Sooooo, every year I do my this happened in the past year wrap-up with a I think these things are happening in the future year prophecy, and I’m going ahead and doing that here and now again, with 2025 withering on the vine in the shadow of a newly-budding 2026 —
But first I want to acknowledge, ha ha, what a fucking year, huh? What a real boner-killer of a 365, man. Dang. Looking back feels like I’m peering through a lens smeared with a slathering of chicken grease and Chapstick — a gooey, hazy view that does not incline me to clean it or even squint, but rather, just to throw it away and move on. I just think it’s been a hard year for everyone. Politically, personally, financially, generally — in every direction, a new disaster big and small. Toilet fires and starving tigers and cracking dams and loose hepatitis monkeys. And I think the BIG PROBLEMS are connected to the SMALL PROBLEMS — like, sure, there’s all this big existential threats like climate change and AI and whatever clownshoe nightmare is going on in the White House right now, but all those things directly pipeline toward higher costs and less stability across the board. Never mind the fact of how many people — immigrants, trans folks, anybody who isn’t white and male — are on the run, against the ropes, on the chopping block. So the political becomes (really: always has been) the very, very personal.
I honestly even struggle to encapsulate the year behind. My greatest inclination seems to be not to acknowledge that it existed and to bolt forward, head down, into the new year. But there’s probably some value in one final nesting sit on these time eggs before they hatch, at least in terms of… you know, me. As for what’s going on in this country and the world, honestly, I suspect you’re caught up, and don’t need me to commit 150,000 words to an Annual Retelling of The Atrocities.
So — selfishly, me. Me, me, me. What the hell happened his year? I don’t even know. Who am I? Who are you? How did we get here? Where is my cat, who is very real and not a hallucination and definitely named Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath?
I wrote a book!
Or, rather, I published a book.
Or, rather, I wrote and published a book — er, two different books.
Or, wait, I published one book, published one short story, wrote and edited one book, and edited a completely separate book.
So, what about all that, then?
The book I published:
The Staircase in the Woods. You probably know about it! I was not quiet about its existence. I can’t be mad about it — the book came out in April in hardcover, and honestly it’s continued to sell well since. So well, in fact, that it has surpassed the total sales of Wayward and Black River Orchard (er, not combined), and both of those are out in paperback now, and have been for years. I think, if I’m evaluating the book at a distance, it’s certainly a book that some people really love and some people really don’t, and honestly, that works for me — I am generally of a mind that interesting books inspire polarizing reactions, so hopefully this book counts as, well, interesting. I certainly cared very deeply about it and it’s kind of a spiritual sequel to The Book of Accidents in that they’re both books that are personal to me, that both attempt to grapple with big squirrely feelings (one about family, one about friends), that each tackle the “haunted house” idea at a sort of oblique angle. I’m glad it’s connected with people. It’s a weird book! I know it. I wrote it to be about some unlikable characters with the goal of making you give a shit about them anyway, and also explaining their unlikable natures through the superpower of Empathy. I dunno! It’s out there. I hope people continue to check it out and talk about it and post reviews. I hope it stands the test of time, but, of course, only time will tell because that’s how this shit works.
The story that came out was “Grand Junction” in the (gasp) Stephen King The Stand anthology, The End of the World as We Know It, which, holy fuck, was just such an honor to be a part of. The story is very much one I mentally dedicate to my own father, who was a hunter, who loved Colorado, and I wanted to write a tale that might speak to some of who he was and what he liked — while, y’know, also writing about the circular nature of good and evil in a world dominated and decimated by Captain Trips, the nightmare superflu. I loved writing it and cannot thank Keene and Golden enough for giving me a shot. And, ultimate thanks to the King hisownself.
The book I wrote and edited?
Well, that’s The Calamities, my demony-horrory-fantasyey book about a bunch of delightfully messy selfish fuck-hungry soul-eating monsters. I wrote the first draft, really wasn’t sure it was any good at all, got an amazing edit letter from my stellar editor Tricia Narwani that basically clarified for me why I felt the way I did about it, and helped me crystallize how to make the thing I wrote be the best version of itself — just turned that in before Christmas and am so, soooo much happier with the book as it stands. I’ll talk a little more about it in the new year — but it was really fun to write and has ties to a lot of my other books. (And if you were looking for some Naberius, well. He’s in here. Alongside a certain orange cat.) Comes out August 18th. Cover reveal soon, but for now…
Finally, I also edited my next middle grade, which I thiiiiiink is now called The Boy Who Dreamed Up Doors, and I’ve gone another edit to do on that in the new year, and then I think it maybe comes out by year’s end? Don’t quote me on that. It’s a weird sort of metatextual riff on portal fantasies! Also a lot of fun to write. Also mayyyybe a secret (and somewhat accidental) screed against AI.
Got to do a book tour for Staircase. Got to sit with an alarmingly cool roster of authors. In that way, my life is quite good and quite lucky.
On a non-writing level, yeah, it’s been a fine year, if a bit blurry? Kiddo graduated from one school and is now in high school holy fuck. Went overseas to Scandinavia — Copenhagen to Oslo to Bergen to Stockholm, then back to Copenhagen. (Each are some of the greatest places I’ve been to. If, erm, very expensive.) I’m healthy enough, I suppose, though especially given the holidays, I could drop a few stone, or however they’d put it in the UK. Maybe I’ll get on one of them fancy GLP drugs and get weirdly skinny! Probably not, but one never knows what the future holds. I read a buncha good books and saw movies and listened to music but I covered that already.
(I note here if you wanna see photos from my trip to Scandinavia, here they be. And there are some below, too.)
So, what’s up then with 2026?
As noted, The Calamities comes out.
Probably, too, The Boy Who Dreamed Up Doors.
(Cover reveals for both coming soon, I suspect.)
Then the sequel to The Calamities mayyyy be not too far on the heels of the first — book two in the duology is Chaos Reigns.
I’ve got a short story to write and turn in for Secret Anthology Thing.
Paperback for The Staircase in the Woods comes out March 3rd. I’m sure I’ll sign and personalize copies at Doylestown to have sent out with some stickers and such to go along with it — and I’m chatting with Thrillerdelphia to do an event there too around launch, which will be a hoot if it works out.
Gonna head to Ireland and Scotland over the summer, in June. Just for funsies, so far — though if there’s opportunity to do a book event, I’ll take it.
Certainly a book tour, probably in August.
My healthcare premiums are going up up up so haha hopefully people will buy my books haha ha haahaaaaa aaahhhhhh.
Anyway. I think that’s about that. I think 2026 will be fun creatively, and probably terrifying in a number of other directions, so we’ll just batten the fucking hatches and power on through the current storm, yeah? Yeah.
I’ll wrap up here with my favorite photos of the year — I’ve got a lot, but I’ll pick a batch and hope you enjoy ’em. I’ll be back before the year topples over with a Writer Resolution for 2026, if that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for.
The tl;dr before you get into this post is this: the SFWA came out, said that some AI usage was okay enough in books for the authors of those books to not to be disqualified from winning a Nebula award, people got (correctly) pissed, the SFWA swiftly threw that fish back into the water and was like, “Just kidding, AI is bad,” and then launched this survey to get community input on AI usage in writing and publishing.
As a result, a few folks have kinda popped up their heads to be like, “But is all AI bad?” and some of this is reasonable and necessary discussion, because sure, what if your word processor accidentally injects some kind of AI process into the work, or what if your publisher against your wishes uses AI in, say, the marketing of the book? What does that mean for you? Do you have recourse? Are you still able to win awards? I guess it would suck to be shut out of awards for that — though, at the same time, awards aren’t even the frosting on top of the cake but the sprinkles on top of the frosting? Whatever.
Of course, in typical fashion, usually these sort of reasonable questions are a Trojan horse to allow a lot of other exceptions in through the city gates. To continue to mix metaphors, if you give a mouse an AI cookie, well, he’s gonna want the AI milk, the AI straw, until eventually you’ve given him an AI nuclear bomb where he kills all the human beings and can feast on our smoldering corpses at his rodenty leisure.
One of the people who popped up was Erin Underwood, who wrote an open letter about all this. It is a letter that purports to be reasonable, common sense, but in my mind is a goalpost-shifting mouse-cookie-giving very hungry caterpillar of a post, where it just wants more and more — and so, it summons in me the urge to point out a number of its flaws. And this, on my part, is probably already a sucker move, because Underwood more or less suggests that AI has written her open letter, at least in part:
“For transparency, I used speech-to-text to capture my words and generative AI to clean up grammar and structure. I needed an efficient way to get my thoughts down quickly so I could move into the work of manually editing and refining this text. I went through it multiple times, revising language, examples, and arguments until the final version fully matched my vision. This was done intentionally to demonstrate how AI can function as a communication tool for business purposes. This letter isn’t a work of art or artistic creation.”
So already, we’re off on a broken foot. I’ve no idea how much of a human letter I’m responding to. (And for full transparency on my part — all of this post is 100% human-written, human-edited, human-derived. I am not Soylent Greening this shit. This is all me, flaws and all.)
Before I get into her bullet points, up front she is essentially saying that we can’t be hostile to the conversation, to these difficult questions, and that:
At the same time, refusing to adapt in ways that protect our own communities would create new harm. Writers, artists, musicians, publishers, and the industries that support them must remain viable and competitive in a modern world that is becoming deeply dependent on AI tools and AI-driven infrastructure. If we are going to protect the future of creative work, we need award rules that are practical and that also allow us to use ordinary business tools.
My first thought here is: yeah, no, that’s not really true.
There’s little evidence at hand, first and foremost, that AI is a value-add to any of this. Writing, making music, publishing, whatever. Industries not using them are perfectly viable. Writers not using AI remain perfectly viable. (I’d argue: more than viable! Actually, you’re better not using it! AI is routinely shown to decrease efficiency and require more human intervention, often just at cut cost.) The trick to this paragraph is it is a false appeal to reason: a quietly fear-based approach that you don’t want to (gasp) be left behind because you aren’t using the reasonable business tools. Except, again, nothing about this is reasonable. AI is a random middle-man created by shitty techlords, forced into systems so that they get paid and that the Magic Number Lines go up instead of flatten or descend.
We are only as “dependent” on AI tools and infrastructure as we choose to be — this isn’t an automatic. But therein lies one of the tricksy bits about this letter, like so many of the AI boosters: it presupposes an automagic AI future, a destiny for AI in and above us. It assumes it’s already here to stay, already embedded in us like a tick, so we might as well make friends with the parasite and use its Lyme Disease Tools and its Rocky Mountain Spotted Infrastructure. Why cure it? It’s already in us! No reason to ask who will rid us of this meddlesome infection!
Having a yes/no switch that governs the use of AI and generative AI isn’t viable because this technology is now embedded throughout the core infrastructure that supports businesses today. However, the fundamentally human act of creation must remain in human hands. At the same time, there are AI use cases that touch creative work directly and indirectly, often without the creator’s knowledge or consent. Those realities must be acknowledged. Creators should not be penalized for incidental, accidental, or third-party use of AI in business processes surrounding their original work.
This is probably one of the only reasonable bits in the letter. Yes, there are tough realities of gen-AI intrusion, in part because so many tech services are foisting it upon us — and we aren’t always aware of how deeply that splinter is stuck.
But, again, give a mouse a cookie…
The creative arts community is experiencing a deep sense of disruption and vulnerability in response to the rapid rise of generative AI. These concerns are legitimate and, for many, unsettling. When tech companies began developing large language models, original creative works were used without permission to train the very systems that are now threatening creators’ livelihoods, authorship, and ownership. That breach of trust is real and unresolved. It also can’t be undone, which means creatives and the industries that support them must think strategically about how this technology shapes both risk and opportunity going forward while also continuing to fight for fair compensation for their work (which, again, was used without permission).
Ahh. Starts reasonable, but ends with: “It also can’t be undone.” Look, sorry, the demon is out! We can’t contain the demon, so now we just gotta figure out how to live with the demon — sure, we can feed it, but we also have to make sure it isn’t eating us! Otherwise, it’s fine!
Except, it’s not fine. It did steal from us, and that’s not just past-tense shit. It is now and will continue to do so.
AI is not inevitable.
Say it again:
AI is not inevitable.
AI IS NOT INEVITABLE.
The only strategy here is the sum total pushback against its uncanny horrors and its non-consensual intrusion into every corner of our world — it steals our content, guzzles our water, increases our power bills, is crammed into services we didn’t ask for it to be crammed into while also charging us more money for the “privelege.” There is no strategy here except to find the fields where the AI grows and metaphorically set them aflame.
And shame and anger against corporate overreach is a powerful fire.
The evolution of AI use cases is fundamentally reshaping how modern business and industry operate, from book publishers to sales and marketing firms, retailers, and fan communities. AI isn’t niche any longer. It’s everywhere, including in our everyday digital tools and the infrastructure that makes business operate effectively. It shapes marketing and advertising, powers internet browsers and discovery systems, feeds social media platforms, and supports strategic planning, workflow design, internal communications, and day-to-day operations.
Worth seeing the conflation here — generative AI and LLMs are not the same AI that necessarily powers every other thing.
Publishers can’t realistically avoid using these tools if they intend to remain competitive and continue selling books, art, and music created by their authors and artists. At the same time, these tools are enabling smaller and independent publishers to compete more effectively with large companies such as Tor, Penguin Random House, and Gollancz by improving efficiency, reach, and sustainability.
Publishers can and must avoid using generative AI and LLM AI. Publishers remain competitive by hiring and training real people to do real people jobs that support real people authors and real people readers. AI remains a broken foot. Bad for the environment, bad for writers, and also, generally doesn’t work well — it certainly doesn’t work as well, or as creatively, as actual humans! Remember, the AI is fed with the work of actual humans. Why do you think that is, exactly?
If you use it, it means you’re replacing people.
People who could’ve done the job better.
People who actually did the job, and now their work is pilfered and duped.
Most creators are not attempting to replace their own creative labor with AI. They are acting in good faith and want clear, ethical boundaries around authorship, originality, and creative ownership. The real challenge is that avoiding AI entirely is becoming increasingly impractical, even for those who are committed to producing fully human-authored work, as AI is now embedded in systems creators can’t control or realistically avoid.
Avoiding AI is easy. I do it all the time! Literally, all the time.
Let’s get into what Erin sees as use cases — though you’ll note throughout these use cases are theoretical and have zero examples of where they have been used successfully.
Voice-to-Text Dictation: Voice-to-text is one of the most common and accessible digital tools in use today, and most modern systems rely on generative AI to transcribe, normalize, and correct spoken language. Dictation is used for verbally jotting down ideas, sending text messages, and drafting emails.
I guess? To be fair, dictation has… been around for many many years and predates generative AI. AI has not been essential in this — which of course is the running theme of AI, far as I can see. “Did you want this thing you do to be better? No? Too bad, here’s AI! Also, P.S. now it’s actually sort of worse.”
Meeting Transcription: Meetings often happen over Zoom, Teams, or other video platforms that allow for meeting transcripts, which can also generate summaries and lists. Those transcripts can also be dropped into a generative AI system to pull out to do lists, ideas, and themes from the call.
Again, I guess, though meeting dictation also existed before AI — and you should also be very, very cautious about letting AI dictate important meetings, because remember that part where AI steals stuff? Yeah. That’s a thing. Also, remember when it turns out ChatGPT is recording all your conversations with it and people were able to access those chats? Riiiiiight. Maybe don’t do this.
Writing Tools and Applications: Microsoft Word, Gmail, and many other organizational tools have AI embedded in their code and use programs like Grammarly and CoPilot to help people proof, edit, and write. Often the very words you were going to write appear as suggested text if you don’t turn off these functions. It’s not just the author who is using these tools but also the editor, the assistants, and any number of other staff who work on the original file.
I mean, you can usually turn those off — and often it makes for a better writing experience because it’s not trying to auto-suggest boring or incorrect messages, but hey, okay, yeah, this exists. Worth noting though that “embedded in their code” is a dubious sentiment. Also, I was able to downgrade to the version of Word without AI. And I turn it off on my phone too wherever I find it. It’s insidious!
Now, for publishers —
AI for Screening and Triage: Some publishers are either considering or have already started using AI to some degree to manage incoming submissions and to move through the digital slush pile to weed out submissions that did not follow the guidelines or other rules … as well as identifying AI generated writing. This may also help them to look for submissions that meet a specific publishing need quickly and efficiently to elevate it for human editorial review.
Well, I hate that, and publishers should absolutely not be using AI to weed through submissions for a few reasons:
a) AI is often wrong, even at identifying AI, which is why it’s often false-flagging things that students wrote as “AI” (see, f’rex, people’s insistence that emdashes mean AI use, even though AI got the emdash use from people)
b) AI is biased, often invisibly, by those who created it, and you cannot see or adjust those biases meaningfully
c) It’s just gross? Letting a bad, environment-destroying machine do the human job of finding cool human stories to publish is gross, and fuck you if you do it
(edit)
And d) it feeds YOUR WORK into THE THIEVING MAGPIE OF AI, what the fuck, you’re just bloating the beast further, goddamnit
Initial Research and Accessibility Tool: AI can help authors parse complex scientific concepts, historical material, or technical subjects, translate sources from other languages, or gain an initial understanding of unfamiliar topics. When used as a starting point rather than a substitute for research, this can expand access to knowledge for authors without institutional resources.
If it does that it definitely can’t explain high-concept shit reliably.
Please.
Continuity and Reference Tools: For authors, publishers, and studios managing shared worlds or long-running series, private, domain-specific language models can be used as internal reference systems to track character details, timelines, world-building facts, and continuity. Using AI in this constrained, reference-oriented way supports consistency and accuracy without generating new creative content or replacing human authorship.
Okay, you know what, I’ll concede that there is some reasonableness here — I wouldn’t do it, because I am a person who likes to have his person-shaped hands all over his person-shaped creations. But! Sure, if someone has a local model AI that they train on just their own material, hey, go nuts. (Though if you use it beyond organization and instead use it to, say, create new ideas — well, you’ve again sold yourself up the river and done nothing good for your brain or for the audience who will one day read your work.)
Data Analytics, Market Research, and Strategy: Publishers may use AI to analyze large volumes of data to identify catalog gaps, assess risks, understand readership trends, optimize release timing, and inform strategic decisions. This directly impacts publishing choices for which original works they accept and which ones they reject.
Given biases and data-gorging AI, this seems fraught to me — but, again, maybe we’re talking AI in the non-generative sense, and if that’s examining raw data and doing something with that, hey, whatever. Though even here, I’ll note that the most successful model of writing and publishing remains the simplest one: write and publish the best things you can that speak to your heart and your soul and then work the marketing ropes as best as you can (with real money) to help the audience see this thing that you made exist.
Ultimately, I flinch pretty hard at the idea of letting Skynet decide what original work should exist and what should be rejected, and here’s why:
The best thing you ever read was an original idea. It was novel in the truest sense — novel like COVID was novel! Not novel like a novel is novel.
But AI can only examine the past.
It can only see the trends that happened, not the trends that go forward.
Think of AI like prequel material — it is forever bound by what has already come before it and can only build upon the ground that has already been laid. It understands things that exist, not things that don’t, and therefore, in a job based somewhat considerably on people’s imagination producing original material, it will shit the bed. Meaning, it will reject cool new things because it cannot understand deviation from the cool old things.
(To be fair, companies fall into this trap without AI, too! But AI codifies it and removes from the equation human instincts and interests.)
AI in Marketing, Promotion, and Discoverability: Even when a story itself is entirely human-written, publishers may use AI to generate cover copy, promotional blurbs, SEO optimization, CTR analysis, or marketing insights.
SEO, okay, whatever, but if you let AI fuck with my cover copy, I’ll kick someone in the dick. Or blurbs! What the shit? Is she suggesting AI write… my blurbs? The ones I provide because I thought a book was cool? At a certain point you just have to wonder what the end vision is, here — is it that you use AI to generate ideas and then the AI writes a book off those ideas and then edits it and then an AI publisher submits it to other AI so that the other AI can provide AI blurbs for it? Books by AI, for AI, marketed to AI by AI? Just this digital ouroborous eating its own tail, shitting in its own mouth? What a glorious future! Who needs people at all?
Audience Engagement and Community Management: Publishers and creators may use AI to manage newsletters, reader outreach, community moderation, and customer support across social and digital platforms. These tools shape audience relationships without affecting the creative work itself.
Listen I’m starting to get tired. I mostly just want to smear the word NO across the blog in some kind of bodily fluid, but I persevere —
God, just write your own newsletters, just reach out to readers like a person, moderate your community as you see fit, be a person dealing with people and if that’s too much, don’t do it. Okay? Okay.
Workflow Automation and Internal Operations: AI is increasingly used to automate scheduling, task management, internal documentation, production tracking, and coordination across editorial, design, and marketing teams. These operational uses support the publishing process without influencing creative authorship.
If this is non-LLM non-gen-AI shit, er, okay, but also, this stuff kinda happens organically as it is? This workflow is well-known and well-wrought. Every book is not a unicorn — there is a process and people are the stations along the chain.
Legal, Contractual, and Financial Processes: Agents and publishers increasingly use AI tools to review contracts, analyze royalty statements, or flag legal issues. These business uses are unrelated to the act of writing and should not affect award eligibility. However, it is worth noting that authors can also drop their contracts into a generative AI system to ask it questions about the contract related to their original work to ensure they understand their rights, what they might be missing, and what they should explore more fully with legal counsel.
Ha ha, what, holy fuck, do not let AI deal with legal, contractual, or financial shit. Jesus Fucking Christ, this is deeply irresponsible. It is not good at it. Lawyers show up to court with this AI shit and they get their asses handed to them. This is not an okay place for AI. This is a dangerous place for AI.
If anything disqualifies the “open letter,” it is this.
Just have an agent or a lawyer.
One that won’t use AI.
Rights Management and IP Protection: AI tools are being used to track copyright infringement, detect unauthorized distribution, manage licensing, and monitor derivative uses of creative works online. These systems help protect authors’ rights and income without contributing to creative content.
This sounds fine, until you realize that…
AI just makes stuff up.
All the time.
Not just my quantum cats, either. I have a search set up for my name and some other topics in Google and every day it yields results that are patently just not there — a headline and a subhead will offer text and description that simply aren’t present when I click through. The entire subject matter isn’t even right. It’s wholly fabricated. It gets worse! So. There was a kid who died in my area, recently? (Well, he was in his 20s, I think. I say kid because I am increasingly AN OLD.) And the web was full of auto-generated AI barf about it — just fake weird news about a poor dead kid who died.
AI is a plagiaristic lie machine. You really can’t rely on it to find licensing info, derivative works, and so forth.
Accessibility, Localization, and Format Adaptation: Publishers and platforms increasingly use AI to generate captions, transcripts, audiobooks, large-print formats, and translations for global or disabled audiences. These tools expand access to creative works without altering authorship or creative intent yet still involve generative AI touching the work after creation.
Another profoundly disqualifying bit. No! No. NO. Do not let AI translate or transcribe our books.
HUMANS ONLY.
I mean, what the fuck. This letter seems to try to lean toward “AI can help you in ways where it doesn’t do the creative work,” but audio books? Translations? It’s very much part of that work. And we want that done right, and by people.
(In part because of accountability! You know who’s accountable when a person fails? That person! You know who is accountable when AI fails? Ennnh! Nobody! Defrayed responsibility! Oops the poor widdle small guy machine made a boo-boo. Want something done right? People are great! We love people! People are why we do this thing! Stop kicking them out of the process!)
Production and Technical Preparation: AI is increasingly used in formatting, layout checks, quality assurance, audio cleanup, and technical preparation for print, e-book, and audio releases. These uses support distribution rather than authorship.
Something like audio cleanup would be, I imagine, not about gen-AI/LLM. But other stuff, yeah, no, people are good. Let the people do it. Thanks.
Generative and Agentic Internet Platforms: The internet itself is shifting from a search-based environment to a generative and agent-driven one. As generative search engines, AI agents, and platform-level AI models become embedded across the internet, users are operating inside ecosystems where AI mediates discovery, visibility, and engagement by default. This means that information gathered in these environments increasingly comes through generative AI systems.
AI
MADE
UP
CATS
I
DO
NOT
OWN
It told me I have cancer!
That I’m a Christian and also Jewish!
It makes up stuff all the time and we’re supposed to just… give everything over to these agentic dipshits? The amazing thing was, we had this very nice Internet — messy, sure, but made of people and all the stuff they said and that they made and that came out of their heads, and then we let robots scoop it all up and start remaking “new” versions endlessly and it’s been downhill since. Let’s not accelerate our descent, yeah? This is silly and bad and I hate it. And you can tell I’m petering out here because my logic is, admittedly, “ew I hate it,” but seriously, it sucks and you know it sucks and down deep in that space between your heart and your stomach it makes you feel icky as shit, like you ate some bad shrimp. AI is bad shrimp. Stop trying to convince us to eat more of the bad shrimp.
Disproportionate Impact on Small and Independent Presses: Small and indie publishers often rely on generative AI for marketing, planning, and analysis because they lack the staffing and budgets of large publishers. Blanket AI restrictions force these presses into an impossible choice of either avoiding modern tools that allow them to publish more work and sell more books or use them and disqualify all their authors from awards.
Small and indie presses provide the crucial value of being small and indie, and indie by the way is indicative of human-influence — right? You go to a small press, you want hands-on, you want people you know, a small flexible team, and not a giant corporation. Well, bad news: AI is giant corpo shit. It’s techlord billionaire shit. If a small press can’t exist without that, then maybe they should reconsider whether or not they should exist at all.
Operational Strain on Fan Organizations and Conventions: Fan organizations and conventions are overwhelmingly volunteer-run and chronically understaffed. These groups operate on extremely limited time and resources, often relying on a small number of overextended volunteers to handle writing, editing, scheduling, marketing, and email communications as part of basic business operations. AI tools can reduce the burden of these time-consuming tasks and help volunteers work more efficiently. Without such support, many conventions may be forced to scale back or shut down entirely due to burnout and lack of operational capacity. The loss of these community spaces would be a significant blow to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror community as a whole.
Uhh I think I’d rather go to a convention run by people, not deranged robots.
You want Fyre Fest? This is how you get Fyre Fest. You want a YA convention with a creepy ball pit? Yeah, this is that? Let AI do this and you’ll end up with 1000 empty tables and no bathrooms.
Again, the theme persists of: “I’m pretty sure conventions existed before AI, and were run pretty well, so what is the AI doing again?”
Anyway, I’ve gotta tap out here.
There’s more to the letter but ultimately it seems to rely on the false premise that creatives better not SNOOZE, lest they LOSE, and we either get involved in the conversation and control AI or it runs over us. Except it already ran over us and now we’re figuring out how to get back up and string caltrops across the road to blow the fucking tires on this thing before it tries to hit us again. Also, nobody’s inviting us to the table. Nobody’s asking for our input. All this does is obey in advance to a fascistic system — AI isn’t trying to make nice with writers, we’re not being asked to join the team. We’re just being told to get on board or get fucked.
And I don’t agree with that framing.
I know. I’m bullish on this. Belligerent. But I really do hate it. I hate AI, and I hate all the framing that it’s somehow essential — it’s like being told you have to use a garlic press in the kitchen, and it’s inevitable, so use it, use it for everything, use it for cutting bananas and chopping nuts and peeling potatoes and cleaning your oven and teaching your kids and it can do all those things so well (spoiler: no it cannot) but SHUT UP AND USE THE GARLIC PRESS BECAUSE WE INVESTED A TRILLIONTY DOLLARS IN IT and if we can’t convince you to subscribe to the garlic press for literally everything all the time — did we not mention it’s a subscription service? — then we’re fucked, uhh, I mean, you’re fucked for not using our miracle product.
Anyway.
I think AI is only inevitable when we believe the lie of its inevitability.
I think people actually hate it. I think they naturally resist it because we can smell the existential threat coming off it like the stench of the aforementioned bad shrimp.
I think we intuitively can detect how it was made by rich fucks who want to be richer fucks, and how we’re just chum in the bucket for their digital sharks.
And I think it sucks.
It fucks the planet. It fucks our information fidelity. It steals our shit, our resources, our time. It’s mostly just a ruse, a threat, a lever: they can say oh take a pay cut or we’re going to use the godlike AI to replace you, and then they replace you anyway, and invite you back at an even sharper cut so you can herd the AI slop barf into shape like you’re Richard Dreyfuss with the fucking mashed potatoes in Close Encounters.
As Ash from Army of Darkness says:
“It’s a trick. Get an axe.”
I’m tired and I emerged from HIBERNATION WEEK to write this and now I need a nap or maybe I just need to lick a couple batteries or something.
Anyway. That’s my open letter. Feel free to respond below, but if you’re a chode, I drop you into the spam oubliette.
A fun thing that sometimes happens is this: you eat a food, any kind of food, and then after eating that food, some manner of stomach bug — a bonafide gut goblin — besieges your gastrointestinal castle, and sooner than later, you’re bent over, howling paeans and prayers to the porcelain altar.
Now, you and I logically know that the last food you ate was almost certainly not the food that made you sick. Honestly, a lot of times we say oh I got food poisoning, but we have no way of even knowing that. You might have touched a doorknob that was previously touched by some poop-fingered barbarian who wipes with cheap paper and tends to poke his little digits through when he does his downstairs cleaning! You just don’t know. All you really know is, goblin particles somehow got in me, and now they really want to get out of me.
Thing is, logic really doesn’t have a lot to do with our, erm, gut reactions to stuff, does it? Logic tends to take a back seat to our mammalian inclinations.
And so, what happens, I find, is that sometimes the last thing you ate, in its transformation as the next thing you’re ejecting from your body, becomes tainted in your mind for some variable period of time. We’ve all experienced this, I assume, in some form. Ever been too drunk on something and then inevitably you have to HURRRRK that booze-sauce back up and even now, decades later, when you catch a whiff of that specific brand of devil’s drink and your entire body is like nope nope no uh-uh not today, Satan? When I was in my 20s I yarfed up some pepperoni pizza and I was put off pepperoni pizza for a good year — and that’s not nothing, because pepperoni pizza may very well be a perfect food. A couple years ago I ate a bunch of ketchup chips from Wegmans and, sure enough, got THE ICK that night annnnnd I’ll bet you fifty bucks I’ll never eat ketchup chips again. They didn’t make me sick! The pizza didn’t either. But your body is like, hey, I’m gonna be super suspicious of that food for a while, yeah?
Cut to Monday night, this week.
I had for my nightlytime snack a little apple puff pastry tart I’d made with leftover LucyGlo apples.
Then I went upstairs.
And then, in the night, the barf goblins found me.
Of course the predominant thing I blearghed up was —
FUCKING APPLE TART.
Apples! My food! My precious food!
Betrayal! Not by the apples, no, no, but by me, by my foul and detestable body, betraying me and my one true love, apples.
Thankfully, I don’t seem quite as put off my apples as I am by the cinnamon — that was the, ahh, predominant flavor coming back up. And, you know, if I may, I will say if you have a food that has to return, cinnamon isn’t the worst. It’s kind of festive! An autumnal purging! A potpourri of human ejecta!
Anyway, so I’m a little put off apple-related things for a while — particularly if cinnamon is involved.
That said, I still have eaten a bunch of apples, have catalogued those apples, and am still gonna be reviewing those apples here.
Which leads me to what is something of an ironic review, given the flavor profile of the apple I’m about to talk about…
My review of a D’Arcy Spice apple from Scott Farm (VT), late-Nov:
LOOKIT THE TINY ITTY BITTY WIDDY BABBY OF AN APPLE.
AW, I WANNA PINCH HIS WIDDLE APPLE CHEEKS
Ahem. Sorry.
So! The D’Arcy Spice! Which is to say, the apple, and not the subgenre of smutty Jane Austen fics. It is in fact a little apple, and quite a dense boy, as well. Honestly, a bit hard to break into, like the money room at a casino. So, it’s tiny, and rock-hard, and once you manage to crack that nut… is it worth the trouble?
It is. This is next in the line of truly odd little apples I’ve eaten of late. There are some big funky flavors afoot here tucked into this tiny package of dense white flesh. Sweet dominates tart here (I prefer when tart dominates sweet, don’t kinkshame), but then you get this host of complex “spice” flavors. I was searching for which of those spice flavors is dominant, and it took me a while to settle on nutmeg. This is a very nutmeggy apple! Little allspice, little cinnamon, but really, it’s nutmeg-forward in some fascinating ways. It’s one of the things I really like about the diversity of apples — you can get apples that taste like pineapple, or bubblegum, or far more autumnal with true spice, spice that hasn’t ever touched the tree and yet there it be, in the fruit.
I’m told this is a fairly delicate and hard-to-grow apple, a dainty sensitive boy, and shame for that, because they’re small and fun to eat and a little weird in the wonderful way of being weird, not the horrible way of being weird.
As such, I’m gonna go ahead and call this a happy 7.4.
No video, I’m afraid, as I totally borked that. Oops! You’ll live.
This is not a review of the work or the life of actor and rapper Ludacris, aka Christopher Brian Bridges. It is also not a review of the apple called Ludicrisp, which is a different (and better, and I believe earlier-in-origin) apple developed by North Star Orchard. This is not a linguistic examination of the word “ludicrous” but it is, in many ways, a review of a very ludicrous apple, an apple whose spelling is more in line with the rapper, less in line with the word, unlike the North Star version, which is more in line with the word and less in line with the rapper, which is to say, this entire situation is ludicrous, and we have perhaps achieved maximum ludicrousness. What I mean to say is, this is a review of an apple called Ludacrisp.
It is also worth noting that we are again back in the territory of “apples that exist to be The Next Honeycrisp,” but if you’re not a reader of apple news (not Apple news, but literally news about apples), you might have missed that The Next Honeycrisp is basically… HONEYCRISP 2.
2 HONEY 2 CRISP
THE HONEY AND THE CRISP
HONEY 2: JUICY CRISPALOO.
Ahem. What I mean to say is, the very same Minnesota developers of the original Honeycrisp are soon to produce an apple that’s been in development for years — a “sequel” to Honeycrisp called the SuperSnap. Which is an inferior name, let me tell you — it sounds like a patent for some sort of PANTS CLASP, or a KITCHEN STORAGE DEVICE. Something Billy Mays, rest in peace, might be pitching me from the foggy depths of Pitchman Heaven. Honestly, I think like with all sequels, you have to go bigger with your Honeycrisp sequel — so you wanna go sweeter than honey, and more textured than crispy. Upping crisp is easy: crunch. Upping honey, you know, I think you gotta go big, and Guinness tells me the sweetest substance known to man is something called thaumatin, which is 3000x times sweeter than sugar, so there’s your new apple name, guys:
THAUMACRUNCH
Sounds awesome. Metal. Cursed. Haunted. Mega Hell Sweet. Yeah.
That said, buried in the article about the HONEYCRISP 2 is that the developer also has an upcoming apple called Big Flirt, and fuck me, I want to try a Big Flirt apple. Sounds like a randy trucker’s name name. “Oh that there, that’s Earl, but we just call him BIG FLIRT on account of him being a BIG OL HORNY BEAR. Go on and give ‘at boy a little kiss.”
Anyway.
Let’s review this fucking apple.
My review of a Ludacrisp apple, from Sprouts, late Nov:
This apple is, as the name inadvertently suggests, ludicrous.
It is, at the start, the densest apple I may have ever eaten. It was like trying to bite into a pirate’s cannonball. All iron.
Then, when your weak human teeth finally manage to puncture its armor, it’s one of the juiciest apples of the year.
Then, as you masticate this stubborn motherfucker, there is a panoply of crazy tastes that enter into the equation, it’s like, boom, soursop, tangerine, tamarind, roses.
You chew that for a while.
Then a while longer.
Then you keep chewing because as it turns out, eating one of these is a fucking marriage. You committed. You said the oaths. You will always be eating this apple, and it will always be eating you.
Finally, the skin lingers in the mouth and offers a… well, a just slightly fishy and bitter aftertaste. A taste that is patently not-present in the flesh.
Maybe that’s just some weird pesticide! Who can say! (I do wash my apples before eating them, to be clear.)
What I can say is, this apple is a whole journey. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of time. It’s kind of like that nightmare Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory ride down the hallucinatory log flume.
Question is, did I like it?
Not… exactly?
But I respect it. It’s got moxie, by god.
So that gets it a 6.3, which is a weird number, and the apple deserves a weird number. (I’ll note here that I did make these into applesauce after and it was a truly bizarre applesauce. Not bad, but off-kilter. Like applesauce from another universe.)
So here’s where we’re at in APPLETOWN — I’ve still got a half-dozen or so reviews to fire off here, though for most of them I’ve done videos over at Instagram. And I’m hoping to get a couple more apples yet from the local orchard (their Goldrush was running weirdly late this year), and I’ll also probably scurry about the grocery store like a weird apple-eating spider to see if I can pick up any varieties I’ve yet to review here.
That said, for the most part, I’ll probably skip the pontificating preamble for most of these and just jump right into the review. It’s the holidays, I’m busy, you’re busy, and October was heavy on the apple content, so I think there’s a value-add in me just cutting to the fucking chase and throwing my apple reviews at your face. Which rhymes. I am an apple poet; grapple with my pro wit. Boom. Drop the mic. On my foot. Why did I drop the mic. That was a bad idea. Oh god what did I do to my toe. Mistakes were made. I should stick to eating apples, no more of this foolish rhyming business.
All right.
Today, we have a two-fer —
Two apples that blush from the inside, with pinkish-reddish flesh — that, due to the anthocyanins inside the apple, which can be a function of the apple variety, but also goosed by exposure to the sun, and further, increased by how many human sacrifices you have laid at the base of the tree while wassailing the orchard in ancient song and apple hymn.
How do these two APPLE SIBLINGS compare?
My review of a Lucy Rose from Sprouts, early December:
My memory of this apple was that, as the name suggests, it was very very rose-forward. But the apple I ate now was no such thing.
In fact, the flavor of this apple would be “long-chewed bubblegum.”
The bite was, up front, incredibly, profoundly juicy — I hesitate to be weird and gross and call this apple a squirter, but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway because honestly, if I’m not a little weird and a little gross, who even am I? But seriously, the juice from this thing was unparalleled — a drippy apple, salivating so much I think its kind was wanting to be eaten.
Problem is, the juice is… watery. There’s not a lot of there there. The skin was tough. The floral bubblegum flavor faded so fast I’m not sure it was ever there. It occasionally flirted with the taste of pennies, which made me think I’d bitten my lip or something while eating it? The crunch was admitted satisfying — like biting into the skull of a long-held foe. But the meh flavor coupled with a long chew and a weird aftertaste made this less fun for me.
Oh! Oh, and it’s supposed to be all red and awesome inside but it was mostly white with like, light stains of pink, which makes it look biological. Like something you’ll pull out of a medical waste bin.
Not great. Let’s go 2.0 and call it a day.
(By the way, I know my photo there sort of sucks. Which matches the apple! Because the apple also sucked! Parity and parallel structure, baby.)
My review of a Lucy Glo from Sprouts, late November:
So, the Lucy Rose sucked.
Presumably, the Lucy Glo also sucks?
WELL, YOU’D BE WRONG. It’s like the saying goes:
IF YOU PRESUMABLY YOU MAKE A PRES OUT OF U AND MABLY.
I mean, I think the’s the saying? Whatever.
So — the Lucy Glo stands in stark contrast to her far weaker sister.
What I found here was a refreshing pink lemonade-tasting, raw-red-innarded, Lemonheads-sour apple with a cider vinegar tingle in the throat — it was a little crunchy but just the right kind of soft where the flesh starts strong but then quickly goes cotton candy, not lingering longly in the mouth. The flavor goes down with the ship, which is what you want with any apple.
It’s more sour than sweet, and I think more candy sour than citrus sour?
But it’s great! Really great. Only thing to ding it, I think, was there was a papery finish and aftertaste to it — it’s like the taste in my coffee if I don’t rinse the brown paper filters before hand, that paper taste carries over. Except here, no paper existed, but it still tastes that way.
Truly a surprising grocery store apple, and though the outside is middlingly ugly (kind of a sicky-blush), the inside was pink-red-pretty. The kind of innards a serial killer would admire, probably.
Let’s call it a 7.9 — allllllmost an 8, but just shy.
The bats are out of the bag — Wanderers is hitting in a limited edition from Earthling Publications. Landing Spring 2026. Written by me (obvs). New awesome intro from Paul Tremblay. Amazing art by Francois Vaillancourt.
It’s 7×10″, slipcased, over 700 pages, full color printing, smyth-sewn binding, 3-foil stamping to the leatherbound cover, signed by all contributors.
Let’s just get that link out of the way right now —
Note: orders start tomorrow (Tuesday the 9th) and there’s also a bundle available till Weds with Robert McCammon’s MINE (one of my favorite books, so that’s an honor right there).
This is definitely a book I hope people find worthy of a special edition like this — I’m excited for the chance to have it take on a new, fancier shape for those who might like such a thing. It’s a book certainly close to my heart, too, so maybe it’s close to yours.
