Sam Robb's Blog

In 1979, the seizure of the Embassy of the United States in Tehran the start of Iran’s perceived war on America.

In 2026, we finally noticed.

I am a libertarian minarchist. I believe that the government should be as small as possible—but as you may note from that statement, it implies that there is some sort of government. Ideally, one that—among a very limited set of duties—exercises military capabilities in the protection of the country.

And for a long, long time it has been abundantly clear to a...

I have David Tennant on the brain lately. Honestly, I feel like he should be declared as a World Heritage Person or something.

In other news, I’ve been noodling about with trying to come up with a useable definition of what “AI Assisted” means for writing. As a fellow in my writing group pointed out, that’s a very author-centric concern. But it’s something that’s significant to my particular corner of the world right now. Maybe I can come up with something to help in that regard. Maybe not. We’ll...

Legendary actor and cultural icon William Shatner is diving headfirst into heavy metal with a new, star-powered album that promises massive guitars, cinematic scope, and his signature spoken-word intensity. So all the weirdness you’d expect combined with what sounds like a good chunk of sincerity.

Look, this could go either way, really…

The forthcoming album will feature covers of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, ...

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend about creative endeavors and AI. Excuse me, I mean LLMs1. It was, in some sense, Yet Another Way for me to organize my thought about the subject viz-a-viz writing n’at.

One of the things that came up was a post I saw recently about how ‘orrible it was that some Romance writers were using LLMs. In the comments on that post, there was a strong consensus that LLMs are nothing but theft engines, and that while using LLMs to enhance your writing is PURE EBI...

I’m not really a “podcast guy”. I don’t always have an earbud in listening to Roe Jogan or some guy doing a three-hour monologue on how we don’t know how eels reproduce (True thing, apparently. Who knew?)

I have ended up listening to podcasts on the way to and from work quite a bit. Mostly writing podcasts, weird stories like The Haunted Cosmos and The Dusty Tome, things like that.

Yesterday I gave “The Confident Fiction Author” by a try. I first heard her on the Novel Marketing podcast, talking ...

The character I’m playing in our current D&D campaign is a little chaos gremlin, a gnome necromancer wizard who was raised by druids… and who has managed to convince herself that she, herself, is somehow a druid as well.

I mean, Holi knows she isn’t, really, but she keeps that understanding locked away For Reasons and doesn’t look at it too closely unless she absolutely has to. So she is all silly sunshine and fluff with certain exceptions where she becomes a very serious, intensely murderous lit...

A little bit of story time. It’s a bit soppy, so feel free to skip straight to those memes if you’re not into that sort of thing.

Still with me? Okay!

My wife’s been feeling sick. Really run down the past few days. So yesterday, we decided to stay home from church. I figured that if she were sick and staying home, I probably should, too. One, I didn’t want to take what she had out and spread it around; and two, I didn’t want to bring anything back home to her.

So there we were, sitting on the couch...

Look, it’s Pittsburgh. It happens. Just roll with it, man.

That’s what Cassie does:

I hadn’t planned to end the evening dancing with a ghost.

That was before I rounded the corner of Fifth and Magee and nearly ran through Joseph Dawson. One semi-awkward almost collision and a turned ankle later, I had a handsome older ghost helping me to my feet, while asking me if I was all right.

Do you want more? You can have more! I wrote “Callipygous Waltz” a few years ago, inspired by an image from . You can fi...

GOOOOOOOOD morning folks! Welcome to the OFFICIAL start of the New Year, by which I mean, “The Day That Sam Goes Back to Work.” Don’t roll your eyes, I’m told it’s a recognized holiday in Terra Nullius, so there.

I am sitting here with a fresh cup of coffee from my new automatic coffee maker. Which seems like a great way to head back to work, except that I forgot to clean out the grounds basket yesterday and woke up to coffee overflow from the counter and onto the floor. Not a lot, thankfully, bu...

I urged a bunch of people associated with Rac Press to take their look back on this year and post them, so it feels a little disingenuous for me to not do the same. Even though I feel more than a little bit eclipsed by the scope of what they managed this year.

Everything started off with a short story for Cannon set in the same world as my upcoming novel, A Sense of Murder (aka “Blue As Sky”). That story, “Footprints in the Sand”, ended up in Cannon Fodder: Tales From the Gun Crew.

I also edited a...