Since it’s good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I’ve added a statement on AI to my website.
Next task: updating the copyright page in all my BVC ebooks to state that I do not grant permission for them to be used in training AI models, and any such use is prohibited.
Continuing with the clothing theme, the New Worlds Patreon is asking: what makes fashion change? Who drives that change? Comment over there!
We’ve all got a friend like this.
They used to be great. Always there for you, super helpful whenever you needed a hand with something. They were the friendly gossipmonger, full of news about how friends were doing, and they even got you into some new hobbies and communities where you made a ton of new friends. And in turn, when they had a problem or two, you of course did what you could to help them past it, because they meant so much to you.
But lately . . . that friend hasn’t been so great.
They started getting needier. Calling you at all hours of the day, to the point where you started using caller ID to screen them out, because you just couldn’t deal with it. Then they started emailing you all the time — five, ten, fifty times a day. You bin some of their messages, read others, and a bunch more languish in your inbox because one of these days, when you have some spare time, you’ll get around to them. Even though a lot of what’s in those emails is out of date now, and even more of it was never actually that important in the first place.
If that was all, it would be fine. But lately . . . okay, can we be honest? This is your friend, we don’t want to speak ill of them, and you remember all those good memories from years past. But lately, “not so great” is kind of an understatement. Your friend — our friend, because I have one, too — has gotten toxic.
They’re messaging us constantly, not just in email, not just in texts, but in Slack and Discord and every social media app we’re on. We block what we can, but we can’t stop it entirely, not without abandoning those apps entirely, which means losing touch with the people who aren’t so toxic. We go to text our mother on her birthday but there’s five pop-over notifications from our friend, and we can only see the first few words of each one, so we can’t really tell what they’re about (they might be important?); we have to click through and look at them. Of course they’re mostly trash, as usual, but oh, here’s a cute video they sent, and what was it we were doing? Right, texting our mother. But now our friend is pestering us to say what we think about the gift we got her, and hey, here are some other products we might also like to buy, and they keep doing it even when we tell them to stop. Fliers even show up on our doorstep — how did our friend get our home address? We specifically tried to keep it from them!
Some days our friend refuses to talk to us unless we download this new app they insist on using. We’re not sure why; they swear the app is more convenient for us, but it’s janky and loaded with ads and we have to pay money if we want to be able to scroll back and see the conversation we had last week. Plus now our friend’s messages are showing up out of order, for . . . reasons? Because of course we’d rather hear again about the car accident they got in two years ago, the one where a toddler died, than about the new energy drink that’s helping them lose weight — sorry, no, that was an ad, and now we’ve forgotten what message of theirs we were looking for in the first place. Probably one where they were having yet another problem, and if you stopped to count the hours, you’d realize you’ve spent far more time managing your friend’s issues than they have helping you with yours. Or hey, here’s one where they’re trying to interest us in a new hobby, a new community, but is it just me, or do those people look really sketchy? Every conversation goes slowly, every interaction with this friend is full of distractions and scams and we don’t like to admit it but we’re pretty sure they’re stealing from us when we’re not watching.
We’ve got only two choices, and both of them suck. We can spend seconds, minutes, hours of our one wild and precious life managing our friend’s bullshit, trying to reduce it to a minimum since we can’t get rid of it entirely. Or we can give up on managing it and just let the sea of chaos wash over us, drowning out everything else.
And all around us, people are moaning that they’re such bad friends these days, they have a hard time knowing how to keep up with or interact sensibly with Their Toxic Friend.
The tech experience has gotten bad. It’s not you, it’s them.
But we can’t just break up with Our Toxic Friend. Because they’re everywhere in our life, and they’re constantly getting worse.
Six years after starting the topic, the New Worlds Patreon returns to other aspects of how clothing can communicate something about the person who wears it! Comment over there.
For the last essay of December, 2024, and this particular sub-topic, the New Worlds Patreon turns to the top brass of a military force — and more specifically, what a good general does. (Hint: very little of the nonsensical “genius” moves TV and movies love.) Comment over there!
I thought I was done with publications for the year, but one more has slipped in under the wire! My flash story “Ten Minutes” is free to read online at The Cosmic Background. It’s born of my brain’s invincible impulse to narrate everything, including my own attempts at meditation — which led to me writing a story about meditation! And about something else, but you’ll have to read to find out what . . .
I’m particularly honored by this timing because The Cosmic Background is running a Kickstarter right now, and so the editor chose my piece as one to showcase what the magazine is doing. I’ll note that, very unusually for our field, TCB pays its slush readers — most markets rely on volunteers for that — so this is part of what your money will support if you pledge! Rewards include your very own eldritch horror in the mail, so check out the Kickstarter page and consider kicking a few bucks their way!
This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay blends a bit into the previous, split apart mostly by the semi-arbitrary standard of having each piece be about a thousand words long, give or take. Having acquired our officers, how do we organize the authority they hold? Comment over there . . .
This looks like a slow year only because the couple of years before it were bonkers. Asterisks mark the things in each category that I’m the most proud of (unless there’s only one thing in the category, in which case, well, it wins by default).
I need to write more short fiction again if I want to have much coming out in 2025 or 2026 . . .
The New Worlds Patreon continues its military tour with a look at officers: how many of them there might be, how they’re chosen, and how they’re promoted. Comment over there!
It’s not exactly tailored to the holiday season, but the New Worlds Patreon is looking at military matters this month. We start with “how big should that army really be?” — comment over there!
The news finally became public today: The Broken Binding, a UK-based special edition publisher, will be putting out an illustrated hardcover edition of the entire Rook and Rose trilogy! New cover art, colored endpaper art, and black-and-white images throughout, with foil on the hard case, the whole shebang. Alyc and I are incredibly excited, and also we signed our names 4,725 in the last month, on tip-in sheets to be bound with the books.
Now, if you’re not already a Broken Binding subscriber, it’s still possible to get a copy . . . but I have to warn you, it’ll be a little bit complicated. Numbers are capped, and according to what I’ve been told, becoming a Tier 2 subscriber (for non-signed books) has a waiting list months long — well after these will have come out, which will be in the first three months of the upcoming year. As for Tier 1 (signed books), the requirement for that is that you already be a Tier 2 subscriber.
But! First of all, The Broken Binding will be selling overstock at some point in the future, after the subscriptions have been fulfilled. According to their social media, that’s likely to be some time in the second half of 2025. Or if you don’t want to wait/don’t want to risk missing your chance, there are always subscribers who decide to resell their copies at or near cost. The Broken Binding’s Facebook group is the hub for arranging these deals . . . though apparently they had some big problems with scammers a while ago, so you have to be invited to join the group now. If you want to go that route, let me know, and I should be able to put you in touch with someone who can invite you.
So yes, that’s a bit of a hassle. But you can check out their Bluesky post to see a preview of the art — no Labyrinth’s Heart there only because that hasn’t yet been finished! The Broken Binding regularly produces lovely, durable books, so if you want a special copy, this is absolutely the time to do it.
As my patrons know, I made a last-minute swap of the theory essay this past Friday. And I remembered to update the notification sent to them! . . . but I didn’t update my post here. So 1) y’all know what a future theory essay will be about, and 2) the correct link is to “The Setting Bible, Part 1.” (The swap happened because what was supposed to be an upcoming essay turned out to span two, and I moved the first part up so as to get both into the same annual collection, rather than splitting them across volumes.)
Five Fridays in this November, so you know what that means: a theory post from the New Worlds Patreon! This time I venture a bit further out of my own sphere and talk about taking inspiration from biology; comment over there.
The New Worlds Patreon‘s final clothing post (for now) takes a look at that most Sisyphean of domestic labors, the doing of laundry — comment over there!
Around 2019, I realized that my reading had become somewhat sporadic — or rather, that it had been somewhat sporadic for quite some time. And when I considered why, I was able to trace it back to a specific root cause:
When I started writing a historical fantasy series, I dove headfirst into research. And as a result, when it came time to set work aside and do something else, “read more” was not high on my list, even if what I would be reading was fun novels instead of history books. Then I finished the Onyx Court series and continued onward into the Memoirs of Lady Trent, which weren’t so research-intensive, but did involve periodic dips into that mode as I oriented myself in a new region for each book. And I just . . . kind of drifted away from regular reading. Until I noticed the lack and made a conscious decision to go back.
Well, here we are in 2024, I’m writing a historical fantasy series again — and I’ve read almost no novels since March.
I binged a few in July when I was on vacation, so I’m sure the impulse isn’t dead. (It’s only pining for the fjords. (Don’t throw things at me. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” has been stuck in my head since March.)) Every so often I slip in something along the way, especially light, quick reads — W.E. Johns’ Worrals books have been good for that. But my TBR shelf, which I was making very steady progress through, has completely stalled out.
The good news is, although I think this particular dive may be even deeper than before — driven by the fact that I started with much less of a grounding in the first place — unlike the Onyx Court series, when we’re done drafting the first book, I don’t have to start all over again in a new century for the second. So I anticipate getting back to more normal reading habits early next year.
But man, I miss wanting to read in my spare time.
Hats last week; shoes this week, as the New Worlds Patreon continues its tour of our accessories — or are they necessities? Comment over there . . .
Last week, on a Tuesday when absolutely nothing else was happening at all, I put out a little book — and I do mean little. It’s right there in the title: The Writer’s Little Book of Naming, an 11K-ish headfirst dive into the sociocultural side of naming — particularly for people, but also a bit for places and things. It looks less at the conlang questions of phonetics and such, more at the ways names can reflect culture and, in so doing, help reinforce and deepen other aspects of worldbuilding.
This is actually the first installment of what I intend to be an irregular series, because it occurred to me one day that ebooks make it possible to assemble works on fairly specialized topics of craft — the kinds of topics that can’t really support an entire print volume, and which appeal to a niche market of writers, but dammit, I want to write about them, so here goes. I’ve got about six of these in mind thus far, so I’ll update as they make it out into the world!
(FYI, it is currently available only through Book View Cafe, the publisher.)
Some of you may have noticed that I abruptly stopped book-blogging in April. That’s not because I stopped reading anything; rather, it’s that my reading list suddenly looked like this:
The Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pérez, trans. Janet Lloyd.
Golden Age Spain, H. Kamen.
Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, María M. Portuondo.
Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, Scott K. Taylor.
Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, Robert Goodwin.
Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, William A. Christian, Jr.
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, Geoffrey Parker.
. . . and that’s just a sampler. It would have been a giant red flag that I was Up To Something — but I couldn’t yet talk about what.
Today, that changes! I can fiiiiiiiiiiiinally announce that Alyc Helms and I are hard at work on another M.A. Carrick collaboration, a historical fantasy duology called The Sea Beyond. From the formal announcement:
In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.
Determined to discover how cosmographers pin down the islands of the Otherworld, Estevan seeks power with the Council of the Sea Beyond – but he risks the exposure of his own secrets, too. For he is a changeling, a faerie masquerading as a mortal. And for a faerie to enter the mortal world like that, a child must go the other way . . .
The Hungry Girl, the nameless human daughter whose place he took, has grown up opposite her “brother.” Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond . . . only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.
Soon the unlikely siblings will need to overcome their rivalry — because only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have come to love.
Though you’d be justified in wondering, this is 100% unconnected to the Onyx Court books: same general time period as Midnight Never Come, yes, and with faeries in, but a completely different version of events — starting with the fact that this is an “open” historical fantasy, where everybody knows and has always known about faerie matters (we’ve been having fun working out some alternate Catholic theology around that), instead of a secret history where the public face of events looks like it did in our world.
So that’s what I’ve been up to this year! I’m not going to backtrack to report on all my reading in the last seven months, but if I have the energy, I may return to a practice from my Onyx Court days, making “book reports” on at least a selection of the titles. We’ll see — right now most of my energy is going to, y’know, the book itself. (And things like finishing up Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon, and and and.) But it’s public and official at last!
From our underthings, the New Worlds Patreon proceeds onward to what we have on our heads. Did you ever notice how weird hats are? Comment on them over there . . .
For a month of clothing, the New Worlds Patreon is starting off right next to the skin. That’s right, it’s time to talk underwear! Comment over there . . .
