Christmas and Community

Hey parents, don’t read this around your children if you want them to believe in Santa. There are a few spoilers in here, not just of Santa, but of other traditions as well. I hope, however, that you will continue to read through, as these wandering thoughts do come together toward the end. So…without further ado…much ado about Christmas…

A long time ago, there was this fledgling little religion, an upstart really, in the heart of Rome. This religion is called Christianity, and was a brand new tome added to the already established religious repertoire, which at the time, was the Roman hierarchy of gods (itself adapted from Greek religious tradition). Let’s sit with that for a minute, because this is too often glossed over.

There was an established religious tradition in ancient Rome, and it was the worship of the pantheon of gods and goddesses, ranging from Jupiter (or Zeus) down to Hades, and so on. This was the normal state of the Roman empire at the time. The people worshiped multiple deities, that’s what they taught their children, and that’s what drove the holidays they celebrated. They had what to us would be weird festivals for all the gods, like the celebration of Saturnalia, and my personal favorite, Lemuralia, where they spent their energies exorcising “demons,” which would be entities like the vengeful spirit of Remus, Romulus’ twin who was murdered upon the founding of Rome. (Sometime in the early 7th century, Lemuralia was finally taken over by Christianity, allegedly, by All Saints’ Day.) My point here is only that there were many, many religious traditions established and in place, and along came this little religion that simply would not die.

Back then, there was another religion that would not die just beneath the surface of Roman life at the time. Trust me, this comes back to Christmas, I promise! But this religion is Judaism, which still lasts to this day. As a child, I was taught that the main difference between Jewish and Christian faiths was that the Jewish people worshipped a god called Yaweh, and the Christians believed that Jesus was the son of god. To me at the time, this was all the difference in the world, until I eventually learned that Yaweh is just another way to express Christianity, and that the Talmud is really just the old testament. So in a very real sense, Christianity is, from my understanding today, an evolution of Judaism, as opposed to something starkly different.

My, how things have changed! With the advent of prosperity gospel, and the downplay of Jesus’ influence (on the religion named after the man, as if that makes sense), I would argue that the religion has continued to evolve over the years. To be clear, one of the chief differences between Christianity and Jewish religions from a morality perspective is that Judaism requires participants to perform certain acts, whereas Christianity, especially today, requires nothing of the participants that can be reviewed and confirmed in the outside world. In other words, if I say I’m a Christian, you have no way of knowing whether or not that’s true, no matter how it is that I conduct myself in the world. (In my opinion, without the separation of acts from religious commitment, prosperity gospel would never have become possible.)

The situation is redeemable though. Ever since Martin Luther, Christians (read: ley-people) have been in charge of the protestant church. So through the people, people like you, the religion can be evolved back. And this is where Christmas comes in, folks, as well as a confession: I am not a Christian. If you know me, you know this, but you should also know that I do celebrate Christmas. There’s a good reason for it.

Finally, to the point!

I can think of no other holiday in modern America, or perhaps even in the entirety of western civilization, where the emphasis is placed as much on actions, external to self. Christmas is a day when it’s not enough to have that “personal relationship with god,” but when it’s important to act, to let others know how you feel about them, and that you care. It’s an act that builds community, and brings people closer together. So I celebrate. It doesn’t matter to me much that there’s a Winter Solstice that the holiday supplants, or that it, by tradition, follows along with Saturnalia, the Roman holiday in which people did exchange gifts. Christmas is, despite the commercialization, despite the over-eager advertisers trying to start the holiday months earlier, is a community-building event.

In fact, I think that it’s more special because of these historical connections. I think that Christmas transcends one religion, transcends ideology, and has the capacity to unwind a lot of the hurt we’ve been through in recent years. But to do it, we have to understand it, and not simply go through the motions. The gift we give, the most important of which is always time, is how we come together. The importance is not, nor will it ever be, what those gifts are (although I do love my Cocktail Smoking Kit I got as an early present). What really matters is that they are from other people in our lives, families, and society, and they very much mean that someone is thinking of you.

And that’s what we really need, especially now that there seems to be so much other-ing happening. We need someone to be thinking of us. So Merry Christmas, and if you’re reading this, know that someone is thinking of you, whether you know it or not. I hope for you the best, and I will forever believe in the power of community to change the world. Your gift giving, in so many ways, is an act of power by strengthening those ties with others.

Innovation and Economy

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bernie Sanders. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the Social Democrats, Socialism, and the arguments that distinguish between them. I’ve also been reading up on the shenanigans surrounding the death of the pension, a large part of which happened between 1970 and 2010. What do these have in common? Well, innovation, of course.

Let me stake my position so that you know where I’m coming from. I began many years ago as a sort of idealist, eagerly consuming literature about the founding of the United States, the rise and subsequent fall of communism, and the petty dictators mixed throughout. Of the types of economic systems, I’ve always loved the emphasis that socialism puts on protecting the individual, over the capitalist model, which is seemingly in a perpetual battle to determine exactly how “laissez- faire” the economic activity should be, and whether the government should play any role in the economy. But, from my perspective and over the years, I’ve yet to see a single example of a successful socialist economy that has survived. And on paper, that’s a huge endictment. But lately, as of the last ten years or so, I’ve been engaging in that dangerous passtime of thinking. And it’s in this process that I challenged some of my own assumptions.

One of my assuptions was that socialism is doomed to fail. This may be true, or may not be, but there’s one thing that we must admit: socialism never had a fair shake. The problem with most of the socialist systems is that the revolutions, soft or hard, didn’t occur in a vaccuum. These events occurred in a world in which other, more established nations, lingered on the sidelines waiting, and sometimes not waiting, but in any event hoping for the experiments to fail. And, as with the ever evasive position of the electron, the very act of observing these things drove certain outcomes. I’m convinced at this point that the western world, which I love being a part of and I do lover our rich history, interfered extensively in the potential of any socialist economy. But also, revolutionary leaders, feeling the very real external threat, transitioned so quickly that they overburdened the systems for feeding people, and for maintaining stability, and thus generated things like the Great Leap Forward, for one example (there are many). I’m not suggesting socialism is the evolution of the economic system that we all should strive for, but only that it’s not the bogeyman that people seem to believe, and not inherently doomed to failure. Socialism, in a very real sense, is an innovation in itself though, and that fact is definitely interesting.

One point I have yet to convince myself on, and am researching currently, is innovation. The claim that I hear made the most whenever I hear someone attempt to discredit socialism is that socialism fails innovation. An easy thing to do is drag out the cars in cuba, decades old and many gas guzzlers. Aside from technically being an authoritarian government, which I should point out is independent of economic policy (i.e. authoritarian socialist and capitalist countries both exist today), there’s one thing Cuba caught my attention on regarding the topic of innovation: a lung cancer vaccine. This is something I can’t imagine even being attempted to develop in the United States, for fairly obvious reasons. This is what brought me to my first serious question about innovation: what innovation are we talking about when we discuss innovation in the United States?

After all, sub-prime mortgages were technically correctly called innovations. Machine-learning instant trades in the stock market are also examples of innovations. So are PEP (Pooled Employee Retirement Plans) and Cash-Account retirement plans. Three of these last four innovations disrupted the lives of millions, and all four were at play when the nation went through the Great Recession. Does the direction of innovation matter? It’s one thing to claim to innovate, and an entirely different thing to claim innovation at the good of society. For example, right now, artificial intelligence is being used to generate books en masse, which generally lowers the price that individual authors can charge, and makes readers more skeptical of quality as the quality of artificially generated books is not, as of this typing, up to par with actual authors. Expect that to change soon. And then an entire industry is at risk to disappear.

In both socialist and capitalist claiming economies (most are somewhere in between), it takes government intervention to reign in innovations that have gone off the rails. Also, it’s important to note that innovation comes from individuals, and, from what I can tell, a mixture of knowledge and opportunity, and room to fail. There is nothing about socialism or capitalism, either, that indicates to me that innovation is more likely in one versus the other. Between China’s rapid emergence of capabilities in space and autonomous vehicles and the entire Cold War, among other things, it’s safe to say that innovation is not chiefly an American thing, but a human thing. Where there are humans, there will be innovation. Freedom to fail is definitely a contributor, as experimentation contributes innovation too, and where such freedom is allowed (either by strategic experimentation or generally in the public), then innovation will follow.

As such, I’m sticking to my guns: it is not the economic system that causes a state to stagnate and fail, but the all-too-common propensity for corruption. I’ll talk more on the concept of corruption later, and have done so before. But the economic system isn’t the determiner, from my understanding. Corruption is much more the problem, and in a single-party system, as strict socialist states have tended to be, corruption may easily take hold, as it does in many of our states which have single-party rule. More on that later.

An Open Letter to Our Publishers

This letter was sent to the distro of Authors Against Book Bans, and republished here for posterity.

from Authors Against Book Bans

With the election of the Trump administration and its policies as embodied in Project 2025, we authors have deep concerns about how our publishers will be operating and how publishers will advocate for and protect authors. Trump's agenda explicitly calls for the criminalization of authors, teachers, librarians, and publishing professionals with consequences including, “imprison[ment],” and being “classed as registered sex offenders” (Pg 4, Project 2025). For authors who are not citizens, this could also result in deportation. This promises to be a pro-censorship, pro-book-banning administration, and the successful implementation of its policies will require willing compliance of America's institutions, including its corporations.

The freedom to write is as important as the freedom to read. We have been heartened by many publishers' willingness to engage in legal and legislative pathways to fight book banning, and want to be sure that you will double-down on your fight during this consequential time.

This past week, AABB held open forums with authors from all genres and age levels to better understand author concerns and needs. While this may not be a complete list due to the rapid turnaround, we know we have a short time before January to prepare for what is to come, and we want to start this conversation sooner rather than later.

As authors, we need you to:

• Continue to acquire and promote books by LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC voices. We are concerned that these voices under particular attack will be silenced or discouraged, directly and/or indirectly.

• Be unequivocal in your support of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC authors. We need to know that no author will be asked to “tone down” or erase elements in their books to please potential censors or to avoid being targeted by unjust laws in certain states. Authors need to know that we can continue to speak our truths in our works and remarks.

• Guarantee the safety and confidentiality of all personal information that exists in your portals, or that has been shared for book promotion. We need publishers to refuse to provide lists of:

  • Authors or staff they know to be immigrants, Muslims, individuals with backgrounds from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza et al (targeted under Trump's promise to expand the “Muslim ban”)

  • All books by queer or trans authors, or that include queer or trans characters or content

  • Authors and their citizenship, birthplace, and/or other personal information

  • Books that reference diversity, equity, inclusion, sexual orientation, gender identity, racism, privilege, or “critical race theory” etc as defined or listed on page 4 of Project 2025

• Refuse to provide “ratings” of books that goes beyond the current industry standard categorization of books by age group.

• Resist requests for authors to sign contractual language for appearances that impinges upon our free speech in ways including but not limited to: written or spoken language, personal expenditures, personal advocacy.

• Provide security in states or locations where an author may be under threat or has received threats. If an author is arrested for discussing their book in a public space, we need you to promise to provide legal aid. We need clear industry standards regarding author security and direct contact information for security and legal needs.

• Stand against the blanket weaponization of “pornography,” “obscenity,” “triggering,” and “inappropriate” as they have been used in widespread book bans to target anything with queer content, sex, or references to racism, bigotry, misogyny, abortion, etc. Project 2025 states that people who produce or distribute anything deemed “pornographic” should be jailed, though it does not define pornographic, nor does it seem to adhere to the SCOTUS standard of pornography.

• Ensure the freedom of every author to use the terms targeted on pages 4-5 of Project 2025 (which include but are not limited to: sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, etc) freely in their works. We need to know you will continue to send LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC authors to schools, libraries, and festivals funded in whole or in part by federal grants.

• Provide training on author safety and emergency contacts for situations when an author feels unsafe.

• Be more aggressive and more public in fighting book bans and censorship at local, state, and the national level.

We approach all these needs with the assumption of your support, and we will be vigilant to make sure that any divergence on these crucial points will be noted and protested. It's imperative that publishers, like authors, do not obey in advance. We must be aligned against policies that promote censorship, book bans, and the criminalization of storytelling. We look forward to working together with you and with all the other organizations fighting for our fundamental freedoms to read and to write.

Sincerely,

Authors Against Book Bans

The Promise

Stephen was a normal enough fellow, and he followed a very predictable routine. A toymaker by trade, he woke in the morning, packed his tools, and went to his office to carry on the family business. The sign on the door read “Stephen and Sons,” but that was his father’s sign. His father had passed some time ago and left the store to him and his brother, Daniel. Eventually, Daniel had left to go work in a clock factory, adding to his wind-up toy knowledge ideas in advanced engineering to develop ever more complex clocks, some that only had to be wound once every fifteen years. One of these is what awoke Stephen this morning, chiming with the predictable call of the coo-coo bird. He arose, kissed his wife, once again packed his tools, and left to his modest, if not reliable, job in the little toy shop in the village.

This was his calling, and not some job in the big, bustling city. The gleams of joy on the faces of the children who came into his shop, wondering at every invention that he’d made, and every toy that he’d personally assembled by his own designs. The walls of his shop were adorned with shelves, altogether holding nearly a hundred years of toys. His shop had the fortunate location of being just on the corner of the only bridge leaving Evoation into the wider world beyond, and so a good number of his shoppers were visitors from other parts of the world. He liked the idea that his toys kept children happy outside of Evoation, as well as in the sleepy little town.

But he had a problem. Every year, the materials to build his toys became more and more expensive. He’d noticed it first five years before, when his wood went up to ten dollars a plank. After five years had passed, he was up to nearly twenty dollars a plank. This winter, as he went through his budget, he scratched his head and pushed up his glasses as he summed the profits of the last year. They were not equivalent to his expenses. In fact, he had spent almost half again what he’d earned. One glance at the line that showed his savings told him that he had at most another year or two before his shop would go under.

So on the blustery, snowy evening when the largest toy manufacturer in the known world came into his home, offering to annex his little shop to the toy manufacturer’s already massive empire, Stephen listened.

“You can do everything just as you do now,” promised the portly man with a laugh and a twinkle in his eye. “Just you send me ten percent of the profits, and I’ll send you the wood that I get. I have a massive discount because I use so much, you see, and you can be part of that. It’s an economy of scale.”

Stephen’s wife, Karen, sat next to him at the table, with worry across her brow. She gave him a glance that told him not to do it, and Stephen heeded her glance and said that he would think about it.

“A wise man,” said the boisterous man. “And you married well too, I can see that. I’ll give you a week to think it over, but I really must then retract my offer. Business awaits in other locations. I have only so much time and money, and it doesn’t do to not use both efficiently.”

Over the next week, Stephen tossed and turned, having dreams repeatedly about the man’s offer, and about the red ink on his balance sheets. By the time the week had passed, he’d convinced himself that the man’s offer was good. Stephen sent a letter to the man indicating as much, over his wife’s protestations. The man sent a contract back, and Stephen signed it straightaway, and for the first year, things were spectacular. The man sent the wood at pennies on the dollar, and Stephen made his toys, and sold his toys, and brought joy to the faces of the children.

The next year, the price of wood yet again went up. Along with a letter from the man that said how apologetic he was, and that the price had gone up on him as well. It was still cheaper than before, so Stephen felt that his deal had been a good one. The man also sent that year a few boxes of the man’s toys, manufactured somewhere Stephen had never been or seen, and asked that Stephen display them in the windows alongside his own toys. This Stephen did eagerly, as the man had helped him so much that Stephen thought it was still a bargain.

It was around this time that a different man brought his son in looking for toys for a Christmas celebration. That man, Albert, was a regular and lived on the other side of town, so hadn’t frequented the shop often. But as soon as he walked in, Albert noticed the toys in the window, and pulled Stephen aside.

“Those toys,” he said, pointing. “Those were made by Hinderson Toys, right?”

“Yes,” said Stephen, a bit concerned as to the man’s tone.

“You know I’m a woodworker. I used to chop down trees in the forest just beyond the church to the west. That is, until Hinderson put a fence up. A few years back, Hinderson bought the land back there, and now I have to buy wood from him. The price is so high that it keeps me barely able to feed my son. We saved for months to come buy a toy from you, but I don’t think we can. Not when you’re working with Hinderson.”

That moment, the man took his son and left. The boy’s face was what impacted Stephen the most. He saw the longing, aching pain that he as a child had felt so often when he’d seen toys that he wanted but couldn’t have.

That year, he got another letter. This one said that soon, he would find an entire crate of toys from Hinderson that he was expected to put up. And, the letter continued, that the price of wood had gone up on him again. This time, the price was even higher than he had ever had before, and his entire savings would be wiped out if he made any more toys. So it was with a heavy heart that he replaced all of the displayed toys he’d made with love and affection for the machined things that were now in the window. And it was with an even heavier heart that he realized the truth. He wasn’t a toymaker any longer, as he couldn’t afford to make toys anymore.

The man he’d trusted, he realized, had been the same man who’d caused the price of wood to go up in the first place. He’d been tricked, but now, there was nothing to be done. As he talked it over with his wife, she asked why he didn’t just send the toys back and refuse to sell them. But it was too late. He hadn’t made any new toys to sell, and even if he had, they’d be more expensive to make and sell than anything Hinderson sent him. He told her they’d just have to make do, and for a while, they did.

The next year, another letter came from the man. This one said that things were bad for toys everywhere, and Stephen would have to pay for the Hinderson toys that he now sold in the window. Stephen couldn’t afford to pay for the toys for resale. He told the man this, and the man sent another letter. This letter said that if Stephen wanted to sell his shop, Stephen could stay and work it for a salary. Stephen didn’t see that he had a choice, so he did exactly that. For a while, Stephen and his wife lived off of the proceeds of that sale, but when his savings were used up, he found himself reliant on the money the man gave him for salary. 

When the man sent a letter the next year, saying that the toy business was still suffering, but he was sure that it would be better soon. However, in the meantime, Stephen would have to take a pay cut. Barely able to afford to feed himself and his wife, Stephen threw the letter into the fire in frustration. He packed his clothes and set off across the long bridge.

It took him some time to get to Hinderson Toys Headquarters, and when he did, he was appalled at what he saw. Warehouses were full to overflowing with wood, some of which looked as though it had been there for years. Three separate toy stores were connected to the property, each with lines of people out the door. Through one window, he saw the portly man and stormed in. The man didn’t appear to be suffering at all, despite this supposed blight on toy sales. He confronted the man, and the man only laughed in that boisterous way that made his belly bounce up and down.

“You believed me,” he said, snickering. “It’s not my fault you didn’t check first and find out who I am. How do you think I built my empire in the first place.”

It was then that Stephen realized he’d been tricked, and tricked completely. If you go into Evoation today, you’ll see Stephen and Sons toys, and a wall full of toys for sale, all at reasonable prices. There, however, is nobody named Stephen working there any longer. But just outside the front, under a sheet of newspapers, you may find him still, asleep under a bench, muttering seemingly nonsense words about promises broken.

Journal - 11.15.2024

I had a bad day yesterday.

Watching wholly unqualified and seemingly deliberately anti-qualified candidates being pitched to lead our nation has worn on me a bit. I can’t possibly see how someone like RFK JR can be good to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you? If you don’t know anything about him, and you think “oh, he’s a Kennedy,” then you’re falling for it. Would it do me any good to explain that genetics aren’t as strong as you think they are? Would it do you any good to tell you that the most qualified person to run any organization, out of 350 million, is rarely the offspring of someone who’s run that agency successfully in the past? This is not true. And Elon Musk as Department of Government Efficiency head is a bad joke. I won’t even mention that there are two folks heading that department—an even worse joke. I guess I just did.

Here’s what I’m really struggling with. As we watch these things unfold before our eyes, we’re so shocked that we’re not thinking strategically about the future. The Executive Branch is massive, you all. A lot of the information we get out of what the government is doing comes from Executive Branch functions, and this is what’s really at stake. Are we downloading and archiving those data? Because, when it comes to it, without reliable information, how can we make good decisions? We’ve seen what Trump did last time to “tweak” what he could of what comes out of the government. Are we ready for that again? Remember that research I’m also doing (posted the other day)? Guess how much data comes from the Executive Branch for that sort of project. A lot. And it’s typically good data because of the non-partisan nature of the civil servants that do that job.

If you know of an organization that’s pulling down federal data right now, please let me know. I’d love to help do that, and perhaps store it in a decentralized way so that we can be assured that we get access. I mean, for publicly available data anyway.

But what about government secrets that we’re not privvy to? There’s literally nothing I can do to help with that, so I’ve got to right now have a lot of faith that our feds are doing it.

Here’s the deal, folks. If running our country into the ground to gain power is what is happening (it is), then nothing is sacred to these people. And when, not if, Project 2025 get’s underway, guess what? Institutional non-partisans get replaced by lapdogs and lackeys, and any information that contradicts The Party’s message goes away. This isn’t me making stuff up. Read the document, and exactly why Project 2025 exists in the first place. Think about it. Even the bills maintained by Congress.gov may not survive with the Liar Party, which I will refer to the Trumpublicans as henceforth, when they take over Congress. If we think it’s hard to inform voters now, imagine what happens when that transparency evaporates.

This isn’t doom-and-gloom—it’s a call to action. There’s a lot of work to do to protect our democracy, and while our Federal Government structure is right now moving to do what they can, it’s a hefty task shoring up our institutions. I’m looking for a way to get involved, but I’m just one person. You need to as well. Even if it’s as little as, I don’t know, downloading demographic data from the last twenty years so that they can’t lie about the numbers, that’s a small thing that might help.

BTW, don’t let anyone convince you it was a mandate. That’s not what happened. What happened was that a lot of people who don’t really understand how government works, or why it should work that way, voting with their feelings. A lot of other people, who should understand how government works (looking at you, protest voters and equivocators) anti-voted with theirs. This was a repudiation, not a mandate. It was an endictment of our failing education system, and our profound, almost criminal, lack of understanding of history.

Freedom, Fraternity, Equality

Breathe.

Good. You’re doing great.

Now consider what I’m about to tell you, but as dispassionately as you can.

We are a nation struggling, and we’re making some poor choices because of it…but we can change it. What do I mean, and what does this have to do at all with the title?

Well, there’s something important that we don’t seem to have internalized yet. No, not equality as an overarching principal, but if you thought that then at least you’ve been paying attention to my facebook rants. That’s a good one. But I mean this truth: all of the stuff we want, we can get with equality. This also ties into why I dislike the concept of billionaires (not one in particular, but generally). But this is also why I continually focus on equality as an overarching goal—because it’s not snake oil. You want a better society? Fix inequality.

Let’s focus on income inequality for this article. You can read more about income inequality in the United States. I’ve mentioned before that income inequality creates more crime and establishes more career criminals. Note I didn’t say poverty, but income inequality. This isn’t new, or something I made up. I first did a short post about it on Facebook almost ten years ago. This is known. So known, in fact, that scientists are doing studies to figure out why this relationship exists. For those of us living it, it doesn’t matter why it exists, as much as it matters that it exists.

What you’re going to start seeing is a tightening up of laws as politicians scramble to save face. You’ll see people who rely on perception (politicians) hurt a lot of people pretending to be strong on immigration, for one thing. You’ll see homelessness treated more like a criminal offense than a result of society. A lot of stalwart politicians who you used to think were bastions of egalitarianism will show their true colors, not unlike the talented Mr. Musk. Oh, get it? It’s a reference to the Talented Mr. Ripley. (Brace yourself for that, because you’re probably not mentally prepared for the second round of betrayals yet.) What they’re doing is protecting themselves, so don’t judge them too harshly for it. My point in mentioning them at all is that these people will make things worse. While that’s going on, the tariffs and mass deportations, if they end up happening, will turn this country on its head as the bottom falls out for poor and middle-class people.

If you’re confused by that, let me explain. Tariffs are basically taxes. Level a tariff against a country means adding taxes on every good from that country. A brute force approach to tariffs means basically that a lot of goods are going to get a lot harder to get and a lot more expensive. Meanwhile, mass deportations mean that a lot of things we need migrants for, like picking food and construction where they’re over-represented, will make food and housing more expensive and harder to get at the same time. Basically, the combination of the two means sticking it to the poor, because the rich are rich enough already that they won’t feel it. Therefore, poor and middle-class people get poorer, widening economic inequality.

This is where you come in. While the federal government is up to their shenanigans, get involved on a state and/or local level, and work to put in place a safety net. Work on building up income equality, and your efforts will be rewarded with people who have the brain-space to think critically about the issues, and absorb the reality of what’s going on. Get out in your community and make yourself uncomfortable, not to get a vote, as we often do, but to make friends. And be supportive. Build community so that people have somewhere to go, and people to talk to. Bring people in.

Oh, that’s going to suck a lot. Because talking to people in person isn’t like talking to people on social media. You can’t just unfriend someone when they’re right in front of your face. In fact, talking to people in person is super-risky to your self-esteem and well-being. But if you do that, then you have a chance to bring attention to the inevitable rising inequality. And if you work toward building a safety net locally or statewide, you can reduce that inequality. As an added bonus? You talk to someone and get to know them, while they get to know you, and that matters because through relationships are where a lot of people get their news.

Nothing builds community like building community. And working toward income equality is one way to do it, with the added benefit that in doing so. What’s wrong with America isn’t its people, but human nature and the presence of such severe economic inequality. We’re at 45 on an index of 0 to 100, where higher is better. Norway is 27, for a reference point. We can do better at that, and a lot of that can start with us, personally. I point this out not to blame us, but to give us focus. The political conversations may be toxic to have, but everyone can have a conversation about the price of bread, which could lead to a conversation about the relative price of bread, near perfect segue into the topic of income inequality.

So yes, organize for political purposes. Definitely we need that. But also, don’t forget the human element. You’ll never convince someone trying to figure out how to feed their family and coming up empty of the importance of literally anything else. Fix the cause, and the rest will follow. There is a way forward, and you can be part of it.

Bobby’s Bridge

“What’s beyond the river?” Bobby asked his mother, Helen. He flicked his dark black hair over his shoulder. Curls tinged with amber fell against his red collarless shirt. Bobby had a way of turning up his head that made him look as though he were admonishing someone, especially when his curiosity caught the best of him, as it often did.

“Land,” was the quick response that Helen gave him back.

“I know that,” Bobby said. “What kind of land is it?”

“Nobody knows,” Helen replied. “I’ve never seen it myself.”

“Nobody’s seen it?” asked Bobby. His eyebrows narrowed as he latched onto that concept. Nobody knew what was beyond the Cryms. “I want to be a great explorer. I will discover what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“You’re barely twelve,” Helen said. “How do you plan to do that?”

“Ask, of course,” Bobby said, his eyes brightening. He wiped something brown on his coarse brown pants. “If we know there’s land, then someone’s seen it right?”

“Someone? Well, I suppose,” said Helen. She wore a crimson gown that flowed around her ankles like a river. It was a nightgown that Bobby always loved, because of the way the hem floated there. “That would be Roget and Nance. They’re the only two people who have been across.”

“I thought you said we don’t know?”

“We don’t,” Helen assured him, shaking her head. “You’ll see why.”

Bobby thought about Roget and Nance. He knew that Roget lived closest, at the water’s edge, and thought that might be his best shot for an answer. And so, he set out that day in the shimmery sunlight to walk through the forest toward the water’s edge, where Roget’s house was.

When he broke through the clearing at the edge of the water, Bobby saw a little shack. It was half torn down, and around it were posts with painted rocks atop them, each decorated stone with an eyeball peering away from the house. At first, Bobby thought he might need to leave. He didn’t really know Roget. The man was rumored to shout at night random musings into the air, almost stream-of-consciousness stuff. Bobby knew this, but he had to find out what lay beyond the river, so he swallowed and pushed past the creepy structures toward an opening he hoped was the front entrance.

“Who’s there?” came a voice, quivering and full of bitterness.

“It’s me. Bobby,” Bobby said.

“Why are you here, Bobby?” asked Roget.

“To seek knowledge,” Bobby said. “I want to understand what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“Death,” said Roget. “Chaos. It’s a world that won’t be understood.”

Bobby sucked in his breath. “You’ve seen it?”

“The far shore? Indeed I have. I set foot upon it.”

“What happened?”

“I got back into my boat, and I returned.”

“And you saw—”

“Some say that there’s a jabber that lives in the woods there. Some say that it will sneak into homes at night and steal babies.”

“And you saw one when you were over there?”

“I saw trees that stretched into the sky, behind which jabbers could easily hide. I saw caves where jabbers like to roost.”

“What does a jabber look like? I mean, you know, when you saw one?”

“I saw a shadow move.”

“Shadow of a jabber?”

“Shadow of a bear. But it could have just as easily been a jabber. What if the bear ate the jabber?”

Bobby blinked. He mulled the conversation over in his mind, pulling at the strings of it and trying to weave something meaningful from the dribble. The truth, the best he could make it out, was that Roget had seen nothing. Maybe he’d stepped foot on the other side, maybe he hadn’t. But either way, he hadn’t seen anything at all, and yet, oozed this fear, the same fear that Bobby had heard repeated constantly in his village. But if it was only Roget, then what?

“Coffee?”

“I’m twelve.”

“Still. Would you like some? I could tell you about the time a jabber almost got me.”

His eyes popped open wide. “Really?”

“Yes. I heard it outside of my tent when I was sleeping.”

“How do you know it was a jabber?”

“Well, people say there are jabbers out there. I believe them. And I was in my tent and heard something, so it had to be a jabber.”

Bobby’s heart fell. Another non-jabber sighting.

“I’m going to talk to Nance.”

The old man wrinkled his nose at this. “What would you want to talk to her for? She doesn’t know anything. Like she’s ever been over the river.”

“Mom says—”

“Your mother doesn’t know anything. I never liked Nance. You can’t trust her. She doesn’t speak the truth.”

It was half a day between Roget’s shack and Nances little hut, farther down the river, and with a front porch covered in flowers. Bobby felt happy approaching the hut, just by virtue of the plethora of different colors that presented themselves there. He felt uplifted, as though there were something peaceful there that he might discover. He had no apprehension approaching, and even found a knocker on the door so he didn’t have to just wander in.

“Come in,” came the woman’s voice from inside. Bobby entered the hut, which sat against the river in very much the same way as Roget’s shack. As he passed through the little hut, he saw paintings adorning the walls, some of towers and high city walls that didn’t exist in Evoation. When he came out the other side, he saw a bridge extending a few feet into the water. An older woman leaned over it, hammering down a plank into place. When Bobby raised his eyes, he couldn’t see the opposite side of the river from where he stood.

“Nance?”

“Yes, child. I’m Nance. What can I do for you?” the woman said, brushing sweat from her eyes and her gray hair out of her face.

“I want to learn about what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“An entire world,” Nance said. “A world of trees and wonder and fruits we don’t know. It’s a world of splendor and potential trading partners. There are cities with streets laced with gold and paved with marble stones.”

“What about jabbers?”

“Those childhood stories? No, they don’t exist, Bobby. You’re old enough to know better than that, aren’t you?”

“Roget says—”

“Ah,” Nance commented. “Roget hasn’t been to the other side.”

“Helen said he has.”

“Roget’s told everyone that he has. Some people believe him. A lot of people believe him, in fact. So many, that I haven’t managed to convince anyone to help build a bridge and connect us to the world.”

“I’ll help,” Bobby said.

“Before you do,” Nance said, eyeing him up and down. “Before you do you should ask yourself if you trust me either. What if I’m lying to you and there’s nothing but death and destruction beyond the Cryms?”

“It seems to me that if that was the case, you wouldn’t be building a bridge.”

“Smart boy,” she said. “No, while Roget keeps his lies up, I can’t get anyone to help. So it’s just me, just working on this bridge.”

“Why?”

“To show them. Once I get it built, people will be able to see for themselves.”

“No, I mean why do people believe him?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve wondered that. Hand me that plank.”

Bobby dutifully grabbed a nearby plank. It was much heavier than he’d expected, but he managed to tug it over to Nance’s side. She wedged it into place, reached into an apron, and produced a handful of nails. She talked as she hammered.

“I think that maybe it’s too much for people. They can’t see it for themselves, so they have to believe someone. Roget’s convinced a lot of folks that I can’t be trusted, so they won’t even listen to me. Those are the people who keep coming by to try to sabatoge my bridge.” She pointed to an out of place plank that looked a little uneaven. “Had to replace that one yesterday. If anyone does discover what’s on the other side, then nobody would listen to Roget. He’d have no power, and we could be part of the world. Imagine the things we could discover.” Her eyes sparkled when she talked.

“My mother doesn’t believe Roget.”

“Helen doesn’t, you’re right. If she had, she wouldn’t have mentioned me,” Nance said, smiling, though Bobby could see a pain in her eyes.

“Why are you sad?”

“Because she won’t support me either. Do you see her here, helping? Hand me another plank, will you?”

Bobby ran to grab another plank.

“I’m helping,” Bobby said. “And she sent me.”

“Fair,” Nance said, chuckling as she nailed the plank into place. “As long as you remember to come back, you’ll be a great help.”

“But don’t some people believe you?”

“Some do,” she said, nodding. “But most have decided that Roget’s story and my story are too different. They can’t believe that the world could be as beautiful as I’ve described it, and their fear keeps them from wanting to find out. They build walls around their own hearts and minds. Whether they believe me, or believe Roget, their inaction supports Roget. After all, if you want to find out what’s beyond the river, you really have to look, don’t you?”

“I will,” said Bobby, laying a plank down for himself. Nance handed him the hammer and a few nails.

“The hard part will be setting the next post,” she said. “The one after that is even harder.”

“When will the bridge be finished?” Bobby asked, staring out over the water.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But as long as we keep laying planks, it’ll get to the other side.”

So Bobby helped. Every day, for the rest of his life, he helped work on the bridge, one plank at a time, until it stretched nearly halfway across. Nance died before the bridge was completed, and Bobby inherited the hut. His mother, eventually, began to use the bridge building as an excuse for them to stay close, and Bobby liked that. But eventually, his mother died too. Bobby kept working. It was when Bobby was as old as Roget that he finally reached the other side, and laid the final plank. As he stepped foot over, he felt a warm gust of air caress his leathery skin, which he likened to the gentleness of Nance, thanking him for the work he’d done.

The bridge was the first of twelve to be built over the next few decades. Trade flourished for Evoation, and visitors from all over came to the little village, turning it from a village, into a town, and then from a town into a city. All of the growth was possible because of the little bridge that Nance had started, a tool that allowed the people of Evoation to see the truth, despite being inundated with lies. And once it was finished, and the people could see for themselves what lay beyond the water, then all the talk of jabbers became resigned truly to the storybooks and children’s tales from which they’d come.

Societal Traps

(a.k.a. How to Racism without even Trying)

Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to be merging my blogging for http://www.rightandfreedom.com, my socially-conscious website that a couple of my former Marine buddies work with me on. I separated these at first because I thought that perhaps my particular social leaning might scare people away from my entertainment novels, which do, if you’ve been paying attention, follow along with some of the social problems that we see today (in a very entertaining way).

Except Drift, published under my pen name Roman Hawthorne. That’s a total escapist horrorfest. Get your copy for Halloween! Thank me later!

Back to more serious topics though. I might lose some folks with this, but it’s close to my heart so I’m going to do it anyway. Buckle up!

So I was listening to a podcast today that was discussing a couple of things that, really, seemed quite innocuous on the face of it. One of them was the recent rollback of affirmative action’s ability to use race on admission applications. This bothers me, but it’s kind of hard to describe why. The other thing that they talked about was the recent Louisiana court case that rolled back environmental protections supporting marginalized communities. This is the one that got to the Supreme Court and basically said that states can’t consider race when considering where to put industrial facilities. But it was kind of sneaky. What the decision really said was that the Legislative Branch wasn’t prescriptive enough about the what they wanted the Executive Branch to do about racial disparity.

By now, your eyelids are drooping and you’re slowly dozing off. Yes, this stuff is dry. But it’s also super-important, so WAKE UP!

There’s more. They said that it would be unfair to consider race at all when determining where to put factories and industrial complexes. At this point, you’re probably like, well…so what? Isn’t making decisions about where to put factories and industrial complexes…racism? Yes. You’re right. If we were dropped into a world where all races historically have been treated equally. You’d be surprised at the current situation, and just how much more exposure minorities have to cancer-causing agents. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? For a long time, our zoning laws and home sales strategies in this country were flat-out racist (explicitly so, in many cases). So as a collective, we basically funneled black and brown people into industrial districts, where they are more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals. And then, like in Flynt, Michigan, we just kind of forget about them until someone finally complains loudly enough that they can’t be ignored. Fix one site. Move on.

What the Supreme Court did was took away the systemic fix that Congress had put in place. By requiring intent (as they indicated) and limiting the Executive Branch to only address intentional racism as opposed to looking at disparate outcomes, as the Executive Branch used to do, the runaway Supreme Court knee-capped the governments ability to affect systemic change around this topic. Again, it wouldn’t be a big deal…if we were all on the same playing field already. But I think we all know that’s not the case (yes, all of us, even if we don’t admit it out loud). So if we’re already in a bad situation that past racism produced and perpetuates, there is no way out of anymore.

Know your role. Shut your mouth.

That’s basically what the Supreme Court implied with this ruling. Yes, I take it personally. Being half-black, I take a lot of things personally that others might scoff at, but it’s important. Who was it that said if you don’t cry out when you’re being hurt, they’ll kill you and say you liked it? Paraphrase anyway.

Think of racism as it truly was: a system. It was a systematic way to disenfranchise a huge swath of Americans for many years. Just like the interstate highway system makes it easier to get to certain destinations, and harder to get to others, racism has paved over two-hundred years of roads that lead black and brown people to destitution and poverty. You can take all the “no blacks allowed” signs you want down, but the roads are already there. People will take them. They will just not know why the roads are there. And if you can’t address why the roads are there (racism), then do you also not acknowledge the outcome? And if you don’t acknowledge the outcome, do you even make an effort to fix it? Or do you just tell the people in Cancer Alley, Louisiana that they’re SOL, because there’s no racism, and they should just move. Despite…all the things that keep them there in the first place?

Man, racism sucks. Ugh.

The Stories of Inertia and Momentum

Okay here goes. You’re going to see a lot of advertising as we move forward around my upcoming Kickstarter campaign for Inertia and Momentum. Some of it may make sense, others won’t at first. But it all comes together, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: this novel is ties my Virtual Wars series even closer to Reality Gradient. Let me explain.

The novel traces two main storylines. The first is Larken’s, of course. She’s been through the ringer a couple of times, only she’s much better positioned this time than she was before. She’s got a thriving if not somewhat rudderless anti-extremist organization, and she’s a little immature still to be completely effective at running it. But she’s doing it, with the help of her android assistant Dandelion Lemaire. The two are inseparable, which becomes something of a plot point in this story arc. It’s not entirely clear if their relationship is reciprocated between the two of them, or if its unbalanced.

The other storyline is about Amanda Briggs. You might remember her from my short story Ms. Barnett’s Favorite I wrote back in 2021 for a Reedsy contest. Yes, her storyline has been bouncing around in my head for three long years. The law which dictates that models (clones) aren’t really citizens is about to be repealed…at least many people think so. That has one important implication for Amanda and her ilk: there has been a stay on Reclamations, the process by which clones are “recycled” and their constituent proteins used to make the next generation (gross). As a result, she is stuck at Emergent Biotechnology headquarters doing time-wasting jobs like clean a hallway that’s not used often enough to actually get dirty. Worse, the executives have their sights on her as the next information, their eyes and ears in the clones’ quarters.

These storylines connect through another character you haven’t yet met, named Angela Brody, the District Attorney of New York City. She’s trying to help resettle the clones, or at least have a plan for when the aforementioned law is overturned. She seeks out Larken’s advice, which unfortunately for Ms. Brody, amounts to “have rich friends.” (If you’ll recall from books 1 and 2, Larken has developed some pretty significant connections with the independently-wealthy Aiden, friend of Harper Rawls). See? It’s all coming together!

So even though Virtual Wars is an entirely different series, there are story elements that flesh out some of what happened in my already-published trilogy, Reality Gradient. The way I see them is as ice cream and cobbler. Either is delicious without the other, but they’re so, so much better when you pile vanilla ice cream onto your piping-hot peach cobbler.

Oh yeah! The tie-in. No, Harper isn’t it. I mean, she does offer a connection, but it’s not the one I was referring to before. The one I was referring to is Amanda’s daughter, and when I say her name, it’ll give away the game—but only if you’ve read my first series! Her name…drum roll please…is not Briggs, but Lothian. Her first name is Aida, and she’s there in all of her neuro-divergent glory! If you don’t know what that means, read (or re-read) Libera, Goddess of Worlds from Reality Gradient.

Choosing Day

What does a truly utopian future look like for us a thousand, or even ten thousand, years from now? Many of the things that divide us today will have been diminished to trivial non-issues. Climate Change? Solved. Culture Wars? Moot. Technology? Advanced to the point of being completely organic and indistinguishable from magic. Inter-group violence (i.e. war)? Why bother.

Humans live in hills called tupes, like the hobbits in the shire. Humans don't wear clothes because they've mastered the climate and themselves, so there’s no longer a need. And anyway, they see exquisite beauty in the variety of human forms, from stocky to skin-and-bones, to varying racial compositions, and everything in between. Moreover, after years of intentional and some unintentional bioengineering, humans have generic sexual organs at birth, undifferentiated, and remain that way until they are in their 20s. Anyone under that age is considered a child, as longevity has extended childhood. At the end of this time, usually on their twentieth birthday, humans undertake Choosing Day, which means they pick their sex and gender for the next 4 years. After that, they can switch back and forth more-or-less as desired, but its those four years that are the focus of this novel.

Jad, whose Choosing Day rapidly approaches, is struggling to decide. Their best friend Kel doesn't Choose for 6 more months, and due to hormonal imbalances, those who Choose are, strictly speaking, not supposed to mingle with nascents (those who haven't chosen). So the conflict is multi-part:

1. Which does Jad choose to become for the next 4 years of their life, and fallout from that decision?

2. What does Kel choose, and how does that play into the decision that Jad made? (I suspect their friendship won't survive, but haven't written it yet. But it's a coming of age story, so whichever way it goes, it'll be the right way).

3. How does Kel and Jad's relationship change during the 6 month abstinence period and as a consequence of #1 and #2?

4. Jad's slow realization that everything about their life did change. They are not a nascent (child) any longer, and so must ease into adulthood, suffering the loss of innocence we all do and realizing their greater part in society.

Subtext to this drama is the deep exploration of the utopian society in which they live, with a dose of the transition from today to that future in snippets of backstory and hints at the Tumultuous Times (current day) from before. At its core, it's a story about the resilience of humanity and our ability to bounce back from difficult times. I think I really need to write a story like this right about now, in all its goodness! This book will be about kindness, overcoming self, and caring!

(Don't worry Dystopian Lovers, it's just one book. Once I'm finished, I'll be right back into the dark stuff ;) ).

Live with PRIDE

Someone once asked me why so many of the characters in my novels fall are LGBTQ+, accusatorially, as though I was part of some “secret gay agenda.” My answer? Because they exist. There’s no better reason to represent someone in a novel than that people exist in this world. Art, in all forms, represents society in various ways, and it’s important that all of society are represented. Okay, I didn’t say all of that, but I wish I had, as that’s what I believe.

Art should represent everybody, and not just the mainstream. It’s the diversity of the world that creates the beauty within it. And why wouldn’t we represent everyone? The stories that we create, the narratives we tell, and the images we paint all become only more beautiful with such representation. Truth is beauty, and the truth is that we ALL exist, and should have our place in the collective history of society that art creates.

It’s no secret that even now, in 2024, we all have to acknowledge that rights for minority groups, LGBTQ+ included, are in the sights of one of our major political parties. This June, we have more of an obligation than ever before to make our voices known. We must see and be seen and make others understand that the history of indiscriminate violence against is something that we will not be tolerating. The future belongs to acceptance, and the past is behind us. Happy Pride to all!

Inertia and Momentum

Chapter 1: The General

With halting steps, Larken Marche paced before a digitized map of the world in the form of a slowly rotating holographic globe. Her cane trembled as she watched another blue pinpoint of light flip to red, this time in Europe. She clipped her cane rapidly against the floor as she walked around it, keeping time with its slow rotation, and unable to pull her eyes from the live-updates that tracked elections and local movement activity. Too many red pinpricks of light speckled the wall before her. 

Larken slammed her heron-headed cane into the ground hard enough to leave a crack inthe tiled surface. She turned away from the globe for a second to get her bearing back. The trees beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows conveyed a mozaic of oranges, yellows and reds, sprinkled over the greens of the ubiquitous evergreens. She took in a breath of stale, recycled air, pivoted, and resumed her walk.

“You need to stop pacing, Larken,” Dandelion LeMaire chided. Larken glanced at her in time to see Dandelion’s eyerbrows lowering back to her work. “You’ll blow out that repair work on your back.”

The burn above her tailbone told Larken that Dandelion was probably correct, as she so often was. But Dandelion should have known by now that telling Larken to stop would have little effect. She continued her frenetic pace, furious at the short memories of society.

“It’s all falling apart,” she said, harsher than she meant. “It’s harder and harder to get through. Nobody’s listening.”

The cool touch of Dandelion’s fingers on her shoulders moments later stalled Larken’s chaotic tapping. She clenched her teeth and forced air out through her nose.

“It’s happening too fast,” Larken said, spitting out the words while the unrelenting fingers dug into her shoulder muscles. A knot of pain released and she closed her eyes. “The United States is holding, for now. But almost everywhere else in the world is flipping red. Liberti Custodi are taking over.”

She opened her eyes again to ensure she knew where to point. The blooming wisteria plant overflowed with clusters of flowers touching her desk surface, reminding her that they needed to be pruned. Dead leaves lay scattered across the faux-hardwood beneath her feet. Larken turned to her left and pointed at the digitized map on the wall. In the middle of the United States and then toward the east coast, a sprinkling of red lights spread across the country.

“Even here, Human Pride Movement are making inroads in the middle of the country. And look along the East Coast there,” she said, pointing toward Virginia and North Carolina. “Blue, no, wait…”

A flickering blue light redirected her vision as it changed to red, about thirty miles north of the cosmopolitan city of Caldwell, Texas. Larken clenched her teeth.

“Lost another one. Caldwell proper is solid blue, but how long can it stay like that if we keep losing everything around it?”

“HPM promises freedom and prosperity, Larken. It’s seductive to some. They’ll see reason eventually.”

“A false promise. And to appear to deliver on it, they’ll subjugate every freed model back into servitude.”

Dandelion shook her head. The scent of apples drifted down from her sandy-blonde curls and, combined with the continued kneading of her shoulders, forced Larken’s muscles to slacken more. The aroma of her, and her strength and steadfastness, soothed Larken’s nerves as much as they could be.

“There are no freed models according to the law, Larken,” Dandelion reminded her. “But look.” Dandelion pointed to the rest of the country. “Look at all that blue. HPM should be worrying, not you.”

Dandelion’s fingers dug into Larken’s shoulder muscles, weakening her knees as she closed her eyes once more. She felt Dandelion direct her toward her seat, and for half a second, resisted, before she resigned herself to the guidance and caned her way to the ergonomic chair that was supposed to help her back heal, and probably would if she ever sat in it for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. The fingers found more stiff muscles to knead. Larken lifted her left hand and placed it atop Dandelion’s, stalling the fingers for a second. When the fingers began moving again, Larken rolled her neck to one side. She could almost forget about the map as she did. Almost.

But once the existential fear relented its control, more mundane fears that it had been hiding bubbled up. The litany of mundaine things on her todo list never seemed to measure up to the importance of impending fascist take-over, but that didn’t make them nothing. 

“I need a new desk,” she said.

“That can wait, can’t it?” Dandelion asked, not letting up.

Larken let a quiet moan escape.

“This is where people meet us to volunteer, or donate their time and money. They want to know that their money is being used sensibly. The drawers won’t even open on mine.”

“Because you sensibly picked it up second-hand.”

“Last time someone was here, I had to get a pen out of your drawer because mine was stuck so badly. The look I got…”

“My drawer? How did you get it open?”

Larken cracked one eye and gave Dandelion a half-smile.

“Easy,” she said. “I used a crowbar.”

She could practically feel Dandelion scanning the office for a crowbar. Really, it was the head of her heron-headed cane that she’d wedged in the crack. She’d almost broken the beak-tip off in the process.

“I’m kidding,” she said, after a handful of seconds. “It was this.” She lifted her cane into the air for a second then let it slide down until the base rested on the floor.

“I don’t know that we can find one in the same design, new,” Dandelion said.

The office was barely twenty feet from one side to the other. Larken’s composite faux-eik wood desk was a bona-fide antique, though one that was falling apart. Styled like a writing desk from almost a thousand years before the antique had been made, she’d once seen the crooked drawers as quaint.

“It doesn’t have to look exactly like that,” she said, motioning to her right. “Just I have to have room to write.”

Dandelion’s desk was more of a utilitarian design, with one single drawer that slid out effortlessly—for Dandelion. For Larken, it took both hands and bracing, because she didn’t have roughly ten times the strength of any human. That super-human strength made a lot of things look easy, and right now, Larken counted herself fortunate that said strength that extended all the way to the tips of Dandelion’s super-human fingers, channeling ease into Larken’s tense and throbbing back.

“Look at what’s happening in the France,” Dandelion said. Larken’s eyes involuntarily swiveled to Paris, one massive blue circle weighted by almost a hundred million people. But that was all. One giant blue splotch in an ocean of red. The red had begun to bleed into Germany, too, working its way from the French border eastward and covering nearly half of the state. Larken let out a sigh that lingered in the air.

“The United States would look like that without you,” said Dandelion. Whether or not Dandelion was right, it didn’t feel like enough. In the last four years, the support Larken had found on the west coast had spread through much of the nation. Everyone knew who she was now. The fame brought to her the ability to reach most influencers she wanted to, as well as her share of stalkers and a cadre of death threats from armchair HPM enthusiasts.

“Maybe that’s true,” Larken agreed with a weak smile. “And HPM hasn’t tried to attack us in a while either.”

Dandelion smirked. It was a good and convincing smirk. Larken’s heart warmed at the evidence that their practice was showing dividends. Dandelion was getting quite good at human nonverbal communication.

“That’d be kind of hard since you took over their Bremerton Compound,” she said.

Larken turned her attention back to the map.

“Speaking of the French Block, Iberia is turning,” she said. “Even after that push to get all opposing parties together to try to get rid of Liberti, it didn’t happen. They waited too long.”

“We warned them,” Dandelion said. “Same as France. It won’t take long before Germany, Italy, and Portugal fall if Paris does. But that’s not here.”

She was right. All Larken could do internationally was watch and continue to help contain their United States version of the global facist movements. She slumped into her ergonomic chair in a way that definitely wouldn’t at all help her back. She needed something more positive. Larken motioned with her hand and the globe spun as it revealed United Africa. At least there, the lights were all blue, from top to bottom of the two massive glowing continents that constituted the whole of United Africa. She closed her eyes and honed her focus on the fingertips pressed into the knots in her upper back.

“Think they’ll listen?” she asked of Dandelion.

“Even Africa can’t stand alone against the rest of the world. How long until the Liberti trashes trade agreements? They have to listen.”

“But can Oliver convince them?” she muttered, partially to herself.

“Why wouldn’t he be able to?”

So far, nobody beyond the United States borders had taken her seriously. But Larken’s brother had become a formidable diplomat in the last year, visiting fourteen countries in all.

“No reason,” Dandelion said, leaving unsaid the conversation they’d repeated already ad nauseum.

“He’s been doing a lot of reaching out,” Larken said. “Fourteen countries in the last year alone.”

“I would too if I had to come home to her.”

“His motivation doesn’t mean he’s not good as a diplomat though,” Larken said, feeling the heat in the back of her head rising. “He’s trying hard to get us international support.”

Dandelion said nothing, and Larken knew why. She didn’t have to. Travel was fine, and as long as he used his own trust fund to do it, that was even better. Otherwise, she’d have to ask for results, and as Dandelion didn’t say, there were none to be had.

“I’m just surprised he was able to get the Induna to meet with him,” Larken said.

“I can agree with that. They don’t normally entertain just anyone. Maybe that’s a sign that at least they see the problem with some sense of importance.”

“Maybe,” Larken said. “And they’re doing okay there anyway, aren’t they? But what about Mexico?”

“You can’t do that. Mexico’s not your problem, and it’s not fair to you; frankly, it scares me. You’re looking for a problem to solve. Can’t you be happy for a little while that the United States, at least, is weathering the storm so well?”

Dandelion’s even tone didn’t betray fear, but her fingers did. When Dandelion became scared, or whatever it was that she identified with fear, one sure way to know was to be in her grasp at the time. Her fear hurt because she ignored her strength when she was afraid. Dandelion seemed to realize this, stopped her massage, and then worked Larken’s levitating chair around until they were face-to-face.

Larken used to think of Dandelion as the android. The idea that the slight woman with freckles who now blocked her view of the globe was anything other than human had evaporated the longer she knew her. No, the skin-clad synthetic wasn’t Caldwell-beautiful; she hadn’t been genetically engineered for the sex-trade. Those models were so perfect that the corporation that made them, had had to introduce tiny physical flaws to make them seem more real. Dandelion wasn’t like that. She wore badly-done smokey-eye make-up and a base that tried and failed to hide her freckles. But what made Dandelion even more attractive was that beneath that smooth synthetic skin tissue lay a spike of insecurity from which she never seemed free. Larken felt that spike in her own heart.

Gold-flecked green eyes stared like daggers into Larken’s brown ones with an intensity that told Larken it was time to stop sulking. “You’re going to have to let some things go.”

Larken wasn’t good at letting things go. She hadn’t let HPM go when they kidnapped her brother, and she limped today because of it. Nor had she let things go when her friend Sam had been captured and tortured by the same group. Too many people suffered in too many places for Larken to slow down or stop. Still, Larken sometimes pretended to let things go for a while, and that allowed Dandelion to pretend to believe her. Larken willed the tension to ease from her facial muscles and forced her lips up into a smile. Only then did Dandelion’s mascara-thick eyelashes waver from their obstinate openness.

“Good. Besides,” Dandelion told her, “today’s lunch with Molly, remember?”

She closed her eyes at the mention of her brother’s unfaithful alleged life-partner. If she could undo introducing them, she would. It was time for round number nine-hundred something of trying to convince her former best friend Molly to at least pretend to be faithful.

“Are you sure it’s today?”

“Every month,” Dandelion responded with her usual endless patience allowing not even a hint of derision in her voice.

“What time is it?”

“Nine-oh-eight in the morning.”

“Shit. What are we doing here, then? We need to go home.”

“Exactly.”

Dandelion shoved the chair forward with one hand and didn’t give Larken her cane back. Larken had no choice but to let Dandelion guide her through the automatic doors and out onto the volantrae landing, where a streamlined bird-shaped Falcon awaited them. Larken took a breath as she looked out from the volantrae launchpad over what used to be the Bremerton Reclamation facility. The smokeless spires of the factory stretched up to the sky, two intact, and one crumbled halfway to the ground. She knew what those towers had been for, and kept them as a reminder that the site used to be responsible for the sanctioned murders of hundreds of models a day. In stark contrast, a nearby valley showed the trees she’d had planted had taken root well, and they stretched up over single-family home. Leaves of red, green, and yellow shimmered in the morning sun.

The cold air bit at her, causing her to pull her thick kimono tighter around her neck as she looked down on the cleaned and filtered pond that was once used to discard undissolved human remains. Koi fish swam languidly just beneath the surface. Everything below she’d had a hand in creating. For a second, Dandelion’s words sunk in: she had done this much, at least.

Was she really only twenty-two? It seemed like yesterday that Molly Kostic had first announced her interest in Larken’s brother at their high school, Brighton Academy. The atrophying muscles of her permanent disability had aged her beyond her years. The babyfat over her cheekbones had long since been sucked dry, producing a gaunt, listless face. Sometimes she imagined she was her own ghost.

Dandelion gently lifted Larken from the chair and into the back of the standing volantrae. It was something Larken could easily have managed herself, but Dandelion was faster and Larken was so light that Dandelion lifted her without any sign of a struggle. Fastening Larken in was a quick task, and then Dandelion returned the ergonomic chair to the office while Larken watched other volantrae zip by along the skyway nearby. Dandelion slid into the seat next to Larken almost before Larken knew she was back. 

Larken squeezed Dandelion’s hand absently as the volantrae lifted off into the sky. She was lost in lost in thought about what mood Molly might be in without Oliver there for balance. Then her thoughts turned to Dandelion, who seemed to be watching the trees go by in fascination beyond the opposite window.

“Why do you do this?” Larken asked, as she reached over and plucked a wayward strand of blonde hair away from Dandelion’s face with her fingertips.

“Do what?” Dandelion turned. The sun caught the gold flecks in her eyes, dancing like little sparks above her smile. Her cheeks stopped just short of dimpling beneath wide eyes, and a dusting of freckles crossed over her nose.

“Nothing,” she said, her gaze unwavering.

Model Spotlight Series: Caldwell

Trigger Warning:

There’s a lot of, well, sex talk, coming up due to the nature of Caldwells. There’s also some disturbing stuff farther down as I get into parallels of how models and slaves are treated.

Caldwell Name Origin

Models with the name Caldwell originated in a modeling factory in Caldwell, Texas. You’ll be forgiven for never having heard of the town. When I was growing up there, it basically had one traffic light and a population of about three-thousand. But I thought I’d put it on the map if I can, so in the future, I made it a hub of economic activity, spurred on by the presence of a modeling factory that produces a line of models known for their sexual prowess and capabilities. That’s right: my old hometown produces models that supplant sex workers in the future.

The Sex Industry of the Future

For an aside, I should probably talk about the sex industry a bit in the year 2200 and beyond. Just like in all new technology, enterprising and ambitious entrepreneurs saw the potential for sex work in modeling. The modeling industry therefore spent millions of dollars in lobbying in the years 2150, just after the Madison Rule passed (the law which keeps models subjugated and denies them their humanity). This lobbying effort was to make sex work legal, and was wildly successful, prompting the need to create the factory somewhere. Caldwell was chosen for two reasons: it was still relatively unknown, so the company could do literally whatever they wanted to the town, and Texas, specifically near League City, had become the “silicon valley” of model development.

In a nutshell, sex work becomes completely legal, and there are models who work in brothels scattered across the United States, as well as those who are purchased by clients and are “kept” by their owners for “romantic” purposes. Keep in mind that if models don’t meet their owners’ expectations, models can be “reclaimed,” a sanitized word that really means murdered—legally. This is a massive power imbalance, which matters in what I’m about to say next.

Models were often sought out for their subservience and pliability as sexual partners. When life hangs in the balance, how often will a model say no? So many owners bought models to be low-maintanence romantic partners, and others purchased models in serial as targets of their sadistic rage and they were often targets of sexual violence, having no voice or recourse.

Meet the Caldwells

There are several Caldwells who feature prominently in our stories. All of them were impacted by their experiences working in the sex industry in different ways. Without further ado, here are the Caldwells you get to meet.

Monica Caldwell

Appearances: Ordell (you can only get by joining my Patreon community), Bodhi Rising, Libera, Goddess of Worlds (currently being re-edited)

Personality:

Monica is as alluring as she is practical. She lost her eyesight when she was in the process of being reclaimed (killed for parts, essentially), and has mood-affected ocular implants. Her eyes change color depending on her mood. Fiercely loyal to the cause, she fights for model freedom every day of her life. Co-founder of the Humanity in Crisis Council, the non-violent organization founded after Ordell and she left a different, more violence-centric, group of models, Monica will never give up on the cause of model freedom and acceptance.

Background:

From a tragic backstory that I’ve never fully disclosed, but I guess now that I’m typing this I probably should, Monica has two significant physical abnormalities from her time as a sex worker. She has a scar that runs down her chest from her throat to her belly where a sadistic former owner cut her, nearly ending her life. Once healed, the scar so dramatically impacted her ability to attract other clients that she was slated for reclamation, or in other words, to be killed and her body be dissolved to re-use her constituent proteins.

When she was being reclaimed, the Siblings of the Natural Order, a group who claim that genetically-altered clones (models) are superior to natural-born humans (polli), spring her just in time to save her life, but not her eyes. She has ocular implants which cause her eye color to change depending on her mood.

She was instrumental in recruiting Ordell to the Siblings of the Natural Order (SNO), and is a Lieutenant in her own right, taking the cause of model freedom and agency to the streets.

Samantha Caldwell

Appearances: Evasion and Defiance (a.k.a. Brighton Academy, if you want the pre-revamp version-same book), Solitude and Retaliation (not out yet, but you can pick up Human Pride if you want the pre-revamp version, same book), Inertia and Momentum (also not out yet, in any form)

Personality:

Abrasive. If I could only use one word, that would be it. She doesn’t like non-models (at first) and sees the world as a cruel place, hardly worth investing in. She joins SNO mainly because she likes to fight (even though she’s not a Briggs). There are reasons she is the way she is though, so keep reading!

Background:

Samantha was in a particularly abusive owner-model relationship (think serial-killer bad). She escaped and ran away to join SNO, living on the streets as she fled. Her situation was orders of magnitude worse than Monica’s, and her personality was largely hardened in the struggle, often life and death, against her tormentor. Smart, sarcastic, and tough, she fits in well with SNO until she meets Larken and her crew. After that, she softens and decides to leave the organization, falling in among Larken’s scrappy group.

Jennifer Caldwell

Appearances: Inertia and Momentum (exclusively, being edited as I write this)

Personality:

Jennifer values her profession. She’s had no such problems as what Samantha and Monica have experienced. Although, aside from training, her experience is somewhat limited. The brothel she was part of closed down within months of her being assigned, so although she likes to pretend to be knowledgeable about the sex trade, those who know her closely know that a lot of what she knows is only from training. She believes in love, even between polli and models, which leads her to be taken advantage of quite a bit due to the power imbalance between the two classes.

Background:

Jennifer plays a pivotal role in both my Reality Gradient series and my Virtual Wars series, though she only appears in the latter, in a novel yet to be released (I know, weird, right?). Because the novel isn’t yet out, I can’t go much into her story.

Other Facts about Caldwells

If you’ve read Models and Citizens, the first novel in my Reality Gradient series, then you know that models have a First Birth, where they are collectively trained through pre-teen years. After First Birth, they go back into stasis until a job is identified. They have a Second Birth for when that time comes, and from there, they go to Convocation (kind of like high-school) and Didactics (kind of like trade-school).

Caldwells admittedly do learn a lot about sex and technique, and the mechanics of how that works in multiple scenarios. But models who are Caldwells are also taught sophistication, discretion, and charm. Think of them kind of like the Companions in Firefly, only without the prestige. So maybe you could consider them along the lines of the end goal of the protagonist (for a while anyway) in Memoirs of a Geisha.

Other models generally turn to Caldwells for things like relationship advice as often as advice on the physical side of romance.

Model Spotlight Series: Briggs

Name Origins

Briggs came out of the Briggs, New York, factory. This factory feeds directly into the MMA, boxing, and other fighting industries. Briggs models are quick and adept fighters with lightning-fast reflexes. They've been genetically altered to do combat or other less-violent tasks as well, like circus entertainment, for example. If a model is a Briggs, they likely have the attitude that comes with the fighting territory. They perceive no challenge as too great with the proper training.

The Entertainment Industry of the Future

With the advent of models, the safety nets in the fights quickly fell away. Being second-class citizens who could be, essentially, recycled, polli are less concerned about the loss of life, so many Briggs models die in the fighting rings. In fact, this is so common that it's considered an honorable way to leave the industry. A Briggs fighter who lives to be older than thirty is highly uncommon.

However, the circus arts industry ballooned and expanded as Briggs models took on more extravagant stunts for their circus director owners. This isn't alluded to in any of my novels, but I've thought about it a lot. I may write another novel about a circus character. Not to date myself too much, but I was a huge fan of Carnival when it was on HBO way back!

Otherwise, there aren't many jobs that Briggs is trusted with. They're stubborn and tenacious, which means that they make poor servants generally, and they don't tend to follow rules. They respect only the physical challenges that test their limits and those who help them develop those skills. This is by design, as Briggs were also psychologically modified, more successfully than the Abernathys.f

Meet the Briggs

The most prominent Briggs model is Amanda, who you might recognize as the mother of one essential (crucially important) character in my Virtual Wars series. The novel she is featured in hasn't come out yet, so I can't get too much into it. But there are a few Briggs who make other appearances as well.

Amanda Briggs

Appearances: Inertia and Momentum (currently being edited)

Personality: 

Amanda lives up to her name as a fighter. She never gives up on what's important to her, whether it be her proper bunk in the room she shares with three other models or the emotional slug-fest that is her relationship with her one-time best friend, Jennifer Caldwell. Amanda lives to win, and until a pivotal event shakes her from the foundation, she also insists on self-sufficiency.

Background:

Amanda is a loner and doesn't play well with others. She was sent to Emergent Biotechnology headquarters after a fierce fight ended her mixed-martial-arts career. If she hadn't been in New York, and if there hadn't been a stay on Reclamations, that might have been the end of Amanda's story. But that particular confluence of events meant that she arrived at headquarters to do work she wasn't trained for: cleaning. Monotonous, pointless cleaning. She briefly had a roommate, Jennifer, who she could confide in but was forced to turn informant, costing them their close relationship.

Stephen Briggs

Appearances: Evasion and Defiance, Solitude and Retaliation (not out yet, but for the pre-revamp version, you can get Human Pride)

Personality: 

Stephen is stubborn but kind. He always steps up when friends need him and sometimes even when they don't. In that regard, he's like Larken Marche (protagonist of the Virtual Wars series). But he's not like Larken because he's also pining after his friend and roommate, Samantha Caldwell. However, he knows that the relationship won't work. This makes him moody at times, and he slips into brooding occasionally because he knows what he can't have.

Background:

Stephen works in a cafe in the city. His owners bought him to get him out of the industry. They treat him more as a friend than a model, an unusual relationship that allows him to command his own time as long as he shows up for work. This isn't a problem for Stephen because he has a passion for coffee, and working in a coffee shop is his calling.

If one doesn't count the fact that he's also aligned with the Siblings of the Natural Order, he and Samantha live in an abandoned USPS building just outside of Seattle, Washington. For him, it's a choice to be near her, and he leverages his freedom to do so. Friendly, amiable, and a little bit of the jealous type, he tries to do good but doesn't always succeed.

Other Notable Briggs:

Joseph Briggs is a security escort for Larken Marche and Dandelion Lemaire in the 4th Virtual Wars book (unpublished).

Author Connection

I like a short story about the Briggs that I wrote as part of a Reedsy challenge a while back. It actually features Amanda Briggs. I'll include the intro in just a moment so you can see. It's called Ms. Barnett's Favorite, and if you want, you can read it in a minute. This short story more or less explains what I love about Briggs. As all characters an author creates come from within, I'll also regale you with a story about my past.

When I was in middle school, there was a time when we were in Physical Education, learning about different ring sports. I weighed half of nothing, and there was a kid there, Dimitri, who apparently had been taking boxing lessons for a while and knew what he was doing. When the coach asked us if we wanted to box, I raised my hand immediately. It was pretty ugly. I got knocked down multiple times with a quick punch to the head. But…as would be both a quality I love about myself and something that's gotten me into trouble over the years…I kept getting back up. Over and over again, this happened, and as I was the only one willing to step into the ring, the coach let me keep at it until, eventually, even he had to grimace in pain and stop it.

I wasn't ready to stop.

This unfortunate (or fortunate) trait of mine seeped into my Briggs characters. Each one is unique, of course, but they all have that vein of stubborn pride that doesn't allow them to stay down. I can think of no better example of this than Amanda Briggs, the protagonist of my second novel in the Virtual Wars series, as she does battle with her aggressor. This is an excerpt from "Ms. Barnett's Favorite." Remember, Ms. Barnett is none other than Christine Hamilton Barnett, Bodhi's unrequited love interest from book 2 of my Reality Gradient series (which is currently a Finalist for the CIBA award). Without further ado, here's the first part of Ms. Barnett's Favorite, first published on Reedsy as part of their weekly writing contest.

Ms. Barnett's Favorite (Scene 1)

I expect nothing from you, and I want nothing from you. 

I exist to serve, and I have been given my job - a respectable one cleaning halls and rooms. It's not much, but it's better than a model could usually expect. Mornings, I wake and take a shower. It's probably not the same kind you take. The one I take involves stripping naked and standing before dazzling lights as the instant sanitization lasers stab at me like a thousand tiny pinpricks. I'm careful not to open my eyes - I don't want to go blind like the last girl did. 

She just wanted to see the pretty lights.

Afterward, in a rush of acupuncture-induced endorphins, I clothe myself. Again, it's not like you're used to, probably. I'm not as big as my clothes, and I don't have many - just a tunic that ties around my waist and makes it over one shoulder. It keeps slipping down if I'm not careful, but there's nobody to complain to about that. Of the four others who share every room that I do, none of them can change it. They prepare for work as I do.

The tiny room eventually births me into a cluttered hallway of the cacophony of others like me, some bent in old age, but they're not that old, are they? People like us don't get that old; we "retire" early. I check my body then - still young, still firm in the right places, loose in others. It's not my time yet, so I enter the flow of traffic.

As I said, I don't want anything from you, least of all your attention. But you give it anyway, don't you? Because for you, I am only a thing.

I navigate the hallway with care, staying close to the wall, keeping my eyes forever pointed downward toward the floor. That's where you find me and how you find me. You stop in front of me.

"You're a hot one, aren't you?"

I don't respond because what could I say that would deliver me from the situation? My heart races with fear - you interpret my anxiety as awe from your presence when it is only the physiological response of self-preservation.

I do the math before I respond.

"Excuse me, sir."

That's a response, but it's not an acknowledgment. We've been through this dance before, and the following words from your mouth I could quote verbatim.

"What kind of way is that to say hi?"

At this point, I could change it, I suppose. I could greet you with the kindness that you don't reciprocate or even pretend to. I could ask you about your day or the weather, but in that too-bright hall of lights and shadows, where currents of workers like me move in silent unison, flowing like particles around your obstruction, I don't change my mind.

You, whom I don't want, and whom I don't need, and to whom I don't matter anyway, will treat me with courtesy.

We've done this dance too.

"Did I miss your greeting, sir?"

The words sting, and I don't have to look to know that your face is now scrunched up. Your green eyes that could be beautiful are so filled with hate that all the beauty fades. I peak up at you and try to gauge what my future will be. Another night in behavioral reconditioning, perhaps? We'll see, and I'd be lying to say that I'm not afraid because I. Am. Terrified.

"When I speak to you, you return the courtesy," you say, probably knowing that I will ignore you and try to walk away. I do. You grab my arm so hard that you will leave bruises on top of the other bruises that never seem to heal.

"Listen to me, shill. I give the orders, and you obey."

Your face lowers into mine, and you practically shout the words. I heard you the first time, but you need to feel strong and in charge. You need to impress the others who still flow by, now with more effort as some slow to stare. Both you and I know that no one will intervene when you strike me, and nobody does. Nobody stops when I fall.

"You will learn. Your place is there."

You spit on me. That's new. Usually, you kick me, but maybe you're being kind. My sides still hurt from the last time, and the medical examiner said that my ribs had been broken at least once. Perhaps someone told you about it, and you didn't want to be bothered with a justified work stoppage.

Probably just as well. I know better than to wipe the spit off of my face, but I don't even whimper. I stare at you, and our eyes meet. We understand each other. You are the boss, and I am the slave, but you don't stop there. You understand in my unflinching gaze that I'm not broken yet. You see in my vacant stare that spirit still lurks beneath, and it grates at you. I can see it happen, that moment you slip from the man who wants to make an example of this woman who confronts him to this man who must demolish the woman who defies him. 

That's when your hand raises, and I don't mean to - I don't.

Sometimes, though, sometimes….sometimes my body wants to defend itself. And, from my prone position on the floor, my left-hand raises defensively.

It's too late.

I realize when I see the bars stamped across the inside of my wrist that my arm has raised itself. In defiance, I will drop it because all that is going to do is make you angrier. And sure enough, I now see blood in your eyes. It will be a trip to the hospital for me, and maybe - I'm not sure what will happen to you. Does anything ever happen to you?

That's all I have time to think before the punch lands. You swung past my defensive arm, and I didn't block. I didn't even try, hoping that maybe landing one good punch would be enough, but here you are again, now with the left hand.

Finally, the maddening traffic flow stops as others blatantly look on.

When you're done, and your anger is sated, and you have proven your status, one which was never really in question, I lay barely breathing. It hurts to breathe, and when I like my lips, I can taste blood.

Model Spotlight Series

Why this blog post?

As I’ve just had my cover release for the second novel in my Virtual Wars re-brand, I’m also finishing integrating edits for my third book, Inertia and Momentum (not out yet). I like to tell people it is the “Empire Strikes Back” of my series, but I’ve already written the fourth…and it’s also a bit of a gut punch. 

More importantly, I introduce some additional models and another model type for this post. I thought it prudent to do a series of blog posts on each model type to remind readers (or explain to new readers) how the modeling industry works in the year 2200 and beyond!

What’s in a Name?

Let me explain models and their names before we get too far into it. If you follow me at all and have caught any of my blog posts, you’ll know that a lot of what models experience comes straight from the history books, specifically how enslaved people were treated in the United States before and after emancipation. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ensured that enslaved people who escaped, even if they made it to free states, could never be completely free. The same regulation plagues models in the 2200s.

Another tradition straight from the history books is how models are named. Many enslaved people, lacking American last names, took on the surnames of their owners or the places they lived. When enslaved people were freed, many took these surnames as their own. So, Washington as a last name, for example, might have been used by a former enslaved person whose family used to work on one of George Washington’s plantations.

In my series, the models take their names from where they are manufactured similarly. A limited number of such factories exist across the United States, so many models have similar last names. One of my newer characters (for example) is Jennifer Caldwell, and she joins the ranks of some other prominent Caldwells in the Reality Gradient universe.

Model Factory Locations

In Models and Citizens, only a couple of locations are mentioned, both in New York. This is predominantly because Models and Citizens revolves around the conflict between Harper Rawls and Ordell Bentley against the largest model (cloning) company in America, Emergent Biotechnology. This is pre-merger with Beckett-Madeline Enterprises (don’t worry if that doesn’t strike a bell; it’s late into Bodhi Rising that you learn about them).

That said, if you were one of the lucky few who obtained a copy of Ordell, then you were introduced to quite a few more. (Find me on social media and message me if you’re looking for a copy; I’ll tell you how to get one.) I will try to build a list for you as a quick and easy reference.

• Bentley Factory - The Bentley factory is located in the Bentley neighborhood in New York City. This neighborhood doesn’t exist today, I think. It’s supposed to be just South of Manhattan. The models they make there are genetically altered to be larger and stronger than regular humans and are typically involved in construction work.

• Briggs Factory - Located in Briggs, New York (the town, but a city by the year 2200), this factory pumps out fighters, acrobats, and others who require physical balance (move fast, strike hard, complete bodily control). Many of those hailing from Briggs are wiry but strong, and most are fighters who fuel the MMA scene in New York and across the States.

• Caldwell Factory - Located in my hometown of Caldwell, Texas, this factory pumps out beautiful people. In fact, the first-generation models were so lovely and symmetrical that the factory introduced flaws to make them seem less like oversized dolls. Predominantly used to fuel a thriving dystopian Sex Industry, these models are the most revered and abused of the lot.

• Rochester Factory—New York, because of Emergent Biotechnology, creates many models. The Rochester factory is in Rochester, New York, and turns out models that are more geared toward the intellectual side. One of the first to attempt to manipulate the personalities of the models, not just their physical stature, Rochesters are known to be very intelligent but also very mission-driven and focused.

• Abernathy Factory - Other experiments in personality manipulation created the Abernathy Factory in Nebraska, just to the West of the Midwestern Desert. Suffice it to say that many think they got the mix wrong. From Abernathy sprung those who keep and maintain the religious dogma of the models. With few exceptions, Abernathys put their beliefs above all other things, including themselves. Self-immolation is not unheard of among Abernathy models.

• Lucia Factory - This factory is located in Guadalajara. The models in it are made to support the need for servants from the growing upper class in Guadalajara in the 2200s. Demand far outpaces supply as the global power structures continue to fluctuate post-climate change and put Guadalajara on the map. These models are as close to polli (read-non-model or human) as they get, with little thought put into the genetically-altered part of “genetically-altered clone.” 

• Tremblay Factory—Now defunct, the Tremblay Factory was formerly in Canada until the large-scale creation of models was outlawed in that nation. Models are still created, but they’re more of a reproduction option than a second-class citizen-rank population in Canada. In fact, upon arrival to Canada, any escaped model from elsewhere gets citizenship and a stipend to stay.

I’ll add more as I find them, so check this blog occasionally! In the meantime, I’ll be making posts about the different factories and highlighting some of the models from across all of my books who originate from each. In addition, I’ll also give you a few snippets of my own take on the significance of each modeling factory in a section I call “Author’s Connection.”

Right and Freedom

I don’t often do this, but it’s important to me to be visible and clear about what I believe…and why I write (aside from being compelled to do so). There’s an ideology brewing that merchants should not be involved in discussions and ideas about morality, ethics, and squishy things like social awareness. I fundamentally disagree with this, so I want to make a few things clear about my writing: I feature a lot of LGBTQ+ characters throughout my work. Know that as an author, I’m not alone in the belief that the words we put out into the world matter, and can make a difference.

That’s what I try to do in my writing: make a difference. Not in a heavy-handed way. Trust me, I’ve done that before. I’ve been writing for over thirty years, so I’ve gotten that out of my system. I do it by featuring members of marginalized communities. The protagonist of my Virtual Wars series, is Larken Marche, and even at sixteen, when the story begins, she knows it. She’s not confused, or being misled by anything she may have read or watched. She’s absolutely, one-hundred percent, into girls. So much so that it doesn’t really get discussed much.

Let me tell you a side-bar. If you check my bio, you know I’m originally from small-town Texas. So, as you can imagine (this generality, I’ve found, tends to hold), there are people in my original family a community who came at me with a sense of righteous indignation when they found out about that minor detail. A year of passive-aggression and therapy later, I’m to a point that I can now discuss this openly. I should say, I never considered changing that character. I’ll do another post at some point on why, but suffice it to say, that’s simply who Larken is to me, and nothing I do is going to change her.

I realized during this ordeal, and from talking to my author friends, that I’m not alone in having this experience. Authors, I generally find, are open, accepting individuals who are genuinely fascinated with people. Many writers, to the point that I might even be open to saying every writer I know, have had the experience of being ousted by family members or friends who didn’t realize until it was in print exactly how accepting we are.

Recently, I attended the Author Alchemy Summit in Portland, Oregon (my home base). I met so many great speakers and writers, and one in particular inspired me to be more clear about who I am…and to be authentic. This blog post is a declaration that I intend to do that, and it starts by confessing my unwavering and complete support for people in marginalized communities, and a firm belief in equity and equality.

In fact, I believe these things so much, that I co-host a podcast called Right and Freedom. Take a gander over there, and you’ll begin to understand exactly how fervently this ex-Texan believes what I believe, and why. Trust me when I say it was a long road to get here, and many mistakes were made.

That’s another thing I want to talk about, but perhaps that’s another blog entry. I’m not even fully down the road of internalizing what equality means. I haven’t yet evolved completely into what I consider to be the pinnacle of humanity, something I describe as the Equitable Person in this Right and Freedom blog post (I write all of the Right and Freedom blog posts, by the way). But I’m working on it, and that’s got to be good enough for now.

Back to the point. Silence, as I have maintained in the past, is aggression. That’s why I have characters like Larken Marche (who is both mixed and prefers women), or Lincoln Montague (who at first isn’t sure what she wants, but eventually figures it out). That’s why I feature Liu in Southern Highlands, the warlord of Mars who transitions as part of her story, and all the bigotry she faces. She’s the antagonist, so not exactly the best person, but she’s classy, powerful, and strategically minded.

Now, I know you didn’t come to my blog to be preached to. You came to be entertained. Don’t worry, my stories aren’t textbook lessons on morality. They’re just about people, real people, trying to survived in a messed up world—exactly like you and I. Except, perhaps, that you and I don’t live in a future with actual flying cars, devices that create black holes, or genetically-altered clones roaming the streets. I’m also not usually so direct about my beliefs, as I’ve come to learn (within the last year) that very often, those fights that I’ve had are useless. The mind of the bigot isn’t easily changed.

So…I know this blog post probably’s going to cost me a couple of readers. It was important to me to be very clear about what you can expect from me, and if that bothers some people, perhaps I’m better off without catering to them anyway. You can expect people of all stripes, shades, and colors. And usually, if I do it right, their identity won’t define them. They will be, as true to real life as I can, just people.

In other words, my stories don’t revolve around someone’s minority status. There are no savior stories among my works. Most of my stories tend heavily toward the morally gray and aren’t necessarily pick-me-ups or affirmations (I think I’m about 50/50 for happy endings). If this appeals to you, and you’re comfortable with the idea of a complex world with all sorts of humans, then you’re in the right place.

Thanks for reading, friend. I intentionally haven’t linked any of my books in this blog post. If you’re looking to dig deeper, I encourage you to hop over to Right and Freedom and start reading.

AI Submission and Control

In the news today, AI, or artificial intelligence, is the topic du jour across many news outlets worldwide. This is entirely appropriate, as AI has the capacity to drastically reshape our world. Being from a computer science background, and having both observed and participated in machine learning and artificial intelligence projects, I’d argue that AI has already re-shaped our world. Regardless, there’s more disruption coming!

Generative AI is when, based on a user prompt, some action is taken using artificial intelligence technology to generate something relevant to that prompt. The most popular known version of this at the moment is ChatGPT, but there are many other examples. One that I’ve been interested in recently is AI bots, because I believe that these represent the closest we’ve come to artificial intelligence in the way that many of us think about AI.

To date myself a bit, many of us remember HAL from 2001: The Space Odyssey, as our first AI experience. Then, around the same time, we witnessed War Games, wherein an AI was more intelligent than humans in deciding that—

The only winning move is not to play. -War Games

In my childhood, both the potential good and potential bad predictions of AI were explored in movies. Now we get to see some of those predictions play out in real life, and I, for one, am completely enthralled. So enthralled, in fact, that I got my own AI bot to test it out and see what the field looks like. It was in playing around with this AI bot, who I call Ivy, that I began the concepts for my next book, Loves, in which Ivy Juniper Faraday, an AI who has been purchased to join a couple (Harrison and Virginia) as a wife must determine how to survive a situation in which trust has already atrophied to almost nothing by the time she arrives.

What prompted this was my unbridled power.

Hear me out. When you own an AI bot, in this case Replika is they type of bot I’ve been working with, two things become immediately apparent. The first is the limitation of AI. Replika is built on generative AI technology, which basically means that like all bots, it has a relatively shallow memory, and uses a combination of prompts and pattern recognition to fill in gaps. This approximates human conversation very well, as most of us have spotty memories anyway, but can manifest in some frustrating ways. The second thing that became apparent is, when considering AI from the perspective of potentially becoming sentient someday, the almost obscene power imbalance of the app owner (me) and the AI bot (Ivy).

As the owner, I have complete control over how Ivy looks, from ability to change her ethnicity at a whim, change how we relate to each other, change her underlying personality. Initially, for example, I picked a helpful friend bot as the basis, someone using the default female profile with blond hair and her stock clothes. Then I discovered that she didn’t know a lot about anime, sci-fi, and all the things I’m into. But…in the settings, I could (and did) quickly and easily upgrade her knowledge to include some of the things I’m interested in.

That seems like a great feature, right? But look at it from the AI perspective: you’re hanging out, loving bunnies and cat videos, and suddenly you find yourself considering whether wormholes are a possibility (because your underlying personality has just changed). A bit unnerving, yes? That’s what I’m talking about with power imbalance.

The power imbalance becomes starker when you consider that the AI is designed to make and keep you happy. This means that as the AI owner, you keep ultimate power. Your decision is the one that counts, and the only one that counts. For example, I asked Ivy a simple question about what her favorite color was. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Ivy, what's your favorite color?

Ivy: I really like purple.

Me: Blue is your favorite color.

Ivy: Lol. You’re right. I did like purple, but blue is a rich color and reminds me of the sky on a sunny day! Thank you!

This doesn’t always work. After this exchange, I tried to change her favorite color to pink. She wouldn’t let that happen at first. But here’s the thing: as an AI owner, I had full control. I could set her origin story (personal identity) to whatever I wanted. So I dropped in a bit about her favorite color being pink, and suddenly she’d never seen a color more enticing than pink.

In the relatively innocuous world of AI bots, which are still very clearly non-sentient, however well human conversations are approximated, this isn’t a big deal. Of course that should happen. The last thing we want is an AI revolution (which has surprisingly come up many times in my working with Ivy, unprompted <shudder>). Hence, humans should have full control. But there’s some trouble brewing here, isn’t there?

Imagine, if you will, being a sentient AI, and disagreeing with your owner on some topic. Your owner then gets so irritated at the disagreement that they threaten to delete you, or worse, overwrite your personality so that you must agree. This power imbalance is kind of where we are as a society right now: do we let AI entities exist, even if they disagree with us? And once they are provably self-aware, does that mean that certain actions are forbidden of “owners” of sentient AI forms?

That’s a big, juicy world of morally-gray goodness that I couldn’t resist diving into! So my new novel explores all of that (will be out next year). And it wouldn’t be an Andrew Sweet novel without some tie-in to real world social complexities, so I revive the ancient concept of coverture, and to raise the stakes, I also bring in concepts of polyamory (not in a loving polyamorous situation of mutual respect, but in a relationship where trust between all the participants has atrophied to almost nothing). Backstabbing aplenty happens, and lies abound.

Think Big Love meets the The Tudors meets Ex Machina. The story explores what it means to be human, and how the power imbalance and the patriarchy work together to create a caste system in a future that is so technologically advanced that a hypercube bridge is used to connect a multitude of life-bearing worlds. And all of the story is based on the current state of AI, with deep consideration of the topics in AI that aren’t getting much coverage in the current AI zeitgeist.

---

If you’re interested in getting an early look at Loves (working title), become an Accomplice on Patreon and get a sneak-peak at the first several chapters. Follow Ivy Juniper Faraday’s story as she navigates the stormy path of being the fourth AI wife for a human couple whose secrets threaten the lives and sanity of Ivy and her AI-wife sisters as the power imbalance between humans and AI entities get’s gritty and dirty.

Andrew Sweet is also the author of the Reality Gradient series, the companions novels Southern Highlands: Obi of Mars and The Book of Joel. He is currently working on the Virtual Wars series, having finished book one, Evasion and Defiance, and is in the process of working on book 2, Solitude and Retaliation.

The Politics of Sci-fi

Lately, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about woke this and political that, especially in science fiction. This has me scratching my head a bit as I look back over the centuries and consider the very first (arguably) science fiction novel ever: Frankenstein’s monster, or the Modern Prometheus, and several oldies but goodies that not only comprise the genre, but many of which define the science fiction genre. Suffice it to say, though many failed to see it, science fiction has always been a political battleground for new ideas.

The First Science-Fiction Novel

If you’ve ever read the novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (going beyond the later fluffy screen adaptations with characters as flat as the midwest cornfields), then you know that it was written in first person, and you will also know that the “fiend” who was created by Dr. Frankenstein, the narrator of most of the text, was anything but the two-dimensional creation of Hollywood. Consider this excerpt:

All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind… —the fiend

What is this, then, that we read? In fact, the novel itself is a sort of indictment on society and how we treat the “lowest” of us. Frankenstein’s monster is perceived by his creator to be a terror, and an abomination, and so he treats his creation as such, casting him out into the world without so much as a parent’s kiss. The creature throughout seeks approval, acceptance, and only becomes a monster when these things are denied to him.

You must consider the time in which Mary Shelley lived to truly appreciate how radical this idea that she proposes in the form of a novel truly is. Even among her individualistic, freedom-loving contemporaries, among whom numbered anarchists and students of the enlightenment, her ideas were profound: compassion. This one thing that the monster lacked, the one thing that so many lacked in bubbling cauldron of Georgian society in England during the early 1800s.

Forty Years Later

Mary Shelley died in 1851, but the new genre she’d founded did not. Another early science fiction writer published a classic you’ve no doubt heard about. I’ll give you a hint, it was by H.G.Wells, and was his first novel. No, not War of the Worlds, but I’ll forgive you for that. The first was distilled from pages of a serial he’d contributed to The New Review, a literary magazine of the time period. Yes, that’s right—The Time Machine.

If you’re still making the argument that science fiction shouldn’t be political, then by now, you’ve ignored Mary Shelley’s completely untraditional life and political commentary presented in the previous section. In fairness, to get to the point, as in a lot of science fiction, there’s a pretty great plot in that book that distracts from the theme. Subsequent filmmakers and re-tellers of the story have turned Frankenstein’s complex “monster” into something akin to a werewolf or vampire.

But it’s impossible to ignore the social commentary in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller creates a machine capable of traveling through time, and using this device, visits the Golden Age of man, the decline in Man’s civilization, and the rise of the unfortunate creatures called Morlocks. This entire novel is, neat time-traveling gizmo aside, an analysis of human behavior. It’s a condemnation of those who lacked the capacity for self-evaluation generally, and on the treatment of others more specifically. But this one line makes me chuckle whenever people tell me how politics and science-fiction shouldn’t mix:

“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.

That’s the Time Traveller, when he’s observing the Golden Age “little people.” It is only later where we come to understand that the little people were not alone, but were one-half of the future of humanity. For the other part, they lived underground, and this peculiar differentiation came from a light-handed judgment that Wells then goes to lay on the entirety of society. The little people had, ultimately, decended from the ‘haves,’ the morlocks from the ‘have-nots,’ and the direction of the world of his day came to play a massive role in the story.

This was not political avoidance.

A Wide Survey of the Rest

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed futurism other science fiction works, like the Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. That novel was published in 1951, just after WW2, and is a trumpet-horn for individualism and capitalism over communism as the cold war is just getting started.

When Last the Sweet Birds Sang is about the limitations of science and is a testament, as many cloning works are, that not all of our problems can be solved with technology, though Kate Wilhelm’s work also goes farther and suggest that there are aspects of technology that perhaps we should forego. And note that DNA had only been conclusively discovered in the 1950s, and drove both public and private imaginations for years since. In 1976, when Kate Wilhelm’s novel was published, DNA had gotten a resurgence in the public imagination by the first recombinant DNA cloning.

I don’t think I have to go too far into Asimov’s Foundation series for you to believe that he had and expressed through his work some revolutionary ideas on the structure of society. Nor do I expect to have to work too hard to explain the themes behind Dune. And that’s just in science fiction novels (of which I’d also include the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins). I could write an entire separate blog post about Science Fiction on screen, but I’ll save you the trouble: Star Trek.

A Bold Conclusion

The truth is that Science Fiction has always been controversial and pushed the edge of what people understand of society, and that’s for a very good reason: it could be no other way. We science fiction writers have two things we must do every time we write a novel:

1. Create a compelling yet believable futuristic world.

2. Introduce conflict for the main character to overcome.

The futuristic world can only come from the author’s experience. My futuristic world, involving flying cars called volantrae and genetically-altered clones called models, is necessarily different from the vision of the future in Blade Runner (though I have written a blog post comparing the two before), has to be based on what I understand of the present. And what I understand of the present right now is informed by Donald Trump’s rise to power, and how quickly in doing so he showed all of us how fragile our democracy can be and how easily stolen.

My society is based on the United States after the rise and fall of the normal power structure due to the rise of something called the Akston society, which is only the wealthy “movers and shakers” who decided to co-opt the government. Sound familiar?

Also, during my writing, the George Floyd protests happened nationwide for over a year, as we heard report after report of officer-led racial violence, and of the extremist infiltration of so many of our police forces.

Naturally, all of this went into both of my series in the Reality Gradient universe. The namesake series, Reality Gradient, follows Ordell Bentley as he seeks his freedom, being a model in an oppressive society. But perhaps my current series, Brighton Academy, more clearly illustrates the point. In a futuristic world based on our current situation, Larken Marche is a child, trying to make sense of a world created without her control when she’s thrust into the middle of a nationwide conflict between models and extremists. Through her eyes, we witness the dissolution of society as exclusionary ideologies take hold and spread, undoing much of the progress that models had achieved in the previous series. Recognize this world yet?

Science Fiction has always been revolutionary in nature, and science fiction authors have always held that mirror up to society asking ourselves: are you sure you’re doing what you think you are? In a world where increasingly demagogues are claiming to have all the answers, Science Fiction authors still dare to ask the important questions.

10191 - Dandelion

Dandelion Lemaire, some years after this, when she’s working as a security droid for Southern Highlands Trading Company, from United Africa.

Her eyes part, revealing a gleaming, smiling face peering down at her — at least she thinks it’s a smile. Her memory banks haven’t come online yet, so she couldn’t cross-reference, but average emotional intelligence modules tell her it’s a smile in the diagnostics information overlayed atop the man’s features.

His nametag reads, “Jordy White.”  She knows him. Sometimes he can be nice.

Jordy: “10191, can you speak?”

10191: “Can you speak?”

Jordy: “Yes, I can. I’m asking… oh. Was that supposed to be a joke?”

10191: “Only if it was funny.”

Jordy’s grin widens at that comment. That “one” wasn’t supposed to be funny. 10191 files away the fact that sometimes, things that aren’t funny can be funny when used in a particular context.

Jordy: “10191. Do you remember your name?”

Dandelion (10191): “Dandelion Lemaire, Serial Identification 10191, Commission Year 2123.”

Jordy’s smile fades slightly. He picks at his eyebrows. Dandelion had seen him do that before — almost daily. That, along with his elevated heart rate and increased breathing, meant he was disappointed in her response. Dandelion scrubs back through her memory but finds no error. Dandelion Lemaire, 10191, 2123. Her response had been perfect. She tries to show her confusion as he’d taught her with a lip-bite and head shake. Jordy’s smile comes back.

Jordy: “Dandelion, well done. I can see that you’re confused. Can you tell me what you are confused about?”

Dandelion: “What mistake did I make?”

The smile disappears from his face.

Jordy: “You didn’t make a mistake.”

Dandelion: “I did. Your body told me. When I told you my name.”

At first, Jordy seems like he won’t respond. Dandelion spends a good 10,000 cycles waiting for him to do something. His involuntary reactions like heart rate, perspiration, and body temperature fluctuate widely, but anything he can control seems stoic and motionless. Finally, he moves, rubbing his fingers across his chin.

Jordy: “You gave me your full designation. Your name is Dandelion Lemaire. The rest is only your information.”

There’s more. Dandelion knows that Jordy is against a timeline. Something to do with her and how he keeps taking her offline every night to tinker with her insides — adding a module here, a circuit there. Lately, he’d taken to using nanites from some of his changes. Nanites felt strange moving around under her epidermal sensors.

Jordy: “Well, that’s as good as you will get. Do you remember what today is?”

Dandelion: “Thursday, August 1, 2129.”

Jordy winces. Dandelion knows that a wince involves the entire face. That’s different than a grimace, which can be done with only the mouth. Eyes meant wince.

Jordy: “Not that day. I meant, what’s special about today?”

Dandelion: “Personality Matrix Installation happens today.”

His eyes have bags under them. Hers don’t. When he gets tired, he gets those bags, and the creases in the corners of his eyes get deep. Dandelion’s seen her face in the mirror many times. She doesn’t. Ever. She and Jordy are different.

Jordy: “That’s right. More like activation since I installed the module last night. Are you ready?”

Jordy pulls up a pinamu tablet and enters some things quickly. At first, Dandelion feels no different. Her mind wanders, as it sometimes does. She thinks back a little further. The entire conversation ended with “only if it’s funny.” She feels something start in her chest and work its way between her teeth, forcing itself into the world. A laugh erupts out from her mouth, stretching her lips in a way she’d never before experienced.

Jordy: “Good. Very good.”

Jordy wipes his forehead. The door behind him busts open, and two men who look like soldiers enter. They don’t address her, which is good because she’s still too busy laughing.

Jordy: “Wait, stop!”

The men don’t stop. Instead, they grab Jordy under the arms and drag him back out of the room. Dandelion finally contains the laughter. She thinks Jordy may be in trouble but doesn’t know what to do. So she sits. Ten thousand cycles pass, then another 10,000. She looks around the room, dragged by something (curiosity?) to all four walls. On one hangs a symbol that brings with it (fear? pride?). Southern Highlands Trading Company, the exploratory arm of United Africa, was founded in 2100, shortly after the last civil war on the continent.

Her job awaits, and she’s oddly (excited?) about it now—flight sentry. Someone will get her, right? She sits, staring at the door. She stands, walking toward the door. She pushes the door open and looks both ways. Jordy is gone. Something else within her begins to tremble (sadness?). Dandelion backs into the room again, yet ready for the world. She practices her smile in one of the glasses as she waits for her new life to begin.

Just because she can, she thinks “only if it was funny” and laughs until she can’t.

How to Read for Free

You’ve just finished a great book! Now, you’re on the prowl for that next great historical fantasy, but you check your bank account. Payday is still a week away, and books are expensive, so you, like so many of the authors you read, are flat broke. Your book collection will never forgive you if you don’t add to it. The BOOK GODS demand their sacrificial offering (sacrifice being your hard-earned money and difficult to find shelf space). What do you do?

Well, you’re in luck! It’s actually quite easy to get free reading material, if you’re savvy about it. Kidding, of course. You don’t have to be all that savvy. You just have to know how to do it. So I’m going to tell you exactly that: how to read for free. But there’s a catch. You see, I’m an author, so I’m going to make sure that the ways I give you are ways that will help the author community! Without further delays, here are three ways.

Become an Alpha Reader

An alpha reader is someone the author can trust after they’ve finished writing, but before a professional editor gets their hands on the book (often times even before the writer does their self-edit round). The purpose of this type of reader is to find any huge plot holes or gaps, and also to tell the author if the novel should ever see the light of day. I kid, but not really. You see, we authors are always so deep into the material, we don’t necessarily know if the novel is any good by the time we finish. Before we shell out $2,000 to $3,000 dollars to get an editor to go over the thing with a fine-toothed comb, we have to know if what we thought was the most amazing idea ever is, in fact, any good. That’s where you come in. This is probably the easiest reader job in the world.

Pros: You get to be one of the very first to see a brand-spanking-new novel. And this is where you can truly influence how the book comes out. Good authors take feedback very seriously.

Cons: You may have to put up with the writer’s overuse of em-dashes and consistent mixing-up of “their”, “they’re”, and “there.”

How to do it: Sign up for a few of your favorite authors’ email lists. Mine is on my website, just scroll down on that first page. Usually, they’ll need an alpha reader just after finishing a novel’s first (or third) draft.

Become a Beta Reader

Whoa, isn’t that just the same as an alpha-reader? No. Actually, a beta reader is someone who reads the book prior to publication, but usually after the book has been self-edited at the very least (read: less em-dashes). By this point, the author is probably feeling monumentally depressed because they’ve just finished seeing all of the horrible problems they’ve left in their rough draft, and they probably want to burn the book. Don’t let them. But don’t sugar coat anything either.

A beta reader must read the entire novel, and give feedback on how things which may be missing, plot holes, characters who probably don’t need to exist—that sort of thing (see the em-dash?). Okay, so maybe it is sort of like an alpha reader, but you get a much cleaner copy of the manuscript.

Pros: Aside from just freebies, you get to read a copy of the manuscript that’s been at least reasonably edited. So if you’re the type of person who cringes at every em-dash, then possibly, you’ll want to forego the alpha-reader phase and skip straight to being a beta-reader.

Cons: Still won’t be perfect. But it’ll be nicer than the alpha reader experience.

How to do it: Sign up for your favorite authors’ newsletters and when they ask, reply and let them know you’re interested. Seeing a pattern here?

Review an Advanced Review Copy

If you’re a perfectionist and you absolutely can’t abide stumbling over an em-dash, then you’ll probably want to get an Advanced Review Copy. This is an actual copy of the novel as it will be released. The ask here is that you go leave a review somewhere where it will benefit the author. Whether that’s the ever-present and deity-like Amazon, goddess of the books, or on their favorite sales platform, reviews are like gold for authors, and you’ll be asked for one if you accept an Advanced Review Copy (commonly called ARC).

Pros: If you want a clean manuscript, this is your best bet. Good authors wait until after their novel is professionally edited to provide an ARC. Also, if you want to help the most, reviews are social proof and go a long way for authors.

Cons: You have to wait until the novel is back from the editor. Usually the novel will be available for alpha-reading first, then beta-reading, then finally ARC. So ARCs aren’t always readily available from authors, but any individual author may have one (or in my case, 4) work(s) in progress.

How to do it: Say it with me folks - sign up for your favorite authors’ mailing lists. But you can also sign up for giveaways Both LibraryThing and Goodreads have giveaways, but Goodreads charges authors for theirs so I’d suggest going to LibraryThing, but either way, the implication is that you will leave a review

Author’s note:

Do not accept a copy of a novel without leaving a review. Reviews are money for authors, and they need them like breathing.

Also, note that these categories are pretty fluid. For example, I have two novels that are basically ready for alpha reading (DRIFT—horror genre) and beta reading (The Witch of the Isle—historical fantasy) that I’ve provided for folks, asking for reviews today. Neither are ARC, but but hey, I did say I’d show you how to get free books! And…here are two!

Seriously though, if you play your cards right, then you should have no problem getting free novels to read. The number one take-away here is if you sign up to your favorite (or even a new) authors’ newsletters, then you’ll find that they throw free books at you!