyway: it uses an algorithm that surfaces really uninteresting posts to show you. It kept showing me random short posts from people I didn’t know about inane topics. Vomit emoji.

But this new change in Meta’s moderation policy is probably a bright line for me. Meta is clearly pandering to the incoming fascist administration. I expect it’s defensible to them since, as a corporation, their only guiding star is to make as much money as possible. And the fascists have shown they’ll crush anyone that doesn’t fall into line. But I can’t be a party to it.

So, I’m going to post a message to my Meta accounts linking to this post and inviting my friends to come here if they want to find out what I’m doing. At least, until the fascists come after me.

At one time, an author might be able to focus on writing and let their publisher handle publicity. Now, an author is functionally expected to build and maintain a personal brand to attract readers independently of the publisher. This requires some avenue of providing information about your work and yourself that you can use to reach readers. Setting up an author website is the way to go.

There are a number of options to provide a channel of information. Some are “free”. You can use a social media platform (like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn). Some are commercial platforms that you can use to restrict some or all of your content to paying customers (like Substack or Patreon). I however am primarily here to talk about another way: building an independent channel of information that you own, control, and can easily take with you.

The real problem with both the “free” and platform solutions is that letting a corporation stand between you and the public is that, ultimately, the service risks becoming (or has already been) enshittified. By positioning themselves between you and your public, their incentives are diametrically opposed to yours. Facebook makes its money by hiding your posts from your “friends” — unless you pay them. (The Oatmeal concisely illustrated this in his comic Reaching People on the Internet).

Today I’m going to describe my approach which has three basic components: purchase your own domain name, contract with a hosting service, and use the a content management system. This ensures that you can reliably create your own information channel that is reliable, portable, and under own control. I am going to describe how I used Dreamhost to register a domain name and provide a hosting service that I configured to use the WordPress content management system (maintained by the hosting service).

Before actually setting anything up, it’s worth considering what information you intend to share and how it should be organized and managed. It’s worth looking at a number of other authors’ sites to see what information they provide and how they organize it. As an author, I want to share information about myself with a publicity photo photo, a biography, my current books, and contact information. Then I want to provide a feed of news about my writing activities: my upcoming events, new books, thoughts on writing, etc.

I use the Dreamhost hosting service. I selected it in 2007, so I’ve been using it for nearly 20 years. I’ve been very happy with it. I have one of the least expensive plans that I’ve shared with other people in my family. There are many more expensive plans, but as long as there is a relative trickle of interest in me, it’s plenty. If I felt that I needed more performance, I could upgrade to higher level services, that are still reasonably priced. But I generally haven’t felt the need.

With most of the plans, you get the first domain name included as part of the service. You mostly want to avoid a domain name that is going to conflict with some well-known service. I was able to get “stevendbrewer.com“. It used to be that people were unfamiliar with top-level-domains other than .com. Nowadays, people hardly seem to notice. (If Eritrea ever sells domain names, I would love to get “brew.er”. Every so often I check.) If the .com is already taken, I might look for a different name altogether in order to not be confused with the other entity. I would set your domain name to automatically renew.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you can set up an email address and a website. As part of the website configuration with Dreamhost, you can have them install and maintain WordPress for you. I would strongly encourage this solution. Maintaining a content management system can be complicated and fraught. Using their solution will make you safer from hackers and save you a lot of unnecessary work.

There are vast number of additional services you can access via the hosting service. You can set up distribution and discussion email lists. (I actually am using micro.blog for my newsletter, which I’ll discuss later.) As I mentioned previously, you can purchase higher levels of webservice, including “dreampress” and “vps” both of which reduce the likelihood of your site becoming unresponsive if many people visit it all at once (i.e. it gets “slashdotted”). I haven’t personally felt the need to purchase this. One useful additional service is to add a txt record to your domain name service for your domain name, which allows you use your domain name as your “handle” in the bluesky service, which offers a form of “verification.”

Once your domain name has propagated and you have WordPress running, you can start setting up your site. There is “dashboard” page visible at a magic-url: add wp-admin after the domain name and you’ll be able to log into your site. From the dashboard, you can find links to configure and manage the entire site. There are a lot of settings to add information and control functionality. There are plugins you can add to add functionality. And you can choose what theme you want for the site.

The settings are accessible in the dashboard. The dashboard itself offers a health check, to ensure everything about the site is configured correctly. Most of the settings are in the sidebar. Under Settings: General, you can set all of the basic info for the site. As you install plugins, their settings will appear here as well.

I use several plugins for additional functionality. I use a paid license for Akismet to filter spam comments that get added to the site. I use WPForms Lite plugin to have a contact form (and can add other forms as necessary). I use the Super WP Cache plugin to improve performance. I installed the Open Graph plugin to improve metadata when I post links at social media sites. And I have two Mastodon plugins: Include Mastodon Feed, which let’s me show my most recent posts in the sidebar and Simple Mastodon Verification that adds the tiny snippet of HTML to my site for my website to be “verified” in Mastodon. Several plugins came along with the theme I selected.

Dreamhost offers a number of advanced themes as part of their install package. I picked “Crio” which is a BoldGrid theme. But there are a vast number of other themes to choose from. I wanted one that offered a list of social media links, a menu of “pages” along the top, and then a feed of news articles.

The page of a theme has a number of regions that can be configured independently. Generally you add content to the regions by installing “widgets.” The Header contains the title of the site (my name) and a “tagline”. The Footer only contains my copyright info. I have a sidebar that I have show up on all pages that provide information I would like people to have accessible to advertise other content on my site that people might be interested in. The body of the site either displays a list of recent posts or the body of either a post or page. It’s worth creating a graphic identity for your site as “favicon” that will show up when people bookmark your page.

From the dashboard you can create pages and posts. I don’t like the default editor to add content, so I use a much more basic one. You can choose the editor you like best. As you post articles you can also add supporting imagery and media to complement your writing. It’s a good idea to have a picture to complement every article.

Once your site is up and running, you might want to publicize your site and posts using social media. I generally craft these posts by hand, but you can use services, like micro.blog to automatically share links to your posts to various services, including via an email newsletter. I primarily use micro.blog to manage an email list. People can subscribe to the list using a form on my blog. It’s possible to manage the list entirely using Dreamhost, but I’ve been using micro.blog which makes it a little easier.

Building an email list “newsletter” is probably the most important tool for maintaining an audience for your work. I hate this, but it’s probably true. Using micro.blog, I can tag certain of my posts to be automatically be sent out via email each month.

In the end, by sharing my hosting service with my brother, I’m spending around $200/year for both Dreamhost and micro.blog. This seems to me to be a reasonable expense to support my author publicity work. That’s about the same as a cup of coffee out per week.

One of the writing prompts on Mastodon got me thinking about goals for the new year. Mostly, I’m just going to keep having fun. I also want to work on promoting my work and trying harder to get my work out there. And I’ve got a bunch of current writing projects to work on. Finally, I’m going to keep working to give back to my writing communities.

My primary goal with my writing has always been to have fun. That’s why I’m doing this at all! Early on as I began trying to become a published author, I wrote a post about how to measure success as a writer. Writing — and all of its associated activities — is satisfying to me. And if it became less fun, I’d probably look for something else to do.

I want to work on improving my efforts toward publicity. You can write all you want, but if you don’t publicize your work, it doesn’t get read. I’ve been disgusted that getting people to sign up for a mailing is seemingly still the best way to build an audience. If you look at the upper right-hand corner of the window, you can sign up for my mailing list.

I also want to do a better job of keeping my manuscripts working for me. And that means re-submitting them when they get rejected. It’s tedious to keep sending them out, but that’s the only way you get stuff published. It’s one of my least favorite things to do as a writer.

Of course, I have a number of current works-in-progress that I’m going to keep working on. I’m getting close to a first draft of The Ground Never Lies. This is a sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem. I also want to finish the third novella of the sequel to Revin’s Heart: the first two, Devishire! and Campshire! are done, but I think a third will round out a book. And I have another half-dozen things to work on: a sequel to A Familiar Problem, a book about Curtains (a character in the Revin’s Heart universe), and a handful of other on-going projects. It’s not impossible that I might write some more Better Angels adventures.

I will continue to try to support and give back to my writing communities. I’ve become Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). I continue on the program committee of the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild and run the writing group Straw Dog Writes on Wednesdays. I support (and participate in) the Wandering Shop Stories groups on Mastodon and Bluesky.

In spite of all that’s going well for my writing life, I can’t say it’s going to be a good year. In fact, I’m sure with the coming change in the Federal administration, a lot of the coming year is going to be horrible to watch. But I’ll keep doing what I can to push back.

Firm Schedule Saturday Night Readings, Saturday, January 18, 2025, 9:15 PM EST The Good, the Bad and the Cringe: Science in Social Media, Sunday, January 19, 2025, 10:00 AM EST Athleticism in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sunday, January 19, 2025, 12:30 PM EST Writing With The Rainbow Sunday, January 19, 2025, 5:30 PM EST Makerspaces - For When You Can’t Own All The Tools, Sunday, January 19, 2025, 6:45 PM EST

I will be attending Arisia for only one day in 2025: Sunday, January 19. Originally, I had planned to attend for the full weekend, but our application for tables in the dealer room was declined and the hotel filled up too early for me to arrange lodging so, although I’d been scheduled for panels on Saturday, I had to decline two really interesting panels and will be unable to offer a reading. But I’m really looking forward to participating on Sunday.

Everyone I know is worried. They’re wondering what they can do, given the incoming federal administration that will put immense pressure on marginalized people and the norms and values of our country. There is no simple answer to this question. Recently I wrote about strategies my university is considering. These are all well-and-good, but what do they mean in terms of action? There’s a lot we can do.

My first suggestion is to do no harm. The biggest challenge to maintaining a fragile coalition is to avoid turning on one another. Our opponents will look for ways to divide us. They know, for example, that Israel/Palestine is a fracture plane in our coalition. They will use inflammatory language to try to get different sides to turn on each other to destroy our coalition. Does that mean we can do nothing? No: But we need to not attack one another for holding the “wrong” idea or for not supporting any one particular thing.

We should try to amplify voices calling for positive action. In 2016, the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild organized Voices for Resistance, a project that brought celebrated writers together to offer a reading on the theme of resistance. I was able to invite Kelly Link and was very gratified when she participated. With current events, our committee is discussing how to organize going forward.

Finally, we need to play the long game. We shouldn’t try to do everything. Pick a few things that are important and commit to working on them personally. There’s a lot we can do. But pace yourself! It’s going to be a long four years.

For myself, my primary goal is going to be to defend the LGBTQIA+ community. I don’t yet know exactly what I’m going to do, but I will continue being visible, writing fiction that features queer stories and characters, and offering myself up for panels that discuss issues of gender and sexual identity. Are those the most important concerns? There are going to be many, many fronts in this struggle. But these are the issues I’m going to focus on and, even if only from the sidelines, I will try to support people that choose other hills to die on.

Recently at the Faculty Senate, there were calls for the Chancellor to make public statements about what the University will do in response to changes implemented by the incoming Federal administration. A number of people were dissatisfied with his reply. They seem to want him to just come out and say, “We will break the law.” They don’t seem to understand that it would irresponsible and short-sighted make performative statements like that prospectively.

I was given the opportunity to attend a presentation by consultants advising about strategies the University should consider heading into the new year. Some key take-aways: We should avoid getting drawn into speculative debate about what might happen, redouble our efforts to maintain internal solidarity, and look to build external partnerships.

The incoming administration will make a lot of noise about things they want to do, but the actual changes they can make will be more limited. It’s distraction to spend a lot of time trying to respond to everything they throw up against the wall and instead, we should try to work in partnerships to find ways to ameliorate the worst effects of the things they can actually change.

We can expect to see concerted efforts to keep us divided and off balance. They will look for points of division among us and try to exploit them to get us to fight among ourselves. We need to resist the temptation and show solidarity around the things we can actually agree on, regardless of whatever points of division may exist.

Finally, we should look to partner with other organizations that we can ally with to maintain solidarity and support our goals: the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), other universities, etc. There are a lot of things we can’t do as an organization. But we can ally ourselves with other groups that can.

It’s going to be a dark time for our country. The incoming administration is antithetical to many of the things we believe in, like the rule of law, equal rights, and social justice. We’re going to be challenged as never before to find ways to move forward even while the rest of the country goes backward. I see the same pressures being bought to bear on other organizations I belong to. But we should focus on what we can do.

My year in writing has been a year of transition. During the spring, I negotiated with my employer to begin a phased retirement. I was distracted during much that time trying to figure out all of the ins-and-outs of this huge life change. There’s a lot to learn and a huge number of details. Luckily, my life partner is good at this sort of thing — much better than me — and she did the lion’s share of the work. I’m so lucky to have her. But starting this fall, I began teaching half-time, which has freed up a lot of time for writing.

I attended several events related to my writing. I was both a participant at Arisia in January moderating a panel on gender and sexual identity in media and serving on several other panels. I was a participant at Boskone during February where I served on panels about evolution and romance. I ran the Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) Marketplace table at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. I also ran Water Dragon and SPBU tables at Readercon in July.

I offered several readings as well, at Arisia, Boskone, and for Straw Dog. I mostly did readings from Better Angels: Tour de Force with selections from Military Morale Mishegoss and all of The Super Sticky Situation.

To support sales of the signed edition, I made a Better Angels ‘zine similar to the Revin’s Heart ‘zine with snapshots and descriptions of each of the Angels with their vital statistics and “three measurements.” I was really pleased with how it turned out — especially the pictures of the individual Angels. They’re really kyuto!

I continued to offer Straw Dog Writes for the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild. Roughly forty people have signed up or attended at some point, The average attendance was four with a range of 1 to 9. Attendance was lower during the summer but a few loyal attendees came nearly every week.

I set up and ran Wandering Shop Stories beginning in 2024. I have written a story fragment almost every day as a warm up exercise. We have four or five other participants nearly every day. In December the server we had used to operate the bot was scheduled to shut down, so I migrated to wandering.shop. Nearly 100 people have signed up for the feed. And in late November, I created a bot to offer the prompt on Bluesky as well.

I had two works published in 2024. The collected edition of Revin’s Heart came out from Water Dragon Publishing with the original seven novelettes plus three “side quests” — short stories from the perspective of other characters. I also had a short story, Always a Destroyer, selected for the anthology Romancing the Rainbow by Knight Writing Press.

I have signed the contract with Water Dragon Publishing for A Familiar Problem. A young man desperately wants a strong magical familiar but, instead, is captured and made the familiar of a powerful demon that intends to train him up for something. But what? The book is tentatively scheduled to be released in January 2025.

I did a lot of writing. I finished writing a new series of six novelettes: Lady Cecelia’s Journey with a seventh omake novelette for the extended edition (totaling 74,000 words). I’m calling it a sapphic romantasy road story:

Love blossoms between two young women, aristocrat and commoner, who risk everything to pursue a life together in face of parental and societal disapproval. Their hope takes them from their small town, across the island, to the Capital following the passionate dream that they can be together openly.

I also have written tens of thousands of words of The Ground Never Lies another sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who thinks herself unlovable, but discovers a capacity for love she believes she had lost. I had developed an original outline and when I finished writing it, I realized I only had about half a novel. But then I realized that I could write another timeline of the events that led to her disillusionment and intersperse the two timelines. At least that’s the plan.

I have several other works in progress. I have two novellas written as sequels to Revin’s Heart with a third in in progress. I’ve written several other short stories set in the same universe as Always a Destroyer.

In the fall, when the candidate for Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) dropped out, I proposed myself as a write-in candidate. In October, I was elected and took office on November 1. It’s been an interesting experience and a good fit for what I can offer to an organization. It’s been a steep learning curve to get up to speed with the current challenges and culture of the organization. But I’m very happy with the rest of the leadership team and feel appreciated for making a useful contribution.

Not everything went well in 2024, however. I was very disappointed when I was not offered a participant role at Worldcon in Glasgow. I had already purchased plane tickets and lodging. I ended up deciding not to go. I was able to recover some of what I had spent, and it turned out that many many people got COVID, so it was perhaps for the best.

I have some exciting plans for 2025 that I look forward to sharing soon.

Revin's Heart bundle

When I joined Water Dragon Publishing, my first publication was The Third Time’s the Charm. It is a steampunky fantasy adventure with pirates and airships and a trans protagonist. An 8000-word novelette, it was published as part of the Dragon Gems program. Especially during the pandemic, Water Dragon had discovered that small books seemed to sell well. Now the rest of the world may be catching up.

In Short Books are Perfect for Our Distracted Age, Margaret Renkl describes finding short novels and novellas are rewarding because you can read them in a single sitting. Enough to immerse yourself in but not something you’ll need to return to day after day to finish.

When I wrote The Third Time’s the Charm, I imagined it as part of a series of connected stories: each with its own arc, but connected to an overarching story that linked them all. After writing the second, For the Favor of A Lady, I was able to persuade my publisher to let me serialize them as Revin’s Heart. Five more stories followed in which the protagonist goes from obscurity to the heart of a kingdom and shakes its foundations.

After, Rewriting the Rules came out, we created a collected edition that includes the seven novelettes plus three “side quests” that tell background stories about the characters, including Riva’s Escape, that describes the transition of the protagonist. In the stories he’s only ever described as an man with his transition simply an established fact. But I thought readers would be interested in learning more about his history.

It was a surprise to me to discover that the bundles of the individual stories was actually easier to sell than the collected edition. Another author was envious of how at conventions, the bundles seemed to fly off the table.

Soon, I’m hoping to see if lightning will strike twice. I’ve written another series of novelettes set in the same world, but twenty years earlier. A minor character in Revin’s Heart is Lady Cecelia, who is the curator of a botanical garden. She shows up just a couple of times. But I was interested in telling her background story.

In Lady Cecelia’s Journey, two young women, aristocrat and commoner, fall in love and struggle against societal norms against same-sex relationships and the difference in their social status. In order to live together openly, they flee their backward town to travel to the more cosmopolitan capital. I’m billing it as a sapphic romantasy road story. I’m hoping for it to be serialized as six novelettes, with a seventh omake novelette, Lady Cecelia’s Temptation, that will be part of a collected edition.

Many years ago, I was a doctoral student in science education… (Pro-tip: Always call yourself a “doctoral student” rather than a “graduate student” because the University staff will treat you way better) Anyway, I was taking mostly Biology classes, but also some classes in the Geology Department.

Geology tends to be a much more blue-collar science than Biology. At least, this department was. And a number of the more blue-collar students pegged me as some egghead intellectual that was slumming in Geology and gave me the cold shoulder. One was a non-traditional student — my age or older — who had worked for years as a well-drilling operator and was going back to school to finish a bachelors degree.

One night, we were running a pump test out in the field. For this test, you run a pump for like 24 hours or longer to create a cone of depression in the water table and then, when you turn off the pump, you monitor how quickly the water table returns to baseline. This can yield useful information about the nature of the permeability of the soil, etc. Anyway, I was one of 6 or 7 students out in the middle of a field at night with a huge generator truck monitoring a pump from like 2-4am.

The guy was chain smoking and holding forth with the rest of the students. They were all traditional late teen or early 20’s undergrads and they looked up to him. He was joking with them and telling stories. Then he looked around at them and said, “If you don’t get a job before sundown… Anybody? Anybody?” There was silence. Into the silence, I said, “You get a goddamned job before sundown or we’re shippin’ ya off to military school with that GODDAMN FINKELSTEIN SHIT KID! SONOVABITCH!” It’s a quote from Cheech & Chong’s movie Up in Smoke.

The guy was stunned. He’d had me pegged for some goody two-shoes academic and had no idea that I was a former stoner and had come of age in a blue-collar environment. He was ecstatic to discover me as a fellow-thinker. “Right? Right?” he crowed. After that, I was officially OK and was welcomed into the bosom of the Geology student community.