alfreda89 | Reading

Wednesday. I was not prepared to find 6 inches of snow on the ground when I got up this morning. I had been informed that there would be snow showers today, but that last night would be "clear."

So, anyway, got up to find 6 inches of "clear" on the ground, and had literally just gotten my boots on to go out to deal with the steps and making a path to the garage so Tali could keep her appointment with her doctor, when the plowguy swooped in and started in to work.

Best. Plow. Guy. EVER.

Relieved of snow-clearing duties, I had a cup of tea, some cottage cheese, and grapes. Then I gathered Tali up from her bird-watching post and bore her, not without complaint, to her appointment. Tali is pronounced healthy and beautiful. She Officially Weighs 13.0 pounds, and she has had her 3-year distemper shot. Her toes were also cut off, all the way around.

For those interested, it is still snowing, very lightly, and is expected to stop around 11:30.

My business today is to finalize my Remarks and choose passages to read. I will probably make broccoli potato soup for lunch, and use my new! food processor to make a batch of hummus. I have two lemons, though I'm not sure I possess a juicer, anymore. I had a glass one from my grandmother, but I haven't seen it in a while. Of course, I haven't needed to juice anything in a while.

Tomorrow will begin another 5-day sprint on the WIP, taking beta reader comments into account. I think I have chicken breasts in the freezer. Might be I should bake one or two so that I'll have easy lunches to draw on. There's a plan.

Upon arriving home, and being freed from The Cage, Tali relieved her feelings by smacking Rook in the head several times, and then having a mouthful or two of dry food to replace the resources depleted during Her Ordeal.

I made myself a cup of hot chocolate, and considered the question of whether or not I'm going to try to install my blindster today. If it works, I can order in three more and there's the sliders dressed.

Remarks first.

How's everybody doing?

Here is Tali, post-Ordeal:

#
Made hummus. Had to check the interwebs again to figure out how to make it do, since just sliding the switch to "puree" did not evoke the desired motivation. Turns out you need to press the handle after deciding between "chop" and "puree".

Despite which, much the easiest way to make hummus so far discovered by this household. I did not find the old glass juicer; I'm of the opinion it left the household sometime back (Note to self: buy juicer), but the lemons were easy enough to squeeze by hand.

Having now accomplished an Accomplishment -- Remarks.

catherineldf

How are things in Minneapolis/the Twin Cities/Minnesota and environs? Honestly: really bad.There have been some wins but people are burning themselves out to the core to foil kidnappings, help people who can't leave their homes, help children who've been kidnapped, help children who are left behind when their parents are kidnapped, help pets whose humans have been kidnapped, help small businesses survive, help people who can't pay rent pay rent, deal with legal challenges, etc.,etc. We're going on three months now and we have bus and train stop monitors, school bus monitors, people doing deliveries, people chasing these fuckers around despite harassment and retaliation, people doing donation drives, people doing fundraisers, people protesting at the Whipple Building (where they're holding folks who've been kidnapped), people waiting at Whipple to help folks who've been released with no winter coats (in MN winter) or phones, people protesting at the hotels hosting ICE (hello, Hilton chain!) and on and on. There are so many heroes.

But in three months, we have collectively been:

Shot and killed.
Regularly teargassed.
Threatened with guns.
Beaten (also by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department, so not just ICE)
Had ICE kidnap legal observers, harass legal observers by showing up at their homes, harass businesses, etc.
Had a huge portion of our population go into hiding, which means they need food, toiletries, rent paid, pet food, diapers, and so forth.
Families have been broken up and traumatized.
There are horror stories about pets and livestock left to starve.
Small businesses are closing or on the brink because they've lost workers or their workers are stuck at home.

How long could your state's economy survived if the federal government wages war on you next? This is what we're up against. Add to that, Minneapolis's biggest public hospital network is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for a combination of reasons and if they go under, there goes most of the medical care for the uninsured, low income, etc, folks. Not to mention, it's a huge employer. I use their system myself and while I can go elsewhere, a lot of other people can't. That's the other part of all this: our systems for everything from housing to healthcare to the arts are taking/going to take a gigantic hit from all this. And where will the money come from to rebuild, assuming this ends soon? Not the feds, clearly.

That said, here are a few places where small donations help a lot. Please donate if you can, book if you can't. "Everything little bit helps," as the bus stop monitor I spoke to the other day on my way to drop off toiletry donations at the Pride Cultural Center Pantry said.

Twin Cities Pride has rainbow Resistance Loon t-shirts that they're selling as a fundraiser for the food pantry.
Music for Good - local musicians teamed up to produce protest songs for a mutual aid fundraiser.
DreamHaven Book GoFundMe - Greg Ketter is donating all new donations to local foodshelves and school book drives.
ICE Hurts Animals Too - animal rescue for abandoned pets/help for folks stuck at home.
The best overall fundraiser list - Stand With Minnesota
The multi-faceted approach, not just donations - Naomi Kritzer's "How to Help if You are Outside MInnesota"

How am I personally? Well, I'm writing this despite having a horrible cold on the anniversary of Jana's death so please assume that I think it's pretty damned important. Big thank you shoutout to everyone who's been helping so far! More cheerful posts soon, I hope.

stevenpiziks

I started writing fantasy 35 years ago. (Oi!) Back then, and right up until about ten years ago, it was death by rejection if you tried to set your novel in a video game. The awfulness of the movie TRON only reinforced this. You were also told to never, ever write a book set in a world created for a fantasy role-playing game on the grounds that the world will be too simplistic by nature, and editors gleefully rejected such books.

Now?

It's suddenly the cool kid on the block. People are rushing to imitate Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the market is becoming flooded with these books.

I think a part of it is that video games have become in recent years a lot more immersive. The games hire actual writers and build actual worlds and tell actual stories. We've come a long way since Atari's "Adventure" game had you move a little square around the TV screen.

I haven't tried writing it and don't intend to--I think the genre and setting are a crutch for writers who can't build worlds or plot effectively--but I don't begrudge Matt Dinniman and his character Carl their success at it. Anytime an author succeeds in this market, go them! What bothers me are the self-published imitators who flood the market with drek until you can't find anything worth reading.

denise posting in

dw_news

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for

dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update

dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update

dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

alfreda89

"Welcome to the Sexy Public Servants Charity Calendar, where True Love is Only a First Responder Away."

How about an omnibus of *four* complete novels about the Sexy Public Servants Charity Calendar guys? Expect Hallmark sweet with some spicy heat. 🌸

It's THE CALENDAR HEROES by Michele Dunaway, now in #ebook at #BookViewCafe & other fine ebook establishments.

#ContemporaryRomance, #FirefighterRomance, #FirstResponders, #ManOfTheMonthCalendar, #Paramedic, #PoliceOfficer, #SweetWithAHintOfSpice, #TheCalendarHeroesSeries

https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc-announces-the-calendar-heroes-by-michele-dunaway/

*This is a test of how does the new Create HTML work with a post like this.... May be under construction!

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: An ancient seabed

rolanni

Tuesday. Sunny and pretty dern cold. Trash and recycling are at the curb. The chickadees and the titmice that dined with us yesterday told their friends down at the bar and this morning we also have cardinals and mourning doves. I haven't seen any other interest, but I fear mine will have to be a pop-up diner.

Breakfast was stir-fried leftover veggies and rice. After I finished stir-frying, I removed the veggies to my bowl, cracked an egg into the frying pan, scrambled it around and added it to the bowl. Worked out well. Lunch will be soup today (yesterday, I decided on fish and the veggies of which I had leftovers this morning).

I really should leap right into the taxes, but -- when I was sitting with the Happy Lite this morning with Firefly on my knees, I read an article about marriage proposals and how they remain the last stage for the Grand Gesture in Romance (which is not true, actually, unless no one's doing epic weddings anymore?) -- the man down on his knees, his intended shocked, and charmed, and if she hadn't been exactly in love, this Lovely Gesture is the final nudge, because of course one must say yes! And how you film it and post it on Insta for all your friends to see. And how they're getting more and more over the top, because nothing says "I love you" like putting somebody into a spot where they don't dare spoil the spectacle.

Trés romantique.

I, of course, never intended to get married, and nor did Steve, having done that once and found it not to his taste. We did have, as I may have said once or twice, an instant connection, and I was prepared to share a household and cats with him forever, because we worked, snapped into each other like Legos. We decided to marry as a practicality, to ensure that, if I fell ill (again), I would be assured of someone who actually cared about what happened to me out there taking care of the details.

When I did fall ill, I couldn't even talk to Steve at his temp-agency job to tell him where I was, because I wasn't his wife. The receptionist at the agency did take a message, though.

I will pass lightly over the Utter Horror that I felt, sick, so very sick, when my mother walked into my hospital room.

The agency got my message to Steve, and he did eventually arrive. At which point my mother did one of the most humane things she had ever done for me. She told the doctor, "He'll take care of whatever you need." -- and left.

When things were less fraught, and I was recovered, Steve and I talked this event over, and I said, "I don't ever want that happen again. Do we need to go to a lawyer and get something written up to say that you'll speak for me?" And he said, "Let me think about it."

A couple days later, when I came home from work, he poured me a glass of wine, and handed me a carved wooden box.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Open it," he said.

So I did.

dreadlordmrson posting in

little_details

Would hospital care after minor dog attack injuries expose a first trimester pregnancy?

Details:
I have a story I'm currently working on set in a modern type world, and a plot point where one of the two main characters is attacked by a pack of street dogs and gets some minor scratch and bite injuries. I'm thinking just a few stitches at most. I can guess they'll need "just in case" antibiotics and rabies shots because of the bites, but would common care involve any tests that would expose an early pregnancy?

Goals:
I'm trying to keep the pregnancy a surprise for the other main character later in the story, so a "some hospitals would do these tests but some wouldn't" could be ruled that this time it wasn't done. But if it's very common to do certain blood or other tests that would easily reveal a pregnancy, that's a problem. And having the other main character who's acting as their savior/caregiver in this scenario decide not to get them treatment wouldn't be in character or suit his arc in the story, even with minor wounds that in theory could be treated at home.

Do I need to change details of the attack, or depict this medical team as negligent? Or is the stealth of this pregnancy safe?

jreynoldsward

Well, the New York Times did it again by dropping a controversial publishing article on Sunday morning. This time it was “The New Fabio is Claude,” a frankly blathering article about how generative AI is allegedly going to push human writers out of the creative writing business by flooding the market with sexy self-published romance books. Featured is South African author “Coral Hart,” who of course is only using a now-retired pen name in the article.[i]

(note: I am using endnotes rather than in-essay cites because I want to cite as many of these sources as I can without readers needing to click away.)

“Hart” claims a six-figure income from “more than 200 romances” that all in all “sold around 50,000 copies.” Impressive?

Weelll, maybe. My calculator shows that this averages around 250 copies sold per title, possibly less because I used the figures of 200 books and 50,000 copies. Hardly outstanding even for selfpub work, and the gloss on the actual numbers makes me raise a brow or two.

And the “six figures” she cites is…well, using the numbers of $100,000 and 200 titles, that’s an average of $500 per book. Of course, we aren’t told whether these numbers are net income or gross income, much less how much was spent on advertising, production, and so on. Meanwhile, Ms. Hart is selling a proprietary AI program that costs $80 to $250 a month. Additionally, the article goes on to mention her “Write Dirty With Me” AI writing course, with “around 20” attendees at—according to her website, a cost of $100 USD. That’s…$2000, for one class, and she had listed several options.[ii]

Methinks I smell a rat here.

An overreaction on my part? Perhaps. But I have been around the self-publishing world since 2011, and I’ve seen this sort of thing happening far too often. If anything, Ms. Hart is a latecomer to this particular scene, because two years ago I was seeing a class promoter (who shall remain nameless) pushing a “write with AI” class at $1000 per person. Doesn’t take many subscribers at that rate to make a decent profit.

Of course, we have Ms. Hart’s inflammatory comment of “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”

Needless to say, outstanding authors in the romance field such as Courtney Milan took to social media to deflate that particular comment. Chuck Wendig also took aim at that comment. [iii], so I figure it’s been hammered upon sufficiently by multiple people.

That said, this is a mentality I saw reflected far too many times by the mindset exhibited by the late 20Booksto50k writing crowd, where rapid release and fast money from writing novels was considered to be more important than writing quality. Again, I’ve been in the self-publishing ecosystem since 2011, and I’ve seen these notions of gaming the system come and go. Many of them are centered around a particular publishing outlet, Kindle Unlimited (hereafter KU), which allows readers to read as many ebooks as possible. The catch is that these ebooks (unless traditionally published) are only available on Kindle Unlimited/Kindle Direct Publishing. Self-published authors in the KU program are paid per pages read in KU, and from books sold on Amazon. They cannot publish the ebook anyplace else, for a minimum of 90 days.

Needless to say, the schemes to game that KU algorithm have been rife from the beginning. I can’t even begin to name them all because, as I discovered early in my career, I don’t write in the subgenres which are popular on KU, so I didn’t pay attention to them. But there’s been everything from redirects at the beginning of the book that take you to the back—therefore generating artificial page reads—to stuffing the book with random stuff (that’s an oldie and my old brain can’t quite remember the mechanics of that one). Let’s just say that the current AI novel-writing craze is just the latest version of gaming the KU algorithm.

Which…another interesting newsletter hit my inbox this morning. Romancing the Data put out a summary of romance best-seller trends, and a couple of statistics jumped out at me.

First, there was a rise in Big Five romance best sellers in the Kindle Store Monthly Top 100 Best Sellers in Romance (Paid) in 2025 (31%, up from 9% in January). There was a drop in self-published books, from 71% to 44%[iv] More than that, Kindle Unlimited books dropped from 91% in April to 74% in December.

Hmm. Granted, that’s based on the last few months of data, BUT…that suggests to me that despite some of the claims in the NYT article from those promoting the use of AI, readers are catching on to the problems with AI slop and, as a result, backing away from programs like KU that become loaded with it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are self-published and don’t use AI in any form struggle to be seen. My big experiment in 2026 is going to be focusing on developing more artisanal products, starting with my new release coming out on February 24^th, Vision of Alliance. Besides a hand-drawn map allegedly from one of the characters (who is apparently known for his lack of drawing ability—cough cough Your Humble Author resembles that person), I’m going to try to create some glossary terms and etc—after all, it is a fantasy novel. I’m also planning to release a hardcover edition as well as a paperback version.

As a parting thought, I’m going to leave you with this quote from a recent newsletter by Baldur Bjarnason (author of The Intelligence Illusion), Out of the Software Crisis: Have I Hardened Against LLMs?:

“The more I wrote about generative models, the more appalled I became at the response from the industry, to both my writing and that of others actively highlighting the risks. Few people who have any influence in tech and software seem to care about the harms, the political manipulation, the outright sabotage of education, the association with extremism, or the literal child abuse.”

You have to subscribe to Bjarnason’s newsletter to read the whole thing, but he raises a point few others have, about the tendency of generative AI models to skew toward, as he puts it “a piece of technology that obviously and seemingly deliberately played into and supported some of the worst elements of the human psyche.”

I hadn’t thought about those aspects in those particular terms.

Now, I do.

No generative AI in my books, please. I plan to hold to this stance as best as I can.

Meanwhile, want to support my writing endeavors? My books are easily found on my new website, https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com. Or you can drop a coin or two into my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/joycereynoldsward

[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/business/ai-claude-romance-books.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KlA.yqs_.m3hZNKuOV7jd

[ii] https://plotprose.com/product/write-dirty-with-me/

[iii] https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2026/02/09/writers-who-use-ai-are-not-real-writers/

[iv] https://blog.romancingthedata.com/p/romance-best-seller-trends-2025

rolanni

I . . . have been remiss in updating the blog, for which my apologies. The last couple days have been not much worth writing about anyway -- mostly reading and doing daily chores, with intermittent sadness.

That said, we move on to!

Monday midday already. Sunny and cold. I put paper plates of seeds out on top the snow on the deck. I prolly shouldn't have done, but I miss seeing the birds. The cats are fascinated and the new sliders in Steve's office gets them right up close and personal.

I called Dead River this morning, while I was still sitting under the glow of the Happy Lite, and was therefore taught the new method of oil delivery. Back in the Old Days, the oil truck came on -- oh, Tuesday. Or possibly every other Tuesday. But, they delivered to a schedule, which they could be expected to keep, to top off the tank. This was ... simple. We have now graduated to a more complex system, wherein oil usage for a particular address is calculated, using known data, and when the oil tank at that particular address reaches what ought to be one/third full, an oil delivery is triggered.

I pause here to mourn simplicity.

The helpful office person I spoke with at the crack of dawn this morning explained this to me, though she could not tell me when the delivery would be triggered. We left it that a truck would come by sometime this week to top off my tank, and then I will Observe the System in Real Time, so that I may see for myself how well it works.

Moving on. Yesterday, my back hurt, and my hands hurt, and -- let's just say that I was a hurtin' person, enough that I was aware that I was hurting. After I finished my work with the WIP, and had written a draft of my Remarks, I decided to field test a gummy. For Science!

I cut a gummy in half (taking it from 10mg of THC to the 5mg recommended for newbies), which dose is said to make one feel calm and subtly relaxed. It made me feel that I had drunk way too much wine. Not a pleasant buzz, but rather a "shouldn't have had that last glass" light-headed-and-unsteady feeling. I mention here that the muscle relaxants and prescribed pain relievers also make me lightheaded and foolish on my feet.

On the plus side, I was feeling no pain. I spent the next while drinking lots of water, and eating snacks and listening to my audiobook, and eventually the "too much" feeling went away, and pretty soon thereafter, I went to bed, and slept very well.

And when I got up this morning, I was still pain-free.

So! Conclusions. Do gummies work for pain relief? Yessir, they do, and they don't make me sick. Most of the prescribed pain relievers and muscle relaxants really make me sick. Already, I'm ahead of the game. Do gummies work as a muscle relaxant? Seems so, since the pain hasn't come back today. And let's not discount that lovely night's sleep.

Obviously, I'm going to have to be very cautious with them, and I may want to conduct a follow-up experiment with one-quarter of a gummy, to see if I can get relief and! still be able to function.

But that's for later.

For today, I spent the morning reviewing the WIP and have less than 50 pages left to read. I'll be doing that after lunch, which will be bean and veggie soup out of the freezer. Unless I decide on something else.

Tomorrow, I will start the day off by opening the tax portal and will hopefully finish filling in the necessary forms before it's time to go to needlework.

Wednesday morning, first thing, Tali has an appointment with her vet, and when I come home I will begin reviewing beta reader comments, and starting the process of producing a final draft of the WIP.

Doesn't that look tidy and fine?

So! Who else is tidy and fine today?

Ah. One of the things I let get past me was the Celebration of Talizea's Gotcha Day, on February 3. Here, we have Then:

And now:

alfreda89

Most people I know dealing with weird medical have something strange going on with the amino acids and probiotics that exist in their gut. This causes problems, and some of us are very effected by foods we eat--or can't--and even air quality, wildfire smoke, people doing stupid things burning stuff, and so on.

So this new info may interest a bunch of you. Turns out Vitamin B1 may have a lot to do with gut motility.

https://www.sciencealert.com/boosting-one-vitamin-may-have-a-surprising-effect-on-your-poop-schedule

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: An ancient sea bed

marthawells

Some good news:

Both Queen Demon and the Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute anthology, made it on the Locus Recommended Reading List:

https://locusmag.com/2026/02/2025-recommended-reading/

with a lot of other excellent books and stories, including a new section for translated works.

You can also vote on the list for the Locus Awards. Anybody can vote here with an email address: https://poll.voting.locusmag.com/ though they have you fill out a demographic survey first with how many books you read per year, etc.

Of course a lot of great work did not end up on the list, like I was surprised not to see The Witch Roads and The Nameless Land duology by Kate Elliott, which I thought was excellent.

rolanni

What went before Thursday: So, I bought a stability ball today -- also known as a Giant Yoga Ball -- on suggestion of PT, and by doing so I learned several things.

Thing One. I had to go to Wal*Mart to obtain this item. Now, I haven't been in a Wal*Mart for at least 8 years, and at that time, I was in the Augusta Marketplace store and it was filthy and ill-kept, misfiled, and nerve-wracking to be in -- you know, like all the stores are now. The Waterville store, today, was -- spacious and well-lit, the shelves were stocked appropriately, signage (with a notable exception, which I will share) plentiful and easy to see. The gentleman in the red vest and ID tags who I stopped to ask where I should look for a Giant Yoga Ball told me that I would be going to the back of the store, to the Sports section, and then he used his phone to tell me that Giant Yoga Balls could be found in Aisle I-15.

Thing Two. Being as I had to walk to the furthest corner of the store to find Sports, I did have plentiful opportunity to look about me, and discover those things reported in Thing One. When I got to Sports, however, I found I-14 and I-17, but not Aisle I-15, which would be my luck. I asked a young lady who was stocking shelves, and whose face immediately said she didn't want to have anything to do with me why there was no Aisle I-15, and the young man who was her partner said, "Oh, no, I'll show you," which he did (I-15 is, in the Waterville Wal*Mart, where they file the bicycles), and when I said, "There are no Giant Yoga Balls here," led me to the exact shelf, which is where I learned Thing Three, which is!

You have to inflate the Giant Yoga Ball when you get it home. It comes with a cheap, plastic, manual air squeeze, and it will, conservatively, take me three days to inflate this thing. However! I have the ball in house, and have started on the inflation project, and I'm calling that progress.

I am now needing to get to my backlogged email.

Tomorrow Sarah comes in the morning to do the cleaning, and I believe I will be blocking out the rest of the day, which will give me 4.5 days to concentrate on reading/writing until I'm next needed elsewhere. I may, in fact, make a weekend of it, and order in, so I can keep focused on the WIP, with short breaks to blow up the stability ball.

So! I have what passes for A Plan. I note that this Plan may mean that I will be not much around the Internets. It's OK; I'll be working.
#
Friday. Cold and intermittently sunny. Sarah changed her hours to Saturday.

Woke up at 5:30, got up at 6, sat with the Happy Lite, ate breakfast and was reading the WIP before 8. Read 200 pages, did a couple loads of laundry, broke for lunch -- chicken Alfredo from ... I have no idea, actually. Pasta Americana? It was good and I have leftovers, which is also good.

The story is not nearly as terrible as I had feared. In fact, it's pretty good. So that's a relief. I have 68 days until I have to hand it in, and even though I have to Really End It, excise those 9,000 words, and probably write ... two? more fill-out scenes, I should be able to make that deadline.

Beta Readers! If you are still reading, do not despair! My Method is to do my read, then read your comments, once I have the story in my head in its present shape. You are, in a word, Still Relevant -- very much so! -- and I look forward to your notes with anticipation.

The stability ball has been inflated, and the cats are of the opinion that nobody needs a ball that big.

Dead River, after assuring me yesterday that my delivery was scheduled for today -- has not yet delivered. I'm in no danger, but I would very much like to know why it's suddenly become difficult to deliver oil to this address.

I still need to finish my Remarks and choose something(s) to read for my Event on the 21st.

The missing 1099-MISC arrived today, which would be my luck, because I wrote to the issuing party regarding its whereabouts yesterday. I now have to block out the better part of a day to enter everything into the accountant's portal, because the thing is purposefully designed to force you to fill it in All At Once. In former years, when I was working from paper, I would have been filling the forms in as columns were added, and paperwork arrived, and the manifesting of the last 1099 would mean that I filled in one final line, reviewed, and took the whole packet down to Oakland on Monday morning.

Stoopid portal.

What else? The now-called Business Office, formerly Sharon's Office, looks like a bomb hit it again. I used to write and do business in here, and . . . I can't figure out how I did -- oh, no, I do know. By this time in the Proceedings, the manuscript would have taken over the living room, and Steve would be reading it while I did the taxes, and I would have been able to keep up better with the day-to-day paperwork because Steve would have picked up the laundry and the cooking and the dishwashing, because he would rather do those things than the taxes.

deep breath

Nope. Still Not Preferring this timeline.

Last night, I collapsed into bed earlyish and asked the Boox to read Cuckoo's Egg to me. Now, I have read Cuckoo's Egg manyManyMANY times. It is, in fact, one of my favorite books. I know this story. But listening to it is a Whole Nother Experience. I have not had this particular sensation of . . . newness . . . with the other books -- all old favorites, because I'm still learning -- I've listened to, so that's interesting.

And that I think catches us up. I'm going to take some time to excavate my desk.

Ah. Today's blog post title brought to you by Rocky and Bullwinkle.

swan_tower

There's a pop-culture tendency to point at structures like Hadrian's Wall or the Great Wall of China and laugh because "they didn't keep invaders out." But that betrays a very limited understanding of what a wall is for.

Without a wall, anybody can wander through anywhere they like -- terrain permitting, which is why people like to put borders in places where nature itself forms a useful barrier. (Much cheaper that way.) When you build a wall, though, easy passage can only be effected in a limited number of places: specifically, where there are gates. Legitimate traffic will go through those restricted channels, which means that at a minimum, your wall gives you the chance to monitor that traffic. If you want to ask their business, record information, collect taxes, or turn somebody away, a wall makes those tasks much simpler.

Can people get over the wall in non-gate locations? Of course: outside of fantasy, basically no wall is completely unclimbable. But every bit of difficulty you put in an intruder's way is going to limit how easily and, more important, how usefully they can get across. Even a mere palisade of sharpened stakes, like that used to defend the Roman border in Upper Germania, is beneficial in that regard. Sure, somebody can get over it. But can a hundred? A thousand? Without being noticed? Even if they can, their horses sure as hell can't, or their supply train. If they want to bring an effective invasion force through, that small group has to either bring the wall down, or (more likely) hit a gate fort from behind, through a surprise attack or treachery. Then, with the gate in their control, they can actually start the invasion proper.

Defense, however, isn't just about barriers; it's also about surveillance. A wall and its forts make a useful base from which to send out reconnaissance patrols, which might either return word of an approaching army or not return at all -- and that's a warning in its own right. If the defenders are competent, they'll also keep a swath of ground outside the wall clear of trees, so that anybody approaching will be spotted before they reach the wall itself. Once there, ideally no point anywhere along the line will be out of view of a watchtower, even if you have to change their spacing or the path of the wall to arrange that. The result is that even the aforementioned single guy or small force can't go unnoticed, unless they go without torches on a cloudy or moonless night -- which, of course, makes it that much harder to effect a crossing. Once the defenders see anything, they light signal fires or otherwise send an alert, and the larger body of soldiers at a gate fort knows to prepare for trouble.

Nor does it end there! In addition to the watchtowers and forts, a wall frequently has nearby support, in the form of one or more larger settlements with their own garrisons. This place can have support services for the army (you don't want a ton of civilians at your wall), and soldiers can rotate in and out -- wall duty being kind of famously an unpleasant assignment. When something goes down at the border, word also gets sent to the nearby army, which can either ride out in support or batten down the hatches in preparation for an impending attack. This can ripple out as far as it needs to, from that settlement to deeper within the territory, and all the way back to the capital or wherever the ruler happens to be.

In other words, a wall is a larger-scale version of the security principles we talked about in Year Three. To begin with, it serves as a deterrent: attacking someplace guarded by a wall is harder than attacking someplace without, which either diverts the enemy to an easier target or discourages the less well-organized foe. If they attempt something anyway, the wall gives you an opportunity to spot it coming, and to warn others that they're in danger. And finally, it provides a foothold for your response, whether that be killing, capturing, or driving off whoever threatens the wall and everything it protects.

So why don't they always work?

Most failures can be chalked up to an insufficiency of money, of loyalty, or of both. If a state can't or won't pay to properly maintain its wall and associated defenses, then crumbling sections or encroaching forest will make it easier for people to get across unseen. If it can't or won't pay to properly equip, train, and compensate its soldiers, then they'll slack off in their vigilance or be useless when trouble arrives. And poorly paid soldiers -- especially poorly paid commanders -- are more susceptible to bribery. Why bother sneaking a bunch of guys over the wall in pitch-black night and then assaulting a fort when you could just get somebody inside to open the gate for you?

Most of the time, the security failures will be small ones. Somebody takes an unauthorized nap and it's fine, because nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nobody's trying to slip across at that exact moment. Guys at a watchtower or two get bribed to look away from, not an invading army, but some smugglers bringing contraband over the border. Maybe twenty guys manage to raid a border village -- and then possibly stay on that side of the wall, marauding through the countryside, because everything they steal makes it that much harder to get back home (assuming they even want to go).

But the big failures are dramatic. Somebody turns coat against their country, maybe for greed, maybe for ideology, but the result is pretty much the same. It may sound like a good idea to get a troublesome general out of your hair by sending him as far from the capital as he can get, but you do risk him deciding he's got better friends on the other side of the wall. If he's competent and ruthless enough, he can keep that warning system from transmitting an alert until his loyalists and new allies are deep into your territory, where there are no more walls to help keep them out.

No, walls don't always work. But when you really need to defend a border, having one is worth the expense. Just make sure you don't stop paying the bills.

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(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ZidYV5)

rolanni

OK, let's see...

Thursday. Sunny and cold. Feeling much more the thing than yesterday, which -- just let's say that it was a day when you drink peppermint tea and honey because your stomach hurts and that turns out to be a bad idea.

Got in an early four hours with the WIP this morning, and have verified that I'll be removing about 9,000 words. This is not a surprise; I kinda sorta knew I was going to hafta do it, unless I Thought of Something. Which I haven't, so -- into the Pull File they go, and maybe they'll be useful later.

I have a doctor's appointment at 2:30, and need to verify where I'm going. Also, I have emails that I need to answer, and! I need to tell Draft2Digital that, yes, I do want Pinbeam Books to be listed with Bookshop.

Still waiting on that one outstanding 1099-MISC.

I see that the judge overseeing the Anthropic Settlement has extended various deadlines for opting in, out, and sideways, which will likely put back the expected payout schedule, originally projected to begin in August. Granted, I never expected to see any money from this "settlement," but the whole thing's so infuriating that even reading the subject line kicks up the blood pressure.

And FedEx has just arrived to deliver a letter, so it looks like the range for hitting my house really is between 11:15 and noon. Which is actually useful information.

Trying to figure out if I want to try to see John Mellencamp's off-Broadway fine-tuning of his play at Ogunquit in October. I expect if I want to do that, I'll have to reserve a room at Ogunquit realsoonnow. Must lookout prices.

For now, I need to do my duty to the cats, and then heat up the soup I didn't eat yesterday, ref stomachache, and -- oh, yeah, find where the heck I'm supposed to be at 2:30.

How's everybody doing today?

stevenpiziks

Aunt Lynne died yesterday.

Technically, she hasn't been my aunt since I was in middle school, when she and my uncle (by blood) got divorced, but my family has a habit of keeping the exes around.

She was my mother's best friend. Her son (my cousin) Dave was my best friend while I was growing up, and his brother Mark was my brother Paul's best friend. As a result, we all spent a lot of time at each other's houses. This started when I was a baby, actually, and I still have hazy memories of Aunt Lynne's first house in Saginaw.

Aunt Lynne was funny, earthy, and outrageous. She was the relative who always makes you feel comfortable just by being who she was. Her house was cool! She had a microwave and an air conditioner! (This was in the 70s, when such things were rare.) She was a second mother to me, really. I associate her with laughter around the table, outdoor family parties, and the secret recipe for baked beans. She was the cool aunt who would talk about adult topics with pre-teenagers as if we were all grownups. She was there when I came out to my family, and she gave me a big hug and said, "There! Now that wasn't so hard, was it?"

Toward the end, her mind faded and she lost track of who she was. The rest of us will have to remember for her. And we gladly will.

rolanni

Those who are interested in the Liaden Read-Along, the summing up of Conflict of Honors may be read here

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

stevenpiziks

This retirement thing is throwing off my sense of time. It's a strange way to live.

I've always been a busy person. When I was in college, I joined clubs and made a lot of friends to hang out with. I also worked. At one point, I had three jobs at the same time. When I started teaching, my new job kept me busy in the extreme. Then I started coaching. And then Aran was born. And then Sasha and Maksim came to us. And then I became a single dad.

Into all this, throw writing.

When I started writing professionally, I took to heart the advice of an editor I knew who said new writers should write every day, and I did. Rigorously. It meant, though, that I had to give up stuff. I couldn't watch much TV, and I had to be careful about my social schedule. After a year, daily writing became a habit. Go me! But giving stuff up became a habit, too. I watched TV only when I was grading papers or running on the treadmill. I only read audio books, and then only while I was driving. I was careful to keep a trim social schedule--no more than one event per week, and it couldn't last more than half a day, except at holidays.

Irregular events became an imposition. Medical and dental appointments were a source of stress because they ate up so much of a day. Ditto for after-school stuff. And for socializing.*

Anytime I had the chance to do something else social--go to a movie, visit friends, go to a party--I checked it carefully against my mental calendar to see if I could shoehorn it in. I double-counted socializing with writing for years once I joined a bi-weekly writers group. It was both social time and writing time. Genius! When I started dating again after my divorce, I literally scheduled the time into my weekly calendar. When I met Darwin, I had to work him into my calendar.

Irregular events generated a lot stress. I couldn't cut out time out of my job for them, or out of family needs, or out of anything but writing time. But I hated and feared cutting writing time because I was afraid that not writing for one day would lead to two days, and then a week, and then a month, and I wouldn't be able to start up again.

This did happen once. I was under contract for THE HAVOC MACHINE (which, by coincidence, is now available as an audio book). It was due on March 1. The September before this, my life exploded in difficult and unusual directions. Every moment I was awake, I was either at work or dealing with a home situation. And I do mean every moment. I remember one day I was sitting at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription and I realized that these ten minutes were the extent of my "me" time for the last month. I certainly wasn't working on THE HAVOC MACHINE. I had no time, and even when I did have the time, I had no spoons. One day without writing turned into a week, which turned into a month, which turned into two. By November, I'd written only one chapter.

I called my editor and for the first time in my career, asked for an extension. My editor told me the book was already listed in the catalogs, and it would be REALLLY difficult to deal with if it was late. I slowly hung up the phone, turned to my computer, and started writing. I pounded through THE HAVOC MACHINE. I stayed up late, I got up early. No one but the boys saw me outside of work. On March 1, I emailed the finished manuscript to my editor. It burned me out so badly that I couldn't even write blog entries for three months.

Things did get better. The boys grew up and got places of their own, reducing my parenting time by 90%. And on June 13, 2025, I walked out of Walled Lake Northern High School for the final time.

Overnight, my schedule evaporated. It was completely empty. I had no job, no commute, no real parenting to do. I wasn't even under deadline.

No, I didn't do the "what will I do with myself?" thing. I love being retired and having an empty schedule. If I want to spend the whole damn day playing a Batman video game, I can. And sometimes I do. It's frigging awesome, and I highly recommend it.

But ...

I'm having trouble adjusting to HAVING all this time. Whenever something comes up that requires some kind of time commitment, I get stressed. Will I have enough time for this? What will I have to give up? How can--

And then I remember IT DOESN'T MATTER. If I want to spend a couple hours plus driving time having lunch with a friend (as I did today), I can. If one of my sons needs support at the doctor, I don't have to say, "Try to make the appointment after 3:30 so I can get there after work, and not on a Monday." I just say, "When is the appointment?" If I need to do some unexpected grocery shopping, it's no big deal.

Wow.

Recently, my mother had some medical stuff going on that required my sister and me to shuttle multiple times back and forth to her house. She lives about two and half hours from me, and over three hours from my sister's, so it's a hike and a half. The entire incident took up the better part of two weeks. (Everything's good now, by the way.) When the problem passed, I realized I was bracing myself to go back to work frazzled and stressed because I'd had little down time.

Nope! No more job. I spent the next couple of days doing little and enjoying it.

I took half a day to clean and reorganize our big closet, and didn't have to feel like I was eating away at "me" time. I drive out to visit my cousins every month on a Sunday afternoon, and I don't get back until after 11:00. So what? I don't have to get up at 5:30 anymore.

But I still have to remind myself of this. The groove hasn't filled in yet.

*Time with my sons didn't count as socializing, by the way. It was family time, which was its own animal.

rolanni

Tuesday. Sunny and cold. How cold you ask? Five-Fahrenheit-feels-like-minus-five-Fahrenheit.

Trash and recycling are at the curb, boxes of books are in the back of the Subaru, I'm sitting in the comfy chair in my office getting a dose of sunlight, and Firefly is marching around on my lap slapping my face with her tail.

No, wait, now she's laying on her side making biscuits, no -- now she's tucked up under my chin and gazing soulfully into my face. She's purring really loudly. So I guess that's my good morning.

Last night, I watched the first episode of Riot Women and I'm having a good time with it. For values of a good time. They are, after all, talking about a subject that interests me greatly as an old woman, which is the sudden facility to become invisible once you're past a certain age. This is especially interesting to me because I passed most of my early life as an invisible person, when I wasn't being told I was lazy and stupid.

Firefly, for those keeping score, is now sprawled across my lap, smiling up at me, purring, and continuing to make biscuits with one paw. I would say that this is a spoiled cat.

In a few minutes I'll be getting up to get breakfast, which will be oatmeal, chocolate chips, and almond butter and then I'll get on the road to get my haircut and to deliver books.

What's on your schedule today?

rolanni

6 Getting Rid of Bradley, Jennifer Crusie (audio first time)
5 *Carpe Diem ((Liaden Universe® #3), Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
4 *Conflict of Honors (Liaden Universe® #2), Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
3 *Agent of Change (Liaden Universe® #1), Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
2 A Gentleman in Possession of Secrets (Lord Julian #10), Grace Burrowes (e)
1 Spilling the Tea in Gretna Green, Linzi Day (e)

________
*I'm doing a straight-through series read in publication order

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I gotta get another hat. . .

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