#publication — Public Fediverse posts

“This is a surprising answer, given that 30,000 people have signed up to read and listen to his thoughts on the market dynamics underpinning the decentralised #DigitalCurrency.

Check is the face of a 2½-year-old newsletter, #CheckonChain, which is, according to the official list, Australia’s top #Substack #publication.

“I don’t tell people it’s going to go to a million dollars tomorrow. I also don’t tell people it’s going to zero. I stick away from the hyperbole. Very much talking scenarios, probabilities,” said Check.

What “top” means, a Substack representative would not say. One definition may be financial. Since it started in March 2024, it has grown to 3000 paying subscribers and an annual recurring revenue of $1.4 million.

This will soon make Check and his co-founder, Alec Dejanovic, who are building the product as lifelong friends, Australia’s first #SubstackMillionaires.”

Making money off a niche interesting area of digital finance on a platform in an AI hoover era will not make you a $B dollars. Q How will the company move to their own platform without AI sucking up their data and insights?

#Publishing / #data / #information / #platforms <https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/the-media-outlet-making-millions-from-bitcoin-but-not-by-buying-it-20260709-p60e47> (paywall) / <https://archive.md/diVTL>

“This is a surprising answer, given that 30,000 people have signed up to read and listen to his thoughts on the market dynamics underpinning the decentralised #DigitalCurrency.

Check is the face of a 2½-year-old newsletter, #CheckonChain, which is, according to the official list, Australia’s top #Substack #publication.

“I don’t tell people it’s going to go to a million dollars tomorrow. I also don’t tell people it’s going to zero. I stick away from the hyperbole. Very much talking scenarios, probabilities,” said Check.

What “top” means, a Substack representative would not say. One definition may be financial. Since it started in March 2024, it has grown to 3000 paying subscribers and an annual recurring revenue of $1.4 million.

This will soon make Check and his co-founder, Alec Dejanovic, who are building the product as lifelong friends, Australia’s first #SubstackMillionaires.”

Making money off a niche interesting area of digital finance on a platform in an AI hoover era will not make you a $B dollars. Q How will the company move to their own platform without AI sucking up their data and insights?

#Publishing / #data / #information / #platforms <https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/the-media-outlet-making-millions-from-bitcoin-but-not-by-buying-it-20260709-p60e47> (paywall) / <https://archive.md/diVTL>

#MidweekMotivation

My wife got a Nature paper 🤩
My turn will come someday 🌱

#Publication #Science #BiomedicalScience #Nature

#MidweekMotivation

My wife got a Nature paper 🤩
My turn will come someday 🌱

#Publication #Science #BiomedicalScience #Nature

Avec brio, Yves Gingras analyse les dessous des sciences et du monde de la recherche scientifique dans son nouveau livre « Les sciences sous ma loupe »
https://cltr.blogspot.com/2026/07/les-sciences-sous-ma-loupe-yves-gingras.html
#science #histoire #recherche #livre #média #laboratoire #politique #entreprise #revue #publication #société #culture #innovation #découverte #tech #entrevue

Avec brio, Yves Gingras analyse les dessous des sciences et du monde de la recherche scientifique dans son nouveau livre « Les sciences sous ma loupe »
https://cltr.blogspot.com/2026/07/les-sciences-sous-ma-loupe-yves-gingras.html
#science #histoire #recherche #livre #média #laboratoire #politique #entreprise #revue #publication #société #culture #innovation #découverte #tech #entrevue

Avec brio, Yves Gingras analyse les dessous des sciences et du monde de la recherche scientifique dans son nouveau livre « Les sciences sous ma loupe »
https://cltr.blogspot.com/2026/07/les-sciences-sous-ma-loupe-yves-gingras.html
#science #histoire #recherche #livre #média #laboratoire #politique #entreprise #revue #publication #société #culture #innovation #découverte #tech #entrevue

Avec brio, Yves Gingras analyse les dessous des sciences et du monde de la recherche scientifique dans son nouveau livre « Les sciences sous ma loupe »
https://cltr.blogspot.com/2026/07/les-sciences-sous-ma-loupe-yves-gingras.html
#science #histoire #recherche #livre #média #laboratoire #politique #entreprise #revue #publication #société #culture #innovation #découverte #tech #entrevue

Avec brio, Yves Gingras analyse les dessous des sciences et du monde de la recherche scientifique dans son nouveau livre « Les sciences sous ma loupe »
https://cltr.blogspot.com/2026/07/les-sciences-sous-ma-loupe-yves-gingras.html
#science #histoire #recherche #livre #média #laboratoire #politique #entreprise #revue #publication #société #culture #innovation #découverte #tech #entrevue

=> political cartoonist Thomas Nast take on inflation with his "Rag Baby" / Harper's Weekly from Sept 4, 1875 - this was the most read illustrated journal in the US during the Civil War

#cartoons #art #drawings #newspapers #media #economy #business #cartoonist #media #publication #politics

=> political cartoonist Thomas Nast take on inflation with his "Rag Baby" / Harper's Weekly from Sept 4, 1875 - this was the most read illustrated journal in the US during the Civil War

#cartoons #art #drawings #newspapers #media #economy #business #cartoonist #media #publication #politics

Sharing a #flashback to one of my earlier publications.

In this article, “The evolving multilateral #defence #diplomacy in the #Caribbean region: prospects and challenges,” we examine how #Caribbean small states use #defence #diplomacy to navigate multidimensional #threats

#snapshot of the publication:
https://content.shipslides.com/d/bdacwnxgcu/raw

Full publication:
https://michal-pawinski.scholar.st/publications/52380-the-evolving-multilateral-defence-diplomacy-in-the-caribbean-region-prospects-and-challenges

Soon, we will have another #publication with a focus on the #US - #Caribbean relationship. Stay tuned!

Sharing a #flashback to one of my earlier publications.

In this article, “The evolving multilateral #defence #diplomacy in the #Caribbean region: prospects and challenges,” we examine how #Caribbean small states use #defence #diplomacy to navigate multidimensional #threats

#snapshot of the publication:
https://content.shipslides.com/d/bdacwnxgcu/raw

Full publication:
https://michal-pawinski.scholar.st/publications/52380-the-evolving-multilateral-defence-diplomacy-in-the-caribbean-region-prospects-and-challenges

Soon, we will have another #publication with a focus on the #US - #Caribbean relationship. Stay tuned!

Identity of man at centre of alleged extramarital relationship extortion remains suppressed

The identity of a high-profile Queensland man at the centre of an alleged extortion attempt will remain suppressed…
#Australia #affair #AU #Austrlia #extramarital #farnorthqueensland #fnq #freepress #gimuy #marlincoast #non-publication #npo #openjustice #publication #Romance #SocialMedia #tropicalqueensland
https://www.europesays.com/australia/22582/

The Curve of the World: Out Today!

The Curve of the World by Vonda McIntyre (Aqueduct: Seattle, 2026)

Buy the Book

From the Publisher | Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble

About the Book, and Vonda

The Curve of the World is Vonda McIntyre’s last gift to us, and it is magnificent. In this alternate history of the ancient world, where Minoans build a globe-spanning trading community, Vonda has taken up the challenge of her good friend Ursula K. Le Guin and become a dreamer of a wider reality, creating a glorious vision of a working world. The Curve of the World is the sum and summit of all Vonda McIntyre was as a writer and as a human being, a marvellous vision of how the world might have been, perhaps once was, and might, still, one day be. The world needs this novel.

But don’t read this book because it’s Good For You. Read it because it’s a real story about a genuine alternative to our world featuring true grownups—and all the delights and, well, ‘learning opportunities’ attendant on that. Seriously, reading this book feels like sitting by a driftwood fire at dusk, while the waves slish and salt-scented breeze dries the tears of joy on your cheeks—the kind of joy that comes from feeling peace and rightness and rootedness in a world just waiting for you to walk it.

Don’t take my word for it. Go read this review on Salon Futura, or this Starred Review in Publisher’s Weekly. Or see below for other writers’ praise.

I loved Vonda. In 2019 she fought to stay alive to do her final rewrite—of a novel she began in the early aughts but then abandoned when she felt dispirited by her career. (I have a lot to say about this, but not here.) Kelley and I were delighted when sometime after she was Guest of Honour at the 2015 Worldcon (2016? I don’t remember) she told us she was working on it again. Not so very long after that, she gave us the first complete draft to read. We did, and as always between long-time writer friends, we had many long conversations about what worked and what could be better.

She went back to work on it again. But then she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and suddenly the clock was ticking—ticking very, very fast.

Vonda fought to stay alive to finished this book. It was just days after she saved the file that she entered the final days of round-the-clock hospice care at home. Sadly, my father died during that time so we couldn’t be here for her final days—we had to fly to the UK to deal with family stuff, Dad’s estate etc—but we’d said our goodbyes. I only wish she could be here to see this day. Please buy the book.

Praise

”A gentle elegiac tone pervades this stunning posthumous historical fantasy from multi–Hugo and Nebula award winner McIntyre (Dreamsnake), who died in 2019. In ancient Crete, Iakinthu, a former bull dancer, is at the apex of her second profession as chief diplomat-trader of her seafaring nation. To fulfill Minoan tradition, she must take her adopted son, Rhenthizu, to meet his birth mother in a faraway land no Minoan has ever visited, after which he will choose which woman to live with. Their epic journey plays out as a feminist odyssey through six distinctive and mostly matriarchal cultures, superbly constructed around permutations of myth and legend. McIntyre’s scene-setting is lush and immersive, and her finely drawn, women-led cast leaps off the page as they confront obstacles with wit and wisdom. This sensitive and captivating voyage of discovery is a fitting capstone to a remarkable career.”
—Publishers Weekly, May 2026

“The Curve of the World is magnificent, a glorious vision of a wider reality: a world in which global commerce and fairness are not a contradiction in terms. It is the sum and summit of all Vonda McIntyre was as a writer and human being, her last, best gift to a world in sore need of hope.”
—Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite and Hild

“I loved this book! It’s a glorious adventure with a heart as big as the world! Iakinthu Gephyra is a diplomat, trader, explorer, and the ‘bridge between people’ who strives to understand and accept cultures that are not her own. To find the family of her adopted child, she sets forth on the most difficult voyage her people have ever undertaken, sailing beyond the Sunset Sea and across the Nameless Ocean. A fascinating exploration of culture, family, and identity, about finding your way and discovering where you belong.”
—Pat Murphy, author The Adventures of Mary Darling and The Wild Girls

“A vivid, luminous novel. As Minoan traders travel the ancient world, McIntyre brings to richly imagined life six distinctive cultures of antiquity, all touched with magic. The characters are so real that I could see, feel, even smell them, and I passionately wanted each to succeed at their various quests. The Curve Of The World is a wonderful capstone to a storied career.”
—Nancy Kress, author of Observer

“Vonda takes us from the known world, a world with known dangers and known comforts, into the unknown, the wild but civilized West. As she herself looked ahead to the journey from life into death, she opens to us a world filled with unrealized possibilities. This is a marvelous book of the civilizations that could have been.”
 —Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies for Middle Management and Questionable Practices

“The Curve of the World is full of daring, and rich and rare invention, but feeling true, as far as can be known, to the mysterious, apparently/ probably women-centered, ancient Minoan culture. I loved the giving of beautiful gifts, between chance voyagers meeting on the ocean. So much better than mere trade. A wonderful book.”
 —Gwyneth Jones, author of Life and Bold as Love

The Curve of the World: Out Today!

The Curve of the World by Vonda McIntyre (Aqueduct: Seattle, 2026)

Buy the Book

From the Publisher | Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble

About the Book, and Vonda

The Curve of the World is Vonda McIntyre’s last gift to us, and it is magnificent. In this alternate history of the ancient world, where Minoans build a globe-spanning trading community, Vonda has taken up the challenge of her good friend Ursula K. Le Guin and become a dreamer of a wider reality, creating a glorious vision of a working world. The Curve of the World is the sum and summit of all Vonda McIntyre was as a writer and as a human being, a marvellous vision of how the world might have been, perhaps once was, and might, still, one day be. The world needs this novel.

But don’t read this book because it’s Good For You. Read it because it’s a real story about a genuine alternative to our world featuring true grownups—and all the delights and, well, ‘learning opportunities’ attendant on that. Seriously, reading this book feels like sitting by a driftwood fire at dusk, while the waves slish and salt-scented breeze dries the tears of joy on your cheeks—the kind of joy that comes from feeling peace and rightness and rootedness in a world just waiting for you to walk it.

Don’t take my word for it. Go read this review on Salon Futura, or this Starred Review in Publisher’s Weekly. Or see below for other writers’ praise.

I loved Vonda. In 2019 she fought to stay alive to do her final rewrite—of a novel she began in the early aughts but then abandoned when she felt dispirited by her career. (I have a lot to say about this, but not here.) Kelley and I were delighted when sometime after she was Guest of Honour at the 2015 Worldcon (2016? I don’t remember) she told us she was working on it again. Not so very long after that, she gave us the first complete draft to read. We did, and as always between long-time writer friends, we had many long conversations about what worked and what could be better.

She went back to work on it again. But then she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and suddenly the clock was ticking—ticking very, very fast.

Vonda fought to stay alive to finished this book. It was just days after she saved the file that she entered the final days of round-the-clock hospice care at home. Sadly, my father died during that time so we couldn’t be here for her final days—we had to fly to the UK to deal with family stuff, Dad’s estate etc—but we’d said our goodbyes. I only wish she could be here to see this day. Please buy the book.

Praise

”A gentle elegiac tone pervades this stunning posthumous historical fantasy from multi–Hugo and Nebula award winner McIntyre (Dreamsnake), who died in 2019. In ancient Crete, Iakinthu, a former bull dancer, is at the apex of her second profession as chief diplomat-trader of her seafaring nation. To fulfill Minoan tradition, she must take her adopted son, Rhenthizu, to meet his birth mother in a faraway land no Minoan has ever visited, after which he will choose which woman to live with. Their epic journey plays out as a feminist odyssey through six distinctive and mostly matriarchal cultures, superbly constructed around permutations of myth and legend. McIntyre’s scene-setting is lush and immersive, and her finely drawn, women-led cast leaps off the page as they confront obstacles with wit and wisdom. This sensitive and captivating voyage of discovery is a fitting capstone to a remarkable career.”
—Publishers Weekly, May 2026

“The Curve of the World is magnificent, a glorious vision of a wider reality: a world in which global commerce and fairness are not a contradiction in terms. It is the sum and summit of all Vonda McIntyre was as a writer and human being, her last, best gift to a world in sore need of hope.”
—Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite and Hild

“I loved this book! It’s a glorious adventure with a heart as big as the world! Iakinthu Gephyra is a diplomat, trader, explorer, and the ‘bridge between people’ who strives to understand and accept cultures that are not her own. To find the family of her adopted child, she sets forth on the most difficult voyage her people have ever undertaken, sailing beyond the Sunset Sea and across the Nameless Ocean. A fascinating exploration of culture, family, and identity, about finding your way and discovering where you belong.”
—Pat Murphy, author The Adventures of Mary Darling and The Wild Girls

“A vivid, luminous novel. As Minoan traders travel the ancient world, McIntyre brings to richly imagined life six distinctive cultures of antiquity, all touched with magic. The characters are so real that I could see, feel, even smell them, and I passionately wanted each to succeed at their various quests. The Curve Of The World is a wonderful capstone to a storied career.”
—Nancy Kress, author of Observer

“Vonda takes us from the known world, a world with known dangers and known comforts, into the unknown, the wild but civilized West. As she herself looked ahead to the journey from life into death, she opens to us a world filled with unrealized possibilities. This is a marvelous book of the civilizations that could have been.”
 —Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies for Middle Management and Questionable Practices

“The Curve of the World is full of daring, and rich and rare invention, but feeling true, as far as can be known, to the mysterious, apparently/ probably women-centered, ancient Minoan culture. I loved the giving of beautiful gifts, between chance voyagers meeting on the ocean. So much better than mere trade. A wonderful book.”
 —Gwyneth Jones, author of Life and Bold as Love

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Published the English edition (v1.5) of my monograph:

Theory of Hybrid Postbiological Continuity: Life as a Principally Substrate-Independent Emergent Process

A curated extended edition on life as substrate‑independent recursive pattern continuity.

PhilPapers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/j-a-jones

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19692964

#systemsTheory #complexSystems #emergence #postbiological
#recursiveIdentity #substrateNeutrality #philosophyOfMind #cognitiveScience #research #publication

[Editions]

Un grand merci au Magazine L'Histoire pour la recension réalisée de notre Gazette des archives n° 275 intitulée "Le sport, archives et histoire : avant et après les Jeux de Paris 2024".

Pour vous la procurer : https://www.archivistes.org/publications/le-sport-archives-et-histoire-avant-et-apres-les-jeux-de-paris-2024/

@maglhistoire

#sport #JO2024 #olympic #archives #publication

https://www.europesays.com/ie/428508/ New guidance on overlooked uterine condition affecting 1 in 3 women #Adenomyosis #ClinicalGuidance #Éire #FertilityPreservation #Gynecology #Health #HeavyBleeding #IE #Ireland #jabsom #JohnABurnsSchoolOfMedicine #KimberlyKho #ManoaExcellenceInResearch #ManoaResearch #MedicalResearch #MinimallyInvasiveDiagnosis #ObGyn #ObstetricsAndGynecology #PelvicPain #publication #uh #UhManoa #UniversityOfHawaii #UterineDisease #Women'sHealth

Our newest publication is out!

We showed that the yeast core factor (CF) binds and specifically recognizes promoter DNA in a two-step process, after which it will recruit RNA Polymerase I, inducing DNA bending and melting to start the transcription process.

https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/54/5/gkag153/8495788

#academicChatter #publication #science #nucleicAcidsResearch #nucleicAcids #yeast #dna #transcription

Our newest publication is out!

We showed that the yeast core factor (CF) binds and specifically recognizes promoter DNA in a two-step process, after which it will recruit RNA Polymerase I, inducing DNA bending and melting to start the transcription process.

https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/54/5/gkag153/8495788

#academicChatter #publication #science #nucleicAcidsResearch #nucleicAcids #yeast #dna #transcription

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature

On s'en doutait déjà.
La #science l'a maintenant prouvé

https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2982423_comment-lalgorithme-de-x-peut-vous-rendre-conservateur

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature

On s'en doutait déjà.
La #science l'a maintenant prouvé

https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2982423_comment-lalgorithme-de-x-peut-vous-rendre-conservateur

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature On s'en doutait déjà. La #science l'a maintenant prouvé www.frandroid.com/culture-tech...

Il vous manipule en 7 semaines...

L' #algorithme de #X pourrait #orienter les #utilisateurs vers des positions plus conservatrices selon des #chercheurs , selon une #publication d’une #étude #scientifique dans #Nature On s'en doutait déjà. La #science l'a maintenant prouvé www.frandroid.com/culture-tech...

Il vous manipule en 7 semaines...

A quotation from Madeleine L'Engle

   Many years ago, when A Wrinkle in Time was being rejected by publisher after publisher, I wrote in my journal, “I will rewrite for months or even years for an editor who sees what I am trying to do in this book and wants to make it better and stronger. But I will not, I cannot diminish and mutilate it for an editor who does not understand it and wants to weaken it.”
   Now, the editors who did not understand the book and wanted the problem of evil soft peddled had every right to refuse to publish the book, as I had, sadly, the right and obligation to try to be true to it. If they refused it out of honest conviction, that was honorable. If they refused it for fear of trampling on someone else’s toes, that was, alas, the way of the world.

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) American writer
Speech (1983-11-16), “Dare To Be Creative,” Lecture, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

More about this quote: wist.info/lengle-madeleine/822…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #madeleinelengle #lengle #wrinkleintime #awrinkleintime #editing #editor #evil #principle #problemofevil #publication #rewriting #writing #rejection

Enregistrement de mon nom de domaine Frimoulux.com https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/enregistrement-de-mon-nom-de-domaine-frimoulux-com/

#site #internet #domaine #nom #hébergement #bande #annonce #vidéo #film #création #projet #image #graphisme #design #marketing #publication #contenu #média #blog #siteweb #sousdomaine #transfert #renouvellement #abonnement #passion #technologie #digital #créativité #portfolio #communication

Enregistrement de mon nom de domaine Frimoulux.com https://tozounoir.zouluvo.com/enregistrement-de-mon-nom-de-domaine-frimoulux-com/

#site #internet #domaine #nom #hébergement #bande #annonce #vidéo #film #création #projet #image #graphisme #design #marketing #publication #contenu #média #blog #siteweb #sousdomaine #transfert #renouvellement #abonnement #passion #technologie #digital #créativité #portfolio #communication

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Dear Reader: a note about SHE IS HERE

I have a new book coming VERY SOON. I, of course, want you to read it. I’m also trying to find time to prep the events—y’know, what bit/s to read, how to talk about the book—before those events actually begin. Which means I’ve been working out how to talk about the book.

I thought you might like to see what I came up with.

Dear Reader,

Novelists learn very early in their careers to summarise every new book with a pithy phrase. (My first novel Ammonite: “Change or die.”) But today, less than a month before the publication of She Is Here, I am still struggling to define it. Perhaps that’s because it’s not a novel—nor all fiction, nor even prose. Not even text. 
      She Is Here is a selection of various published and unpublished creations spanning my career from before the publication of that first novel through to today. The fiction ranges from very short, to very early, to a novella about the magic of music published here for the first time. The poems were written to express emotion in private—grief, refusing ableism, dangerous lust, and the despair of degenerative illness. None are previously published—in fact, this marks the first publication of any of my poems anywhere. Similarly, I made the art purely for its own sake—in this case, images (very) loosely inspired by the illuminations of Early Medieval gospels. The non-fiction ranges from manifesto to Op-Ed to epistolary criticism to musings on etymology and the double-edged tool that is branding. Different facets from different eras of my creative life.
      That long-ago tagline, “Change or die,” was perfect for Ammonite. More than 30 years later I find it has become the bedrock principle of my life. Writers are often advised to write what we know. I believe, rather, that we write from our deepest self, from who we are. If we want our work to change and grow, we must, too. Life is change—constant discovery.
      The last words of “Glimmer,” the shortest fiction in the book, are “She is here. She has arrived.” The narrator has made a galaxy-spanning journey through time and space, past reality—astonishing, impossible—a miraculous achievement. But the achievement, the arrival, isn’t the point; the rest of her life is about to begin. Because it’s always about to begin.
     She Is Here, then, is a snapshot of a moment in time, containing, as do all of us, bits of the past, present and future. A kind of creative Commonplace Book.
      She is here. I am here. But where, exactly, is that? I have no idea; that’s the point! The joy lies in continuing to find out…

If you like the sound of that, perhaps you’d like to join me for one of those events in Seattle or Edmonds or virtually, before or during publication. I’m curious about what aspect of the book you’d like to know more about—so if you have an opinion, comment, or question, just drop it here.

Meanwhile, feel free to pre-order the book. Or put a hold on it at your library. It’s all good.

#bookBirthday #essays #interview #novella #poems #publication #sheIsHere #shortFiction #zoomorphics

Dear Reader: a note about SHE IS HERE

I have a new book coming VERY SOON. I, of course, want you to read it. I’m also trying to find time to prep the events—y’know, what bit/s to read, how to talk about the book—before those events actually begin. Which means I’ve been working out how to talk about the book.

I thought you might like to see what I came up with.

Dear Reader,

Novelists learn very early in their careers to summarise every new book with a pithy phrase. (My first novel Ammonite: “Change or die.”) But today, less than a month before the publication of She Is Here, I am still struggling to define it. Perhaps that’s because it’s not a novel—nor all fiction, nor even prose. Not even text. 
      She Is Here is a selection of various published and unpublished creations spanning my career from before the publication of that first novel through to today. The fiction ranges from very short, to very early, to a novella about the magic of music published here for the first time. The poems were written to express emotion in private—grief, refusing ableism, dangerous lust, and the despair of degenerative illness. None are previously published—in fact, this marks the first publication of any of my poems anywhere. Similarly, I made the art purely for its own sake—in this case, images (very) loosely inspired by the illuminations of Early Medieval gospels. The non-fiction ranges from manifesto to Op-Ed to epistolary criticism to musings on etymology and the double-edged tool that is branding. Different facets from different eras of my creative life.
      That long-ago tagline, “Change or die,” was perfect for Ammonite. More than 30 years later I find it has become the bedrock principle of my life. Writers are often advised to write what we know. I believe, rather, that we write from our deepest self, from who we are. If we want our work to change and grow, we must, too. Life is change—constant discovery.
      The last words of “Glimmer,” the shortest fiction in the book, are “She is here. She has arrived.” The narrator has made a galaxy-spanning journey through time and space, past reality—astonishing, impossible—a miraculous achievement. But the achievement, the arrival, isn’t the point; the rest of her life is about to begin. Because it’s always about to begin.
     She Is Here, then, is a snapshot of a moment in time, containing, as do all of us, bits of the past, present and future. A kind of creative Commonplace Book.
      She is here. I am here. But where, exactly, is that? I have no idea; that’s the point! The joy lies in continuing to find out…

If you like the sound of that, perhaps you’d like to join me for one of those events in Seattle or Edmonds or virtually, before or during publication. I’m curious about what aspect of the book you’d like to know more about—so if you have an opinion, comment, or question, just drop it here.

Meanwhile, feel free to pre-order the book. Or put a hold on it at your library. It’s all good.

#bookBirthday #essays #interview #novella #poems #publication #sheIsHere #shortFiction #zoomorphics

Pas très passionnant les publications ces temps ci
Tout le monde se contente de publier son archétype Stoïque Oracle etc..
#WRAPSTODON
Pas tres original !

Enfin bref, faut passer à autre chose !
N'est-ce pas ?
Non ?
Hum !

....

#Mastodon #Oracle #stoique #etc
#EtQuoiDautre ? #NoComment
#Publication #Archetype
#Moi #toi #Lui #Nous #Vous
#EnfinBref
#NouvelleAnnee
#NouvelAn
#2026
#BONNEQUOI ?
#Hum !
#NonRien
#BonBenVoilà
#CestTout !!
#STOP !!!!!

🥂❕️🍾❕️🎶❕️😊❕️👍❕️📺❕️

Pas très passionnant les publications ces temps ci
Tout le monde se contente de publier son archétype Stoïque Oracle etc..
#WRAPSTODON
Pas tres original !

Enfin bref, faut passer à autre chose !
N'est-ce pas ?
Non ?
Hum !

....

#Mastodon #Oracle #stoique #etc
#EtQuoiDautre ? #NoComment
#Publication #Archetype
#Moi #toi #Lui #Nous #Vous
#EnfinBref
#NouvelleAnnee
#NouvelAn
#2026
#BONNEQUOI ?
#Hum !
#NonRien
#BonBenVoilà
#CestTout !!
#STOP !!!!!

🥂❕️🍾❕️🎶❕️😊❕️👍❕️📺❕️

Pas très passionnant les publications ces temps ci
Tout le monde se contente de publier son archétype Stoïque Oracle etc..
#WRAPSTODON
Pas tres original !

Enfin bref, faut passer à autre chose !
N'est-ce pas ?
Non ?
Hum !

....

#Mastodon #Oracle #stoique #etc
#EtQuoiDautre ? #NoComment
#Publication #Archetype
#Moi #toi #Lui #Nous #Vous
#EnfinBref
#NouvelleAnnee
#NouvelAn
#2026
#BONNEQUOI ?
#Hum !
#NonRien
#BonBenVoilà
#CestTout !!
#STOP !!!!!

🥂❕️🍾❕️🎶❕️😊❕️👍❕️📺❕️

Pas très passionnant les publications ces temps ci
Tout le monde se contente de publier son archétype Stoïque Oracle etc..
#WRAPSTODON
Pas tres original !

Enfin bref, faut passer à autre chose !
N'est-ce pas ?
Non ?
Hum !

....

#Mastodon #Oracle #stoique #etc
#EtQuoiDautre ? #NoComment
#Publication #Archetype
#Moi #toi #Lui #Nous #Vous
#EnfinBref
#NouvelleAnnee
#NouvelAn
#2026
#BONNEQUOI ?
#Hum !
#NonRien
#BonBenVoilà
#CestTout !!
#STOP !!!!!

🥂❕️🍾❕️🎶❕️😊❕️👍❕️📺❕️

Pas très passionnant les publications ces temps ci
Tout le monde se contente de publier son archétype Stoïque Oracle etc..
#WRAPSTODON
Pas tres original !

Enfin bref, faut passer à autre chose !
N'est-ce pas ?
Non ?
Hum !

....

#Mastodon #Oracle #stoique #etc
#EtQuoiDautre ? #NoComment
#Publication #Archetype
#Moi #toi #Lui #Nous #Vous
#EnfinBref
#NouvelleAnnee
#NouvelAn
#2026
#BONNEQUOI ?
#Hum !
#NonRien
#BonBenVoilà
#CestTout !!
#STOP !!!!!

🥂❕️🍾❕️🎶❕️😊❕️👍❕️📺❕️

Compendium Of Seabed Mapping Use Cases | HE Nippon Foundation - Gebco #Seabed2030 Project
--
https://seabed2030.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SEABED-2030-Compendium-of-Seabed-Mapping-Use-Cases-031024.pdf <-- shared presentation
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #earthobservation #spatialanalysis #oceanfloor #seafloor #marine #ocean #global #usecase #cable #subsubseacable #planning #design #engineering #routing #risk #hazard #infrastructure #trench #slope #seamount #cost #costsavings #benefit #economics #usecase #seabed #opendata #platforms #sensors #survey #dataprocessing #management #publication #bigdata #acquisition #coverage #hydrospatial #hydrographic #coast #coastal #development #spatialplanning #maritime #socioeconomic #sovereignty #navigation #nauticial #charting #charts #marinecharts #depth #crowdsourcing #3D #basemap #tsunami #stormsurge #extremeweather #model #modeling #landfall #impact #humanimpact #propagation #climatechange #ocean #biodiversity #ecosystems #reef #bathymetry #government #policy #pollution #blueeconomy #industry #NGO #academia #research
@Seabed2030

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion

#Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/24/affaire-epstein-loin-de-la-transparence-promise-la-publication-encore-partielle-des-archives-attise-la-confusion_6659281_3210.html

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion

#Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/24/affaire-epstein-loin-de-la-transparence-promise-la-publication-encore-partielle-des-archives-attise-la-confusion_6659281_3210.html

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion

#Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/24/affaire-epstein-loin-de-la-transparence-promise-la-publication-encore-partielle-des-archives-attise-la-confusion_6659281_3210.html

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion

#Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/24/affaire-epstein-loin-de-la-transparence-promise-la-publication-encore-partielle-des-archives-attise-la-confusion_6659281_3210.html

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion

#Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/12/24/affaire-epstein-loin-de-la-transparence-promise-la-publication-encore-partielle-des-archives-attise-la-confusion_6659281_3210.html

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion #Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

Affaire Epstein : loin de la t...

#Affaire #Epstein : loin de la transparence promise, la #publication encore #partielle des #archives entretient la #confusion #Trump #pedocriminal #president #USA www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

Affaire Epstein : loin de la t...

#Publication #partielle du #dossier #Epstein : l' #administration #Trump accusée de " #cacher la #vérité"

#Epstein #files partially , but not fully , released

https://fr.euronews.com/2025/12/20/publication-partielle-du-dossier-epstein-ladministration-trump-accusee-de-cacher-la-verite

#Publication #partielle du #dossier #Epstein : l' #administration #Trump accusée de " #cacher la #vérité"

#Epstein #files partially , but not fully , released

https://fr.euronews.com/2025/12/20/publication-partielle-du-dossier-epstein-ladministration-trump-accusee-de-cacher-la-verite