I finished the Tesla book last night, and the most interesting thing I learned about Nikola Tesla is that J.P. Morgan had rhinophyma and was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a colossal asshole about it. Unfortunately, that isn’t a fact about Nikola Tesla!
Anyway, I started Soraya Bouazzaoui’s Aicha last night, and based on the first chapter I suspect I’m going to like it quite a bit.
… and after staring at my screen for five minutes without writing a word, that might be the most interesting thing I have to say tonight. We had a field trip this morning; the 8th grade split up and went to three different colleges, and apparently everyone had very different experiences. We had a campus walking tour and that was basically it. Not bad, necessarily, but not worth the large amount of legwork and nonsense that a field trip requires. Tomorrow I have a study session after school for however many of my algebra kids want to stay after school to prepare for their final on Thursday. Thursday I have the last meeting of my weird little gay kids club. And after that, I’m basically done, except for the part where I have five more days of actual school to survive.
Well, I’ll survive it; I’m fairly confident of that, having done it many times before. The operative question is how many of them will survive it. Hopefully all of them, but I’m not making any promises. The words “If you two idiots don’t sit down I’m going to set the entire room on fire” came out of my mouth today, so I may be nearing the end of my patience.
I mean “idiots” in the most loving way possible, and “set the entire room on fire” as a metaphor for the power of my love, of course.
Watch: once this post goes live, I’ll get another email, and this whole thing will turn out to have been real, only now I’ve pissed her off.
Suddenly it occurs to me that the fact that there has been a delay in this person replying to me is actually evidence for it being real. Surely, surely I’m not actually being ghosted by a scammer, right? These people are nothing if not persistent.
At any rate: last week I got an email from someone purporting to be an Editorial Director at a publishing group that shall remain nameless, as will the actual person. That person showered several paragraphs of praise upon The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 and then asked me what my future plans were for the series and whether I currently had representation. Which, obviously, I don’t, seeing as how I haven’t written a single word of fiction since Covid hit.
The praise felt a lot like AI. Which, y’know, suspicious, especially when coming from someone who was purportedly an editor.
I did some research. The publishers were legit and the person was a real person. I allowed myself to get excited for a moment, then noticed that the email address was clearly not from any kind of official work email. A personal email address? Maybe, but it added additional tingles to the Spider-sense. Plus there was no actual promise of anything in the email, or was there actually an ask, so if this was a scam, they had multiple steps planned for it.
I went to LinkedIn. The editor was there, too. I dug up the work email and sent a quick message: a more polite version of hi, is this real?
I got an immediate response saying that the person had retired in December and that the email address was going to be shut down in January. It is May; clearly this did not happen. LinkedIn made no mention of being retired and the website of the company still refers to this person as if they are currently employed.
Also, this provided a reason for the personal email, right? Maybe they’re retired, but not retired-retired, if that makes any sense.
So I did two things, wanting to see where this was going, especially if I could get some posts out of it: I responded politely and with some interest to the original email address, but I also sent a message to the person’s LinkedIn, with a brief explanation of the situation and basically saying Hey, I don’t quite trust this, would you mind letting me know if it’s real?
And now it’s several days later, and I haven’t heard from either of them. The editor doesn’t appear to be especially active on LinkedIn, and their messaging system is opaque at best, especially concerning messages from people you aren’t already connected with, so that’s not terribly surprising, but I was expecting a pretty quick response from the original email– either you’re real, so you’re looking forward to hearing from me, or you’re not, in which case you’re still interested in … whatever it was you had in mind in the first place. I’m still not completely clear on the angle, to be honest.
It also occurred to me that whoever sent the email very well might be monitoring the blog, so maybe an explanation is the post from the day it happened saying I thought I was being scammed? Maybe they just dropped it at that point, realizing it was futile.
Either way, this didn’t end up being nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be, dammit.
Magnificent, as expected. This book is a little bit less complex than This Inevitable Ruin, which had a ton of moving parts, and it ends in a way that literally caused me to put the book down for a few minutes until I could shut my jaw again. That said, it did expose a weakness in Dinniman’s writing that I hadn’t noticed because I read the previous seven books in such close proximity– this guy doesn’t like to recap anything, and this series has acquired an immense number of tertiary characters. A couple of reveals didn’t hit like they probably ought to have because my first reaction was “Who the hell is that?” rather than shock at whatever just happened. A series reread will be necessary before Book 9, which I assume will come out sometime next week.
Surprisingly cute! I assume “puts the biscuit in the basket” is some sort of hockey phrase, not a gay double entendre, which it certainly sounds like. And speaking as a straight guy, Rachel Reid is surprisingly talented at writing sex scenes between people she doesn’t share equipment with. I was willing to continue on with the series until discovering that apparently in this world the entire NHL is gay, and each book jumps characters. I’d be perfectly happy to read more about Kip and Scott; I’m a little less enthused about a new pair of protagonists with every book, especially considering how backlogged I am right now.
(Also: I wasn’t aware that “gay hockey book” is actually a genre and not just this series. There are other authors writing about gay hockey players! I did not know that.)
I’m reading this right now, and I’m considering not finishing it– not because Carlson isn’t a good writer or Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age is poorly written, but because I flat-out don’t understand the science well enough, and while I don’t think you have to be a specialist or an engineer, I think the author is assuming a bit more knowledge and understanding about how electricity and electric motors work than I actually possess. Hopefully I’ll either pick up what I need to know in the next 75 pages or so or he’ll dial back on the technical stuff a bit, because right now this isn’t working for me.
I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, which didn’t stop me from collapsing into bed a bit after noon and sleeping for six hours. I feel like hell and am going back to bed in a few minutes; I haven’t eaten all day and I feel like some food might be a good idea. Not sure if my wife and son still live here, either, so I should probably go see if they’re still in the house.
Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?
I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.
In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.
(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)
It’s 7:00, and I’m seriously considering going to bed. Today wasn’t even a bad day, but I’m completely beat to hell and tired of literally every aspect of trying to exist in 2026. Hopefully I’ll be in a better headspace tomorrow.
Authors, I thought we discussed this last week, but somehow today’s is worse; of the three highly anticipated books I got last Tuesday, I’ve finished one of them (The Last Contract of Isako, which I enjoyed but did not, sadly, set my world on fire) and now you’ve hit me with not only a new Dungeon Crawler Carl but also the second Amina al-Sirafi book and the new Bobiverse? Get your shit together, damn it, and come up with a release schedule. This is nonsense. Have you seen my Unread Shelf?
The good news, I suppose, is I don’t have anything else on pre-order until late June, but still. Damn.
Also, I definitely read the first 100 pages of Horribles before posting this.
