Things burbled along in the late fall, but I did not manage to post about them. Then came the holidays with preparation, a delightful family visit, and decompression. Here are some tidbits from the writing biz that came along the last couple of months.
I've been a member of the Authors Guild for some time and interact with them frequently in various ways: they host my web page, present webinars, provide legal and other advice, and generally advocate for authors. They are participating in the lawsuit against Anthropic for scraping copyrighted text from books without permission. My novel The Krone Experiment was caught up in that. I might get $3000 in the class action suit. I'm not holding my breath. Most of this exchange with the Guild is remote, but the Guild has recently promoted the organization of local groups with designated Ambassadors. The new representatives for the Austin area are Scott Semegran and Daphne DeFazio. On October 30, Scott and Daphne arranged a local meet-and-greet at the Easy Tiger Linc brew pub near the old Highland Mall. I had a pleasant time there, handing out business cards for The Path to Singularity and chatting about other authors' experiences.
My publisher and I applied to participate in the 2025 Texas Book Festival held on the capitol grounds and Congress Avenue in Austin on November 8 and 9. I was rejected, but on Sunday I attended as hoi polloi as I have regularly for years. I wondered around checking out signing tents for an hour and a half. There were long signing lines for New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for his best seller, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation. There were amazing lines, maybe a thousand people, for Ali Hazelwood. Ali Hazelwood is the pen name of an Italian romance novelist and neuroscience professor who is based in the United States. Many of her works center on women in STEM fields and academia. Her debut novel, The Love Hypothesis, was a New York Times best seller. I'd never heard of her. Other long lines were for Tracy Deonn, Adam Silvera, and Stuart Gibbs who write young adult fantasy and sci-fi. I chatted with a guy from the Writers' League of Texas and left my email. I need to sign up with them. I got the business card of the editor at Texas Tech Press; I might ask them about publishing a collection of travel stories I have written over the years.
I continue to enjoy the companionship and interaction with the Westbank Writers Group that meets every Monday at the Laura Bush branch library. Laura Bush also invented the forementioned Texas Book Festival. On November 10, I attended a meeting that hosted two authors of children's books. I have a draft of one that I have fiddled with for decades, but which has never quite congealed. On Saturday, November 15, I gave a presentation on The Path to Singularity to library patrons. It was fun, with a lot of good questions and interactions. On November 17 and 25, we talked about plot and structure. I've had the chutzpah to ask some of the members of the Westbank Writers to write reviews of Path for Amazon. Apparently, they help sales, but you need hundreds. I have less than 10. Please pitch in if you are so moved.
My son, Rob, wrote a short play called The Slow Invasion, a zombie satire on Covid. A bunch of zombies appear around town but are rooted in place. People become used to them and complacent until one day they rampage. The characters in the skit, who have learned to live with the zombies, react in their own personalized, self-absorbed ways until it is too late. Rob and some friends arranged and filmed a table read of the script where actors read their parts in the script. Rob played the film at the meeting of the Westbank Writers group on November 3. It was very well received. People laughed all the way through at just the right places. This is remarkable in part because the actors had never met before the reading. The video is 24 minutes long on YouTube. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkFfBYbBUAw. It might become a real film someday.
On November 25, I attempted to activate an ad campaign for The Path to Singularity on Amazon, shameless huckster I have become. You provide keywords, the more the better at some level, but then managing the bids for which you are willing to pay for clicks and impressions becomes cumbersome. I first used my whole book index, but it turned out Amazon won't accept more than 1000 keywords. I also tried to think of how to employ the keywords in a manner that I could control, alphabetically, for instance. Amazon's system does not encourage that efficiently. One is also encouraged to add keywords based on "also boughts." I discovered that Amazon does not allow any apostrophes or punctuation in the keywords. They rejected "Martin Luther King, Jr." as a keyword. I confused Portfolios with Campaigns. I didn't properly set up a billing system. After a day or so, I set the project aside as holiday rush loomed.
I've also continued to regularly attend functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Society. On November 25 we discussed the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. On December 11, we met in the downtown bar, Remedy, owned by Austin Forum director Jay Boisseau for a discussion of the future expansion of consciousness by Brett Hurt based on his sci-fi book, The Lattice. A tad utopian for my taste. I asked him whether he thinks humans will merge with machines and gave him a Path business card. The next day Brett invited me to connect with him on LinkedIn. On December 12, I led a discussion of the book Future Babble by Canadian Dan Gardner. An old high school friend had suggested Gardner to me after reading The Path to Singularity. In Future Babble, Gardner rightfully warns not to trust anyone who aspires to predict the future, including yours truly. Gardner differentiates between "hedgehogs" who talk well but cherry pick their arguments, ignore contradicting evidence, and are nearly always wrong and "foxes" who understand the uncertainties and qualify their arguments. I'd like to think I'm more on the fox side, but it's not for me to judge. Boisseau picked up the hedgehog and fox characterization when he later led a January discussion of the technologies that are likely to be prominent in 2026.