Sparkles of talent

It's looking like my time on Instagram and Facebook are rapidly drawing to a close. This isn't Tumblr-related, at all, but there is a lot of cross over between people whom follow me there and talk to me here (and vice versa)

Meta is not (to my knowledge, nor to my assumption) going to ban free posting.

And.

They have a long history of restricting reach, and paid account tiers are only going to push this further, rapidly. Many years ago, I had a marketing client whom built up a massive Facebook audience and distinctly remember when Facebook changed their algorithim towards a paid model. Said client went out of business within months.

There is 0% chance I am going to pay Meta to distribute free rambles to an audience I build up. For many reasons.

Please consider signing up for my email newsletter.

I love making rambles and comics and essays and showcasing weird sutdio conversations with you all.

I'm watching my ability and willingness and ability to build on social media platforms diminish.

A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines. The now-extinct viruses were a branch of the influenza B family tree known as the Yamagata lineage. Scientists first reported the apparent disappearance of Yamagata viruses in 2021. At that time, experts speculated that precautions taken to stop the spread of COVID-19 — such as masking and social distancing — had not only driven the overall number of flu cases to historic lows but may have completely snuffed out this type of flu virus. 

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

I haven’t posted properly about my ALL HAIL CHAOS launch yet because I become overcome every time I think about it.

Listen, my meta fantasy with gang of chaos gremlin bisexuals criminals etc and there’s a musical book went over better than I could have dreamed but sequels are tricky and I know I made you guys wait - I was sick but also I knew the book could be better!

But people came! People flew in to come and brought me flowers and one reader said something very insightful about Glacia and Diane Duane came (!!!) and Sarah Maria Griffin did an introduction so sincere and beautiful it made me wish to cry. I’m not very good at being sincere without cracking jokes but I tried to be in this blog post.

I did try to give a reader a skull. Mistakes were made.

I am so grateful, for those who came and those who were there in spirit.

This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.

...From the product page:

This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms material—some of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universe—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple. The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady. The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms novelette Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.

All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt! So please go validate my mental state by buying the package.

And happy Pride!

(Meanwhile, the project for the course of the month is to put all the major queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. Just added: Mevraen, Wyn and Eftgan. Now to get Lissa and Matt and Matt's boyfriend in there...) 😏

Hey, so many of you are familiar with fix-it fanfiction, the superglue which holds together the hearts canon has shattered, right? Well, I have a point to make. As of right now (1-28-2020), there are 6,659 fanfictions in the Leverage category on AO3. You know how many of those are fix-it fics? 25. A measly 0.38% of Leverage fanfiction is tagged as fix-it. For comparison, 2.20% of MCU fanfiction and 1.25% of Supernatural fanfiction are fix-its.

So yeah, Leverage is so amazing that hardly anything needs to be fixed. But we already knew that. No, it gets better. Of those 25 fix-it fanfictions, 16 (64%) of them are actually fix-its for OTHER fandoms. Leverage has been used in fix-its for White Collar, The Walking Dead, Coupling (UK), The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Kings, Person of Interest, Pacific Rim, Once Upon a Time, The Losers, Merlin, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the actual 2016 US election (yeah, that).

I have a writing question.

Have you ever written an epilogue before finishing a work?

I have an epilogue almost completely written and im not even 100% sure how they get there. I know basically how i want the story to end but the details need work.

I am here to tell you that I wrote what will be the epilogue for The Door Into Starlight (when it finally gets completed...) in 1980. I absolutely knew—even at that early stage—what was going to happen, and how it was (and is) all going to end.

And I had no damn idea how my characters and I were going to get there, either. (In fact, some of the most important details have only become plain to me in the last few years.) ...So don't despair.

The development of story is rarely linear, no matter how much we'd like it to be. A whole lot of writers have run up against this simple fact, at one point or another in their careers, and—trying to brute-force the situation into compliance—have wasted vast amounts of time and energy bashing their (figurative) heads against a rock-hard wall of resistance as they've tried to force story to grow in a linear way.

Sometimes, however desperate you are for it to do that, it just will not. (Though sometimes, I think just to throw us off our game[s], sometimes it does.) At such times, the thing to do—because frankly, you don't have much choice—is this:

Write down what you've got and then move on.

...This is something I've become used to over many years. In (pausing to attempt an estimate) maybe thirty out of fifty novels, I've absolutely routinely gotten the beginning first, and then the end... and have wound up spending a while staring at an empty-looking middle. (Though this staring period pretty quickly became a lot shorter for me once the habit of a reliable outlining workflow settled itself in... making it a lot easier to quickly structure and exploit what out-of-order pieces manifested themselves.)

Your own writer-brain's typical story-development pattern will probably take some time to develop and settle. This is fine, so don't sweat it. The beginning of your career will be about building and deepening the neural channels in which story runs as it grows, and all kinds of life- and work-events will affect this gradual development. Everybody's storygrowing patterns differ... so just let yours proceed to ingrain themselves at their own speed.

...Because they're going to anyway. 😏

1. if you get the “answer my call” text, NEVER ANSWER THE CALL. 

They are calling you because they want to have the conversation verbally, and be able to lie later about what they said or didn’t say. Force them to continue via text or email- force them to continue the conversation in writing or not at all. 

2. “Lack of 2 weeks notice is unprofessional!” or the other version, “Not providing notice is illegal!”

No it isn’t. Neither is true. 

And in the US, all states except Montana are “at will” employment (though you may hear an employer refer to it as “right to work” to make it sound better, it’s the same thing). Sure, at-will employment means they can fire you without cause, BUT! It also means that you are not legally required to give a reason for quitting, or to give notice of any kind. 

Is it polite to give notice when you can? Sure. Do bosses expect it? Absolutely. But that does not make you legally required to provide it. 

3. The only thing I would change in the worker’s interaction here was their response when initially asked to come in. 

Employee: “Hey Mark. Sorry I’m unable to cover the shift tonight because I’m studying for my exam tomorrow.” 

Don’t give a reason for your lack of availability. It may be tempting to. You may feel rude if you don’t. 

DON’T DO IT.

You do not owe your boss any information about what you do off the clock, and any reason you give will only ever be used against you. 

Boss: “Hey I need you to cover Jasper’s shift tonight.”

Employee: “Sorry, I’m not available.”

And leave it at that. 

Do not elaborate. 

Do not offer additional information. 

When you boss asks you to elaborate, because they will, be polite but firm. “With respect, that’s personal. I’m sorry, but I’m unavailable to cover this shift/work late/come in early/etc.”

Be a broken record- you’re unavailable. That’s the only information they need to know, and it’s the only information they have a LEGAL RIGHT to know. 

I repeated the experiment later, wearing the boots but otherwise my usual clothing and mimicking the expression I thought I’d had at that moment. People parted like I was Charlton Heston.

I now wear that style of boots whenever possible. I recently had a man do a double-take as I walked by and ask me, politely, where I had served because I “looked like a soldier.” I’m not current or former military. I was wearing a flowy purple peasant top and looked as un-soldierlike as possible.

Wheel like you’re gonna win the Indy 500 and don’t care how.

Your crutches are short swords; walk like you can see them buried in the bodies of anyone who crosses (in front of) you.

I was told that I’d hear back this week. This week is almost over and I’ve heard nothing. There’s still tomorrow but the wait is interminable. My emotions are a mess, it’s hard to get myself to eat anything… If I don’t get this job, I’ll probably have to move and I really, really don’t want to move.

From everything I can tell, the staff really like me. Following an in-person interview (so far as I’m aware, I’m the only applicant who could come in person), I received an email that included “it was a real pleasure getting to know you better, and we so enjoyed the conversation.” I really really want to believe this means they do like me and do want me for the role, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone they liked more.

I’m so fucking stressed. I have been rejected from so many things I thought I was a shoo-in for in the past, so I just can’t convince myself this time is going to be any different. I can’t imagine a more perfect job than this one, and I don’t want to imagine what state I’ll be in if I don’t get it.

I don’t know what good venting here will do but, I dunno, maybe anonymous voices on the internet will finally convince me of what my family hasn’t. Or maybe this won’t be replied to until after I hear back, one way or another. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to reblog this down the line with confirmation that I made it through the tunnel and into the sunlight.

I hope you do, too, friend.

[stuffs my own pessimistic views of the economy and general job market back into the closet]

But luckily, I had dinner with family scheduled that night, and they helped… not cheer me up, but make me feel less stuck in that awful pit. I went to shul the next morning, where a former student of mine was having her Bat Mitzvah, and between the care of my family, the repose of my religion, and the pride in my student, I was surprisingly okay by a day or two after hearing the news.

Nobody is getting hired right now, because no employer wants to pay adequate compensation. They put out applications and “now hiring” fliers so people will apply en masse so Investor-Chan will notice them and then Number Will Go Up.

With the next position, Imaginita, every time they say "okay, we'll be getting back to you in X amount of time with a decision", it might help you to decide 1) They mean it when they say it, but they have ADHD levels of "bad at estimating time" so it might actually be 4x as long; 2) assume you didn't get it, start working on the next interesting job listing, and if you DO get it then that can be a delightful surprise.

I know exactly how you feel about this must be evidence that you are never going to be good enough. I do that too, in work and in my social life and in my family-of-origin life. I've had enough therapy to know I do it, know why I do it, know why it's no longer useful to me, know what a better path looks like. It's still a struggle for me to keep putting my feet on that better path. When people don't choose me after I clearly chose them, it has everything to do with them and nothing to do with me.

All we can do is to say, "Well, I hope they get what they wanted out of that choice," and move on without them.

XKCD today decided to go for animorphs reference!

Mouseover: ’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.

And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.

It is!! It always is!!

The population of an entire island working together to eradicate every last rat and mouse to save the native bird populations. They had to trap a bunch of the birds and keep them in captivity so they wouldn’t be hurt by the rodenticides, and released them after the rodents were gone. Normal residents helped by phoning in tips whenever they saw rodents. And they did it. Lord Howe Island, last I read, remains rodent free, and the native bird populations are rebounding!

Acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, both of which were terrifying specters of my childhood, have been largely dealt with. Ecosystems devastated by acid rain are also recovering.

In 1991, the first captive-raised condors were re-introduced to Big Sur, Pinnacles, and Bitter Creek.

In 2006, three months before I turned eighteen, the first wild pair of condors was seen nesting in Big Sur in over a hundred years. A hundred years.

We did that. We fixed it.

How about another example.

When my mom was small, in the 1960s, there were many, many days of the year she was not allowed outside. Days and days they had recess indoors, because the air was so poisonous to breathe. Here's an article about it, with some good pictures.

My mom was 13 in the picture on the left. She was 50 in the picture on the right.

In 1987, there were 27 California Condors in the world, all captive.

In 2024, there were 566.

369 of them fly free.

That happened within my lifetime, and I'm not even 40 yet.

When you lose hope, think of our stories we're telling you. Recount them to yourself like a prayer. That's what I do.

There are 369 California Condors flying free in the sky right now.

There is no more acid rain.

There is an ozone.

There are wild tigers.

There are still birds on Lord Howe Island.

By 2013, there were approximately 1,200 living wild, across 18 dens. Their numbers increase regularly, and while the face challenges due to habitat loss, climate change, and their limited genetic diversity, they're in a much better place than they were.

I think it's easy to get lost in the bad things going on in the world, and close to home. But the bad things are often acute. They flash in the pan, which is bright and can be scary, it's easy to be distracted by it. But ultimately, there are always people working to clean up, and prevent it from happening again. There's always people working to improve things overall, and people researching how to do that. It just takes time, and it's not flashy, it's just work.