Those of you who follow the podcast I do with mystery writer Michael Pinkus are probably aware that both of us struggled through June. We struggled with progress, with confidence, with if all this was worth the effort, the works. It's unfortunate that we both hit a lull at the same time, but even so I think we managed to offer each other enough encouragement to get through it. Now in July's first podcast, it's clear we've both recovered and are on our way to being fully fired up and back at it.

In a more literal sense, I had a long-awaited elective surgery early this month and am well on my way to a full recovery from that.

Thus, welcome to the recovery edition of my newsletter!

A quick note on technology: if you've had problems following links to my site, it's my fault. Read my firewall explanation below and please, please, please let me know if you still have issues.

Writing

I continue to make painfully slow progress in editing my most recent draft, but I am making progress. I believe in May I said I'd be done in June. Now humbled by that mistake, I'm not mentioning a date. Instead I'm measuring progress by page count, and I'm more than halfway through.

No one would accuse me of being a prolific writer. I've already put years into my current novel and at this point it looks like it won't see the light of day until 2027. I've seen others turn out twenty or more books over the same period. A lot of that is down to learning the craft. I do hope that subsequent novels will arrive more quickly, I doubt I will ever be churning out a new book every two or three months.

This is problematic. In a world chock full of contradictory advice for new writers, one thing stands out as consistent: the more work you have out there, the better your odds of finding readers. I have tried to address this by writing short stories, but most ideas I have in that area rapidly expand to novel-sized tales. I don't want to be that person with a dozen unfinished novels, so those get shelved until my current work is published. That's not helpful.

I've had a little more luck with flash fiction, but I've had trouble figuring out what to do with it. Until now.

I've decided that these stories are best shared with you, my subscribers. I considered doing a Patreon, but that means managing yet another platform, another platform out of my control and subject to overnight enshittification, and a separate list of people to manage and connect with. Besides, I'm not interested in turning these into a revenue stream, and the last thing I need is the pressure of needing to deliver some new work on a regular schedule (a regular newsletter is challenging enough as it is.)

It appears that Kit, my newsletter service, has a way to integrate subscribers with my site, but the integration is clunky, and not a friendly experience for readers. Besides, I really don't want to be implementing something that ties me to a specific platform. Sooner or later a private capital firm will make an offer the owners of Kit can't refuse, and that will start the slow decline of the service into the toilet. That's also when I'll take my mailing list to another provider. If I have a custom-coded integration, then it will be easier to make the move.

At the same time, writing code detracts from writing words, which is distinctly not what I want to be doing right now.

The interim solution is old-school: password protected content. With that I give you this piece of flash fiction: Sentient Interstellar Probe Number Five. The password is "$sub/scri.bed" (yes, that's a woefully insecure password, but it's really just there to defend against the AI scrapers. I'll probably change it from time to time and post the new one here.) This will give you access to a new section of the site exclusively for subscribers. I'll highlight anything new in the newsletter and the same password will get you access to all subscriber content.

I'd love any feedback you have on the story. Just reply to this email with your comments.

A side note: My Over-Aggressive Firewall

I make an attempt to refrain from talking about software in this newsletter, sometimes with limited success, but in this case it's relevant to some of you who use a web client to read your email. I will explain:

I have a custom-coded application firewall that's designed to prevent bad actors from overwhelming the small server my sites run on. These days, more than 90% of the traffic to my site comes from search engines, AI scrapers, vulnerability scanners, SEO trackers, and so on. Because new forms of unwanted traffic appear on an almost daily basis, this code is pretty aggressive about blocking anything that looks even vaguely illegitimate. Just after sending out my last newsletter, I noticed that two of you clicked on links to my site (I don't know which two) and my firewall blocked the request.

I think I've addressed this, but it's hard to be sure, so I have an ask: if you click on a link or try to access my site in some way and don't get through, please let me know by replying to this email. There's only one case where I definitely won't be able to help: if you're using a VPN service that has facilitated attacks on my server in the past, you won't be let through. Complain to your VPN provider.

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