I’ve been buried in drafts over the last few weeks - a rewrite I was doing, a few manuscripts to blurb, and the twelve, count them, twelve, in-progress novels with the Clarion West novel workshop group - some amazing work is emerging there and I hope to see it on bookshelves not too long from now. So far we’ve had Sarah Pinsker, Daniel Abraham, P. Djèlí Clark, NK Jemisin as guest instructors, with many other wonderful authors/publishing folk to come. I’ve been enjoying myself hugely, which is also making me think about designing more writing courses/doing some craft books/generally teaching more. So I will be doing all of these things, and I’d like to figure how to use this newsletter as a part of this attempt as well.
All of my work news is things I’m waiting for other people to announce, but there’s a lot of ongoing apocalypses to track at the moment. Which means a steady amount of doomscrolling, and if you’re an experienced doomscroller you learn to start organising your doomscrolls according to category of impending apocalypse. Impressively given its scale, the least depressing apocalypse option is currently the AI-based endtime, like when Anthropic (Claude) recently won a case where the judge said the piracy it did was fine, why not. Earlier, the Anthropic CEO (Claude’s dad) said half of white collar jobs would be lost because of AI and I guess that’s the point at which the rest of society will actually give a toss about what people in the arts/media have been screaming about for the last few years. Or maybe they wont, because they wont understand it, MIT studied how using the gpts has a ‘cognitive cost’. And I wonder whether this loss of intelligence will be factored into whatever Zuckerburg is going to pay his Avengers-style AI supergroup and also build a superintelligence which just seems like another Meta-set memoir in the making, though it will not be published by the Tiktok publisher, which has shut down. Meanwhile, Anthropic also published a report about how AIs have learned to blackmail users and sabotage companies, so that should go really well.
Have some cheerful ducks:
Also some very 80s quiz-style facts about books on Book Riot
Killer whales make fashion tools.
Dosa divas, a spicy new game about fighting capitalism with food
A new phrase I learned is ‘dopamine dressing era’. A phrase I knew about but now want to know everything about is monster smut.
Lots of other phrases I don’t know even after reading them. Youth person brainrot comprehension attempt in that ultimate Gen Alpha platform, the Guardian.
Back in a bit
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