Well, it never rains but it pours! As we had cause to note this last weekend. I’m running off to Martha’s Vineyard today for Viable Paradise—and sending off a draft I’ve been working on for a while now—and writing a newsletter. And Dead Hand Rule comes out in a week and a half! There’s still time to pre-order.

I’m excited to announce the addition of a new stop on the tour: In addition to the event at Porter Square Books on Oct 28 (launch day!), I’ll be at Pandemonium Books and Games on Wed, November 12. You can find all the relevant details on this handy page Macmillan put together, along with booking links.

Otherwise, my attention, as I’m sure you can imagine, has been a bit fragmented, even setting aside the, well, the altogether.

This recent crunch session has re-aggrivated some chronic pain all up and down my mouse-arm chain, so I decided to try a new setup I’ve been curious about for a while. I got myself a Kensington SlimBlade Pro trackball mouse—I guess I should say ‘trackball’ because there’s no mouse involved, just this sleek red orb on a charcoal base. The whole thing is symmetrical so you can switch hands whenever you like, and you can spin the ball in place to scroll up or down. I’ve found that any “one weird trick” input device solution will lead to some sort of chronic aggravation eventually—we’re born as omnivore scavengers designed to do a whole bunch of different things in a day, and society has organized itself in ways that lead many of us to sit in one place for extended periods of time experiencing sensations of impending doom (eat your heart out, anchorites!)—but we’ll see how this goes. One week in, it’s quite a positive sensation so far. When I ply the red orb I feel like Saruman at the palantir, which is a good headspace for my purposes, at least until the voice of Sauron gets involved.

I’ve been doing a bit of screenwriting in a piece of software called Arc Studio, and I adore its ‘find’ feature. When you search for a string, Arc Studio produces a list of matches with a substantial amount of context—whole sentences or even an entire line of dialog—in a way that makes the feature extremely useful for tracing callbacks and echoes, or for surfacing networks of meaning in your project. You might not have realized that the word ‘grind’ always has a particular negative valence, and always connects to one particular character. This is a good practical example of something I’ve been pondering for a while. More tools for word and concept exploration within the context of a draft might have a lot of value for writers—making connections visible while giving writers room to develop or exercise their judgment—in a way that’s basically the opposite of using LLM systems, which preempt that judgment. Of course, learning to suss out this sort of connection, or to establish it intentionally, is one of the fun parts of writing, but I do suspect there are areas in which analytical tools could reinforce the composition process, much as that spaced-repetition flashcard systems can have a magical effect on vocabulary retention in foreign language study (trust me, I’ve done it the old-fashioned way), or that swing analysis can help baseball players. But of course, in fiction, we had Joyce, Woolf, Ralph Ellison and Robert E Howard before we had UNIVAC; the old-fashioned way has a lot to show for itself.

And that’s what I’ve got so far. Take it easy, friends, & work for the Liberation of all sentient beings. See you next week.