Author of LGBTQIA+ speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. SFWA Secretary. (he/him)
About two weeks ago, I started to query for a literary agent. I aimed to send out at least one query a day. So far, I’ve exceeded that by almost three to one. I’ve currently sent out 33 queries — and received four rejections.
At first it was hard because the queries required some new thing I needed to write. Some wanted an expanded biography. Others wanted a logline. But I’ve pretty much got these all written, though I continue to polish and adjust. So now, I just need to copy-and-paste.
I also needed to find appropriate break points for requests for different length excerpts: 5 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages, first three chapters, entire manuscript, etc. Now I’ve got those all figured out.
Now it’s really just adjusting the opening to explain how I think my manuscript fits what the agent says they’re looking for. I still have to research each agent to find out what they’re seeking and to see if they have any special requests. One wants to be addressed by first name. Another by Mx.
One unusual special request was to identify a special item I would take on a spaceship. I scratched my head a bit and eventually said I would take a NeoBoxer — a cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog that could pilot a starship if necessary. And I invited them to read Better Angels to learn more. Maybe it will get a chuckle.
I’ve made a few mistakes. I accidentally submitted one letter with the wrong name (the name of the founder the agency is named after rather than the individual agent). I also accidentally sent queries to two agents at the same agency, which is reportedly a no-no. I have a spreadsheet, so I should have caught that. I’m being extra careful going forward. My memory just isn’t what it once was.
I’m also trying to keep track of the agents I consider and reject. One said they were only accepting by referral. One said no “new adult”. One said, “no fantasy” even though the search I’d conducted was for agents that accept fantasy. It’s hard to keep track of everything.
So far my rejections have just been form rejections or one liners. “Not right for me.” “Isn’t the right fit for my list.” “I have decided to pass.” (Nothing as interesting as what this guy has received.)
When I got my first rejection, I shared the news at SFWA. Several people sent encouragement and one person asked what I was going to do to celebrate. One author said that when he gets a rejection he always has Rejection Nachos which are an important part of the process. If I were to get Rejection Nachos every time I get a rejection, it might create a personal health catastrophe.
Instead, I will hold out hope that an agent finds my query intriguing enough to request the full manuscript. And maybe, then, they will offer to represent me. It could happen. Then I really would celebrate.
Every morning, I take my 93-year-old mother for a walk. We almost always walk along Montague House that has a sidewalk beside a metered parking lot. The sidewalk used to be wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, but now that she uses a rollator, it’s a little too narrow. We sometimes walk single file, when there are parked cars. But, on a Saturday in the summer, the parking lot was empty.
In any case, this morning I stepped into the empty parking lot and walked along the curb. As we passed on either side of the parking meters, my mom said, “Bread and butter.”
I, of course, immediately replied, “Bread and butter!”
I remembered how we did this when I was a child and I asked her whether she could remember how she’d learned it. But she couldn’t — I assume it was from her childhood as well. So I looked online for the answer.
At first I found nothing, in part because Internet search sucks now and also because bread-and-butter is a ubiquitous phrase with many practical and idiomatic meanings. But it turns out there is a Wikipedia page for Bread and butter (superstition). What would we do without Wikipedia?
Most of the page is drawn from a 1923 article in the American Journal of Folklore, Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls that claims it wards off bad luck (or prevents a quarrel). Interestingly, it is also the specific charm for when two people go to dry their hands on the same towel. Who knew?
I’ve always been partial to non-fiction accounts of spies and espionage. I picked up Gorden Corera’s The Spy in the Archive and found it readable and informative, though with certain deficits.
Vasili Mitrokhin was a retired KGB colonel who spent most of his career as an archivist first in the Lubyanka and then, when KGB expanded to a new building, Yasenevo. He was the one tasked with moving the files — some 300,000 of them from one building to another. This gave him unique access to many of the KGB’s most closely guarded secrets.
The book dwells on Mitrokhin’s motives for defecting. Mitrokhin had become disaffected with the Soviet system, but was always guarded about his own history. The book provides what evidence is available and tries not to speculate overmuch. But the result is a bit unsatisfying since so little is really known.
What he specifically targeted was the “cheka” system of secret police using informers to maintain ideological compliance. Although the Russian intelligence service has changed its name from Tsarist then Bolshevik then Soviet then Russian times, it’s culturally the same. Now wielded by Vladimir Putin, although the individuals have changed, the practices have not.
Mitrokhin used his unique access to take notes about tens of thousands of files and to sneak them out hidden in his shoes. He spent years assembling the notes into a highly compressed form until he retired in 1984. He made approaches first to the Americans, who rejected him, and then turned to the British. Eventually the British brought him and his family in. The revelations contained in his notes shook the foundations of the intelligence community around the world.
Mitrokhin had seemingly been unhappy with his life and career. He was not much happier after his defection. He was frustrated with his efforts to publish and publicize his work. He passed away in 2004, still fighting to get his vision out.
The book, which intersperses the sketchy personal history of Mitrokhin with the events of his defection and some history of the origins of Soviet intelligence service and its practices during the Cold War, often felt a bit jumbled to me. But Mitrokhin is an interesting, if mysterious, historical figure and I enjoyed learning more.
When I was about seven years old (circa 1970), my family got a boxer dog. I recollect that we paid $100 (about $860 today) for a flashy fawn from a breeder, who let her go because she was the runt of the litter. But she was very pretty and adorable. Her official name was “Miss Meerschaum.” My father was a pipe-smoker and meerschaum is a kind of light-colored wood used in pipes that gradually turns a boxer-colored brown as it’s used. But we just called her “Miss Boxer” for short.
We got a dog primarily for my father. One of his students had committed suicide and he’d become very depressed. He spoke with a therapist who recommended several things, one of which was to get a dog. I think my father fell in love with boxers after reading about Malabar Farm. My father was an ecologist/environmentalist and Louis Bromfield, who was considered the father of the environmental movement, famously had boxers.
Miss Boxer was the first of three boxers my father had. Boxers, like most large, inbred dogs, don’t live very long. After Miss Boxer, we got Sunny and then, after I had left home, he got Beau (whom I called Beauzeau because he was such a clown.)
Once I was out running in the countryside with Sunny. We lived in the country and she ran off lead most of the time, ranging around. She was usually pretty far out in front. She was amazing in that as we came to a decision point — a corner or fork in the trail — she would look back and with a gesture, I could tell her which way we were going to go and she’d head off that way.
Boxers are described as being protective. Running along the road, I approached a truck that had four or five young men standing around the tail gate drinking beer and laughing. I didn’t think much about it, but something must have seemed off to Sunny. She came alongside me and interposed herself between me and them. Then all the fur came up along her back and she ran with a really stiff-legged gate. The young men fell silent and watched us go past. Then she just went off ranging around as usual. My respect for boxers as guard dogs went way up after that.
When I had a family, we decided to get a dog. I, of course, held out for a boxer dog. My wife was skeptical and did extensive research on dog breeds, looking at all kinds of weird things, like otter-faced dogs. I would also conduct oppositional research to point out all of their negative characteristics, e.g. “It says they bark incessantly. Did you hear that? INCESSANTLY.” Finally, I wore her down and we got a boxer puppy.
Boxers are a little weird. They look weird and they act weird. Their short muzzle is thought to be a neotonic (puppy-like) characteristic and their behavior is also puppy-like their whole lives. Their forward-facing eyes give them a very human-like gaze. Their wrinkly face is incredibly expressive. And their jowls (which my brother and I called “muppies” as children) are soft and velvety.
When we got our first boxer, my wife would just shake her head and say, “Boxers look weird!” And then about 6 weeks later, she shook her fist at me and cursed, “Now other dogs look weird!” It’s true. Once you get used to boxers, it’s the long-nosed dogs that look weird.
My family had two boxers. I set up a website to share our boxer experiences. Our first boxer died young, at 6, from canine lymphoma. (Like all inbred dogs, boxers are subject to a variety of health problems, like cancers and heart conditions). The other lived until she was old and grey. I kind of wanted to get another, but my wife resisted because we’re getting too old to manage a big dog and we have my elderly mother living with us, who is too fragile to have a crazy boxer dog jumping on them. And for several years, I was without boxer companionship, which I missed terribly. But then my son got one.
When my son got an apartment, he decided to get an emotional support animal and I was delighted that he chose to get a boxer dog. I got to go with him to pick out the puppy from the litter. Then to go with him to bring her home. I’ve gotten to see her pretty much every day as she’s grown up. She is adorable and I love her to pieces.
Boxers are also reflected in my fiction. In my collection, Better Angels: Tour de Force, one of the protagonists is a NeoBoxer — a genetically engineered, cybernetically-enhanced boxer dog. NeoBoxers just look like dogs, but they have human (or better) intelligence, are able to pilot star ships, and can make themselves understood by (most) people just by barking.
There are actually two NeoBoxers in the stories, Lambda and Tau. (One of the stories is a riff on Lady and the Tramp.)
When the artist first drafted the cover, she thought the character must be humanoid with a boxer head. I explained that, no, he just looked like a fawn boxer dog. “Oh, that’s way easier!” she said.
I’ve actually got several more stories that feature NeoBoxers, but since the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy seems to no longer be a focus of the publisher, it’s not clear that these stories will ever see the light of day. It’s kinda sad.
Other dogs are okay too, I guess. But boxers are the best.
Today I believe I performed my last professional duty as a faculty member by attending a Faculty Senate Rules Committee meeting with the Administration. The Rules Committee, which sets the agenda for the Faculty Senate, meets monthly with the Chancellor, Provost, and the Campus Leadership Council. I made a few small contributions at the meeting and, with that, I don’t believe I have any more official duties until I formally retire at the end of the August.
I first got involved with the Faculty Senate shortly after I was hired in 1996. I began by serving on one of the committees: the Faculty Senate University Computing and Electronic Communications Committee. In 2004, I became Chair of the Committee. I also served on several other councils and committees over the years. I’m not sure when I became a Faculty Senator, but in 2013 I joined the Rules Committee for the first time.
In the early years I was more focused on union service and there was a strong bias against the union among the leadership of the Faculty Senate at that time. Although the union had been voted in 20 years before, it had been a divisive vote and a number of the anti-union people bore a grudge for the rest of their careers. Several of them were among the leadership of the Faculty Senate.
A big part of why I pursued Faculty Senate leadership when I did was because the administration began trying to centralize and outsource all of the IT functions. After a lengthy selection process, with good faculty participation, the campus had selected a Learning Management System. Just after all of the faculty had migrated their content to the new system, a Dean wanted to chuck it and force everyone to use a different (worse) system that was supported at the system level. We fought that off. Similarly, a misguided Chancellor wanted to force all of the faculty into Exchange, even though the students were all in Gmail. This was a spectacular flameout because the Chancellor hadn’t bothered to check how much it would cost and the campus couldn’t even afford the costs. We slowed down the adoption long enough that the Chancellor left and, afterward, leveler heads prevailed.
After I rotated off the Rules Committee as an at-large member (term-limited), I next served on the union bargaining team for several years. As that ended, I allowed myself to be recruited as Presiding Officer of the Faculty Senate, which I began in 2020. And I served for the last six years of my career.
I began during the depths of the COVID response when the Senate meetings were being held remotely via Zoom. When the campus returned to face-to-face meetings, I continued to preside remotely, since I had by then been diagnosed with a chronic lung condition and wanted to avoid the poorly-ventilated, densely-packed room. It was a little strange to have the auditorium directed by “big brother” on a screen, but people were generally supportive and made allowances for the things I could not easily do.
In point of fact, I pushed for us to continue to hold Faculty Senate meetings remotely. I was unable to persuade the Secretary to actually share the data, but I’m pretty sure we had better attendance, better participation, and more discussion when we were using Zoom. But he (and others) felt it was very important to bring people together in a room.
As Presiding Officer, I was also called upon to preside over an extraordinary meeting of the Faculty Senate and two General Faculty meetings. When the Chancellor called police to haul away student and faculty protestors, there was outrage. The Faculty Senate called an extraordinary meeting to give the Chancellor the opportunity to explain and for the faculty to ask questions. When many faculty were dissatisfied with the Chancellor’s response, they called fora General Meeting of the Faculty to vote no confidence. It was a giant hybrid meeting in one of the largest spaces on campus with overflow via Zoom. In the end, the faculty did vote no confidence in the Chancellor. The second General Faculty meeting was to have the faculty adopt a resolution calling for solidarity in higher education in response to the attacks being brought by the federal government.
Serving on the Rules Committee gave me a perspective and insight into the University — and its governance — that many faculty never see. I remember meeting with a Board of Trustees member that really summarized how they see the University. I don’t recall the specific issue he was talking about anymore, but I summarized for people by explaining that they would look at parameters — like the number of light poles per square mile — and the compare us with our peers, then say things like, “Well, Stanford has 15 light poles per square mile, but we have 19 — therefore we need to cut down four light poles per square mile.”
As my wife was on the Select Board, I frequently was invited to attend soirees at the Chancellor’s House as part of a town-gown initiative. I suspect I attended events at the Chancellor’s House more than any other faculty member in history. I remember I had been telling my wife about a particularly prickly chancellor and she said, “Oh, you must be exaggerating!” We arrived at the event and the Chancellor was greeting people at the entrance. I said, “Hi, Chancellor. We missed you at Faculty Senate on Thursday!” He drew himself and said, “I’ll have you know I was on Beacon Hill advocating for the funding for this campus. PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH TIME I HAVE TO SPEND TRYING TO SECURE FUNDING FOR THIS CAMPUS!” I plastered a smile on my face and nodded. Afterward, my wife said, “Okay. I get it. You were not exaggerating at all.”
Perhaps the most discouraging experience I had was when this chancellor presented their “Framework for Excellence” to the Faculty Senate. It was like a presentation to that Board of Trustees member. He had constructed a value-function graph for every parameter on the US News and World Report rating system to estimate the slope of the line where we stood as compared with our peers and proposed to spend money every place where the slope was steep, hoping to jump us up in the ratings. I was scathing. My proposal would have been to identify problems on the campus and try to address them. But, when that chancellor was forced out and the next chancellor came in, the campus unexpectedly jumped up several places in the US New and World Report ranking. The new chancellor crowed about how his policies had resulted in this historic rise, but I knew better.
I was not great as Presiding Officer. But I like to think I did okay. I was able to stay calm, mostly keep track of what was going on, and use Robert’s Rules to keep the meetings on track. I was pleased to find a role that I could perform usefully. And the experiences were all useful for my writing, But I don’t mind letting it go.
This month, I have started to query for a literary agent to publish my next book. It is an odious process which is qualitatively worse than submitting manuscripts for publication. Most “markets” that you submit a manuscript to at least pretend that they will respond to let you know if they’re going to reject your manuscript. But agents — universally as far as I can tell — say that you can expect your query to vanish into a black hole, and that if you haven’t heard from them in two or three months, you should assume that you never will.
Last fall, at WriteAngles, I attended a panel of agents that talked about their role in the publishing process. Agents are fundamentally a kind of parasite that act as gatekeepers for the publishing industry. Basically none of the traditional publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts, so you need an agent to even have your work considered. Agents see themselves as indispensable, of course. The agents on the panel suggested that you should query for at least six months before considering alternate routes to publication (i.e. small press or self publishing). Since I’ve already done those routes, I thought I would investigate finding an agent this time around. To find an agent, you need to engage in this activity called “querying”.
Querying requires a vast amount of research. I’ve attended several workshops to learn about the process. To begin, you need to draft a query letter, identify “comp titles,” and provide a preview of your manuscript. Of course, there’s no consensus about what any of these things represent, so you also have to study the submission guidelines for each agency. Some agencies also require other things (like a logline). Others put varying and unspecified arbitrary constraints (length of query letter, length of preview, etc).
One Straw Dog Writers Guild workshop I attended, provided a very nice overview of the query letter. A few takeaways: Address agent by name and be sure to not misgender. Indicate your reason for querying this agent: have you met before? Do you have something in common? Introduce your title. Identify the genre and wordcount. Craft a three paragraph pitch: The protagonist, the obstacle, and the stakes. Identify recent comp titles. Provide a short bio that focuses on your writing accomplishments. Finally, wrap up with a closing. Of course, as I said, some agencies want something different, so you still have to check the submission guidelines.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge for me was to identify “comp titles.” These are books with similar themes that have sold in the past few years. Before the workshop I had tried looking various places (e.g. Amazon and Goodreads) with little luck identifying good choices. But the workshop introduced me to NoveList a search engine that lets you search for recent books and find related titles. Luckily, my local library provides free access for library card holders. Using that, I was able to identify some recent books with similar themes.
Once I had the pieces mostly in hand, I started the most difficult part: trying to identify agents that my book might appeal to. There is a nagware website, querytracker, that many agents use for query submissions. The “free” version is intentionally crippled in a bunch of ways so that they can try to get you to pay for a higher tier. The website purports to have information about agents, but I’ve found that it has basically nothing and, what it has, is out of date. But it does have a bunch of agent listings so it’s not a bad place to start. Starting there, I investigate the literary agency’s website and study the page about the agent there to learn what kinds of things they are looking for. After exhausting querytracker, I will start studying Locus, which lists which agents sold speculative fiction books each month. That may well be more a profitable course of action, but querytracker — though not very useful — is easy and seems like a good place to start to practice, as I polish my letter and my pitch.
Lady Cecelia’s Journey is a sapphic, romantasy, road story. It is written as a series of six novelettes (that can serve as chapters in a collected edition) that, including a seventh “omake” story, totals 74,000 words. It is set in the same universe as my debut novel Revin’s Heart, but at an earlier point in time. That said, this is is a fully independent story.
Lady Cecelia is an aristocratic young woman attending the Westland Finishing School in a conservative part of the island of Belleriand. She has begun to realize she has feelings for women, but grew up in a sheltered environment with no opportunity to explore her sexual orientation. Her wealthy parents, who unbeknownst to her are the leaders of an organized crime syndicate, intend to place her in an arranged marriage to benefit the family politically.
Cecelia falls in love with Kasseh, a commoner who is attending the finishing school due to the patronage of the Baron. After they are are expelled for “conduct unbecoming a lady,” they flee together toward the capital, where — with the Baron’s support — they hope to be able to live together openly. Her mother takes a dim view of her rebellion against her authority and aggressively pursues her.
I’m aiming to send out at least one query per day. Recently someone at SFWA said they had submitted 150 queries before finding an agent. So that at least gives me some ball park figure to think about as I pursue this path. It’s a journey of my own that I’m undertaking one query at a time.
Oh. And if you’re an agent, I was kidding about the whole “parasite” thing. Really. Ha-ha-ha.
I saw a thin book at the library by Werner Hertzog, The Future of Truth, that caught my eye, and I spent a few hours today reading it. It’s not really a coherent book: it’s a series of reflections and anecdotes, often interesting and occasionally provocative, that are loosely about “truth,” as we move into the age of AI. I enjoyed reading it and found it time well spent.
It reminded me a bit of the first class in philosophy I ever took. (Note that Werner very specifically denies his is a book of philosophy). The professor of my undergraduate philosophy class asked us to write similar undirected essays, however. I really struggled with the class during the first half of the semester. I had no idea what to write. I was used to writing to achieve some purpose and with no direction I wasn’t sure what to write. I was definitely failing the class at that point. But then I discovered what to do: I could just write bullshit. I started writing a torrent of bullshit and turning it in. The professor was ecstatic. In the end, I think I got a C in the class. It probably was as useful as any class I took as an undergraduate, though I can’t point to any other really specific thing I learned in the class.
Actually, that’s not true. He also clued me into the importance of feelings. As a child of a scientist, I had a tendency to think of empirical science as the best source of truth about the world. My father, when he was teaching introductory biology would ask his students about to undertake the dissection of a cat to determine the sex of their specimen. When they asked how to do that, he put the questions back to them, “How should we decide? Should we vote? Why don’t you have everyone in your group vote.” Then he would direct them to dissect the cat and inspect whether it had testes or ovaries, as a lesson in empirically finding things out, rather than other means. But, of course, as a society we do use voting — for example, on juries — to determine truth. And feelings, as broad integrators of how we weigh up all of the evidence, end up being key.
When I was a doctoral student, I took another philosophy class. I was really ready for it then and immersed myself in the history of philosophy of science. It was taught by a young woman who had been a practicing, tenured biochemist. She decided to leave it all behind and went back and got another PhD in philosophy and was starting over to get tenure again. (Tragically, she passed away from breast cancer scant years later). Her office was at the other end of the hall from my office, so I would walk down frequently to chat with her. One day, I told her about my brother’s friend who liked to read the bible. He said it was important because it contained the true words of Jesus as well as a bunch of other nonsense. But that he could tell which were the things that Jesus actually said. She applauded my use of this rhetorical device. But I assured her that, no, this person actually existed.
The book is a bit uneven. One chapter is a single page about a pig that got stuck in drain. Another chapter is a single paragraph of two sentences. It meanders through history and personal experience, from opera to film, from America to Europe, from Rome to Potempkin Villages. From fraud to ChatGPT.
A lot is about people’s intentions and goals. He describes many instances of people using small lies to reveal a greater truth, which he distinguishes from people deceiving themselves or seeking to deceive others.
I had an undergraduate student once who couldn’t understand students not knowing what they wanted to do. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and had been striving toward it for his whole university career. I pointed out that it required a lot of courage to really pursue your dreams. Some students might know what they wanted to do, but be too afraid to actually try because, if they failed, they would have lost their dream. If they never really tried, they could go through their life telling themselves they really could have been an astronaut or whatever, if they’d really tried. He thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. In the end, rather than doing the thing he’d always wanted to do, he found a completely different kind of profession and seemed very happy.
Toward the end, Werner looks at the implications of generative AI and deepfakes on our growing inability to distinguish truth from falsehood. He tries to balance the amazing things that AI can do in specialized domains with it’s undermining our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
In the end, his main conclusion is that truth ultimately isn’t something that can be apprehended by people. But the striving for it is essential. He advocates spending more time walking on foot, out in the world. And reading books — like his no doubt. No lie there.
I’m closing in on retirement. Although I’m still nominally employed until August 31, I’ve been effectively retired since the end of May when my “period of irresponsibility” began. In spite of that, I’ve felt busier than ever — and somewhat resentful of it. Today, I had an insight that helped me explain why.
For thirty years, my time has not been my own. In return for a modest wage and benefits, I accepted responsibilities to conduct various programs for my employer. As a faculty member, I was effectively never on the clock. (I have worked jobs where I needed to punch a clock, so I’m intimately familiar with what that’s like.) Instead, I agreed to take responsibility for various projects (like set up and manage a computer center, provide software resources to faculty, teach classes, coordinate committees, etc). Throughout my career, this often meant checking email and messages beginning in early morning (indeed, around the clock) and being willing to work very long hours when necessary. Even my normal working hours represented a substantial commitment of time.
I generally aimed for around 50 hours per week. It was hard to count exactly. And a lot of what I did overlapped with my personal interests, so it wasn’t clear how much of my research, about technology say, was solely for work and not something I might have done on my own anyway. But it was generally a lot more than 40 hours a week and I tried to not let it grow to 60 hours a week. (A lot of faculty report working 60-65 hours per week). And, even though I wasn’t being paid during the summer, I was usually extremely busy then working on updating computer lab hardware and software, supporting curriculum development, or even conducting tropical field biology.
Over the past several years, I have needed to devote more and more hours to elder and family care needs. Of course, when my kids were little, I spent a huge amount of time on parental care. While I was finishing my dissertation, I was also caring for an infant. Those days were long indeed. But, between the time my kids started school and quite recently, my non-work time was my own. Recently, however, that’s changed.
Now, I find that I’m spending something upwards of three or four hours per day devoted to family care issues, doing things for other people: fixing meals, taking walks, washing dishes, doing laundry, going on doctor’s visits, etc. I was already doing this before I effectively retired, too. But I noticed recently, I felt like I was resenting it more. I think I’ve now realized what it is: I think, even before retirement, I’ve been taking this time from my “work” time. Since my job responsibilities changed and since I went to half time, I was spending less and less time on work anyway. And that was the time I was mentally redirecting to these other activities. But now that I’m no longer employed, that time feels like MY time that I’m having to give up.
Most of the giant corporations have gotten the memo that their oligarchic overlords want them to shove AI into everything, whether people want it or not. I’ve written previously about my position vis-à-vis AI and how I avoid using AI for anything. The net result is that I have to spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to turn AI off in things.
It’s a constant battle. Last year, at least twice, I had to go into the settings of Zoom to turn off every single AI setting so that Zoom would not constantly try to beg participants in any meeting I hosted to turn on their spybot. And that happened yet again when they added some new chatbot and a note taking service. I’ve discovered that some people have no idea how dangerous these things can be. There was a local story about a school committee that went into executive session to candidly discuss litigation where one of these tools was running. It helpfully mailed the transcript to everyone, including members of the public. People treat Zoom sessions as an informal discussion — not a place where every word will be recorded and shared publicly. (After I succeeded in turning it off, I noticed a page that suggested they were going to start charging $10/month for it. I wonder how many people will use it if they have to pay for it…)
Some companies have gotten the memo. I was pleased when DuckDuckGo created a NO-AI search landing page. I have set my default engine everywhere to it. It’s nowhere near as good as search engines used to be, but at least it doesn’t have AI summaries. Last year, DuckDuckGo ran a survey to ask whether people wanted AI in search results or not. They gave away pins to some people who responded and boosted the survey in social media, and I got one! It’s pictured above. I wear it proudly.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of AI junk that’s hard to avoid or turn off directly. That’s why I was so pleased to discover the Disable AI WordPress plugin. When I first discovered it, it was still in a very early version with hardly any installs. I did my due diligence to inspect the source to figure out what it was doing (and make it sure didn’t appear to do anything nefarious.) It basically uses CSS to set the visibility of AI buttons and interfaces to false, so they don’t show up in the interface. It’s awesome! It’s unfortunate we have to depend on adversarial coding, but thank goodness for Free Software that makes that possible!
To be clear, there are many domains where various kinds of machine learning have already been effective and will continue to be transformative. But that doesn’t mean I want to be forced to ever use it. So I’ll keep doing whatever it takes to push back.
On September 27, 2021, I submitted a new story, The Silver Tongue, for publication. And on September 28, I received a rejection. I submitted it several more times in 2021 and it got rejected as well.
My brother Philip was surprised. He said that if Gardner Dozois were still around, he would have accepted it instantly. Having never met Gardner, I couldn’t say. But it is kind of weird story and probably needed a weird editor to appreciate its merits.
I generally try to avoid editing manuscript after I’ve written them. I try to use whatever energy I have for writing new stuff. But at some point, I went back to look at it to see if there were obvious defects or changes I might make. I was kind of shocked to find that it really felt like a pretty tight story to me, without much additional cruft. It was good!
After a while, I gave up trying to keep it out to markets. A lot of the the top markets turn manuscripts around pretty fast and notify you when they reject stuff. Others take a long time and/or never get back to you. Every so often, I’d remember it and send it out. I submitted it twice in 2022, twice in 2023, twice in 2024, once in 2025. Then I saw The Freak!
“Huh,” I thought. “The Freak! They might like it.” And I sent it off.
