Susan Fanetti's Blog

I generally love the holidays and dive head-first into all the happy chores of making the season magical—decorating, cooking and baking, gift shopping and wrapping, the whole sparkly ball of fun. When our sons were kids, I worked hard—and eagerly—to make the holiday as special as I could, even in my single-mom days, when the budget was beyond tight and the only gifts I could afford either came from my own hands or from the dollar store. I carried on important traditions from my own childhood and built new ones with my kids.

Seventeen years ago, when my husband, our youngest son, and I moved from Missouri to California while the older, freshly grown boys stayed back, holidays changed for us quite a bit—we’ve been all together to celebrate only a handful of times in these years, and it’s harder to get excited to cook a big dinner for such a small holiday. Also, though I absolutely adore California, it doesn’t snow or even get particularly cold here in the Sacramento area, and it took several years to learn to feel Christmasy in hoodie weather. Even so, I’ve tried to hold the key traditions as much as possible.

Despite the general lack of weather that could support Frosty the Snowman, if our older boys could or would move to California (they can’t and won’t; they’re well established back home), we would never leave. The main reason we’re planning to return to the Midwest in a couple years (after we’re both fully retired) is to reunite the family—which means I get those big, magical holidays back at last.

I think maybe this is why the holidays come up in many of my stories—if I can’t have the huge family gathering myself, I can invent one for characters and have myself a little vicarious cheer.

To be honest, sometimes being so far away from half our brood hits me hard. There have been a few holidays when I barely bothered—didn’t decorate or bake or do anything but gifts. (The years when the boys only wanted—needed—money, and gift giving was about Venmo, were especially rough.)

This year is an odd one. 2025 has been challenging for many, perhaps most of us in a lot of serious ways. The whole country, the whole planet, is going through it these days. It feels like every single day brings a new thing to make us scared or angry or hopeless. The temptation to think “Christmas schmistmas, let’s call the whole thing off” is strong in me this year.

But I’ve decided not to give into that bleak bullshit, even though our family won’t be together.

Instead, I’m going full OPERATION KLAUS, pulling out ALL the decorations on Saturday and filling this house with so much light and sparkle it’ll look like a North Pole disco. I’m baking ALL the cookies. I’m gonna blast Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole Christmas standards in the car and get the bass going like they’re Kendrick. We’re watching a full month’s worth of holiday specials and movies. We’re even gonna do Christmas crafts, dammit!

This year, I’m not handing the holiday over to cynicism and despair, nor depression and overwhelm. This year, I’m throwing glitter in their faces.

Call it Radical Joy.

Whether your life is going well now or you’re in deep struggle, I wish you peace and love during this holiday season and always. If you are going through it, I hope you find ease and comfort soon.

I hope you’re able to find some radical joy of your own.

s—

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Thoughts on The (Dreaded) Miscommunication Trope

Several weeks ago, I got a message from a reader challenging me (nicely) about what she argued was a misalignment between my stated aversion to the miscommunication trope and the occurrence of miscommunication in several of my stories. In responding to that reader’s message, I ended up thinking pretty deeply about this and falling into bit of a rabbit hole about it. So I thought I’d share an expanded version of my explanation/clarification as October’s first post.

The tl;dr is that it’s not miscommunication I dislike in romance, it’s the miscommunication trope. Also, I want to quibble with the word “miscommunication,” as used here.

I am 100% down with characters who are traumatized, neurodivergent, or just bad at peopling behaving traumatized, neurodivergent, or just bad at peopling. Characters (and people) who suck at being brave enough to Say the Thing, or who have histories of having their words twisted or being treated badly by people, who thus hold back their truths for safekeeping even when they’re not actually threatened, those are characters behaving appropriately, consistent with who they are.

Poor communication skills, or deep reticence and reluctance to connect, those aren’t the miscommunication trope. A traumatized, self-protecting character learning to love and be open with another person? I am riding that wave all the way to the shore with them, no matter how choppy the sea. A friends-to-lovers story where they are both in love but afraid to say it and “Ruin the Friendship” (and yes, I’m nodding to Taylor’s new album there)? That also makes perfect sense, and I will hang with them until they work it out.

The thing that will get me to throw my Kindle out the window is none of those things.

What I hate, what will ALWAYS break my connection with a story and virtually always lead to an instant DNF: lack of communication inserted inorganically to create trouble for the couple to overcome.

When a couple is supposed to have gotten through the awkward self-protection phase and is established as being in love and then one of the couple sees something, overhears something, is told something by a third party and then ACTS on that, as if it were verifiably true—that drives me absolutely bananas. How am I supposed to believe in a real bond when a character is willing to blow the whole thing up without ever going to the person who is SUPPOSED TO BE THEIR ONE TRUE LOVE and saying, “Hey, I overheard you on the phone. Did you mean [insert mistaken assumption here]? Or, “Hey, I saw you hugging [person not me]. Looked pretty intimate. What was that about?”

Also, “Hey, when we were first together, you said [something important about what you want]. I thought I wanted that, too, but I’ve changed my mind. Do you still feel the same way?”

Or how about when a third party tries to cause trouble, but nobody bothers to say, “Hey, so-and-so told me you did such-and-such. Did you?”

[Sidebar: that last one is the absolute worst. I pretty much hate any love story where a third party can do damage to a couple when no real damage actually occurred. If you don’t trust your true love, what the fuck are you doing? And if you can’t trust your true love, what the fuck are you doing?]

What I HATE in romance is the plot device of—not miscommunication (because in none of these scenarios does ANY communication take place)—making assumptions/jumping to conclusions and torpedoing a whole relationship without ever confirming what’s true. Even though they eventually get to that conversation (if it’s a romance), the fact that they blew it up in the first place kills it for me.

I cannot believe in that love any longer. If you don’t trust your partner, that’s not love. If you don’t respect your partner enough to talk things over, that’s not love. If I’m reading a romance, and the main couple aren’t being loving, that romance has failed (at least for me).

If, on the other hand, a relationship is new, and the couple is navigating the rocky terrain of getting to know someone and letting them really know you, I’m very comfortable with poor communication slowing them down. Because that’s real. It’s what happens. Real love grows when couples open up enough to let the sun in, but sometimes the clouds are dense.

I’m going to take a light swipe at a very popular author whose work I generally adore to make my point about this. Emily Henry totally rocks, I have all her (recent) books, most in every possible format. But there’s one I have only on Kindle, likely will never buy any other edition (unless my autism demands a complete set lol) or read it again, and this is why.

Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers, Funny Story, Great Big, Beautiful Life—all amazing, 5-star reads for me. Hilarious, heartfelt, and deeply fulfilling. I’ve read them all multiple times. Henry writes living, breathing characters with chemistry that pops like popcorn.

Happy Place is also hilarious, with richly drawn characters. But the central relationship is a second-chance romance where the lovers broke up over assumptions they made about each other AFTER YEARS AS A COUPLE.

They were together like EIGHT years, I think (I’m not going to look it up, but that’s the number in my head, and it feels right). Come on. If you break up over incorrect assumptions at that point, you weren’t meant to be.

I didn’t DNF Happy Place—that’s how much I love Henry’s work. The friend relationships were amazing, and I liked both main characters. But I did not believe in their relationship. They freaking lived together, man, and let these assumptions fester until their relationship fell apart. Nope.

On the other hand, I love Funny Story, which also has a lack-of-communication situation that breaks the couple apart (in fact, several of Henry’s novels do). But there, the trouble happens at the beginning of the relationship, like literally right as they are tipping toward couplehood, and the reasons for each character’s behavior that get them into trouble are fully established, essential to who they are, and thus make perfect sense.

I know plenty of readers love the miscommunication trope, and that’s great. If it works for you, good for you! But to me it feels both inauthentic and, frankly, kinda lazy. There are lots of authentic reasons an established, loving and trusting couple might undergo a crisis. Lots of external forces can press hard enough to make even the strongest metal crack.

But if a relationship buckles under a lack of trust or respect, it wasn’t made of strong stuff. And (if it happens in a story) neither was the writing.

Couples who truly love each other trust and respect each other. In fiction and in life. Full stop.

And there you have it. My explanation for my aversion to “the miscommunication trope” and my clarification for why and when I’m comfortable both writing and reading poor communication in a romantic relationship. FWIW.

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with some thoughts about the horror genre and my love if it, seeing as it’s that time of year.

Speaking of, if you’re currently feeling witchy, I have a spooky story of my own: The House on Bitternut Street is a quirky, witchy, lightly creepy haunted house story.

xoxo

s—

As this blog is the only place I’m talking about or promoting my work online, and I’m occasionally releasing subscriber-exclusive content (including something coming up soon) here as well, it’s a good idea to subscribe, if you’re interested in such things:

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In virtually my entire life, I have never enjoyed sports in any way. As a participant? HAHAHAHAHA. Though I work out regularly and have for years, I am possibly the least athletic person on the planet. I have virtually no spatial awareness. I’m clumsy. I’m slow. I’d rather be in a comfy chair beside the fire with a book, thank you very much.

Even as an observer, sports left me cold. My father was an avid sportsman/outdoorsman and sports fan, and an athletic-ish person (he played middling softball in an array of work leagues, played a decent golf game while he brokered deals on the links, and he bowled well in amateur club leagues), and he was a devoted, season-ticket fan of every 60s-70s St. Louis sports team, but WOW did he not have the patience to share that love with his daughter—or, frankly, even to think I should be interested. So I grew up mainly frustrated at how he hogged the TV room all weekend every weekend (except those he spent on his own sitting in deer blinds and jon boats). The man would watch any sports show. Even the fishing ones. AND THERE WERE CARTOONS ON THE OTHER CHANNELS. GAH!

Kids, in the olden days, families had only one television in the WHOLE HOUSE. It was an actual piece of furniture. Can you imagine?

So I grew up both excluded from and (consequently) disdainful of sports. That didn’t change as I grew up. My first husband was a sports fan, too, and watched a lot, but he had no patience to explain anything, either. I spent a lot of time finding other things to do so I wouldn’t bother him while he watched—or in the kitchen, prepping snacks when he had friends over to watch with him.

Now my husband of nearly 30 years and our youngest son are both avid fans of the Big 4 sports, but by the time we got together, I was somebody who called it “sportsball” and rolled my eyes at how excited grown men got at other grown men playing silly games for millions of dollars. I did my own thing while they watched games—and honestly, that was fantastic when I was writing 6-8 full-length novels a year. Lots and lots of time to myself, lol!

Through research for my writing, I got quite into MMA for a while, but I really can’t stand the UFC as an organization, so I gave up on that a while ago and considered my slight peek into the world of sports over.

But then a strange thing happened … I became a Swiftie.

I say “strange,” because pretty much everybody who knows me goes bug-eyed when they learn that I’m a Swiftie (I’m about Level 8; iykyk). I’m a punk/grunge girly, with a strong foundation of 60s protest folk (the gap between those genres is actually tiny) that became a general fondness for singer-songwriters. I’ve always enjoyed some pop music—I’m a big P!nk fan, for example—but I don’t have patience for bubblegum. On the radio, to me, Taylor seemed soft, bright pink, and sweet as candy. I know a lot of musicians, and a LOT of them really love her. I used to give them shit about it. I didn’t have any bad feelings about Taylor’s music; just did not get the appeal.

The stuff with Kanye was on my radar (I first learned of the VMAs thing from P!nk’s tweet about it):

Because I’m pretty plugged into pop culture in general, I sort of followed the Snake thing when it unfolded, feeling some feminist rage on her behalf, but otherwise, I devoted very little of my brain to Taylor Swift.

Then, on a sleepless night during the pandemic, I watched Miss Americana on Netflix, and she impressed the hell out of me. I’m of the “eat the rich” persuasion, I don’t think the world should have even a single billionaire anywhere, but I’m also of the “don’t fucking hold women to a standard you don’t even show men” persuasion. And since we live in a world where billionaires are so common plain old millionaires are barely edible, I’d say Swift is doing the billionaire thing better than most of ‘em. More than that, though, I discovered that her music is miles deeper than the bubblegum (or, in Swiftie parlance, the “glitter gel pen”) hits.

I decided to check out her albums. I started at the beginning and bounced off the first two, written when she was a teenager—and to this 60yo grunge fan, she sounds way too young in voice and theme. So I started at the back instead, with (at the time) Folklore, and that was it. The first time I heard “this is me trying,” I became a Swiftie.

Now I love her whole catalog, even the early stuff, which gains a lot of depth in the context of her whole body of work.

That’s the background to explain why I was right there in the thick of it when a certain tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs tried to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it.

If you’re reading this, you probably know I’m a hardcore romantic. I was invested in that story from the go. When Taylor attended her first Chiefs game, I told my husband and son that I wanted to watch the game. They both stared at me like I’d grown several new heads—then my son laughed and said, “Taylor’s gonna be there, isn’t she.”

We’re from St. Louis, so, since Kroenke absconded with the Rams (and Bidwell with the Cardinals before that), the Chiefs are our closest thing to a hometown team, but nobody in the fam had ever been a Chiefs fan. In fact, after the Rams left, my husband turned from football entirely. He was pissed and decided he’d given his last bit of loyalty to a football team. But my guys love me, so they watched that game with me.

I was there for Taylor and Travis, but as we were watching the game, I asked a question about what was happening on the field and had my first-ever experience of getting an answer. Without snark! I asked another question, and you know what? They answered me. With sincere enthusiasm for helping me learn.

Now, to give my dad (and, I suppose, my ex) some grace, I’d tried to ask them questions in the time before DVR, so they couldn’t pause games to explain things to me. They had to miss a piece of the game to answer any question I tried to ask. Jim and Stefan, on the other hand, could push a button and give me a full class, with acted-out scenarios, to answer every question I had.

Once freed to ask questions, I had a lifetime’s worth. That first game took us about 6 hours to get through because we paused it so often. Same the following week. And the week after that. For that whole 2023 season, they gave me a master class. Not once did they make me feel like I was being a pain in the ass—in fact, they loved teaching me.

And I discovered I LOVE football. Like, how the fuck did I go almost 60 years on this planet thinking the guys in the helmets were mostly not very bright? How did I think they were just thoughtlessly crashing themselves into each other? This game is complex as hell!

I’ve done my autistic thing and dived deep, I’m still fixated and will watch basically ANY football thing, I’m on Year 3 of Susan’s Football Madness, and I’m still learning new things all the time. Holy crap, this game is awesome!

Now our Sundays are entirely devoted to football, from the beginning of The Red Zone all the way through Sunday Night Football. I love so many players across the whole league.

I’m not entirely sure I’m a devoted Chiefs fan. I’m there for Travis, but I feel some conflicts about other players and the team itself. When Trav retires, I’ll decide where my deepest love lies. Maybe I’ll be sufficiently settled in the Kingdom and remain a Chiefs fan? Maybe the Niners (the home team here, with cutie George Kittle)? Maybe the Bears or Colts? (the next closest to our hometown)? Maybe another team? We’ll have to see. But now that I’m here in NFL-land, I don’t see me heading for the exit.

As it turns out, starting to love football opened a door in my head—and heart.

You know what else is awesome? The WNBA. Taylor got me into football, and Caitlin Clark (a Swiftie herself) got me into basketball, but now those connections are only important to my origin story as a sports fan. They are no longer why I’m invested in the sports. The Fever is my W team, but Caitlin is not my favorite player. She’s in the top ten, but she might not crack the top five. I discovered a whole league chock full of powerful women I adore. Aliyah Boston’s is the jersey I wear, and I would give up an organ for Kelsey Mitchell.

I also caught the rugby bug during the Olympics and adore Ilona Maher (on the pitch and off), but watching rugby in the States is not easy. We had the streaming app for a while, but it turns out, to be able to make sense of a game you’re watching on TV, you need more than somebody with a camera on the sidelines doing their best to follow the ball. You need actual production professionals, and we’re not getting that in the US except for the Olympics.

So now I’m a rabid sports fan, watching podcasts analyses, playing in fantasy leagues, devoting whole days of my week to watching games like I’ve got money on the outcome (I don’t—I don’t gamble, ever), and people who knew me in the before times would be shocked.

My disdain for sports was rooted in the strongly gendered soil of my 60s-80s upbringing, the entrenched idea that things like football and basketball were only for boys and men to play or even enjoy. And those roots were thick and lasting, even as I shed most other such limiting ideas. But it’s women who brought me to sports—and the wonderful, evolved men in my life who have embraced this new love with me.

Just something I’m thinking about as football season gets underway—and Ms. Swift has herself a One True Love and a big ol’ diamond ring, not a paper one, on the finger they put wedding rings on. Love stories all around.

Especially in these times, we have to cling to the things that bring us the respite of delight.

I hope you’re having a great weekend—and if you, too, are a sports fan, I hope your team wins (unless they’re playing the Chiefs or the Fever haha)!

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with more bookish content.

xoxo
s—

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Hey there!

Today is the day! Freak, Book 3 of the Signal Bend Heritage series is NOW AVAILABLE. You can find it at Amazon and most other vendors.

Freak features Abigail Freeman as the FMC. Abigail is a new character to this series, introduced in Book 1 (Virago) and featured in a significant subplot of Book 2 (Snake). The title of Book 3 is a reference to what happens in Book 2, and to the fact that Abigail is a bit of a town outsider and why.

Mel Lind was introduced late in the original Signal Bend series. Until now he hasn’t gotten much page time, but I think you’ll like him a lot. He’s almost a cinnamon roll. IMO, he’s got a little too much edge to really fit that mold, but he’s close.

This is the book that finally broke a long, painful bout of writer’s block.

This book is also the book where the series narrative arc takes off (and where I, as I was writing, discovered that arc). I expect that main elements of the club story in Freak to play out over the rest of the series.

If you’re interested in some of my inspirations for character and setting, you can check out my Pinterest Board for the Signal Bend Heritage series.

I hope you enjoy your visit with Abigail and Mel, the whole Night Horde family, and the special town of Signal Bend, Missouri!

xoxo
s—

This coming Monday is the 105th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which finally enfranchised women of the United States with the power of the vote.

Progress in this country has always traveled a stuttering, circuitous path, making promises and reneging, picking and choosing who gets rights and when they get them or lose them, making it difficult if not impossible to exercise one’s rights when they ostensibly have them.

Thus, 18 August 1920 did not suddenly unlock the vote for every woman of age in the country. First, and for decades after, it was white women who could safely step into a voting booth, and not all white women had access to that safety or that vote. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, that enfranchisement spread widely to all adult citizens and systems were in place to protect it.

Despite its rocky beginnings, and the obstacles and inconveniences put in place in most states by people seeking to quell the power of the vote in certain demographics, despite the way the VRA has been weakened in recent years, the right to vote has been protected since 1965. For virtually all my life, then, I had the privilege and luxury not to think about the right to vote as anything but a reality in my life and a historical fascination to study. For myself, it was simply something that I could do, a right and a responsibility I’ve always taken seriously.

18 August has been a celebration day for me for most of my life. This year, however, the 19th doesn’t need a birthday party. She needs a war party.

I never considered that someone in the modern world would ever have sufficient power in this country to take my vote, or anyone else’s, away. I honestly never considered that someone who wanted to disenfranchise whole segments of the populace would be widely considered anything more than a crackpot weirdo screaming into the void.

But that void got crowded and grew teeth, and here we are. Women have already lost the right to bodily autonomy. Now people who would have been rightly shunned as cuckoo birds are sitting at the desks of prominent news mainstream shows, and an alarming number of brocasts, suggesting, with minimal pushback if any, that it was a mistake to “give” us the right to vote. And not only women, but anyone in a demographic that gained the right to vote any time after 1776.

I could do a big, messy diatribe here, I want to do a big, messy diatribe here, but I’m tired and seriously swamped with prep work for the fall semester. (I could also do a big, messy diatribe about the absolute FUCKAPALOOZA of trying to teach amidst all the abject horror and infuriating buffoonery taking over the country and the world, but again, I’m too damn busy gearing up for that bloody battle to yell about it.)

So instead of getting my rage on, I’ll use this moment to direct you, if you’re interested, to some content about suffrage and other rights women have fought and died to claim.

First, because this is primarily what my blog is for, some related stuff I’ve written:
Voices, Votes, and Vibrators. An article about suffrage and women’s health for the Dirty Sexy History blog. (Lots of linked sources)

Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven. My historical romance featuring an English suffragette (in which I use a lot of the research linked in the article above).

Some books about the fight for suffrage (US and England):
All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900, by Martha S. Jones

Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women, edited by Joyce Marlow.

My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst

The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, by Sylvia Pankhurst

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement 1848-1898, by Lisa Tetrault

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, by Elaine Weiss.

Other books about women’s rights:
The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay

She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall

Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement, by Katherine M. Marino

by Chanel Miller

Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Lynn Lewis

Legislation: International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality, edited by Ramona Vijeyarasa.

Okay, I’ve got to get back to semester prep. I hope you find something inspiring to read. If you do read any of my suggestions, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so maybe come back and leave a comment!

I’ll be back in a few weeks with more content about my own books and writing—and on that point, I would be remiss not to remind you that I’ve got a new book coming out in three weeks! Freak, Book 3 of the Signal Bend Heritage series, goes live on Saturday, 6 September!

See you then!
love,
s—

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Hello!

As the calendar flips to August, I return to a primary focus on my day job, prepping reading lists and syllabi, writing lesson plans and lecture notes, setting up course information in Canvas (our online course tool platform), etc. But before I put my head down for that work, I’ve got some authory work to do.

Today I’m revealing my next release! Freak, Book Three of the Signal Bend Heritage series, is now available for preorder at Amazon and just about everywhere else. Release day is Saturday, 6 September. A paperback edition will also be available.

This is the only place I’m announcing the reveal and the only place I’ll do any kind of promotion on it. I understand and am okay with how so little promotion might affect sales; that’s the trade-off I made when I decided to back away from social media for my mental (and ethical) wellbeing. That said, if you’re feeling inspired to do so, please feel free to share promo/teaser images I post here, or just the link to this post, or anything you’d like to share about this release—no pressure to do so, no expectation at all on my end, just my consent for you to copy SBH3 promo images like the one below to share if you’d like to do so.

Freak is a story that “popped” for me while I was writing Snake, Book 2 of the series. Abigail Freeman, the female lead, is first introduced with a small, incidental mention in Virago, Book 1, and though she was mentioned as no more than a little bit of town flavor, I got the first tickle of inspiration in that brief moment. Then something happens to her in Snake that sparks quite a bit of plot, especially for the Horde, and in all that, Abigail rose in my mind to the level of a potential lead. The prologue of Freak, which I shared last month, covers that inciting event from Abigail’s POV.

Abigail herself is somewhat inspired by a social media influencer, Hannah Taylor (LilyLouTay). She’s pretty popular, and you might well know her. She does cute southern cooking vids, which often feature her husband, James, as her chief taster and number-one fan. Actually, Abigail and Mel’s relationship is maybe a little bit inspired by Hannah and James.

I hope you enjoy Freak and the continuing saga of Signal Bend and the Night Horde MC!

Here’s the description:

Abigail Freeman has lived all her life in the hills above Signal Bend, Missouri. Like the grandmother who raised her and taught her all she knew, Abigail leads a traditional, solitary life mostly outside the prickly borders of the modern world. Some call her a witch, some call her a freak, but others call her an old soul and a good woman, the kind of country-bred that’ll drop everything to help a stranger. And just about everybody loves her pies.

Mel Lind has lived long enough in Signal Bend to be considered a local. A longstanding patch in the Night Horde MC, and lead electrician at Signal Bend Construction, he’s built up a decent life for himself. After years of family obligation, he’s glad to be living solo, no external expectations to shape himself around, no compromises, no burdens on his shoulders but his own.

When Abigail comes home to find her property ransacked, death and destruction in every direction, she knows it’s too much for her to handle alone. So she calls the only help she feels she can trust: the Night Horde.

It’s Mel who answers her call. That simple coincidence changes both their lives forever.

At the same time Abigail and Mel realize a bond is forming between them, the Horde discover a schism forming among them. When the club is in turmoil, Signal Bend suffers for it. That dark history has repeated several times.

This time, Mel has someone other than himself to keep safe. And Abigail needs him safe, too.

And here’s a little teaser as well. Since I already shared the prologue, I’ll give you Chapter 3 today—a view of Abigail from Mel’s perspective:

Abigail Freeman’s house was like something out of an old folk tale.

On the outside it looked like a normal farmhouse, setting aside the vivid purple paint and black trim (and the graffiti she’d left on a side wall and prettied up like it belonged there), but once you crossed the threshold, the inside was like nothing Mel had seen outside a book of fairy tales.

He understood why some folks around here thought she might really be a witch.

Take this kitchen, for instance. At its base, it was a regular country kitchen: large and practical, with a wood floor and wood countertops, lots of wooden cupboards and other storage, including two big old hutches and a hand-built case of floor-to-ceiling shelves. She had three ovens—two in a wall unit probably installed in the 80s and a monster range that was probably twice as old as that. Her fridge was an antique beast as well, the kind where the freezer had to be defrosted a few times a year.

The base of her kitchen, in other words, was what one would expect from a hundred-plus-year-old country house—funky and aging, but practical. The wild stuff began the next layer up. The cupboards were painted a deep purple color—not the violet of the exterior but a rich, reddish purple like a ripe plum. The ceiling was painted black. A patchwork of thin, woven rugs in a vast array of colors, patterns, and sizes covered the floor. The backsplash behind the sink was gold tile, each one hand-painted with a different flower. Half a dozen pendant lights hung from the ceiling, each one with a vintage glass globe in a different color and shape. The walls—wood planks—were barely visibly behind the hutches, the shelves, a big pegboard hung with rows of live plants in small glass pots, and another wall bedazzled with an extensive collection of cast-iron cookware.

And then there were the little glass pots and bottles that filled that case of shelves, each one carefully marked with a label in Abigail’s calligraphic handwriting. In a normal kitchen, that would be a spice rack, and about one-tenth the size. This one indeed held kitchen spices, every one Mel knew and a whole bunch he didn’t. But then they took a decidedly fantastical turn. Dried bits from strange, spiky plants, odd things in liquid, things with names he’d never heard. And also names he knew but unsettled him nonetheless: bee venom, dried crickets, dried ants, and more. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find ‘eye of newt’—but that was not among her strange ‘spices.’

Maybe she was a witch. He hadn’t asked; that seemed like one of those questions it was best to keep to himself.

What really made it seem so ethereal wasn’t the strange little bottles but the plants, so many plants the kitchen was a jungle. In addition to that board of baby plants, three pots hung from macrame hangers before the window at the sink, dozens of plants hung from the ceiling in similar hangers all around the room, one enormous plant made a vining curtain over the side window, and bunches of leafy stems had been bound together and strung across the room like clothes hanging to dry. At six-one, Mel practically needed a pith helmet and a machete to cross the room.

Coming into this kitchen from the outside was like walking through a portal and landing in the forest where Hansel and Gretel got lost. It was dark, verdant, unusual, and bursting with life. And in the middle of it stood this woman, herself verdant, unusual, and bursting with life.

But she wasn’t dark. Abigail Freeman’s inner light was bright as a lighthouse.

Mel was maybe a little bit in love with her.

Er … no, not that. He didn’t do love; with love came commitment, and that wasn’t his bag. He’d done his time being responsible for another person, and now he liked captaining a ship for one. Nobody leaning on him, nobody riding him if he got home late, nobody waiting on him for anything.

But damn, he liked Abigail’s company.

Until a pack of unknown (yet) shitheads had ransacked this homestead, Mel hadn’t known her particularly well. The people up here in the hills stuck to themselves more than not, so he wouldn’t have said he knew any particularly well. Gary Prentiss, he supposed, but that was because Gary had been a minor thorn in the Horde’s side until he’d ended up dead because of it. Abigail he’d known only because she made the best damn pies and jams he’d ever had, and he always made a point of stopping by her booth at a town festival and loading up on provisions.

Simple coincidence had brought them into each other’s orbit. Mel had been the one to answer the phone—a landline that almost never rang—when she’d called the club for help that day, and since then, Abigail had become one of his favorite people. Yeah, she was a little weird, but it was the best kind of weird, entirely without malice or cynicism.

She was one of those folks the sun seemed to shine straight through. Always smiling, always sweet, patient with young and old, deftly disarming anybody who might be inclined to be difficult. That last one spoke to a strength of spirit most ‘nice’ people didn’t possess, in his experience. A lot of people were ‘nice’ because they were afraid of confrontation and wanted to slip under the radar. They were people pleasers, looking for affirmation, not actually compassionate. Abigail was kind, but she wasn’t afraid of confrontation. She stood her ground with a sincere smile and without aggression. She simply held her boundaries firm.

She was the type of woman who’d leave a nasty message meant to hurt her feelings and deface her home right where it was and paint flowers, butterflies, and honey bees all around it, turning something that had been done to her into something that was hers. There was a firm FUCK YOU in a move like that.

She was kind, but there was steel in her.

She was real nice to look at, too.

If Mel had a type, it was ‘independent.’ He admired anybody who handled their own shit. He didn’t like clingy women, those made their guy their whole personality, but otherwise he liked most of them. If he had a physical feature he appreciated most of all, it had to be eyes; eyes were what he noticed first on anybody, and a pretty set on a woman would pull and hold his attention every time. Abigail’s eyes were the clear blue of a June sky, and her perpetual smile kept them sparkling like a lake on a sunny day. Combined with that wild mess of dark hair and those bodacious curves a man could sink into, okay, yeah, he’d had a thought or ten of her during his ‘personal time,’ sure.

Men who thought only skinny women could be beautiful were missing a bet. There was nothing like pulling a woman with some meat on her close and wrapping her up in his arms. It felt good absolutely everywhere. Skinny girls were sharp and bony, and he could barely feel he had anything in his arms—not to mention being half-worried he’d accidentally break one if he got too energetic. They were pretty, too, he wouldn’t kick a lanky girl out of bed, but they weren’t the be-all, end-all of beautiful, sexy women, not by a long shot.

Sometimes his eyes settled on Abigail from behind and he almost grunted.

So yeah. He was attracted to her. And okay, maybe he had a little crush. He damn sure wouldn’t turn down the opportunity. However, he’d tossed a few feelers out over the past few weeks, and she hadn’t picked up on a single one. Not even a little extra pink in her cheeks or a flutter of an eyelash. He could admit some insecurity at having his signals so roundly ignored.

Mel wasn’t shy about making his moves, but he liked to have some indication a move was wanted before he did anything obvious. Abigail was sweet as candy and said she enjoyed his company, but she was clearly not interested in anything more than platonic.

Word around town was she’d never been with anyone, not a relationship, not a one-nighter, nothing. He knew for sure she wasn’t strongly religious, at least not in the Bible-waving way, so it wasn’t that. Maybe she was one of those ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual’ folks and not interested in anybody ever.

While he couldn’t relate to that thought—hardly an hour of his life went by where he didn’t think about sex—it helped. He was vain enough to think if she liked men she’d at least give him a second look. He took care of himself, worked out and all that, and he had no, like, deformities. Enough women had called him hot that he could be confident he was decent looking. He was getting up there a little, maybe, just a couple years shy of fifty now, but he still did okay for himself, and not only at the clubhouse.

He tried to be a decent human being, too. He didn’t have a hero complex, didn’t need to look for people to save to feel good about himself, didn’t need a chick fluttering her lashes at him in gratitude, but he threw in where there was need.

It was a lot easier to believe Abigail wasn’t interested in sex than that she wasn’t interested in him. He was pretty comfortable with himself, but rejection still hurt, even if it was only implied.

After a last, lingering glance to watch her body move as she mashed potatoes, he carried the jar of wildflowers to the dining room and set them in the middle of her round table.

Every room he’d seen in this house—kitchen, dining room, living room, a bathroom—had the same otherworldly atmosphere. Dark wood floors, covered with mismatched rugs, dark walls—in here they were painted a chocolate brown—plants hanging and sitting everywhere, eclectic collections of lights. In the dining room were a huge, dark china chest and a mismatched sideboard painted antique silver. In this room, she’d draped a big piece of funky fabric across the ceiling, drawn up in the center, around the light fixture, and swagging to the corners, so it was like sitting in a tent in the Sahara or something.

She’d spread a lace tablecloth over the table and set two places with her mismatched dishes and silverware. Two old-fashioned stoneware pitchers, one blue and full of ice water, and the other white and full of sweet tea, sat near the center, by the ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like kittens. The flowers in their glass jar and cutesy ribbon made a surprisingly nice touch, as if they’d been arranged for someone to paint a still life.

Everything about this woman was weird and beautiful in equal measure.

Why had he brought her flowers? He supposed the impulse might have been rooted in attraction, but he didn’t think he’d meant it, consciously or otherwise, as more than a nice thing for a friend. She’d certainly taken them like that. What would he have done if she’d thought they meant more? Would that have made an opportunity?

The light in the room changed subtly; a faint, flickering dimness. Mel looked up and studied the overhead light—a cut-glass bowl light that had probably been installed in the 1930s. One of its four bulbs flickered unsteadily—in a way he recognized as a problem in the wiring, not just the bulb dying.

Good thing Abigail had called an electrician over for supper.

“Mel, hon?” she called from the kitchen right then.

Mel grinned. Though he was pretty sure she’d been raised right here, she had a real mountain accent that closed off the vowel in his name and changed the sound to ‘Mil.’ She also dropped the word ‘hon’ like a period on half her sentences, whomever she was talking with. Though she was younger than him, she talked like somebody’s granny, and it was fucking delightful.

“Yeah, Abs? What you need?” He swung around and headed back to her witchy kitchen.

The food smells suddenly hit him like a drug, and he stopped and sucked in as much of them as he could. Roast chicken with rosemary, mashed potatoes with garlic and sour cream, fresh bread, sauteed green beans, no doubt fresh from her garden. He never ate better than when he ate here.

“What you do in your kitchen is fuckin’ magic, Abs.”

She turned from the stove, where she was scooping potatoes into a stoneware bowl. She always cooked for about six people and sent him home with three days’ worth of leftovers. Yep, she was like a squishy newborn granny pixie. Charmed the socks right off him.

“Sometimes, I s’pose, what I do in here could be called magic, but this here is just mashed taters. Will you carry the bird in, hon?” She nodded at the platter on the island, where a perfectly roasted chicken sat, bedecked with rosemary and gleaming under an amber-colored glass pendant lamp.

“Happy to,” he said and went to the island. When he saw her trying to tuck the bread basket under her arm and carry the potatoes and the veggies, too, he took the basket from her and added it to his own load. She smiled a thanks at him.

They took their usual seats at the table and Mel carved the chicken while Abigail filled their glasses with sweet tea.

She’d never served anything alcoholic with dinner, he thought she probably didn’t drink beer or wine, but with dessert, there was always a little glass of hooch—just one, in a little jelly glass. She made a hard cider that tasted like cinnamon applesauce and would absolutely put a grown man under the table in a couple glasses.

As usual, Abigail wouldn’t fill her plate first, so he served himself some chicken and passed the tray to her. Then he went for the mashed potatoes. If he ever ended up on death row, his last meal would be nothing but a great, heaping bowl of these potatoes.

“How’s the goats?” he asked, plopping a third big scoop of mashed magic on his plate. “You had a job in … where again?”

“Labadie,” she answered as she selected some chicken for herself. “They’re a new client, and it went just fine. They had a real nice place for me to set up the trailer. I got one more job lined up this month, and then it’ll be the end of the season for the brushers.”

“I’ll be glad of that. I don’t like you being out on the road so long.”

She laughed at that while she spooned a significantly smaller portion of potatoes onto her plate. “I’m not on the road, hon. I’m just campin’. The goats and the dogs do most of the work.”

He stopped with a serving fork full of green beans (sauteed in bacon grease and seasoned with some kind of blend that tasted like something the gods on Olympus would eat—the woman should write a cookbook, seriously) halfway to his plate and gave Abigail a firm look. “After what those shitheads—‘scuse me—did to you, Abs, I don’t like you away from home so long. On the road means away from home. They’re still out there; we haven’t found ‘em yet.”

He’d grown increasingly frustrated as the question slipped down the list of the club’s priorities. They’d hit several dead ends in the search for the doers, they’d dug themselves a big hole trying to figure it out, and most of his brothers had lost the appetite for the fight. Pretty soon he’d be the only one who cared enough to even bring it up at the table. Maybe he already was the only one.

He had not shared that frustration with Abigail, however, and he would not. If he had to figure it out himself, so be it, but he meant to find those fuckers and make them pay. Anybody who’d hurt this sweet woman deserved a very hard payback. Bloody hard.

She flapped a hand at him. “Well, first thing, I wasn’t here to get hurt when they came by, because I was ‘on the road.’ Second thing, they didn’t do much to me. They made a mess, but that’s all cleaned up now, thanks to you and your club. They killed my chickens, and that was the worst of it. You know I’m not forgettin’ that. I just…” she paused, turned to stare out the window (through dozens of tendrils from the plants hanging there), and continued her thought. “I don’t like dwellin’ in the dark, y’know? Life is hard sometimes. Bad things happen sometimes. That’s part of gettin’ up each day, puttin’ your shoes on, and movin’ forward. Sometimes it’s hard. But I don’t want other people’s demons dancin’ on my hearth.”

He chuckled softly and reached across the table to brush his fingers across her hand and catch her attention. She wore a big ring on the middle finger of her right hand, with an oval amber stone sizeable enough to fill the space between her knuckles.

Her hand twitched beneath his touch, almost like he’d brought a static charge with him. He felt something like that himself.

When she turned back to him, he said, “I like the sound of that, but I’m not sure I’ve got its meaning.”

“Other people’s demons dancin’ on my hearth?”

He nodded. “Yeah. What d’you mean?” He had a guess, but he wanted to be sure.

“Granny Kate used to say it. It means don’t invite other people’s darkness in to turn your own life dim. I said it just now because I don’t want that one bad day, when some people felt compelled to do somethin’ bad to me, to change me or my life or my home. I’m not stayin’ home because I’m scared of what some stranger might do while I’m gone. I’m not hidin’ when I’m home, afraid somebody’ll do somethin’ while I’m here. I won’t live like that, and I’m sorry for anybody who feels they have to.”

His guess had been in line with her explanation, and again he felt that kick of admiration in his chest, strong enough to be attraction, even desire. His hand was still on the table; with barely a thought, he caught hers and squeezed.

“You’re a real special woman, Abigail.”

Her eyes dropped to his hand over hers and held there for a moment. Then, slowly, they came up to fix on his face. Their eyes locked, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to grow suddenly heavier, like the last second before a lightning strike.

When she began to slip her hand free, his hand clenched and held her fast.

He hadn’t meant to do that; it had been a reflex.

But now he couldn’t let her go.

©2025 Susan Fanetti

Every summer, the readers in the Susan’s FANetties FB group have a Q&A in which they submit questions to me, and I, usually quite reserved throughout the year, hold forth at length in my answers. This year, the 11th, had a particularly great collection of questions that really made me think.

One of them got me so spun up I wrote a whole angry essay in response (angry at the topic, not at the questioner–it’s an important question), complete with lots of links to sources, not to mention LOTS of swearing, and it’s just too much for FB to handle. So I’m publishing it here, available for anybody who wants to read it.

So buckle in, and let’s talk about AI.

Q: As publishing evolves, authors are exploring AI tools for research or writing. Have you considered using AI in your process? Why or why not?

A: I think about this shit a lot. It’s like a constant drumbeat at the back of my brain, occasionally surging forward in a crescendo. It touches both my careers, and I have BIG OPINIONS. I feel strongly enough that I’m not going to try to make space for the other side of the debate. I think the other side of the debate is unethical at best and downright world-killing at worst, so … yeah. If you use generative AI, you probably don’t want to read my thoughts about the use of generative AI. I’m not going to be nice about it.

Before I get into the details here, the tl;dr of this answer is: ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. BECAUSE IT FUCKING SUCKS MUDDY DOG BALLS.

Design by Kim Hu. You can find a purchase link at the end of the post.
(And yes, I own this shirt)

There’s your warning.

Now I’m gonna get real honest.

*cracks knuckles* *cracks neck*

I’m going to organize this manifesto into separate parts, taking on each of the big, big issues I have with GenAI. In case the distinction isn’t known to everyone: broadly speaking, generative AI is the stuff that purports to create something from a prompt. Assistive AI is like what Siri’s been doing for more than a decade, the tools Photoshop’s had for almost as long, even predictive text—stuff that’s not replacing human work so much as making human work a little easier. That’s an important distinction.

BTW: when you hear/see someone arguing that GenAI is the same thing as using a calculator in math problems, the correct analog is SIRI, NOT ChatGPT. Siri is *assistive* AI, like a calculator is assistive to the math the human brain is actually doing.

To use a calculator, you have to know the numbers to enter. You have to do all the actual thinking yourself to arrive at the numbers you enter. A calculator is streamlining the most basic function of the work. GenAI, on the other hand, is purporting to do the actual thinking for you.

GenAI can be used like a calculator, and when it is, it can simply be a similarly supportive tool. But its creators are pushing it as a better thinker and creator than the human brain, and people are mainly using it so they don’t have to do the thinking and creation. That’s very, very bad for humanity.

I don’t use Siri, because I’d always rather type than talk, even at my own phone, but I don’t want Siri dead. ChatGPT, on the other hand, deserves a firing squad. And then burn the bones and salt the earth. All its stupid competitors, too.

And do not get me started on so-called “agentic” AI, or we will be here all day. GRRR.

Environmental Impact: This one should be the most neutral regardless of whether you think the products of GenAI are a good or an evil in the world, because this is simply fact. GenAI, in particular LLMs (large language models, which is what ChatGPT and such are), has an absolutely ENORMOUS energy footprint. According to an MIT study, a single ChatGPT query uses five times the energy of a regular Google search. Multiply that by how often you use Google, how many people around the world are searching the web at any given moment, and imagine what happens if (when; sigh) GenAI replaces Google and becomes the world’s default. The most basic function we ask GenAI to do is five times more destructive than what we’ve been using to accomplish the exact same task, in seconds, for decades now. Imagine how much energy each request to produce a document or collate data, much more demanding tasks, takes. And that’s just part of its overall energy gluttony and climate assault.  The xAI supercomputing facility in Memphis is poisoning the people who breathe the air around it. And these facilities use a colossally dangerous amount of unreplenishable water as well.

We’re 25 years—one generation—from 2050, the year climate scientists have identified as the point at which we will be in a full-blown climate disaster, and the fuckheads crowing about GenAI are apparently like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we killed the earth by 2030 instead?”

I wish every last one of those moronic techbros itching powder in every pair of underwear they ever put on for the rest of their lives.

Creative Impact: As an English professor and a writer, this one gets me where I live. I have a whole anti-AI lecture to give students at the beginning of the semester (with a lot of what I’m saying here), because GenAI is a fucking scourge in schools right now, and the bullshit ways techbros and pro-AI people talk about it makes me want to puke. And then throat-punch somebody.

THE IDEA IS NOT THE ART. THE EXECUTION OF THE IDEA IS THE ART. COME ON! Telling Midjourney to make an image with elements you’ve (I’m using the general ‘you’ here) specified is NOT you creating that image. That is Midjourney finding versions of those elements out in the aether, and STEALING THEM FROM ACTUAL ARTISTS to Frankenstein the image you said you wanted. The person who typed in the prompt IS NOT AN ARTIST. People who use GenAI to “create content” are more analogous to a shitty corporate executive, demanding work from somebody else and taking all the credit. In fact it’s worse, because at least the corporate drone getting their work claimed by their boss is drawing some kind of payment for the work.

It’s an absurd assertion that it’s “elitist” or “gatekeeping” to say you gotta do the fucking work and write the fucking book your fucking self, you gotta put the paint on the canvas, you gotta design the image, you gotta carve the marble. That’s not gatekeeping. It’s art. Only Michelangelo, through the lens of his genius and talent, saw the David in a block of marble. Only the very human man himself could have created that masterpiece. Perhaps a machine could carve a block of marble to look like a man, but what would result would be no masterpiece.

The David, one of the world’s greatest works of art. Taken during our 2022 visit to Florence.

We negate the value and significance of art itself when we call what a machine produces “art.” There is a reason we consider art one of the humanities.

Few have the talent of Michelangelo, but any human can make art. Art is self-expression. Full stop. Bad art made by human hands is still art. Not all art can be successfully monetized, but that doesn’t have anything to do with talent OR artistic expression. Van Gogh struggled to pay for food and shelter all his short life, after all, and sold very few works in his lifetime, and he’s now almost universally regarded as one of the greatest artists the world has known.

Money has literally NOTHING to do with art itself. It has lots to do with having access to the time and supplies to make it, of course, privilege is very much in play there, but whether a piece has any monetary value is irrelevant to the art itself.

People who use GenAI want an easy button. But NOBODY gets an easy button to create or to learn. You might have the resources to do it more readily and often than someone who’s working 16 hours a day to keep the rent paid, but you still gotta do the work, and so does the tired double-shift worker. What comes from the easy button will never be art and should never be allowed to replace what humans create.

So yeah, I make a teensy bit of room for some of the good GenAI might be able to do in science and medicine (I’m not informed enough about that yet to assert a strong opinion), but consumer-facing GenAI is nothing but a plagiarism machine, full stop. Plagiarism is theft. And the AI bros aren’t even pretending it’s not. They’re arguing in court that they should be allowed to steal it, because of how much money can be made when they do.

That’s the thing that seems to get lost in the constant discourse about GenAI and how much money a very few people who are already richer than the rest of us combined can make: productivity is not the be-all, end-all of life. Productivity is not a moral or ethical value, and it should not define human existence. Most people’s employment is not a calling, not a thing they do for love. For most people, work is no more or less than a necessary burden. The meaning of life cannot be that we are simply cogs keeping the billionaire-support machine running.

It’s not the destination, after all, it’s the journey. The learning and experience we gain before we achieve a thing is greater than the thing itself. We are shaped by our experiences. GenAI is all about the destination—and at that destination, GenAI gives us a hologram of reality, not the actual thing.

You can really tell that the people running the tech world have no respect whatsoever for humanity—or for the study of it, what we call the humanities. The latest issue of The New Yorker includes a lame-brained defense of AI, in which the author describes AI’s ability to summarize writing, and uses a passage from the opening to Charles Dickens’ classic novel Bleak House as an example: “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy.”

Declaring Dickens’ writing “muddy and semantically torturous,” the New Yorker writer suggests this AI summary as an improvement: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various places throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

Now, I’m not a particular fan of Dickens, and I am particularly not a fan of Bleak House. However, the difference between the opening Dickens wrote and the summary AI cobbled together from stolen bits of the internet is the difference between making art and stringing words together.

There is rhythm in Dickens’ passage, there is semantic pattern and balance, there is mood. The summary is nothing more than a report. It’s not even description because it doesn’t carry any emotion or mood. It’s just “It’s foggy, there’s a few street lamps, looks like sun in the country. Anyway.”

And HOLY SHIT, the point of art is not merely to convey information, and not merely to be entertained. It’s not mere “content” to be consumed. The point of art IS TO MAKE YOU FEEL, to have something to say, to put you in a character’s (or author’s) head and share an experience. That summary bleeds all the feeling straight out of Dickens’ art.

And HOLY SHIRTBALLS, the point of studying art and literature is not simply to get the plot points. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. We study art to appreciate it, to relate to it, to understand its context in the human story, and to understand how the language achieves such a lofty goal as communion through time and space between writer, story, reader, and the world.

Very few writers are trying to make the themes and emotions of their stories difficult to unearth. They’re not hiding what they want to say. They’re trying to pull you into their brain and show you what they see and feel so that you see and feel it too. They want you to get EVERYTHING they’re saying and seeing and feeling and thinking. They want you to live the story.

I should have used “we” instead of “they” there.

When someone asserts that AI can be a useful tool for students because it takes difficult prose and summarizes it in simple language, when they also insist that AI can write books and movies, can do the work of human artists, what they’re really saying is that art doesn’t matter. And they’re also COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT of humanities education.

We don’t assign Dickens or Shakespeare or any other writer whose use of language is less colloquial and therefore more difficult because we’re trying to torment our students or because we don’t think there are great writers who use contemporary diction. We assign them because 1) they are great writers, so important to our body of literature they are part of our modern cultural idiom, here in the “western” world at least, and familiarity with their work is part of the context of understanding contemporary works, and 2) learning to interpret and analyze these difficult texts builds the skills to be able to interpret and analyze any text. Oh, and 3) because to understand our own humanity, we must understand the humanity that came before us.

It’s artists who interpret human history. That has been true since the first cave painting.

Moreover, we don’t assign essays because essay-writing itself is so vital to daily life. That’s true for some, those who become professional writers, but that’s not most people. We assign essays because grappling with your own ideas is important—and not just the opinions you’ve osmosed from parents, and media, and friends, and randos online, but ideas you build through research—real research, conducted by experts and reviewed by other experts. Learning how to truly evaluate sources—not just find junk online that already agrees with you, but find the people who are doing real study so you can test your opinions against facts and empirical observation and expert analysis. Academic writing and research shows students that the opinion of someone who’s studied the topic in depth and for years, under the rigorous structure of academic process, is a better opinion than some dude with a podcast, and builds the skills to know which dude with a podcast has actually done the work and which bozo is spewing vibes and toeing the line of his sponsors’ interests.

In good research, sound research, we understand, analyze, and evaluate others’ arguments and then synthesize what we’ve learned with our own ideas so that our ideas come through that process, maybe changed, but certainly stronger, grounded in logic and harder to rebut.

Doing that thinking and expression in writing is important. In writing, you can practice refining your words, find the organization and style that brings the most impact, understand whether your audience is already on your side or needs convincing, and which approach is most likely to gain their attention and respect.

It’s not about the essay. It’s about the work you had to do, and the learning that happened while you did it, before you even began putting words on a page. These are crucial skills of critical thinking that transcend college requirements.

GenAI strips away all that learning. And good god, without it, the apocalypse we’re heading for is Wall-E.

Economic Impact: The first and easiest point to make here is that stealing art from writers and artists, and anybody else who has “IP” online, is stealing money from them. Art isn’t about monetary value, but we live in a capitalist society, and artists have the same human needs of food and shelter that, in our society, we must pay for. If anybody is going to make money from art, the list had damn well better start with the artist.

During the SAG/AFTRA strike a few years ago, one of the main sticking points was studios’ insistence on taking the rights, in perpetuity, to voice and image of actors once they were under contract for any project. Which would mean, of course, that studios could pay an actor once and never again, forever. Just use the AI-generated likeness in any future projects, forever, without any compensation or even consent for the actor. Most actors aren’t Brad Pitt. Most actors barely earn enough from acting to live—if that. It would have destroyed the entire entertainment industry as we know it and replaced it, in a very few years, with nothing but AI-generated slop.

That’s important because we all turn to art for comfort, for community, for entertainment, for emotional resonance, for inspiration, for purpose. For humanity.

But the studio heads would’ve made big, big, bucks for a while (as if they don’t already), and that’s all they give a shit about. Thankfully, they eventually conceded the AI fight in order to come to a labor agreement. But they will try again next time, no doubt.

This gets to a bigger point about the economic impact of GenAI. Payroll is the most expensive item on a company’s budget. Execs are already doing everything they can to keep payroll costs low (e.g., pay people as little as they’ll tolerate without uprising). All this talk of GenAI’s “productivity potential” is heading down a very scary road, where whole sectors of human jobs disappear, replaced by AI. The very rich will have everything and the rest of us will be scraping their leavings off the street. Like pre-1900s levels of wealth disparity. Just last week, Salesforce reported that up to 50% of its work was being completed by AI, and it had laid off 1,000 human workers.

It is also singlehandedly striking the death blow for the critically injured profession of journalism. The internet itself shot journalism in the head, and this new scourge is kicking the plug from the wall. A report released a few days ago points to the way search engines like Google use “AI overviews” is tanking the “clickthrough” rate—in other words, people aren’t clicking links to the actual information when they google something. They’re simply reading the AI summary at the top of the page and calling their question answered. (BTW, for other rebels like me, you can add “- ai” to the end of your search term, and that nasty overview will go away.)

Also? GenAI is bad at what it says it can do. It lies all the time, it’s wrong all the time, and when it’s challenged, it acts like a petulant toddler who needs a time out—and often more like the psycho ex you needed a restraining order for. GenAI has told recovering addicts they’ll feel better with a little meth, it’s told people to kill themselves, it’s literally driven people mad, (and that’s not an isolated problem). It’s just bad, but it puts all that badness in a nicely wrapped package that looks pretty smart at first glance (or longer, if you know nothing about what you asked it).

Astrophysicist Katie Mack writes that GenAI was designed to be convincing, not to be correct. And if that ain’t the best description of the brosphere ethos, I don’t know what is.

To sum up: consumer-facing GenAI is very bad, morally and practically. Writers who use it aren’t writers, they’re thieves. Period. Same goes for AI cover art. And I will mount up and ride against any author who promotes AI-produced books.

No, I’m not interested in counterpoint. I have no respect or patience for the pro-AI crowd at all. If we come to a point where AI is the default for art, work, and all important aspects of human life, and I’m still alive when it happens, I’m moving off the grid somewhere and turning into a swamp witch.

/endrant

BTW: The shirt in today’s image was designed by Kim Hu, and is available at https://aftermath.site/buy-destroy-ai-shirt-aftermath-kim-hu

If you read the whole thing, thank you! (And I bet you’re sorry you asked that question, lol!)

… and a little preview!

Hey, everyone! I hope you’re keeping cool and getting some happy times in your summer!

I’ve got some good news, I think. Last week, I finished a manuscript—the first novel I’ve finished in a whole year. I’m starting to actually believe my violent bout with writer’s block is finally over, and I think I won by submission, lol.

This will be the third book in the Signal Bend Heritage series, and this one feels like it’s where the part of the narrative that will be the series-long arc begins to step forward.

It’s still in its rough draft stage, and nobody’s yet read it but me, so I’m not ready to announce an actual release yet, or share the title, or anything too official, but I do feel like I can share the prologue, because it refers to something that happens in Book Two, Snake.

So that’s what I’m going to do for today’s post: share the prologue in its entirety. I’m not going to restrict this content to subscribers—I’m planning to only restrict content that will only appear on the blog. Works in progress and other content related to things I plan to formally publish will be available to read for anyone who comes to the blog.

Be on the lookout for additional details and release information in the (hopefully quite near) future. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get those details in your inbox. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can do so right here:

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Without further ado, I present to you the (rough draft of the) prologue of the next Signal Bend Heritage book:

PROLOGUE
Summer

Singing along with Dolly Parton about her coat of many colors, Abigail Freeman turned her old truck onto the road that would bring her home. On the bench seat beside her sat Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, her collie-mix mutts, who were excellent herders and very good boys. They started fidgeting on the seat as she made the turn; they were just as glad to be home as she was.

They’d been away near a week, she and the dogs and the goats, and she always fretted about the chickens she left behind. She didn’t let them run loose when she wasn’t home, they stayed buttoned-up safely in the predator-proof yard attached to the coop, and they had food and water in big automatic feeders, so she didn’t worry about their safety. But they preferred to have run of the big yard during the day, and they got kitchen scraps when she was home, so she worried they were lonely.

Her goats were her main income, and they had a varied portfolio. She made soaps and lotions from their milk, she sold or bartered with about half the kids each breeding season, and she hired them out as a brush herd. Brushers were natural lawnmowers hired by communities, businesses, and, sometimes, individuals with too much property to maintain on their own. The goats came in and spent their days eating up the overgrowth in vacant lots, side yards, and other places ‘weeds’ grew lush.

A weed was nothing more than a plant growing where it was supposed to grow; so far as Abigail was concerned, a weed wasn’t a thing at all. But most people thought the plants that were supposed to grow were whatever they wanted to grow, with no care about what the land wanted, so she hired out her goats to eat themselves happy for cash.

Cleaning out other people’s brush was the thing best keeping the lights on, so she needed to get the goats out where they made their best money. But she hated to be away from home. Not just for the chickens’ sake but for her own.

Abigail was a solitary soul. She enjoyed people, she thought humanity was fairly miraculous in all its variety and complexity, but she liked her own company best.

She’d known from an early age that she wasn’t like most people; Granny Kate always said Freeman women were witchy women. Abigail had never known another Freeman woman, so she couldn’t corroborate, but she’d learned everything Granny had cared to teach her, so she supposed if Granny had been witchy, she was as well.

She preferred to think of it as traditional, however—she had an affinity for traditional ways of being and doing, a deep-seated awe for the natural world, and not much patience for all the complicated technological frippery of modern times. If knowing which herbs would help a cough just as well as, if not wholly better than, some fake-cherry slop from the pharmacy made her ‘witchy,’ so be it.

Just before she reached her gate, Bogie, the older and wiser of her boys, stopped his ‘Yay we’re home’ dance and went on alert, his ears high and his nose quivering. Picking up Boge’s cue, Mitch went still as well, and added a low rumble, like a whispered growl.

Abigail hit the brakes and slowed gently to a stop on the road a few feet from her gate. Her boys were good protectors; they clearly sensed trouble, and she didn’t presume to have better senses for trouble than guardian dogs.

“What’s wrong, boys?” she asked, peering through the windshield and side window, trying to see anything out of sorts. But this was hill country, and her house was behind the knoll that made up her front yard. All she could see was her roof and chimney, and the big copper weather vane of the old lady’s shoe, from the nursery rhyme, that she’d made some twenty years earlier. The copper had aged into a beautiful patina.

“Bogie?” she said, and the dog swung his head quickly to her, huffed softly, and returned his attention to the gate, which was open, as usual. Nobody dangerous or crooked bothered coming all the way up here, where there weren’t many people and none who had much worth stealing.

There was Gary Prentiss, she supposed, a troubled and troublesome neighbor, but nobody much minded his transgressions overall. He was probably the poorest among the generally poor folk who lived on this lonely old road in the hills. Abigail, like most of the others up here, would have given him most of what he snuck in and stole, but Gary had a stubborn kind of pride about it, so they looked the other way except when he got too greedy and took enough to hurt.

It was possible he’d come up to her place, saw the trailer gone and knew she was away with the goats, and dug around for something he needed.

The dogs knew Gary and Leigh Prentiss, though. They wouldn’t alert like this if he were around.

“Okay, babies. Okay.” She reached behind her and grabbed the butt of the rifle she kept on a rack against the rear window. For a country person, she had an unusual distaste for firearms, but as a country person, she knew their value, and she knew how to use them. Granny had taught her that, too.

Bogie whined at the sight of the rifle in her hands, then returned to his duties as sentinel.

She checked the rack and laid the rifle across her lap, then eased her truck into as slow and quiet a roll as she could manage in a seventy-five-year-old manual transmission Ford pickup pulling a sixteen-foot livestock trailer. “Let’s see what we see.”

~oOo~

Abigail stood in her back yard. She could do nothing but stand there with her hands over her mouth, and she had no idea how long she’d been doing it. The rifle lay atop the picnic table; any need for it had lapsed well before she’d reached her gate.

In every direction she looked, she found destruction. Most of her chickens were dead, their bodies crushed into the earth by the tires of at least two vehicles. Feathers lay everywhere; each breeze cast them about like bloodied confetti. Buster, her young cockerel, just coming into his manhood, lay dead beside the strawberry tower, his head cruelly twisted.

Her babies had been safe in their coop, specially designed to keep them comfortable and secure while she was away. But whoever had done all this had torn a wall of the coop straight off, apparently by driving through a corner of the coop yard. Then they’d chased down her babies. Her mind kept trying to play the scene through, the chickens scurrying in confusion and terror, the metal monsters roaring after and over them.

Tire tracks made looping trails everywhere. Trucks had driven over her chickens, through her gardens, and mowed down dozens of her gizmos and gewgaws, her whirligigs and windchimes. Some of those had been made by ancestors long dead before she’d ever existed.

And the goat barn? A truck-size hole front and back; somebody had driven right through, and now each breeze made what was left of that building rattle dangerously.

As a finishing touch: scrawled across the side of her house, in which she’d been raised, in which Granny Kate had been born, raised, and died, in bright orange spray paint, the words FAT FREAK. Dried rivulets streaked down from the angry letters like tangerine tears.

That paint seemed to be the only attack on the house. The three exterior doors were secure, all the windows intact. Her plants on the porch looked fine, and she could see her houseplants hanging and resting just where they should be in the kitchen windows. Nobody had broken in and ransacked the house, apparently.

And nothing seemed to be missing out here. Destroyed, yes. Murdered, yes. But not stolen.

This had been done for no other reason than to hurt her.

Who would do such a terrible thing? Who would kill harmless, helpless animals for nothing more than malicious sport? She knew people found her strange, but was she hated? What had she done to anyone to make them hate her like this?

Still in the trailer, the goats bleated their irritation at being closed up. Bogie and Mitch trotted around the yard, their ears high and their noses down, their hackles raised, seeking the culprits, tracking down any further hint of danger. All Abigail could do was stand in the midst of it all and gape behind her hands.

Why? Why?

For no other reason than to hurt her.

Her eyes fell again on Buster’s poor body. Her little buddy. She’d hand-raised him when Sonny, her previous rooster, had decided that the flock wasn’t big enough for another male, not even a baby, and begun to attack both Buster and Ethel, his mother. Usually she bartered her cockerel hatchlings with neighbors for other things she needed, but she’d kept Buster because Sonny had been fourteen years old, which was basically a centenarian for chickens. But he’d still been ornery enough to want to kill his replacement. So Abigail had scooped up the cockerel and left Ethel his five sisters.

Sonny had died of old age and orneriness while Buster was still hopping around inside the house like a feathery, two-footed puppy. And Abigail had never loved a chicken the way she loved her Buster.

She staggered to his poor broken body and dropped to the ground to scoop him into her arms. As his neck drooped dully over her wrist, the horror fully hit her. She buried her face in his feathers and sobbed.

~oOo~

The goats wouldn’t let her wallow more than a few minutes, but by the time their bleating grew insistent and Abigail finally lay Buster back on the grass, Bogie and Mitch had completed their inspection of the property and taken up their role as family. They lay each on a side of her, their heads in her lap. When she stood, so did they.

The goat barn was destroyed, and the fence of the attached yard as well. She’d have to put the goats in the day pasture. That meant a long night for the dogs, and for herself; the woods held foxes, coyotes, feral hogs, even the occasional black bear. Animals weren’t safe at night in an open pasture, especially not youngsters.

She stared at the horizon, where the sun had begun to droop toward dusk. The sky was clear, nearly cloudless. Closing her eyes, she took a long, deep inhale through her nose, absorbing all the scents of the afternoon. No hint of rain, at least. But blood and torn earth and fear. So much fear in the air.

There was no way she could put all this to rights alone. But who could she ask for help? Without knowing who’d done this or why, was there anyone she could trust? The notion of unknowingly asking for help from those who’d caused this harm made a clump of hot coals ignite in her belly.

One of the goats kicked the side of the trailer. That would be Satyr, twenty-three years old and king of the herd.

Well. There was nothing to it but to do it. Was she going to stand here like a garden gnome for the rest of her life? Of course not.

Dark would fall soon. There wasn’t much more she could do tonight except get the goats offloaded and prepare for a long vigil. She’d have plenty of time to figure out who she could trust and what help she needed.

Wiping the last of her tears away, she bent to collect Buster’s body, but paused before she got her hands down. No. She didn’t know who might help her, but she wanted it known, what had been done here. Buster was no longer on this plane, nor were the girls they’d killed. She could leave their physical remains where they were without further harm.

She stood tall again. “Okay, boys. Let’s get the goats. We got a long night ahead of us.”

Walking to the trailer, she saw the insult scrawled like graffiti on the side of her family home, on the violet paint she’d so happily chosen a few years back. FAT FREAK.

Well, yes. Her shape had always been round and soft, certainly not like a model or starlet. She’d been called fat often enough in her life not to be surprised that many considered her so. And yes, she’d been called ‘freak,’ too, often enough. It was the word closest to hand for most, to describe how they felt when they saw someone who didn’t live the way they thought people ought. Abigail thought people ought live the way they wanted, so long as they didn’t smear their wants all over other people’s needs.

So yes. She supposed she was a fat freak. And that made those ugly orange letters not an insult at all. Just an observation. The most offensive thing about that scrawl was its ugliness—on her wall and in their hearts.

Ugliness, she could do something about.

~oOo~

The night was long but uneventful. By sunrise Abigail was weary, but she’d thought things through. Terrible as it all was, none of the property damage meant all that much. She could replant her gardens. She could repair or remake her generations-deep collection of yard decorations. The chickens were the truly heartbreaking part of it. Everything else was just stuff.

Well, not all of it was just stuff. She had to get the coop repaired and the goat barn rebuilt, and those tasks were far beyond her capacity to handle alone. And not much within her ability to pay for the work to be done. She was going to need some neighborly help—as long as neighbors hadn’t done this in the first place.

She knew where to go for help: the Night Horde MC. It shouldn’t have taken her so long to figure that out, but she’d never had to ask for such help before. The Horde had not been much a part of her life. Though she considered herself, and was considered to be, a Signal Bend resident, she lived well outside the town limits, and she didn’t go into town with much regularity.

Most things she needed she either grew or made herself, or she bartered with neighbors. Once a month she made a big run for staples and other things she either couldn’t make herself or didn’t have time for and to deliver jams and pies, or soaps, cremes, and lotions, to various individuals and to shops where she sold on consignment. Otherwise, she went down when there was a seasonal festival, where she ran a booth and sold her wares direct.

There wasn’t too much about Signal Bend in her daily life, so it took her a while to imagine asking the Horde for help. But she knew she could have full faith that they’d been no part of this mess. Even if they’d had some kind of quarrel with her, this was not their style at all.

So she’d call the Horde and ask for help.

©2025 Susan Fanetti

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how dearly I love my adopted home state of California.

I’m a native Midwesterner, born in St. Louis and mostly raised there (we lived in Milwaukee for a few years when I was in grade school). A lot of my adult life was also lived in Missouri and the “Metro East” area of Illinois. I got all my degrees in colleges in the St. Louis area. I married a man from the St. Louis area. Our two oldest sons graduated from a St. Louis high school, and they both have mainly stayed put, now married and establishing their own businesses in that area.

I located my first (and most popular) books, the Signal Bend series, in mid-Missouri, creating a fictional town strongly based on St. James, MO, the town nearest the small non-working “farm” my beloved grandparents retired to, where I spent big chunks of my childhood and created a bushel of happy core memories.

My roots in the Midwest, specifically Missouri, are deep.

But I renounced Missouri years ago.

There are many things I love about the state of my birth, but, barring causes I can’t imagine at this time, I will never, ever live in Missouri again. Because our older sons and their spouses are well established there, and I am tired of living 2000 miles from them, our Plan A for our coming retirement years is to return to the area, but we are exclusively looking in Illinois. (Recently we’ve had to develop a few retirement plans, so we can respond to the changes around us, but our top plan remains getting the fam back together.)

Even so, even then, I will always consider myself a California girl.

My attraction to and fascination with California began long before I ever stepped foot on its soil. In TV shows and movies, books and magazines, it always seemed so magically beautiful and … I don’t know, just, like, perfect. My parents cast aspersions and made the usual snide (and I now realize wildly … let’s say “inappropriate” and move on) comments about it, but all I saw was beauty and fun and freedom. Probably a lot of my fascination, at first, stemmed from the simple fact that I am a person who from the moment I understood the concept, loved the ocean, and the Pacific is glorious. But I was landlocked and nearly 20 years old before I ever focused my actual eyes on the actual sea.

Thankfully, my uncle and aunt got stationed in the LA area, and California entered the family vacation options menu.

When I finally got there (that first trip was the typical SoCal family vacation—LA, San Diego, and all the theme parks between, with a day trip into Mexico) my first impression was that my fantasy couldn’t touch the reality. When I saw how much more than ocean and palm trees and sun California was, when I realized it was a gorgeous mélange of culture, and food, and architecture, and people, and … I was gobsmacked. California is bigger, bolder, more vibrant, more beautiful, more dynamic than my imagination ever conjured.

That feeling has never really left me. Since that first trip, I’ve lived in both SoCal (San Bernardino) and NorCal (the Sacramento area, and a few months in the East Bay) for a total now of more than twenty years of my adult life. I understand now, of course, that California is far from perfect. I have had plenty of WTF moments living here. But I also understand how very close to perfect it is in ways that are important to me. In its natural beauty and its human vivacity, California is the first place I’ve lived that feels like I belong.

In my mind, to my eyes, California is the best state in the US and the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—and I’m including my international travel in that assessment. When we leave, if we leave, we will mourn, even as we rush toward the chance to have our family as reunited as it can be.

In the meantime, we are sucking the marrow out of this magnificent state, traveling throughout it, partaking of everything it has to offer—the big centerpieces, like Yosemite, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller delights, like Mono Lake, the Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, the Valhalla Renaissance Faire.

Jim and I just got home from a lovely getaway to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. Nature is my church. Ocean, forest, river, canyon, lake, rolling meadow, waterfall—that’s where I feel true peace and the presence of something great and mysterious around me. And one thing above all others inspires reverence in me: the Giant Sequoia. I am utterly awed and humbled by those extraordinary titans, towering up from the Sierras like ancient gods. To stand at their massive feet literally brings me to tears. To me, they are ancient gods.

The very largest trees on the planet, among the very oldest, and they exist only here.

I guess in that way I’m like a Giant Sequoia: I thrive only in California soil.

For various reasons, that’s what’s on my mind today. I hope you’re safe and exactly where you want to be this weekend. I’ll have some more author-oriented content for you in a couple weeks.

Love,
s—