I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

#SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm Rosslare port to experience capacity issues from tomorrow.
Noting allowed through, not even medicine!
Sorry diabetics, people with no thyroid (like myself) and anyone else dependant on pharmaceuticals to *LIVE*

A classic red fox, though he's really orange. The fox is looking right in a landscape-oriented frame. Ears up, and dark. Nose pointed right. Still got a bit of a shaggy winter coat, though it's clearly thinning now for summer. The fox has shenanigans on his mind. The fox has chaos inside his head. The fox loves chaos. Photo by me, Chuck Wendig

A fox came to my front door the other day, and here is that fox.

You are all invited to the launch of my very first poetry collection! l'll be launching alongside fellow Dedalus Press author Philip McDonagh on Wed 29 April at 7pm at Hen's Teeth, Dublin. Pre-order the book in paperback or hardback (fancy!) at www.dedaluspress.com/product/the-salt-of-something-new

What you don’t do, if you have any cop on, is go off on one, making increasingly ridiculous demands, blocking the normal flow of people’s lives, causing at best enormous disruption, and at worst real harm to many, many people.

It is mad.

Or, you discover that despite your best efforts, the decision maker refuses to act for no good or discernible reason.

In such case, you then escalate and take more direct action - demonstrations, protests etc

But all the while you work to ensure that your actions don’t cause serious harm to others

Then you engage them to ask them to act.

At which stage pen of two things may transpire;

You may discover that it’s not as simple as you thought and that there are additional factors in play.

If that is the case, then you see if you can offer some ideas that might contribute to the solution.

The most basic principle of campaigning for change is to ensure you understand what change is required (what’s possible and what will likely work basically) and identifying who the relevant decision maker is.

I totally get how many people are distressed, alarmed and seriously at risk due to fuel price increases.

However, the leaders of this protest are a fucking disgrace. They are causing untold harm to people and to the economy, without having done even the most basic analysis of the problem.

1: I am one of those “Sob Stories”, I had a medical procedure on Wednesday, I made it, but it took me twice the length it would normally (8 hours total in the car) while I was in white hot pain having to go back roads to avoid the #RoadBlocks

#SpeirGorm #SpéirGhorm #FuelProtests
#SpéirGorm

Protesters add new conditions to ending blockades Caroline O’Doherty reports: Protesters have added new demands to the conditions under which they say they will end their blockades. They now want the Dáil recalled immediately and want the ban on oil exploration off the Irish coast rescinded. That is in addition to removal of the carbon tax from fuel products and price caps on agricultural diesel, auto diesel and home heating kerosene. James Geoghegan, one of the organisers of the protests, told Newstalk the new demands came from discussions with protesting groups around the country.

Ah, so they have now ADDED demands. Just like everyone said they would. These are unserious people.

I'm sure many people have seen the Publisher's Weekly article about my editor, Sean McDonald, leaving Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and his imprint, MCD Books, being shuttered. I have a lot of feelings about this, including gratitude for ten years of stability with one editor. Before Sean, I had a trilogy where each novel was taken by a different publishing company. It sold well enough that I was still in the game, but I never had anything approaching a settled situation. I never had any assurance from book to book that I could relax or get comfortable or feel settled. Sean's offer for Annihilation and the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy was extraordinary. It fused a deep love of the literary with a savvy understanding of the world beyond the words in the novel. He had the vision to put the three Southern Reach novels out in the same year, creating a PR sensation to go along with a startlement of mostly rave reviews--a positive feedback loop that landed Authority and Acceptance on the bestseller lists in trade paperback. {Ultimately, the series has gone on to sell well over a million copies in the US alone, and been translated into over 37 languages.) He further had the vision to slap an X on an omnibus hardcover just before the holidays, as a perfect gift book. It was as immaculate a synergy of the storytelling and the marketing and PR expression of that storytelling as I have ever seen or had ever experienced as the author in question. He also slipped the manuscript of Annihilation to a producer at a lunch, which led to the Annihilation movie and eventually led to Annihilation making the NYT bestseller list for the first time.

When he got his own imprint at FSG, MCD Books, my novel Borne was the first published as an MCD book. It didn't make the bestseller list in hardcover, but got rare trifecta of rave reviews in the NY Times, LA Times, and Washington Post in the same weekend. The trade paperback edition is in a fourteenth printing. After the Annihilation movie came out, I strove to write the least commercial idea I had, first, to kind of wash away the Hollywood experience. That novel was Dead Astronauts, accompanied by The Strange Bird. I sent Dead Astronauts to Sean with an email note that I knew the novel was unexpected and very strange and I appreciated him reading it, but I did not expect him to publish it. I absolved him any obligation. But within a couple of months, He replied that he liked it very much and he did want to publish it, and he saw a clear path to publishing it. The trade paperback is still in print and Dead Astronauts earned out the advance, despite being formally experimental. When Hummingbird Salamander tanked at the beginning of the pandemic (only to rise again in trade paperback), Sean didn't bat an eye about it, just moved on and endeavored to reprint my entire backlist at FSG. As of this writing, City of Saints & Madmen is in an eighth printing, and the others, Shriek, Finch, and Veniss Underground, are all in print and selling steadily.

FSG itself--from the art department to the PR and marketing teams, the other editorial staff, and the foreign language rights division--has always felt like a place where everyone passionately loved books and while no company is perfect, I certainly have felt it was and is an oasis in an increasingly inconsistent publishing world. I'm very sad that Sean is leaving FSG. I know he will land on his feet, as they say, and do more great things elsewhere. I really owe him a lot and FSG a lot. I'm very fortunate, very blessed, and I also know from 45 years of a book life that everything has its place and has it season. It's good to celebrate what you had and how wonderful it was to have it, rather than to dwell on the fact that it has ended. Eleven books in eleven years, with a twelfth on the way is a thing to treasure. Sean changed the trajectory of my career, and we fought many a long, arduous campaign during book launches often quixotic and against the grain of the popular in the moment. I have a lot of joy and love in my heart for all of those times and all of those opportunities. It's been a great run. I've learned a lot and had such adventures. My career isn't over and my association with FSG isn't over, either--among other things, I have a novel under contract with them--but it does feel like the end of an era, for me. Honor the past but don't live there, the saying goes. But, you'll forgive me, I hope, if I live there for just a bit longer. Thanks for reading.

Many of you have heard that my editor Sean McDonald will no longer be working at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I wrote a little bit about my feelings at the end of an era.

We actually do need YA books that don't have (or have less) sex, romance and violence. We also need books that have those topics. We need YA to be varied - teens are diverse! - but we also must refrain from moralizing those themes. Abstinence isn't "clean", and sex isn't "dirty."

Who is funding the fuel protest's online campaign? Political mobilisation does not scale "spontaneously", and, once that fire is lit, there is no controlling what it burns. Who is funding the fuel protest's online campaign? As petrol stations start to run dry, and cities are gridlocked by trucks and tractors, I am reminded of the two cardinal rules of mass political mobilisation; it does not scale "spontaneously", and, once that fire is lit, there is no controlling what it burns.

This post shows that the tractor protests started with a Meta ad that channeled people into WhatsApp groups.

www.thebriefing.ie/who-is-fundi...

Fuck this. As an industry, we are in an existential crisis of book banning because of homophobia and transphobia weaponized by racist authoritarians. “Dirty books” are not the problem. Censorship is.

Make whatever books you like, but don’t you dare call other books dirty in your shitty marketing.

also probably worth noting a truck / tractor convoy converging on Dublin has been a dream of the Irish far right for ages and they're eagerly glomming onto this one. they saw the spectacle of the Canadian trucker convoy and the farmer protests on the continent and they've wanted their own ever since

I’m sick of people who don’t use hyphens
A line must be drawn

When you let racist vigilantes setup road blocks & search buses counting heads with no ramifications or prosecutions afterwards, then of course actions will eventually escalate to what we are seeing now.

Selfish people thinking it's all about them & they've gotten away with it.

1/

#IrishPol

I was going home after a funeral today (which yes, people were late to because of the protest) and a tractor was ahead of us on the road, and I dryly said to my friend, “Look, a farmer actually working today.”

BBC Four - Art of Persia Broadcaster and journalist Samira Ahmed reveals the remarkable story of Iran.

I made a whole BBC TV series (2020) about the remarkable resilience of the people of Iran and their culture over centuries of threat and callous rule. You can watch it right here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

It’s never good news when my training in medieval history feels weirdly current

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Every person in the country must legally let an emergency vehicle through.

This part of the protest is driving me mad. It’s putting people’s lives and property at unnecessary risk. I’ve done First Aid and Fire Safety — minutes literally count in these situations.

In Korea, when the president declared martial law after midnight and erected barricades in Seoul, congressional reps from all parties ran into the streets, yanked ak47s from the army at the barricades, broke down the locked door to Congress, repealed the martial law order, and arrested the president

I am here for messaging that the THREAT alone - regardless of if it's carried out or walked back - should end his presidency.

The die is already cast. You cannot wield the power that man has and say that kind of shit.

Sakura in Kyiv has started to bloom.

I captured it today.

News headlines don’t notice the beauty.
I do.

Seriously, writers need to show a united front on this. Any publisher doing this needs to shamed into a hole in the ground. This kind of disrespect for writers and writing should make their reputation dirt.

Uhh, what editors?

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

Your reminder to be sure to download and print out the Mueller Report (I did years ago).

We should expect that there will come a time when it can no longer be found online.