Kit Walker's Blog

For those of you who haven’t heard about this: last week, small press publisher Bona Books announced that their upcoming anthology, Wrath Month, would be delayed because they were pulling three stories from the collection. They had reason to believe those three stories were machine-generated and not written by a human.

Bona Books then went on to chronicle their investigation into those stories — including this bit about a piece by Bella Chacha (probably a pen name), titled “The Machine-Breaker of Aba”:

The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story’s centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over (“Not X, but Y…”). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.

Like me, you may have several questions. Questions like: if “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” had all these problems, why was it still considered to be within the best 20 of the 606 submissions the anthology received? Were the other 97% just that bad? If these problems only became apparent after close editorial scrutiny, why was this scrutiny not present before Bona Books signed a contract with the author and (presumably) paid them money?

The post goes on to explain that, following feedback from the editorial team, Chacha’s final manuscript included very few of the changes they’d requested. If the anthology was “inches away” from going to print, why had nobody checked before then whether any edits had actually been made? Why was inclusion in the anthology not contractually contingent on those edits?

The answer to all these questions appears to be that “The Machine-Breaker of Aba” was selected largely on vibes:

It hit our brief with a perfect intensity that felt difficult to resist. A queer woman, building a machine from scrap metal and rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it. The author was an emerging Nigerian writer named Bella Chacha.

So, to the editors of Wrath Month, actual writing craft took a backseat to a punchy premise and the prestige of putting a rising star in their anthology — one who fed their (admittedly well-placed) desire to elevate marginalized writers.

And to be fair, the editors at Bona Books are hardly alone in this. They were first tipped that Chacha’s story might not be authentic when they learned she’d managed to get 15 other stories published in professional markets over the previous 12 months. That’s an insane number. A lot of people had to get bamboozled in quick succession for that to happen.

If you know anything about how short fiction publishing works, though, it’s not that surprising.

In 2026, both the writing and publishing of short-form science fiction and fantasy is basically a vanity project. Gone are the days where you could crank out one pulp story a week to pay the rent. For one thing, the processing times are too long; most short fiction publications are running on a staff of one or two actual editors and a squad of volunteer slush readers. In some cases you’ll wait a year just to get a rejection, much less an acceptance and a cheque. Most of these publications don’t allow simultaneous submissions, meaning you can only submit a story to one of them at a time. A finished piece can spend years getting shopped around various markets before it’s either accepted somewhere or chucked in the trash. And even the highest-paying SFF markets pay less than $0.15 USD/word; when you consider the hours it takes to plan, write, and refine a story, this rate works out to well under minimum wage basically everywhere that has a minimum wage.

So the only way anyone can afford to write a story and get it published in one of these markets is if they’re already financially secure and can burn many, many hours on work they’re effectively not getting paid for. Which, incidentally, filters out most of the marginalized voices these publications claim they’re so desperate to hear from — unless those marginalized voices (or dishonest people claiming to be such) are churning out passable content very fast and at basically no cost.

One could argue that the economics of short SFF publishing only make sense if you’re using AI.

Bona Books has positioned themselves as one of many victims in an existential crisis facing the entire publishing sector, but what we really have here is this: a niche micro-industry that runs largely on prestige, which claims to vanguard the craft of writing but either can’t or won’t pay writers like craftspeople, and is now reaping the inevitable consequences of this business model. I’m not sure I have much sympathy for that.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we cover Starship Troopers 3: Marauder — a movie trying to say something about the role of Christian evangelism in the manufacturing of consent for the Iraq war, but doing it very badly.

Smashwords’ End of Year sale has come around once again! All my books are at least 50% off, and you can get a bunch of them for free; sale prices are valid through to July 31.

You can also get The Casefile of Jay Moriarty on Kobo for $2.99 USD until the end of the month here!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

Sharma wants a daily playerbase that is the equivalent of 83 World of Warcrafts at their highest peak, all logged in at the same time. Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam, had an all-time peak of 1.8 million. She wants 555 Counter-Strikes every day.

Art and culture are “what you have to lose with an administration like this,” Rollins adds. “They hate science. They hate literacy. They hate women. They hate nonwhite people. They hate LGBTQ people. Those aforementioned groups, they make things that make life great. They want to eradicate it and erase it. You can do more than one thing at once. You can entertain many things. And so you can be concerned and fight the good fight, and you can also put a record on and love the Cramps.”

The point is that if you put hashtag #filthykinkymonsterfucking on your promotion for a book and the actual sex scenes are identical to that of a standard human but green, a lot of readers will understandably feel like they’ve been short-changed.

If you’ve written something and your goal isn’t to get the attention of Tor Books or whoever, let me suggest that you’ll reach more people if you just post it online. You probably won’t make any money off it, but you almost certainly won’t make any money submitting it for publication.

-K

The story I’m working on right now explores law enforcement in Britain, so I picked up Iain Donnelly’s book Tango Juliet Foxtrot. I wouldn’t give it an unqualified recommendation; Donnelly has a more humanist approach to policing than some other opinion-havers in the field, but shows a lot of unexamined preconceptions and biases that lead him to recommend some really questionable policies. Overall, though, Tango Juliet Foxtrot did a lot to help me understand how police in Britain see themselves and their role in society.

But at one point in the book, Donnelly gets into his work on a project tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation. He lists off the project’s partners, which include the NHS, the Department of Education, the NSPCC, and—this one gave me pause—Barnardo’s.

Some personal context: my great-grandfather, Harry Walker, was one of the Barnardo Home Boys. Harry and his brother Syd were surrendered to Dr. Thomas Barnardo’s charity as children; they weren’t orphans, but their family just couldn’t afford to take care of them anymore. Barnardo sent Harry and Syd to Canada. They were promised they would be adopted by a loving family, and that they could stay together.

They were lied to, twice.

Harry and Syd were forcibly separated and only saw each other again by sheer chance a decade later, during the war. Harry was not adopted by a loving family; he was sold into forced servitude, exploited for cheap farm labour and frequently abused until he finally managed to run away and survive on his own.

One might argue that what happened to Harry was not the intended or desired outcome of Barnardo’s program, but his experience was far from uncommon. So, presumably, Barnardos’ role on Donnelly’s task force was to present the “for” argument in the child exploitation debate.

I don’t think a lot of people in Britain know about what happened to the Home Boys. As far as their historical record is concerned, these kids ceased to exist the moment they left the country. But Harry Walker had a whole life after Barnardo’s was done with him: he was a rum-runner, a soldier, a policeman. He married a devastated widow who’d lost her husband to the Great War and adopted her daughter—my grandmother—as his own. He was far from a perfect man, but he was a human being. And what Barnardo’s did to him, and so many other children like him, should not be ignored.

Smashwords’ End of Year sale has come around once again. All my books are at least 50% off, and you can get a bunch of them for free; sale prices are valid through to July 31.

You can also get The Casefile of Jay Moriarty on Kobo for $2.99 USD until the end of the month here!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

We wiped out the passenger pigeon to build this, and it sucks. We forced the Cherokee Nation into reservations to make room for this, and it sucks. We sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange and kids there are still being born with missing limbs to protect this, and it sucks, and we didn’t even bother to take care of it, and it’s falling apart, and no one is having a good time.

“The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that ‘sincerely held religious belief’ under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse,” wrote Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, on X.

Key to appreciating Jackass is knowing that, had your life turned out a little differently, you would be this stupid. Or you are this stupid, just in ways that are more socially acceptable, or at least more commonplace.

I finally got around to watching Project Hail Mary. You people lied to me. Markiplier isn’t in that movie at all.

-K

It feels rude to complain about rain while large parts of the world are actively on fire, but for the record: it’s been pissing down in Edmonton for the past couple of weeks. And it’s Alberta, so damp means mosquitoes. I am being eaten alive. At this rate, the government will need to start airdropping dragonflies into Edmonton like wolves into Yellowstone National Park.

And while I’m sure nobody in Europe finds it particularly funny at the moment, you do have to admire the comedic timing of datacenter lobbyists declaring that the EU must choose between AI infrastructure and climate goals right before a massive heatwave descends over most of the continent. If I wrote that, people would complain I wasn’t being subtle enough.

Sebastian was supposed to arrive round about six. He’d missed Christmas last year, which wasn’t exactly a surprise; he hadn’t been around all that much when he was stationed in Hereford, and Patience saw him even less now that he was living in London. But he’d promised he was coming to visit this year—and he was bringing Jay.

Patience wasn’t sure about Jay.

In the latest interlude of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, Sebastian celebrates Christmas in Herefordshire and Jay can’t sleep.

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14!

Britain’s asylum system demands intimate proof of queerness from people whose countries still have laws and social norms shaped by British colonial rule. It presents itself as offering protection while reproducing the racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies that helped create the danger from which many flee.

Judge Gregory Carro had scheduled the hearing for Tuesday but adjourned it about a half-hour after it was supposed to start when Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann told him that prosecutors had failed to send required paperwork to the jail.

“It’s on us,” Seidemann said. “We got the writ signed but we failed to serve it.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Carro replied.

“And a lot of magazines, including The Advocate, did an interview and said, ‘The most out director,’ but they never had the nerve to ask me if I was gay. They thought it was — like my parents –- it was something worse than gay. So a lot of people never asked if I was gay because they were afraid I’d say, ‘No, I’m a necrophiliac’ — which, even that, that’s just fear of performance.”

Let me assure the fanfic readers among my subscriber base that I, too, had a chuckle over the phrase “omega heat wave.” As for the rest of you: don’t worry about it.

-K

I’m camping in Beaver County this week, which involves surprisingly reliable Wi-fi and occasional polite conversation with elderly rural Albertans. These people have heard all about me from my parents, who also camp out here; my parents have proudly informed everyone that I’m a writer, which has led to a certain level of polite interest among the populace.

They do not appear to have explained what I write about.

So now I need to figure out, fairly quickly, whether I should inform a 70-year-old UCP voter named Dawn ahead of time that my books are more than a bit gay, or if I’m going to let her figure that out for herself.

First it was a crime thing. Then it was a sex thing. Now the crime thing is also a sex thing.

Sebastian Moran is an ex-SAS security consultant. Jay Moriarty is a hacker and professional grifter. For the past few months, the two of them have been partners in crime … and shagging each other senseless.

But lives like theirs are far from simple, and as Moriarty and Moran’s relationship deepens, things only get more complicated. Soon, they find themselves under threat — not just from London’s criminal underworld, but also from Britain’s halls of power.

Together, Moriarty and Moran take on an AI-obsessed local councilor, rob a gala that’s already being robbed by someone else, run a long con on an influencer-turned-pimp, and face down both the world’s greatest consulting detective and the nightmares of Moran’s past.

Collects books 6 – 11 of Kit Walker’s Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, revised and edited, plus four bonus stories!

The second collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on September 14! It’ll be available in print and ebook formats, and you can preorder the ebook version now:

This volume features cover art by Dany Rivera, who did a wonderful job bringing my little guys to life. Go check out the rest of her work, she’s excellent.

The cases highlight the fact that Flock can be used to track the whereabouts of individual people, that police do not get a warrant in order to use the system, and that, if they have access to the system, they have the technical ability to look up any license plate they want for any reason they want.

… Palantir UK CEO Louis Mosley has said that if Nigel Farage’s Reform comes into power, the company will follow the party’s professed directives to use NHS data to target individuals based on their immigration status.

Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA), said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community”.

That community “showed their heroism” during the miners’ strikes, he said. “They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

I am currently sharing my campsite with a family of geese. The atmosphere is best described as “threatening.”

-K

My research for the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story has led me to try and figure out where the Metropolitan Police Service in London stores its firearms. It turns out this is information that the Metropolitan Police Service would really rather prefer I not have.

(I understand why this is the case. It’s just annoying.)

In the course of my research, though, I came across this video about the Met’s Specialist Training Centre, which provides firearms training to multiple police organizations within the UK. The video features, among other things, a member of the facility’s staff pointing to a barrel attachment on a revolver and calling it a suppressor.

My inner Ivan Chesnokov immediately started screaming. For those unaware: you generally can’t put a suppressor on a revolver and expect it to actually, you know, suppress anything. So either the barrel attachment isn’t a suppressor (gunfuckers in the YouTube comments are widely of the opinion that it’s actually a compensator), or what we are being shown in this video is a bullshit gun that doesn’t work.

I know the gunfucker is a rare breed in the UK, but I feel like the staffer in that video is the one guy in the whole country who should know what he’s talking about.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

The final chapter of “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

“All the pieces matter.”

So hey, you know that series which is widely considered the best television show of all time? Yeah, turns out it’s actually good.

I didn’t watch The Wire when it was first airing, largely due to the fact that I was 11 years old when it started. I finally got around to it this year, and it has immediately become one of my all-time favorites.

There’s a lot to like about The Wire. It knows when to shut up and let the filmmaking speak for itself. It respects the intelligence of its characters, but is attentive to the limited vocabulary they have to describe their circumstances. It’s confident in its ability to hold your attention without prolonged exposition, flashy gimmicks, or cheap shock.

Maybe what I love most about it is this: everyone involved took their jobs seriously and showed up with something to say. At the very beginning of its first episode, The Wire shows you a Black kid lying dead in the street and says, “This is America.” And then it spends the next five seasons proving itself right.

Author and LGBTQ Reads creator Dahlia Adler notes that publishers are stepping back from queer books because of the risk of bans. She’s been tracking queer book deal announcements in Publishers Weekly for many years, and they’ve been declining. Even when queer books are acquired, the language used in the announcements is often coded, obscuring the queer representation.

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.

“It’s all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people,” Alex said. “It’s so dead internet, like none of this is real.”

It’s reassuring to me that David Simon is as angry and vindictive a writer as I am.

-K

My dad has been using the same computer since 2014, and it’s been failing by degrees for the past couple of years now. A few weeks ago, he finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a new machine running Windows 11.

Friends and enemies: I cannot overstate the extent to which Windows 11 is a fucking nightmare, built to harass and exploit the average user at every turn. My dad’s a reasonably tech-savvy guy, but if I weren’t constantly on hand to deal with all the dark pattern button prompts and notification spam he’s been getting from his own fucking OS, this 73-year-old man would be trapped in a hell from which there is no escape.

As a solution, a few of my associates have recommended switching my dad (again, 73 years old) over to Linux. I will not be doing that.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we bring our friend Tanner Vogelgesang onboard to talk about John Waters’ Serial Mom. We then proceed to spend most of the episode gushing about Kathleen Turner and her facial acting.

“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! The first chapter is available now, and subsequent chapters will be posted weekly on Mondays.

Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient.

But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers.

Crypto scammers are targeting the thousands of ships stranded near the Strait of Hormuz—and at least one ship that faced Iranian gunfire may have been tricked into believing it had paid Iran for safe passage.

Ghana has rejected a proposed $300 million US health deal, with officials telling DW the agreement raised major concerns over data privacy, sovereignty and constitutional oversight.

Writing update: I am discovering research questions so obscure that I could basically write whatever I want, since nobody would be in a position to prove me wrong.

-K

In the British government’s latest round of throwing policy at the wall to see what sticks, a bill has just cleared parliament that would permanently ban tobacco products (cigarettes, vapes, dip, etc) for anyone currently under the age of 18.

To be clear: this is not just a ban on smoking for under-18s. It’s already illegal to smoke in the UK if you’re a minor. What this bill proposes is that, if you were born on or after January 1, 2009, you would not be allowed to buy or consume any tobacco product ever, in your life.

You may or may not know this about me, but I’m descended from a long line of thieves, smugglers, and enemies of the state. My great-grandfather, Harry Walker, was a runaway Barnardo Home Boy, rum-runner, World War I veteran, and rural policeman. There is considerable overlap between some of those life stages. Apparently, the only reason he wasn’t kicked out of the Alberta Provincial Police for bootlegging is because he appealed to his local member of parliament—incidentally, also one of his customers—who got him transferred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police instead. The APP was disbanded shortly afterward.

So when I heard about this upcoming ban, every one of my ancestors sat up and recognized it as a foundation for the easiest bootlegging operation of all time.

Think about it! You wouldn’t even have to go through the hassle of smuggling the product over the border. Tobacco would remain legal to import and sell in the UK; everyone born before 2009 would still be allowed to smoke, after all. All you’d need to do is legally buy the product in bulk, then sell it off at a markup to all the pissed off twenty-somethings who missed the boat. And as time went on, your customer base would only get bigger.

Anyway, if the bottom falls out of this whole writing thing, you’ll find me on the streets of Newcastle selling loose cigarettes.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

“Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree” is the eleventh story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one’s a story about navigating a sexual relationship with someone when their trauma keeps looming over the both of you and you’re not really sure what to do about it. It’s also a story about stealing from the English for fun and profit.

It therefore contains, as my friend Ian described it, “twenty pages of theft and fucking.”

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from “forcefully” being inserted “into every facet of your conscious experience.” At another, he celebrated “undermining democracy.” At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as “actually really sweet and tender and loving,” while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being “so alone.”

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt.

The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video.

On a related note, Green Party MP Hannah Spencer recently set off a minor uproar for pointing out it’s a bit weird how much everyone in parliament drinks. So it turns out the same government officials who want to ban smoking, porn, and transing your gender are a little sensitive about anyone looking sideways at their lifestyles.

-K

Alyx Jones is an independent game developer from the UK. She’s been working on The Quiet Things, a deeply personal game about sexual abuse, trauma, and survival. A trailer for The Quiet Things was slated to be shown during the BAFTA Games Awards on April 17; for an independent developer, this was a huge opportunity.

Until the trailer was pulled from the show at the last minute.

Jones reports that she had already revised the trailer once because BAFTA flagged certain imagery (“an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror”) as potentially violent. Not only is this silly on its face, it’s also incredibly weird considering how permissive game trailers usually are when it comes to violent imagery; to list just one example, the Baldur’s Gate III announcement trailer features a man vomiting his own teeth.

Nevertheless, Jones made the requested changes; she was then informed, the night before the awards ceremony, that her trailer had been pulled from the show anyway. The stated reason was that “there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience.”

24 hours is more than enough time to throw some white text on a black screen with a list of trigger warnings. Even a live warning from someone onstage with a microphone would take less than 10 seconds.

A responsible journalist would be hesitant to draw any hard and fast conclusions from all this, but I’m not a journalist. I’m an artist — one who’s experienced my own fair share of corporate meddling in my work. And if I were in Alyx Jones’ position, I would quite confidently believe I was being jerked around by someone who never intended to let my game see the light of day.

BAFTA has since stated that they “fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.” I’m not sure what the word “support” is supposed to mean in this context, considering what they put Alyx Jones through; if they’re not willing to broadcast a 2-minute trailer in support of games like The Quiet Things, what are they willing to do?

The use of words like “wellbeing” is also telling.

For the record, Jones’ trailer is incredibly tame; it features first-person game footage of the player character walking through various environments while characters in voiceover talk around the protagonist’s traumatic experiences in vague terms. The trailer only alludes to sexual assault; there’s a brief bit of VO where the main character says “stop” twice in a distraught voice.

This, apparently, is too distressing for the average BAFTA viewer — because trauma stemming from sexual abuse, especially childhood sexual abuse, is so stigmatized in polite society that we’d all rather pretend it doesn’t happen. Even the gentlest reminder that it exists is tantamount, in the eyes of some, to a psychic assault. For the sake of everyone’s mental health, victims must be silenced.

Incidentally, this exact stigma is what The Quiet Things was created to address. You can watch the trailer here.

A brutal encounter with the horrors of his own past has left Sebastian Moran unmoored and exhausted — so his partner, Jay Moriarty, takes him out of London and rents a quiet cottage in Yorkshire. As Moran struggles through a storm of conflicting emotions, Moriarty is determined to help. He wants Moran to feel secure. He wants him to feel capable. So Moriarty and Moran are going to steal just about everything in the county that isn’t nailed down.

The eleventh story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, “Moriarty & Moran’s North Yorkshire Crime Spree,” comes out on April 27!

What the first few days of ABS are showing is that this system is somehow actually highlighting the human element of the game, and adding another layer of strategy to a game that prides itself as being the thinking person’s sport.

Dave Pelzer’s story is real and it’s his and he can tell it however he wants. But three million copies of that story in a market that rejected everything that didn’t look like it is something different. That’s a monoculture. And a monoculture does political work regardless of whether any individual story inside it is true or false.

It is very worrying that a woman presented by British media and politics as an expert on [trans] healthcare was allowed on the BBC to rehash unchallenged the 75-year-old nonsense of a dead paedophile.

Unrelated to anything, I’ve just finished season 2 of The Wire and I need to know who is feeding Wee-Bey’s fish.

-K

I started using Scrivener in 2012 or so, and I’ve kept the same license going ever since — despite the fact that support ended for my version of Scrivener years ago. I’m now at the point where the app crashes on two startups out of every three. Upgrading to the latest version of Scrivener would cost me $80, so I figured I’d try out some other (cheaper) writing apps and see if they were viable options instead.

This is how I found out I am yet again a severe edge case with the workflow of an insane person, and Scrivener is more or less the only writing app with a design that accommodates my bullshit.

I guess I’m spending $80.

On this episode of I Will Fight You, we attempt to say The Bye-Bye Man with a straight face (0% success rate) and find out what happens when somebody decides to make a horror movie by just slapping random spooky elements together.

The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is now available in paperback on DriveThruFiction!

Having held both this and the Amazon proof in my hands, I can tell you the DTF edition is a much nicer print job. If you’re willing to wait 2-3 weeks for shipping, this is the one to get.

When Sara was referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) – the system designed to identify and support victims and survivors of modern slavery – the Home Office asked her to produce extensive evidence of her exploitation and take part in interviews totalling many hours.

Advocates for civil liberties and immigrants have called on Ottawa to back down from a proposed expansion of immigration officers’ discretionary power to cancel documents and terminate processing and have said [Bill C-12] could endanger those who enter Canada under fear of persecution.

When we look at what is compelling and desirable about living in her world, the vision that her characters present, and (yes) the inherent nature of “Hogwarts Houses,” it becomes clear that Rowling’s art embraces tribalism and an ‘us versus them’ ethos with deep earnesty. Its comfort, grown all the more comforting in the cold social-media-addled word we now find ourselves living in, is the warm comfort of ‘belonging.’

And in order to truly belong, others must not.

If you are a Bluesky person or a Fediverse person, you can now follow me over on Wafrn. No, I don’t know how you pronounce that either.

-K

Book publisher Hachette has pulled out of its deal with author Mia Ballard over accusations that her novel, Shy Girl, was written with the assistance of a large language model.

I say “accusations” because the actual evidence here is pretty thin. The arguments presented are all either “the writing looks like AI” or “we ran bits of the novel through an AI detector and it told us the text was AI-generated.”

First off, human beings are quite bad at telling the difference between machine-generated and human-generated art. The logical inconsistencies in the plot and prose could be the result of a chatbot overrunning its context window, or just sloppy writing, or (considering the subject matter) a deliberate attempt at surrealism. Most of the “obvious tells” of LLM-generated text (em dashes, rule of three, etc.) are actually features of a formal African English education, because LLMs were largely trained by criminally underpaid African workers. And guess who most often gets accused of “sounding like a chatbot”?

Then we get into AI detection tools, which The New York Times claims to have used. Many “AI detectors” also use machine learning to some degree — analyzing and comparing two sets of text is something LLMs are built to do — but these tools tend to produce a lot of false results. The differences between human-generated text and machine-generated text are going to be largely invisible to an LLM designed to mechanically produce text that could plausibly pass as something a human wrote.

And that’s not even getting into the “AI detectors” that simply paste the submitted text into ChatGPT and ask it, “hey, did you write this?” To quote a friend of mine with approximate knowledge of many things, “anyone who tells you they have a tool to accurately detect AI is probably a liar, and liars love to use AI, so it’s probably just feeding the text into ChatGPT and asking.”

Three years ago, I noted that because “it looks like it was made by AI” is an accusation that can’t be proven right or wrong, it would inevitably be used as an ideological bludgeon against any art an accuser personally didn’t like very much. And now it looks as though a lot of people really didn’t like Shy Girl, didn’t think anyone else should like Shy Girl, and found the perfect way to bully it off the market.

(Does it feel good to be right all the time? No, it’s awful.)

Trying to suss out whether a book was written using an LLM or not is, in my opinion, pointless. A book should be criticized on the basis of whether it sucks — and, so far, provably LLM-written books have universally sucked. When an LLM manages to write a novel that’s actually good, we can revisit this topic.

And I’m fine with making it a rule that nobody can publish a novel they didn’t personally write, but in that case someone should have a word with Tom Clancy’s corpse.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a young boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

The final chapter of “A Reckoning in Whitehall” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.

In other words, the employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it.

It’s tempting to reinscribe an essentialist reading, and see Bound as a trans film now because it was made by trans filmmakers. Or we could think of transness in cinema a little more expansively. In his book Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Cáel M. Keegan suggests that we read Bound as an “invitation to sense differently.” Which is a part of the trans experience—we feel a truth via the body that appearances belie. In Bound, we find the beginnings of a journey into a certain trans sensibility that runs through all the Wachowskis’ work.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.

Would you believe this is not even the first time I’ve quoted that bit from Broadcast News?

-K