"The Executive Leadership and Trustees on the Board of the Horror Writers Association has voted to remove Sephera Giron from her position as Trustee effective immediately.” Good. As an ex-trustee, wish I had the time. The HWA needs more “luddites” who aren’t afraid to speak up.

I had my gargoyle gecko out for some running around time and she jumped off my shoulder onto the shelf and ran halfway up one of my Stoker awards and has just zoned out there.

I don't know who needs to know this, but: mourning geckos are MUCH easier to catch than yellow-headed dwarf geckos. Mourning geckos tend to scurry a few inches and freeze, but the yellow-headed dwarf geckos will rocket away and thrash around wildly if you get your fingers on them.

Wanna support queer writers? Back the project here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/dav...

The Neon Hemlock Novella Series | Volume Seven

Novellas and a short story collection from “the apex of queer speculative fiction publishing” —Publishers Weekly

kickstarter.com

Somewhere in New England, there needs to be a promontory named Bonks Head.

Hey, the court just gave final approval to the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic. I'm reading through the order right now. www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058...

Judgment AND Order AND Terminate Civil Case AND ~Util - Terminate Motions – #680 in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal., 4:24-cv-05417) – CourtListener.com

Judgment AND Order AND Terminate Civil Case AND ~Util - Terminate Motions

courtlistener.com

Heads-up for folks with food allergies and sensitivities ... it turns out most of what's sold as 100% avocado oil is adulterated with other oils, so you can't know what's in it unless you're very sure of the manufacturer: www.npr.org/2026/07/21/n...

Is that food really made with 100% avocado oil? Likely not

A new study finds that consumers who are paying a premium for foods advertised as made with avocado oil are probably not getting what they think they're buying.

npr.org

I and @jarodkanderson.bsky.social, @quotidianwriter.bsky.social, Mindy McGinnis, Nelson Rolon, and Thao Thai are mentoring emerging Central Ohio writers through the Writers Rising program, which is free and open to applications now through 8/20: www.quotidianwriter.com/writers-rising

The follow-up novel has been delivered, edited, and I need to submit revisions in the next month. Updated title: Daughter, Dreamer, Slayer

Lucy A. Snyder@lucyasnyder.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm about a month out from my deadline to deliver the follow-up novel to Sister, Maiden, Monster. Making good progress. Preliminary title (but subject to change): In The Bones of a Sundered World

The creator of Roger Rabbit (who is 85 years old by the way) is a good sort Crossposted with @openvibe.social

Discussing a collab with one of my favorite writers and we're both pretty geeked about it. 😁

To heck with the Necronomicon: learning the sugar content of my favorite desserts is truly cursed information.

Yeah I think I spoke up on this because things will only get worse if they are ignored and at least Taco Bell did something!! They did it unprompted! No one asked them to. They did something they are obligated to do and a lot of other corporations won't.

This kinda mirrors my thoughts on the matter, and an issue that I do genuinely think is killing us: right now we treat the first person to DO SOMETHING about a problem as the cause of the problem, which disincentivizes actually giving a fuck about anything.

Doe@doefulwoeful.bsky.social · 3w ago

Not to go to bat for a fast food conglomerate but they were the first business to blow the whistle on this, pull potential contaminants from their stores and alert people to the potential harm. It is not their fault their supplier gave them an invisible parasite. It's a supply chain problem

Exciting news from Lightspeed -- an old hand leaves, an older one returns. I am going to miss the team so much, but I'm so excited for what will come next! www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/e...

Editorial: July 2026 - Lightspeed Magazine

Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month's content and for all of John Joseph Adams's media and book recommendations!

lightspeedmagazine.com

Huge new class action lawsuit filed by big publishers and authors against Google this week over AI training. It accuses Google of taking millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly using them to train LLMs. 🧵 1/4

Lots of us were raised in ways that make self-deprecation a reflex but: writers, please don't run down your own genres of choice. For instance: If someone says "Hey, you sold a book?" try not to shuffle and reply "Yeah, but it's just small press poetry" or "Yeah, but it's just a horror novel."

Tell your friends you love them, man. You never fuckin know.

I've encountered a bunch of bad/baffling creative feedback, but the one that still leaves me scratching my head was the OSU poetry instructor who insisted that poetry should not be narrative. The oldest, best-known poems in literature are narrative poems. C'mon.

S R Jones @aegisimmemorial.bsky.social · last mo.

If you see this, please tell me the worst/most baffling bit of creative feedback you've ever recieved. Mine is still the time somebody told me my aliens had names that were too alien. Not that they were unpronounceable, just that they didn't sound enough like human names.

I usually don't repost images without alt-text but I went to alt-text this one and I'm like well it's... well, it's a crab-fishing boat, and there's a door, and the door is Full Of Crab????????

Zac Thompson@zacthompson.bsky.social · last mo.

Pictures from a friend of mine who works on a crab-fishing boat off the coast of Newfoundland. I love the nightmare crab door.

me writing a piece of fiction: "I cannot use an exclamation mark as the whole thing will sound unhinged." me writing an email: "Do you! Want! To send me! The File! I would really! Like! The file!"

If you're in the Columbus, OH area on July 11th or 12th, come down to the Columbus Book Festival! I'll be in the Horror Writers Association tent with other authors. www.columbusbookfestival.org

Columbus Book Festival

Celebrate a community of book lovers at the two-day Columbus Book Festival at Columbus Metropolitan Library's historic Main Library.

columbusbookfestival.org

I am extremely pleased to have this essay, on how American fiction has grappled with COVID, in @currentaffairs.bsky.social. This is a subject I care deeply about and had been wanting to write about at length for a long time. Please give it a read.

We Still Haven’t Processed the Pandemic

Novels set during the height of COVID-19 fail to tell the full story of that era of mass death and despair.

currentaffairs.org

Speaking of horrible ideas ... AARP is telling their elderly, computer-naive subscribers to use AI.

I shared an article (not mine) hosted on Substack and had a bunch of people jumping down my throat about it being on Substack. Someone trying to be helpful suggested Beehiiv as an alternative platform. I checked it out. It's not an alternative at all, as far as I can tell.

The heat is brutal, so a couple of days ago I put shades over both my ponds ... so far the water temperature is staying reasonable. You would never know I pulled a bunch of frogbit out of this one just yesterday. (There's a bubbler so the oxygenation is fine.) (Yes, that is a tree in the pond.)

Honestly, all the arguments about Substack and Blockchain and whether I should even try to prove my authenticity as a human creator make my head hurt. I just wanna write stories about tentacles and doom and girls in love.

I wrote a very long blog post with my feelings about @ellipsus.com Emboss, Disability, Surveillance, and the futility of trying to prove humanity. dreaming.daxmurray.com/ellipsus-emb...

Ellipsus Emboss, Disability, Surveillance, and Proving Humanity.

Let's put authors in the panopticon and let all their haters invade their privacy!

dreaming.daxmurray.com

I'm leaving this up because of the conversation, but I'm adding my voice to those who say: Don't use this. The author confirmed to me that she's committed to using AI for coding this, and it's a bad idea for lots of reasons.

Lucy A. Snyder@lucyasnyder.bsky.social · last mo.

This may be of interest to a lot of folks here: "I Built An App for Authors To Prove They Did Not Use AI To Write." open.substack.com/pub/verakuri...

"Trans people will always exist." Cool. "They can't kill us all." Comforting. Yeah, transness will survive, but *I* want to survive, too, y'know? But also, survival and existence aren't enough for me anymore, and they shouldn't be enough for allies either. I want to see my trans friends thrive.