Fellow authors, check out Eva Langston's terrific new podcast, "The Long Road to Publishing," in which she interviews longtime novelists about their careers.

I highly recommend the debut interview with the novelist Courtney Maum, and the next one with Julia Bartz:
shows.acast.com/.../epis.../...

SecDef is NOT a position where it's okay to be learning basic security practices on the job.

Taking care of Mom has become like getting too near a black hole: the equations blow up, causality breaks down, time and space switch roles, nothing makes sense.

open.substack.com/pub/michaelc...

On Jan. 5th, 2020, Daniel Rodriguez texted his friends, "There will be blood." On Jan 6th, at the Capitol, he shocked a cop repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury found him guilty. Sentenced to 12 years. Trump just let Rodriguez go free. (Hat tip: @davidlitt)

Let's just revisit the truth of January 6th, shall we?

This was not a peaceful political protest. This was a planned, coordinated, violent onslaught by Republican thugs.

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards testified afterward, "I was slipping in people's blood." (1/3)

PSA for my author friends.

Check out CreatedByHumans.ai, a project to get AI companies to pay authors when LLMs ingest their books as training data.

They've partnered with the Authors Guild, which gives them a ton of credibility in my eyes. The AG exists to protect the rights of writers.

In lieu of flowers, send pizzas to his funeral. #pizzagate

On a scale of 1 to 10, how corrupt does this sound?

"Alito spoke with Trump not long before Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to delay his sentencing following his conviction in New York in a case arising from hush money payments."

🚨🚨🚨🚨HOMEWORK🚨🚨🚨🚨
I think the Jack Smith draft report is finished. Write to Merrick Garland and ask him to release the Jack Smith report. You can do it here. Select “Messages to the Attorney General” from the drop down menu www.justice.gov/doj/webform/...

I’m really looking forward to the big snowstorm in D.C. Supposed to be 6-12 inches. I love the quiet and the white, and the feeling of staying in while the world takes a pause.

Hi there RFK. I was born 5 years before the rubella vaccine in 1969. Cost: $10 per dose in 2024 dollars.

Cost of 2 cochlear implants: $100,000.

Plus 50 years of hearing aids + batteries, cochlear implant spare parts, and audiologist visits.

Not getting a vaccine can be pretty damn expensive.

Looking to interview creative writers--poets, novelists, etc.--who use ChatGPT or other LLMs to aid their creative process. Not for text production (they're terrible at that) but for brainstorming, idea generation, and other high-level uses. Hit me up.

But gradually, through persistence and grit, everyone, including the aliens, learns to understand each other. It's an optimistic story of communication against all odds.

Now that it’s done, I’m about to look for a fiction agent. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck! (6/end)

The whole plot turns on misunderstandings. The team misunderstands the alien language in ways that nearly kill them. The team leader falls in love with the linguist--and they misunderstand each other too. (5/x)

As a deaf person I'm keenly interested in communication and (just as importantly) failures of communication. Misunderstandings are a big part of the plot. I wanted to represent the protagonist's experience as a cochlear implant user realistically on the page--including his misunderstandings. (4/x)

The worldbuilding was tough: how does an intelligent social insect colony pick up a hammer?

I've been a nonfiction writer all my life, so I also had to tackle an even tougher challenge: how to build a plot and write plausible characters—including a sapient social insect colony. (3/x)

The team consists of an entomologist, a linguist, a physicist, and a neuroscientist. Eventually the neuroscientist becomes convinced that humanity will never accept coexistence with sapient insect colonies. He begins sabotaging the team’s work. (2/x)

At last, the finished manuscript of my novel!

It’s about a deaf grad student in entomology who asks how to stop a rogue ant colony that is ravaging Earth. The answer is, “Ask it to stop.”

He recruits 3 other grad students and they travel to a high-gravity planet to learn an alien language. (1/x)

Why are all you people following me? I haven’t even posted anything yet.