The Power We Give
Reading Time: 4 minutes Azabelle pulled the pins that held up her hair. Dark curls tumbled around her face. She felt Shadow’s presence, of course, but she’d felt it so long she barely registered the danger.
Home Delivery
Reading Time: 10 minutes Desperate for cash, Nick and his friend plot a home invasion. They picked the wrong house.
Gods and Monsters Installment 3: Music and Moths
Reading Time: 7 minutes At eighteen, when Gabriel leaves the orphanage, the sisters breathe a sigh of relief. He has never been any trouble. Never talked back; indeed, rarely talked at all. He is obedient, clean, and scentless. The nuns can find no fault in him, but neither can they feel affection. He makes them forget Christ and contemplate Gabriel. He induces guilt. His very silence screams for attention. He is a shadow in the soul.
Táltos
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Hungarian folktale about young girl seeking to rectify injustice done to her sisters.
Affordable Resurrection
Reading Time: 6 minutes Lightly amusing modern-feel fantasy mashup about an unlikely partnership between a budget-price necromancer and his student locked in an unusual business model.
In the Fire of Her Eyes
Reading Time: 4 minutes She kept her eyes shut. She ran deep into the wilderness. And as the sun flickered out, and the sky went black, and she held all the light of the world behind her eyelids, she tried to pretend she could bury her pain, and she wouldn’t die alone in the cold of the mountains.
Why the Sea is Boiling Hot
Reading Time: 21 minutes A serial killer is playing havoc in the city-state of Sheebatiya. Can Allii uncover the killer before fear pushes the city into anarchy?
Gods and Monsters Installment 2: Beginnings of River and Gabriel
Reading Time: 8 minutes Gabriel is much more unusual than a virgin birth. Granted, human virgin birth is miraculous, but in many species of fish, lizards, insects, and sharks, virgin birth is the norm. It is helpful to remember that a miracle is not necessarily good, it is simply unnatural.
Naughty or Nice?
Reading Time: 5 minutes A vampire, attempting to adapt to Western customs, sends her Christmas list to Santa.
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‘Dragonfall’ is an inclusive fantasy where the dragons have feathers
Reading Time: 3 minutes Come for the dragons, stay for the queerness.
Uranians by Theodore McCombs
Reading Time: 2 minutes Uranians — an anthology including four short stories and one novella — is the perfect marriage of sci-fi and queerness.
Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
Reading Time: 2 minutes Troubled young lovers, an awesome-but-miserable wizard father, a setting based on a Ukrainian city amid industrialization, and a door-mat protagonist who gradually finds her strength…
The Bridge to Magic by Alex Thornbury
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Bridge to Magic is a dark YA fantasy with a feisty female lead.
Where the Lighting Goes by Jackery Salem
Reading Time: 3 minutes Salem builds something truly unique out of many familiar fantasy tropes — dwarves, dragons, amnesia, all kinds of magic — and ties it up with compelling characters and a deeply satisfying conclusion.
Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly by Toge Productions
Reading Time: 2 minutes Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly is the sequel to the critically acclaimed Coffee Talk by Toge Productions. In this game, you serve drinks to magical patrons which impact the outcomes of the stories they tell you.
5 Upcoming Fantasy Books Inspired by Wuxia, Xianxia, and East Asian Mythologies
Reading Time: 6 minutes Check out Melissa Ren’s most anticipated fantasy books inspired by wuxia, xianxia, and east asian mythologies!
NightBirds by Kate J. Armstrong
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’d say that anyone who enjoys well-written feminist fantasy should jump on this series now.
Writing Advice of the Week
Writing Advice of the Week: The Craft is in Drafts
Reading Time: 11 minutes When you write your first draft, you’re telling yourself the story, as you need to hear it, to make the best sense of it. That first draft is typically when you learn about your main character’s goals and motivations, the barriers or villains that hinder their success, and what the ultimate stakes are if they don’t succeed. You also meet the rest of the cast and get to know them, understand them, see them moving about in your story world. But when you tell your story to your reader, you begin to uncover what the reader needs.
Writing Advice of the Week: Write Your Way Out of the Slump
Reading Time: 9 minutes During February, making time to write can feel extra difficult. Prioritizing your writing, getting the right pieces in the right places, and speaking to your readers are the goals.
Writing Advice of the Week: Climb Your Success Ladder
Reading Time: 10 minutes Regardless of industry metrics and analytics, regardless whether you’re established or debuting, through thick and thin, writers write. And in this bizarre, yet hopeful, publishing landscape, writers create their own success.
Writing Advice of the Week: Rejection is a Beginning
Reading Time: 9 minutes Writing and storytelling are skills anyone can learn with a little practice, the right mindset, and a bit of help. And rejection isn’t the end of your literary road as long as you keep driving ahead. That’s because rejection is a powerful tool for growth — if you let it be one.
ESSAYS
Life: modern physics can’t explain it – but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might
Reading Time: 5 minutes Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.
3 AI tools I use regularly that aren’t ChatGPT or Midjourney
Reading Time: 4 minutes I use Otter AI, Canva, and Notion nearly every day, and here is why other writers should, too.
The multiverse: how we’re tackling the challenges facing the theory
Reading Time: 5 minutes The idea of a multiverse consisting of “parallel universes” is a popular science fiction trope, recently explored in the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, it is within the realm of scientific possibility.
AIs ‘learn’ by creating mini-AIs and it’s super weird but also very cool
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to a paper released last fall by researchers from Google, Stanford, and MIT, large language models learn new information and concepts by creating new, miniature machine learning systems on the fly.
NEWS
Adobe’s Firefly will be a Midjourney killer for book cover art
Reading Time: 4 minutes Adobe Firefly’s images are almost as good as Midjourney, the interface is infinitely better, and artists will get paid for their training data. The beta is open now, and it’s looking extremely promising.
WGA backtracks on anti-AI stance, as long as writers get credit
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Writers Guild of America, which represents screenwriters, is backing off on its anti-AI stance, Variety reported today.
Google falling farther behind in AI race
Reading Time: 5 minutes Edge, Opera and Brave all now have AI built in. Google’s Chrome is not even in the race yet.
Adobe, Nvidia announce ethical AI image generation
Reading Time: 4 minutes Adobe and Nvidia both announced AI image generators today — Firefly and Picasso, respectively — that do not use artists’ work for training data without their permission. Both companies also promise to pay artists for work generated in their signature styles, as does Getty Images.
Study: Writing occupation will be most affected by AI
Reading Time: 3 minutes According to research released today, the more high-level and creative your job, the more likely it will be to be disrupted by AI. Top of the list? Writers and authors — with up to 100 percent of their jobs likely to be affected.
GPT 4, Claude, and Alpaca all went live this week and yes, we need to worry
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was a big week for AI news these past few days. GPT 4 was released on Tuesday, Midjourney 5 was released on Wednesday, and Alpaca — a $600 clone of ChatGPT — was released on Monday. Yes, you can now have your own large language model for less than the cost of new phone […]
Midjourney 5 released with more aspect ratios, photorealism
Reading Time: 4 minutes The fifth generation of the super popular Midjourney app is out, and it’s more photorealistic and better at hands and faces.
AI work can be copyrighted, if human creativity was involved
Reading Time: 3 minutes The US Copyright Office issued a ruling today that AI-generated content can, in fact, be copyrighted — as long as a human being has contributed work to the end product.
ON WRITING
Claude Pro is here — and writers should sign up
Reading Time: 2 minutes This morning, Anthropic announced the paid version of Claude, the best alternative to ChatGPT currently on the market. Writers need to sign up.
Adobe Express offers free AI art and is out of beta
Reading Time: 3 minutes Adobe Express is now publicly available, with free AI image generation. Plus, since it’s Adobe, the AI is trained only on fully-licensed art, and artists and compensated.
Scalzi, other spec fic authors head for the X-it
Reading Time: 3 minutes Authors are leaving Twitter — rebranded today as just “X” — for other platforms. Many are landing on Threads.
Sci-fi author uses AI to promote new book about AI
Reading Time: 2 minutes Best-selling Brazilian author PJ Caldas used AI technology to release a book trailer for his first novel in English.
How to create a good author profile photo
Reading Time: 6 minutes Some free and easy ways to create good-looking author headshots and profile pics.
Can Claude AI fix your grammar mistakes? No, it can’t, but there’s an AI that will.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Claude AI, the hot new chatbot for book authors, works well as a grammar tutor, but is bad at fixing mistakes in your text. However, I did find one AI-powered tool that caught every error I threw at it.
10 ways Claude AI can help you self-edit your book — for free
Reading Time: 16 minutes Claude AI is the single best editor I’ve tried so far. And it can do a whole book at a time. For free.
Book editing with AI: Code Interpreter vs. Claude — there’s no contest
Reading Time: 8 minutes Anthropic’s Claude beats ChatGPT hands-down when it comes to analyzing full-length books.