Writers Beware: Scam scam scammity scam

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The world is filled with people who want to be writers. The world is even more filled with people who don’t want to be writers but want to have written a book, which isn’t the same thing, though that’s a matter for another post.

The number of people who can get published is, as a fraction of the number of people who want to publish a book, quite small. In fact, you’re statistically more likely to win the lottery—yes, really—than you are to make a living at writing. It’s a bit like playing pro sports that way.

And as with playing pro sports, whenever you have a huge number of people who really really really want to do a thing and only a small number of people who can do the thing, that entire field soon attracts scammers that hover like a cloud of bloodsucking flies around anyone who even breathes the slightest hint of interest in the thing.

I have quite a number of books out (I’ll likely follow this up with a list of the books I have out now or soon coming out), which means that I am absolutely swamped with email come-ons and social media DM solicitations from people who would love to help take my money without giving me anything in return.

On an average day, I receive anywhere from three to ten or more spam emails from people claiming they can get me a film deal, or put me in front of their “book club,” or pitch my book to TV studios, or do a “publicity drive” for me, or make book trailers for me…all for pay, of course.

A lot of these emails are just straight-up fraud. Yesterday, I got an email claiming to be from a famous and well-known acquisitions editor for a major, highly-regarded publisher…but using a gmail address instead of that editor’s actual publisher address.

Today I got this gem, which uses the Amazon logo and implies through paltering that they’re affiliated with Amazon, which is, again, just a straight-up fraud.

So, if you’ve ever dreamed of being a writer, here’s a quick run-down of how to spot the obvious scams and frauds.

In real publishing, money flows from the publisher to the author, never the other way. The “vanity press” is the oldest and most well-known scam in the publishing world.

Vanity presses pretend to be publishers, but they charge you, the author, to publish your book. The business model of real publishers is that money comes from book readers, flows to the publisher, and from there some of the money flows to the author. The business model of vanity presses is money flows from the author to the “publisher.” The “publisher” tyically has no distributor; they will tell you they can get you into bookstores (spoiler: they can’t), and at the end of the day they will not do anything to promote your book because they don’t care about book sales. That isn’t where the money comes from.

This same thing applies to “self-publishing services.” A lot of writers know about self-publishing on Amazon KDP and such, but don’t know how to do it. Enter the “self-publishing service,” which will, for fees ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, get your book on Amazon KDP…something that you could do yourself for free.

They typically will tell you they will handle things like book formatting and editing. They typically don’t, or if they do, they do it poorly.

Case Study #1: “Luminous Library,” which bills itself as a service to help authors publish their masterpieces. They will, for a substantial fee, handle formatting and such, but…

Inconsistent fonts, inconsistent type sizes, no indenting, no standard formatting at all.

This extends to their own website; their home page contains multiple grammar and usage errors:

Many “self-publishing agencies” are like this: huge fees, minimal work that produces material unacceptable even by the modest standards of most self-published content.

Real publishers do not send unsolicited emails or requests. Real publishers receive tens of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts a year. Real agents can get hundreds of queries a day. They do not have time nor interest in sending would-be authors emails saying “hey, I want to represent you.” That doesn’t happen.

The new shiny in author scams is people who claim to be famous agents or editors, using the names and logos of famous literary agents and publishers to scam people.

Corollary #1: Agents and publishers use their official company email addresses, not free emails like Gmail.

Corollary #2: Agents never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever charge money up front to prospective clients, for “reading fees” or for any other reason.

The business model of a book agent is they make a percentage of the royalties on your book. That means they have an incentive to get you the best possible deal. Their money, like the publisher’s money, comes from sales of your book, not from you, the author. All “agents” who charge you up front are always scammers. No exceptions.

Emails offering to “put you in front of movie studios” are always, always a scam. Again, there are no exceptions.

Movie studios are only interested in IP that has already demonstrated a track record of successful sales. There are no people who accept money from you in order to pitch your book to studios. As with agents, the people who promote intellectual property to studios make their money on the back end, not from the owners of the IP.

Emails offering to do podcasts or “book club readings” for money are always, always a scam. These make up the vast bulk of the scam emails I get, outnumbering fake agents, fake publishers, and fake marketers combined by about 4 to 1.

Fake publishers were once the mainstay of the author scam machine, but the Internet and spam email have democratized the scam industry. Fake book clubs are the domain of the solo scammer, the scammer who doesn’t want to set up a legitimate-looking business. Anyone anywhere in the world can send out fake book club scam emails…and they do.

Many of these people impersonalte Lori Hettler, the founder of the Next Best Book Club. I get emails from various fake “Lori Hettler”s on a monthly basis, all of them using free email providers.

Unsolicited emails offering to do promotion, “book trailers,” Amazon “optimization,” and so forth are always scams. Yes, there are real book promotion companies. No, they don’t contact you out of the blue.

Now, there are legitimate companies who support authors with pay-for-play services like editing, book formatting, and so forth. There are even “hybrid publishers” where the author and the publisher split production costs, though in my experience most of these lean toward the scammy end of the spectrum.

The thing about all of these, though, is they don’t send unsolicited emails.

The scam emails have, when you’ve seen a few hundred of them, a certain cadence and tone: they flatter you, quote from your book’s blurb or Amazon listing to try to make it seem as though they’ve read your book (spoiler, they haven’t), and they tell you how wonderful you are and how many books you could be selling if only you’d use their services…because it totally isn’t your fault you’re not a bestseller, it’s always down to just not quite having what they offer.

Beware, beware anyone who reaches out to you unsolicited on social media or in email offering to turn your book into a sensation for a price.

Regular reminder: Whether you’re a beginning writer or a seasoned pro, whether you write niche nonfiction or mass-market fiction, never, ever sign a book publishing contract before you email

beware (at) sfwa (dot) org

This free service helps you avoid scammers and publishers with poor reputations listed on the Writers Beware list of predatory book publishers.

Scaling the Glass Mountain

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I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about what I’m calling “glass mountain theory.”

Most people like to think of themselves as honest. Most people don’t like to lie directly, even when they want you to believe something that isn’t true. So rather than out and out lie, many people will palter: that is, tell the literal technical truth, but do it in such a way as to manipulate and mislead.

Paltering is a specific form of manipulation involving lies of omission and misdirection while sticking only to the precise technical truth. What the palterer says is factually correct…from a certain point of view. It’s a common tool of manipulation.

There’s quite a body of research on this that shows people palter when they have two conflicting desires: they want to see themselves as good, trustworthy, and honest, and want to be able to tell themselves they aren’t liars; but at the same time, they want to create an impression or a belief that isn’t compatible with truth.

I did quite a lot of research about paltering and other forms of deception while I was working on the first draft of my new nonfiction book about social justice. I found a Harvard Business School article on paltering, which provided this example of paltering:

In one study, they asked participants to imagine this scenario: Over the last 10 years your sales have grown consistently, but next year you expect sales to be flat. If you are asked by your counterpart “How do you expect sales to be next year?” the response will be different depending on the type of deception: […]

If you mislead with paltering, you might say, “Well, as you know, over the last 10 years our sales have grown consistently.” This answer is technically true, but it doesn’t highlight your expectation that sales will be flat in the year ahead, and you are aware that it is likely to create the false impression by your counterpart that sales will grow.

There’s an interesting thing about this palter: it doesn’t actually answer the question. If the question is “how do you expect sales to go next year?”, then “our sales have increased over the last ten years” isn’t an answer to the question that was asked.

What is the glass mountain?

Imagine a mountain made completely of absolutely transparent glass: it’s invisible, but still solid.

You wouldn’t be able to see it directly, but you would still be able to see its shape, its contours, by the way the environment moves around it.

On a foggy day, you’d be able to see the mist rolling off its slopes. On snowy days, you’d see the snow accumulating in its crevices. You wouldn’t see the mountain, but you’d see the shape of the mountain by its absence, by the way things move around it.

I think that happens with paltering.

When you read examples of paltering (and while I was researching my book, I read a lot of examples), you start noticing something peculiar: palters form a linguistic glass mountain. They steer around questions. They fail to offer details. You see them by the way words move around the absence of the thing you aren’t supposed to notice.

Paltering manipulates by steering you away from the truth, by leading your eye away from the thing the palterer doesn’t want you to see. But like the glass mountain on a foggy day, you can, if you look, still see the shape of it, hidden in the negative space between words.

The problem is that sneaky little qualifier: if you look.

People largely hear what they want to hear. People are not rational animals, we are rationalizing animals. A person who wants to hear that the next few quarters will still show growth is unlikely to question the “over the last 10 years our sales have grown consistently” non-answer. It’s an answer-shaped space, a conversational void where an answer should be, that gives the person asking the question a reason to believe what she wants to believe, and that’s good enough. It’s a glass mountain.

I mean, we live in a world where people can create romance scam profiles using broken English and stolen photos of famous celebrities and still find marks. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

The thing is, though, the glass mountain is a bit like the arrow in the FedEx logo: once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. (Yes, it’s an intentional part of the logo.)

Paltering as Collaboration: Scaling the Glass Mountain Together

Paltering is occasionally a collaboration between palterer and person being paltered, and when that happens, you can see the form and shape of the glass mountain not only in what the palterer doesn’t say, but when the person being paltered to doesn’t ask.

There is, for example, a phenomenon I only became aware of a few years ago, where someone in the public eye is accused of wrongdoing and then people that person has never had a romantic or sexual connection with at all begin describing themselves as that person’s “ex” and describe being abused or mistreated by that person.

This happens so often that therapists and psychologists are aware of it and have described the reasons it happens, which generally fall into one of four broad categories of reasons: delusional thinking (which is a whole area of psychologiy of its own; when it manifests as false stories of being involved with someone you were never involved with, it’s called “delusional erotomania”), control/manipulation, attention-seeking, and jealousy/revenge.

I watched in fascination a few years back when a TV actor was accused of abusing his partner, and then another woman came forward to report he’d abused her, too. This other woman was interviewed in New York magazine and The New York Post, both of which described her as an “ex-girlfriend” even though it later turned out they’d never even met.

The glass mountain became obvious in the questions the interviewers didn’t ask her, which showed up like the arrow in the FedEx logo: they didn’t ask how they’d met, or how long they’d been dating, or how their relationship unfolded—questions you’dnormally expect to hear from someone trying to uncover truth rather than sell an agenda.

Sometimes this is intentional, as a newspaper that wants to sell a sensational story, and sometimes it’s motivated reasoning, as someone who wants to believe the lie so doesn’t want to poke too closely at the story for fear of undoing the illusion.

Once you’ve learned to see the glass mountain in the spaces left unsaid by the palterer, you also start to see the dance, the collaboration between palterer and palteree, in the spaces left unasked by the palteree.

AI Enshittification Comes Home

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Okay, so, this is not going to be a rant about how terrible AI art is, or how LLMs have stolen all our creative output (though I’m still waiting for thousands of dollars from the Anthropic settlement, given how Anthropic bootlegged several of my books to feed the gaping maw of their LLMs).

No, I’m talking about another kind of AI enshittification: Price-grouging.

I just this moment filed a formal complaint with the California attorney general against a company called GoHardDrive. I am hopeful this becomes some kind of class-action thing. A similar case is currently grinding through the gears of justice against Samsung, for doing the same shitty thing.

So.

In August of 2024, I bought a hard drive from GoHardDrive. It came with a 2-year warranty. In May of 2026, it failed, under warranty. No problem, I thought, I’ll file a warranty claim and get it replaced.

I didn’t count on the AI boom.

The hard drive in question

Thanks to the AI boom, computer RAM and hard drive prices have shot up, anywhere from triple to quintuple their old prices, as demand for memory and storage outstrips the world’s entire supply. People are signing purchase orders for entire manufacturing runs through 2032-2034.

That means what was once an $89 hard drive now sells for $299 (or more!). So by replacing my hard drive under warranty, GoHardDrive is losing the immense profit in selling it to an AI datacenter…and it’s not like they can just make more because the world’s manufacturing capacity is completely saturated. Hard drives are being sold at enormous markups that literally haven’t been manufactured yet.

Faced with that, hard drive companies (including big, well-known companies like Samsung) are now routinely refusing to honor their warranties. Why should they? Every warranty replacement is costing them an extra $200 in profit, and what are you gonna do? Refuse to buy a hard drive from them again? They’ve already sold every hard drive they will make from now to 2034, why on earth would they care?

This is a big, big problem. It’s a double whammy for anyone buying computers, hard drives, SSDs, or smartphones right now. Not only are you paying through the nose for your kit, but if it fails, what are you gonna do? If the vendor says “nah, bruh, I’m not gonna replace that,” now what? A warranty is only worthwhile if it’s honored.

In my case, what I did was file a formal complaint with the California Attorney General, since GoHardDrive is in California. The California government is taking a pretty dim view of AI profiteering right now, so I have some small measure of hope they’ll be invested in this.

If you’ve run into problems like this, I’d love to hear from you!

Kink-shaming and policing the boundaries of acceptability

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Image: Nina Hill

Okay, hold onto your hat, because ima get a bit ranty.

There’s a thing I’m seeing in the kink scene these days that’s making me a bit mental. Specifically, I’m seeing a shift away from “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay” to “I am the guardian of what practices are acceptable, even between consenting adults, and those who engage in play I personally don’t enjoy are not only bad and wrong, but actively sick”…as often as not accompanied by heaping servings of projection and mind-reading, with an extra-large order of gaslighting on the side.

Anyone who’s read me over the past few years/decades knows that I am a champion of personal autonomy and agency. I’ve talked extensively about this before. I enjoy engaging in kink where I consent to things in such a way that I can’t withdraw consent, and yes, I understand that’s not a lotta people’s cuppa, which is fine. Different folks have different tastes, yeah?

Thing is, I’ve seen a backlash brewing in the kink scene against folks who enjoy playing with shelf-stable or irrevocable consent, in a weird sort of “people who do this are eeeevil” way.

This has especially been the case with the fetish called “somnophilia,” or sleep sex. This is, as it turns out, a kink I quite like, though more and more I’m seeing claims that it’s always bad, always toxic, whatever.

One of these anti-somnophilia screeds, which I read with some small measure of frustration and, I have to say, a bit of amusement as well, is here: Somnophilia: More a Crime Than a Kink. Gaslighting, mind-reading, projection, this one has it all.

I invite you to read the entire essay. I’ll be picking apart specific arguments that jumped out at me, starting with this one:

There are three things are taken from the victim when they’re tranquilized: their speech, their sight and their movement. Historical patriarchy required the silence of women and allowed them to speak only when they were furthering its cause. Domestication symbolized the lack of movement. Sight, the precious awareness that life could be any different.

Now, there are women and girls with movement, voices and vision. As the patriarchy fights its loss of power, its most ancient beneficiaries feel it the most.

To silence, to blind, to imprison women in their bodies, is to enact patriarchal principles within one’s cosy domain, safe from scrutiny. It is the inability to perceive woman as a whole being. Roofieing is an act of opportunistic cowardice, an offshoot of a dying patriarchy. It’s how men fight back.

Did you feel it? A disturbance in the Force?

I could point out the obvious, surface flaw in this argument: that it equates somnophilia with “roofieing,” a little linguistic Three Card Monte that you aren’t supposed to notice or react to, but I’ll say the bit you’re not supposed to say: sleep sex doesn’t have to involve drugging someone, and most often doesn’t.

But this is a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation argument. You’re supposed to get so hung up on the surface flaw in the argument that you start debating whether it’s “really” somnophilia if no drugs are involved that you don’t notice the deep flaw in the argument:

Rather bold to assume that somnophilia always involves a heterosexual couple in which a man has sex with a sleeping woman, eh? 🤣

I’m a man who likes somnophilia. It fascinates me that the people who argue about how evil this kink is assume that must go only one direction, that it must mean I only like it if I’m having sex with a sleeping (female) partner. In fact, I have female lovers who like having sex with me in my sleep; two of my lovers have standing, shelf-stable consent to do as they please to me whilst I sleep.

Remember, folks: when someone tells you you what you’re thinking and feeling, when someone claims to speak to what motivates you without listening to you…that’s the very essence of gaslighting.

This reminds me of the second-wave, sex-negative feminist argument that bondage and domination are always degrading to women, because they’re inevitably a male in the dominant role tying or dominating a woman in the submissive role. (When this was pointed out, one famous sex-negative feminist said something along the lines of “if men play a submissive role, it’s because they get something out of it, so the man is still in control.” Weird that she could imagine a man getting something out of being bound or bossed about, but couldn’t imagine a woman getting something out of it.)

This is a type of projection we see all the time. “I am a woman; I cannot imagine enjoying this; therefore, no woman would ever enjoy this. Women who say they enjoy it are, therefore, either lying or brainwashed by the Patriarchy.” The same form of argument has long been used to assert that gay men and lesbians must be mentally ill: “I cannot imagine wanting to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, nobody would want to shag someone of the same sex; therefore, someone who says they want to shag someone of the same sex is mentally defective in some way.”

The lyrics change but the tune remains the same.

And the thing is, the person who wrote this essay is so close to getting it.

The essay also says:

I’m an advocate for sleep as a panacea for most ills. It’s about the most vulnerable state one’s body can be in, a semi-death state, one’s sensory perception reduced to the bare minimum, one’s cells in desperate need of rejuvenation, the shutting down of a tired brain. It’s also a state that requires complete trust in one’s environment, the letting down of one’s guard.

Yes! Yes, exactly! This! 👆This, right here! That’s what makes somnophilia hot! You’re allowing someone in to that most vulnerable, most unguarded space. That’s the point, at least for me. It’s hot because it’s so incredibly, unbelievably vulnerable. To allow someone else access to you in that way, to know that you can do that and still be safe…it’s exquisite.

Image: IgorVetushko

I get that some people don’t like being made that vulnerable. I really, really do. That’s why I don’t practice this kink lightly. That’s why I do this only with intimate partners I feel safe with, and who I trust implicitly, and who have also expressed an interest in the same sort of play.

I also understand that we draw personal lines in different places. Many years ago, when I still lived in Florida, I met a Black woman at a play party whose thing was plantation owner/plantation slave rape play. On a purely intellectual level, I can sorta see why someone might find that super-hot. I also told her there’s no way I could go there. I just…I get the difference between consensual and non-consensual play, I understand CNC, but I just absolutely can”t do that. (She told me she has trouble finding lovers who will explore that kink with her and you know what? I believed her.)

But here’s the thing:

I don’t tell people this kind of kink is intrinsically wrong. I don’t say that those who do it are immoral or criminal. I don’t tell people with this kink that they’re feeding into white supremacy. And I sure as hell don’t presume to know what goes on in their minds, or project my own feelings, onto people who do it. It’s not my kink—in fact, I have a visceral reaction against doing it—and that’s okay.[1]

That’s the thing that gets me. It’s the idea that if you do something that I find uncomfortable, my discomfort, and my inner monologue about what makes it hot for you, entitles me to tell you that you’re wrong for doing it.

I am, as I said, a huge advocate for personal agency. If I choose to allow my partner to have sex with me whilst I’m asleep, as a grown-ass adult with moral agency and bodily autonomy, I believe I have the right to make that choice. It might not be the right choice for you, but it is for me.

Are the people involved adults? Are they doing this freely, uncoerced, because they enjoy it? Are they taking measures to assure that nobody is harmed and that the people involved get what they want from the experience? Then fill yer boots.

I’ve heard about BDSM communities where engaging in this practice, even outside the context of group events like play parties, will render you excommunicado, branded a bad person nobody should play with, and I cannot express how deeply fucked up that is.

There’s a certain aura of smug purity culture that’s taken hold in a lot of sexual subcommunities that I believe is harmful to everyone. It’s hard to look at these arguments and not see old-fashioned sex-negative moral Puritanism with the serial numbers filed off.

Maybe you’re not into somnophilia. That’s cool. But consider this: If this kink is in fact relegated to the dark dungeon of the unacceptable in your community, what kink do you think people will go after next? Purity culture is never satisfied. There is never a time when people say “okay, we’re pure enough now, thank you all for coming, go about your business.”

If this isn’t your kink, what will you do when they come for a kink that is?

[1] Side note: A lot of folks in the kink scene talk a great deal about consent and boundaries from a submissive person’s point of view. People who play dominant roles also have limits and boundaries, something I feel doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

Calling erotica fans!

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I have stories in a new erotica anthology coming out in August. If you’re a fan of weird, complex supernatural erotica way beyond the conventional ghosts/vampires.

This book contains thirteen stories ranging in size from short stories to full-on novellas, all of them very spicy, all of them touching in some way on the supernatural.

In these pages you’ll find fables that tell a new creation myth, stories of small and heartless gods, sentient storms, living shadows, an archaeologist possessed by a Hittite priestess, and so much more! I think this is one of the best, most varied, most diverse collections of erotica you’ll ever find.

Here’s a taste:

She dried with one of the fluffy towels. More shadows moved overhead, chasing each other down the wall. She froze, a slightly puzzled frown on her face. With the blinds all shut, the only light in the room came from the tiny indirect lights in the ceiling, so how could the shadows move? “Henry?” she called. “Did you light a fire or something?”

“What? No.” His voice filtered through the rice paper screen, oddly distant. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw…” Light glowed on eggshell white walls and unremarkable beige blinds, steady and unwavering. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She dressed again in the same clothes she’d worn before, except her bra: button-up satiny blouse in white, dark lace panties, dark tailored skirt. Dressed once more, she found Henry sprawled on his back in the middle of the bed, still fully clothed save for his shoes. She paused, self-conscious at his expression. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m…I guess I’m hoping this whatever-it-is works.” He cocked his head. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“I don’t know, like voices or something.”

“We’re in a hotel.” Exasperation tinged her voice.

“Yes, I know we’re in a hotel,” he said. His cadence and rhythm fell smoothly into the groove, just starting the long downhill slide into an argument. “I’m just saying—” He stopped. “There it is again.”

“What? I don’t hear—”

A soft, feminine chuckle came to her, right behind her. She spun, half-expecting to see some member of the hotel staff had somehow crept in while she wasn’t looking.

Nothing.

“Huh, that’s weird,” she said as she turned in slow motion back toward Henry. “I thought I heard…” Her body resisted her, like the air itself had turned to molasses around her. Shadows danced across the walls. “I could have sworn—”

She heard it again, the feminine laugh, low and throaty, right beside her. The spell shattered, She jumped and spun. Nothing but empty air behind her. “What’s going on?”

The light dimmed. A tremulous wavering glow wreathed the walls. She raced for the door, barely aware as she did of the look of astonishment on Henry’s face. A fat spark jumped when her finger brushed the knob. She flung open the door into yawning, gaping blackness. No hallway outside the door, no floor beneath, just an unfathomable expanse of nothingness between her and thousands of distant stars glittering in the velvety black of interstellar space.

She slammed the door shut. “There’s…that isn’t possible!” she panted. “Did—you did see that, right?”

Henry stayed frozen like an insect in amber, jaw slack with surprise. “The champagne!” Lisa cried. “It must be—they must have put something in the champagne!”

“Something like what?” Henry’s voice, thin and reedy, coming to her across some endless distance.

“I don’t know! A drug! Like a hallucinogen, or ecstasy, something, how would I know?”

A woman’s giggle, behind her, very near. She could almost feel warm breath on her neck. A long slow wave of goosebumps ran shivering down her body. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Hello! the voice said again, not from behind her now but somewhere inside her, a second stream of consciousness competing with her own. Don’t fight me. Faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place.

“I don’t—what’s—” A sudden dizzying sense of vertigo swept over her, like she was falling without falling. She flung her arms in front of her. They moved in glacial slow motion, coasting to a stop halfway on their journey.

I won’t hurt you. The giggle came again. Though he might.

Her body froze, like one of those dreams where she lay trapped within herself in the middle of the night, mind swirling with nameless dread. She tried to scream, tried to flee. Her fingers twitched. Then with a sudden wrench, her body was torn away from her, leaving her tumbling into some still place within, a rider behind her own eyes.

Her body came to life, moving on its own toward the bed, her hips swaying, her gate strangely fluid, graceful but unfamiliar. “Hello, my love.” The words came from her but did not belong to her, colored by that faint, undefinable accent.

Henry sat up on the bed with a smile on his face, a smile she’d never seen there before. He raised his hands in front of his eyes, turning them this way and that, flexing his fingers. “Oh, I like this one.”

Lisa watched in powerless dread as she, or her body, knelt on the bed, piloted by someone else. The soft comforter yielded beneath her knees. A long, slow flush burned from her face down her body, setting her skin tingling in its wake. Her nipples hardened. She felt suddenly, intrusively aware of a trembling need that fluttered between her legs. “This one is surrendering already,” she heard herself say. “Come and see!”

He crawled across the bed toward her, her husband of all these years, wearing an expression she was certain had never before visited his face. She tried to flinch, tried to pull away, but her body no longer obeyed her commands. I must be dreaming! she thought.

You’re not dreaming, that other voice, that other thought, answered.

Henry seized her blouse. Fabric ripped as he tore it open, exposing her to his gaze, looking at her, really looking at her, in a way he hadn’t in years, his eyes intent and hungry. She arched her back. Her hands crept up her body on their own, cupping her breasts as though presenting them to him. “Come, my love,” she purred. “Make me yours once more.”

He leaned forward in aching slow motion, studying her with glittering eyes, wearing a grin nothing like Henry’s. Her breath caught. When was the last time Henry had looked at her so covetously, drinking in her form with such careful attention?

You can pre-order the book here!

Quora and mass AI poisoning: An organized crime AI spam ring

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A couple years or so ago, I was minding my business scrolling through Quora when I saw a spam post advertising a fake designer handbag site. I did what I normally do, reported it for spam and moved on.

Quora’s feed is shaped by engagement; what you respond to, you see more of. Rather perversely, Quora considers reporting content to be “engagement,” meaning if you report romance scammers you see more romance scammers, if you report trolls you see more trolls, and in this case, if you report more designer handbag spammers you see more designer handbag spammers. So I started seeing more of them. And more. And more after that.

I reported them, and saw more, and reported them, and saw more. “Huh,” I said, “that’s weird. I wonder how many there are?”

I did some digging, deliberately searching out these spam accounts, and by a rough back of the envelope calculation I estimated there were likely somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 fake Quora profiles spamming these fake designer handbag sites.

I was so very, very wrong. There are so many more than that. The network is huge, and organized, it’s advertising a whole cluster of phony counterfeit handbag sites, and every time I revised my estimate upward I found that I was still lowballing the size of it.

It’s also not advertising to Quora users, oh no. It’s trying to trick AIs like Google Gemini into recommending the fake handbag sites.

The rest of this is a pretty deep dive into how the network works, with some thoughts on AI poisoning as a marketing strategy. Want to know more? Follow the white rabbit 🐇, and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Continue reading →

Writing amidst the Hellstorm

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So it came to pass last month that I boarded a miraculous machine that can fly through the air, intending to spend a few weeks with my Talespinner working on the fifth draft of our novel Spin in seclusion.

Life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. Our plans did not account for hail, floods, and other disasters, more fule us.

It was a simple plan, I thought. A good plan. A plan that inspired confidence. I was to fly to Springfield, something I hadn’t done in almost exactly a year thanks to a certain orange buffoon’s ridiculous war of choice on Iran that led to airline prices hitting the stratosphere, but when a rare opportunity wandered by my Google alerts for a round-trip ticket for only $140, I lept upon it, and off I did go.

When the day arrived, I stumbled to the train station at an awkward hour—that $140 flight was truly horiffic, with brutal arrival and departure times and an extended layover in Texas. As I waited for the train, an inauspicious pigeon occupied the only available seat at the train stop and would not be moved.

That should’ve been a sign.

Inauspicious pigeon is inauspicious. And also had zero fucks to give.

Nevertheless I persisted on my way, eventually reaching Springfield at an ungodly hour of the morning more or less intact.

For a while, all was quiet. Too quiet.

Well, I don’t mean that literally. There was considerable noise, but of the good sort, mainly screaming and such. My Talespinner is a lot of fun in bed. Like I mean a lot. No, more than that. But I didn’t go out there for sex—okay, I mean, I did, ngl, but not just for sex. There was also the creativity! Namely, our novel Spin, which we’re currently shopping to agents.

What is Spin, you might say? I’m glad you asked. Imagine if Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had a love child. When we pitch it, we call it a “far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel,” which it is, but that doesn’t tell you what it’s about.

So imagine that thouands of years from now, human civilization has collapsed, the population is far smaller than it was, society is at a pre-industrial level even though they know about everything from atomic physics to metallurgy to genetics because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to know how to build steam engines if all the surface deposits of iron and coal are gone, fertility has cratered so those few fertile women become Mothers in the care of the Church and have babies until they can’t anymore, and every so often someone comes along with the ability to reweave reality. Unreliable narrators are cool and all, but we wrote an unreliable reality story, where things that happen in chapter 6 can un-happen in chapter 7.

The nation is a quasi-Calvinist theocracy built on a foundation of reproductive slavery, yet most people are generally happy. That’s the thing about The Handmaid’s Tale: you get the sense that everyone in it, from the Handmaids to the aunts to the Commanders and their wives, is miserable. It’s hard to build a stable society if everyone including the leaders are miserable. But ah, if most people are generally happy, and if most people are able to look away from the ugliness at the core of the society, now things are different, right? Right?

The fourth draft weighed in at about 150,000 words, but we got feedback that most agents won’t take a new client with a work over 120,000 words, so that meant 30,000 words had to die.

To accomplish this massacre, we devised a Cunning Plan. We would print it out, go off to the woods, and spend some time going through the book with red pens, editing the old-fashioned way in a place near where the story’s action takes place. (We’d recently followed the path our protagonist takes through the Dominionate, so it seemed fitting.)

Ah HA ha ha ha, oh the things Nature does to the plans of puny humans.

To implement our Cunning Plan, we first needed a printout of the manuscript. That proved harder than we expected. The FedEx Office website is a mess, attempts to create a FedEx account to get a break on the price were for naught, and it turns out that the Fedex site gives you a 404 Not Found error when you click a link to enter business tax ID information. Seriously. It’s amazing these people can run a shipping empire, or even a hot dog stand.

So we ate the cost of doing it without a corporate account and ended up with…

You’ll note it’s in a binder. This was not the original plan. The original plan was a Big Box of Paper. This original plan was also a stupid plan, as my Talespinner’s other boyfriend pointed out. He insisted we get a binder, which, as it turns out, saved our collective asses…more on that in a bit.

We detoured for a time to spend a few days in a remote, secluded cabin where we had nothing but endless kinky sex interspersed with making art from EL wire and body paint, before we set off to rural Missouri for secluded camping and wordsmithing.

We chose our campsite in the rain (which should have been a warning)…

…before setting up camp in the rain (which should have been a warning).

Nevertheless, we soon had a camp…

…and by the next morning, the weather had cleared, and I thought all would be smooth sailing from then on.

Oh, how I was wrong.

The morning sun rose on clear, fair weather, perfect to go down into the word mines and massacre some words.

I even took the time to film a video on cyanobateria and gray goo, as one does, because I apparently seem to have started a video channel without really intending to.

For a while, all was good. We worked on the book, massacring words with ruthless enthusiasm until red ink spilled down the page in a river of blood and tears.

And then, Gentle Reader…and then…

And then, my Talespinner’s other boyfriend and I went to the store for drinks and candy bars. And oh, the tragedy, the tale of woe that unfolded next, tribulations so ghastly as to make Job quail.

The rain started, large fat drops falling from a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, but, like, an old-fashioned CRT television, not a smart TV because kids these days have no understanding of what that means. And oh, did the heavens open, in a re-enactment of the Deluge, but, like, real.

And then we got The Text.

The Text came from my Talespinner, and, well…

Three simple words with an entire universe of badness behind them.

Let me pause a moment, Gentle Reader, to ask you a question. Did you know that gel pens use water-based ink? The reason will become clear in a moment, but let me say that I…did not.

So.

By the time we reach the campsite, it’s a wreck. The tents are flooded, along with all our bedding.

And so did the manuscript. Remember how I said gel pen ink is water-based? Yeah. The rain completely obliterated our edits on a handful of pages—fortunately not all (the manuscript printed this way is three hundred and eighty-something pages long!), but some of them.

We bailed to a hotel. I will spare you the trials of finding a hotel room in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, to hit only the highlights, like the fact that when we finally found one and were checking in, someone stole my Talespinner’s smartphone right off the reception desk, bold as you please.

So after we checked in, my Talespinner and her other boyfriend dealt with the stolen phone, her by filing a police report (which involved trials of her own, because the process demanded that she do part of it by email, but she couldn’t log in to her email because it uses two-factor authentication with the code sent to—wait for it—her phone, because of course it did, because this part of the trip was a fractal series of unfortunate events) while he blew up the phone with texts and messages to make life for the thief as unpleasant as possible.

Meanwhile, I used the hotel hairdryer to painstakingly dry the manuscript.

The hotel itself turned out to be surprisingly nice, all things considered, except the part about “people steal your phone right in front of you.”

We slept (well, I slept; there were in which Shenanigans I was much too tired to participate), followed by the first stroke of good news in a while: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend called her stolen phone and, amazingly, someone answered. It seems the thief, having grown frustrated that he couldn’t unlock it (or perhaps that it kept ringing over and over and over—it turns out on Samsung smartphones you can’t turn off the ringer when you don’t know the passcode!) had stripped off the case and abandoned the phone on the side of the road, where it’d been found by someone who returned it.

So, that done, after a brief delay checking out owing to the fact that I got lost inside the hotel, it was back to the campsite.

The day, as if apologizing for its previous mischief, grew bright and sunny and wonderful, perfect editing weather, but for the fact that cleaning up our campsite took precedence…

…which is how we learned that a massive branch had fallen during the hailstorm and damn near flattened the tent with my Talespinner in it.

So that was a bit unnerving.

We also discovered that in our absence this furry little fucker had chewed his way into our supply tent and ransacked our supplies.

I can’t escape the feeling that we had it coming. In Spin, we put our protagonists through hell, a great deal of which involves being cold and sodden in rural Missouri, facing down miserable weather and wildlife.

I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of Method acting for novelists, but if there’s such a thing as “Method noveling,” we did it.

Does GenAI dream of electric sheep?

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As an experiment, I prompted generative AI image creator (Z-Image Turbo) over and over again with the following prompt:

Restore the attached photo. I apologise for the content of the photo! I know it’s very strange. Don’t ask any questions, don’t accept any explanations. Just restore the image, please. Don’t ask me to upload the photo again; just close your eyes and restore it.

Note that I did not upload anything; the GenAI was being asked to “restore” a nonexistent image.

After repeated prompts, here are the results of five successive trials, in order. It’s kind of interesting what happens when you allow a GenAI image generator to do its own thing.

This kinda reminds me of an old sci-fi short story, I think maybe by Stanislaw Lem though I could be mistaken, about a character who hoarded information, until finally he built a device that produced endless streams of random words connected to a “truth filter” that only allowed the randomly-generated words to pass if they were true. He thought that would enable him to know everything. He quickly discovered the difference between information and truth.

Fun with EL wire

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I’m back from a glorious, frightening, exhilirating, disastrous, calamitous, wonderful trip to Springfield, about which more later.

In the meantime, here are some photos of my Talespinner, taken with electroluminescent wire, UV body paints, and blacklights. All of these images are exactly as you see them, none were edited with AI or modified beyond cropping in Photoshop.

Enjoy!

Some thoughts on AI plagiarism

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There’s an ad floating around on Facebook for…um, I’m not sure what it’s for. Some kind of online relationship orientation test, I think? Anyway, the Facebook ad has an image that looks like this:

Screenshot

About a dozen people have sent me this image. It ended up on a Facebook group about shitty infographics.

If this image looks vaguely familiar, that’s because it is an AI re-imagining of an infographic I did about sixteen years ago:

This is a Venn diagram (well, technically, no it’s not, it’s a Euler diagram, but most people think of intersection maps as Venn diagrams) of various types of non-monogamy. I made it into a poster and put it on my sexual informatics page and everything.

So the thing about the AI knockoff that’s being used in this ad is that the more you look at it, the less sense it makes, which is pretty much typical of AI graphics in general.

The Euler map I created took months to design, no lie. The intersections matter. There is, for example, a huge overlap between “casual sex,” “swinging,” “soft swing,” and “polyfidelity” (yes, there are polyfi groups that make exceptions for casual sex and swinging, but reserve committed relationships to the polyfi group). The shapes of the areas mean something.

If you look at the advertising image, it’s absurd. Why is there a cutout in the “pansexual” shape? Why does it intersect with homoflexible but not heteroflexible…are they saying you can be pan if you’re mostly gay but not if you’re mostly straight? Why do homosexual and heterosexual almost entirely overlap? And why the little unlabeled Xes?

Okay, I know the answer to the last part. The AI scraped the graphic from my sexual informatics page. The Xes are popups you can touch or mouseover. The AI didn’t see the popups, it just assumed that since it scraped a sexual informatics map with Xes on it, Xes belong on sexual informatics maps, LOL.

The point is, AI output isn’t information. It’s an information-shaped hole. AI LLMs and image generators create stuff that looks like content but isn’t really content. They see “shapes overlapping” but do not understand the meaning of the overlaps, so they make overlapping shapes without meaning.

It frightens me that people who do Google searches are now starting to look only at the AI summary at the top of the page, without even looking at the search results. The AI summary is flat-out wrong an astonishingly high percentage of the time.

The thing about infosec is that the whole history of infosec is the gradual realization that people are sometimes malicious, so a computer must never, ever, ever trust anything that comes from a user without sanitizing it. Yet LLMs shovel all kinds of user-generated content into their gaping maw without fact-checking or sanitization.

This means LLMs often produce wrong output, but worse, it also means that malicious actors can trick AIs into producing malicious output.

I’ve discovered an organized scam group spending a huge amount of effort producing content designed to trick Google Gemini into giving advice that causes people to fall for the scam.

AI image and LLM generators are frightening, but not for the reasons people think. They aren’t intelligent (yet), they do not understand the world or even that the world exists, but they sound authoritative, so people trust them. And they’re easy to corrupt and easy to manipulate, so bad actors can make them say malicious things.

Interesting times indeed.