Thanks for spreading the word about the Dead Hand Rule cover launch last week. I handed in the final round of line edits on the manuscript this week—the pass that most closely corresponds to “the edit” in a film sense, when you sit alone in a dark room growling at a scene: should it end earlier, or later? Is that the right button? Can I punch up this joke, can I strengthen this chain of cause and effect? Did this guy take off his sunglasses in a dramatic fashion five pages ago, thereby precluding him from doing so at the end of this scene? (Unless he’s the kind of guy to put on his sunglasses again to enable future dramatic-un-glassesing.) (Is that a word?)

Now it’s off to copy editing, the last chance to make any substantial changes at the sentence level. Page proofs come next, the last time I see the manuscript before it reaches you. When you’re working on page proofs you’re not really working on a ‘manuscript’ any more—you’re working on the typeset pages of your actual book, the way a print reader sees them. If you want to change a line, you have to think what that change will do to the pagination. All this work is done on the computer these days, though as every office tool suite in 2025 seems to be determined to get in the way of workers trying to do work, I wonder at what point it’ll make sense for everyone to just say ‘fuck it, the internet was a mistake’ and go back to physical galleys. I worked with physical galleys for a few books, and while, look, it was a pain, I’ve also spent, at this point, hours of labor trying to whack-a-mole unwanted AI features out of the programs I use for work. Also when I’m looking at a four hundred fifty page printout I can’t alt-tab into the Torment Nexus or That Thing That Needs Doing. However: I shudder to imagine what a return to physical galleys would look like on the editor side. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe everyone in editorial would get mad swole.

As I’m trying to Post Less (smile more? not working so far), I’ve entered the stage where I’m accumulating Post-Shaped-Thoughts. Here’s one:

The conventional wisdom runs that it’s hard to write a character who’s smarter than you. I don’t think this is true. Or at least: I think that the conventional wisdom, as usual, overplays its hand. The key insight (hexapodia!) is that you the writer can take as much time as you want to think up something clever for the character to do or say, and you can set the circumstances under which the character acts. You get to play the chess game with unlimited time control, then depict the character playing with one minute on the clock, a gun to their head, and five shots of vodka on board.

Of course if you are showing the internal monologue of a smart person thinking, a reader can check your work. If you are in first person—and I’m not often in first person on the page, so take this with a grain of salt—this is where it can help to have a sense of what the first person text is, to whom it’s being told. You can take this to a Wolfean extreme of course—“the book you hold in your hands is a translated holographic manuscript from the far future that came to me after being thrown into a black hole” sort of thing—but you don’t have to. It can be as simple as, this is the kind of story my character might tell to a date, or to a trusted friend, or to their therapist, or to their son. Depending on their goals, they might not detail every single mental leap—they might be more interested in their own feelings about their work.

Also: personally, I bounce off ‘smart’ characters much more for reasons of tone and energy than because the math doesn’t quite check out. Someone keeps telling me how smart they are, how perceptive, how well-read, etc: I don’t know any really smart people who do that, so it seems suspect. It’s easier to show how someone else feels about a character—how impressed they are, how jealous they are, etc. Archie Goodwin buttresses Nero Wolfe in this way. You have to be careful though: consider the adaption decay of Watson.

If you bank in the United States, recent steps to politicize the banking / payments infrastructure seem like really bad news—I’m no expert and I am also paid to ask the question “what could go wrong” over and over again1—but this stuff seems like it could be ‘cause a run on banks’ bad. Henry Farrell has the goods, plus some advice about what to do beyond the basic ‘call your reps’—read the whole article, but this is a place where sternly worded letters to your bank / any bank in which you hold stock can have a lot of weight, especially if you threaten to move your money elsewhere. Here’s his description of the problem.

So here, as best as I can see is what is happening. The Trump administration is taking the position that payments that it didn’t want to to be made are actionably unlawful, even if they were according to procedure and legal (e.g. authorized by the previous administration, or by Congress). It is demanding that banks or other financial institutions reverse these payments on the basis that they were unlawful. And in one case at least, the New York FEMA funds, it appears to have already gotten its way.

Banks can reverse fraudulent or mistaken transactions, at least some of the time, through means such as ACH reversals, though they are understandably hesitant to do it unless it is absolutely clear what has happened, for fear of getting caught up in complex legal disputes. So what seems to be happening here is that the Trump administration is pressing banks to use these means to reverse politically inconvenient transactions: that is, transactions that appear to be perfectly legal and aboveboard, but that the Trump administration doesn’t like, even if they reflect the will of the previous administration that authorized it, or the will of Congress that designated funds for a particular purpose.

Put more bluntly: the Trump administration is trying to turn private banks into enforcers for its own particular political agenda. If banks give in, it will be an enormous and dangerous step.

What this may mean

A lot of what the U.S. government ‘does’ is not done by the U.S. government at all. Instead, it is done by contractors, non profit organizations and the like, who are paid by the U.S. government. There are laws and principles that encourage this kind of outsourcing. And there are some people who are closely associated with the Trump administration (e.g. Chris Rufo) who appear to want to use this to attack the non-profit sector, which they see as a bastion of the enemy.

If banks acquiesce, these figures will have a new tool. They will be able to demand that banks hand over money from organizations’ bank accounts on the basis that the U.S. government gave them money that it shouldn’t have at some point in the past. Notably, for the $80 million, there appears to have been no visible legal process. The New York City comptroller seems to have figured out what happened when it became clear that there was $80 million less in the the city’s accounts than there should have been. At least on the basis of current information, the bank does not appear to have informed the city before sending back the money, so that there was no notice, let alone any opportunity to push back and present contrary evidence.

This is terrible news for nonprofits with any financial reliance on the U.S. government. They are potentially liable to get their bank accounts cleaned out without notice or obvious means for appeal. There could be knock-on consequences. Will such non-profits find it harder to get bank accounts, on the basis that they are politically risky clients? Very possibly. Will they find it harder to get loans, on the basis that their apparent assets may evaporate unexpectedly, if the political regime so decides? Almost certainly.

It is also terrible news for the U.S. banking system. Payments are supposed to be boring and predictable, with certain highly specific exceptions. Now, a huge amount of politics and arbitrariness is being injected into the system. Organizations cannot rely on U.S. payments as they used to. Nor is there any guarantee at all that this is the limit of political interference. The one big lesson that emerges from Abe’s and my book is that once a precedent has been set, it is liable to be built on. Not because there is any grand master plan or secret conspiracy, but because a political appointee, perhaps with an entirely different agenda, sees that banks have been forced to reverse payments for x reason, and asks themselves, why can’t we do that for y as well.

Seriously though, read the article.

Fingers crossed and weather / illness / etc permitting, I’ll be at Boskone tomorrow around 2pm! Look for me in the lobby. I’ll be the guy who looks less like his author photo with every passing day.

That’s all I’ve got for the moment—still on deadline for Undisclosed Things—so I’m off! Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings. See you next week.