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Which of Dante’s circles of hell is being stuck in the internet provider store trying to cancel your account? I’m pretty sure it’s near the bottom if not the absolute lowest.

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Came home from work strongly suspecting my body is fighting off an illness of some sort, and am now ensconced in my armchair with a cozy blanket on my lap, wearing my “obstinate, headstrong girl” sweatshirt from the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, with a cup of elderberry tea and my current knitting project on one side and this stack of books and notebooks on the other. I don’t know what whims will strike me in the next few hours as I settle in to rest, but by golly I’m ready for anything.

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I am bemusedly watching the numbers go up once more on my one random Princess Bride post (it tends to lie mostly dormant and then every now and then surge briefly before returning to its previous quiescent state), and I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to see my books reach a wider audience I simply need to add some Princess Bride references to them. How am I going to do this when they are mystery-fantasies set in 1920s England? Still working out the details on that, but it seems the only logical path forward.

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*English man with a mustache in a period drama voice* GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, MAN.

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In the ask box

I'm posting this with the asker's name obscured, as I don't want to run the risk of embarrassing them, or of provoking others to some kind of backlash.

Numbered? Okay. Here are reasons number 1 through 186 for you, made available by putting my name into this master list of Meta--scraped works and pulling up the titles of those works of mine that over time made their way into LibGen without my permission, and which (after they were scraped from there) were then used to train AI at Meta.

That is pretty much my entire literary output for the last fifty years, scraped illegally from LibGen into Meta's LLM-training database. Those include numerous works from my own tiny online bookstore, the income from which is sometimes all that's kept @petermorwood and me alive.

It's often my great pleasure to donate ebooks (and regular print ones) to libraries on request. But to have work taken and posted online without permission strikes me as... not very nice. Donation of one's work to online sources should be a choice the individual artist makes. And I was never given the chance to make that choice. Others decided they were entitled to make it for me.

Anyway, I think Meta's actions should have consequences: as should other thefts of copyrighted material by Big Tech. That's what the class action lawsuits against Meta and Anthropic are about.

I hope the above data will be helpful in assisting you in your assessment of my possible state of misinformation, or my moral decrepitude.

And if you feel that my being angry about what Meta and Anthropic and their ilk have done with my work (and my dead husband's, and that of tens of thousands of our colleagues) makes me evil...

Well, that's a take. May others' assessment of your moral state be kinder.

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I realized that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

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susanna clarke (source) u cannot just say that now i will be Thinking about it Forever

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Hey all, just wanted to let everyone know there's a fun sale running for fantasy/sci-fi books from Aug 7-11. The Epic Sale of Beloved SFF. Each book featured in the sale has been personally recommended by another author or reviewer, which is a fun twist on these sorts of sales. Most of the books are $0.99, but some are free, so it's definitely worth checking out and seeing if any strike your interest.

(Glamours & Gunshots is one of the recommended books, and I've put both Magic Most Deadly and Death by Disguise on sale during this stretch as well, but I assume most people seeing this post will have already either read them or considered them and decided they aren't for you, so this post is mostly to let you all know about all the other fun books you can snag. Though obviously I'm not going to be mad if you buy my books as well.)

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"I cannot imagine who she would have become, but I think she would have been extraordinary. I am grateful I knew her, no matter how short the time." - Mon Mothma on Jyn Erso Rogue One Novelization by Alexander Freed

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So I might have just told a group of middle school girls that I would start a writing club with them this fall. Any suggestions for how best to facilitate this? I’m not looking to teach them writing but rather to have it be more focused on them exploring their creativity with me offering guidance. I’ve never even led/facilitated a writers’ group for adults, much less pre-teens, so I’m at a bit of a loss here!

(If you are wondering why I offered to do this when I have no clue about how to do it, don’t worry, so am I. What can I say, they are the sweetest girls ever and I get excited about helping kids who enjoy writing keep on enjoying it as they get older.)

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When there’s interpersonal conflict do not assume you have to pick a side. You can say ”hey, let me know if you need somebody to talk to” to everyone and get every side of the story and ponder on the complexity of human relationships instead. However it will make you sad and often despite your best efforts it may solve nothing.

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Thank you all for your suggestions! If my book order arrives in time, I will be bringing:

Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell

I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, Peter S Beagle

Peril at End House, Agatha Christie

as well as:

Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm, Erin Byers Murphy

Thin Places: An Evangelical Journey Into Celtic Christianity, Tracy Balzer

both of which I own but haven't read yet. If the book order doesn't arrive in time, I'll be instead shopping my bookshelves, and will likely add to the above two books:

The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon, Grace Lin (purchased for my Grace, who loved Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and its sequels, but who didn't jive with this one, so I would like to give it a try myself before donating it to the library)

A cozy mystery off my shelves that strikes my fancy when I'm packing

The Glass Magician, Caroline Stevermer (purchased a few months ago and saved for a special occasion)

I will be spending eight days camping in a little over a week, and my e-reader will no longer hold a charge. What physical books should I bring along to read? Fantasy, sci-fi, mystery preferred. Lightweight enough to pack easily.

Followers by now probably know my general preferences for stories, but just in case: always hope-filled, always turning toward the light, warmth and humor, no grimdark, no gore, no violence against women/children just for the sake of it, joy, joy, joy.

Favorite authors for casual reading (i.e could bring along to the beach or pick up and put down easily while relaxing at the campsite): Agatha Christie, Lloyd Alexander, LM Montgomery, Dorothy Gilman, Edward Eager, DE Stevenson, Sharon Shinn, Patricia C Wrede, Victoria Goddard, Carola Dunn

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2,000 more words and I'll be at 30,000 in the PICTA (Project-I-Can't-Talk-About). 12,000 more words puts me at 40,000, which is just about halfway (both in terms of story, given where I'm at now, and in terms of general word count expectations for this genre). Will I have this draft finished by the end of the summer, as I had hoped? Unlikely, but I am making excellent progress on it (for me), and it is turning into so much more than I imagined when I started scribbling a just-for-fun, need-to-give-my-brain-a-break, write-for-fun story in a notebook back oh, two-three years ago now.

Still not talking about it, though. Not until this draft is finished. THEN I'll be able to tell you all about it.

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Why is the picture of Susannah Harker and Crispin Bonham Carter at Austen’s house celebrating 30 years of the ‘95 adaptation cheering me up so much

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I will be spending eight days camping in a little over a week, and my e-reader will no longer hold a charge. What physical books should I bring along to read? Fantasy, sci-fi, mystery preferred. Lightweight enough to pack easily.

Followers by now probably know my general preferences for stories, but just in case: always hope-filled, always turning toward the light, warmth and humor, no grimdark, no gore, no violence against women/children just for the sake of it, joy, joy, joy.

Favorite authors for casual reading (i.e could bring along to the beach or pick up and put down easily while relaxing at the campsite): Agatha Christie, Lloyd Alexander, LM Montgomery, Dorothy Gilman, Edward Eager, DE Stevenson, Sharon Shinn, Patricia C Wrede, Victoria Goddard, Carola Dunn