Category: bluesky

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.

a weird abstract artwork as a stamp

Time being limited, you only have so much attention you can devote to things. The more things you try to track, the less depth you can devote to any one. I think it’s worth being reflective every so often about how many different things you’re trying to pay attention to. To begin with, there’s real live people: people in your household, cow-orkers, & friends. Then there are communication tools: telephone, email, and social media environments. Finally, there are a vast number of notifications that are competing for our attention: computer notifications, updates, and automated messages. It’s overwhelming.

There’s a vast scholarly literature about the “attention economy.” Advertisers and the commercial social media companies have been intensely interested in how they can capture and keep eyeballs on their products and platforms. There are hundreds or thousands of articles you can read where people have parsed and dissected the topic a million different ways because there’s so much commercial interest (i.e. money) involved.

Commercial social media companies have conspired to promote the idea that they are unitary “sources” of “content” and that people should be content to scroll through an endless succession of effectively anonymous posts selected by The Algorithm, provided they’re reasonably aligned with their interests. I’ve always found this notion horrifying.

As an aside, let me note that essentially all of the literary agents I’ve queried have had X-twitter, Facebook, and /or Instagram feeds. I think *one* mentioned Bluesky. Personally, I would be embarrassed to be seen with a Twitter account these days. If you hang around in a Nazi bar, who’s to say you aren’t a Nazi… The nagware QueryTracker web app they mostly use seems to only support asking about Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And many of the agents ask if you have a “social media” presence — meaning one of those three commercial platforms. Sigh… Many also ask for my “website” and/or “blog,” so that’s something.

In the 1990s, an anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, proposed a limit to the size of meaningful human communities. His statistic, Dunbar’s Number, suggested that humans can maintain approximately 150 stable relationships at a time. Various other’s have critiqued his methodology and proposed other, usually larger, potential numbers: up to around 300.

In education, there is a similar effect. When there are fewer than 300 students in a school, all of the staff can learn all of the kids’ names. This has profound effects for kids acting out in school: when even the crossing guard and the lunch lady know everyone’s names, students are not anonymous — they’re not just a number. It creates an atmosphere of respect. Once schools get much larger than that, people quit trying to learn the kids’ names because it’s impossible.

I’m trying to winnow down my information environment to entities I actually care about and want to follow. I’ve started using an RSS reader to let me follow particular writers. And I’ve begun trying to critically look at social media accounts I follow to decide whether they are contributing meaningfully to my experience. I basically always did that when I followed people at Mastodon: I always check profiles and scroll through the feed to see if they’re adding value. At Bluesky, I clicked a bunch of starter packs and so now I’m following a lot of accounts where I did not thoughtfully make that assessment. But, honestly, I haven’t liked the vibe at Bluesky enough to bother with critically evaluating my feed there.

Note in particular that I’m talking about writers, by which I mean “human beings that write things.” I’m not interested in things nobody could be bothered to write, by which I mean AI. Evidently, somewhere between a quarter and a half of the posts on commercial social media are written by AI now. And it’s even worse on LinkedIn. If a human can’t be bothered to write something, I can’t be bothered to read it.

Today, I got a notification from Google with what looked like a news headline. (I mostly don’t allow “apps” to send me notifications, but I let Google notify me mostly so that when I’m driving, it can alert me to accidents or traffic jams and help me route around them. But, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any way to tell it to be more selective about notifications.) The headline was, “Americans increasingly disillusioned by ‘AI.'” This did sound like an article I might be interested in reading, so I clicked on it. It was not. It was not an article — just some AI summary. I closed the tab.

icon for wss366

Wandering Shop Stories, a prompt for writing microfiction on Mastodon and Bluesky, begins its third year in 2026. It has grown modestly from having three to six curators and nearly 200 followers. Every morning, at 5am Eastern, a post appears on both services with a prompt for the day that proposes an ordinary word with multiple meanings that invites people to write a short piece of microfiction that includes the word and to tag the post so that everyone can follow along.

Starting this year, we decided to add a new wrinkle. Until now, we just selected a word based on the day of the year (day 1 to day 366 — on leap years). This year, we decided to track calendar days and holidays, to allow us to consider specific words for special days. This isn’t to say that we necessarily will, but we added the infrastructure to make it possible.

In technical terms, our new curator Gary created a new column in our spreadsheet with the dates and then we repurposed the “explanation” column to list holidays. I added in a few US and Japanese holidays. (For several years, I’ve been subscribed to a Japanese holiday calendar in my daily calendar, which has been a source of great enjoyment and enrichment.) Then Nara and others went through and added a bunch more holidays from various calendars.

Once we had the structure laid out, I modified the python script that actually makes the posts. I reworded the post slightly and added a conditional to only identify the holiday if it is a holiday. When I made the change, I got the syntax slightly wrong so, this morning at 5:00am, the script ran and failed with an error. When I woke up a few minutes later, I checked and, seeing the post hadn’t gone, logged into the server to check the error log. I had forgotten a colon (well, two actually). So I added them and ran the script manually.

Post by @wss366@wandering.shop
View on Mastodon

I really love our little #wss366 community! I love writing to the prompt every morning myself as a creative warm-up for the day. Furthermore, it’s been a real joy for me to see other people engage with the prompts and to read the contributions they write. And every quarter that our little group of curators has met via zoom to chat has deepened my appreciation for our quirky little community. Thank you both to participants and curators for investing your time an energy to bring our little community to life. Here’s to another successful year of Wandering Shop Stories.

old jelly jar

As I reflect on my year of writing in 2025, it was a somewhat discouraging year. I did quite a bit of fiction writing, but almost none of it got published. I wrote 26,000 words of short fiction and did 20 submissions. Zip.

I also worked on longer fiction. I finished the 19,000 word manuscript for Ecorozire! the third novella sequel of Revin’s Heart. It’s not clear when they might ever see the light of day. I also finished a 43,000 word rough draft of my new novel The Ground Never Lies. It still needs a lot of work and fleshing out, but I haven’t managed to get to revising it.

The high point was that my first novel, A Familiar Problem finally came out. I wrote it in 2022 and it was rejected five times before being accepted for publication. I signed the contract in 2024 and the original scheduled publication date was December 2024. But it was delayed, first until January and then June. And it finally came out December 10, 2025. I had planned to use 2025 to promote it and scheduled myself to appear in conventions. But, over and over again, I was going without the new book to promote. This was rather discouraging.

I also had the discouraging interaction at Worldcon that left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I ended up having to interact with the other author again at LOSCon. If I hadn’t already made the arrangements to travel to Los Angeles, I probably would have canceled going. We got through it, but it really raised the tension — at least for me. I otherwise had a good time. I had many other positive interactions and, uncharacteristically for me, I managed to meet a lot of new people. And it was fun to unbox A Familiar Problem. Having a new book come out counts for a lot.

So, not everything this year was discouraging.

I did write a lot of blog posts — more than 80. Most are about stuff I was doing. A few were about news or writing. I wrote an Awards Eligibility post. OK. That was a little discouraging.

I also wrote an article about bookselling for SFWA Planetside that is scheduled to appear in January. I have a companion blog post that I will release at the same time.

I was re-elected to a full term as Secretary of SFWA. The difference between service last year and this year is striking. When I joined the Board, SFWA had lost essentially all of its leadership and staff. With fresh leadership, we hired new staff who hit the ground running and really engineered a transformation. The Board has been able to return to developing strategy. Whereas, last year was all frenetic activity, this year has been more relaxed. That’s not to say there haven’t been moments of controversy and high drama (like yesterday). But, no matter how bad it’s been, it’s been better than last year.

My service to the Straw Dog Writers Guild continues. I run Straw Dog Writes and serve on the program committee. I ran the online meetup nearly every week for the second — going on third — year. The regular group is small, but lively, with a mix of less frequent participants. On behalf of the program committee, I invited and hosted several talks during the year. I also served on a committee to review candidates to potentially update the website. I was excited and encouraged to draft the recommendation that was taken to the Board but, unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Maybe that was another discouraging thing.

Wandering Shop Stories is an ongoing pleasure. We have 168 followers on Mastodon and 69 on Bluesky. Asakiyume frequently boosts and offers thoughtful comments on contributions. We’ve held genuinely enjoyable quarterly meetings aligned with the major solar events (solstices and equinoxen). And we’ve brought on one or two new curators. I write to the prompt most days, although occasionally I use snippets of works-in-progress or even bits of published works. It’s a great creative warm-up exercise in the morning. And reading the contributions by other authors and interacting with the small community that has sprung up around the project is always a treat.

I also participate in a number of other writing prompts on Mastodon and Bluesky, including #WritersCoffeeClub, #WordWeavers, #PennedPossibilities, #ScribesAndMakers, #Writephant, #LesFicFri, #WIPSnips, and probably others. The community of writers on Mastodon is particularly strong and supportive.

The year was also the middle half of my phased retirement. It’s weird to think I’ll teach Writing in Biology just once more this spring. I’ve been teaching this particular class since 2002 and am ready to be done. It’s been hard to keep it fresh and, honestly, seeing the end of the road ahead, I haven’t tried very hard. I realized recently that, when I fully retire in August, I will have spent 30 years — basically half my life — employed by the University. That seems like something that calls for further reflection — and should probably be the subject of its own post.

icon for wss366

Wandering Shop Stories, a writing prompt that began in January and recently migrated to wandering.shop, has now taken a new step to be more available to the wider SFF community: We ‘re now on Bluesky too!

It looks like the announcement that birdchan would start using everything everyone posted to train its AI finally roused a huge number of people to get up and leave the Nazi bar. And it appears that Bluesky is where the SFF community is going to land. Personally, I find this a bit disappointing as Bluesky is funded by venture capital. It’s currently very nice, but I suspect it will inevitably become enshittified. But, like it or not, that’s where the vast majority of the SFF community is going.

I decided, therefore, to see if I could create a bot to share the Wandering Shop Stories prompts at Bluesky in addition to Mastodon. I still prefer the vibe at Mastodon and am not planning to leave. But I’d like to be able to cross-post stuff. So it would be nice if the #wss366 hashtag would reference something. And there may be people that would like to play along at Bluesky. So, I decided to see how difficult it was to adapt the python script I use for Mastodon to also post at Bluesky.

It turned out to be super easy. Well… Sorta.

It also turned out that when I installed the atproto library, it updated something else that caused the Mastodon bot to quit working. I hate when that happens. After spending a few hours fighting with it, I decided to just do a side-install of a newer version of python and use a virtual environment to make sure that everything was separate from the system install of python. I should have done that in the first place, honestly.

Then, everything worked. Well… Almost.

It turns out you can’t just emit text and have it auto-format it, like it does if you post it. You have to run it through the filter on the client side to build rich-text using a utility called “textbuilder” before you submit it. That was a bit cranky and not well documented. But, eventually, I got that to work just tickety boo.

I used to do this kind of technical work all the time. It’s nice to see that I still can navigate programming and building reliable unix services. But, honestly, I’m pretty glad it’s not my day job anymore. My father always described these kinds of things as “just like using a computer.”

In the end, I’ve found spending a few minutes a day writing a very short story — especially when I’m otherwise too busy — to be really helpful at sustaining my creativity. The prompts that we choose are aimed to be ordinary words that have multiple meanings, so you can spin them a bunch of different ways. I love how it makes me feel to write something short and sweet.

Even more, I love seeing the contributions that other people make. I’m looking forward to seeing what people on Bluesky choose to contribute!