Category: Uncategorized

I will never apologize for refusing to use sensitivity readers.

The Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming estates have been in the news lately, after their publishers have worked with committees of “sensitivity readers” to rework their books in order to make them less offensive to woke sensibilities. The outcry was so great that Roald Dahl’s publishers agreed not to go through with their plan to sanitize his books, but to release the originals along with the censored versions (though I have heard conflicting stories indicating that the ebooks have been retroactively censored).

For many readers, this was their first time learning that “sensitivity readers” are a thing. While their outrage at the Orwellian rewriting of dead authors’ works is entirely justified, sadly, this is nothing new to the science fiction and fantasy field. Indeed, as Larry Correia and Steve Diamond pointed out in the latest episode of Writer Dojo, sensitivity readers have been a thing for at least a decade, and the most insidious examples of censorship are the ones we don’t see, when writers self-censor for fear of offending the outrage mobs.

For several decades now, science fiction and fantasy has skewed hard to the left, and the fact that there wasn’t a major outcry against these self-appointed Orwellian censors back in the 10s is a damning indictment of field as a whole. Why did it take until now, when the beloved works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming were threatened, for large numbers of people to speak out against this trend? Because all of the big names and major institutions in the SF&F field (or at least, the traditionally published side of it) tacitly approve of the censors and are quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) working to advance their politically correct agenda.

Back in the early 10s, when sensitivity readers were starting to become fashionable, I privately swore that I would never, under any circumstances, submit my work to any of these professional grievance mongers, nor internalize any of their rules to self-censor my work. If I was writing about another culture and needed to make sure I got things right, I would seek out feedback from a trusted friend who had personal experience with that culture (which is actually surprisingly easy here in Utah, thanks to how many of us have served missions in every corner of the Earth). I would not seek feedback from anyone whose paycheck depends on finding new and innovative ways to be offended.

The thing that’s sad, though, is how many writers have bent the knee to these cultural vandals, because they felt it was the only way to get their work out there. I happen to enjoy being a voice in the indie wilderness, but it’s not for everyone, and a lot of writers are self-censoring in order to keep their agents, or their publishing deals, or even just because they hope to have an agent or a publishing deal someday. It’s sad.

If I were feeling conspiratorial, I would point out that if my goal was to establish a neo-feudal, Orwellian police state, where religion was replaced with The Science, individuals were atomized away from their families, and the common folk were divided against each other by identitarian tribal distinctions in order to make them easier to govern, I would seek to capture the SF field before moving forward with my plans, so as to prevent a new 1984 or Brave New World from spoiling them. The pen is mightier than the sword, after all. If possible, I would subvert the SF field to actively advance my agenda, such as pushing the Marxist politics of envy, or the Malthusian economics of depopulation, or the post-modern rejection of any and all sexual mores and gender roles, so as to destroy the family as the fundamental unit of society. But none of that would really be necessary, so long as I made sure that nothing of any real truth or beauty came out of the field. All of the major awards would favor the ugliest lies that my propaganda machine put out into the world, and all of the professional organizations would pit authors and editors against each other according to their tribal identities, such as race or class or religion. Victimhood would be rewarded, and merit would be suppressed—and anyone in the field who dared to oppose this agenda would be harrassed relentlessly by my underlings, who would work to get them canceled from publishing deals and disinvited from major events.

In any case, I’m not going to be a part of that, even tangentially. Which is I I will never use sensitivity readers to review my work, nor apologize for refusing to bend the knee to the woke censors.

Why I’m not worried about AI replacing writers

So machine learning artificial intelligence has really been blowing up this past month, probably because of ChatGPT and all of the fascinating things that people are doing with it. I’ve been getting into it myself, using it to help write or improve my book descriptions, and also experimenting with it for writing stories.

At this point, any original fiction that ChatGPT writes is about the same quality as something written by an overly eager six year-old (minus the grammar and spelling errors), but I can see how that could change in the future, especially on a language learning model that’s trained on, say, Project Gutenberg, or the complete bibliographies of a couple of hundred major SF&F writers. The technology isn’t quite there yet, but in a few years it could be.

But apparently, that hasn’t stopped hordes of amateur writers and/or warrior forum types from using ChatGPT to spam the major magazines with AI-written stories. In fact, Clarkesworld recently closed to submissions because they were getting flooded with “stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI.” Neil Clarke wrote an interesting blog post on this problem, saying that this is a major growing problem for all of the magazines and that they will probably have to change the way they do business to deal with it.

So will AI eventually become so good that it replaces writers altogether? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

Replacement vs. collaboration

The gap between an AI that can do 100% of what a fiction writer can do and an AI that can do 90% is actually much wider than the gap between an AI that can do 90% and an AI that can only do 50%. That’s because both the 90%-effective AI and the 50%-effective AI require collaboration with a human in order to do the job. Neither of them can fully replace the human, though a human-AI team may be able to do the work of many humans working alone.

If we ever get to the point where AI replaces storytellers completely, we have much bigger problems than a few out-of-work science fiction writers. Storytelling lies at the heart of what it means to be human: we call ourselves “homo sapiens,” but we really should call ourselves “homo narrans,” since story is how we make sense of everything in our world. If an AI can replace that, then we as a species have become obsolete.

But I don’t think we’re going to ever reach that point. My wife is currently getting a PhD in computer science—specifically in machine learning and language models—and she believes that there is an inherent tradeoff between intelligences that can specialize well, and intelligences that can generalize well. AIs are master specialists, but humans are master generalists. If we ever build an AI that’s a master generalist, we may find that it’s actually much less intelligent than an average human, because of the tradeoff.

But all of that is purely speculative at this point. Right now, we really only have AIs that can do about 20% of what a fiction writer can do. In the coming years, we may ramp that up to 50% or even 90%, but anything less than 100% is not going to fully replace me.

Tools, force multipliers, and the nature of writing

However, that doesn’t mean that the thing we currently call “writing” isn’t going to change in some pretty dramatic ways, much as how the internal combustion engine dramatically changed the thing we call “driving.” And with these changes, we may very well get to the point where the market just can’t support as many professional writers, and the vast majority of us have to find other lines of work.

Conversely, it may actually expand the market for “reading” and create new demand for “writers,” as “reading” becomes more interactive and “writing” turns into an AI-mediated collaboration with the “reader.” Kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure that writes itself, based on the parameters set by the “writer.”

I have no idea, but the possibilities are fascinating, and the writers who are sure to lose are the ones who fail to confront the fact that their whole world is about to change—indeed, is already changing.

I think what it’s going to come down to is who owns the tools: not just who can use them, but who can modify them, personalize them, and use them to create original work. If copyright law decrees that the person who owns the AI also owns anything created with the AI’s assistance, that is going to be a major buzzkill… unless we get to the point where everyone can have their own personalized AI, which would be pretty cool. It would also solve a lot of the problems emerging from all of the super-woke filters that are getting slapped on ChatGPT.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the day where I can use an AI model to write fifty novels across a dozen pen names in a single year. What an incredible force multiplier that would be! But only if those novels are “mine,” whatever we determine that means.

So really, instead of arguing about whether AI will replace authors, what we really ought to be talking about are the aspects of writing and storytelling that drive us to create in the first place, and how those aspects can translate into a world where the nature of “writing” looks radically different than it does right now.

The “but I already know how it ends” problem

There is one problem that is unique to the written word, and it’s something that every writer has to confront when making the leap from amateur to professional (or even just from an amateur who dabbles in prose to an amateur who finishes what they start). The problem can best be summed up by this:

Why should I bother writing this story if I already know how it ends?

Unlike visual media such as TV, movies, video games, or illustrations, the art of the written word exists 100% in the reader’s head. These things we call “words” are really just symbols that convey thought from one mind to another, and have zero meaning outside of the head of the person reading. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a classic novel written in a foreign language that you don’t understand, and see how well you enjoy it.

But when we read, we like to be surprised on some level. There is something about the novelty of the story that appeals to us—indeed, that’s why we call them “novels.” The trouble is that the very act of creating a novel kills the novelty of it. At some point, you know how it’s going to end, and after that point the act of writing becomes a chore—or rather, it can be, unless you find something else about the process that fulfills you.

Some professional writers deliberately put off that moment for as long as they can, never figuring out their ending until it comes as surprise, even to them. Others look for fulfillment in something else, like the artfulness of their prose, or the dramatic suspense built up by their use of language. Still others just plow ahead, accepting this loss of novelty as a cost of doing business.

But however they choose to deal with it, every writer has to confront this problem in some manner before they make the leap from amateur to professional. And this is perhaps the biggest reason why I’m not too worried about AI replacing me as an author: because even an AI model that can do 90% of what I do will still require its human collaborator to address this problem.

Fanfiction and derivative works

Of course, the amateur vs. professional problem will affect some genres more than others: “write me a romance just like ____ where the male love interest has black hair instead and works in my office” is going to be just fine for a romance novel addict who just wants their happily-ever-after without any uncomfortable surprises. But we already have this: it’s called fanfiction.

Which is not to say that all fanfiction is formulaic and predictable. But the thing that sets fanfiction apart from original fiction are the things make it a derivative work: things like characters and settings that are already well-established, or a rehashing of storylines that were created by someone else.

This is an area where I think AI shows the most promise, and will turn out to be the most disruptive: not in creating original works, but in creating derivative works. Imagine if you could plug a novel into ChatGPT and tell it to rewrite the ending so that the girl ends up with your favorite character, or your favorite villain wins in the end. ChatGPT can’t do that very well right now, but I don’t think we’re far from building an AI language learning model that can—especially if it’s trained on actual books, instead of online content.

What I foresee is a world where AI blurs the line between fanfiction and original fiction so much that it becomes normal to read a bunch of these derivative works after you’ve read the original. Indeed, it may become a game to see who can make the most popular derivative work, and the popularity of some of them may very well exceed the popularity of the original.

Or it might become normal to run everything you read through an AI filter that removes offensive language, or the sex scenes that you were going to skip anyway (or conversely, an AI filter that adds offensive language and sex scenes). Taken to an extreme, this could lead to some really dystopian outcomes that further divide our already polarized world. We’ll have to see how it shakes out.

But all of this derivative content is only possible if there’s original content to derive it from. And while AI may lower the barrier of entry somewhat to creating original content (or not, since there really aren’t any barriers to entry right now, aside from the time and practice it takes to become proficient at your craft), the problem of “but I already know how it ends” will keep most dabblers and amateurs in the realm of creating derivative works, not original ones.

The act of “writing” and “reading” may change dramatically based on the force-multiplying effect of these tools. We may even get to a point where “writing” and “reading,” as most of us understand it, bear little resemblance to how we understand it today. But unless our very humanity becomes obsolete, I’m confident that I will still be able to carve out a place for myself as a writer.

Can this video possibly be more Georgian?

All it needs is a couple of old men playing backgammon on a folding table by the side of the road… although that’s something you see more of in the town, not the village.

For goodness’ sakes, it even has a rooster crowing at the end!

The Babylon Bee Guide to Every Christian Denomination

Saw this video a couple of days ago, thought it was hilarious—especially the parts about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “Mormons? Just kidding—we said Christian denominations!” And then later… “Unitarian Universalists? They’re atheists. We’ll even take the Mormons over these guys.”

Although, to be fair… if Joseph Smith’s first vision was real, and God really did tell fourteen year-old Joseph not to join any church, because He didn’t recognize any of them as His true church and kingdom… then of course every other denomination that rejects the restored gospel would also reject the Mormons as not being “true Christians.”

But yeah, one thing we definitely need to work on is our beard game. Brigham Young, Joseph F. Smith—we used to be even more awesome than the Church of Christ with their Duck Dynasty guys, but man, we’ve really lost it in the last hundred years!

Are vaccine-related deaths decimating the SF field?

This is an extremely polarizing and contentious issue right now, so I’m going to try to make this post as fact-based and non-sensational as possible.

Full disclosure: I never got the covid shot. My wife and I both had covid before the “vaccines” became available, and decided that our natural immunity provided enough protection for us. We were also trying to become pregnant, and even in January 2021, we had heard rumors that the shots were affecting both men’s and women’s fertility, as well as women’s menstrual cycles, and didn’t feel that the risk was worth it, in spite of the tremendous social pressure to get “vaccinated.”

At the end of the day, we simply did not trust that the “vaccines” were safe (and I put “vaccine” in quotes, because we now know that these shots do not provide lasting immunity, nor do they prevent transmission. The health establishment literally had to change the definition of “vaccine” for that word to apply to these treatments). We were wary of the fact that the emergency use provisions absolved the manufacturers of any liability, and that the long-term effects of these shots was unknown. In our family’s calculation, the potential risks outweighed the potential benefits, especially since we already had natural immunity and were unlikely to contract covid again.

In the past year, some very disturbing things about the “vaccines” have come to light. A recent poll by Rasmussen shows that more than 1 in 4 Americans believe they know someone who has died of the covid “vaccines”—not from covid itself, but from the vaccines. Interestingly, more Democrats (about 1 in 3) than Republicans (about 1 in 4) claim that they know someone, which is interesting, because the political left was much more taken with the “vaccine” mania than the political right. Remember that super cringey vaccine song on Colbert’s show?

The last two years have been crazy, for sure. But how has it affected the science fiction and fantasy world? The January issue of Locus Magazine made me curious about this, since Greg Bear recently passed away “after complications from heart surgery,” and the obituary section mentioned two other people under the age of 60, one of whom “died unexpectedly.”

So I went through all of the back issues of Locus from January 2021 to the present, and made a comprehensive list of every person mentioned in the obituaries, with their age and cause of death. If they died of a stroke or an accute heart-related issue, I bolded their name, since the mechanism for death appears to be related to blood clots caused by the spike protein that the mRNA “vaccine” is designed to generate. Also, I bolded the name of anyone 70 or younger who died without the cause of death listed. The global average life expectancy is just north of 70, which is lower than the US, but I decided to take the lower of those numbers. I also bolded any names where the cause was listed as covid, since many people who died in the first couple of weeks after getting the shot were automatically listed as covid, especially in the initial rollout.

Here is the list:

JAN 2021

  • Ben Bova (88): “contracting COVID-19, developing Pneumonia, and suffering a stroke.”
  • Phyllis Eisensetein (74): “suffered a stroke in January 2020 and entered hospice care not long after.”
  • Richard Corben (80): “died December 2, 2020 after heart surgery.”
  • Dean Ing (89): cause not listed (died July 21, 2020).

FEB 2021

  • James Gunn (97): cause not listed.
  • Storm Constantine (64): “following a long illness.”
  • Anton Strout (50): “died unexpectedly.”
  • Jael (83): cause not listed.
  • Alison Lurie (94): “in hospice.”
  • Richard West (76): “of COVID-19.”
  • Joseph Altairac (63): cause not listed.

MAR 2021

  • Kathleen Ann Goonan (68): cause not listed.
  • Rowena Morrill (76): “following years of poor health.”
  • Jean-Claude Carrière (89): “of natural causes.”

APR 2021

  • Norton Juster (91): “complications following a stroke.”
  • Dean Morrissey (69): cause not listed.
  • Michael G. Adkisson (65): cause not listed.

MAY 2021

  • John C. Pelan (63): “of an apparent heart attack.”
  • Wanda June Alexander (69): “diagnosed with lung cancer last year, and though she underwent successful treatment, her lungs were severely damaged, and she entered hospice care in January 2021.”

JUN 2021

  • Marvin Kaye (83): “in hospice care.”
  • Don Sakers (62): “of a heart attack.”
  • Jan Stirling (71): cause not listed.
  • Jim Rittenhouse (64): “in hospice care.”
  • Anish Deb (69): “of COVID-19.”

JUL 2021

  • Bob Brown (78): “after a valiant battle with esophageal cancer.”

AUG 2021

  • William F. Nolan (93): “of complications from an infection.”
  • Stephen Hickman (72): “of natural causes.”
  • Joe McKinney (52): “in his sleep.”
  • Paul Alexander (83): cause not listed.
  • John Longendorfer (90): cause not listed.

SEP 2021

  • Elizabeth Anne Hull (84): cause not listed.
  • Patricia Kennealy-Morrison (75): cause not listed.
  • C. Dean Andersson (75): “in his sleep… after a long illness.”
  • J.W. Rinzler (58): “of pancreatic cancer.”
  • Ron Weighell (70): “a few weeks after suffering a stroke.”
  • Lorna Toolis (68): cause not listed.
  • Judi B. Castro (58): “following a brief illness.”

OCT 2021

  • Erle Korshak (97): cause not listed.
  • L. Neil Smith (75): “after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease.”
  • Carol Carr (82): “of lung cancer.”
  • Genevieve DiModica (73): “of natural causes.”

NOV 2021

  • Mary Kay Kare (69): “of a blood infection.”
  • Gary Paulsen (82): “of cardiac arrest.”
  • Lou Antonelli (64): cause not listed.
  • Douglas Barbour (81): “of lung cancer.”
  • Otacilio Costa D’Assuncao Barros (67): “was found dead in his apartment… after two days without contact by neighbors. The cause of death has not been disclosed.”

DEC 2021

  • Petra Mayer (46): “died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism.”
  • Robert Thurston (84): cause not listed.
  • Jim Fiscus (76): “died suddenly.”
  • Catherine M. Morrison (52): “after a brief illness.”

JAN 2022

  • Anne Rice (80): “of complications from a stroke.”
  • Diana G. Gallagher (75): “of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”
  • William G. Contento (74): “after a long struggle with prostate cancer.”
  • Jeremy G. Byrn (57): “after a long illness.”
  • Chris Achilleos (74): cause not listed.
  • Jose Luis Benicio da Fonseca (84): cause not listed.

FEB 2022

  • Willie Siros (69): cause not listed.
  • Dave Wolverton (64): “after suffering a severe head injury falling down the stairs the previous day.”
  • Ron Goulart (89): cause not listed.
  • John Jos. Miller (67): cause not listed.
  • J. Brian Clark (93): cause not listed.
  • Sally Gwylan (67): “in a traffic accident.”
  • Jane E. Hawkins (70): “was a cancer survivor, but she received a terminal diagnosis and went into hospice.”
  • Elizabeth Miller (82): cause not listed.
  • Bill Wright (84): “fallen at home and ‘thought he had broken his back.’”
  • Chuck Verrill (unknown): “after a long illness.”
  • Athos Eichler Cardoso (87): cause not listed.

MAR 2022

  • Angelica Gorodischer (93): cause not listed.
  • Tom Dupree (72): “of cardio-respiratory arrest.”
  • Harold R. Johnson (68): “of lung cancer.”

APR 2022

  • Andy Remic (50): “of cancer.”
  • Faren Miller (71): “after being hospitalized with serious respiratory problems.”
  • Shirley Hughes (94): cause not listed.
  • Melissa Mead (62): cause not listed.
  • Priscilla Tolkien (92): “after a brief illness.”
  • Aiki Flinthart (unknown): “after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis.”

MAY 2022

  • Robert C. Cornett (69): cause not listed.
  • Bill Johnson (65): cause not listed.
  • Valerio Evangelisti (69): cause not listed.
  • Joel Houssin (68): “after a long battle with MS.”
  • Carlos Emilio C. Lima (65): “from an infection following surgery.”
  • Lygia Fagundes Telles (98-103): cause not listed.

JUN 2022

  • Patricia A. McKillip (74): cause not listed.
  • Sergey Dyachenko (77): cause not listed.

JUL 2022

  • Ken Kelly (76): cause not listed.

AUG 2022

  • Eric Flint (75): cause not listed.
  • Geoffrey H. Goodwin (50): “of heart failure.”
  • Dorothy J. Heydt (80): cause not listed.
  • Barbara Haldeman (Barbara Delaplace) (69): cause not listed.
  • Jonathan Lyons (52): “succumbed to injuries after being mugged.”

SEP 2022

  • Nichelle Nichols (89): “of heart failure.”
  • Alexei Panshin (82): cause not listed.
  • Robert “Bob” Self (55): “as the result of an accident.”
  • Wayn McCalla (53): “following a long illness.”
  • Roland J. Green (76): cause not listed.

OCT 2022

  • Peter Straub (79): “after a long illness.”
  • Bruce Taylor (75): “after a brief hospital stay. He had a heart condition and was in poor health recently.”
  • Maureen Kincaid Speller (63): “she had cancer.”
  • J.G. “Huck” Huckenpohler (81): cause not listed.

NOV 2022

  • Robert A. Madle (102): “died peacefully in his sleep.”
  • Albert E. Cowdrey (88): cause not listed.
  • Hilary Mantel (70): cause not listed.
  • Matthew Mather (52): “died suddenly.”
  • Lani Forbes (35): “of neuroendocrine cancer.”

DEC 2022

  • Tom Maddox (77): “of a stroke.”
  • Martin Morse Wooster (64): “the victim of a hit-and-run.”
  • Jill Pinkwater (81): cause not listed.
  • Sue Strong Hassler (84): “of complications from back surgery and COVID.”
  • Anne Fakhouri (48): “following a long illness.”
  • Justin E.A. Busch (63): cause not listed.
  • Ned Dameron (79): “of ALS.”

JAN 2023

  • Greg Bear (71): “after complications from heart surgery.”
  • Anne Harris (58): “after suffering a stroke.”
  • Marcus Sedgwick (54): “died unexpectedly.”

To be clear, there may be benign explanations for many or even most of the people whose names are bolded. Strokes and heart attacks have been killing people long before the covid “vaccines” existed, and continue to kill people without any help from the “vaccines.” Also, many people who died under 70 may simply have been in poor health—after all, it’s not like the SF field is known for robust physical fitness. However, there may also be people on this list who did die of vaccine-related issues, whose names I did not bold because they were over 70 and the cause wasn’t listed. So it cuts both ways.

My purpose is not to compile a comprehensive list of vaccine-related deaths in the SF field, but to point out some deaths that appear to be suspect. And of the 114 people listed, more of them “died unexpectedly” or “died suddenly” than died of covid, which is worth noting.

If you haven’t seen the documentary Died Suddenly, it’s worth watching, even though it does have some flaws. Most notably, toward the end it recycles some disturbing footage of people who either did not die, or who died before the pandemic, implying that they all died of the vaccines. You can find a much more in-depth and non-sensational treatment of vaccine-related deaths and injuries on Chris Martenson’s channel, especially in this video where he interviews several morticians about the clotting issue:

Vaccine safety is a very serious issue, and every day, it seems that we are learning new things about the covid “vaccines” that call into question all of our assumptions and beliefs. The science fiction field has always leaned to the political left, especially on the traditional publishing side. For the past two years, many of our conventions and other events have pushed mask mandates, or required proof of vaccination, including our own LTUE here in Utah.

Has this lockstep, unquestioning, and at times almost militant advocacy of the establishment narrative led to the tragic loss of several writers and artists before their time? Has it decimated—indeed, is it continuing to decimate—the talented creators in our field? How many wonderful stories will never be written because of this? How many voices will no longer be heard?

I hope that we can come to a place where we can honestly start asking these questions. Because if we can’t, then the science fiction and fantasy field has lost much more than those who have died, and the gifts they would have shared with us.

I suppose I should post something here

So it’s been more than a week since my last post. Don’t worry, I’m still around: it’s just that this blog is always the first ball to drop when I need to get things going. The post-holiday season was actually harder on us in a lot of ways than the holiday season itself, with insomnia, stomach bugs, and the like, but we’re getting back on our feet and doing pretty well.

The main thing I’ve been focusing on is writing, and I’m happy to say that I’ve been making very good progress these last few days. I’m trying out a completely new process, which I’ve blogged about a little, but I’ll have to write a full blog post on it once I’ve got all the kinks worked out. It basically involves hacking my ADHD to write more, in much the same way I hacked my ADHD to read more.

So yeah, things have been kind of crazy around here, and definitely more off-balanced than I would like. But it’s also turning out to be more productive, too—at least when our toddler isn’t throwing up and I’m able to sleep through the night. Happy new year!

My Wild Predictions for 2023

  1. In January or February, Russia will launch a major new offensive in the Russo-Ukraine War, destroying much of the Western narrative surrounding that conflict. However, it will not be a decisive victory, and the war will not end this year.
  2. China will launch a ground invasion of Taiwan, and will seriously miscalculate the US-allied response. This war will also continue into 2024.
  3. A tactical nuclear weapon or dirty bomb will be used in combat, either escalating one of the ongoing conflicts or starting a new one. However, there will not be a major nuclear exchange between global powers this year.
  4. A Washington DC politician or judge will be assassinated, most likely by a lone wolf radicalized on the internet.
  5. Food and energy prices will continue to inflate. However, deflation will be a more serious problem for the elite managerial class.
  6. The covid narrative is going to flip in a major way. The vaccines and the lockdowns will become anathema, and many prominent players in the pandemic (including Trump) will come under serious fire from both political sides.
  7. Toward the end of the year, we will start to hear rumblings of another pandemic.
  8. Deleting social media will become a major cultural trend.
  9. President Russell M. Nelson will announce something huge in General Conference, on the order of the Come, Follow Me initiative in 2018.
  10. In spite of all these global challenges, our family will continue to thrive and will end the year even better off than we now are, both spiritually and temporally.

Quick update

So I was going to post the next blog post in the Grand Conspiracy series today, but this week between Christmas and New Year’s has been unusually hectic for us. Long story short, both of my families (extended in-laws and my own extended family) are in town, so I’ve been juggling family obligations between the two of them. If I were still single, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but now that we have small children, it’s not quite so easy.

On top of that, I’m trying to stay up on publishing tasks, including the production of all of my books as auto-narrated audiobooks, and a new short story single that’s supposed to come out the first Saturday of January. Also, I’m trying very hard to get some writing in whenever I can, and since that obviously takes precedence over the blog (and really should take precedence over publishing tasks, too), this blog is the thing that often gets the shaft.

But I know exactly what I want to write for this blog post series, and I definitely plan to put it all out there eventually, even if it takes a while. In other words, I’m not going anywhere, so it will get done eventually. Just have to deal with other things right now.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this amusing video that I recently watched. Enjoy!