Blog

On Having Two Children aka Authoring with Multiple Releases

This year I have the absolute honor of having two books come out. That, in itself, feels awesome to say, and I don’t want to be ungrateful for the opportunities I’ve been given. But, I will say that somewhere around January 2nd I realized I am perhaps vastly unprepared to have two very different books coming out in the same year. Casual is a near future dystopian novel that comes out February 11 from Tenebrous Press Hold My Heart is a steamy noir cosmic horror novella coming out from Ghost Orchid Press on May 27 When signing contracts, I discussed the release dates with both publishers, making sure it wasn’t…

On Reading and Re-reading With No Memory

I’ve had some very positive feedback on my forthcoming novel, Casual, in the past few weeks. Ivy Grimes compared it to 1984 and Brave New World. Then Lit Hub said it is “Up there with Atwood, Bradbury, Dick and Gibson.” These are books and authors that I have grown up with, that I respect immensely, and that I never dreamed of showing up in a review of my work. Besides making my heart flutter, these reviews made me want to go back and re-read some of my favorite books and look at them from a more mature perspective. I also wanted to see how they have influenced me. I started…

Let’s Go to Finland

I’ve been distracted by a lot lately: Holidays. Work. More work. A lot more work. Ramping up the release of my next two books (Casual is out next month!!!). Writing the next thing. Etc. And in all of that, Read the World has taken a seat on the back burner. But, I’m ready to start investing more time in the project, because I think it’s important to discover the place of the things we’re reading. I have installed a few new plugins that update the look/feel of the map and the related books/stories/poems, and I think it’s working a lot better now. However, there are definitely a few bugs. Unfortunately,…

It’s Not You, It’s Me: Timing and Context

As a reader, I’ve been obsessed with Gillian Flynn this year. It started when I read The Grownup as a “suggested” book when I was looking for alternative gothic stories. I wanted haunted house stories that didn’t feel like haunted house stories, and The Grownup seemed to fit. Unfortunately, I didn’t really like it, even though I desperately wanted to. The opening of the novella was unbeatable. The honest, raw voice of a sex worker turned psychic was witty and relatable. And I wanted more ballsy, unapologetic sex workers! But as the story went on, I was less interested in the child and family. Perhaps that was because of my…

Cutting Back on Images In the Time of AI

Why I’m no longer using images in my social media and blog posts. Perhaps you’ll consider joining me?

AI and Human Connection

I am fairly anti generative AI. Beyond its environmental impact, there’s social harm as well. Which angle? Take your pick. Spreading misinformation. Harming reputations. Inciting hate or violence. Impacting political campaigns. Perpetuating bias. The list goes on. In the writing community, there are also concerns of copyright infringement, the continued societal disrespect and commodification of creative pursuit, and already stressed systems being flooded with AI content. But lately I’ve been pondering the way generative AI promoters seem to aim at stripping human interaction from society. Setting the Scene: Her Let me start with an example. In the 2012 movie Her Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI program. On…