I watch the Amazon rank of my books to get a measure of what’s going on. Since I’m not the publisher of my books, I don’t have access to the underlying raw data from all of the different places where my books are sold. But watching the Amazon rank gives me some indication of what’s going on.

The reasons why the rank changes are pretty inscrutable. When people buy copies via Amazon you see a big bump. When nobody’s buying, it declines. But it sometimes goes up and down small amounts for other undetermined reasons: Maybe people searching for it? Or making searches in which it appears? Who knows?

When Better Angels: Tour de Force came out, we marked the original Better Angels short story free everywhere. It’s the first story in Tour de Force and you can see it for free as part of the digital preview anyway. But it turns out that you can’t mark Kindle books free. Amazon won’t let you. If Amazon sees you’re giving a book away elsewhere, however, it will sometimes mark the Kindle book for free too. (This happened with The Third Time’s the Charm, which is still free everywhere, including at Amazon.)

When a book is free, its rank seemingly goes way, way up. That’s not too surprising, I suppose. When it was marked free, it went from ~3M to about ~50K and then would bounce around there. It would sometimes spike up to 1500 or so and then drift back down. I noticed it spiked up the other day and then, when I checked again, it had dropped down to 3.5M. “Huh?” I thought. So I went to look at the product page and noticed that it wasn’t free anymore.

It’s still free elsewhere. I checked at Smashwords and Kobo anyway. Weird. It’s impossible to know why Amazon does anything they do ̈̈— other than that one can reliably predict they’re shoving their blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

I attended Boskone before I started publishing science fiction and I was impressed by the number of authors I recognized. I’ve attended the last two years and it still hasn’t lost that magic. And being able to rub shoulders now as an author myself is a lot of fun. I was particularly looking forward to setting up a fan table for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and meeting SFWA members that I expected would drop by.

I like to arrive the night before so I can get a good night’s sleep and have plenty of time to find everything to get ready beforehand. But this year, there was a storm the day before and some work events conflicted with getting an early start. So we decided to wait and just drive over on the morning of the convention.

When we arrived, I visited the area where registration would be. There was one person there and I was gratified that they recognized my name. We confirmed when registration would open and where the fan tables were.

After we checked in, we went back to the car and, on the way, found that the galleria was already open. Once we’d put our stuff in the room, I went back and set up the SFWA Fan Table. I had received the necessary supplies just two days before: A banner, tablerunners, an ARCH D sized posterboard, two kinds of flyers, and rack cards.

It took less than an hour to get setup. I commented that it was WAY less work than setting up a dealer table. When I set up the tables for Water Dragon Publishing and Small Publishing in a Big Universe at Readercon, we had more than 70 titles to unbox, organize, and set up on book stands. By comparison, this was a snap.

Then I just hung out at the table.

I had some other events scheduled. I moderated a panel, served on three panels, and had a reading. They were all excellent. Well, all except the reading: Nobody came to my reading. I got my books out with cards and stickers and ribbons and ‘zines. But nobody came. I sat there for a half hour, then packed everything up and went on with the con. That’s how it is when you’re a nobody.

My younger son came with me and helped cover the fan table when I couldn’t be there. He made a point of telling people that he was not a SFWA member, but was eligible to be an associate member. He said that people told him nice things about me, which made me feel good.

I got to meet a lot of SFWA folks. Some current board members, former board members, and former officers stopped by. And a goodly number of members. I also got to explain SFWA to a bunch of new people. I don’t know how many new members we might get. But, personally, just getting to meet a bunch of people, was a big win for me.

We had been watching the weather and had considered staying another night in the event it looked bad. Originally, it looked like it might be a big snow event. But then it looked like it might just be rain. Then it looked like it might be icy. So we packed up a little early to drive during the warmest part of the afternoon. In the end, it was just rainy on the MassPike, but there had been a lot of snow at our house. We had no problem getting home, but I was a bit daunted to pull the car into the 8 inches of snow on the driveway. But I was able to park. Getting the car out may be another matter.

Today, my university sent me a link to a mandatory cybersecurity training. In the HTML-formatted email, they included a link that looks like this:

https://university.matrixlnselu.com/training/home

But the actual link that would be opened goes to something like:

https://num9.safeclicks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclick.marcon.university.edu%2F%3Fqs
%3D79af0e80a4fc65b28bc6d7truckf2e0620df074d3c5769b3901
732d80246a6a905559ef9d772af96560ba50bbfe6380c2309c565d
7e2c62631&data=05%7C02%7Csdbrewer%40university.edu%7Cb
702860502824bdd172f08dd421140a2%7C7bd08b0b13374dc194bb
d0b2e57a497f%7C0%7C0%7C638739364061829157%7CUngown%7CT
WFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXBsex1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCI
sIlAiOiJXaW4zpenisFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7
C%7C%7C&sdata=Km50bFeo%2FrVW4AtWPtduUM2FZQhKdYWbcJQZlS
7YNjE%3D&reserved=0

(note: these have been munged so they hopefully won’t work)

There are actually two redirections in the link above. First, the mail-system rewrites every URL you receive in email and replaces it with a database look up at outlook.com so that if they decide a URL is malicious (i.e. links to something they don’t like) they can make it so the link doesn’t work. The second redirect is done by the system that generates the original email: they want to keep track of who clicked on the link so they can generate metrics about who is reading their emails.

I replied to the email to say “This seems like a terrible security practice. URLs should go where they say they do. And if they don’t, employees should be trained to not click on them. Duh.”

I replied back to the sender (which opened a “ticket” with IT) and I copied the Chief Information Officer of the university, whom I’ve known for many, many years. He replied first, “I hear you” he said. But he made it clear this is just what we’re doing now.

I pointed out that I’ve always tried to teach people to never click on links like that which leak information information about your browsing activity. I spent most of my career pushing back against this kind of enshittification. But to little avail seemingly.

We went on to exchange a couple more emails about feeling like grumpy old men complaining about the young whippersnappers who can’t read packet captures or “parse a coredump to save themselves.”

University IT replied later to close the ticket and say, “Thanks for the feedback. We will take it into consideration for future training notifications.” Heh. Right.

I’ve gotten my final schedule for Boskone, Feb 14-16! I’m moderating one panel, serving on three others, and offering a reading on Saturday afternoon. 

 Start Time              Title
Fri  2:30 PM       Biology in SF/F                                   
Sat 10:00 AM       SF and Totalitarianism                            
Sat 11:30 AM       Genetic Engineering (mod)                              
Sat  5:30 PM       Reading: Steven D. Brewer                         
Sun 10:00 AM       Fantasy Beyond Swords and Sorcery

There are a lot of great people on the panels with me. It should be a lot of fun!

We didn’t get a table in the dealer room this year and so, since I’ll otherwise be at liberty, I’ve decided to organize a fan table for SFWA. It will be in the Galleria (along with the dealer room) so stop by to say hi!

When I was in grad school, circa 1994, I started writing haiku in Esperanto and exchanged them with my brother Phil. It was a way to practice Esperanto and have “a moment of zen” each day during a time when I was very busy.

At first, most of my haiku were “joke haiku”. I eventually learned that there is a name for joke haiku: senryu. But some of the haiku I wrote, even in those early days, were actually not bad. And doing something creative, however small, was meaningful to me.

A few years later, after I had secured a faculty appointment and moved to the Pioneer Valley, the Haiku Society of America met in Northampton. I attended out of curiosity, and was intrigued when my haiku were taken seriously. I realized that I didn’t have to treat writing haiku as a joke. And that there was a long history of haiku, going back hundreds of years. And a larger world of practice that included tanka, renga, haibun, and more.

Ten years later, I decided to self-publish a book of haiku in Esperanto with English translation: Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo. I decided to include artwork along with the haiku and developed a theme of imaginary postage stamps from Esperantujo — Esperanto Land, a fabled country that springs into existence around people when they speak together in Esperanto. I used photographs I’d taken, combined them with a frame that looked like perforations, and added a monetary symbol that used the unicode glyph for spesmiloj, a proposed universal currency.

It was my first attempt to lay out a book. It was a lot of work and it didn’t turn out quite perfectly. But it was pretty good. It was incredibly gratifying to receive the proof in the mail and actually hold it in my hands.

Due to the full color illustrations, it was pretty expensive. But I had a great time showing it to people and giving copies to family and friends. Since it was so expensive, I set the price to be effectively at cost. As costs increased, Amazon became unwilling to sell it (since they don’t make enough profit). So I eventually decided to make it available via Google Books for free. I can still order author’s copies, however, so if anyone really wants printed and signed copy on paper, let me know.

I published three more books of haiku. Premitaj Floroj (Pressed Flowers) used images from the UMass Herbarium. My best work, I think, was senokulvitre (without eyeglasses) for which I created a series of black-and-white illustrations with a narrow range of focus. I still use these images frequently to illustrate blog posts. In 2016, I published the last one, Ideoj Ĝermas (Ideas Germinate) that used creative-commons licensed imagery of seeds from a French museum. These are all still available for purchase.

I’ve written hundreds of haiku in the intervening ten years, but I haven’t published another book. I came up with a great idea for one. But collecting the imagery would be a lot of work and so I haven’t done it. I’m not sure the world needs another book of haiku in Esperanto. I’m not sure it ever did, honestly. It certainly didn’t appreciate them. But I had fun making them and that’s what really counts in the end.

I’ve only been attending Arisia for a few years and every year I’ve attended, it’s been at the Westin Seaport in Boston. But this year, they switched to the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. Evidently, it had been here in the past.

It’s a lot smaller. It filled up so quickly that I wasn’t able to get lodging. And my publisher wasn’t able to get a spot in the dealer room.

I was able to get on the program. I was scheduled for six panels and a reading. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t able to get lodging, I decided to drive over only for a single day. So I declined the two panels and the reading on Saturday and planned to drive over just for Sunday.

A couple of days before, the forecast changed to predict a serious winter storm for Sunday night. Great, I thought. But I have a four-wheel drive car, so I decided to just go for it.

They had warned the parking might not be available, so I got up at 4:30am and drove into Boston, arriving around 7am. As it turned out, parking wasn’t a problem and I had plenty of time to walk around and find everything before registration opened at 9am. Not that it took long to find things, because the venue was quite small.

I hung out in the cafe for a while and then ran into a writer friend who was setting up to volunteer in registration. We chatted amiably and then, once registration opened, I was able to get my badge, go to Program Nexus to get my presenter packet, get the QR code to get the parking discount, and get set up for my first panel.

It felt crowded and cramped having to squeeze through the hallway that was jammed with people. Arisia requires masks, but I found being in crowds to be nearly panic-inducing even before COVID.

My first panel was The Good, the Bad and the Cringe: Science in Social Media about how misinformation and disinformation has made social media into disaster even worse than journalism was before. All of the participants brought useful information. I was able to offer some unique perspectives about how people use social media, not just for information, but for “lulz” where engagement is more important than veracity. At the same time, I asked the audience to consider which was more important when they were a teenager trying to learn about sex: the sex-ed class or the locker-room? Both perspectives are incomplete: the sex-ex class generally offers only a curated and white-washed view of the truth while the locker room is more authentic, but full of misinformation and distortions. But both perspectives add value.

I had a short break before my next panel Athleticism in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had wanted to be on the panel because physical fitness and training are essential elements in both Revin’s Heart and A Familiar Problem. I was able to plug my books and contribute several good bits that seemed appreciated by the audience and other participants.

I had a long break until my next presentation. It was so crowded in the hotel, I finally just went out to my car in the freezing parking garage, covered up with my coat, and snoozled for an hour until the cold finally drove me back in.

My favorite session was probably Writing With The Rainbow. This was the only one that was really about authorship. And had all the queer vibes I love. I was able to talk about my books and short stories I’ve written and the goals I’ve been trying to accomplish. I was glad to meet all of other participants and we had a great conversation about the topics.

Immediately after was my last panel, Makerspaces – For When You Can’t Own All The Tools, where I was the moderator. One of the participants had dropped out, so there were only four of on the panel and, so I promoted myself to be a participant as well as moderator. It was a nicely diverse group with another academic makerspace user, someone from a huge independent makerspace, and someone who runs a small makerspace out of their home. I was pleased with how well the questions I’d crafted elicited good conversation and information. I told a couple of stories that resonated with the participants and audience, about making a shimenawa and a story I’d heard about AS220.

As soon as the last panel wrapped up, I hurried out to my car and started driving home. The winter storm was moving in, and I had to drive straight through it to get home. The road signs all said, “Winter Storm Warning! Plan ahead!” Gee, thanks.

Visibility was low in a few spots and the MassPike was snow-covered, so it was sometimes difficult to see lane markings. I averaged about 40mph and took a longer route which avoided the back roads. It increased the travel time by only about 1/3, so was well worth it. It was nice to get home and go to sleep before midnight in my own bed after a very long day.

Now today, I’m back to work, waiting to see if I caught COVID, and dreading the change in administration. But, for a cold snowy day, I’ve made a big pot of clam chowder and am staying in where it’s warm.

I think Arisia is going to be in the same venue again next year, so I’ll plan to make my reservations earlier and recommend my publisher make the request for space in the dealer room as early as possible.

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.