#Newsletter Freebie

[catsteinbooks]

Do you like sexy ghosts?

(Yes, you do. This is Tumblr.)

So, I've got like this job actually writing books and trying to get people to buy them. But right now, I'm giving one away for free! (I'm like the anti-Aziraphale here.)

It's a ghost romance set in late 19th century Ireland, with a curse, a heroine with OCD and related social anxiety, and a total sweetheart of a ghost hero. They spend the whole story being cute together and helping one another. A greedy capitalist is the villain. It's lots of awww with a dash of spooky.

It's going out to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow, and you can sign up here: catsteinbooks.com/newsletter

(Secret tip: Obviously, I hope you'll stick around and check out my books and whatever, but there's not actually any penalty for signing up, getting the book, and unsubscribing.)

[authorkarajorgensen]

From my current short story/WIP/The Reanimator Mysteries #2.5

This will hopefully be sent out to my newsletter subscribers in December (January at the latest if the month really kicks my butt).

[author-a-holmes]

Whatever Happened To Madeline Hail?

If you'd like to read the complete story of 'Whatever Happened To Madeline Hail?' you can get it for free when signing up for my newsletter.

[berenwrites]

Free Fiction Friday July 23 (a little late)

Free Short Story

Mages: Magic & Mayhem

Join Dante, a rising actor, as he is suddenly thrust into a world of magic while taking a much-needed break from the pressures of his career. Unprepared for the dangers and secrets that come with it, he is faced with a mage in his debt and newfound knowledge he does not know how to deal with.

Dante must navigate a turbulent underworld full of power and possibility. Will Dante be able to survive in a world where magic is now part of his life and more powerful than ever?

Free to all the subscribers of my newsletter (no spam, I promise), in fact, at the moment, mostly just the free fiction emails 🥰.

Go here to sign up and the details of how to get your free copy are in the final welcome email.

If you would just like to pick up a copy it is 99c and available from:

Smashwords & Amazon

[laurahepworth-author]

A short bonus story for From the Ashes is not available on my Substack newsletter! The Letter is a prequel story and, if you haven't read my young adult, high fantasy, Cinderella retelling that it goes along with yet, the link and info for it will be at the bottom of the post. There are also downloadable versions available for The Letter.

[djrusso-romance]

I did the thing, finally! I made a newsletter magnet! My short story is a Taryn-and-Wes-centric story that takes place a year and a half after the events of the novella. And it's free if you sign up for my newsletter! I've got a bunch of projects in the pipes and my friends are always writing interesting alien and monster romances I love to scream about, so you'll want to sign up, anyway. Sign up to get your free (SPICY) copy!

[geethr75]

Happy Holidays!!

Hey all!! I hope you all have a marvellous and amazing holiday and a great new year to come. I’ve been dealing with health issues, both physical and mental on top of tech issues with my laptop. It’s in the shop for the third time this month, and honestly, at this point I’m not even sure if it can be repaired at all. I can’t afford a new one just yet, however. Guess I better write and sell a lot…

[sylviahubbard]

You are cordially invited to join #SylLit Mailing List 💌✍🏾📚 #writerslife

Subscribe immediately by clicking here : eepurl.com/b91huD You can also get free reads and subscribe at the same time going to these stories Free Book Giveaways EXCLUSIVE https://www.prolificworks.com/author/SylviaHubbard Let Me Love You Her husband’s boss will do anything to have her, but he’s not a man who likes to mix business with pleasure. Under her husband’s command, she is ordered to…

[jolenes-book-journey]

My Own Social Media Challenge Has Begun

My Own Social Media Challenge Has Begun

My Own Social Media Challenge Has Begun! I have finally gotten around to choosing a Newsletter application that integrates with my website and offers me all the features I wanted for only $79/year. It will allow you to create and send unlimited newsletters, email series, and integrates the WordPress subscriber system into their subscriber database. It will also allow you to import your email…

[authorkarajorgensen]

Cover and Blurb Reveal for "An Unexpected Question," A Reanimator Mysteries Companion Novella (TRM #2.5)

What's this? A cover and blurb reveal for the next Reanimator Mysteries short story. "An Unexpected Question" is coming in December or January to my newsletter subscribers for free. You can also add it on GR: www.goodreads.com/book/show/20...

Or join my newsletter: eepurl.com/bfJTW9

[visualtargets]

Fun, Facts & Freebies! - subscribe here: visualtargets.com.au/newsletter/

Each Issue is jam-packed full of content, with an exclusive offer for subscribers only.

Issue #3 in development soon :-) Get your inbox ready for a visual extravaganza!

[world-of-fire-and-flight]

Upcoming May Newsletter

Coming to my newsletter this month: A brand new deleted scene from FIRE & FLIGHT, some never-before-seen series artwork, and me being super excited for EMBERS OF ETERNITY's impending release🥳 Don't want to miss out?

Sign up for my monthly newsletter at brswrites.com/newsletter and as a "thank you" for joining the journey you'll receive TENEBRIS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF FIRE & FLIGHT!

[laurahepworth-author]

There's a bonus story for 'From the Ashes' coming soon to my newsletter! It'll be a public post on Substack so anyone who wants to will be able to read it whether they're subscribed or not, however, if you'd like to know as soon as it's available (or get the bonus epilogue for 'From the Ashes') please do join!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

The problem with good news in the real world is that it's messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn't mean it shouldn't buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope.

The big climate news this past week is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's clarion call about surging CO2 levels – the highest ever – amid a year that is on track to have the largest and most extreme series of weather events in human history:

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxide-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

This is genuinely alarming and you – like me – have probably experienced it as a kind of increase in your background radiation of climate anxiety. Perhaps you – like me – even experienced some acute, sit-bolt-upright-in-bed-at-2AM anxiety as a result. That's totally justifiable. This is very real, very bad news.

And yet…

The news isn't all bad, and even this terrible dispatch from the NOAA is best understood in context, which Bill McKibben provides in his latest newsletter post, "What You Want is an S Curve":

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/what-you-want-is-an-s-curve

Financier and their critics should all be familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." This is true outside of finance as well. One of the reasons that we're seeing such autophagic panic from the tech companies is that their period of explosive growth is at an end.

For years, they told themselves that they were experiencing double-digit annual growth because they were "creating value" and "innovating" but the majority of their growth was just a side-effect of the growth of the internet itself. When hundreds of millions of people get online every year, the dominant online services will, on average, gain hundreds of millions of new users.

But when you run out of people who don't have internet access, your growth is going to slow. How can it not? Indeed, at that point, the only ways to grow are to either poach users from your rivals (through the very expensive tactics of massive advertising and sales-support investments, on top of discounts and freebies as switching enticements), or to squeeze your own users for more.

That's why the number of laptops sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of cellphones sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of "smart home" gizmos slowed down.

Even the steepest hockey-stick-shaped exponential growth curve eventually levels off and becomes an S-curve, because anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop.

One way or another, the world's carbon emissions will eventually level off. Even if we drive ourselves to (or over) the brink of extinction and set up the conditions for wildfires that release all the carbon stored in all the Earth's plants, the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere has to level off.

Rendering the Earth incapable of sustaining human civilization (or life) is the ultimate carbon reduction method – but it's not my first choice.

That's where McKibben's latest newsletter comes in. He cites a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, which shows a major reversal in our energy sources, a shift that will see our energy primarily provided by renewables, with minimal dependence on fossil fuels:

https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/

The RMI team says that in this year or next, we'll have hit peak demand for fossil fuels (a fact that is consistent with NOAA's finding that we're emitting more CO2 than ever). The reason for this is that so much renewable energy is about to come online, and it is so goddamned cheap, that we are about to undergo a huge shift in our energy consumption patterns.

This past decade saw a 12-fold increase in solar capacity, a 180-fold increase in battery storage, and a 100-fold increase in EV sales. China is leading the world in a cleantech transition, with the EU in close second. Cleantech is surging in places where energy demand is also still growing, like India and Vietnam. Fossil fuel use has already peaked in Thailand, South Africa and every country in Latin America.

We're on the verge of solar constituting an absolute majority of all the world's energy generation. This year, batteries will overtake pumped hydro for energy storage. Every cleantech metric is growing the way that fossil fuels did in previous centuries: investment, patents, energy density, wind turbine rotor size. The price of solar is on track to halve (again) in the next decade.

In short, cleantech growth looks like the growth of other technologies that were once rarities and then became ubiquitous overnight: TV, cellphones, etc. That growth isn't merely being driven by the urgency of the climate emergency: it's primarily a factor of how fucking great cleantech is:

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/the_incredible_inefficiency_of_fossils.pdf

Fossil fuels suck. It's not just that they wreck the planet, or that their extraction is both politically and environmentally disastrous. They just aren't a good way to make energy. About a third of fossil fuel energy is wasted in production and transportation. A third! Another third is wasted turning fossil fuels into energy. Two thirds! The net energy efficiency of fossil fuels is about 37%.

Compare that with cleantech. EVs convert electricity to movement with 80-90% efficiency. Heat pumps are 300% efficient (the main fuel for your heat pump is the heat in the atmosphere, not the electricity it draws).

Cleantech is just getting started – it's still in the hockey-stick phase. That means those efficiency numbers are only going up. Rivian just figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle. That's just one rev – there's doubtless lots of room for more redesigns that will further dematerialize EVs:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

As McKibben points out, there's been a lot of justifiable concern that electrification will eventually use up all our available copper, but copper demand has remained flat even as electrification has soared – and this is why. We keep figuring out new ways to electrify with fewer materials:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This is exactly what happened with previous iterations of tech. The material, energy and labor budgets of cars, buildings, furniture, etc all fell precipitously every time there was a new technique for manufacturing them. Renewables are at the start of that process. There's going to be a lot of this dematerialization in cleantech. Calculating the bill of materials for a planetary energy transition isn't a matter of multiplying the materials in current tech by the amount of new systems we'll need – as we create those new systems, we will constantly whittle down their materials.

What's more, global instability drives cleantech uptake. The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a surge in European renewables. The story that energy prices are rising due to renewables (or carbon taxes) is a total lie. Fossil fuels are getting much more expensive, thanks to both war and rampant, illegal price-fixing:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused

If not for renewables, the incredible energy shocks of the recent years would be far more severe.

The renewables story is very good and it should bring you some comfort. But as McKibben points out, it's still not enough – yet. The examples of rapid tech uptake had big business on their side. America's living rooms filled with TV because America's largest businesses pulled out all the stops to convince everyone to buy a TV. By contrast, today's largest businesses – banks, oil companies and car companies – are working around the clock to stop cleantech adoption.

We're on track to double our use of renewables before the decade is over. But to hold to the (already recklessly high) targets from the Paris Accord, we need to triple our renewables usage. As McKibben says, the difference between doubling and tripling our renewables by 2030 is the difference between "survivable trouble" and something much scarier.

The US is experiencing a welcome surge in utility scale solar, but residential solar is stalling out as governments withdraw subsidies or even begin policies that actively restrict rooftop solar:

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1798049929082097842?s=51

McKibben says the difference between where we are now and bringing back the push for home solar generation is the difference between "fast" and "faster" – that is the difference between tripling renewables by 2030 (survivable) and doubling (eek).

Capitalism stans who argue that we can survive the climate emergency with market tools will point to the good news on renewable and say that the market is the only way to transition to renewables. It's true that market forces are partly responsible for this fast transition. But the market is also the barrier to a faster (and thus survivable) transition. The oil companies, the banks who are so invested in fossil fuels, the petrostates who distort the world's politics – they're why we're not much farther along.

The climate emergency was never going to be neatly solved. We weren't going to get a neat novelistic climax that saw our problems sorted out in a single fell swoop. We're going to be fighting all the way to net zero, and after that, we'll still have decades of climate debt to pay down: fires, floods, habitat loss, zoonotic plagues, refugee crises.

But we should take our wins. Even if we're far from where we need to be on renewables, we're much farther along on renewables than we had any business hoping for, just a few years ago. The momentum is on our side. It's up to us to use that momentum and grow it. We're riding the hockey-stick, they're on that long, flat, static top of the S-curve. Their curve is leveling off and will start falling, ours will grow like crazy for the rest of our lives.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

[current-words-publishing]

FREEBIE

Have you signed up for the DPP newsletter? Subscribers got early access to the current (12/25/22) issue of Instant Noodles (that’s right, they got the password to get to read it before the general public!). And this month, we have a freebie that we hope authors can use to help them meet their goals. FREEBIE So, sign-up today!