Trump II – Porn

As most people will have deduced by now, a lot of the Trump team agenda is going to be derived in some way from the Project 2025 handbook. One of the objectives specified in that handbook is the banning of pornography. Let’s start with a reality check. Nobody can ban pornography. That is like trying to ban the consumption of alcohol, or prostitution. Societies that try to ban those services end up with corruption, laws […]

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2024 Election – Writing Impact

So, the 2024 General Election is over in the USA, and the authoritarians have won. Leaving aside the whole area of principled and unyielding resistance to fascists and assholes, which I totally support, the main personal question for authors is; how will this affect your writing? I have to confess that my writing (as in the Hammering phase, putting prose down) has been pretty much stalled for the last 6 months. Ideation and Percolation have

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UPDATED – Social Media Platforms

Once in a while my frustration on a topic grows to a high level when I see people making the same mistakes over and over again, and still expecting a different outcome (and not getting one) or, worse still, accepting mediocrity and nonsense instead of operating to higher standards. Twitter (or X, or whatever letter of the alphabet Elon Musk has decided to call it this year), has become a propaganda cesspit. We saw this

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AI – how to navigate the storm

Book publishing for fiction has been battered for years by a combination of mergers, the chronic under-capitalization of small to medium-sized presses, predatory scamsters (many of them based in the Philippines), and the biggest shibboleth of all – the idea that if it is on the Internet, it should be free (or very close to it). Ebooks started to take over the book publication market a long time ago, but they have not conquered all,

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Tropes

Tropes have been under heavy discussion recently in the fiction writing community. However, it seems that the definition of “trope” being used in recent discussions is a more modern definition of the word. Dictionary.com has this to say about all of the possible definitions: The best explanation that bridges the gap between the strict dictionary definition and the more commonly accepted current usage is this one from study.com: Although a little confusing, the definition of

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