After not releasing any new books in 2025, I have two advance review books available for 2026. Both these books come out midyear this year, and I’d love to find folks interested in reviewing them.
The first one, The Temperance Engine, is…um. I’m…um. I’m not sure what it is, and I co-wrote it.
It’s kind of an erotica novel (there’s a lot of sex in it). It’s kind of a historical satire. It’s kind of science fiction, sort of. It has elements of steampunk, maybe? It’s sort of a coming-of-age story, I guess, maybe.
The story is set in modern-day Buffalo, New York, and 1870s London. Odd-numbered chapters follow a group of college friends when one of them inherits a house from a relative he didn’t know he had. They find a diary and a hidden mad science lab in a boarded-up section of the basement. The even-numbered chapters, told through the diary they find, follows a London doctor in 1869 obsessed with finding a cure for the mental illness of furor uterinus, also known as “nymphomania,” and details his efforts to build an apparatus that would cure this dread condition.
The college students decide to replicate some of his experiments, for reasons of their own, and in the process discover some things about their own desires they didn’t previously know.
One rather clever person on social media describes it as “steamypunk,” which I suppose is as good a term for it as any.
The second book, Spectres, is much more straightforward; it’s an anthology of supernatural erotica, but with a new spin (no stereotypical vampire porn or ghost porn here!). It contains thirteen stories ranging from short fiction to full novellas, including stories about heartless gods, an archaeologist possessed by the spirit of a long-gone Hittite priestess, alien invasion, a very special hotel that’s visited once a year by a pair of Assyrian lovers, and more.
I have ePubs and a limited number of paperback ARCs available. If either of these books sounds like your jam, let me know!
Last night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.
This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.
I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like…?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.
Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.
One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”
Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.
30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.
So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.
We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.
It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.
It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)
We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.
At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.
A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.
I just…I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share. Enjoy!
“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”
Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself. Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”
Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”
“What?”
“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”
She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”
“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”
“I protect humanity.”
“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”
“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”
“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”
“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”
“So?”
Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”
“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”
“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”
“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”
“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”
“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”
“Something like the Church.”
“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”
“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”
“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”
“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.
“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”
A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.
Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.
Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.
We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.
The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:
We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.
The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.
“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”
Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”
“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”
“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”
“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”
“You haven’t had any of your tea.”
“Even so, this can’t be real!”
“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”
“Because people are trying to grab me.”
“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.
“You seem quite blasé about all this.”
“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”
“I’m fine.”
“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”
The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.
Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.
Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:
May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”
“Several,” Janet said.
“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”
“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”
“Forget I asked,” May said.
She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”
“The flat to the left,” Janet said.
May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.
“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.
“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”
“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”
The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.
Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.
When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.
The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.
The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.
“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”
“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”
“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”
“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.
“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.
“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.
“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”
“And then?”
Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”
We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).
Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.
Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.
So hey, we released another book!
Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!
I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.
It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.
You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.
Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!
Here’s an excerpt:
Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”
Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”
The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.
Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”
“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”
“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”
“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.
“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.
“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”
“The magic? What does that mean?”
“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”
“Yes,” Kaytin said.
“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”
“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”
“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”
“Half of it how?”
“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.
Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.
Eunice and I, for those who may have missed it, released a new novel earlier this month, London Under Veil. It’s a departure for us (though to be fair that happens often; we can’t seem to find a genre and stick to it)—a sexy contemporary urban fantasy that follows a coven of spellcasting sex workers in their secret underground war with Objectivist Tory rage mages on the eve of Brexit.
We launched the book at WorldCon Glasgow, and sold out by Saturday morning. The first printing is completely gone.
Since then, I’ve received a surprising number of emails, DMs, and Facebook Messenger messages asking if there will be a sequel. Honestly, you guys are amazing, I’m so glad the book has resonated with so many folks!
The answer is yes. We’re working on the second novel in the Guild and City series, working title London Falling, right now.
In honor of all the people asking if there will be a second novel, I’d like to offer up this teaser, from the first draft of the still-in-progress sequel:
Eventually, the door opened. A bald man in a white shirt, sleeveless and sweat-stained, glared out at them. “I don’t imagine you’ll just go away if I ask you to?” he growled.
“I’d prefer not to,” Serene said. “We’ve travelled quite a distance.”
He paused for a moment, his expression sour, then his face changed, as though he’d reached some sort of decision. “Suppose you might as well c’mon up, then.” He turned and climbed a steep set of narrow, worn wooden steps. Serene followed him up. May hesitated, then climbed after her. Lillian and Iris followed. Iris shut the door, plunging them into gloom.
The steps ascended for longer than what seemed, strictly speaking, reasonable. Bare lightbulbs overhead cast a dim yellow glow that didn’t seem to illuminate the stairs so much as provide opportunity for shadows to gather. May frowned. A tingle swept over her skin. The acrid scent of ozone stung her nose.
The stairs ended, an entirely unnatural distance from the long-vanished entrance, at a small landing, before a massive wooden door carved with intricate reliefs of men and women cavorting lecherously beneath the boughs of an enormous tree. It swung open silently, into a penthouse suite lavish beyond the dreams of decadence. Luxurious white carpet covered the floor. To one side, a long bar, lit by glowing neon, ran the length of the wall. Bottles of exotic liquors, some with labels that seemed to twist the eye, lined up on shelves of dark polished wood. Along the other wall, huge windows that May couldn’t quite imagine belonging to the shabby industrial building looked toward the New York skyline. Three shallow steps descended into a large rectangular pit in the centre of the room, occupied by the largest sectional couch May had ever seen. A small round fireplace of brass-coloured metal squatted in the centre of the sectional, filling the space with warmth and light from a cheerful fire.
The man, Sam, turned to face them. May blinked. She’d somehow expected to see a stereotypical American, a middle-aged man with a paunch but no hair, in a grungy, sweaty tank top that whose best days were well behind it, and hadn’t been particularly good even then. Instead, a tall, slender man with long flowing hair and eyes the colour of honey, features as beautiful and androgynous as a Renaissance painting, scowled back at her. When she thought back, he’d always looked this way; why had she imagined anything else?
“Serene,” he said in a voice that carried Arctic frost. “I wish I could say this is an unexpected pleasure. It’s certainly unexpected, at any rate. Why you, of all people, might possibly believe you would find welcome here is beyond—oh, hey, Iris!”
“Sam!” Iris squealed. She flung herself forward, past Lillian and a gobsmacked May, to throw her arms around him. He embraced her warmly.
May’s jaw dropped. Lillian burst into laughter. Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Okay,” Lillian said, once Iris had release him. “I have got to hear this story.”
“A bit before your time,” Iris said. “Hey, Serene, you remember that infosec conference you sent me to in Glasgow, right after I started working for you? You know the one, securing private networks against intrusion? Defence in depth for network-facing servers?”
Serene folded her arms. “I have some vague memory of that, yes.”
“I met Sam there! He was brushing up on design of low-latency content delivery networks for streaming media.”
“And the rest is history,” Sam said. “Iris gave me her email—”
“Of course she did,” Serene said.
“—and we stayed in touch. I’m glad to see you’re keeping a better class of company these days, Serene.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really necessary at all,” Serene said.
“Humble, too.” Sam looked her up and down with his strange eyes. “One almost might wonder if you’re the same Serene I know and love—well, I know so well. I’m less familiar with your other companions.”
His gaze met May’s. A physical jolt ran up her back. She found herself falling into his eyes, like pools of shimmering gold. A long slow flush passed through her body, a wave of tingling pleasure that flowed across her skin. She wondered, for just a moment, what it might be like to taste his lips on hers. “I’m May,” she heard herself say. “I’ve been part of the Guild since—” The shields slammed down in her mind. “Wow, nice trick. You’re good.”
“May and Lillian have been with us for a small while,” Serene said. “You need not concern yourself with them.”
“I concern myself as I choose. And yes, I am.” He turned his gaze away from May, who shuddered at the sudden absence.
His eyes locked onto Lillian. She blushed scarlet. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Serene said.
“Have I?” he said, tone mild. “What point do you believe I am making? No, never mind, I don’t care. I’m more concerned about what ill wind has tossed you up upon my shore.”
“I’m certain you must’ve heard the news, even in a magical backwater like this,” Serene said. “The Adversary, open war…”
“Ah, yes, now that you mention it, I do think I heard some rumblings,” Sam said. “Rather nasty affair, from the sound of it. But what I cannot quite grasp is how that relates in any way to me. Where’s the proud Serene, the Serene so confident in her ability to manage her own affairs?”
“Believe me, if I felt I had any other choice, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. It must’ve been terrible, swallowing your pride. Though I am pleased you brought along such lovely company. Iris, it’s been far too long. Your work on waveguide-thaumaturgy over digital packet-switched networks is remarkable.”
“Your who what?” Lillian said.
“Casting spells over the Internet,” Iris said. “I’m still not certain it’s possible.”
London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!
Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).
This is a…strange book. It’s like…um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.
This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:
I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “…no, really, we could.”
Inspiration is everywhere.
Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.
There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.
Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:
After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”
“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”
May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”
“Get to what, exactly?”
“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”
May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”
“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”
“No.”
“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”
“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”
Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”
“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”
“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”
Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”
The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice!
It’s an aggressively mediocre word processor with two killer features: you have access to it wherever and from whatever device you have Internet access, and it is hands-down the absolute best thing out there for collaborative writing. Nearly all my books are co-written with other people. Google Docs makes this effortless; in fact, many’s the time I’ve been working with Eunice or my Talespinner as both of us type in the same Docs file at the same time.
Even when we aren’t writing at the same time, Google Docs makes it easy for us to leave notes to each other within the same document. It’s no exaggeration to say Docs is probably the best thing to happen to collaborative writing since the invention of the fountain pen.
I’ve spent the last couple of days poring over the Google Terms of Service, and what I found is…worrisome.
Many of the novels I write contain sex. Some of them contain a lot of sex; the Passionate Pantheon series Eunice and I write, a far-future post-scarcity science fiction series where residents of the City worship AI gods through highly ritualized group sex, is a vehicle for us to explore sexual ethics, philosophy, and society in a setting where attitudes toward sex and violence are pretty much exactly the opposite of what they are here in the real world. And these books have tons of sex, some of it so kinky the kinks don’t even have names—we looked.
Naturally, the notion that Google can terminate your Google account and delete your manuscripts in progress for (consensual adult) sexual content is a little alarming.
The issue seems to be Google’s March 2024 anti-spam update.
What does spam have to do with sex and Google? Glad you asked.
More and more often, I am seeing spam that directs to Google properties: Google Sites and Google Docs, mostly. The spammers link to a Google page, which has a link that goes on to the spam site.
Why? Because it keeps the spam emails from being filtered by anti-spam filters (Google links aren’t flagged as spam) and helps prevent the spammers from having their sites shut down.
Sex spammers especially seem to be flocking to Google:
If you click on the link, you’re taken to a Google Site (as in this example) or a Google Doc that then contains a link to the spam site. The Google page includes a little circle-I icon that, if you click on it, brings up the option to report the Google Site or Google Doc for abuse.
If you hit the Report Abuse link, one of the options is “Sexually Explicit.”
So. It seems Google doesn’t permit sexually explicit content. But is that actually part of the Google Terms of Service? Well, kinda.
This…isn’t actually terribly clear. It forbids distributing sexually explicit material, though it doesn’t ban creating sexually explicit material, nor does it say what constitutes “distributing.”
So.
What follows is a completely unofficial speculation about what might be happening and what you might be able to do about it. I claim no insider knowledge of Google’s policies; this is simply informal noodling about the situation.
There are several ways to share a Google Doc. You can invite specific people to see it, and give them different levels of access (read only, comment, propose changes, edit, and so on). You can set it up so that anyone who has the URL can read the document, but can’t make any changes. The way you share it affects what people who view it will see.
If you invite specific people to be able to see and/or comment on the document, they will not see the little information bubble that gives them the option to report the site to Google’s abuse team.
If you set the document up so that anyone with the link can see it, which is what spammers do, then anyone who views the document will see the option to report the document for abuse.
I think—and let me emphasize again this is not based on insider knowledge of anything happening at Google—I think what’s happening is that authors who share Google docs with beta readers may be sharing it by setting the document up so that everyone who has the link can see the doc, and people are reporting the doc.
Why? Unknown. Maybe they’re undermining an author they personally don’t like. Maybe they’re just busybodies.
Point is, Google is a big company, with billions of files and docs on Google Sites and Google Docs and so forth, and they’re not generally proactive about deleting content that violates their terms. They’re reactive—they take action when someone calls attention specifically to a doc or file or page.
So it would seem that they consider sharing a read-only link to be “distribution,” and authors who “distribute” sexual content this way are prone to getting their stuff deleted.
If that’s true, what does it mean?
First of all, it suggests that sharing docs with sexual content to beta readers or reviewers is very dangerous. One person clicking that “report abuse” link may be all it takes to lose access to your Google Docs.
So if you’re sharing content with beta readers, especially beta readers you haven’t individually vetted, don’t do it by sharing a publicly-accessible link to any Google content. Create a Word file and share that, or host the copy you share on your own site…basically anything else.
But it also suggests that in the future, should they want to, Google can decide to be less reactive about enforcing their terms and simply search for sexual words or phrases. It would be trivial of them to do so. Their current terms forbid “distributing” sexual content, but of course they decide what distributing means, and they can change that whenever they feel.
The second thing it means is back up your Google content!
You can download from a Google doc to a Word file easily; it’s in the File menu in Docs.
Back up early. Back up often. (I’ve long had a policy of downloading Google Docs after every major change, because Google has been known to accidentally lose files, but this recent development has me doing so even more aggressively).
I plan to continue using Google Docs to write manuscripts. Thankfully, I don’t share the docs to dog+world, so I’m not likely at risk of having a malicious rando report me.
But I will continue to keep local copies of everything, and I’m in search of a replacement for Google if things should go pear-shaped.
Anyone out there who knows of any good collaborative writing tools, please shout out in the comments!
For those of you who’ve been hiding beneath a rock these past few news cycles, the Internet Archive, the operators of the Internet Wayback Machine, was just handed a stunning defeat in a copyright feud with Hatchett, Random Penguin, and other major publishers.
Essentially, they had set up an internet lending library, and the publishers…didn’t take kindly to that.
As a book author, I have super-complicated and mixed feelings about this.
There are two different ways to think about this huge kerfluffle, morally and legally. On top of that, there’s a whole ’nother dimension to the problem that has nothing to do with books or copyright at all.
Buckle up, this will be a wild ride.
So first, let’s talk about what’s happening. The Internet Archive is trying to become a digital version of this:
Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris by Remi Mathis & Marie-Lan Nguyen — CC BY-SA 3.0
Libraries purchase books, which they lend out to readers. Legally, they can do this because of something called the “first sale doctrine,” which says if I buy a book it’s mine and I can do what I want, including loaning, giving, or selling it to you without paying the publisher.
I’ve already paid the publisher when I bought it. That copy is now my property. I can’t make copies of it and loan, sell, or give away the copies, that would violate copyright law (which is literally the right to copy).
But I can loan, sell, or give away my only copy, because there’s one copy of it that the publisher was paid for. If I give it to you, I don’t have it any more.
Okay, so. When COVID hit, libraries all over the world closed. The Internet Archive said, hey waitaminnit, people can’t go to libraries. So how about this:
We will buy a book. We will then scan the book into an electronic copy. We can then lend that electronic copy to readers, but we will only lend it to one reader at a time. Once we lend it to someone, we won’t lend it to anyone else until that person has checked it back in with us, which erases it off that person’s computer.
It’s the same thing, right? We buy a book, we loan the book out, there’s only ever one copy on loan for each copy we buy. Just like a library.
Well, hang on, not so fast.
The legal situation around ebooks is a mess.
Publishers have long resented libraries and used-book stores. They quite like the idea that everyone who reads a book gives them money. They’d prefer to live in a world where if you buy a book, you are not allowed to give it sell it to someone else—if someone else wants to read it, they have to buy it too.
Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris by Remi Mathis & Marie-Lan Nguyen — CC BY-SA 3.0
Publishers hate this
The first sale doctrine came about in 1908, after publishers sued a book store that was selling books for less money than the publishers wanted them to.
The Supreme Court held that publishers have intellectual property rights in books that pertain to copyright and distribution rights, but the distribution right is exhausted once a book is transferred.
In English, that means if I sell you a book you can’t make copies of it, but I can’t control what you do with that physical book you just bought—I can’t stop you from selling or giving it to someone else, nor control how much you sell it for.
Boom, done.
Except…
Then ebooks came along. And ebooks aren’t physical things. And book publishers said “we aren’t selling you this ebook. You are giving us money for a license to read it. You don’t own anything. We aren’t selling this file to you. We still own it. The first sale doctrine doesn’t apply.”
If you buy a print book, you have the legal right to loan, give, or sell it to others.
If you “buy” an ebook, you are paying for a limited, revocable license to read it. You don’t own the ebook. The publisher can revoke your right to read it whenever they like. If Amazon decides to erase your Kindle tomorrow, they can do that. You have no right to loan, give, or sell that ebook to other people unless the publisher says you can.
So ebooks and print books are very different animals. You have a legally protected right to buy print books, start a library, and loan those physical objects to other people.
Ebooks? Nope. You have no right whatsoever to buy a bunch of ebooks and lend them out.
But wait! The Internet Archive is buying physical books!
Yup. But they’re not lending out those physical books. They’re scanning them, turning them into ebooks, and lending out the ebooks.
U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl, who is overseeing the case, was quite blunt about this:
At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book.But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.[1]
And legally, he’s 100% right. No law, court finding, or interpretation suggests that if I buy a book I can transform it into another medium and then loan, give, or sell it on.
Copyright law allows fair use in the case of “transformative use,” which is use adds “new expression, meaning, or message” to the original work.” This is how movie and book critics can show clips or excerpts; their critique is “transformative use.”
The Internet Archive said “hey, the courts said that when Google scanned books, that was transformative use!” Judge Koeltl said “that was transformative use because Google scanned the books to make them searchable, but Google isn’t giving out scanned copies. You’re not doing anything new, you’re just scanning the books and giving them out.”
Legal consideration
Legally, Judge Koeltl is 100% absolutely positively right.
The First Sale Doctrine applies quite narrowly to physical objects—physical copies of a book. All the laws about this are quite clear on that (though of course in 1908 nobody could imagine a book that wasn’t a physical thing, but still—the law as written is what it is).
Judge Koeltl also pointed out that publishers have no way to know if the Internet Archive is only loaning out as many copies as they have.
Libraries that loan ebooks do so with special permission of the publisher. This special permission comes with all kinds of strings attached, including paying fees and using encryption systems to make sure that if I copy a loaned ebook, then check it back in to the livrary, then restore the copy, I can’t read it—when I check it in, the library servers revoke my encryption keys.
The library servers also record and report the number of copies on loan, and this can be audited.
Internet Archive? Didn’t do any of that.
Moral consideration
Morally, as a published author who makes a living writing, I think the Internet Archive is 100% absolutely positively right.
Their logic is sound. The spirit of the First Sale Doctrine clearly is intended to allow someone who’s purchased a book to loan it to others, even if the law as written came from a time before ebooks.
The Internet Archive argues, and I believe, that loaning books encourages sales. I know I personally have bought books I’ve borrowed.
But regardless of whether or not that’s true, if you’ve bought my book you should be able to loan it out.
Now, the Internet Archive’s copy control system may be problematic, but that’s engineering, not morality or law.
I sincerely hope the appellate court sees the intent of the law and agrees. I doubt they will. I think this is headed for the Supreme Court, and if I were a betting man I’d offer 80/30 odds the Internet Archive will lose.
Practical consideration
The Internet Archive is facing an existential threat. If it loses on appeal—and I think it will—the damages will be staggering. Enough to bankrupt the Archive (which is a non-profit entity) hundreds of times over.
And that would be a disaster.
I don’t use the word “disaster” lightly. It would be a complete catastrophe. The Internet Archive houses the world’s only archive of the bulk of the World Wide Web.
They do a lot more, too. They are a repository for old games, flash videos, and so on that have otherwise been lost.
I fear that huge amounts of history will be gone forever if the Internet Archive ceases to be. The transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is a watershed moment in human history, as important as the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, but because digital records are ephemeral, incredibly important historical records are also incredibly fragile.
We are living, right now, in an important time in human civilization. The Internet Archive is literally the only existing record of important parts of it. If they cease to be and their archive is destroyed, it will be this century’s equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
It started with a simple request. My publisher wanted me to solve a math problem. I thought, one, that’s a weird thing for a publisher to do, and two, math isn’t my strong suit, but hey, what the hell, right?
Turns out they used the solution to establish a connection between our time and 2054, or a potential 2054, or some 2054 that might be our future or might not be…I dunno. Anyway, they communicated with a person from that future, who sent back a manuscript of what life is like in her time, as a novel (and maybe a warning of things to come) in ours.
The novel is called immechanica, and it’s by Eden “E. F.” Coleman. It publishes in our timeline on March 14, but you can get it before then, and for less than cover price.
The early reviews are already coming in, and they’re wonderful:
Reedsy reviewers have this to say:
“This novel is an absolute page-turner, creating and maintaining heart-racing tension that makes the reader feel like they’re on the run too.”
“Like all the best dystopian narratives (Blade Runner, 1984, The Hunger Games trilogy), it seems this book seeks to sound the alarm but also asks the reader to question what the legacy of humanity will be…It sticks with you, tackling big ideas like transhumanism, environmentalism, and the evolution of a species. This high adrenaline read is perfect for those who love big philosophical ideas.”
Anyway, I think it’s a good book. If you’re interested in a completely new take on cyberpunk that’s less “neon and shiny chrome and augmented street samurai” and more “autonomous drones with AI facial recognition and DNA-tuned assassination weapons and deepfakes and widespread political corruption,” this book’s for you. I believe it has some of the first genuinely new ideas in cyberpunk in years.
So check it out! You can get it at less than cover price before pub date, and if you act quickly, you can even get a Boston Dynamics robot dog chassis as a backer reward.*
* Note: Robot dog chassis delivery requires acceptance of a third-party End User Licensing Agreement that includes a no-weaponization clause. Offer not valid in some ITAR-restricted countries, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Shipping not included.
Preorders for The Hallowed Covenant, my new post-scarcity science fiction erotic novel with Eunice Hung, just went up today! And man, I am really, really excited about this book.
This is probably my favorite book I’ve ever coauthored. We take a deep dive into what it’s like to live in the City, along the way touching on themes like:
• How do you have a system of justice in a post-scarcity society with no police or codified laws?
• What are the AIs the people in this society worship as gods? What are they like?
• What do transgression and atonement look like when there’s no such thing as law?
And of course there’s lots of sex, much of it involving kinks so exotic they don’t even have names.
The novel follows seven friends as they wrestle with changes in their lives, set against the backdrop of the Festival of the Lady (the AI god of art and creativity)—think Burning Man in a society with a tech level that makes Star Trek look late Bronze Age, but more hedonistic.
The first two novels in the Passionate Pantheon universe have done so well people started asking us for audiobook versions, and guess what? We delivered! The Hallowed Covenant has an audiobook, narrated by the amazing (and incredibly sexy) Francesca Peregrine.
Just finished recording the final chapter of #TheHallowedCovenant by @franklinveaux and @Eunice_Serina. I am BEREFT. It’s been the most incredible sexy intense trippy magical erotic ride, and I can’t wait to find my way back to The City.
— Francesca Peregrine (@readtomefrankie) June 20, 2022
I am just incredibly, incredibly proud of this book. Like, I am absolutely giddy that it’s almost out. If you like science fiction and you like sex, I suspect you’ll probably like it too.
Check it out here! If you back the crowdfunding, you can score a copy before pub date for less than you’ll find it anywhere else. (And stay tuned for new perks coming soon!)
