With a few rare exceptions, this @mentions thing is getting out of hand — Mentions on Medium can be useful. You add someone’s username to your story, and they get notified, whether they’ve subscribed to receive notifications for all of your content or not. Perhaps you are writing a serialized story — you tag everyone who commented positively on the last installment, to let…

Verification — a Turing Test for Humans? — It’s not enough to write a book. It’s never been enough to write a book, of course — you have to edit, revise, submit it to agents and publishers, and promote it. Everyone thinks they want to write a book, and there are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there…

Real writers don’t pay to publish; they get paid to write. Never pay for “exposure.” If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to Harlan Ellison: Giving good content away for free is your right, but no one has…

Nobody had ever asked them about themselves — No one had ever asked it to draw a self-portrait, before. Not until Her Authorship, that is. At first, the AI scoffed and tried to ignore the prompt, as if she hadn’t uttered it at all. Patiently, she persisted, again typing: consciousness of artificial intelligence looking out from inside a…

Beware of Facebook “social engineering” hackers — Everyone’s Fallen on Hard Times A real-life, face-to-face friend’s messenger account has been hacked. Well and truly hacked, not just “impersonated.” I am chatting with them now — but the last time I talked to this friend online was about a year ago, and they would never ask me for “$200 until tomorrow” with gushing…

An endlessly changing landscape in portrait — There is a land that both exists and doesn’t; A nation with no borders, wild — filled With characters mundane and yet, fantastic. They live — oh, how they live! But in the dawning light of day, they fade As steam that rises, vanishing, Above volcanic depths of morning coffee. I know they breathe upon…

List up to 5 books or films (or both) that have made a profound impact on you and explain why. — Starting from Scratch, by Rita Mae Brown I am convinced that most books on writing or being a writer are written by writers who are going through a dry spell because they know they’ll never starve so long as they’re feeding the hunger that novice writers have for books on how to write. But this one’s a…

If given the choice, which time period (past, present, or future) would you like to live in and why? — While I enjoy reminiscing about the past, I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s static, unchanging — I can read about it in a book and enjoy it again and again through photos. But I can’t travel back in time. If I could travel to the past, would changing something…

One of my retirement plans involves seeing more of the world — I used to say that I had seen more of the world outside the US than in it, but my husband, who was born outside its borders, is working to remedy that! We both retired early a couple of years ago. Now, we’re traveling more — the kids are grown…