Category: writing

rock

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.

It got accepted!

You can now read The Silver Tongue in Issue 4 of The Freak! Enjoy!

rosary

Most mornings, I write a brief story fragment for Wandering Shop Stories as a warm-up for my day’s creative activities. Sometimes, I use these directly as a rough draft or outlining tool for my current works-in-progress. Often, they’re just one-offs or fan fiction/literary canon of my existing work.

Since January, however, I’ve been struggling. I really haven’t hit my stride writing since my son was hospitalized. We’ve had a lot of stuff going on and my head just wasn’t in the right place. Some days, I couldn’t post anything at all. When I could, it often wasn’t until late at night. And I was frequently dissatisfied with the quality of what I was writing.

Things have been getting better. And just recently, I’ve finally felt like I’m starting to hit what I’m aiming at.

Last fall, before things went south, I wrote a few story fragments about the Hero and the Demon Lord. Here is the first series:

“What’s even the point of this?” the Demon Lord said.
“Ssh,” said the Hero as he cast his line out again.
They sat together at the shore of the lake. There was a quiet plunk as the bobber landed in the water. Ripples radiated out and then settled down.
“You know I can just cast death on the fish and…”
“You shall do no such thing.”
A ripple appeared around the bobber. Once. Twice. Then it dove under the water.
The Hero pulled back on the rod. The bobber and hook popped up, bait gone. The Hero pulled another worm out of the bait can.
“At this rate, we’ll never get lunch,” the Demon Lord said.
“Look in the basket under your seat,” the Hero said.
The Demon Lord pulled out the basket and opened it.
“Sandwiches?”
“And beer. Isn’t this better than fighting to the death?”

“What kind of sandwich is this?” the Demon Lord asked.
“It’s a tasty sandwich,” the Hero explained helpfully
The Demon Lord unwrapped it and inspected it skeptically.
“Try it!” the Hero encouraged.
The Demon Lord took a small bite. And then a larger one.
“An interesting flavor…” he said, as he chewed.
“Right?”
“So what is it?”
“It’s bang bang chicken.”
“You made this yourself?”
“Oh, no. My mother made it.”
“Your mother!?”
“Only the best for my friends.” The Hero smiled. “At least I hope we’ll soon be friends.”
The Demon Lord scowled.

“Well,” the Demon Lord said, getting to his feet. “It’s been fun, I guess…”
“You’re not going to eat and bolt, are you?” the Hero said, pained.
The Demon Lord settled back into his seat, grumbling.
“Look!” he growled. “Maybe you don’t have anything better to do all day, but I…”
“Pish posh,” the Hero said, casting the line again. “Your minions can run things just fine without you for an afternoon. When was the last time you took a day for yourself?”
“But…”
“Besides, you haven’t had dessert yet.”
“Dessert?”
The hero gestured and a group of people approached.
Carrying a cake with candles, they began to sing Happy Birthday.
“It’s not my birthday!” the Demon Lord barked.
“Do you even have a birthday?”
“Well, no…”
“So, today is as good as any.”
“What kind of cake is it?” he said, eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Why, devil’s food. Of course!”

“Blow out the candles! Blow out the candles!” everyone called.
The Demon Lord scowled, but then blew out the candles and everyone clapped.
“Are you really sure that’s sanitary?” he mumbled, as they produced a stack of paper plates and plastic forks.
“Well?” asked the Hero.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to cut the cake?”
“With what?”
“Ah! I thought you’d never ask!” the Hero laughed. “Here!”
The Hero offered the Demon Lord an elaborate knife. It seemed to glow blue with an inner light.
The Demon Lord eyed it suspiciously.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s Cakecrist,” the Hero said. “The Frosting Cleaver — Made by the elves, you know.”
The Demon Lord extended a finger and tentatively touched the knife. There was a spark and a curl of smoke rose up. He jerked his hand back.
“I think I’ll let you cut the cake,” the Demon Lord said.

The Hero stood on the dock and watched while the firemen worked to contain the raging inferno where the lake cabin had once stood.
“I’m afraid it’s a complete loss,” the Captain said.
“It’s not a complete loss,” the Hero clarified. “We learned a lot.”
“What did we learn?”
“Well… We learned he doesn’t like fishing and he likes cake. Oh! And that he hates surprises.”
The Captain stared at the Hero for a moment, then sighed and looked away.
“It was bound to end this way,” he said.
“What do you mean?” the Hero said “End? We’ve got another date next week!”

The Hero and Demon Lord are tropes from Japanese manga. They appear constantly in all sorts of different forms. I’m by no means the first to “ship” the Hero and Demon Lord. In Gachi Koi Maou-Sama, for example, the Demon Lord is a cute girl that has a crush on the Hero. There are undoubtedly dozens — or hundreds — of manga that have the Hero and Demon Lord as characters. Sometimes they act according to their stereotypical nature but, just as often, they’re used to subvert the standard paradigm and do something unexpected.

Just recently, I decided to pick them up again and I’ve been pleased with some of the results — as pleased as with anything I’ve written for a long time.

After vanquishing the dread Spectre of Despair, the hero was feted with a parade through the town. As he passed by, a boy called out from the crowd.
“Hero! Hero! What’s the name of your sword?”
The hero paused a moment, then replied, “It doesn’t have a name. It’s just my sword.”
“Awww!” the boy said, disappointed.
“I’ll tell you what,” the hero said. “If you think of a cool name, I’ll name my sword that in your honor.”
The boy’s face lit up with excitement.
The hero waited while the boy wracked his brain for a cool name. The crowd grew silent with anticipation.
“I’ve got it!” the boy crowed. “Swordy McSwordface!”
“Swordy McSwordface! Swordy McSwordface!” the crowd chanted.
The hero drew Swordy McSwordface and broke the blade over his knee.
“I’ll get a new sword,” he said.

The Hero arrived to visit the Demon Lord for coffee. He was ushered into the Demon Lord’s breakfast nook. The Demon Lord looked up from his paper and warmly greeted the Hero.
“How would you like your coffee?” asked the maid. She was a charming lass of 16 or 17 with rosy cheeks.
“I’ll take it with a little cream,” said the Hero.
“And would you care for some coffee cake?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She made a bob, backed away from the table with her eyes downcast, then turned and left the room.
“So…” the Demon Lord asked. “What do you think of my new monster?”
“Monster?” The Hero regarded him quizzically. “What monster?”
The Demon Lord pointed after the maid.
“Her? But she’s just a girl!”
“Exactly,” the Demon Lord exulted.

“What!?” The Captain of the Holy Order of Knights was incredulous. He stared disbelievingly at the knight who had just delivered the report. “Did I hear you correctly? You’d better repeat that.”
“I said,” the knight reiterated, “that the Hero is having breakfast with the Demon Lord.”
The Captain rubbed his hand all over his face as he tried to digest this.
“Who told you this?” he asked finally.
“The Hero told me.”
“The Hero told you? Himself?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say, exactly.”
“To the best of my recollection, he said, ‘I’m having breakfast with the Demon Lord.'”
“Hmm. No chance of a misunderstanding? He didn’t say, for example, ‘I’m having breakfast with the semen gourd’?”
“No. I also saw him go into the Demon Lord’s castle.”
The Captain sighed.
Just then the Hero entered.
“Did you really have breakfast with the Demon Lord?” the Captain asked.
“Yes,” the Hero replied. “He showed me his new monster.”
“Oh! You were collecting intelligence! How scary was the monster?”
The Hero caught sight of his reflection in a mirror and wiped a bit of lipstick off his cheek.
“Terrifying!” he answered, in a low voice.

The Demon Lord chuckled, rubbing his hands together. The Maid touched up her lipstick using the mirror in a compact.
“Did something good happen?” asked Jaygor.
“Everything is going according to plan!”
The Demon Lord clenched his fist. “Soon the Hero will be on his knees, nothing more than a quivering mass of gelatinous slime!”
“Pardon me, Demon Lord,” the Maid said. “I think your plan will have a better chance of success if I can make a few purchases.”
“Oh?” he said, interested.
“Yes. Just a few details, really — to enhance the effect.”
“How much will all this cost?” asked Jaygor.
The Maid batted her eyes. “Hardly anything!” she said.
The Demon Lord got out his billfold and began to extract some bills, but the Maid reached over and pulled out his credit card.
“I’ll be back later,” she said, and blew him a kiss. She slipped out the door toward town.
The Demon Lord replaced his wallet. “This is going to be great!” he said as she left.
Jaygor just rolled his eyes.

“Hello?” the Hero called. His voiced echoed through dark, empty corridors.
“This way,” said Jaygor, unexpectedly from the side.
The Hero jumped, but then followed Jaygor through the twisting passages of the dungeon.
“Say…” he said, after a short time. “So why are you all down here?”
“I’ll leave that to the Demon Lord to explain,” said Jaygor. The Hero detected a note of bitterness in his tone.
They arrived in a dimly-lit chamber carved out of the living rock. The Demon Lord was seated, uncharacteristically, at a small wooden table.
“Would you like some coffee?” asked the Maid.
“Yes, please,” the Hero said.
There was silence for several moments, as the Hero struggled to articulate the question.
“I had to rent out the Black Castle,” the Demon Lord said.
“Oh?” said the Hero.
“I became over-extended on my credit card,” the Demon Lord said.
Jaygor stared daggers at the Maid.
“How was I supposed to know that magic beans were so expensive?” the Maid said, pouring the coffee.

The Demon Lord came to his breakfast table in the dungeon. The Maid poured coffee while Jaygor brought him his morning paper. He unfolded the paper, then squinted, trying to read the indistinct print in the dim light.
“Why do you still read a paper, Lord?” asked Jaygor. “Why not use a magic scrying glass or something?”
The Demon Lord smiled.
“It’s something you young people can’t understand,” he mused. “The sound of the rustling paper… The feel of newsprint… The smell of the ink…”
He unfolded the paper the rest of the way, then scowled. Inside, there had been a print registration error and the text was unreadably blurry.
“Jaygor!” he barked.
“Yes, Lord!”
“Bring me my scrying glass!”
“At once, Lord!”

Just recently, I introduced a new character: the Saintess. The Saintess is also a tropey character from manga.

The Hero and Saintess were deep in the Forbidden Forest.
The Saintess pulled out the map and studied it for a minute, then finally threw her hands up.
“This is hopeless!” she said. “Admit it! We’re lost!”
“What do you mean?” asked the Hero.
“We have no idea where we are!”
“We’re right here!” the Hero said, pointing down.
“But where is ‘here’?” she pressed.
“The Forbidden Forest?”
“Argh!” She gnashed her teeth.
“Look!” the Hero said. Up ahead, they could see a sign.
The Saintess made a glad cry and ran forward to see what it said.
The Hero strolled up to the sign. It said “Forbidden Forest.”
“See?” he said. “I was right!”
“I hate you,” she said.

The Hero and the Saintess followed a dark, winding path under a canopy of immense trees draped with moss and vines.
“Why do they call it the ‘Forbidden Forest?'” asked the Hero.
“The Forest is a queer place,” the Saintess said. “Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak.”*
“So it’s ‘woke,’ is what you’re saying?”
The Saintess started.
“Well… That’s not really…”
The Hero stretched his arms. “It sounds like my kind of place!”

*Note: The statement by the Saintess about the Forest is a direct quote from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, when Merry and Pippin are talking about the Old Forest.

“Do you even know what direction we’re going?” the Saintess asked.
“Sure,” the Hero replied. “We’re going this way!”
“No!” she said. “Which of the cardinal directions? Are we going north? Or east?”
“I know how we can tell,” the Hero said. “Moss grows on the north side of trees.” He pointed at a nearby tree.
“There is moss on every side!” she snapped.
“Ooh! So that means that every direction is north. Now we know exactly where we are: We’re at the South Pole!”
“I hate you,” she said.

I was particularly pleased with these last two. They’re short and punchy with a clear sense of story: a clear problem with a satisfying resolution — though perhaps not so satisfying for the Saintess.

I’m finally starting to feel like I can be productive writing fiction again. As I said at LOSCon, I’ve always found that my creative output is extremely uneven. But maybe it’s time — time to get serious about getting some new work done.

a group of dice

Since January, I’ve a lot of extra Tanuki Time, but I haven’t had the focus to work on my longer fiction. I have several projects that are essentially completed, but it’s beginning to look like I’ll need to find a different outlet for publishing them. While I’ve had less focus, I’ve been working more on shorter fiction.

What’s For Breakfast, Toasterella is about a wizard who patented a method for contracting with sprites to compel them to work for you, but he discovers a limitation when he needs to change the contract. It’s been rejected twice.

A Persistent Curse is about a dog caught between his owner and his witch grandmother regarding a particularly nasty curse. It’s also been rejected twice.

Exit Interview is my newest complete short story. It’s what happens when the entities that are running the simulation your universe is in decide to shut it down. It’s been rejected once.

Jimmy and Coral is a work in progress that’s not actually speculative fiction. It began as a series of vignettes posted to Wandering Shop Stories but, now that I’ve figured out the rest of the story, I’m just writing the rest in a document. It’s about a young woman whose mother is kidnapped and has to turn to her estranged father to try to get her back.

Now that the semester is over — and once I’m through the Nebulas — I’m hoping I’ll have time to get back to the business of writing. I plan to start querying to look for a new publisher — or maybe self-publish my current book projects. I also have made arrangements to use a recording studio to try to create an audio book for Revin’s Heart. I’ve had a lot of interest in have an audio book available, so I’ll see whether I can do a good enough job myself. It will be fun to try.

an istvan bierfaristo mug

After reading Riva’s Escape (a side story of Revin’s Heart), one of my beta readers commented about how they appreciated the way my writing recognized the value and significance of work. In the scene, Revin (who has just transitioned) is pressed into service working in the kitchen of a restaurant washing dishes. This got me thinking about how my own experience with work has impacted how I write about it.

I started working on a farm before I was legally old enough to work. At age 15, a friend and I were hired to bale straw. We rode on a wagon behind a tractor grabbing bales of straw that emerged from the baler — a complicated machine that was powered by a shaft from the tractor. We would take turns carrying the bales back and stacking them up until the wagon was full. It was hot, dirty, and dusty. Looking back, my current lung condition probably wasn’t helped by breathing all the dust. We would often work until it was starting to get dark. I remember coming home in the gathering dark, taking a shower with the dirt sluicing off me, closing my eyes, and feeling like I was still bumping along on the wagon. Years later, I tried bailing hay. As an adult, I was hired to work by myself on the wagon (ie, working twice as hard) and lifting bales that weighed twice as much. I lasted one day.

I spent two summers as a high school student working as an animal caretaker in a toxicology laboratory. It was a bleak, proletarian existence. You were required to punch a time clock within seven minutes (five minutes before the hour or two minutes after) to punch in, then punch out before legally required breaks and lunch, punch back in afterwards, and then punch out at the end of the day. I was on the “large animal” team that cared primarily for beagles. Other teams did mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys. The entire windowless facility had tan walls, gray floors, and unfinished ceilings with black-painted duct-work, pipes, and wiring. The animal rooms had two banks of stacked cages with a big floor sink at the end. I would go into a room, clean and fill all the water dishes, then pull the trays under the cages one after another, wash them in the sink, then replace them. Finally, I would recheck the water dishes and clean/refill any that were empty. (Some dogs, desperate for stimulation, would dig in their water dish as soon as you filled it.) It became so routine that I could daydream during the process to the extent that, when I got my schedule out after leaving a room, I sometimes had to check to see if I had just finished a room or just arrived.

I worked for a year as a busboy at chain seafood restaurant. There, I had perhaps the worst boss I ever had as an employee. In the restaurant, there was a lounge attached to the restaurant with an entrance for patrons and a passage containing the busboy station near the ice and soft drink dispensers for waitstaff. The boss would walk through those entrances in a big circle and every time she came around, I was doing the wrong thing. “Why are you bussing tables! The floor is dirty! Sweep the floor!” So I’d carry my tub to the dishwasher, get the sweeper and start sweeping the floor and she would return, “Why are you sweeping the floor! There are tables that need to be bussed!” She was pure evil.

I worked for a while as a gas-station attendant. When I was in middle-school, they had kids take the “differential aptitude test” — one of the many standardized tests used for nefarious purposes by educators — that included a component that was supposed to help you identify potential career options. I knew that I wanted to be a field biologist, so I tried to pick options that I thought would be aligned with that goal: Yes, I liked working outside. Yes, I liked working with numbers, etc, etc. Eventually, the computer spat out an answer: it said I should be a gas-station attendant. So, when I actually worked as one years later it was a more than a little ironic. I actually liked it quite a bit, though it was not a particularly good choice as a career, with poor pay and limited options for advancement.

I had a lot of different jobs over the years. I was a dishwasher in a college cafeteria. I worked as an archeological faunal analyst. I was a Spanish-speaking bilingual teacher’s aide for a migrant worker education program. I was a substitute teacher for a time. (That was horrible.) I did scientific field work in many different contexts: catching birds, lizards, mongooses, etc. For several years, I was an “edutainer” traveling to elementary schools to teach about science. I visited hundreds of schools in a dozen different states.

Eventually, I returned to graduate school. I pursued a PhD in Science Education. (I also got a Masters in Earth Science studying wetlands hydrology). While I was doctoral student, I got tasked with setting up a computer lab and then the Internet happened. These experiences led directly to my career as a faculty member serving as the Director of a computer center at an R1 institution. In this role, I performed a vast number of teaching, research, and service activities. (My curriculum vitae is more than 20 pages long.)

These work experiences have all informed my writing in multiple contexts.

I find that “work” is actually a somewhat loaded and conflicted word. On the one hand, it can mean the drudgery you are required to perform. But it can also have the connotation of your calling, your “life’s work,” which for many people becomes nearly their identity. Some people detest work while others strive for the ideal of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I have deep respect for the work that people do in all walks of life. And I was pleased that this was reflected in my writing to the extent that someone noticed it.

a rocky outcrop covered with mosses, ferns, and lichens

Relatively soon after I moved to the Pioneer Valley, my father gifted me a membership to the Trustees of Reservations and encouraged me to visit Bartholomew’s Cobble. It’s a bit of drive, in the extreme south-west corner of the state. But it’s an amazing place with the highest plant diversity of any site in New England. This spring, I visited again to see the spring wildflowers.

A friend and I made a road trip out of the adventure. We masked up (due to my health issues) and drove on back roads so we could keep the windows down. We drove first to Westfield and stopped at Skyline Trading Company for lunch. Then we took a new (to me) route through the back roads, criss-crossing over the Connecticut border to get there.

I’ve always been fascinated by plants. As a child, I frequently went with my father to natural areas where he introduced me to plant identification. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of botany classes: plant morphology and structure, spring flora, and plant systematics. And, as a graduate student, I studied wetlands hydrology, for which plant identification was essential.

Bartholomew’s Cobble is a promontory of quartzite and marble situated by a bend of the Housatonic river. This creates four distinct zones: cool dry, cool wet, warm wet, and warm dry. Plus the marble limestone, relatively rare in Massachusetts, creates regions with higher pH which adds to the range of available microhabitats. This produces the high plant diversity at the site.

We arrived in mid afternoon and, after paying the admission fee, set out walking. There are several trails through the reservation, but the one I always take is the half-mile Ledges trail. It simply follows a route around the promontory and takes you through each of the habitats. You start at the cool-dry quadrant, then pass into the cool-wet segment along the river, then turn west into the warm-wet, then warm-dry, and then finally return to the parking area.

a rocky outcrop with wake robins and dutchman's breeches underneath.

The progression of spring wildflowers was markedly different between the cool and warm sides. In the cooler areas, spring had only just started to arrive. There weren’t many flowers or fiddleheads. But mosses, lichens, and older growth were apparent. The warmer sides had many of the classic early spring wildflowers: triliums, dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, spring beauties, etc., etc. It was lovely.

My friend is a molecular biologist who was intrigued by the variety of plants. Like me, he teaches the writing class at the University. He was fascinated by the number and variety of plants and began thinking about adapting his version of the course to have students look at plant diversity in the fall. It’s a lot easier than it used to be.

I spent years and years studying plant identification. Nowadays, I find that although I can still recognize a lot of familiar plants, there are vastly more I never learned. I even wrote a haiku (published in Ideoj Ĝermas) about the experience of seeing the plants that bloom after your spring flora class is over.

Also identifications have changed. A lot of the nomenclature I learned has been replaced, as molecular systematics has reorganized the phylogeny of plants.

Nowadays, you don’t need to learn plant identification at all. People can use apps to identify plants. I’ve used LeafSnap and, more recently, iNaturalist, that also keeps a record of plants you’ve observed and has experts that help confirm identifications. This can allow students — even with little experience with plant diversity — to make observations about plant species and distribution.

I’ve visited Bartholomew’s Cobble perhaps five times over the past thirty years. Maybe someday, I’ll walk some of the other trails.

odd typewriter word processor hybrid manufactured by Canon in the early 1980s. It has a lcd display where someone has typed "word processor."

I use a text editor for pretty much all of my draft writing. I can date this pretty much to 1993, when Microsoft Word 6.0 was released. It really sucked and, after many years of using a word processor, I quit using one for writing.

I did most of my early writing by hand or using a typewriter. I took “secretarial typing” in high school — they changed the name that year to “business typing” which was perceived as less sexist. I was the only boy in the class. There was a “personal typing” class that required students to learn to type 45 words per minute. But in secretarial typing, you needed to learn touch typing (to not look at the keyboard) and type 60 words per minute. It was perhaps the single most useful class I ever took in my life.

I also learned to use DEC computers with a paper terminal in high school. Mostly, I was programming in BASIC. There was rather crude text editing, but I could see the potential for writing text. There was a text formatting program called RUNOFF that I experimented with a little bit, but it was too complicated for my purposes and so I never actually used it for anything. But I could see the potential.

When I went to college, my family purchased a Smith Corona electric typewriter for me as a gift for going to college.

As an undergraduate, I learned to use a word processing system — maybe ALL-IN_1 — on the VAX computer at Alma College. It used a “gold key” to access formatting commands and you could do a lot of amazing things. I had been using my typewriter to write papers, but quickly switched to writing everything using the word processor.

Around that time, a friend kept asking to borrow my typewriter. I didn’t mind since it wasn’t like I used it anymore: once you got used to using the word processor, the idea of going back to using a typewriter was a monstrous impossibility. I kept suggesting that he learn to use the word processor, but he always claimed to not have time. So I finally said I would type his paper for him using the word processor.

There was a central terminal room, but we went to a small computer lab in the life science building. I logged in and quickly typed his paper. Then I printed it using the dot-matrix printer in the lab. He looked at it skeptically, then said, “Yeah. OK. But it has a widow.”

“Let’s fix that,” I said. I typed a few keystrokes and printed again. When I handed him the output, his eyes got bigger and bigger and bigger.

“You can print it again?” he breathed.

He got an account the next morning.

I had other computers along the way (including the odd typewriter/wordprocessor hybrid pictured above) but when I started graduate school, I bought a Powerbook 100 and a copy of Microsoft Word 5.1. It was amazing. It was perhaps the best word processing system I ever used. I used it to write all my papers as a graduate student, including my gigantic 200 page dissertation that had 88 figures and 15 tables.

Then Word 6.0 came out and it was garbage. It was clunky and unstable. It frequently crashed and you lost what you’d been working on. Its documents frequently became corrupted and were unrecoverable. I kept using my old copy of Word for a while, but it was clear its days were numbered. So I switched to doing all of my draft writing using a text editor — so at least I wouldn’t lose my writing.

On a Mac, the best GUI text editor for a long time was BBEdit. I used that for a number of years, then (when it quit being shareware) I switched to TextWrangler.

Note: I’m leaving out the whole chapter where I learned Unix and the vi editor. I used vi a lot for programming, but there wasn’t a native vi for classic MacOS, so it wasn’t something that was convenient to use for local files until MacOS X came out. So, although I use vi a lot, I never used it much for writing.

When I began teaching the writing class, at first I chose different packages for Macs and PCs. Then I started using Linux myself and started looking for applications that would work identically on all three platforms. Eventually, I settled on Atom, which was released in 2015 and I started using that.

Atom was an adequate text editor. It was built on Electron, which made it a bit bloated and clunky. But it worked exactly the same on all three platforms. It was also highly configurable and had a lot of community add-ons to provide additional functionality.

In 2018, Microslop purchased Github, and in 2022 killed off development of Atom — probably to force people to use their proprietary development environment. But, because Atom was Free Software, the developers promptly forked it and renamed it Pulsar. It works exactly like Atom did and I still use it today.

I had very little success persuading students to use a text editor to write. And I didn’t see many other people using text editors either until this year. Suddenly EVERYONE seems to be using text editors to write. Weird. I guess everything old is new again.

A bunch of people seem to be using Obsidian. Tobias Buckell described building a whole writing environment based on Obsidian. Other people are using Notion and NotebookLM and there are a bunch of others.

I’ll keep using Pulsar, at least until I finish teaching the writing class. Then, maybe, I’ll look at others to see if I can find something I like better. But I’ll still want something that is Free Software and cross platform.

crocuses

When I was the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center, Spring Break was just a chance to get caught up with software and hardware updates. Since then, I’ve used it to accomplish significant bits of writing. This year, however, I really needed the break. And I took full advantage.

I used my time for self-care. I slept a lot. I got in a lot of walking. I hung out with a friend on the patio. It took some time, but I finally started to feel like myself again.

For the first time since December, I felt like I could write some fiction. I wrote a short story, A Persistent Curse, and submitted it for publication.

With his paws on the back of the sofa, Makul poked his nose through the curtains and looked out. A misty drizzle was falling — it always rained when the curse was bad. The raindrops passed through an assemblage of shadowy spirits clustered just outside the window trying to get in. 

Makul waited, watching, until she came around the corner: a short, wizened crone with a dowager’s hump who shuffled along with a stick to hold her up. She gathered her black shawl around her shoulders as she hobbled around the corner and into the shade from the lone cloud that hovered over the apartment building. Her mouth made a hard line when she looked at the building and saw the swarm of spirits jostling around the first-floor apartment of her grandson.

“Tiom da fantomoj!” she muttered. “The curse is bad this morning.”

It was rejected. But at least I feel like I have some creative energy again. It was a long dry spell.

I’m still getting some extra Tanuki time. But little by little, things are returning to baseline.

I remind myself that it’s my last Spring Break. This is my last semester as an active faculty member. I’m trying to be particularly cognizant of the milestones and rhythm of academic life as I experience them for the last time.

In any event, today is the last day. Tomorrow, the students come back and on Tuesday I’ll start teaching again. I have a fair amount of grading I’ve been putting off — and my regular service commitments this week: Faculty Senate and Rules Committee.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends!

Geyser

Since December, I’ve basically not written any fiction. I’ve written a few blog posts and managed to keep up with my class — checking my students’ writing and making comments on their papers. But I’ve barely been able to write fiction.

I learned long ago that my creative output is unpredictable. And I generally don’t really worry about it. I know that it will bounce back in time. But it’s still no less frustrating when I try to do some creative writing and the words just aren’t there.

I did manage to write a haiku today. And tonight, I did got a few manuscripts that had been previously rejected back out to calls for submission.

It’s been a discouraging year.

I understand why so many people drop out of trying to get their work published. It’s easy to get depressed and lose hope when your work gets rejected over and over and over again. But this is not my first rodeo.

I know that at some point, the words will come. And, like a geyser, they’ll come pouring forth so fast I’ll be hard pressed to get them down as they come spraying out.

Until then, I just need to hang on.

a stylish hip flask

It’s become nearly impossible to avoid “AI” which is increasing shoehorned into every corner of our lives. I’ve lived through a bunch of the tech bubbles and this is by far the biggest and most intrusive. The tech-bros are convinced that robot slaves will print money for them so they can do away with all of these inconvenient human resources, impoverish them, and make them traffic their children for sex. Or, maybe, that’s just what they want you to think — to keep the bezzle going. But the fact of the matter is that today it’s nearly impossible to do anything using technology that hasn’t been tainted by so-called AI.

It seems apparent to me that the techbros have been intentionally enshittifying tools (like search) to force people to become dependent on AI. I suspect they are also using the huge pools of venture capital at their disposal to literally pay companies (cough Mozilla cough) to put AI into everything so that it becomes impossible to avoid.

It’s becoming harder and harder to define exactly what is AI. Some people distinguish between analytical and generative AI. Or what the model is trained with. Or where the model is run. I’m quite sure that almost no-one, outside of narrow specialists really has a good understanding. I think it’s all worth avoiding.

As an author, I strive very hard to stay away from AI. I don’t use any of the AI chatbots. I’ve used ChatGPT exactly one time. I want my writing to be unequivocally my own. I certify as such when I submit a manuscript. Toward that end, I don’t use computer operating systems with AI installed (I use Pop!_OS and an older version of the MacOS.) I have managed to retain the Google Assistant, turning off Gemini whenever they turn it on. I use the NoAI Duck Duck Go search engine. I have all of the AI bullshit turned off in Firefox. I do most of my writing in a text editor that doesn’t have AI (although there are AI plugins you can install). I’m using the wp-disable-ai plugin for WordPress to remove the interface elements that are based on generative AI. I turn off the AI Companion in Zoom. etc, etc, etc.

That said, I also use tools where it is nigh-on impossible to completely avoid AI, like Google Docs. Or Google Image Search. Or Google Maps. As Philip Brewer commented to me:

You know, it’s just about impossible to do anything on the internet and not end up using LLMs. If I use Google to check and see if there’s already a company with the same name I’m thinking to use as the name of a nefarious company in my story, Google is going to give me an AI-fied version of the search. If I read that, and then (depending on the result) either go with my fictional company name or else change it to some other fictional name, is my work now a work that used an LLM?

I don’t avoid AI only because of my authorship. I also want to make sure I’m using my brain and not becoming dependent on machines to think for me. I suspect people will discover that it is exactly like with GPS systems: There is “concrete evidence supporting the abstract contention that the rising technical order of GPS systems is dissipating human mental order in those who come to increasingly use and depend on it.” (From J. Robbins, “GPS navigation…but what is it doing to us?,” 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 2010, pp. 309-318, doi: 10.1109/ISTAS.2010.5514623 — see A. Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction?” The Walrus, Oct. 14, 2009. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/432651). This is not to say that I never use GPS systems, but I try to minimize my use — using them only when absolutely necessary — because becoming dependent on them causes the parts of your brain that do that work to atrophy. Literally.

I also avoid the commercial AI systems because their creators and operators are manifestly untrustworthy. You can’t know whether the results they’re presenting to you have some hidden bias. Or an overt bias. Sometimes that bias may be as simple as, “This restaurant paid us more money to have them show up in your Google Map results.” But there are a lot of other far more subtle potential biases that might be intentionally programmed in for political or ideological purposes. I would much rather be able to inspect the underlying data directly and make my own decisions. Search engines allowed us to do that. AI summaries do not.

People are going to need to come to their own decisions about what kinds of AI use are acceptable and unacceptable. I recognize that I tend toward one extreme. But others may reasonably tend toward another. Context is important.

It is not just a slippery slope. I remember many years ago, I went bicycling with my brother on the KalHaven rail trail, that runs from Kalamazoo to South Haven, on the Lake Michigan shoreline. We rode out, making good time, and feeling great. Then we turned around and the ride back was a terrible slog. It felt like we were riding into a strong headwind. Upon reflection, we realized that although the rail trail looked perfectly flat, it was not level. The rail trail is all downhill from Kalamazoo to the lake. And all uphill going back. You’d never know that standing on any particular point — you can’t see the slope. I think AI is like that: it’s a continuum and it’s going to become harder and harder to know exactly where you are on the slope. Unless you have a GPS.

Note: WordPress would lurve for me to use an AI assistant to generate an image for this post. I considered doing that — just for the lulz. But, no. It’s my own, original artwork. Made by me: a human being.

It was a slow year for me. Although I wrote a lot and submitted a lot of stories, the only work I published this year that is eligible for awards is my novel A Familiar Problem.

Brewer, S.D. 2025. A Familiar Problem. Water Dragon Publishing, San Jose. 202pp.

I had another story accepted for publication last spring, for which I’ve signed a contract, but it’s not going to appear until sometime in 2026.