October Update, Event Reminder, Mini-Giveaway, Bit o' News, Pointless Rant. And a Song.
A mid-month goodie bag
Right, first up and most importantly:
WHERE THE GHOST STORY RUMPUS IS, HALLOWEEN 2023 EDITION:
Next Saturday, October 28th, at dusk— that’s 4:00 p.m., for those of you who don’t speak upstate New York— in what promises to be a proper chilly Hudson River Valley drizzle, I will be making my first East Coast reading appearance in several years at the dreamy Owl Pen Books in Greenwich, not too far from Saratoga Springs. I’ll be joined by three delightful writers and people: John Langan, Julia Rust, and David Surface.
The town of Greenwich is kinda out in the woods, yes. Where bookstores of your dreams should be. There’s a high school there. Their mascot really is the Green Witches. See?
Been a while since I’ve looked forward to an event quite this much. Only one thing that would make it more special:
You, coming.
See you there?
ABOUT THAT GHOST STORY I (SORT OF) PROMISED YOU:
It’s coming. At its own pace, in its own time, as stories will. But it’s getting there. I’m not convinced it’s going to be ready by Halloween. And I’m not putting it up until I’m sure I like it.
But it will be here. Call it a seasonal offering. Brit-Am Halloween-Xmas, when most of you call down your ghosts.
As opposed to people like me, who call or just trail them along with us all year round…
The story’s called “Iaway”.
A MINI GIVEAWAY
First current paid subscriber (monthly or annual or lifetime) who contacts me to request it, either in comments below or via site email, will receive a promo code for a free download of the smashing new audio version of my most recent collection, Tell Me When I Disappear, which is available now on Audible or wherever you get your audio entertainment.
Not a subscriber, yet? I have a fix for that…
A USELESS, HALF-HEARTED RANT
Even I don’t understand why, but the completely unsurprising discovery, courtesy of the searchable database put up by The Atlantic, that at least three of my books have been stolen— no, there is no other word for it. and no, it’s not just some accidental oversight, it’s a program doing exactly what its programmers intended, meaning steal— by Meta et al for use in “training” their A.I. engines to write well has left me even angrier, and more brokenhearted, than the now-familiar experience of finding freshly pirated versions of my books in cyberspace, and getting depressing hints about just how many of the readers I do have probably read me that way.
This isn’t about whether A.I.s can write well. Whatever that means. It’s not even about getting offered a say in whether I want to make some money by furthering and hastening not just my own professional extinction but the species-wide memory wipe about what art is and why it matters (although I would have said no).
It’s the arrogance, The ruthless recklessness of the ungodly rich. There are class action law suits already. Thank goodness, and of course. The lawsuits will win (meaning settle), eventually. And a few years from now, I’m sure I will get an email with instructions about how to receive my $52 share of the few million dollar penalty being divided amongst the however many thousand victims these people filched from (minus lawyer fees). I’m sure that damage-money is already built into the budget.
In other words, it’s not the inhumanity of A.I. that’s so crushing; it’s the inhumanity of people. The ongoing evolution of our collective perception of our minutes alive and of each other as opportunities to monetize, the end.
Given the horrors of these past few weeks, and the mass suffering of so many, this hardly seems worth thinking about, let alone posting about. Even I hardly care at this point, and I honestly haven’t thought about it much.
And I do so much want this space to be primarily about reasons to wake up, keep going, keep finding, stay open to one another. Hence the name I gave it.
But sometimes. Sometimes…
A SONG
This is a mostly mixed, unmastered track from the third Momzer record, which we really will probably finish one day. I wrote it in what seemed then like dark times, as some sort of quietly defiant survival hymn. Of course, now, those times feel like halcyon days, and the song too polite.
But I still like the song. It’s called “Sometimes.” Here it is.
(that is…here it will be. Having a technical issue I don’t understand. Check back, please…)
(Okay, try now and let me know…)
(Music performed by Mark Estberg, Jonas Yip, me. Song/lyrics by me. Production by Jonas.)