More than once in Agatha Christie’s novels, I came across a phrase that used to puzzle me: “I/she disapprove/s of marriage as a career for women.”

Being a thoroughly post-modern Millie, who came of age in the early eighties, that just didn’t scan. A marriage was not a career. It was something you did for love, or, increasingly, didn’t do at all in Europe at least. Because who needs a paper, if you’re in love after all?

Later, when I was a young mother, mired in diapers kid spit up and the older kid being just smart and accomplished enough to magnify the mess. (Not that he was a terribly bad kid, but he did things like eat the cat food, or attempt to help in very strange ways.) I came across an article in some magazine (I don’t remember which, and if I’d bought a housekeeping or women’s magazine it would be for a recipe or a craft thing. But I’d have read it anyway) where some woman tried to be cutesy and compare being a mother to a corporate career. Where she — and I at the time — were mired was the factory floor, in our coveralls, and we couldn’t keep clean or do anything but just barely manage the brutal work. She talked about ome day being like her mom, who — with kids out of the house — could have lunch meetings with her peers, and keep her hair and clothes beautiful.

At the time I kind of chuckled, and it gave me hope of a time when my entire house didn’t smell of sour milk.

….. Since then I’ve both come to believe that yes, indeed, marriage is a career and that the progression is more or less what that woman had outlined in jest.

Look, careers are a slippery thing. Most people, when they envision careers see themselves in business attire and progressing till they’re the VIP of some company. That — even for college graduates, even for those with graduate degrees — describes may 1 to 2% of careers.

Most people not only don’t have that star studded path, but they don’t really have anything resembling a “career.” What they do have is “jobs.” Meaning they go in, they work a day, they get laid off, get another job. In my lifetime (husband and I entered the market in the mid to late eighties) even jobs have no security whatsoever, and because of changes in tech and economy, you’re likely to have two or three different fields of jobs over the years you’re employed. It might be even in the same general “field” but the subfields will be wildly different, or how the job is accomplished will be completely different.

Although we sell every young person the bright dream of the “career” it is unlikely their job will have any coherence or much satisfaction.

In fact, let me add, for most normal, functional human beings, it was always like that. Your job is something you have and do so that you can fulfill your life’s plan and purpose and find satisfaction elsewhere.

Yes, some of us are broken and not in any way shape or form functional human beings, and do find quite a bit of satisfaction in what we do for money. (Glares. Stop the smirking please.) In my case, that is writing. But my husband derives as much satisfaction from programing and head-breaking mathematical puzzles (which are sometimes the same.)

Even then, there’s a difference between your art or craft that you do and enjoy and your job or career. No matter ho much you enjoy your work, particularly these days (because there’s some fundamental breakages in how things are done) but probably always, honestly, there’s always vexations, bad bosses, parts of the job you don’t enjoy at all.

As much I love writing, there were times I would have turned in my writing career — willingly — for a glass of water, then poured the water out on the ground. Except that…. well, baby needed shoes, and expensive college books, and did they really outgrow those pants again? And oh, yeah, we probably should have the money to go see my parents, because they’re getting on in years. So I stayed on, even when writing was a pain and a source of stress.

BUT I did have that other career, the one writing supported. And there I did progress from the spit up years to the middle manager years, where I was mediating their education to, eventually, the executive suite, where my job was to figure out how to network and help them if I could. And–

Because the only satisfying career most of us will have is our personal life: Marriage, sure, or family, or just our friends and our social connections. (I will point out a lot of the women who disapproved of marriage as a career for women were spinsters, so their career was …. looking after the broader family and working for the village in various ways.)

But that’s most likely to always and still be our most important career and the mark we live in the world.

Having people preferentially chase “careers” has created an unreasonable expectation that your jobs will be wildly satisfying and lead to “careers.”

And then we wonder why people are upset.

Business is business. It’s what you do to live, not your life.

Find your satisfaction and purpose in something else, or you’ll be unhappy your whole life.

As I write this, Israel has gotten back all the living kidnap victims. Unfortunately there’s only twenty of them.

Also fortunately Trump managed to get in the treaties that Hamass doesn’t get to stage its repulsive rallies or give “souvenirs” to the hostages.

Both of these are great and good. But I flinch a little when I hear about the “peace.” I don’t think Trump is stupid. I don’t even think he’s as naive as he was in his first term. Surely he doesn’t expect it to hold.

Or maybe he does. He had his son in law, Jared Kushner, negotiate the “peace” and frankly the man reminds me of a golden retriever for a reason. Maybe Kushner believes that he really negotiated lasting peace, and maybe Trump is crossing his fingers and hoping.

I’d be glad to eat my words on this but I don’t think I will: I will be shocked if the peace lasts till the end of the year. It won’t last long after. And if the domestic terrorists Antifa sponsors Democrats by any means win the midterms next year, Hamass will definitely trike immediately after. (Not that I think they’ll wait that long.)

There is a reason for this, and it’s not just “I don’t trust them” or “I have a memory longer than 20 minutes.”

The reason is simple: Hamass won’t hold the peace, because it can’t.

Eric S. Raymond has made similar observations about Antifa, the armed wing of the Democrat party, and he’s not wrong there either, but it’s even more so for Hamass.

We’re not dealing with a normal country. We never were. And it’s not just because normal countries don’t elect a terrorist group for its leadership. (I’ll pause a moment while you think about that, because that’s the edge we skate on as we speak.) It’s that “Palestine” as constituted, the country the kleptocratic bureucrats of the EU are so all in on recognizing, doesn’t have … anything. And I’m not talking about “oh, they’re despoiled.” I like the rest of you remember what they did to the infrastructure they found in the West Bank when they took over. There were functioning, producing greenhouses they ripped apart to use the plumbing to make rockets to lob at Israel. No, what I mean is that Palestine makes nothing, produces nothing, grows nothing. They can’t feed their own people. They can’t even educate their young, and send them to “schools” staffed by UN “teach-a-terrorist” units which indoctrinate them in the way of the suicide bomber.

All that keeps Palestine that appendage of Hamas and the people it indoctrinates/propagandizes/holds captive going from day to day is that euphemistically called “international aid.” If they didn’t get food/money/clothes shipped in, they’d be running around naked and starving in the desert.

They are a “people” (not really in any way but legally, btw) held together and governed and more importantly PAID for the simple purpose of making war on Israel. There is no other purpose, no other reason, nothing else that can get them paid or provide a purpose to their existence.

Given that, they can’t avoid breaking the truce. Even if their leaders understood they had to do it. Even if their leaders wanted to do it, it would never happen, because the entire ethos of the people, perhaps not down to the infant at the breast, but definitely down to the toddler, is to attack Israel.

They’re a people gathered, taught and governed as a living weapon to make war on Israel. They have no other purpose, no other interest, no other culture. They have no other reason for existing.

So, no, sorry President Trump, they won’t hold the peace. But remember you gave your word. And when they break it, all the brakes should be taken off Israel’s response.

Because we can’t have a people in the world whose whole purpose is to destroy another nation. We already have communists for that.

And that’s all. Right now the best I can wish the people of “Palestine” is that any remaining sane ones (if any remain) take off and make it to saner places (not here, thank you. We already have enough indoctrinated terrorists) and forget their “identity” before what is ultimately inevitable.

Today though? Today we celebrate that Jewish people more abused than any since the end of World War Two made it home.

And we gird our loins for what’s to come.

Nothing left to do.

As in the old Russian fable, the scorpion will sting the frog that’s carrying him across the river, even if that means they both die because it’s its nature. It can’t do otherwise. Same for the Palestinians.

Two more songs for the sound track.

Some observations:

1- Prodigal is of course the chapter in which Skip is visited by his father’s ghost, and let’s all be very grateful he just decides to become a diplomat instead of going Hamlet-murdery. Very sensible of him. (I can’t believe I’m posting THAT.)

I realize the chapter being 2 songs is weird, but I thought the feel was very different and for narrative (also boppy) reasons New London New London was needed.

Prodigal is a very weird song, but I’m a very weird writer and let’s not talk about my character’s weirdness, if you please.

The one who spots the Odyssey allusion gets a Britannia flag sticker as soon as I have them made.

2- I have no idea why my subconconscious decided a song about attempts to murder the singer should be boppy and happy. It just IS.

However, rendering pictures was a problem. So I went with silly. Notice the venomous toad is wearing a snazzy jacket please.

Midje lacks the concept of bear traps, alas.

In case you missed the previous songs, this is the link to the playlist.

Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

Posted on October 5, 2025 by Sarah A. Hoyt

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Outer Tiers (Chronicles of the Fall Book 18)

Konstantin Aslanov is back!

And posted to an Outer Tier World with an orphaned guardian’s store–the official name of the oft rumored “Doomsday Cubes” so popular in cheesy spy movies.

He hadn’t counted on children in danger, buying a hundred race horses, or running head on into a corrupt colony government. But with newly acquired sidekicks, it’s full speed ahead to save an entire World as Plagues and Invasions hit the entirety of the Three Part Alliance!

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)

Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.

And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.

This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . .

FROM DENTON SALLE: The Summoned Sage: The Summoned Sage Book 1

“Don’t bother. I’m already dead,” the man said. “Only a spell keeps me here.”
I froze and he continued speaking. “I am sorry I had to summon you. I wanted a young hero, not a sage. But someone must carry the scroll to my teachers, lest the world end in blood and terror.”

A dying scribe-magician ripped me from my retirement in Texas to help save his world. A world kind of like Old China, where the legends and tales about cultivators are real. And I have no idea how this works. All I have is some years of practicing an internal martial art.

But I’m trying to complete his quest as thugs from a tong, monsters, and other cultivators hunt me before some catalysmic event destroys the world. They killed him for this scroll, and I’m pretty sure I’m next. If the foxes or fu dogs don’t eat me first.

And I’ve picked up this girl by mistake, which complicates things even more. Maybe I don’t want to go home? But can I even survive in a world like this? Assuming I can complete this quest before it all goes to hell?

If you enjoy Beware of Chicken or the Unintended Cultivator, you’ll love this isakai adventure where a man from Texas finds the magic powers of taoist myth are real and a world depends on his choices.

Scroll up and one click to start reading this fantasy adventure today!

FROM CELIA HAYES AND JEANNE HAYDEN: A Full Dozen of Luna City (The Chronicles of Luna City Book 12)

The final chapter in the modern day chronicles of Luna City; where Richard Astor-Hall and Kate Heisel plan their wedding, Police Chief Joe Vaughn discovers that he is famous, the fabled Mills Treasure may have been found at last, and Miss Letty McAllister reveals all, in explaining the mystery of a rarely-seen ghost in the Cattleman Hotel.

BY CASEY NASH, ROBERT HANLON AND SCOTT MACREA: U.S. Marshals Timber, Flint And Jubal Stone: Showdown at Red Hollow: A Western Adventure (A U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint Western Book 7)

If you thought the stakes could not get higher when Marshals Timber, Flint and Stone teamed up for The Long Trail to Justice, then you haven’t imagined the dangers of their next adventure, Showdown at Red Hollow!

Jake Timber, Ezra Flint and Jubal Stone join forces to investigate the murder of a fellow marshal just outside the boomtown of Red Hollow. It looks like the work of the outlaw band The Crimson Veil, but soon the marshals realize they are caught in a bigger, more dangerous conspiracy.

Facing a ruthless team of hired killers, a renegade band of Comanche, a crooked politician bent on crippling the town, and the most efficient killing machine of the Wild West, Timber, Stone and Flint race to their ultimate confrontation… the Showdown at Red Hollow.

Showdown at Red Hollow is the pulse-pounding follow-up to The Long Trail to Justice, the first-ever teaming of Jake Timber, Ezra Flint and Jubal Stone. Now, acclaimed authors Robert Hanlon, Scott McCrea and Casey Nash come together to produce another white-hot, classic Western Adventure!

EDITED BY D. JASON FLEMMING: The Victober Collection 2023: 3 Classic Victorian Novels

Three classic Victorian novels, almost in time for the month of Victober!

Black But Comely

Born to gypsies, raised by Jews, Jane Lee turns eighteen and decides to win her way into the upper classes of Victorian society. Her heritage won’t let her go, but her single-minded will and cunning are a match for any gypsy plots against her.

Marmorne

The British Segrave brothers were as different as could be. Emil, the eldest and a solicitor, was passionless and precise. Julius, the middle brother, had enough energy for three normal men, so his decision to mount an expedition to Africa was no surprise. Youngest, Adolphus, was the peacemaker between the other two.

How their fates became tied to the quaint French village of Marmorne, and the Prussian invasion of France, none of them could have foretold…

Sweet Anne Page

Sweet Anne Page is an ideal to everyone who meets her. To Stephen Langton, she is the youthful ideal of love. To Humphrey Morfill, she is the ideal way to marry into money. To Claudia Branscombe, she is the ideal foil, a distraction that enables her plots and intrigues. And to Raphael Branscombe, she becomes the ideal path to revenge…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Everything in 24 Frames

Twenty-four frames equals one second of motion-picture film.

Cather Hargreaves learned that fact for class, but as an abstraction. Now that he’s going on a tour of a movie studio and its back lots, he’s about to get real-life experience in just how movies are made.

What he didn’t expect was being tossed into a real-life horror, as the war against sectarian violence suddenly comes home to the City of Angels. It’s a moment that will change the course of his life forever.

When life is on the line, 24 frames can be an eternity.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion

Invasion from an alternate timeline?
It’s December 1937 in a world exactly like ours except that it is about to veer wildly into alternate history. It’s less than two years before World War II broke out historically in Europe. War has already come to much of Asia, with Japan invading China. An isolationist US fears it will be drawn into that conflict, especially after the Japanese sink the US gunboat Panay. Just when President Franklin Roosevelt thinks he has that crisis under control, he faces a bigger issue. High tech descendants of the Wokuo, Japanese pirates and smugglers who should have vanished over three hundred years ago, flood into the Pacific coast off California.

The Wokuo are both refugees and invaders, fleeing from war in an alternate reality where they survived and grew strong, while looking for new conquests to replace their lost empire. They set their sights on California. President Roosevelt sends disgraced former Colonel Martin to California to organize resistance to the invaders, but the Colonel has his own issues, buried deep in his brain and waiting to cause disaster.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.

AND YES I’M GOING TO REMIND YOU: No Man’s Land: Volume 3 (Chronicles of Lost Elly) is out.

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

To compensate, if you’ve missed the first three tracks of No Man’s Land Sound Track (WHY do you monsters suggest stuff like this to me when I’m stressed and weak?) they’re on youtube. (And yes, they will be up for sale and given for free to my paid substack subscribers. BUT first I need to deal with the sequella of mom’s death (sorry. It’s eating my life.)) And there are two more I need to put up before I go clean the grotty house. If I get them up before tonight, I’ll put up a post later today.

No Man’s Land Sound Track.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: CARVE

Y’all are MONSTERS. MONSTERS. I was standing on the corner, minding my own business (probably reading my Heinlein) when suddenly some baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad commenter (You are a baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad thing. Baaaaaaaaaaaaad.) mentioned the words “sound track for books.” And that I really should do a sound track for No Man’s Land.

It’s not like y’all don’t know I’m slightly on the spectrum (like people are slightly pregnant while screaming into the delivery room) and likely to become obsessed with stuff involving writing poetry and playing with clankers for music and–

Well! Now there are three tracks (though the chapter with Skip hiding in beds made me profoundly uncomfortable, it makes a fun song. The “He came to me in a dream” Probably called “Prodigal Son” but not written YET (unless I’m sitting down tonight and hit hits me) links up with his training for the Interplanetary Diplomatic Service. It will be the refrain.

I hope y’all are happy with yourselves. And yes, chapters WILL get written, today hopefully. The reason they’re late is more that I’ve been helping the Littler Pickle (younger DIL) fix up a space for storage for her stuff.

Dan says I’m actually writing a Rock Opera and wants me to do a screen play. If I kill him I was playing poker with y’all all night, right.

He also wants me to do videos with the lyrics, and that I CAN do it’s just going to take learning how. Chapters for Witch’s Daughter first, because it’s “this” close.

So, from the Top, what I have Right NOW on the No Man’s Land Playlist:

Track 1:

Track 2: (And if you haven’t read the book, read the description, otherwise you’ll be MIGHTY confused.)

Track 3:

THAT’s it. For now.

Until our next episode of “Pointing the writer at clankers and not even saying we’re sorry!”

There are reasons to be afraid of AI. None of them are inherent to AI, though. They lie at the intersection of AI and human stupidity.

No, you are not at risk of AI going sentient. Would you people stop with that? That’s science FICTION, not reality. AI is like a giant calculator that can absorb everything you feed it, including words and images. But it’s still a giant number-sorter. It’s not going to become our overlord. And those of you who are pushing this are driving my poor priest insane, so please stop it. I don’t like being asked to pray that AI doesn’t become an impious intelligence ruling us, okay? I can hear the Author laughing in the back of my mind when he does that.

No, you are not at risk of AI trying to kill you because it’s jealous of humanity. When Heinlein implied a danger of that sort it was with cyborgs. Kindly look up cyborgs to understand why that would be a risk. There’s a human brain involved.

And no AI is not going to do any of the scary things that “science fiction warned us about” anymore than cloning is going to create someone who looks exactly like you, is your age and can pass. At most — if they iron out the rapid-aging kinks — it can create your baby-identical-twin. I figure it could be great for parents who lose their only (adult) child, say or couples who want to avoid some horrible genetic issue with one of them. But for having your replicant show up at the door wearing identical clothes to what you have on and knowing everything you know? NO. It’s great fiction, but it’s based on Doppleganger legends, not science anything.

“But Sarah, in the future–“

That’s bull with a side of sh*t. The future still has hard biological limiters, like humans aren’t born at age forty. Unless of course you just way “future” when you mean “magic.” Sure, maybe in the far far future, but that hardly matters. If we get to that point there’s other things to worry about. (And there’s the reason most of my books are 4 to 5 hundred years in the future. Sometimes more.)

Guys, let me give you a tiny hint here “Science fiction warned us” really means “Guys and gals who were writing by the rule of cool and trying to make their next month’s rent warned us.” Now, is that scary? Of course not. It’s people writing drama to pay their rent.

Do most of them know what they’re talking about? Well, people like Heinlein did. That’s why he doesn’t have any big insanity like that. But most of my colleagues? Dear Bob (Heinlein.) Remember these are the people who write regencies with exploding carriages and the duchess taking the gig to the supermarket. Stop it, just stop it.

Where AI is dangerous is when people assume the same things the alarmists do but flipped. We’ve already had a spate of suicides, losing your mind from people who think AI is real and their only friend. (This should be spelled fren for the level the reasoning is at.) And who piously believe everything AI tells them. Mind you, no, we can’t legislate against that, and if we try, these people will believe the guy on the corner, the cat, or the I-ching in exactly the same way, leading to similar results. Investing something with “human” and “loves me” and “must follow instructions” is a way humans break. And a lot of humans broke of loneliness and losing their moorings after 2020. Worry about the broken humans not AI. For AI you need only keep repeating “it’s not alive. It’s just a giant, complex calculator.”

Other dangers also come from thinking AI is an independent intelligence and “so smart” and you’re starting to see companies wanting to turn things like…. Air traffic control to it.

Now it’s fine to have AI scan and give alerts, but for the love of Bob (Heinlein) do not give it ultimate decision powers. IT CAN’T THINK. And it makes really strange errors no human would make.

Which leads us to the other part of it: STOP RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR HEAD ON FIRE SAYING THAT AI WILL STEAL ALL THE JOBS.

The thing to do when your head is on fire is stop, drop, roll. Then put your head under water till the fire goes out or bubbles stop coming up. What? Oh…. see, this idiocy has just got on my nerves so badly.

Look, yeah, AI might take YOUR job. There are some highly specialized fields that AI can do better. I’m aware of them, because one might have been mine, if I’d taken a very clear fork in my life about 34 years ago. Scientific translation can’t be done entirely by AI, but it can be done now well enough that junior translators can do the verification run, and therefore senior — highly paid — translators can be laid off.

This sucks, of course, if it’s your job they come for. And if you are my age or older and tired you might decide it’s all over and retire. But you don’t have to. It just means you have become inviable for a large company to pay you a huge salary. But — hello! — AI means you can set up your own shingle and start your own company and make the same or more, because you, in your house, in pajamas, can have the work of a team of “junior translators” at your fingertips.

I understand it’s more or less the same for programmers and I understand it from my husband who has a degree in math and has been walking the fine line between math and programming for 40 plus years. He knows that AI “junior programmers” can be trusted even less than human junior programmers, but on his own time, with the fifteen or so projects he plays with in the basement (he swears one of them ISN’T a time machine, but I know the conversations I’ve overheard between him and younger son) he uses them a lot, to cut time and effort that he’d have to donkey-carry himself line by line otherwise.

It is not in any way shape or form an ender of work, but a modifier. It makes some things much, much easier, saves a lot of boring, repetitive work, and frees the people who can do more to do more.

Like…. every other major innovation in the history of humanity.

Stop throwing sabots into AI. It’s not here to steal your jobs. It’s here to make sure (metaphorically speaking) cloth is way cheaper, everyone can have more than two sets of clothing, and no one has to work dawn to dusk in dark satanic mills.

Here’s the secret: Humans will find other things to do.

And for that matter, no, it won’t mean people don’t develop skills. Yes, younger people are grossly maleducated, but you don’t get to blame AI for the malfeasance of the NEA and the department of education. (You don’t get to blame the young either. They’re the victims here.)

The truth of it while AI is MAJORLY labor saving, it’s not MAGIC. Humans still need to learn about “the thing” that they want AI to do, so they can stop it making errors, or perhaps fix the errors. Or understand what about your prompt sucks raw eggs.

I was talking to friends about this with Midjourney this morning (which I use specifically for labor saving. Because I can draw images for covers — or clanker movies. sigh — but it would take me MONTHS and I’d rather be writing which pays better for me, anyway). Prompts are…. something you sometimes need to analyze very carefully. If the AI insists on putting a giant beast and your guy in a position like they just met for a snog, it’s probably because something in your front failed to give a hint of what the relationship between these two forms is. Think of the AI as an alien. It doesn’t think that it’s improbable for humans to consort with giant bear-lions. It has all the covers of fantasy romances to scan, after all. So you need to say something like “the giant bear lion he’s hunting” and after the next horror “He wants to shoot.” instead of hunting. And sometimes the AI in alien-fashion associates something with a specific sexual perversion, and then you have to carve out your eyes with a melon baller. The word can be something like “Muscular” or “Barefoot.” And apparently it thinks evening dress means bare breasts. WHY? I don’t know. My guess would be juxtaposition with “lady of the evening.” So prompt crafting is WORK. Even if you’ve trained the AI to YOU and gotten pretty good at it. It has days too. Like the day it refused to believe women existed and I had to give it image prompts until it went “Oh, one of those.” No I don’t know what people had been running on the poor clanker that erased women from its idea of the world. And sometimes it’s like that for a day, then comes back. Right now it doesn’t understand “Super-hero comic style.” Or it didn’t yesterday. Probably will today. But again, you have to work with it, it’s not magic.

And this means it’s creating a whole class of workers, which is someone who can both dissect and rearrange word prompts and work with images to know what works. And be able to fix portions that don’t. One thing midje has done is show me that my friends who say they can’t draw really mean they can’t SEE. Even if it’s obvious an image is horrendous (I sometimes share for funsies) they go “oh, that’s pretty good.” Which probably means…. the percentage of atrocious covers won’t go down. (Let’s face it, they roamed the face of the earth long before AI. And I don’t mean “I don’t like your cover. It’s horrible.” type of art opinion, but OBJECTIVELY atrocious covers. Like you can’t tell what’s happening, or you wish you couldn’t.)

But in everything…. look, I learned to write with a quill pen partly because Portugal is nuts in a very specific way. In the 1960s there was no reason for this.

BUT in general, we learn skills that tech has superseeded, so we can check on the tech or make do if it fails. Now, I think kids should learn to write by hand, even if they’ll spend most of their lives typing. BUT I don’t think we should make them chisel the letters out of rock or write them in clay. They didn’t even do THAT to me.

So AI doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t learn art — most of art is learning to read — or poetry, or music, or definitely writing. (There might be a way to make a clanker write a novel, chapter by chapter, but from using it to write book descriptions (Y’all don’t know HOW BADLY I suck at those, for some reason) it would be torturous and painful. (I mean I need to correct about half the sentences in a couple hundred words, I just can get the “feel” which I can’t do on my own.)

There might in the future be a way to push-button write a novel. Honestly, if he who is known as Speaker to Lab Animals would hurry up with the neural interface, it’s likely to be better. But for the foreseeable future an AI writing a novel without a world-mountain of editing after belongs in the same realm as “A clone, indistinguishable from yourself including knowledge shows up at your door wearing the same clothes you’re wearing.”

I use writing as an example because I KNOW that. But talking to people who do other things affected by AI it seems to be the same everywhere. Sure, you can just “supervise AI” and do the clean up work after. And if that’s what you WANT to do, you do you. I prefer writing the thing, which then needs (relatively speaking) remarkably little clean up. But it’s a horses for courses thing.

For some occupations, right now, like for…. Oh, people who pumped gas in states not as crazy as Oregon, or buggy whip makers, or…. tech will eliminate their occupation, yes.

Just like typists were run out of jobs in the thousands…. and side stepped into “personal assistants” because their bosses still want to dictate emails. (No, no joke. Have seen it.) But also do a lot of other things that go beyond pushing keys.

AI might eat your job. So? Stack your skills into something else. Journalists probably can’t learn to code, no. (It’s a different type of mind, most of the time) but (note journalists are NOT being run out of their jobs by AI but by meretricious behavior of their own.) if they’re halfway good and honest, lots of jobs need investigative skills. And oh, yeah, AI can in fact HELP with that. Also if you bide a while websites will realize they need someone with a pulse and a human brain to check/fix AI content. So half of the idiot stories pushed make some sort of sense. (Of course this is for the rare journalist who cares about reality. I know a few.)

Stop saying AI will take/destroy all jobs. Economics doesn’t work that way. Economics — as a friend reminded me this morning (hi Jeff) exists to mediate infinite human wants with the possible. That means if your job in the realm of the possible is rendered obsolete, you have to look for unserved wants that you can use your skills on. And unless you’re profoundly depressed, you’ll see there are some.

AI isn’t the only reason that people lose jobs, and there’s always a way to work around setbacks. (For inspirational story, go here.) Staying locked in the fetal position screaming won’t help, though. And neither will demanding the government do “something”. You know what the government ALWAYS does. Its only competence is hurting its own people and taking their stuff. If you had government run the Sahara there would be a sand shortage. When you demand the government interfere, you’re more dangerous than AI will ever be.

Yes, sure, you’ll have to change, and learn and grow. But it’s always been like that. No one gets a life where they don’t do that. We just seem to be hit harder both because tech innovation is moving very fast, and because we now live long enough each of us can get to have three or four careers per life.

It’s a good problem to have. It’s a sign life is better.

So stop sulking and imagining AI is lurking under your bed, waiting to pounce. If you gave AI those instructions, it would promptly lurk under your flower bed waiting to ponce. Whatever that is.

Do not attribute magic capacities to the thing. For good or ill. But learn what it actually is. And work with it.

UPDATE: There won’t be another post. Sorry. The younger DIL and I were moving things around and playing with heavy duty sanders. Tired now.

There will be a real post later. (We’re all out of schedule!) For now have some clanker songs.
And curse those who gave me the idea of a sound track. You know who you are! Have you no shame?
So here is the first track, Space Admiral’s Son.

And here is a redo of Forever Through No Man’s Land which youtube, inexplicably, decided was a short!

Yesterday was two yeas since we saw the the tribal neolithic way of war on full display, reaching for us out of the brutal and horrific past. And now we see our own left gleefully fall into it and thinking it’s an amazing flex that will give them everything they want.

To explain, for those who aren’t aware of what the neolithic way of war: for almost (or more than) a century anthropologists, more out of wishful thinking and ideology than anything else, maintained that there was no war before history. But people who are sane and have met humans have instead started pushing back on this nonsense with the truth.

We know exactly what war in pre-history was like, not only from horrendous anthropological finds, but also from our civilization having met neolithic tribesmen in the recent past, where they lived isolated in Africa and the Americas and definitely Australia.

No, barbarians didn’t march in serried ranks, and they certainly didn’t have military organization and discipline, at least for anything above small tribes. (And unlikely, since the ethos of Personal Bravery is against military discipline.)

Instead they had attacks that we would call arrant and horrible terrorism. It was all “War by war crimes.” Instead of rational objectives or working to conquer ground or strategical resources (whatever they are for the time) their means of war were to descend on civilians and commit horrific atrocities.

I have talked about this in the past, because having read about the first encounters with African and Amerindian tribes, I’ve figured out that atrocities were a RATIONAL way to prevent encroaching on their territory or attacks on themselves.

Look, these were small bands and tribes. Of course they didn’t have borders and couldn’t defend those borders. Instead, they had vast territories, through which they largely wandered in the way of hunter gatherers.

If finding another people, potentially (almost surely) hostile given the time, their best bet was to attack and make their attack so horrible that however big the group that wandered in will run back out and as far away from them as possible.

Sure, if they could without or with little risk, they killed all the intruders. But this wasn’t needed and of course, warriors fought back. So, by preference they attacked groups of unaccompanied women and children and committed horrible acts upon them, not only killing them but making their deaths horrible and mistreating their remains.

This sent the message of “Your women and children aren’t safe here.”

This worked great — and so kept being done — until they ran up against modern, western civilization, where humans by and large recognize the humanity of other people. I.e. we identify with other humans worldwide, not just with our tiny little family. And we’re a bigger, more connected group than the neolithic mind can comprehend.

This means that their big showy horrors and attacks that were supposed to scare the enemy instead turned the vast majority of humanity against them and destroyed them.

I want to emphasize this is always the end of tribal attacks on humans who recognize themselves as more than a tribe. Every single time.

The horrendous attack by Hamass on Israel was exactly this type of attack: an attack on the unsuspecting and those who would not fight back. Something from the deep memory of mankind, the kind of memory we hoped was long buried in the past. The atrocities they committed were a sign of utter and complete rebarbarization. Which, before the usual suspects talk about the Palestinians horrible oppression or claim a genocide that GREW palestinian population is in fact a sign of mistreatment. They are being mistreated by their Hamass overlords, who use them to farm international aid. They export nothing but misery and made up stories of oppression, while living on hatred, breathing hatred and feeding off hatred.

This has brought them to the level of cavemen with modern weaponry, and they are a horror and a reproach on the face of the left that adores them and the international Islamo-fascists who use them. Anyone who can and will say they support Palestinians and Palestine and PARTICULARLY Hamas after the horrors of 10/7 is no longer human but someone who was possessed by a demon of hatred and can no longer think.

Of course most of the people “supporting” them are kids and the oldsters who have never seen or heard of the real atrocities committed by these savages and are instead running on a script of “pity the poor noble savages” because that’s what they were taught. We must stop teaching Rousseaunian nonsense to the young. There are noble people and there are savages. The best you can say for savages is that they’re not inherently bad. Sometimes they are simply in dire need and living with a broken culture. But there is nothing noble about cruelty and dire need. Stop teaching kids that.

As for being victims, well, you can be good and be a victim. You can be bad and be a victim. Victimhood does not grant moral high status. It is an injury and you may be deserving the support of men and women of good will to stop being a victim. But it in no way makes you a hero or wonderful.

Hamass has tried to avoid the backlash that is the due of barbarians and their atrocities by claiming they are the real victims and hiding in the niches of modern minds that believe no one should ever be punished for their crimes, or that perhaps the vast majority of Palestinians are innocent. (Innocent they might be. They are also deeply indoctrinated into hatred, which makes them dangerous instruments. And we do not know how to minister to a culture diseased. Thought uncorking the sun on them seems to have fixed Japan. Alas not permissible in tight confines of the Middle East.)

But in the long run, the “demonstrations” in their favor and the people trying to defend them are a tiny, if excessively vocal minority, amplified by the leftists in the media who think this might help them bring down the west.

What they did and what they planned and celebrated as though it were a great achievement, exactly like primitives at the dawn of history, was so atrocious, so horrific, such a violation of all decency and morals that the rest of us who live in the 21st century saw the face of their movement for the monster it is. And you can’t come back from that. You just can’t.

Curiously, over here antifa and the other dead end — poisonous — tail of the dying communist dragon have decided that this type of war is the way to destroy human civilization.

Part of it is, as Eric S. Raymond pointed out that they are running the script of previous communist revolutions and since they live in a context free world and don’t study history (because history runs up against Marxist technology that they can’t question or their entire mental map falls apart,) they don’t realize that the conditions and countries under which these terror attacks worked are very different from our connected, ease of communication, largely socially flat world (by comparison to the past.)

Which means that they like the barbarians of Hamass are providing cold buckets of water to the dormant and self-satisfied modern mind. Reminding us of the things that howl in the night and that cannot be negotiated with, compounded with and must never, ever be pitied.

They won’t like the results.

Every time savages doing war the barbaric way meet with modern humans they lose. The only question is if they lose before making civilized people commit acts that scar them and which they’ll forever regret.

With the understanding that again we’re dealing with a tiny minority — not even a rump movement, but a pimple on the ass of the already dead rump movement — let’s hope that in America at least — I’m not making predictions for the rest of the world — we manage to once more walk the knife’s edge over the abyss without falling in.

Until then, be careful in crowds.

And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

I swear I’m working on a post as we speak. This day is already at least two weeks long. It started with calling the doctor about stupid insurance tricks relating to a med, then calling the pharmacy about another med, then–

So, while I’m working on the other post, remember it’s triple point day for the rest of the day at Amazon, and I have some books you should buy. And new Clanker songs at the end. Odd ones. I mean, I made the poor thing say “Half Crossibling.” Pity it.

Of course, first, by contractual obligation (with my husband and first readers) I have to promote the FULL release of No Man’s Land.

All Three volumes are out: No Man’s Land.

Humanity reached for the stars with ships that could cross the galaxy in an instant.

They called them Schrödinger Ships—because half of them vanished without a trace.

For a century, no one knew where they went. Then the truth emerged: the ships hadn’t just traveled through space. They’d traveled through time.

Scattered across millennia, lost colonies had grown into star empires spanning thousands of years. Some had forgotten Earth ever existed. Others had evolved beyond recognition.

In the 26th century, explorers discovered Elly—a world where genetic experiments created functional hermaphrodites who wield powers between science and magic. Now this dangerous world must rejoin human civilization, though Ellyans can never truly integrate.

But some things are lost for a reason.

The Chronicles of Lost Elly Where science becomes magic, and the past holds the key to humanity’s future.

And now, for other people, so you can earn those triple points! ;)

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Certified Public Assassin

Molly McGuire: murder for hire…

Working as a Certified Public Assassin was, after all, the fastest way to pay down millions of dollars of medical debt. Between that payment and the student loans from getting her associates’ degree, she’s barely making enough to keep body and soul together, but the debt’s almost gone.

Except…she’s paid her student loans. Many times over. There’s something going on, and her handler can’t figure out what. Hiring a hacker to track whatever’s glitching in the student loans database and programming seemed to be a logical next step; however, it isn’t just a glitch. Somebody’s got it in for Molly…and for everyone that has a license to kill.

This has barreled from circumstance through happenstance, and straight into enemy action. But who’s the enemy?

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol.1: In Dreams and Other Stories

A man whose debts must be paid by vengeance. A woman desperate to save her husband. A grieving father finding a young enemy soldier on his veritable doorstep…

These fantasy and soft sci-fi stories wonder whether or not heroes need families. Are we not told that families slow the hero down? Is it not typically implied that they get in the way of the adventure? Are they a burden, or truly the greatest strength from which the hero and those he loves can draw?

Six tales in this collection center on family, faith, and self-sacrificing love as men and women fight for the ones whom they hold most dear. Whether the enemy is inner turmoil, a nightmare, or a demon really does not matter. If the threat seeks to harm a member of the family, it is going to pay dearly.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Secret of Seavale (The Markham Series Book 1)

A cottage by the sea, nestled in a respectable neighborhood. It should be a safe haven…

Elizabeth Markham has run away from school and seeks the house of her godmother, six miles outside of Portsmouth. Seavale Cottage is a place of peace, and Elizabeth will be safe under Mrs. Brownhurst’s care.

But she arrives at Seavale only to discover that Mrs. Brownhurst has gone away, leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself. She finds assistance in her servants and in her very obliging neighbor, Captain Randall, and all is well until Seavale is beset by strange nighttime happenings. Elizabeth is about to discover that her place of refuge holds more danger than she ever dreamed, and she must gather all of her courage and resources if she and her friends are to survive the secret of Seavale.

FROM C. CHANCY: Tell No Tales

Some nights it just doesn’t pay to rise from the grave….Corbin wants to uncover the truth behind her death at a demon’s hands. But her memories have been shattered by the grave, and even with footloose Sighted mechanic Devon Fortunato helping her search for answers, a restless ghost is up against the darkest spells and lies of the living. If they can’t unravel who sabotaged the Cunning Folk circle’s spellcast defenses, the child Corbin meant to protect will suffer a fate worse than death. Corbin’s notes hold clues, but the broken circle would rather die than admit the truth….

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Possum Creek Massacre: A Paranormal Police Procedural (Witchward Book 2)

Renowned for her witch hunting skills, Detective Amaya Lombard knew that being summoned from the coastal rainforest of Oregon to the backwoods hollers of Kentucky meant the case was something special. From the moment she arrived at the magic-drenched scene in an abandoned farmhouse she knew how bad it was going to be.

She had no idea just how complicated it was going to get, professionally and personally. Now she must catch a killer before they catch her. The roots of evil plunge deeply into the past, and the blood soaked history of Kentucky’s witch warded houses and barns may hold the key to keeping her alive in the present.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: PLANTING LIFE: Shut the Kingdom (Near Future Science Fiction Adventure)

Nominated for the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

The road to Mars has to start somewhere. It might as well be central Virginia.

Jack Darien scorns his parents’ path. After the disaster at his father’s Mars settlement, the high school senior scraps both his lifelong interest in space exploration and his college plans. Even his rescue of a college student from assault doesn’t make him see his own future any differently.

Jack becomes obsessed, however, when one strange comment from the attacker draws him to unravel secrets at the former Superfund site that is now Webb University, the school where his returning father teaches and eco-restoration reigns. What starts for Jack as a distraction from thinking of his future turns into a dangerous journey that puts him, his mother, and sister at risk. As for his father, Jack decided long ago the man was on his own.

Jack’s determination to chart his future clear of his father’s failures hits a snag when he learns the school’s hidden mystery. Unfortunately, those determined to bring Webb down learn it, too, and ratchet up their own efforts toward Webb’s destruction.

Planting Life is an immersive young-adult science fiction adventure. If you like unearthing secrets, a dogged hero, and reckless courage under threat, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s near future coming-of-age saga.

FROM FRANCIS DECHANTAL: Jessamyn’s Yarn

How far do you go to help a relative you haven’t seen for sixteen years? On the verge of making promises to a chosen community, twenty-five year old Jessamyn drops everything and rushes to help her Great Uncle, when he is attacked and injured, on his Iowa sheep farm. Some of her best memories come from his long ago kindness. Once there she struggles with his concussion, his sheep, his handsome neighbors, and his acquaintances, some of whom would love to steal the sheep, or take over the farm. What is she going to do when the crisis is over? Will she stay on the farm or return to her previous life?
Enjoy this warm tale of family and friends rearranging their relationships, and watching a few shooting stars as they do so.

FROM LIANE ZANE: Helsing: Demon Slayer (The Dragon’s Paladins Book 1)

Book One of The Dragon’s Paladins

A warrior bound by duty. A woman marked by fate. A world on the edge of darkness.

When the sky burns and the earth trembles, old powers stir beneath the surface. In the wake of a devastating solar flare, ancient evil rises to take advantage of a broken world. But the Elioud, a hidden race of angel-blooded warriors, have not stood idle. In the mountains of northern Albania, a stronghold has formed under the drangùe and his consort—a sanctuary where harmony and heroism might hold back the coming dark.

Ryan Helsing, a decorated Army Ranger with a past forged in fire, is sworn to that cause. Battle-tested and emotionally scarred, he never questions his orders—until he’s sent to retrieve Dianne Markham, the younger sister of the drangùe’s wife. What should have been a simple escort mission turns deadly when daemons strike Dianne’s cruise ship just as it docks in Split, Croatia. Ryan barely gets her out alive.

Now they’re on the run across a crumbling Europe, hunted by forces both human and inhuman. Dianne never asked to be part of a war between supernatural powers. All she wanted was to survive the chaos and find something real in a world of shallow pleasures. But when Ryan storms into her life with steel eyes and a haunted soul, she’s drawn into a world where ancient bloodlines, harmonic technology, and dark angelic forces collide.

Marked by an unseen enemy and carrying secrets even she doesn’t understand, Dianne may be the key to everything. And Ryan will risk his life to protect her—even if it means confronting the echoes of his past, and the possibility that fate has more in store for them than either imagined.

Helsing: Demon Slayer launches a pulse-pounding romantasy of survival, sacrifice, and the fierce first strike in the battle to hold the light.

Sometimes, one man is all that stands in the way.

FROM FRANK HOOD: A Geek’s Progress: Navigating a Software Career from the 80s to the 20s

This is what I call my work biography. It’s about how to survive in the business world and, inevitably also about the changes in technology that I went through in 40 years of software development from punch cards to Artificial Intelligence. If you’re young and reading this, I hope it shows you what to expect–not how to climb the corporate ladder, but how to contribute to making things people want while making life better for you, your family, your fellow employees, and the company you work for–whether they want you to or not. If you’re farther along in your career and reading this, I hope you nod in recognition at many of the things I’ve been through.

Many books purport to tell you how to innovate, but most of us will never be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. I never had any interest in being among those folks. I just have always wanted, like most of us introverts who develop software, to be able to do a good job, making things better and getting a little recognition along the way. So if you’re a future high risk/high rewards entrepreneur, this book is not for you. It’s for the rest of us little people who just want to have a good life.

The technical side is not neglected, but I have tried to put most of it in what I call geeky asides for those who are not software developers but want to still read about a long career in the business. Software development itself is an inherently innovative business. Everything a software developer does is about crafting a unique product or way of doing things. I have found, over my career, that I had to learn a new technology stack every 5 years of my career as the rest of the software world innovates around me. Yes, that means I’ve had to relearn how to do my job 7 times. Actually, the last 5 years of my career, I knew retirement was looming, so I made use of my hard-won knowledge of AI and turned my focus on what’s next to the technologies needed for my post-retirement writing career, rather than learning more than a bare acquaintance with the newest techniques in software development. Still, on my last work project before retirement, I turned out to be valuable because we were tasked with interfacing with 30 year old technology that is still out there and necessary.

My hope for anyone reading this book is that you have a good life, and that, maybe, what I’ve learned the hard way helps you with that.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Enchanted Princess Wakes

Once upon a time, a princess was cursed at her christening — but not the one you heard of.

When the fairy decreed that Rosaleen would fall into an enchanted sleep, and how she would wake, the grand plans of kings, to unite kingdoms, failed. They sent her to an out-of-the-way castle in the mountains, in hopes the curse would do no harm to anyone else.

There, alone, Rosaleen lived and learned, and realized that she herself had to be ready to face the curse, and when it broke.

FROM TIMOTHY WITCHAZEL: Noah and the Great Flood: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

From author and poet Timothy V. Witchazel comes a retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark in the alliterative verse, the style of poetry used in Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and other Anglo-Saxon works.

FROM HEATHER STRICKLER: Lift High the Candle (Wyrd Rhymes)

When the storm rages onward
And the world comes tumbling down
And there seems no future forward,
And you’re deep enough to drown.

Some times a simple song uplifted
Can ease the burdened soul.
So here a book has drifted
With rhymes to ease the toll.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1)

“The thrills are nonstop, the alien cultures and races are well developed and fascinating, and there’s just the right amount of humor to keep the whole thing fizzing.” — Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Reese Eddings has enough to do keeping her rattletrap merchant vessel, the TMS Earthrise, profitable enough to feed herself and her crew. So when a mysterious benefactor from her past shows up demanding she rescue a man from slavers, her first reaction is to run for the hills. Unfortunately, she did promise to repay the loan. But she didn’t think it would involve tangling with pirates over a space elf prince…

Book 1 of the Her Instruments trilogy is a rollicking adventure set in the expansive Pelted universe, and kicks off an epic space opera series where the fate of worlds hangs in the balance. Fans who enjoyed Firefly or Andromeda will like this series.

AND NOW, LET THE CLANKERS SING

These two songs are weird. The first one I’ve had for a while, and it might be a little deep In-Elly baseball (No, not literally, they don’t have baseball.) Maybe. Anyway, I am trying something new with the video, which is more or less matching video and event in song. Except I don’t have unlimited midje credits and don’t want to spend a week making it, so re-usage happened, as well as selecting the Ellyan images who don’t make you (me) want to crawl backward away from the uncanny valley.

But, anyway: Ballad of the King of Elly

And the next one is all sorts of strange subject, but since it shows up in book 2 (and three) here goes nothing:

The Watcher’s Song: