Blood Fiction v4 Book Signing

SUNDAY, JUNE 14TH

11:00 AM

BOOK CARNIVAL

348 S TUSTIN ST, ORANGE, CA 928G6

(714) 538-3210

GAMES/SNACKS/WIN COPIES OF THE BOOK!

Stan, my new gecko

 A new addition to the menagerie is Stan, the Standings Day Gecko. I've kept many Day Geckos but never a Standings. Their markings-- green head, blue tail and contrasting stripes-- fade as they get older and they go a little baggy and grey. But don't we all!

Here he (or she) is in all his juvenile glory. 

House Opposite in full splendor

 Caught it on the 23rd. 

This is what it looks like from inside my yard-- in case you're wondering why I find it so striking. 

I know reflections are famously eye-catching. I read many stories as a kid (all of which featured someone with a name like Indian Jim) that had Jim flashing a heliograph to signal our boys as a plot point. 

"Why, it's Indian Jim! He has reached the hiding place--see that flash?"

"It's more than three leagues hence but it's as bright as the sun!"

(I may be mixing Cowboys and pirates there.) 

It's the fixed nature of the mirrors on the house that make it special, along with its timing - presaging the coming of spring. 

The House Opposite That Lights Up at Dawn to Presage The Coming of Spring

 The House Opposite That Lights Up at Dawn to Presage The Coming of Spring is back, baby!

The owner's renovations worked and the dawn glow is back in business this year.

This photo was taken two days ago. The brightest reflection would have been this morning but I overslept two days in a row. Dunno what this means about the prospect of spring.

I don't know yet if the owners/restorers have filled in the erosion on the slope below the house. It's been a rainy year thus far and the vegetation is a lot thicker than usual. The house looks great with its new black (instead of red) roof and new paint.

I'll try to get another shot of the spring glow tomorrow.

I talked about the renovations previously in October 2025 (when the house opposite lights up at dawn to presage the coming of winter), and about a pilgrimage to the house itself in 2020, when the poor thing was going into a bit of a slump.

Poupée Doll (creative non-fiction)

 All this talk about vaccination reminds me of convalescent homes, a fixture of my parents' generation. 

***

Poupée Doll

I remember the fever. It roared in as I played with my doll, Poupée, my woolen rabbit and my teddy bear, all arranged around a little table. I had served them tea and we enjoyed sophisticated little conversations.

The fever hit in one strange instant. Mid-sentence, I lost my train of thought. The child’s table shrank and tumbled down a long tunnel. I stood up, shakily, always on the verge of overbalancing. My family bore haloes. The furniture hollowed out and became nebulous, transcendent. I grew lighter and found myself stepping carefully to avoid floating into the air. I assumed I would rise up to a better place, but in a few moments, these airy angel steps somehow landed me hard on the floor. Sandpaper hands like vises seized me, lifted me and pressed me into a smoldering linen bed where I shivered and burned and mumbled for water I couldn’t drink.

On the third day, I saw the devil, tall and graphic, walking down our street throwing children into a basket on his back. For a week someone placed cold compresses on my forehead while I coughed a thin red membrane on to the pillows. In the few moments I could see, I thought the crimson streaks were my lungs.

Convalescent homes did not take children with Diphtheria. They required us to suffer at home for three weeks until we were non-contagious before they admitted us. My father handed me over to the blue-gowned matron on the twenty second day.  I took my beloved doll, Poupée, so named by my French Aunt Jacqueline. My previous life retreated, like the tide, and a new life washed up against the green gloss walls of the home.

The home was full of children with lumps and stumps, some sightless, some deafened by measles or paralyzed by polio. Paying children were housed in upper wards with windows. The working-class children, like Poupée doll and I, were sequestered in iron beds a mile from the world.

Between my ward and the main door ran a corridor painted a shiny leaf green from waist height down. The color choice may have symbolized spring, new vernal life, to the staff but to inmates it denoted an institutionalized half-life, where you were warehoused until your own body decided whether you would live or die. At night, the nurses would slap us if we did not sleep promptly at lights out. During the day, we played with our toys, if we had brought them, ate small portions of pie from shallow tins the size of rail station posters, served with potatoes and, if we were very good, an hour in the afternoon sun in the grounds next to the hospital laundry.

William, the boy with polio, had graduated from an iron lung in the hospital to iron legs at the home. He now wore calipers, which barely slowed him down. He climbed the crabapple tree in the yard and threw down the tiny sour apples, which we gathered up, laughing, and took to our little metal lockers beside our beds.

Then, the mother of a Scarlet Fever girl lied about the three-week quarantine. One of the paying girls, she was admitted still in the throes of fever. Lucky for her, as the starchy nurses applied their hottest poultices and brought her temperature down in hours. Unlucky for us, as her Streptococcus coughed its way into our green-striped corridors and turned our skin to raw-nerved burplap. The renewed fever knocked me back into the burning linen for three more weeks, and by the time I was able to breathe again, my ward was emptied. William was dead and already in the ground under a sandstone slab, and my friend with spina bifida was paraplegic, shortly to pass away.

Four months after I arrived at the convalescent home, I passed fit to leave.

Poupée doll did not leave with me. She remained behind, scheduled to be destroyed, because the nurses said toys could never recover and would be infectious all their lives. I lost my beloved companion and barely kept my life.

New short story "Twin Engines" in Black Cat Weekly #217

 My newest short story "Twin Engines" is in Black Cat Weekly #217, out today. 

Cover of Black Cat Weekly #217

Twin Engines, by Lyle Hopwood

Her escape to New Boston leads to a fateful meeting with a racing legend.

Black Cat Weeklies are jam-packed with goodies. Every issue includes two (2) entire novels, half a dozen short stories and a solve-it-yourself mystery!

For 40c!

The House Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn--good news!

Over the years I've posted many pictures of the House Opposite That Lights Up At Dawn to Presage the Coming of Spring (HOTLUAD).  Recently, things weren't looking so good for HOTLUAD. It was vacant, subject to vandalism and showing a lot of erosion in the hillside below the house. 

HOTLUAD glowed at the opposite end of the year as well, when the sun hit it at the same angle it did in March. So this week we had an opportunity to see how it was doing. 

Verdict: All's well with HOTLUAD!

Someone has been doing a lot of work on it in the last few months. I'm not sure if it's owned by the same people, but two or three lots above it are also being renovated, and a lot of overgrown trees removed. HOTLUAD itself first swapped its brick-red roof (the San Juan Capistrano city-approved color) for slate grey, and then various windows disappeared and reappeared several times (presumably being boarded up and then replaced). Although the famous dumper truck did not come back, workmen's trucks were frequently in evidence along with ladders and suchlike "improvement" technology. 

February 2018

October 2024

August 2025

In August this year, repairs started in earnest. You can see that air conditioning units are being moved in (or out) and all kinds of magic are happening with the all-important windows. 

And today, October 17th:

October 2025

Look at that glow!

Here's a zoom:

October 2025

You can also see how the trees have been trimmed or removed, to the right of HOTLUAD.

I have great hopes for it presaging spring in four months. 

Jack White - CBGB Festival, 27th September 2025

And here's another standout performance. The Rock/blues king is still putting it all out there. Jack White at the CBGB Festival, 2025. 

 

Jack White - Live at Edgefield (5/24/25)

I haven't been celebrating music enough. Let's catch up.

 

Updated Lyle Hopwood bibliography with more links to "free to read" sites.

 As more an more magazines are scanned and come online at archive.org, more of my early stories are available to "borrow" from them. 

I've updated my bibliography today. Links in the first section sometimes go to the publishers sales page, but more often go to free-to-read sites like archive.org. I'm in two minds about their "service" - I certainly don't get paid when you borrow a magazine from them - but it is, as Americans say, what it is. 

Lyle Hopwood

Bibliography

Short Stories

The Technophobe (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #10 ed. Chris Reed

Sensonomicon (1988) in Back Brain Recluse #11 ed. Chris Reed

The Fathers (1989) in Back Brain Recluse, #13 ed. Chris Reed

The Outside Door (1989) in Interzone, #28 ed. Simon Ounsley, David Pringle

Feminine Intuition (1990) in Dream Science Fiction #23 ed. George P. Townsend

Milk (1991) in Edge Detector #3 ed. Glenn Grant

David Cronenberg's "Alien" - Novelisation by J. G. Ballard (1993) in Interzone, #75 ed. Lee Montgomerie, David Pringle

Pace Car (2021) in Interzone #290/291 ed. Andy Cox

Jump Jiving (2022) in Eldritch Science #8 ed. George Phillies

Sundown (2022) in The Writing Disorder, Winter 2022 ed. C. E. Lukather

Blackpool Tower (2023) in BFS Horizons, #15 ed. Pete. W. Sutton

Autonomous (2023) in Aurealis, #157 ed. Dirk Strasser

Sunless (2023) in IZ Digital April 2023 ed. Gareth Jelley

Hang on to Yourself (2023) in Bewildering Stories #1021 ed. Don Webb  

Nine Dioptres (2023) in IZ Digital May 2023 ed. Gareth Jelley

Swim With the Space Whales (2024) in Interzone #300 ed. Gareth Jelley  

The Oathbreaker (2025) in Black Cat Weekly #186 ed. John Betancourt

Short stories in anthologies

The Technophobe (Technophobia) (1990) in Unter die Haut (Under the Skin) Phantastische Erzählungen amerikanischer Autorinnen Gebundene Ausgabe ed. Karin Ivancscis und Peter Hiess

The Outside Door (Die Tür nach Draußen) (1990) in Unter die Haut (Under the Skin) Phantastische Erzählungen amerikanischer Autorinnen Gebundene Ausgabe ed. Karin Ivancscis und Peter Hiess

Feminine Intuition (Weibliche Intuition) (1990) in Unter die Haut (Under the Skin) Phantastische Erzählungen amerikanischer Autorinnen Gebundene Ausgabe ed. Karin Ivancscis und Peter Hiess

Milk (Die Milch der frommen Gewalt) (1989) in Der Riss im Himmel (The Crack in Heaven) Science-Fiction europäischer und amerikanischer Autorinnen Gebundene Ausgabe ed. Karin Ivancsics

Lokitoo (2023) in Union, A Dragon Soul Press Anthology ed. J. E. Feldman

Writ Large (2023) in Blood Fiction v2 ed. Mark Sevi

Cargo Cults (2023) in Emanations Zen ed. Carter Kaplan

The Burn Out (2023) in Fission #3 ed. Eugen Bacon and Gene Rowe

The Naiad (2024) in Unauthorised Departures, ed. Rick McGrath

Pace Car (2024) reprinted in in Unauthorised Departures, ed. Rick McGrath

Autonomous (2024) reprinted in in Unauthorised Departures, ed. Rick McGrath

Crossmatch (2024) in Blood Fiction v3, ed. Mark Sevi

Mummy Wheat (2024) in Blood Fiction v3 ed. Mark Sevi  

Hey, Marilyn (2025) in BSFA Fission #5 ed. Gene Rowe and Eugen Bacon



Audio

Crossmatch 2824 (2024) in Creepy Pod narrated by Megan McDuffee

RIP Mark Volman: Marc Bolan on the Flo & Eddie show

RIP Mark Volman, one half of Flo & Eddie, The Turtles and Frank Zappa/T.Rex backing singers. 

The joyous wails of Flo & Eddie in the background of T.Rex songs were, and are, a delight to me. In this video, Marc Bolan starts to record a station ident and it turns into a whole song, with Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan providing the solid support. 

Fiction: Angel City (short story)

 

Angel City

Eastern American legends tell of a tribe who founded a golden city in the far west, led by their divine foremother Eve Angelica. The Royal Treasurer asked us to determine if her city existed, and if so, to locate the gold these ancient people amassed and sequester it for our Queen.

For our trek, I assembled a team of five women; a geologist, a botanist, two ethnologists who had lived with a remaining eastern tribe, and an interpreter, Skilar, who was brought up in an east coast village. She could read several hundred written word-glyphs as well as speak latter-day Inglish fluently.

The first westerners we met, living outside the ruins of Angel City, call themselves the Lost Feelies. They do not know of Eve. They say their founders were white men and women from the east who all arrived together on iron horses. They call these ancients the “Rubber Barons,” and say they built Angel City in one hundred years. The Lost Feelies told us that the tribe now dwelling in the inner city are not related to them, arriving long after the city was built.

When asked why their people abandoned the city, the Lost Feelies say supernatural enemies from the Land of the Setting Sun sent two plagues: “Bee Die Off” killed all the flowers and “wheat rust” (a fungus) ruined their grain fields. The city dwellers starved or dispersed. From the size of trees now growing in the ruins our botanist agreed that a major disaster occurred around four hundred years ago.

We followed the course of the river, which is a mere trickle in a vast channel some thirty paces wide, now much overgrown. On once-paved streets near the remaining great buildings, which they call “Those-Who-Scratch-The-Sky,” there are numerous dwellings made of ephemeral materials. They include cartonnage boxes and blankets of animal and plant fibers. There exists a great stock of paper in the abandoned buildings, which the people scavenge for cartonnage-making. A popular coating for the papier-mâché homes is a variety of green paper cut into hand-length rectangles. Each bears a portrait of a man in the center and a selection of lucky numbers. The tribe living in the streets call themselves “Skidro.” They too claim to be descendants of those who built the Sky Scratchers. They say they have an “American Dream” that material wealth will “trickle down” from the Sky Scratcher, and so they live in its shadow, waiting.

A Sky Scratcher

We asked the Skidro where they kept this treasure. They pointed to the largest Sky Scratcher and said it is concealed “inside the block-chain.” Skilar elicited from them that the ultimate source of wealth is the “bite coin.” Our ethnologists believe this must be gold, since gold will readily take teeth marks, but I feel the concept of “trickle down” strongly suggests that wealth was spiritual, distributed by a sky god.

We soon reached an impasse, despite Skilar’s fluency. I quickly learned that the highest Skidro moral value is “Freedom of Speech.” They permit and even encourage untruths. They call lies “Alternative Facts.” They recite a mantra, “Do your own research!” When we asked for verification of statements, they cry “I plead the fifth,” and “We refuse compelled speech!”

Our geologist told us that this area suffers frequent quakes. Eight Sky Scratchers still stand, but ten or a dozen have fallen. These cluster, with lower-height wooden buildings (and some stone) surrounding them as far as the eye can see. Some still have metal glyphs attached to the upper façade. Skilar told us they were single words without a common meaning, denoting the name of the god to whom the edifice was dedicated. 

We explored the tallest intact tower.  It is rectilinear at the bottom, quickly becoming circular, and built in a series of reducing steps, or setbacks, which eventually shrink away to leave a round tower above, surmounted with a crown. According to Skilar, the building is composed of 73 “floors” (as each layer is called, though they are not on the ground). Each “floor” is about the height of two women and each has many window bays inset into the outer surface. The core and cladding are made of white “concrete” which Skilar described as a stone the ancients liquified, then poured from spinning machines, after which it resolidified. Concrete is usually white but sometimes beige, like a cheap sandstone but with far more strength (as I found when I tried to chip a piece off as a souvenir).

From the remains of the roadway, broad concrete stairs ascend to the “ground floor.” The step height is designed for women, but they measure a dozen paces in width, suggesting ceremonial processions ascended the steps.  Skidro told Skilar that workers, both women and men, walked up the steps to spend time sitting in chambers at the top of the building. We were unable to verify this. The structure is so austere that it seems likely to me that only priests would be allowed to enter it.

At the top of the stairs are two flat, rectangular areas filled with small rocks. Skilar learned these were fountains that propelled water through hidden pipes into the air, after which it would sink out of sight. I assume this water was used for ritual ablutions before ceremonies. The river is a mile away but our geologist pointed out that, judging by the size of its concrete channel, it must have been a veritable torrent in the Classic Period. Perhaps the depletion of this resource provides another reason for the city’s abandonment.

Beyond this ritual cistern, against the concrete wall, stand four metal sculptures. These resemble serpents adorned with red, serrated crowns. Each has a glyph affixed which Skilar read as “Fire Riser.” She did not know what relationship snakes have to fire.  I asked her if the glyphs could be an example of “Freedom of Speech,” but she said that both here and in the east, glyphs sanctified by the “Fire General” were always true, as the gods required the General to be literally truthful in all her dealings with the populus.

Serpent sculpture at the top of the broad stair.
Traces of red paint remain visible.

The main entrance on the “ground floor” (many steps above the ground) was originally composed of large sheets of curved blue glass, some fitted with hinges to form doors.  We saw no evidence of fortifications or guard quarters. The doors lead into an expansive open chamber. Large concrete pillars inside the space reveal the method by which the immense weight of the building is distributed to the ground, but the size of the open space is remarkable. It is some six “floors” high. The space—Skilar read the glyph as “atrium”—retains traces of wood flooring and there is a long, chest-height counter with remnants of red-stained wood. Skilar said that easterners believe the ancients stationed four “recessionists” in military garb behind these counters to repel invaders and escort invited guests.

Light pours in through the upper windows, lower windows and doors. It seemed a barren glare to us, but while the blue glass remained intact on the now open side of “atrium,” daylight must have been calming and tranquil.

Skilar and I climbed the ribbed metal staircase at the far side of “atrium.”  It leads only to a balcony (or half-floor with a short wall) overlooking the entrance and “atrium.” Further ascent, Skilar said, was undertaken in a box winched on cables. We explored, finding two arrays of the winched boxes and many rooms of unknown use. We saw several blocks and chains, but I did not find any bite-coins.

We saw several other glyphs Skilar believes the “Fire General” must have written.  Signs include “Occupancy” followed by a numeral, which must be the number of celebrants in a religious ceremony, and “Emergency Exit,” a reference, I believe, to the doorways which are thrown open during an “Occupancy” and through which Disaster Demons are expelled. From the balcony, we saw that the principal contents of the vast “atrium” comprises many ceramic containers, the size of coffins, each one filled with soil. Around them, the Classic Period tribe placed stools with backs, for comfortable viewing of the vessels’ contents.

I asked our botanist to examine the plant material remaining in the soil-containers. She found desiccated leaves and stalks from Swiss Cheese plants, remnants of Bromeliads, dried leaves of Velvet Philodendron, and stalks of Dumbcane. All of these, she told me, originate in rainforests far to the south of Angel City.  They are all inedible and some are noxious, so were not grown for food.

We left the city precipitously, as an earth tremor shook the ground. The Skidro told us it presaged another “big one” strong enough to collapse a sky-scratcher.

From our brief visit, I conclude that the ceremonial cisterns before the entrance, the dim, filtered blue light, the serpent sculptures and the large ceramic pots filled with rainforest trees and shrubs surrounded by observation platforms and resting areas—even the belief that beneficence ‘trickles down’ like drips from trees—suggest an attempt to recreate the tropical home of their gods. I further believe, contrary to their own origin myth, that the city-builders came from the south, bringing their gods with them. The Sky-Scratchers were their temples.

Accordingly, we feel that any subsequent expedition in search of bite-coin should contact the more indigenous tribes, beginning with the Lost Feelies (since we have already made contact) and their neighbors, the Hollyweird.

***

This piece is a travelogue in the style of Fr. Diego de Landa. It is a fictional account of an expedition to the ruins of Los Angeles.

The Classic Maya civilization collapsed five centuries before Father Diego de Landa arrived in Yucatán, Mexico. He set to learning Mayan history, relying on contemporary villagers’ stories and his own primitive ethnography. In 1562, de Landa burned the 27 bark-paper books he had found, believing them to be the work of demons. In doing so, he wiped out almost all written Mayan historical records. Because of his vandalism, his account of explorations in Yucatán paradoxically provides much of what we know about Maya life.

***

07/17/25 - edited the image of ruined LA

MIcro-retirement

 Silicon Valley occasionally invents something really useful. This week they invented "micro-retirements" - two weeks off work every 12 to 18 months.

Fission #5 now available

 

Fission #5, edited by Gene Rowe and Eugen Bacon, is available now from wherever you get books. 

Among many others it features my short story "Hey, Marilyn."

Demos, a member of the Atropian sect pledged to end human life on Earth, learns Marilyn may be incubating a young AI.  Paul, one of a loose group of her friends, wants her to live--Marilyn, that is, not the AI.

Science Fiction: How to find an Agent and how to promote your book

A friend asked me for advice on publishing and promoting a Science Fiction novel. I’ve never published one, so I researched it. I hope it will be of use to others.

Generally, advice for how to get your manuscript accepted and published is the same as for non-genre novels: Find an agent or find a publisher which accepts non-agented submissions.

Finding an agent

You can research agents and track submissions through sites like QueryTracker, MSWL (Manuscript Wish List), Reedsy and Publishers Marketplace. Some agents want you send to them exclusively (i.e. they do not accept a simultaneous submission) but given that they have up to six months response times, you may prefer to ignore that and send out queries in batches of 5-10 and wait for feedback. Based on the feedback, if necessary revise the query letter and/or manuscript and then send out the next batch.

In a hurry?

Lists of literary agents for Science Fiction:

https://blog.reedsy.com/literary-agents/science-fiction/

https://literaryagencies.com/science-fiction-literary-agents/

https://www.tckpublishing.com/literary-agents-accepting-science-fiction-and-fantasy-submissions/

No Agent?

Some book publishers accept non-agented submissions. They tend to keep it on the down-low because when they open up to submissions they get a flood of manuscripts from writers who have not bothered to read their guidelines and send unsuitable material. If you want to succeed, read the publishers’ guidelines. If possible, read some of their books. (This goes for finding an agent as well. Know what they want before you write them.)

Unrelated Picture Because Posts
Without Pictures Get Less Engagement

How to find a publisher who accepts unagented Science Fiction manuscripts:

Authors Publish send out regular lists of publishers accepting manuscripts.

Aethon Books, Flame Tree Publishing, Arcadia, and Dark Age Press all have open submission periods occasionally, so you can check their websites.

A place of intent blog has a list of publishers https://www.aplaceofintent.co.uk/blog/science-fiction-and-fantasy-publishers-accepting-submissions

Science Fiction Book Promotion

Your book is published. Now you have to publicize it. This goes for both self-published and trad published books. Somehow, your book has to stand out from the 80,000 other books published this week.

Here are some places you can promote the book.

1. Social Media and Online Communities

• Goodreads: Join science fiction groups and participate in discussions or book clubs to build relationships with potential readers.
• Facebook: Create an author page and join large sci-fi/fantasy groups such as "International Sci fi and Fantasy Book Club " or "Fantasy-Faction - Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Discussion." These groups sometimes allow self-promotion for active members.
• Twitter/X, Bluesky: Use hashtags like #scifi, #amwriting, and #indieauthor to reach a broader audience.
• TikTok: I know nothing about it but people are always talking about BookTok.
• Instagram: Cover reveals and photos of your cat sitting on your book

2. Book Promotion and Advertising Platforms

• BookBub: Discounted book promotions. BookBub features can significantly boost sales and visibility. Be prepared to pay.
• BookBaby: Paid promotions, but also has a lot of helpful articles, written as “You would have to do this and this and this unless you hire us to do it for you” where this and this and this are perfectly doable if you’re motivated.
• Other Promotion Sites: Consider sites like Freebooksy, Book Barbarian, and Books Butterfly. These platforms specialize in promoting books to genre-specific audiences.
• Amazon Ads: Run targeted ads to reach readers interested in similar books. Amazon’s advertising platform allows you to set your own budget and track performance.
• Facebook Ads: Boost posts or run targeted ad campaigns to reach sci-fi fans on Facebook.

3. Newsletters and Email Marketing

• Substack: Free platform to start an author newsletter and build a subscriber base.
• MailChimp: For managing larger email lists and automating campaigns.
• StoryOrigin and BookFunnel: Use for newsletter swaps and group promotions, helping you reach new readers and grow your email list.

4. Book Reviewers and Influencers

• Book Bloggers and YouTubers: Reach out to influencers specializing in science fiction for reviews and interviews.
• Online Review Sites: Submit your book to sites that accept self-published sci-fi, such as those listed in Erica Verrillo’s compilation of 269 reviewers for speculative fiction.

5. In person promotion

• Sell at Science Fiction Conventions, Comics and Games conventions. If appropriate for your work, conventions often have a dealers’ room/hucksters’ room. Rates for tables and booths vary.
• Network at Conventions (WorldCon, New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention, Eastercon)

6. Free and Discounted Promotions

• Free Ebooks: Offer free short stories or novellas to attract new readers and encourage sign-ups to your newsletter.
• BookBub Featured Deals: Discount your book for a limited time to drive sales and climb bestseller charts.

7. Networking and Community Engagement

• Writing Forums: Engage in forums like Writing Forums to network, share experiences, and promote your work. (To the extent allowed—note that spamming forums with self-promotion may get you shunned or banned.)
• Writing Workshops: If the workshop allows it, discuss or promote your work at workshops. If not (or in addition) network with the other authors and share promotion success stories.
• Beta Readers and Critique Partners: Use platforms like Voracious Readers Only and BookSirens to get feedback and early reviews.
• Book signings at local stores: Ask your local bricks-and-mortar bookshop if they will host a book signing for a local author.
• Book signings at local libraries: Ask your librarian if they have local author days.
• Book signings at Friends of the Library bookshop: Ask your local Friends of the Library if you can place your books in their bookshop and if they would be open to hosting a talk or book signing for a local author.

 Good luck on your publishing journey!

Hey, Marilyn in Fission #5 - out now

My story, "Hey, Marilyn," is in an anthology with stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and Gareth Powell - among other legends: Fission #5. I'm over the moon.

I'm looking forward to reading the other stories.

Many thanks to editors Eugen Bacon and Gene Rowe.

Cover of Fission #5

Happy Easter

 Happy Easter from my Easter Bunny, Sparrow. 

He is decorated in folklore-accurate seashells and pendants*. 

*I made that up.

Seaweed Savior

In March, Black Cat Weekly published my story The Oathbreaker. A professor is swept up in the saga of a woman doomed to spend eternity with her Viking captor. He is studying seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, Wales, when three women recruit him to save her. 

Black Cat Weekly cover

Today, the BBC published an article about a real professor who studied seaweed on the coast of Anglesey, and who is credited with saving the Japanese sushi industry. Laver is a type of seaweed that grows in green-black sheets on rocks and is used in British cooking, particularly as Welsh Laverbread.  When Kathleen Drew-Baker attempted to cultivate Laver in her laboratory, she found that seashells in the bottom of the tank developed a reddish growth. She recognized the red growth as a species of algae called Conchocelis rosea. Studying it further, she realized that C. rosea wasn't a separate species at all. Laver has two different lifestyle stages, one as a red filament growing on seashells and one as blackish sheets growing on rocks. She published her findings in the October 1949 edition of the journal Nature.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a series of storms had decimated the production of Nori, the seaweed used extensively in Japanese cuisine, especially in sushi. Sea mines and general devastation of World War Two further reduced the supply. A Japanese professor read Drew-Baker's paper and realized that the closely related Nori could be cultivated the same way. Now, the conchocelis-phase Nori is grown on oyster shells in nurseries. Nets are placed over the shells until the adult phase of Nori attaches to them, and then the nets are taken out to sea, where it grows the thin leaves that can be harvested and processed for food.  Drew-Baker's discovery was the key to the recovery of the seaweed beds.

Seaweed growing on nets from the Nori Cultivation page

Kathleen Drew-Baker's story has another angle. Although she was an academic all her life, she was unpaid for most of it. Back then, the university would not employ married women. When she married she was offered the opportunity to continue working, but she was not on the payroll.

If my three angry women had met Kathleen when she came to Anglesey, they would have had a lot to discuss about the very slow pace of improvement in women's rights.

Federal Judge rules that FDA's attempt to regulate clinical laboratories exceeds its authority

Overview
On March 31, 2025, a federal court vacated the FDA's final rule attempting to regulate laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) as medical devices under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). The ruling is a significant victory for clinical laboratories across the country.

FDA regulates test kits (like home Covid test kits) as "medical devices" and has developed stringent requirements for their manufacture and sale. An LDT is a service, agreed between the patient's medical doctor and the medical doctor in the laboratory, to test the patient's specimen for various "analytes" (antibodies to viruses, hormones, viral particles, etc.). These tests are developed by the laboratory because manufactured kits are not available for the exact test the patient needs. The FDA had asserted a right to regulate LDTs as medical devices.  

The advantage of LDTs is that they can be tailored to fit these needs quickly and for far less cost than asking a kit manufacturer to create a specialized test and obtain FDA approval. LDTs are regulated by the Center For Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendments (CLIA) which require the lab to "establish performance characteristics" --prove that the test works as claimed-- and retain the proof for inspection by CMS. 

FDA's decision to regulate LDTs would have resulted in double regulation (CMS and FDA), slowed innovation and cost billions of dollars, which would ultimately be passed on the patient.

The rule would subject about 79,114 existing LDTs and 1,181 labs to FDA premarket reviews, post-market surveillance, and quality system requirements. "FDA acknowledged that the costs of the proposed rule would be significant. Specifically, it estimated that the cost of preparing and submitting [applications] for existing laboratory-developed tests would exceed $35 billion and could reach $113 billion. It also projected that, going forward, annual compliance costs for affected laboratories would range from $4 billion to $14 billion." (From the judgment linked below.)

On March 31, 2025, a federal court vacated the FDA's rule to regulate LDTs as medical devices, marking a significant legal setback for the agency. Judge Sean D. Jordan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled that the FDA lacks statutory authority under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) and CLIA to oversee LDTs, which he characterized as diagnostic services rather than physical medical devices.

The court emphasized that Congress designed CLIA as the primary regulatory framework for clinical laboratories, delegating oversight to CMS rather than the FDA. LDTs were deemed "proprietary methodologies" rather than physical devices, placing them outside the FDA’s jurisdiction.

Of course, FDA may appeal the decision, or Congress may act and change the requirements by law. 

I know laboratories have already spent large amounts attempting to get ready for the May 2025 deadline. (I should have taken up the offer to act as a consultant...too late now.) My advice is to keep doing all the things the FDA has so far required. No harm, and possibly great good, will come from having properly documented complaints procedures and test development and change files beyond the original CLIA requirements. 

The judge's ruling in full.

A Rant Concerning AI helpiness, and how terrible everything is nowadays

 Google search is useless. 

I know this will surprise you young whippersnappers, but back in the day, if you typed something in the Google search bar, it would look for and bring up documents that used those words.  This was a very useful feature. It didn't bring up any sponsored pages, ads or inane commentary supplied by the "AI." 

If you typed 

generals gathered masses just like witches

It would find the lyric sheet for the song "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, and because those words all appear in the first few lines, that would be in the first page of results.

A couple of days ago, I typed 

the winter life is coming back

expecting the algorithm to name the song by the group Cream that contains the line. This is what I got.

Screenshot of search and results

In other words, the AI just started arguing with me about whether the line in the query bar was true or not!

The song turns out to be, as I'm sure you're all eager to tell me, "Deserted Cities of the Heart" by Cream. 

I asked Google what it thought it was doing, and it replied, in part: 

Screenshot

And this - Google's own AI's answer - is wrong, or at best highly misleading. 

"bacon eggs" written that way does not find pages containing both words. It finds pages where the words "bacon eggs" appear in exactly that order. (For example, "Serve it with bacon, eggs, and toast.")

To find pages where both bacon and eggs appear but not necessarily together in that order (for example, "people like to eat bacon with eggs"), you would have to type the words without quotation marks, as below:

bacon eggs

On Twitter, oh I'm sorry X, these days, I see a huge percentage of people answering a Tweet by asking Grok, Twitter's sorry X's AI, to explain what the Tweet meant, or if the Tweet was "true." Depending on the phrasing, Grok will say different things to different people. A whole host - millions of queries - using lakes' worth of water and thousands of dollars worth of electricity - of utterly useless questions and even more useless answers, many of which are probably taken as gospel by the question asker. 

No good can come of this. The incredible investment in AI cannot pay off for the companies building out capacity and pinning their business plans on some fairytale of return. A 2000-style dot com crash is imminent. The only lasting effect of AI will be dumbed-down people fighting in their bunkers for their interpretation of everything based on idiomatic peculiarities in their queries. One hopes (with little confidence) that the fighting will remain virtual and not spill into the real world.