Right? It’s HARD writing a book, at least sometimes. I haven’t published one yet, but I’m working on a few. Publishing anything takes a lot of work, and if you skip that work altogether… what did you do? Tools make sense in the right place, but if you let them do everything, what did you contribute?

Agreed. It’s actually a goal of the right to get people to give up (you know the old saying about evil’s triumph). It’s *understandable* to feel defeated sometimes, and maybe we all have to fall back temporarily to lick our wounds, but quitting the fight (even just speaking truth) helps no one good.

I want to try one, or three 😙

Korean street lava cream cube bread!

It's a square bread blowtorched to produce a super crispy caramelized shell, and it's stuffed with so much creamy filling it's literally overflowing.

Every bite explodes with milky and caramel flavors.

#trend #korean #foodie

Comic. [Gravestone for Joseph Paul Overton with list of years underneath. 1960-2003 is in black at the top and crossed out in red. Underneath in red is 1965-2011, crossed out, then 1973-2018, crossed out, then 1982-]

Overton

xkcd.com/3230/

Comic. One... two... THREE! [text in red] X Deprecated [line break] One... two... three... GO! [text in red] Deprecated [red curly bracket around top two lines] Too easy to mix up [line break] Three... two... one... GO! [text in green] [check mark] ISO Standard [caption] If I were in charge of ISO, the first thing I’d do would be to standardize the way people count out loud before doing something in sync.

Countdown Standard

xkcd.com/3232/

Embody your narrator like a method actor: a final tip about nailing your narrative voice.

✨ I’m thrilled to share a special moment from my journey as a writer—introducing and reading from my novel Archangels of Funk, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction! 🖋️💫

🎥 Dive into the world of Archangels of Funk, published by @TorDotComPub.

This sounds fascinating!

Murder on the Starship Australis Visit Amazon's Murder on the Starship Australis Page and shop for all Murder on the Starship Australis books. Check out pictures, author information, and reviews of Murder on the Starship Australis

I write modern sci-fi pulp stories. I have a noir detective series set on a generation ship, and a western set on that ship's ultimate destination. Lots more stories in both, and other series, to come!

Today's a great day to support some creators.

Writers and artists and creatives of all sorts: reply with a link to one of your works, if you'd like. And feel free to tell us about it.

Everyone: let's check through the replies and buy some creations and support some human beings.

And I’ll bet that’s nonrefundable the moment it charges. 😒

Yesterday, the crew of the ISS called the crew of #Artemis2 and had a short conversation in between their busy schedules of research and documentation (I promise, to a scientist, that's more fun than it sounds!)

This was the first ship-to-ship communications ever to take place in space. #NASA

All of this ^ is why we all keep telling you to use unique, randomly generated passwords not based on any system for EVERY ACCOUNT, everywhere. You might not care about your obscure forum account! But that forum account can lead to other, more high value targets in aggregate.

Are You Playing Dungeons & Dragons or Doing Your Taxes? “The rules are constantly being updated, but they’re still shackled to a system from the 1970s.”

1. Your goal is to retrieve your treasure from a monstrous entity.

2. All you need is a pen and paper, but expensive software makes it much easier.

3. The rules are constantly being updated, but they’re still shackled to a system from the 1970s.

This linked article is magnificent! 😄 Thank you so much for brightening my day with so many (rueful) laughs!

goodnight horror fam 🖤😈🫶

As a person who deeply loves all forests everywhere, this lit me up *two* different ways this morning 😄🌲🌳💚

#Writers question: what’s your go-to thesaurus these days? I lost my good Roget’s paper thesaurus in a move years ago, and no online tool I’ve seen yet can keep up with evolving language. What do YOU use to help you find that perfect word sometimes?

Reminder to all my kind SkyWriters out here:

You CAN make Bluesky remind you to label images with good, descriptive alt text, and you get up to 2000 characters in that field!

1) Go to Settings
2) Open Accessibility
3) Set “Require alt text before posting” to ON
4) Feel good about helping everyone!

Yes! It would even help if Bluesky set “require alt text before posting” to ON by default. I just saw that mine was no longer on, and I turned it back on. I feel like I set the system to require it when I first created my Bluesky account, but maybe an update reset defaults. Or maybe I reset somehow.

What a perfect excerpt to plant some seeds of delight, Ed! I look forward to reading a lot more! (Already joined your mailing list, of course 😄)

Excerpt from novelette CURVES AND COMPLICATIONS by Ed Robins “You won’t… you won’t hurt him?” “Darling, I’m gentle as a kitten.” “You forget that I’ve seen your claws, Mr. Devoe.”

Finished the first draft and revision of CURVES AND COMPLICATIONS, a #hardboiled novelette. Well... no end yet... does it really need one? 🤔

Read this next story in the #scifi #noir series MURDER ON THE STARSHIP AUSTRALIS exclusively by joining my mailing list at: 10centuniverse.com. ⚡️📚💙 🪐📚 🚀

Visions of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Predictions that C… A fascinating collection of fiction-turned-reality tale…

One of my favorite things about reading science fiction from different ages is seeing this. I read a well-curated collection once that gave some broad insight as well. (Hopefully linking to its Goodreads page below.)

www.goodreads.com/book/show/83...

I haven’t read either of those, but they sound like the kind of character arcs that I would really enjoy. Thanks for the recommendations!

91 Percent Human: The Shy Girl AI Scandal When I was nineteen, I wrote a poem about flowers that never blossomed.

Somehow, I had missed the entire Shy Girl - Mia Ballard controversy until today. Found an enlightening essay about it, and I might look for more later.

For anyone like me for whom this story is new:

open.substack.com/pub/thedreyd...

Congratulations again! I love this novelette so much, too 👏 👏 👏

"The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe" is a finalist for the 2026 Derringer Award (for mystery and crime short fiction) in the novelette category! It's an honor for the story to be recognized, and huge thanks to @clarkesworldmagazine.com for giving it a home in the first place :D

Excellent! 😄

My only disappointment was that there was no alt text on that original image. I hope that low-vision folks can still appreciate it. 🧡

Right? I love to pick up a few freebies each month by new-to-me names, especially if they come recommended from authors I already enjoy. But of the “wild” ones, as you put it so well, I see a lot of people who just don’t measure up yet. And some of those same markers.

Love the disappointed otter!

Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of lazy and predictable writing that I DNF immediately. Sometimes it just looks like the author doesn’t know their craft, but sometimes they use all the predictable structures and it feels positively artificial, too. And I expect that the first attracts the second.