A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.
If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.
It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
You, an individual, cannot "fix" the whole world. You can act at the scale of your life. You should act at the scale of your life.
A digital colored sketch of four cats squeezed into square shapes, arranged in a grid. The cats all slightly break out of their squares and have various cheeky expressions. The cats are all colored Molly with red, cream, yellow, and blue. The Clip Studio Paint logo is in the bottom corner of the artwork.
Cat squares step 2: color β€οΈ
[ #cuteart #illustration ]
Wow! That's an impressive monument! The level of denial up here, in contrast, is equally impressive, as though no one died needlessly and the pandemic was just a bad dream. There are a couple of monuments in the US, but I wonder if more would exist if the pandemic hadn't become so politicized.
A calico tabby with a mostly white body and tabby mask on her head sits looking back over her shoulder. She is surrounded by houseplants.
Happy #caturday from Ivy! She looks innocent, but she's just tried to climb over my plants to the window in order to watch birds. "Why can't I freely access every window, Human?" she asks.
We Lived Happily during the War And when they bombed other people's houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house- I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.
"in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war."
- Ilya Kaminsky
Overall, I highly recommend! Ignore those bad Goodreads reviews! (I should do that more myself, honestly. The previous book I read, The Everlasting, was so disappointing in comparison, yet it has a high rating.) #booksky πͺπ
I want all writers to be into writing as much like themselves as possible. I hate to see someone say writing's so good they wish they'd written it. You couldn't have, you're you, & they're them. That's the spirit of plagiarism behind AI. Believe in your capacity to create beauty unique to you.
Yes, space pirates with lots of pirate politics, shifting alliances, backstabbing, and quests for revenge alongside thoughtful discussions of ethics. There's a romance too, which started too fast for me, but then felt more natural in the second half as the characters built an emotional connection.
A hardcover copy of The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard rests on a pile of other books. The cover features two women with topknots, one in a robe and the other in trousers, holding hands in front of a portal looking out into space. The ship they're in is highly decorated, and, through the portal, you can see more ships flying in formation.
I'm overwhelmed with work and, seeking sanity, am throwing myself into SFF novels. After a couple of disappointments, I chose The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard, knowing it was a safe bet for complex world-building and lovely writing. Even better, it also features space pirates!
CHARLES RAFFERTY The Problem with Early Warnings People don't like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire. Even then, if the flames are far enough away to be pretty, they'll finish their drink, take one more pass at the hors d'oeuvres. How things happen has always been unclear. Hurricanes begin in a place where no one lives. Agents of the government start to wear masks. Fascism is a word my neighbors won't use yet. They are following the law, they say, and the sirens are coming for someone else.
This hit so fucking hard today.
I think a lot of us get hope wrong. Hope, I do not believe, is an emotion. In fact, hope makes space for lots of emotions to exist alongside it. You can DO hope scared, angry, sad etc...
Hope doesn't find us. We make hope through action and struggle. It's a practice of living and is re-made daily.
This rug is so cute! I love the design and colour!
Todayβs Feature:
βChildhood Triptychβ by Billy-Ray Belcourt from The Idea of an Entire Life published by @carcanet.bsky.social
Read here:
poems.com/poem/childho...
It's difficult to read because the protagonist despairs so easily - he avoids action, for the most part, and easily loses himself in despair for what he's witnessing. But it's a timely story in our age of climate despair and ongoing extinctions. A beautiful, but very sad little book.
The Book*hug Press edition of The Last of Its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert sits on a woven blanket. The cover art features an 19th-century sketch of a great auk, which looks similar to a penguin in body with a larger beak and a white spot between its eyes and beak.
I recently read and recommend Sibylle Grimbert's The Last of Its Kind, translated by Aleshia Jensen. A reflective, tragic tale of an 1830s naturalist who captures a great auk, then bonds with it. As he realizes the species is going extinct, he loses faith in science, humanity, everything. #booksky
A large red amaryllis flower, one of four on the stalk. The petals are long and pointed, but overlapping so much that it looks like one solid flower. The stamens are hanging down in front, red and tipped with pollen.
One of my colleagues gave me an amaryllis bulb a few months ago, and it's finally come into full bloom. This is only the second amaryllis I've had, and the flowers are amazingly large and velvety. It's a treat to see something so beautiful when everything else is so dark and gloomy. #plantsky
Books don't tell readers who they personally are or who they are supposed to be. They do show readers a variety of characters. Implicit in that is this: "Here are some ways of being." Kids books aren't altering your kid to be someone new. They are simply showing them parts of humanity.
A sketchbook page of a cute, stylized little orange tabby cat sitting and looking smug/proud. Around them are various scribbles, doodles, other cat sketches, etc. It reads βjust make somethingβ amongst the doodles. All artwork is done in shades of orange, green, purple, and red with both paint pen and colored pencil.
Energy to take into 2026 βοΈβ¨
[ #cuteart #traditionalart #sketchbook ]
I wanted to see what came next: how do the separatists reintegrate with other humans? It's not going to be easy, and that conflict would be a fascinating story. The action-packed scenes were fun to read, but they were only the first step to resolving the story's problem. Still enjoyed it, though.
This novel deals with interesting moral quandaries and tries to dissect the impact of fascist indoctrination. Kyr is a genuinely unlikable protagonist, and the text highlights how no one really likes her - yet everything works out too neatly in the end. The story just needed to go a bit further.
A hardcover copy of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh sits on a woven blanket. The dust jacket is shiny and features the novel's title in bright gold overlaying the image of three purple-coloured planets in space.
Couldn't finish This Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh before the year's end, but spent most of New Year's Day unable to put it down. The middle of the novel was thrilling with strong action scenes and plot-twisting time loops. Just wish the ending hadn't relied on so much deus ex machina. #booksky ππ
I read so much this year, and while quantity isn't significant, I'm still impressed by the number and range of books I managed. Memoirs were outside my scope, but I challenged myself to read some and rather liked them - with the right writer and voice, the genre can work, even for skeptics like me.
Then, for non-fiction and poetry:
- The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
- Son of Elsewhere by Elamin Abdelmahmoud
- a body more tolerable by jaye simpson
- I Cut My Tongue on a Broken Country by Kyu Lee
Some favourite fiction from 2025:
- The West Passage by Jared PechaΔek
- The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
- Abigail by Magda SzabΓ³
- The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa
- The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong
- Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher
- Other Worlds by AndrΓ© Alexis
#booksky ππ
Book 70 of 2025 ππ There Will Be Bodies by Lindsey Davis, which I read in the summer, but forgot to post. The murder mystery fell flat for me, but the historical background of recovery and rebuilding efforts following the Vesuvius eruption was intricate and engrossing. #booksky
A hardcover, English translation copy of The Electric State by Simon StΓ₯lenhag rests on a woven blanket. The cover features an illustration of the protagonist leading her robot away from a much larger robot beneath the overhang of a building. Behind them is a parking lot and, more distantly desert and mountains.
Book 69 of 2025 ππ The Electric State by Simon StΓ₯lenhag, the story of a teenager on a quest to save her brother that's told as much by text as by the photo-realistic illustrations of an alternate 1990s haunted by rusting warships and addictive virtual reality tech. A fascinating book! #booksky
Usually, I only pick up a couple of Seth's Haunted Bookshelf each year because the quality of these 19th and 20th century stories can be patchy. This year, I grabbed all three without checking the reviews, and I was lucky that they're all strong stories, with solid plots and vivid writing.
Three small books are scattered on a Persian-style rug: The Mistress in Black, Lucky's Grove, and Lady Ferry. The covers feature pop-art style graphics with bold lines and colours that feature major scenes from each story: a woman's face, lit by a match she holds, a burning manor house, and a skeletal old woman in a gown.
Books 66-68 of 2025 ππ this year's additions to Seth's Haunted Bookshelf from Biblioasis: three short stories featuring a possibly-immortal lady, a teacher's ghost seeking redemption, and a Christmas tree cursed by a local tree spirit. All three had just enough chills and thrills. #booksky
