Jeffrey Palms

Mr. Colombo said he had a new bird, and a new mélo-kit, and did Marco want to come over and see it, he asked, as he beckoned his neighbor inside. Marco wasn’t really interested—he just wanted to crash on the sofa and open a beer and forget about the long day at work—but Mr. Colombo, like most people in Rome, never really took no as an answer; he only waved his hands more forcefully and herded him in, talking without pause about plumage and trills and transducers and accumulators, and Marco followed meekly.

music can do a lot of things for sure. Apparently when it comes out of birds it can be converted into power. I’m sure that’ll go well for everyone/society

Really enjoyed "On the Effects and Efficiency of Birdsong: A Meta-Analysis" by @ftberner.bsky.social @diabolicalplots.com

tinyurl.com/bd9j6utx

ME: pack a bag, we’re flying to kansas

MY WAYWARD SON: what kind of bag

A reminder of how to read a poem properly

Double-page spread, showing the chapter title and an island on the distance at sunrise.

Splash page, a zoom-in on the island.

Comic page with two panels. The zoom-in continues, a brutalist building stands atop the island.

Full-page view of the building.

I've created a website were I'll be publishing Ekphrasis, the comic I'm (slowly) making.

You can already read the first few pages there, I hope you like them <3

ekphrasiscomic.neocities.org

ah ok - @astracordis.space, are there any left? I’m just sitting here with my checkbook fyi

Do you (will you) have prints of these to sell?

Color illustration, in purple and yellow colors, of a brutalist space station/habitat.

One of my latest illustrations for the @astracordis.space TTRPG ~*

Diabolical Plots logo: a smiling begoggled face on teal

New fiction!
"On the Effects and Efficiency of Birdsong: A Meta-Analysis" by F.T. Berner @ftberner.bsky.social
www.diabolicalplots.com/dp-fiction-1...

Close up of some eyeglasses covered in raindrops with a blurry abbey in the background

anyway here’s a photo of neimënster abbey trying on my glasses (good)

day 10 of my residency at neimënster abbey is done: so far doing the writing in the morning trying to catch my wave of fatigue when it’s profound enough that all little dreamlike fiction things are possible (good) but not so profound that the core machinery starts to falter . maybe 45 good minutes

Writing a book isn't about competition, it isn't about winning or getting rich, it's about sitting down with your fucked-up thoughts and weird ideas and putting them on paper to traumatize people who read them. AI will never get that part right.

Tea or Coffee, Stars, and Gravity A Hard SF anthology of stories involving tea or coffee, stars, and gravity.

The “Tea or Coffee, Stars, and Gravity” anthology KS campaign is 95% base goal funded (www.kickstarter.com/projects/526...). This means we are 81% to SG1 & 71% to SG2. 10 more backers to base goal funding. A little more caffeine in our mugs today and we’ll be there. #sff #fantasy #book #ks #booksky

Color illustration of an old train riding over a rice-field at sunrise.

Cover illustration for Passing By, the upcoming solo journaling RPG by @thelostbaystudio.com.

We fear what this dark tide portends. I fear it, perhaps, most deeply of all. During the intermission, I text my wife: The age of visionary outerwear is ending. She texts me back okay.

utterly hilarious piece of short fiction here, rides an absurd visual over a steep cliff, nice wink at (you know) societal demise, perfect pacing etc – please take a moment for INCLEMENT WEATHER by @johnchrostek.com in @hexliterary.bsky.social 👌

hexliterary.com?p=2870

Kindly said 🥹

Ok just me then 😅 it’s like a soft momentum feeling, probably something I hang onto in the absence of more story publications 😅🥲

do you find any comfort in that? I like having those half drafts knocking around and providing some vague writerly security (there’s gotta be potential or maybe even a gem lurking, there’s work already on the page, work that nobody has rejected yet!)

Having said that… 40 is a lot 😅👏

Medieval bestiary inspired digital illustration of a dragon eating a severed arm.

Digital illustration of 8-winged, 2-headed eyeless white bat in flight, framed by a gold ring border of eyes and corner wing elements. Each wing has a different colour of the rainbow.

A very colourful digital illustration of a moth with colourful leafy wings, framed by swirly leafy elements, and a spiral with the phases of the moon along it.

Medieval bestiary inspired illustration of eohippus, the dawn horse.

Here are some of my more sparkly works! 😁✨️

Three small drawings: One of a shrine under a pine tree with a stone inside, one of a salamander on the forest floor, one of a coastal path with stone steps, two tall trees, stone columns and two hikers in the distance. The overall feel is very late summer to early autumn.

ok I will stop fiddling with this now

The world runs on music, from percussion battalions to water purification concertos. Layers of song, discord & harmony in equal measure. But at its most basic: the working tunes passed from parent to child to aid you through the day. What power does your song hold?

#TinyTalesTuesday #WritingPrompt

i was speed scrolling and definitely misread that as “alien sound instruments” so zero for three on the actual words

Anyway one thing that I have found gets me past the brain revolt is to just really lean into a sentence. Write one weird and beautiful sentence. I am sure there's a psychological explanation for why, but I don't know what it is. Maybe it's being present, forgetting about progress. +

me [70k words into the novel draft]: if this narrator guy does just one thing that isn’t outrageously bizarre i will END HIM before all my bored imaginary readers smash tomato pulp into my favorite clothes

the narrator: I woke up and brushed my teeth. The sun was shining outside . I

A lineup of illustrations, each of a whimsical small house

Gonna construct a village on my workspace wall with these perfect and lovely small abodes from @anineillustration.com which by the miracle of the post I have lately received

She kept speaking but I gave up listening. This absurd tree-instrument was sounding its music and I was fly-trapped in its spider web. The timbre was the thing, I realised. What the discovery of harmony had done for pitch, that was the magnitude of what was happening here with regard to timbre. My fascination was so intoxicating that when Mitr paused for breath I said, “I accept.”

One year ago my short story BODY MUSIC was published in Andromeda Spaceways ••• issues of body composition ••• the journeys art makes through stages of the world ••• a guy trying to save a life

andromedaspaceways.com/product/asm-...

THE MOTORCYCLE GANG FESTIVAL by Robert John Miller As a morale-boosting exercise, the Tri-County Board had all been watching a gritty motorcycle drama together on Wednesday nights and decided what we really needed was more of an outlaw spirit to up&hellip;

"As a morale-boosting exercise, the Tri-County Board had all been watching a gritty motorcycle drama together on Wednesday nights and decided what we really needed was more of an outlaw spirit to up our street cred..."

🏍️ from Robert John Miller!

https://www.havehashad.com/cceg2

Generative A.I. This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of Al in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative Al works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writingwriting that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative-requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. We urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences. One further reason to abjure generative Al, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, Al is enormously environmentally destructive.

Yes in thunder. My syllabus statement:

I really did – ive new years resolved to read more short fiction and it’s already paying off

Really enjoyed BELLY FULL OF EYES by @kswalkerwrites.bsky.social in @3lobedmag.com. i mean there’s a character called Kkkkgggg

www.3lobedmag.com/issue46/3lbe...

thanks to AI taking so much stuff off my plate I can finally focus on the important things: the whirring void of my own consciousness