Attention Readers Expect a change in management here. TinyLetter, my newsletter server for five years, is closing up shop next month, and…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Publishing dark matter since 2018
Attention Readers Expect a change in management here. TinyLetter, my newsletter server for five years, is closing up shop next month, and…
Leave a CommentDear Readers, This month, no august pronouncements, just some random thoughts. Well, just one diatribe: Tech companies want to make themselves indispensable for anyone who…
Leave a CommentThis month’s assorted provocations include several commentaries, a story, a funding appeal, and news of recent publications. Two of the items are fiction.
5/5. Got an email saying, “Greetings everybody, I’m Oscar, your friendly spambot. I’ll be feeding you all sorts of incredibly delicious offers from exotic portals for your shopping enjoyment. You’ll want to read each and every one and clip the valuable coupons.”
How nice. I kept reading.
You would be foolish to decline my bountiful offer, but can opt out at any time by visiting my Patreon page and donating $5 to cover my monthly upkeep or just $50 for a whole year, and thank you in advance.
Welcome to my internet family!
Oscar.
At least it doesn’t want Bitcoin. Still considering what to do. Any ideas?
Leave a CommentBefore I forget, Saturday 4/30 is Indie Bookstore day. You may yawn, but it’s a big deal in their struggle for survival. Find a local bookstore and go see what’s happening. Click the poster below to visit a store locator at bookshop.org. Click here to see the full size image. If you have a website or want to send out email about it, copy this section and paste it there.
And while you’re there, why not browse at the Perfidy Press Bookstore. Thinking of adding a shelf called Friends Recommend... with books that you and others I know believe readers would enjoy. It’ll be limited to 10 titles, so don’t delay, send in your faves.
Sometimes the magic works.
It isn’t normally possible for an author to get a new book reviewed in print before it goes to galley, which means you’ve got a publisher or you’re publishing it yourself and it’s all typeset. I’m in a pre-publication limbo, and rather than just twiddling my thumbs til my publisher does their thing, I decided to review my novel myself—but not by itself.
1 CommentThis month’s topical commentary comes with a commercial.
In a perverse twist of ancient history, here comes the Ides of March and Ukrainians are falling to bombs, missiles, and shells aimed at them by a modern-day power-mad emperor. We’re in dangerous territory that could have been skirted. I can’t help but feel things would have been different had the US and EU not engineered a 2013 coup in Ukraine that threatened to make it an anti-Russian economic and military outpost. (If you object to the socialist slant of that article, see this 2019 paper by neorealist political scientist John Mearsheimer that largely agrees with its analysis.) Read and weep about what the West hoped to reap at Russia’s expense — an enlarged military perimeter, lucrative investments, austerity measures, neofascist nationalism…
1 Comment“The walls here are like a daily newspaper, trying to make us get off the couch and roam the streets demanding all that is written on the walls.” — Níkos Tρavvós