I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago when I noticed I’d not released a newsletter since I’d finished serializing my Iron Kelwas novella. I’ll also be going on vacation again very soon, so no time like the present.

We were staying at a beach house on the Outer Banks when Bona Books published their findings after almost publishing an author using AI. I won’t belabor the issue because, frankly, Bona Books did a pretty good job documenting the issue, and I can’t fault them for going public with their findings. That was - in my opinion - the correct way to approach the issue.

I’ll be honest: my history of double-digit rejections has taken its toll. The expectation that I’ll likely compete with alleged stories written by alleged writers was a bit too depressing to contemplate, so instead of thinking about LLMs, fraudulent writers, AI hypsters who would destroy genre fiction markets as a way to promote their model, etc. I started writing a Weird Future thing that has been rattling around in my head.

If the techbros and AI evangelists are depending on us reading the writing on the wall regarding AI’s “inevitability” then it’s my job to be illiterate.

Anyway, it’s been fun to write something that started as an incredibly stupid idea: what if Wizardry but the dungeon’s vertical? I’m having fun, have a vague idea this might be longer than Kelwas but we’ll see.

Speaking of Kelwas, I plan to slap a bad-ass cover on it, and sell it as both ebook and physical copy. Hoping to get this finalized by early 2027.

One More Thing. . .

Okay, so I need to promote The Speculative Detective Agency where my forthcoming story, That Old Black Magic We Call Empire shares a Table of Contents with amazing writers like Amber Sparks, Lincoln Michel, Megan Chee, Monique Laban, and many more! It’s due out October 6, 2026, but we’d love to get at least 50 pre-orders before then.

I’d never written a mystery before - even if mine ended up more on the noir end of that spectrum. Lots of fun to write, but I was quite terrified that one of my readers would tell me it wasn’t noir, let alone mystery, leaving me back at square one.

That’s all she wrote!