Why I'm not on Kindle Unlimited
I've recently had a few people ask me why my books aren't on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service. The short answer is, Amazon is evil. Here's the long answer:...
Turing didn't see this one coming
There's a weird, funny thing about running an online business where people are so often forced to interact with chatbots and "knowledge bases" that they'll...
I am in Portfolio Hell
I'm job-hunting at the moment, which means updating and polishing up my portfolio. While I've got plenty of documentation and scriptwriting samples in there,...
Born to be unmarketable
I'm from Canada, where it's a long-running joke that our celebrities have to wear name tags. It's certainly true that being an artist in Canada is not a job...
Everything happens so much
As previously mentioned in this newsletter, at some point within the past few years I completely lost track of the Hollywood hype machine. I have no idea...
Fleeing the digital old country
For reasons that may be obvious at this point, my mother is thoroughly sick of Facebook and wants to leave the site. Unfortunately Facebook is the thing...
There are no dragons in this book
Conventional publishing wisdom holds that it's not a good idea to release a new book on the same day as a highly-anticipated title like Onyx Storm, but I'm...
New book preorders (and other stuff)
I have not yet figured out how one builds an effective book marketing strategy when one's target demographic isn't "queer romance readers" or "crime thriller...
The reign of the Vanessas Hudgen
I think the big advantage of writing the way I do is that I'm freed from the tyranny of narrative utilitarianism. If I were writing about characters intended...
The trash version of the Criterion Closet
I own a lot of DVDs and a growing number of Blu-rays. I've been collecting physical copies since I was a teenager; when everyone else started ditching their...
Free & cheap degenerate literature, inquire within
Christ, you post 1400 words of your masc special forces protagonist taking the strap and suddenly everyone's a fucking coward. Anyway, I've just finished the...
The rage of Funko('s IP trolling bot)
Over the weekend, itch.io (an indie games marketplace, and also one of the sites where I host my books) was taken offline by its domain registrar in response...
The Thick of It was a documentary
The UK government has decided to stop issuing physical residence permits to immigrants (like me) and start using "e-visas" instead. The practical upshot of...
It's capital all the way down
One of the latest developments in the world of fanfiction is a debate over "archive-locking": making one's fanfics only visible to registered users of the...
I hated Twitter before it was cool
My RSS reader this week contains no less than three stories about how Bluesky is the rightful successor to Twitter and will, furthermore, save the internet....
Just Alberta things
A friend of mine sent me this screencap from a livestream of the Until Dawn remake: Until Dawn takes place in the Canadian Rockies, and Edmonton would be one...
The endangered lit brick
A friend of mine is currently having his novel shopped around by an agent, and what he's been hearing back is that the Big Five publishers almost exclusively...
New book (and last gasp of the Spooky Sale)
The thing about publishing as frequently as I do is that you eventually run out of ways to say "I've written a new thing, please check it out." Anyway: I've...
New preorder and some horny opera
I think I'm done with Booksprout, the service I've been using to provide free advance copies to book reviewers. The service itself is fine, and the reviews...
I return from the frozen north
So I'm back in the UK now, after three weeks visiting in Canada — specifically Edmonton, a city I am now woefully maladapted to living in. People here in...
