Author of LGBTQIA+ speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. SFWA Secretary. (he/him)
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) does an immense amount of work in support of the writing community. In the next few days, our Winter Worlds of Giving fundraising campaign will wrap up. Please give generously to support our activities for the coming year!
Currently there is a matching program, generously funded by Veronica Roth, that will TRIPLE donations from SFWA members up to $10,000. All donations go to the Where the Need is Greatest fund which lets your money support whatever new challenges come up.
I joined the Board as Secretary in 2024 and have been genuinely impressed by the dedication and commitment of our staff and volunteers. Everyone is working as hard as they can to maintain and enhance existing services, bring a lively new program of professional development, and confront emerging challenges to the writing community. So whether you’re a current member, a Nebula attendee, or a fan of science fiction and fantasy, I encourage you to give generously to the Winter Worlds of Giving before the campaign wraps up on Saturday, January 31. We can do more together!
I have gotten essentially no fiction writing accomplished during this Intersession. My university contract says most of January is a period of non-responsibility so each year I can usually get a lot of writing done in those weeks. But this year, my mentally ill adult son was hospitalized for the first time in four years.
I’m not going to write about his mental illness diagnosis or experience. As my wife would say, that’s not my story to tell. But the impact it’s had on our family does feel like my story to tell. And I think it’s important to share, because many people shy away from talking about mental illness in our society because they’re ashamed. The demands his chronic illness put on our family may be less visible, but they are very real.
For the past two years, he’s lived independently, though fortunately close enough that either my wife or I can visit daily. We had expressed growing concerns and uneasiness for several days before he was hospitalized and tried to provide nearly round-the-clock support. I stayed with him during the day and she stayed with him in the evening, including hanging out on his couch one night. But, in the end, after about three days, he still needed to be hospitalized.
This is the fourth time he’s needed hospitalization over the past seven years, but this is the first since he began living independently with his emotional support animal. While he is hospitalized, care for her has fallen to my wife and me — in addition to following his care, ensuring all of his professional supports are coordinated and, of course, one of us going to daily visiting hours to see how he’s doing and (struggle to) stay connected.
For me, taking care of his young dog is a genuine pleasure. She’s a little weird, but boxer dogs are always a little weird. On the one hand, boxer dogs are so similar to one another, they might as well be clones. But, on the other, they all have unique idiosyncrasies. She is adorable, and I love her to pieces.
That said, it’s been hard. Trying to keep track of another set of needs is almost more than I can handle now. Despite masking everywhere, my wife has a bad cold that’s interfering with her job. It’s been rough.
Still, I have managed to accomplish a few things. I submitted my application for the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. My article about bookselling, How to Hand-Sell Books for Fun and Profit, appeared at Planetside. I’m scheduled to read from A Familiar Problem for the Straw Dog Author Showcase on January 31. And I got my university course website published on schedule, one week before the start of classes for Spring 2026.
Yesterday, due to the massive winter storm, I could not safely attend visiting hours, so I used the time to install FreshRSS and take a nap. I also managed to write a story fragment for @wss366. I’ve only managed about half the days since this all started.
Every day of hospitalization is a trial in multiple ways. The dog — and all of us — want my son to be ready to come home. We’re doing the best we can for the moment, making sure she gets lots of love and walks and treats. But it’s hard for her and hard for us. And still will be for weeks after he does return to his place, as he recovers. She is ready to do her part doing what she does best, providing unqualified emotional support. She is ready.
I spent a snowy afternoon setting up FreshRSS at my hosting service. It was a snap. It really only took me about a half hour once I got started and made me wonder what I’d been waiting for. I’ve only just started exploring it’s capabilities, but it seems great so far.
One of my fellow authors at Water Dragon Publishing shared a bit of news at the Discord and indicated she would be providing further updates to her blog, if people wanted to follow her journey. I had been meaning to set up a new RSS feed reader for a couple of years and so this was just the prompt I needed to kick me into gear.
I was an avid user of Google Reader and then, for many years after, ran an instance of TinyTinyRSS (TTRSS) as a feed reader on my home server. At some point, however, TTRSS began to require Docker. When I tried to set it up, it didn’t work right — probably because I got something wrong in the Docker configuration — and I said, “#@&% this!” I wasn’t going to teach myself Docker just so I could play at being sysadmin.
I tried a few other app-based feed readers, but I really wanted something server based. Otherwise, you really can only check your feeds from a single device and I switch among three devices pretty much constantly. I had identified FreshRSS pretty early on as a good candidate, but I wasn’t sure it would play nicely with my hosting service. I had tried to install TTRSS there and that hadn’t worked (which is why I had been running it on my home server).
In the end, I just did it. I downloaded the source, checked the documentation, and got started. I re-used the domain name “feeds.bierfaristo.com” that I had created a few years ago and added hosting. I scp’ed the tar file, untar’ed it, and the pointed my browser at the URL. Bam! I was in business.
I had saved an OPML file of my old feeds, which I went ahead and imported. It was a trip down memory lane. A lot of the feeds were dead, but a surprising number are still good. I’m looking forward to being more intentional about keeping up with feeds again.
At Worldcon, I got the chance to chat with Roxana Arama, the editor of Planetside (formerly the SFWA Blog). We had a great conversation and she encouraged me to write a pitch for an article.
Upon reflection, I decided to pitch an article about hand-selling books for authors as a kind of Bookselling 101. Since I had time in August (and was likely to have less time once the academic year started), I went ahead and drafted the article even before my pitch was accepted, figuring I would post it to my blog if it didn’t get accepted.
My pitch was accepted, but with a modification: They wanted a Bookselling 201 article and were most interested in having my expand on the aspect about pitching and hand-selling books. I made the necessary revisions and the article, How to Hand-Sell Books for Fun and Profit, is now live at Planetside.
I thought it would be fun to share the rest of the Bookselling 101 article I wrote here.
Where to Sell
There are a large number of opportunities where you might be able to sell your books directly to an audience. Perhaps the most important are the national and international conventions, like Worldcon, Dragoncon, and Comicon. Regional and local conventions are also worth attending. Additionally, there are often a vast number of local events that will welcome an author selling their books, including festivals, artisan markets, and holiday markets.
Conventions usually have a “dealer room” where most of the bookselling happens. Dealers pay a charge to have a space in a room with other dealers where they can sell their wares. For an individual author — especially a beginning author — the charges for a table may be higher than are warranted. But there are sometimes ways to share the cost. It may be that your publisher will already have a table. Or will pay to have the table, if you volunteer to help staff it to sell your books and others from the publisher. Some groups, like Broad Universe and Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU), offer tables that multiple authors may join and share. Many conventions also offer other opportunities for individual authors to sell their books, in an “author’s alley” or via book-signing events.
Your Personal Brand
Presenting yourself and your books effectively makes a good first impression. Branding works. Many authors use some props to create a distinctive author appearance: a distinctive hat, like Tobias Buckell’s beret, or a T-shirt with a graphic design that evokes or aligns with your brand. A tablecloth and tablerunner, or banner, with branding are worth having to give your bookselling operation a polished, professional appearance.
Branded giveaways are useful to remind people about your books after they’ve walked away from your table. A business card, with a QR code linking to your website, is a no brainer here. But there are a lot of other easy and fun possibilities. Bookmarks are an obvious choice. Stickers can be good, although they’re more expensive and some venues ban the distribution of stickers. Some conferences use badge ribbons and, if you can think of a catchy hook, they have the added advantage that other attendees may see other people wearing the ribbon and will come to your dealer table because they want to get one of their own.
If people purchase several books, it’s convenient to be able to offer a bag to help them carry their books away. Be aware that in some localities, disposable plastic bags are outlawed, so paper bags are safer. The bag is another opportunity for branding: A rubber stamp works well, but stickers or labels can do in a pinch. Alternatively, you can purchase some branded reusable bags to sell.
Practical Concerns
Books are heavy, so a collapsible cart or wagon can be invaluable for moving your books and other materials during load-in and load-out. Stout cardboard boxes are ideal for protecting your books. But high quality reusable grocery bags with a flat bottom are convenient too and have the added advantage of handles. Book stands are also useful for standing up just a few books to highlight. (They’re also useful for when you’re a participant at a panel, to show your books while you present!)
It’s fun and easy to also sell books at outdoor festivals and markets, but you need some additional resources. You will probably want a collapsible 10×10 foot tent. Some are much easier than others to transport and setup by single person, so consider those factors when making your selection. Also, be sure to get some weights so that your tent doesn’t blow away in the wind. (Ask me how I know this…) You’ll need a table and some folding chairs. Usually tables and chairs are provided in dealer rooms, but for most festivals, you’re on your own. An 8-foot folding table works well. But two smaller tables — or just an additional table — can provide some flexibility.
Hand Selling Books
The most important thing I’ve learned about bookselling is that a concise, polished pitch for your book greatly increases your chances for making a sale. My article at Planetside, How to Hand Sell Books for Fun and Profit, goes into more detail about this.
Financial Concerns
Before selling anything you should make sure you have your financial ducks in a row. If you are selling on behalf of another organization, like your publisher or SPBU, they may have taken care of these details beforehand. Otherwise, you should consider setting up a separate bank account for you to keep the finances of your bookselling operation separate from other activities.
Honestly, if you’re a professional author, you should already have a separate bank account for business income and expenses. But, if you’ve resisted that up to now, stop resisting — you really need that, if you’re going to be a book seller.
Before you start selling, you will probably need a Tax ID number in order to collect and report sales tax. The rules and the amounts can vary widely depending on the locale. The rules for this vary from state-to-state or even city-to-city, so be sure to check the laws carefully in your locality.
You will need to accept payments. There are a few payment processors that offer inexpensive integrated systems you can use as a Point-of-Sale terminal. Many cell phones now can accept NFC (tap) payments with one of these using a card or phone or smart watch. There are also inexpensive devices that can accept tap payments, but allow someone to also insert a chipped card. These systems generally impose a 3-4% charge, which you will need to price your products appropriately to cover.
Different events bring people with different preferences for how they want to pay. Most transactions are usually via credit cards but, at some events, many people will want to pay cash. An envelope containing small bills is useful and that can also hold the cash collected. I usually start with $100 in one, fives, and tens to make change. I can then easily calculate the additional cash collected by the end of the event, to confirm it matches the transactions recorded in the payment processing system. Some events and populations prefer yet other payment systems, like venmo or paypal. It’s useful to be able to accept payments using whatever system the customer prefers.
I’ve generally found it convenient to price products at even dollar amounts that include the taxes and payment processor charges. Remember that, if you price something at $11, you will need a large number of ones and fives to make change, if you have many cash sales.
I’ve found that printing price tags on florescent card stock is useful. I have a template with prices along the edges that I can cut in half and then cut between the tags. These are easy to tuck in between the pages of books, so they stick up and are highly visible. You can use the different colors of tags to indicate various things: e.g. price range or genre. People like to know how much things cost. If you don’t have price tags, people will need to ask you, which will deter sales.
So, that’s it. That’s pretty much everything I know about selling books. Yep, that’s pretty much it. Oh, except you need some books to sell. You should probably go write some books now.
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.
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.
I’ve been reluctant to admit it, but I’ve been having trouble finishing books. Or, indeed, even starting books. I’d heard of “writer’s block” but is there such a thing as “reader’s block”? It perhaps began even before the pandemic — certainly since then — that I’ve struggled to make myself read whole books. Over the past few months, I’ve checked out perhaps a dozen books from the library and returned them all unfinished — some unopened.
I decided recently that I was going to make myself start reading again. I spent some time thinking about it and realized one problem was that, for various reasons, I didn’t have a place to read anymore. So I set about to create one.
My office had gotten taken over, at one point, as a storage room, and was choked with boxes. Buried in them was an old antique chair, so I extracted the chair and banished enough of the boxes to make a space. Then I went to the store and bought new floor lamp, so I’d have enough light to read by. And I set up a side table to hold my TBR pile and a coffee cup. And then I started to read.
On my last trip to the library, I had checked out Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons. It was wonderful! I enjoyed reading it a lot. And I finished it. After reading it, however, I realized something else.
I read books differently now that I’ve written books of my own. Rather than becoming purely immersed in the story, I find myself frequently distracted by observations on the craft of the author. Why did they choose to include this detail? Why did they select a conlang term for this item and not that? Why? Why? Why? I think that was part of what was making it hard to read books. Now that I’ve recognized it, I can adapt.
Anyway, I went through the house and collected together my whole TBR pile(s) and, while I have the holiday and intersession before me, I plan to try to make plenty of time to read.
My first appearances of 2026 have been scheduled! Some of these are still preliminary and may change, but I wanted to get them out in time to share in my January newsletter.
At Arisa 2026 (January 16-19), I am scheduled to moderate one panel and serve on four others:
Manga 101: Introduction to Japanese Comics Kendall Square Saturday, January 17, 2026, 10:00 AM EST
Don’t Know Much About Geography–But You Should! Porter Square A Saturday, January 17, 2026, 5:30 PM EST
Artist, Craftsperson, Maker, Crafter, Hacker – What’s in a Name? Central Square Saturday, January 17, 2026, 6:45 PM EST
Your Fat Friends Porter Square A Sunday, January 18, 2026, 10:00 AM EST
Isekai 101: Surviving Your Time In Another World (moderator) Harvard Square Monday, January 19, 2026, 10:00 AM EST
There is still a chance I will get an opportunity to read at Arisia. The schedule is still being finalized.
Later in the year, I’m tentatively planning to attend Watch City, the Nebula Conference, and Readercon again. I’m also proposing myself to be a participant at Worldcon. I’ll post further updates as we get closer!
Writing is easy. Getting published is hard. Getting published again is harder. But it’s sure easy to get discouraged.
During the 2025 Nebula Conference, I attended a workshop by Becca Syme of Better Faster Academy about career longevity among writers. Up front, she delivered the startling statistic that 80% of writers give up within three years. Her presentation focused on helping people set more realistic expectations and persist in the face of adversity. (Note: Her presentation, The Longevity Blueprint: Building A Career That Lasts, was really excellent and is still available to watch, but only for Nebula or Quasar attendees — or SFWA members. Note: you can still join SFWA or register for the upcoming Nebulas to gain access.)
The worst thing about publishing is that it’s stochastic. Outcomes are largely decoupled from inputs. You can do everything right and still not get published. Until you recognize that and internalize it, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Getting rejected really only means that this editor didn’t need this manuscript this time.
Still, I’m reminded of the Stupidity Demotivator: Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.
The real question, I suppose, depends on what one means by “winning”…
Many, many years ago my brother and I discussed career paths. His approach was to work at a job he hated, but which paid well, with the goal of saving enough to be able to retire early so he could do whatever he wanted. He retired around age 50 and has been “doing whatever he wants” for more than 15 years now. By contrast, my approach was “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I found a career that was meaningful and satisfying and, although it was a lot of work (I aimed for 50-55 hours per week), it was work I generally enjoyed and found rewarding.
For me, my authorship is the same. I don’t write aiming to make a lot of money. I do it because I find it satisfying. I love to write. It makes me happy.
I’m sad, however, when I think of all the people who’ve crashed out. Who came to the party with high expectations and ended up going home alone. I wonder where you’ve gone and what it might take to get you to come back.
As I move toward full retirement, I’m devoting an increasing amount of my effort to trying to build sustainable communities to support writers. Straw Dog Writes, Wandering Shop Stories, and my work for SFWA all fall under this category. But they only address one side of the equation.
The money is harder. Economic forces are squeezing the publishing industry — and writers even more. Sociocultural shifts have resulted in fewer people buying and reading magazines and books. And now, Generative AI is flooding the marketplace with slop, making it that much harder for a new author to get discovered among the noise.
I remember Elizabeth Bear commenting that writers aren’t competing with one another: writers are all competing with the six-pack of beer at the party store for a purchaser’s dollar. I liked that way of looking at it. One of my goals for the coming year is to spend less money on beer and more buying books and then writing about them. Look for that here in the coming year. I hope you’ll still be here.
When I awoke before dawn on the solstice, I checked the weather (there is a weather station at the Computer Science building, about a quarter mile from my house). The temperature was already above 39°F and I thought, “Ya, know. I could get up, have a leisurely cup of coffee, and still go to watch the sunrise at the UMass Sunwheel.
Both my brother and I have always been intrigued by sun-aligned structures. I still recall getting up very early to drive from St. Louis to the Cahokia mounds to watch the 1991 winter solstice sunrise with him and his wife. I have previously visited a number of indigenous sun-aligned constructions when I was a young man. Serpent Mound in Ohio appears to have sun-aligned components. When my wife and I were in Mesa Verde, we visited the Sun Temple. And many others over the years.
The Sunwheel project had started in 1992-93, and was just getting sited when I arrived at UMass in 1996. I remember I took my young children to one of the solstice sunrise presentations there. But I hadn’t been to a sunrise for a long time.
A Crowd Listens AttentivelySteve Schnieder Explains the Seasons
I arrived a few minutes before sunrise and joined a crowd of forty or fifty people who had come to watch the sunrise. I was pleased to see a colleague I knew from way back was there to do the presentation. He did a fantastic job of explaining how the axial tilt of the earth produces the change in apparent movement of the sun across the sky. And, combined with the elliptical orbit of the earth, results in the changes in times of sunrise and sunset around the solstice. As he joked, he wishes people a happy solstice and perihelion during the season. He introduced the Sunwheel and told us a bit about it’s history. He pointed out other standing stones that showed moonrise and moonset. For extra credit, he also explained how the precession of the orbit of the moon results in changes in where the moon rises and sets relative to the sun. He ended up, pointing out the stone that marks where the star Sirius sets, which the ancient Egyptians used to mark the flooding of the Nile.
As he finished, the sun began to peek above the horizon. I took a few more pictures, chatted with a few people I knew, and then took my leave. It was a great start to the winter solstice, when the sun finally begins it slow passage back to the north.
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.
