1. There will not be a second assassination attempt against President Trump before the election.
On this one, I got it wrong badly. There was at least one other attempt on Trump’s life, the one with the gunman camped out in the golf course for ten hours, who very nearly got a shot in. There was also a case where a whole bunch of people in the stands at one of the Trump rallies was hospitalized with chemical burns, probably from an attempted chemical attack on President Trump. But that one didn’t make the news nearly as much. And those are only the ones we’ve heard about.
I hope Trump makes it to the inauguration, because now that he’s actually won the election—and there are still people taking shots at him—the odds of him getting assassinated between now are not insignificant.
5. Harris will lose badly and Trump will win the 2024 election in an electoral landslide.
This one, I think I got right. I’m writing this post on election night after all of the networks have called Pennsylvania for Trump, and Trump has declared victory (though it’s unclear if Kamala has called him to concede yet). It is possible that we might see some “election fortification” in the next 24 hours, but I think it’s unlikely. And while Trump’s victory could have been more of a blowout, I do find it telling that Kamala Harris failed to outperform Joe Biden in every single county in the country. Youch.
So by my count, that puts me at three out of four in the prediction game. Not perfect, but pretty good. We’ll see how the rest of them play out, because I think the last few weeks of 2024 are going to be pretty rocky. Hopefully I’m wrong, but we’ll see.
It’s been a few years since I last ran this survey, and I’m curious to see how things have changed (if indeed they have changed at all). Also, there’s a new question about pricing audiobooks, which I’m especially eager to analyze, since that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet. Check it out!
It’s been a really mild autumn this year. We got our first hard frost only about a week ago, and it’s currently about 66 degrees outside. Feels positively balmy!
The image above is my current computer setup. The playpen is for the kids to watch a show while I’m working on the other monitor, such as what I’m doing right now. We’re still living with my in-laws, so this room is their library add-on. It’s really nice! I especially like how much light the windows let in, as well as the fact that it’s set away from the rest of the house, so I don’t have to worry as much about waking sleeping kids.
For the last few months, I’ve been alternating between each week between different WIPs, trying to use some of the principles I learned from hacking my ADHD in order to write more. I should really write a blog post about that soon. Basically, I switch out a new project every week, shepherding about half a dozen WIPs toward completion instead of completing them one at a time.
Since I only just started a few months ago, it’s going to be a few more months before the first of the projects is finished, but once I fill out the queue to that point I should be able to publish a new novel every other month for the forseeable future. Once I can do that consistently, without sacrificing the quality of the stuff I write, the plan is to move it up to once every six weeks, then once every month. With the way I’ve been incorporating AI into my writing process, it’ll be a challenge but still very doable.
I’m also working to get all of my audiobooks up on Findaway Voices, which distributes to Spotify, among other places. Since I’m not quite sure how to price them, I’m running a $2.99 sale for the rest of the year. The plan is to run a book pricing survey with my email list and use that data to guide future pricing for my ebooks and AI-narrated audiobooks. I’ve also been invited into the beta for Amazon’s AI-narrated audiobooks, so those should be going up on Audible before too long.
In family news, my wife is applying for a position in the BYU Linguistics Department, and they just set up a bunch of interviews (including the one with a General Authority, which is supposed to be with both of us). She’s also finishing up her PhD, which should be done next year. Between that and watching the kids, I don’t have a lot of uninterrupted writing time—thank goodness for AI!
And now the kids’ shows are over, so I’d better get back to doing other things. Take care!
I’ve read every one of these books from start to finish, and I love them all. Even the lesser ones I’d put up above most of the Hugo-nominated books from the last couple of decades. And the best—well, let’s go there.
First, Not This August. This was really more of an early Cold War political thriller, with frightening near-future space technology since, at the time this was written, Sputnik was freaking everyone out in a major way. The technology itself is moderately science fictional, but if a book like this were written today, it would probably be shelved as a technothriller—which makes me wonder if the conservative science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s didn’t just migrate to the thriller genre as science fiction was increasingly taken over by the left. But that’s a subject for another blog post.
In any case, Not This August is very much a cautionary tale, kind of like 1984, but set only a decade or two after WWII. Basically, China and the USSR launch a joint invasion of the US that succeeds, but an underground resistance movements works to finish this American superweapon: an orbital military base armed with nuclear weapons that is undetectable by the surface and can bomb anywhere on the planet.
Since it was written in the early part of the 50s, it plays very much on fears that the world wars would shortly resume, and that the US would never recover economically from the wars. Such fears later proved to be unfounded, but at the time, there were very good reasons to think we were caught in a vicious cycle—and in some ways (such as with Eisenhower’s warnings of the Military-Industrial complex), perhaps we were.
In some ways, it was a difficult read, not because of the writing itself, but because of how dark it was. However, like any good thriller, it built up the suspense quite nicely, and I finished the last hundred pages at a sprint. With that said, it hasn’t aged nearly as well as 1984, and reading it from the perspective of the 2020s it seems much more like an historical curiousity than a true cautionary tale. But I enjoyed it.
Three to Conquer was much lighter, and a fun, quick read. It’s about a man who is secretly a telepath, who stops on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist and discovers that some hostile alien body-snatchers have come to Earth after infecting three returning astronauts, and are now trying to takeover all of humanity before we realize that they’re even here. It’s a race against time to find and kill all of the zombified humans before they infect everyone else, with a cute little love story thrown in for good measure, between the main character and his secretary. A fun if somewhat forgettable read. I did really like how the main character had a sharp mind and was quick on his feet.
Now, to the really good ones.
Double Star is a fantastic book, and just because I’ve put it at third place on my ballot, you should not think that means that I thought it was mediocre at all. In fact, I’d put it above probably 60% or 70% of the novels that have won the Hugo. It’s quite good, showcasing Heinlein at some of his best (though I do think Farnham’s Freehold is better). It was a really compelling story about a man who overcomes his prejudices and shortcomings to grow into the role that has (quite literally) been cast for him. It also makes me very, very glad that I’m not an actor. Highly recommended.
The End of Eternity is one of the best time travel novels I’ve ever read. It’s about this bureaucratic organization called Eternity, which exists to shepherd humanity safely through 75,000 centuries of history. Basically, the technicians of Eternity calculate all the best ways to tweak the timeline with “reality changes” in order to avoid all of the worst catastrophes, like pandemics, global wars, etc. But after the 75,000th century, there’s a long period of “hidden centuries” that are somehow inaccessible to them, followed by a world where humanity is extinct. The main character is a technician who falls into forbidden love with a woman in Time, whose existence is going to be wiped out by a reality change. He conspires to save her by bringing her into Eternity, and sets off a series of events that threaten to wipe out Eternity itself.
I really enjoyed this book. Toward the end, I wondered if this book would have a happy ending, since I couldn’t think of any way to pull that off without making it kind of sappy and cliche. Then the twist happened, and everything changed… but we still got the happy ending, which fit in perfectly with the world-changing twist. Just a really brilliant book by an all-time science fiction master. Classics like this are the reason why Isaac Asimov hasn’t been canceled yet, and hopefully never will be.
As I said above, I genuinely enjoyed all of these books. But as good as they all were, none of them blew me away nearly as much as Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.
The Long Tomorrow is a post-apocalyptic story about a future America, after the atomic wars, where cities are a thing of the past, the Constitution has been amended to restrict the size of towns (in order to prevent them from becoming potential targets for a nuclear weapon), and most of the population has reverted back to 19th century tech and an Amish or Amish-adjacent lifestyle. But there are legends about a secret city called Bartorstown, where the old technology hasn’t been lost, and people still live lives full of wonder and wealth, just like the old days.
The story follows two boys who run away from home in order to find Bartorstown, tracing their adventures and coming of age, until they finally learn the terrible truth about what Bartorstown actually is, and grapple with what that means for all of them. It’s a pretty basic plot, but what really blew me away was the depth of character and how brilliantly Brackett’s writing and storytelling drew me into their lives, making them come alive. Consequently, the story really came alive, raising all sorts of questions that left me thinking and wondering long after I’d put it down. There are some really heavy themes in this book, but like the best sci-fi, it doesn’t feel like “message” fiction at all.
It’s a little bit sad, though, because Brackett wrote this book just as the hydrogen bomb transformed foreign policy with the threat of mutually assured destruction, thus making her post-apocalyptic future into something totally implausible. The Long Tomorrow only works in a world where total nuclear war doesn’t result in the utter annihilation of humanity. From what I can tell, that’s the main reason this book never really took off. Also, I’m guessing that Brackett didn’t have as many fans as Heinlein or Asimov, and since the Hugos have always essentially been a popularity contest (these days, among an increasingly narrow and snobbish clique), that’s probably the main reason why The Long Tomorrow didn’t win the Hugo this year, even though I personally think it’s the most deserving book on the ballot.
But as I said above, 1955 (the publication date) was a really good year for science fiction, and all of these books are really good—some of the best, in fact. I highly recommend them all!
I know that it’s been just a week since I said I would post less about politics and current events, but the events of the past week are so Earth-shattering that I really can’t hold back.
First, yesterday’s 200+ missile strike on Israel by Iran. For me, the scariest footage I’ve seen so far was this:
Obviously, Israel was not wiped off the map by Iran’s ballistic missile strike. In fact, from what I’ve heard most recently, the only casualties from that attack are one Palestinian in Judea/Samaria, and five Iranians when the missile they were prepping blew up on the launch pad. Wah wah sad trombone.
But it would be a very different story if any of those missiles had been tipped with a nuclear warhead.
So as we await Israel’s response to this unprecedented attack, I think it’s not to early to call the start of the Israel-Iran war. It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s actually here, and I think it’s going to heat up a lot faster than most people think it will.
At this point, the two big questions on my mind are: 1) how many other countries are going to get dragged into this war, and 2) do the Iranian mullahs actually believe that they can win?
I’ll tackle the second question first. If the answer is “no,” then it means that the Iranians are being purely reactive, and this is Israel’s war to lose. And unlike the United States, which has a long track record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (especially under our current alleged president), the Israelis are clearly determined to win.
At the risk of waxing dangerously optimistic, I think there’s a very good chance that this is the case. The Hezbollah exploding pagers was an incredible operation that caught everyone by surprise, and the way the Israelis followed it up with the assassination of Hezbollah’s top dog Hassan Nasrallah was a massive blow that has the potential to completely reshape the Middle East. And now, with their assault on southern Lebanon, Israel has effectively eliminated Hezbollah as an existential threat to their nation, just as they have eliminated Hamas with the Gazan war.
Of course, given the nature of the escalation, the Iranians were forced to respond, and not just by shooting off a bunch of missiles into the desert for show, the way they did when Trump killed Qasam Soleimani. But such a response is guaranteed to escalate the conflict even further, to the point where Israel is now likely to take out Iran’s entire nuclear program, and possibly their oil wells too. They clearly have the capacity to do so.
Will the unpopular Islamist regime survive such a dramatic escalation? What if Mossad also assassinates a few of their mullahs, or the Ayatollah himself? Do the mullahs really think they can win?
What if they actually do?
What if they aren’t just purely reacting to events as they unfold, but are purposefully shaping events according to some script which we have yet to see? What if they want Israel to escalate, so as to drag other countries into the conflict?
I forget where I saw this statistic, but something like 70% of Iran’s oil production goes to China. If Iran’s energy sector is effectively taken offline by an Israeli strike, how will China respond? Does that make them more or less likely to launch an invasion of Taiwan, or to become more aggressive in the South China Sea?
Iran is also supplying Russia with most of their offensive drones, which the Russians have put to quite effective use in their war with Ukraine. If Israel takes out Iran’s drone production, or threatens to take it out, how will Putin respond? Will he come to Iran’s aid, the way he came to Bashir Al-Assad’s aid in the Syrian civil war? Will he expand the Russo-Ukraine war? Will he go nuclear?
If the Israel-Iran war is confined to a regional war, Israel will probably win and become a regional hegemon—and thanks to Biden’s and Obama’s catastrophic mishandling of foreign policy, the United States’ influence in the region has been and will continue to be seriously diminished. But with an Iranian defeat, the Abraham Accords are likely to become the framework for reshaping the entire region. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be discarded, and most of the Palestinians will probably be relocated as Israel gradualy absorbs Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Some of them may become Israelis, but most will not.
Iran’s best chance to win this war is to draw in as many other countries as it can, especially Russia and China. Will they do so? Can they do so? Do they believe they can do so? I think this question is the key.
But here’s one question I do believe that I can answer: is this the beginning of the Battle of Armageddon—the prophesied end-times conflict that will precede the second coming of Christ? No, I don’t believe that it is, for the following reasons: 1) the Jews have not yet built the third temple, 2) the Latter-day Saints have not yet built the New Jerusalem in Missouri, and 3) the world is not yet united in war against Israel. This war may be the dress rehearsal for Armageddon, and depending on the outcome, we may only be a decade or two away from it, but I don’t think this is the big event.
Not yet, in any case. As we’ve seen over the last week, the situation can change very quickly.
One of the things about AI-assisted writing that has really surprised me is how resistant other writers can be to the very idea of using AI in their creative writing process. Here in Utah valley, there’s a large enough writing community that we occasionally get together for an informal meetup over lunch, and every time I’ve brought up the subject, I could almost see the fists come up. At one of our local writing conventions, Writer’s Cantina, I was on a panel about AI-assisted writing… and there were maybe only four people in the audience (and one of them was my wife!)
It’s a shame, because I really do think that generative AI is going to transform the way we write everything, from emails and reports to blog posts, long-form essays, and yes, even fiction. It’s only a matter of time. AI is gradually being worked into the apps and programs we all use to write, and as people become more comfortable with it in other aspects of their lives, they’re going to start using it to write fiction—and that’s okay! Almost all of the resistance is based on ignorance and fear, not a clear-eyed understanding of how these AI tools actually work.
As someone who remembers the days when “self-published” was very much a dirty word—in fact, many people considered it the kiss of death to ever having a professional writing career—it very much feels like we’re repeating the whole tradpub vs. indie wars of the early 2010s, just over the issue of AI-assisted writing. The biggest difference is that the internet is 10x more toxic than it used to be, probably because of how polarized and partisan our world has become in general. But other than that, it’s like we’re only a year or two away from an AI-assisted author having a massive breakout and proving that you can write with AI and be a success, the way Amanda Hocking proved that you can self-publish and be a success.
So why should writers consider writing a novel with AI? One of the things I hear a lot from other writers is “I enjoy the writing process too much to ever consider using an AI to help me write.” Which is fine, I guess, if you’re writing just for yourself and maybe your own family. But if writing is your career, or something you hope to turn into a career, why wouldn’t you want to experiment with AI-assisted writing? After all, if you refuse to even experiment with it, how can you possibly know that it won’t improve your process in some way? And if it can improve your process and give you a competitive edge, isn’t that reason enough to try?
Here is what I’ve found after a year and a half of experimenting with AI-assisted writing:
In the old days, it would take me anywhere from six months to several years to write a novel. Now, I can write a novel-length work in about 1-3 months.
Before, I would hit a patch of writer’s block in the middle of almost every project, leading to weeks (and sometimes months) of agonizing frustration and crippling self-doubt. Now, because of AI, I can step back far enough to see the forest from the trees and identify all of the major story issues before they become creative blocks—and generate a rough draft in about a week.
Before, whenever I would come up with a great new story idea while in the middle of another project, I would have to suppress my enthusiasm for that idea or risk having it derail everything I was working on. Now, I finish my projects fast enough that that generally isn’t a problem—and even if it is, it only takes a day or two of chasing that idea to satisfy the creative itch, and either trunk the idea entirely or turn it into a new project to work on later.
Before, my biggest limitation was my ability to turn ideas into words. Now, with a few clicks, I can generate all the words I could possibly need, and the biggest limiting factor is my ability to stay true to my own creative vision.
It’s a completely different paradigm, with a totally new skillset and a very long (and at times somewhat steep) learning curve—and that’s probably the real reason why most writers are so reluctant to experiment with it. But is it really worth it? The only way to find out is to make the leap. For the last 18 months, I’ve been making that leap, and even though I have yet to feel like I’ve mastered AI-assisted writing, I’ve already seen enough to believe that it is.
I’ve kept this blog for almost twenty years. During that time, there have been busy seasons and there have been slow seasons, but it’s never really gone away, and I don’t think it ever will. That’s good, because since I don’t do social media anymore, this is my only online public-facing platform.
With that in mind, I think I need to make a better effort to plan out what I post here, since whenever I fail to do that, I tend to default to weird political theories and speculation about current events—neither of which is probably very interesting to any of my current (or future) readers. For a while, I was posting my year-by-year take on the Hugo Awards, and that was pretty good, but I’ve reached a point where I have too many books to read to be able to do those posts weekly. I still plan to do them, but it’s going to be a bit sporadic for the forseeable future.
When it comes to writing, the thing that I’m focused the most on right now is working AI into my creative writing process. In fact, one of the reasons I’m in such a slow season with this blog is because I’ve been so focused on doing that, and I’m not sure how to share it. At some point in the future, though, I would like to publish a non-fiction book about writing with AI-assistance, so it might be useful to start breaking down the concepts and turning those into blog posts. So that’s something I’ll probably start doing.
I’d also like to share some excerpts from the stuff I’m currently working on, especially the AI-assisted stuff. I think you’ll be surprised at how good its getting, and I could really use the feedback to help make it even better. So that’s also something I’d like to start posting regularly.
Here’s what I’m thinking: on Tuesdays, I’ll post an excerpt from the AI draft of one of my current WIPs, and on Wednesdays I’ll post a little about what I’m doing with AI and how I’m incorporating it into my creative process. Saturdays will be for posts about books I’ve read or am currently reading. Beyond that, I’ll occasionally post a funny meme or an interesting video just for fun, and MAYBE post something about current events or weird political theories, but it won’t be the majority of the content I post here.
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy, which has somehow become the #2 search result for that term on Google. As a result, I’ve been getting hundreds of views on that blog post every week—and whenever Glenn Beck or some other conservative media commentator discusses the apocryphal prophecy, I get thousands of views.
I’m not an expert on the prophecy, and the only reason I blogged about it was because, as a fiction writer, I found it intriguing. For that reason, I’ve edited the original blog post to link to Michael B. Rush’s website and YouTube channel, since he’s the guy who first “discovered” this prophecy, or first discovered the interpretation that applies to our current political situation.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that most of Rush’s work is not true, especially the stuff he has to say about the lost ten tribes. But Ezra’s Eagle is still intriguing, because the events of the last couple of months suggest that the prophecy is still in play.
But first, it’s worth taking a more critical look at it:
I think this YouTuber makes some very good points, and his other videos about the end-times and Latter-day Saint eschatology are very well researched and present a solid position for where we currently stand and what still needs to happen before Christ returns in power and glory to inaugurate His millennial reign. However, I do think he gets a couple of things wrong here:
First, President Trump did not fill out his first term. He was de facto removed from office after the events of January 6th, as evidenced by the deletion of his Twitter account and the fact that General Milley reached out to his counterpart in the CCP to declare that he would not obey an order from the president to launch a nuclear attack on China. Yes, Trump was a “lame duck” president at the time, but he still had two weeks left in his term, during which he was de facto no longer the president.
Second, I think we can make a solid case that Joe Biden has been de facto removed from power. With all of the media attention on Trump and Harris, not a lot of people are talking about this, but Biden has basically been on “vacation” ever since he (or more likely, someone on his staff) issued the letter announcing that he was withdrawing from the election. In fact, it appears that the letter itself was part of a coup to remove him from power. His presidential schedule has basically been empty since then. So with all of that going on in addition to his obvious dimentia, can we really say that he’s still the de facto president? I think not.
By my reckoning, Trump and Biden both fit the criteria for the first two short feathers of the second wing, and Biden was indeed “sooner away than the first.” (2 Esdras 11:27). So if the events of the next few months were to play out according to the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy, what would that look like?
Please bear in mind that I am a science fiction writer, not a professional scriptorian or political commentator. I have no special knowledge, and I literally make up stories for a living. So please don’t take this scenario as a prediction of future events, or (God forbid) as any sort of encouragement to violence. Instead, think of it as a rough outline for a political thriller that follows Ezra’s Eagle—and if you want to turn my outline into an actual book, feel free to write it. It should make for a very entertaining piece of fiction, and nothing more.
But anyways, if I were writing a novel that follows the timeline of Ezra’s Eagle, here is how it would play out:
The prophecy makes it clear that each feather corresponds to a particular king or ruler. Trump was the first short feather of the second wing. If Biden is the second short feather, then there are still two more short feathers who have to have their time before the three eagle heads wake up, and it appears from verse 28 that these other two feathers are candidates in an election that is cut short. Unfortunately, since Trump has already had his time, I don’t think he’s one of those feathers. Therefore, for the prophecy to be fulfilled, I think he needs to be removed.
Here’s how I see it playing out: in the next couple of weeks, there is a second assassination attempt on Trump, which actually succeeds. As his running mate, J.D. Vance becomes the name on the top of the Republican ticket. Tensions reach a boiling point, and a lot of people expect the Right to react with political violence after Trump’s death, but that doesn’t actually happen at this time. Instead, Vance gets a huge surge of popularity, and it appears that he will win the election in a landslide.
This is what triggers the waking of the three Eagle heads.
2. The 2024 election is canceled and Janet Yellen becomes interim president
I still think Janet Yellen is the most likely candidate for the first eagle head, because of her connections with the Federal Reserve and her current position in the Treasury. In this scenario, Trump’s assassination fails to result in the sort of violent right-wing backlash that the deep state needs to construct the political narrative for a plausible Harris victory (with a “fortified” election, of course), so instead, they orchestrate an economic meltdown and a currency collapse. This is something they were already planning to do, in order to usher in their central bank digital currency (which is also the mark of the beast), but they have to accelerate those plans by a couple of years, and also take power directly in order to ensure a smooth transition.
We already see signs of the beginning of an economic collapse, or a “hard landing” as the financial wonks like to put it. The 2-year and 10-year US Treasuries have been inverted for the last two years, but they just uninverted a few days ago. Every time this has happened in the past, we get a recession, and with the current fragile state of the global economy and the financial system, a recession could easily turn into a total collapse.
3. The United States goes to war in a major escalation of global armed conflict
I’m not going to try to predict which flashpoint explodes first, or how the opening moves of the next global war play out. Personally, I think we’re already in the opening phases of WWIII, but there are a lot of ways that conflict could escalate: for example, a US/Israeli attack on Iran, or an Iranian attack on Israel, or an expansion of the Russo-Ukraine war to Poland and/or the Baltics, or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan… you get the picture. Point is, there is a major escalation of global war, potentially including tactical (though not strategic) nuclear weapons, and the US is at the heart of it.
The Ezra’s Eagle prophecy is clear that the first eagle head dies of some sort of illness. The most likely fulfillment of this is that we get a second pandemic, much worse than covid-19 and likely also from a human-engineered virus of some kind. It may start with a second lab leak, but given the state of the world at this point in the timeline, I think it’s more likely to be an actual bioweapon, deployed with the purpose of destroying our country.
5. The United States falls into a civil war, and the deep state breaks up
After Janet Yellen dies, the deep state breaks into competing factions, and the US breaks into a hot war, during which the other two eagle heads (ie Janet Yellen’s successors) kill each other. I have no idea who the other two members of this deep state triumvirate might be, so I’m not going to speculate. But in this scenario, they come out of the shadows after Yellen’s death and drive the country into a civil war.
6. A new election is held, but ultimately fails to restore the United States
The other proponents of the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy think that the last two feathers are connected with the Antichrist, but I reject this interpretation because I don’t believe that the prophecies about the Antichrist are talking about a single charismatic leader. Instead, I think these two last feathers are a remnant of the deep state that tries to put the country back together after the civil war. It could be two presidential candidates who are never seated, or it could be two actual presidents who fail to serve out their full terms.
7. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints steps into the post-civil war power vacuum as a political entity and establishes a new government within the territory of the former United States
This is also where Daniel’s prophecy about the stone cut out of the mountain without hands begins to have a political fulfillment, and when the Latter-day prophecies about the establishment of Zion in the Kansas City area of Missouri begin to be fulfilled. It’s also where the Ezra’s Eagle prophecy ends.
Once again, this is not how I think events will actually play out. Rather, if I were writing a novel about Ezra’s Eagle and the 2024 US presidential election, this is how I would write it. I’m not a theologian or a political pundit: I’m just a guy who makes up stories and publishes them as science fiction. And ultimately, I think Ezra’s Eagle is more fiction than fact.
