I’m having a little FOMO. I decided to skip Worldcon this year. I had originally intended to go. That was why I had signed for LOSCon last year. But I had a somewhat mixed experience last year, so instead I decided to just stay home. I’m not really having much FOMO because I really don’t like going to conventions all that much in the first place. But a little.

Last year I did everything. I did Arisia, Boskone, Watch City, Nebulas, Readercon, Worldcon, and LOSCon. I had signed up for everything since I had a new book coming out! But then my book didn’t come out in December. Or January. Or February. Or May. Or July. Or August. In November, we finally got copies while I was at LOSCon. And I probably should have signed up to do everything again this year to promote my new book. But I couldn’t.

Part of it is traveling. Since I have to use a portable oxygen concentrator to fly, it’s pretty inconvenient. It’s really helpful to have someone to travel with me but I wasn’t sure I could get anyone to go. Often my son has traveled with me, but the semester is about to start. And I really didn’t want to travel by myself.

A lot of people love going to conventions for the parties. Unfortunately, due to my health issues, I can’t really attend parties anymore. I need to wear an N95 mask and I especially try to avoid crowded spaces that have poor ventilation. So I can’t do the parties.

Note: It’s worth pointing out that I hate parties and I would never go to them anyway if I could possibly avoid it. I can’t stand parties and I would rather eat shards of broken glass that go to one. But now I *can’t* so it’s OK.

As an aside, I saw that COVID is high in California anyway, so I’m feeling like I dodged a bullet. Last year, pretty much everyone who worked at my publisher’s dealer table got COVID, flu or both. I didn’t — because I wore a mask the whole time.

I enjoy serving on panels at conventions. I think I’m not bad at it. I used to worry about what I was going to stay, but I’ve discovered that if you stick a mic in front of me, I can babble endlessly. People generally seem to think I have something useful to offer.

I liked selling books in the bookstore I was really surprised to find I was pretty good at that. But after the unpleasant run-in with the other author last year, I was reluctant to do that again.

A final factor that played into my decision was that this is my last week of employment. Monday, August 31, is my very last day. As it turned out, getting all of the paperwork organized and submitted has been unexpectedly complicated. You would think a giant university would know how to manage something like that, that obviously happens literally every day. But they don’t. Which day is my “date of retirement”? My last day of employment? Or the first day after? They don’t know. (It turns out it’s my last day of employment.) I’m glad to not be trying to resolve these issues remotely from California.

In the end, I’m guess glad I didn’t go to Worldcon. I do have a little FOMO. I will miss seeing my SFWA folks and a lot of the other authors I’ve worked with. But I’m glad to miss the travel and the stress.

I do plan to go next year, when it is in Montreal, because I can just drive there. I’ll see you all then!

the interior of a casement room in brick fort in north carolina

For months, I’ve been needing to shut down my old blog and archive my old posts. And I finally found a solution: blog.sh!

Although the term “blog” was coined in 1997, I didn’t write my first post until 2002. I started blogging defensively. What happened was that I would start drafting an email to one person, then think “Oh, this other person would be interested too” and add them, but then realize that some of what I was writing wasn’t really appropriate for them, so then I would make two emails and have to copy and paste and edit. Finally, I realized I could just put all of the “public” info — the things I didn’t care if anyone read — into a blog post and only send specific emails to particular people.

I had been exploring wikis at the time, using PHPWiki and saw that there was a mechanism to do daily posts using a calendar interface. I used that for a couple of years but then decided to switch to using Drupal for blogging. My blog resided at blog.bierfaristo.com and my first post was on Dec 14, 2005. By this time I was also getting interest from other organizations who wanted to set up websites that were effectively blogs: the Amherst Democratic Town Committee and Esperanto League for North America (now Esperanto-USA) so I set up Drupal websites for them as well.

I was tangentially involved when the University of Massachusetts Amherst decided to standardize on Drupal as their content management system. I had been using it for a few years at that point. They brought in a focus group and had two presentations: one was by a Drupal consultant and the other was for a commercial product that was a static-site generator. I could see the attraction of using the static-site generator. But I knew that the campus would need to accept content via the web and, their only solution for that was to hand-write one-off PHP scripts. That sounded like a disaster from a security standpoint.

One of the short-comings of Drupal was that it was difficult to update: point updates were pretty easy, but each major update required migrating the content and completely retheming the site. And when Drupal 8 came out they basically threw out all of the expertise anyone had developed by completely redesigning the entire system and made managing the dependencies so complex you needed a separate tool (composer). So, I gave up on Drupal and never updated from Drupal 7.

A lot of other people did as well. Some folks created a fork called backdrop that rejected the changes that Drupal 8 had made. I had initially considered switching to that as well, but they had decided not to support the antiquated “blog” system and it required migrating the content into a different content type. So I didn’t bother making the switch.

During this period of time I had also started using Twitter and eventually also set up a separate Twitter feed for my author work. I quit using it and finally deleted my accounts when Twitter started being run by a Nazi. I grabbed archives of my feeds before I did so. But I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.

When I set up my author blog (where you’re reading this post), I decided to use WordPress. Mainly, as I’ve written elsewhere, this was because I could get my hosting service to manage the install and keep it up-to-date. It works OK, although I’ve been worried about security as AI is being used to find vulnerabilities. But I try to use relatively few modules and make sure they stay updated. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Early on, the security in WordPress was execrable, which was in part why I went with Drupal as a CMS. It seems better now.

In the interim, my old blog site still languished on Drupal 7. I hadn’t used it in several years. Even though Drupal 7 had been end-of-lifed a couple of times, people still kept patching it to keep it working. But finally, they said they really, really, really were going to stop. And, in April, I started getting a daily email whining that it really was EoL and needed to be taken down. So I was interested when I saw the announcement about blog.sh that was optimized for building an archive site.

I was particularly interested in a static site generator for an archive because I wanted something that wouldn’t require maintenance. It wasn’t something I would necessarily watch all the time and so I didn’t want to have to think about managing security. I wanted something that could just sit there.

I used it to set up the blog for Elegant Lich and that worked pretty well. So I decided to create an archive site: archive.bierfaristo.com and begin migrating content into it. I migrated the blog posts first. And I was able to import my twitter feeds.

I still have a few outstanding challenges. I tried to migrate my blog from Esperanto-USA, but that blog has been gone a long time: I tried to grab some posts from the wayback machine but have only been partially successful. I was an early user of Flickr and I still have a lot of images there. Phil and I used an early version of lychee to build image galleries. When they switched to a new new system, the upgrade looked complicated, so I never updated that either and it’s kind of orphaned. I don’t see these as high priorities. But things I can work on if I feel like it.

I have lost some things. I think I failed to grab a backup from the brief time I was at mastodon.lol. I don’t think I’ll bother to grab my history from Facebook. I very rarely wrote anything specifically for Facebook. Early on, you could gateway your posts from Twitter to Facebook, but they killed that after a while. I mostly wrote for my blog and then shared links there. They never got much traction because, of course, Facebook’s whole business model is to hide things you post from your friends unless you pay them.

I’m not expecting anyone to be that interested in my old posts anyway. But I can often remember an old post where I mentioned something or linked to something, and I’ll be interested to look things up, link to things, or share them again when they’re relevant.

The author of blog.sh seemed a little surprised at how quickly I found his system and started using it. I think I saw his original announcement at Mastodon: someone must have boosted it into my feed. I’ve identified a handful of minor problems that he’s promptly fixed. And I made one feature request that’s in the works too. (I offered to try to try to write the feature myself, which he politely declined. I really didn’t want to learn how to write in Ruby anyway, but I felt compelled to offer.)

And when this blog has run it’s course, I should be able to easily pull it into my archive site as well. It’s a nice feeling to have this long standing problem resolved.

cpu

John Gruber would like you to know that HE isn’t perpetuating the use of Twitter by going there to get “interesting content.” Only the people who post interesting content exclusively to Twitter are doing that.

Bullshit.

Nobody has to go to Twitter. Or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. You just don’t. People who use those services are pariahs as far as I’m concerned.

Your presence there is why those people post things there. And your willingness to go there is how they justify to advertisers to spend money there. By using those services, you are perpetuating their use. You are.

Similarly, I’ve heard a number of people say, “But it’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family members or community!” That’s also not true. They are there because it’s how they can get in touch with you. Your presence is keeping them there.

I remember back when I was using those services, I already realized that it wasn’t healthy. But it wasn’t until getting away, that I came to realize how stressful the constant barrage of advertising and algorithmically promoted content really was. It seems trite, but the world seems quieter and brighter when you’re not staring into a cesspool all day.

The AI slop has made it even worse. Reportedly as many as half of the posts there are written by AI now. The tech-bros have realized that slop is giving their services a bad name. But they’re trying really hard to distinguish between good slop and bad slop. The NYT claims, “Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop.” Uh… No. It’s all slop.

What’s funniest is that services like LinkedIn, that was constantly begging people to use AI to write their posts, is among those who are now trying to crack down on slop. They have a button for people to report content that “seems like AI slop.”

Now Anthropic is talking about watermarking their slop and, all of sudden, people are all up in arms about it. “But I wouldn’t have time to write everything I want to without AI.” No. If you’re using AI, you’re not writing it.

To come full circle, one of those quoted in the article is John Gruber, who calls the watermarking system “a Perversion of Writing“. No. Using AI to write for you is the perversion of writing. Write your own stuff or don’t. Don’t let a robot write for you and try to pretend it’s your own.

My brother shared a post that used the word “eigentlich” (which in German just means “actually”). I said it looked like “elegant lich.” And then a few minutes later, we both said, “That would make a great name for a fantasy magazine!” So we decided to start one.

It also gave me an excuse to try blogsh.app. It’s a static site generation system that runs at the command line. You can do all your editing in markdown using vim and the system builds out static web pages. But it also can post announcements at either Mastodon or Bluesky and direct readers there to leave comments. It’s got a bunch other bells and whistles too.

As an aside, the blog.sh system was primarily designed as a way to gather together all of your old content spread across different services so that you can archive it all yourself in one place. It’s a really cool idea. I’m interested in doing that myself. But this seemed like a low-stakes way to try the system out.

I only ran into one really difficult problem while setting it up. I didn’t uncomment one line in a configuration file and it took me several hours to figure out what the problem was. Other than that, it was just figuring out how things are set up and where the things are. For someone without a strong background in unix, it would be a lot more difficult. But both my brother and I are old hands with unix, so it felt very comfortable exploring and using the system.

It’s been a busy couple of days as we set up the DNS, hosting, software, and social media accounts. I registered the domain name elegantlich.com and we put a placeholder there, where the magazine will actually go. Then we set up a blog at blog.elegantlich.com that we can use for testing and planning. We also created accounts at bluesky and mastodon.

We wrote a few posts. Phil wrote an introductory post and a post about what kinds of fiction we might look for. I wrote a post about creating the graphic identity for Elegant Lich. I was very pleased with the woodcut I found that seems like a good place to start.

Now we can actually start thinking about our project to make plans, timelines, and budgets. We could probably self-fund a very minimal publication, but I think we’re going to explore running a kickstarter. We attended a workshop on running kickstarters at the Nebula Conference and I think this might be a good fit. We’ve already identified a bunch of tiers that we could go for: dedicated web hosting, paper publication, and pro rates for authors.

Feel free to follow along as we conduct our planning in public. And, if you’re an author, start thinking about what kind of fiction you might want to submit to Elegant Lich. We’re having fun and we hope you will too.

photographic timer

I read an essay today: I Wanted to Own the Harness. Then Codex Desktop Won. It is seemingly about someone who has fully integrated AI into their workflow — and their life — and finds it indispensable. Cory Doctorow would probably call him a “centaur”.

Cory Doctorow has written extensively about two ways that people interact with AI. Some people are “centaurs” and use AI to enhance and extend their own abilities. Others, who are not so lucky, are “reverse centaurs.”

Reverse centaurs are people that live in a Taylorized hellspace where the AI is using the person to extend its abilities.

In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.

I say above that the article is “seemingly about someone who has fully integrated AI into their workflow” because I can barely understand what he’s saying.

As a long-time programmer and technical user, I’m generally familiar with technology. However, as an author and educator, I’ve personally avoided using generative AI. I’ve written a handful of posts explaining why. Which isn’t to say I haven’t tried to generally keep up with the field. That said, I found reading this post almost totally incoherent.

I get that he started out looking for a way to maintain control of his his front end and workflow and still be able to switch among back-end models, in order to not get locked into a single vendor. That makes sense. But then he quit worrying about that as a goal because this setup required less of his attention? I think?

I do understand that he has a little dog (a Phalène) on the screen that sounds a lot like the Talking Moose. Except maybe it actually listens to you? I installed an early version of the Talking Moose. It did not measurably improve my productivity.

He goes on to say things like this:

In its own agentic benchmark, Ponytail cut source code by 54 percent across twelve Haiku 4.5 feature tasks and passed all twenty adversarial safety runs. It also used 22 percent fewer tokens, cost 20 percent less, and finished 27 percent faster. Its large wins came when a native HTML input replaced hundreds of custom lines. On irreducible backend work, it barely changed anything. The mechanism is visible in the diff.

What?

My brother said, “Cutting it by 50% would leave you with 102 syllables. Cutting it by 54% would leave you with about 94 syllables.” I guess I’m only familiar with Haiku 1.0.

Anyway, this excerpt is selected more or less randomly. I could have picked any of another dozen paragraphs that are equally orthogonal to anything in my experience and that use a bunch of terms I would have to go off and research to really understand what they mean. (Years ago, I might have used “grok” here, but not any more. Thanks, asshole trillionaire.)

I’m glad it’s working for him, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to speak centaur. Honestly, I’m not sure I really want to either.

a fountain pen

In August of 2023, I pitched establishing an online writing group for the Straw Dog Writers Guild, modeled on the SFWA Weekly Writing Date. The rest is history. As we start our fourth year, I’m looking forward to another great year.

I had started attended the Writing Date soon after I joined SFWA and I found it helpful. It was a nice way to meet people and to have some “accountability” for putting a block of writing time.

When we did a survey of Straw Dog members, a theme emerged that people wanted to meet other members and write together. But there was also an interest in having more virtual events, especially for people who don’t want to drive after dark in winter. I realized the writing date model was a good fit.

The program committee liked the idea and on September 16, 2023 I got my first request to join the group. Since then, we have met nearly every week (with the exception of holidays). There was a initially a surge of interest and then the group settled into a steady-state with an handful of participants every week — sometimes as few as one or two, but typically five or six — with new people regularly joining and folks dropping out after a while.

At the end of that first fall, I wrote a paragraph as part of my year-in-writing review:

In the fall, I established Straw Dog Writes for the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild. It’s a program modeled on the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association Writing Date. I’ve gotten about 20 participants (about half of whom might show up on any particular week). And about half are pre-existing members, half new members (who’ve signed up to participate), and a handful of people who are not yet members but who are considering it. This has been about as good as I could possibly have hoped.

And after a full year, I wrote a brief report of my experiences. It was mostly satisfactory, although I periodically questioned whether I had really succeeded in building a stable group that could sustain the group if I wasn’t there every week making it happen. That was true during year two as well. But over the course of this past year, participation has grown. We now typically have more like nine or ten. Furthermore, we have developed a core group of participants that make the group feel like more than just me pushing it along. It’s felt really good to have the group find its audience.

As we now go into year four, I’m looking forward to another great year. Straw Dog is beginning a redesign of their web presence that I’m involved in, so I’m hopeful I can improve how Straw Dog Writes is represented on the web. I think a better graphic identity would help too. I would also like to see Straw Dog Writes have a steering committee of folks interested in helping think through how we can improve.

As always, Straw Dog Writes is open to anyone who would like to try it out. I invite you to contact me to get the Zoom link. And if it is useful to you, please consider joining the Straw Dog Writers Guild to support the activities we do.

a bound journal with a book mark ribbon and elastic band.

When I was a graduate student, I read a book by Wittgenstein: Notes on Logic. It was just a series of brief notes, few of which I can now remember, that represented reflections that Wittgenstein had made on observations, insights, and contradictions related to logic. One was meaningful enough, I used it as my .sig for a while back in the 1990s: “If someone says, ‘I have a body,’ then one can ask, ‘who is speaking here with this mouth?'” This book has the same kind of feel, with many pithy observations, insights, and contradictions about writing fiction.

It’s not a book you can sit down and read straight through. At least, I could not. I would read a handful of notes (they’re numbered from 1 to 280) and then I would need to put the book down for a while.

I got my copy from the library. If I had owned a copy, I would have used a highlighter every few pages to keep track of the bits I agreed with or disagreed with. Or had no frame of reference to understand.

I don’t know whether I would have found the book useful as a beginning writer. And I’m not sure how useful I find it as an experienced writer. I’m not sure “useful” is quite the right word. It reminds me a bit of someone who said that the rules of Esperanto are all permissions. This book is largely about giving you permission to do it your way. She tells you how she does it, but makes it clear that she doesn’t think that’s the only way to do it. Or even the best way. It’s just what she does — your mileage may vary.

I never took a class in writing, in spite of teaching writing for 25 years. Indeed I never took a class in many of the things I became expert at. I never took a class for computer programming, or unix, or the web, or technology of any kind. Yet, I became a kind of computer guru. I never took a course in Esperanto, yet I became an award-winning author and poet. It isn’t as though I never took classes: I did a bachelor’s degree with two majors, a masters degree, and a doctorate. But I always was an autodidact even when taking classes: I looked at classes as an invitation to develop expertise in whatever I was studying. Sometimes the class helped, sometimes it didn’t.

I think this book helped.

As I was thinking about writing this review, I kept thinking of things I would want to argue about. Or agree with. Or highlight — if I’d had a highlighter, I might have done that. But I’m not sure that’s really the point.

278. It’s a long game. That’s all I ever want to impart to my students. What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.

Just keep writing about the stuff that’s important to you, however you can make it work for you. It’s good advice.

escabeche in a mason jar

When I first moved to Amherst, I discovered La Veracruzana: a Mexican restaurant that had a salsa bar. Included in the salsa bar was something they called “escabeche.” I had never seen it before: a mix of pickled onions, carrots, and jalapeños. It was delicious. I would always get some whenever I ordered from the restaurant. Our grocery stories didn’t have anything like it, so it was something I could only get at this one restaurant.

If you look up escabeche, the word often refers to a dish like ceviche, with fish or meat prepared in an acidic solution, which causes the proteins to denature — like they’ve been cooked — but without killing the bacteria or parasites, like cooking would. Brrr! No thank you.

Several years ago, I noticed at our local farm stand that the jalapeños and carrots get ripe at the same time. Aha! I thought. I wondered how hard it would be to make my own escabeche. Every year, I would see the jalapeños and carrots and think, “I should look up a recipe and try it.” But never would.

This year, I discovered that Walmart carries huge cans of escabeche — for cheap. Walmart caters to the migrant farm workers that come to Hadley to cultivate and harvest their cash crops. Walmart has bilingual signage and a lot specialty Hispanic goods and seem to have locked up that market. The escabeche is good too!

Still, when I saw the carrots and jalapeños at the farm stand this year, I decided it had to be now or never. So I went ahead and and bought two bunches of carrots, four boxes of jalapeños, and some mason jars. Then I started looking at recipes.

I should have looked at the recipes first. It turns out that most of them only keep for 2-3 weeks because they’re not really “canned”. I guess I’m going to be eating a lot of escabeche really fast.

I looked at a bunch of recipes. They’re all similar, but with minor differences. Interpolating, I tried to craft my own.

Here’s what I used for my first batch:

  • 2 cups water
  • 3 cups distilled white vinegar
  • 1/3 cup white sugar
  • 1/3 cup kosher salt
  • fresh jalapeños (quartered), carrots (sliced), and red onions (halved and sliced)
  • spoonful of garlic
  • 2 bay leaves

I put the jars in an inch of boiling water to sterilize them.

I mixed the water, vinegar, salt, and sugar and brought it to a gentle boil.

I chopped up the vegetables and packed the jars (I should have packed them tighter).

I filled the jars with the boiling pickling brine and sealed them up.

Then I let them cool and put them in the refrigerator. I waited about 24 hours before opening one.

Today I tried the first one. It was good! It’s not the same as the really pickled stuff, but delicious. It’s a total success.

I may try some of the additional wrinkles I’ve seen some recipes use. Some cook the vegetables lightly first. Some use a mixture of distilled and apple-cider vinegar. One uses orange juice as a sweetener. But I’m quite pleased with the results so far.

To be honest, after these experiments, I’ll probably just go buy the canned stuff. It’s hard to beat $1.78. Even one basket of fresh jalapeños cost $2.50. But it’s always fun to try making stuff yourself.

It’s easy to take air for granted, until you can’t breathe. Then you become acutely aware of it’s importance.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition. There were signs earlier, but neither I nor my medical professionals put them together until there was a crisis and I ended up in the emergency room. After a 12-day stay in the hospital, I got out and had to make a number of accommodations to my changed life circumstances. Now, I generally isolate, wear an N95 respirator for indoor events, and pay closer attention to air quality.

I was born the same year the Clean Air Act was passed. The air quality in US cities, which had become nearly intolerable and was lampooned and memorialized in comics and cartoons, gradually improved during my childhood. I spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles during the mid 1980s and you’d hardly notice the haze until the wind changed and you’d realize there were mountains nearby. In other parts of the world, air quality continues to be a problem: I visited Saõ Paulo in 2006 and the air quality was chokingly bad.

I moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in 1996. The Valley has a tendency to funnel air up from New York City and to trap air creating inversions. The result is that the air quality tends to be worse than you would predict from the bucolic, rural appearance. But it was rarely bad enough to be a concern until we started getting plumes of smoke from wildfires in Canada.

During the last intrusion of wildfire smoke, the air quality was bad enough that I wore my respirator while I was outside. I also pulled out my COVID-era Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and set one up in my office and in my bedroom.

To track the outdoor air quality, I did a bit of investigating and discovered the PurpleAir sensor network. You can buy devices to share air quality readings that can appear on a giant map. I kept a tab open on my computer and watched as the readings on the sensor climbed. There weren’t sensors really close by in Amherst. (Well, there’s one, but it’s an indoor sensor, so it doesn’t tell you very much.) There are two or three by the bridge in Sunderland and one in Hadley and one in South Amherst. Among those, I could interpolate to get a pretty good sense for what the air quality was here. But I found it useful enough, that I decided to buy my own sensor.

I bought the PurpleAir Classic – Air Quality Monitor. It was the only one that wasn’t sold out. (And, as of now, it is sold out.) I didn’t need any of the advanced features that the others had. And this one was marginally cheaper.

It arrived yesterday afternoon. It was not difficult to set up. I’ve installed it out in my tent and zip-tied it to the frame. I have power out there — I’m using an old, old Raspberry Pi power supply I happened to have sitting around. It was fun to have it show up on map and then be able to watch the readings change. There’s even a widget I can install to have it’s readings show up as an embed in my website. (I tried putting one on this page, but it breaks the formatting.)

Now I’m kind of waiting for the next plume of wildfire smoke to come this way so I can watch the number go up. Bring it on!

a stylish hip flask

Like most authors these days, I’m getting constantly inundated with author scam messages. As someone familiar with the underlying technology, these are pretty easy for me to recognize, but I realized it might be worth documenting the kinds of features I use to identify them. Some of these are pretty obvious, while others are more subtle.

A great source of information is SFWA’s Writer Beware. Victoria Strauss has been writing about these scams as they’ve developed over the past couple of years. This impersonation scam has already been documented by Victoria — including the particular person being impersonated —which I’ll use here for my demonstration.

This message purports to be from an agent at a literary agency that would like to solicit the manuscript I’m currently querying with. In this case, the agent and agency are both real but this particular message is fake.

A couple of things to note first. One is that I’m using a desktop computer application to check my messages. If you use phone email clients, they often make it difficult to see the email address a message came from — or to consult the full headers. Second, is that my email client is configured to not load remote “content”. I recommend never, ever loading the remote content in email. It’s almost always web-bugged, meaning it uses a filename or server path that communicates to the sender that you’ve looked at the message. You really don’t want to ever do that. It does mean that messages sometimes look broken. But the “design” of email is easy to copy and so you shouldn’t ever let yourself be fooled by a message because it “looks” genuine.

One of the first things I do when I get one of these messages is to determine whether the person referenced actually exists. A quick web search will confirm that Amelia Atlas is an actual agent and that she does, in fact, work with the Creative Artists Agency. But a little more digging will show some discrepancies. First, the email address the message was apparently sent from (amelia.agent.caa@gmail.com) is different than the email address shown in the footer (amelia@caa.com) and both of these are different from her actual email address (which you can find at her agency website).

Note that you can’t fully trust the email address shown in the “From:” line of a email message. Those are possible to forge, so you really need to look at the raw message source and confirm that the email was actually sent through gmail. The mail headers are long and mostly impenetrable, but there’s the relevant piece that shows where my mail server received the message from Google.

Unfortunately, Google does not show us the actual IP address the scammer connected from — just the address of the server they used (74.125.227.130). Otherwise, we might be able to deduce where they are located in the world. But this shows pretty clearly the email address they used and that it did come from Google.

Since agency email addresses are clearly @caa.com and this came from @gmail.com, we can be pretty sure this message is fake. The fact the footer shows an incorrect address — and is in fact not even linked to a mailto: link, but instead to the agent’s page at caa.com is also a giveaway. It’s gotten so that just the fact that it’s sent from gmail.com is, in itself, suspicious.

Note that this a lesson for authors as well: you really should get a domain name of your own and send all of your email from that if you want to appear legitimate. And you should also maintain a web-presence at your domain name with information people can cross-check to confirm that messages from you are not forged.

One other pitfall to be aware of is that scammers sometimes will register domain names that use non-ASCII letters to impersonate valid websites. For example, I could register “𝖼𝖺𝖺.com” (which uses mathematical characters that look like “caa”, but are different unicode characters: U+1D5BCU+1D5BAU+1D5BA instead of U+0063U+0061U+0061U). This is why you should never trust a link sent in email. Go find the server yourself and navigate starting from there. You can type the domain name yourself, or start with a search engine — they mostly won’t be confused.

Double checking information “out of band” is a useful strategy also in other contexts. One time I got a voicemail from someone who introduced themselves as an FBI agent from Boston and left a phone number. I didn’t call that phone number but, instead, looked up the Boston FBI office, called the number, and asked for the agent by name. It really was a valid message. But you should always be skeptical of information provided by a potentially unreliable source.

Finally, the content of the message is also suspicious. Anyone who knows anything about querying knows that agents basically never solicit manuscripts. If anything, they want a well-structured query and would probably want to look at an excerpt before considering the full manuscript. This particular agent’s webpage specifies what she’s looking for:

For fiction submissions, please include your query letter, bio, and the first 10 pages of your manuscript in the body of your email. For nonfiction submissions, please include your query letter and bio and proposal if available.

Most agents use the nagware website Query Tracker to manage queries. A few do in fact use email, and I expect they are among those most commonly impersonated.

One thing I found creepy about this particular scam was that it seems to be that the scammer has been reading my blog, so they appear to know I’m currently querying. I got an earlier scam solicitation that pretended to be a different agent at a different agency that was similar, but I wasn’t yet querying at that time.

One other particular giveaway in this instance for me was that I have in fact queried a different agent at Creative Artists. So I wouldn’t query a second agent at the same agency — and would certainly not expect a different agent to contact me.

Good luck out there. It’s a dangerous world.