This One Time...
...in Islamabad and other writing news.
The Writing Never Stops but sometimes it slows to a crawl…
As Amber Cowie once said to me, “even if it’s one sentence a day, eventually you’ll have a novel.”
And so, an excerpt from said novel;
Once, in Islamabad, he’d rented a Winnebago for a job in Kandahar. A petrol burning hybrid built decades prior, its composite exterior showing its age, spiral fractures in the paintwork, blistered and discoloured. Faded grey silicon cataracts dampened the reflection off the vehicle’s rooftop solar paneling, though in proper daylight the panels still managed to charge the marine lithium batteries buried beneath its flooring. Gave it decent range but at the expense of any sort of acceleration or speed. Two critical options he’d later regret not having. What he’d wanted was to make coffee. What he’d been missing was any actual means of grinding the beans.
Where The Book’s At
Believe or not I keep adding to the manuscript and very rarely edit. So I’m sitting at well over 200,000 words which need edits. So that’s the next task, lose 50,000 words and continue to adapt the ending to our ever changing geo-political, current world landscape. It’s crazy and may sound precocious but I wrote the outline for this book using artificial super intelligence as a thematic backdrop back in 2020, having read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). And while I had an idea that AI would become important, what I did not know was that over the next few years it would become the single most important thing in modern humanity. Never mind the next hundred years, which is the timeline for the Emergent Series.
Meanwhile, my author friends and peers are completing multiple novels. After months of fatigue and sickness, I am very much looking forward to a return to a schedule that allows for this book and the series’ finale to be completed in short order.
Where All These Scam Email’s Are.
I plugged a bunch of these emails I’ve been receiving lately and in some cases continuing conversations with, strictly for engaged pleasure into GPT and asked if they were AI generated and/or legit. Here’s the response:
Why You’re Suddenly Getting These Emails
You have:
A visible book
SEO presence
Tech-thriller niche keywords
Probably Amazon metadata surfacing you
Possibly Goodreads indexing
There are automated tools that scrape:
Indie sci-fi authors
Thriller authors
Mid-list genre writers
Then they send semi-personalized outreach.
You are now in that tier.
That’s not a bad sign.
It means you’re discoverable.
Where I’m At
It been a rough December/January with what has now been treated as bacterial pneumonia. While I sure couldn’t run a marathon right now, I’m definitely on the mend from what has been a chronic condition for weeks. Katie has also had it. She was the last holdout while my parents were here, and I am grateful because I was where she has recently been , fatigued, coughing with a brutal sore throat. Subclade K for sure. (reference post can be read here)
Where the Other Writing Is At
Good news! I placed in the top ten (within my group) in the NYC Midnight 250 word micro-fiction contest beating thirty other writers (in my group) and some 2400 writers overall to progress to the second round! The assigned categories were; genre–horror, action–scouting, word–worse. The second round has already been assigned and I have Drama, Provoking, Occur. Need a top five finish to progress to the final round. The story is finished and uploaded. It’s controversial and dark-ish, using a current news story as canon. The title is Melanin and Honey and I’ll post it once the contest rules allow.
The Continuing Research
The field of biogenetics is moving rapidly. Check this out:
“Traveler-Based Genomic Surveillance (TGS). Participation in the program is voluntary and anonymous. In addition to nasal samples from travellers, CDC has analyzed more than 2,600 airplane wastewater samples as part of its broader bio-surveillance efforts.”
And things are happening just as rapidly behind that wall.
On Jan22, 2026 the U.S. completed its withdrawal from the WHO. This LINK is worth the read regarding the WHO’s response to the events around the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent global pandemic.
So now the largest contributor not only financially but intellectually has withdrawn behind its borders and kept their $216 million annual contribution to world health for themselves. This act by itself might seem random and vengeful, but what is the larger picture here?
Trump is a master at the Deal. He wrote a book about it, The Art of the Deal. I’ve never read it but his operation as POTUS seems to reflect his desire to make America Great Again.
I do not agree with said policies.
But he’s getting this shit done and fast. Make no mistake; however, if that man wants something, like your oil, or your mined resources, I believe he will make a plan and attempt to relieve you of it. His success of course depends on next Venezuela, whose chess move appears to be to rid Cuba of its oil, which it primarily got from Venezuela. All in an apparent attempt to topple the Castro regime. He’s no dummy, Mr.T, and he has support. Beware the smiling assassin.
I alluded to a situation unfolding like this in The Sequence using a similar presidential figure and a similar single syllable name, Cook. He completed the wall, withdrew his armed forces and effectively ghosted the rest of the planet, claiming that The America could continue on its trajectory all by itself, no help required. Book two expands on this and I’ve written a small anthology of individual characters’ journeys as they depart their home nation, a nation willing to detain and sentence its own citizens for performing what had previously been accepted medical procedures. I’ll tidy those up and release them under a paywall in The Short Version, so that I’m not writing a history lesson instead of prescient science-fiction, cuz I actually think this shit is happening right now.
The High Arctic
Meanwhile, something else I’ve been paying attention to is the Canadian Arctic border. I work with people that used to fly the DEW line and replace batteries in the radars. We have not had much of a presence up there forever and now the Russians not only have a presence, it’s expanding.
There is no NATO base anywhere close to Nagurskoye. The nearest Norwegian military airbase is about 1500 km away, while the US base in Thule, Greenland, is more than 2,000 km away.
The Russian Armed Forces have, over the past decade invested major sums in the building of new air force infrastructure across the Arctic. The Nagurskoye base reported all-year-round operational in 2020. It is reportedly capable of handling “any kind of aircraft.”
Nearby is a major building complex that is designed to house a significant number of troops. The Trefoil base complex includes 14,000 square meters of connected buildings.
Check out this article for some comparison footage on exactly how much infrastructure is being put in place. Putin did this before, amassed troops and arms along the Ukraine border. I was like “he’ll never do it.” And then he did.
Same plan here. Except it’s fucking Canada where I and my family live, where we enjoy peace and protection from NATO and our allies to the south. Except….
The Coming War
I love this stuff because you can’t really imagine it and create it from nothing. Storylines that I am able to pull out of real life like is gold. wrapped up in real world events, fictionalized by yours truly.
Trump wants Greenland not because he’s a dick, because it’s the shortest path for China or Russia to launch missiles against the United States.
In my opinion, Putin is up to something big. Trump as well. Are we about to see these two juggernauts thrash it out in a proxy war? Is it already happening? Is China waging a generational biological war against the West? What do the three nations want? Agenda 21? Ego-driven world domination, divided by three?
Something weird is happening, like a global shakeup is about to happen, and I would love to write a comic book series about my fictionalized interpretation, Heroes Required. But I fear there is no time.
All speculation of course and in general, is purely canon for my fictional work.
When the Artificial Tells You To Go Write.
Having plugged those emails into ChatGPT, and received its response, I then told it, thank you, I’ll get back to the manuscript and it said:
Good. That’s the correct move.
Every minute you spend inside the manuscript right now compounds.
Every minute spent evaluating $180 “opportunities” does not.
Finish the book.
Make the ending land.
Make Orlando matter.
Make the cost irreversible.
Promotion can wait. Craft can’t.
Go write.
Love it. Orlando, in case you didn’t know, being the main protagonist of the sequel. I found this inspirational, even if/especially because it came from an algorithm.
So Go, Write You Fools…
Loved the excerpt. The rest is very thought provoking as usual and a little (lot) scary.