Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (RP1), which I read after I saw the movie, was a cyberpunk roller-coaster with a veritable cascade of 1980’s references and trivia. That alone made the book much more interesting than the movie, as I walked away with a lot of little insights into the 1980’s pop culture scene and much-loved movies, music, and books about which I had no idea. RP1 was a cool read, which set me up with some pretty high expectations going into Ready Player Two (RP2).

I bought the second book a couple of years ago and, just after deciding to read it, I bumped into a reviewer who utterly slated it. I am, if nothing else, easily influenced, so reading a couple of f-bombs in a really short review which also mentioned something akin to “money-grab” and “repetition,” my heart honestly sank. Despite my expectations being crushed on the rocks of commercial reality, as viewed by the florally-languaged reviewer, I went into RP2 with an open mind and I was ready to enjoy another adventure with Wade Watts.

But, damn it. That reviewer was right.

RP2 is an object lesson in what I fervently hope never to do as an author, and a cautionary tale for all of us. Especially those who enjoy wild success on one their books. RP2 is replete with more trivia about 1980’s culture and even a little from the 1990’s, covering everything from games to children’s TV. And that is what killed it for me, by the time I reached page 222 and the world of Halycodonia. There is only so much trivia I can handle. Now, admittedly, I have a very low level of trivia tolerance. After all, I despise the game Trivial Pursuit with a passion reserved only for thieves, bullies, and Education Review Office functionaries. So this fact does not predispose me to endless trivia drip feeds. However, what made RP1 charming and fun, in part, has become the mill stone around the reader’s neck. It drags the book into pointlessness and the trivia adds nothing to the narrative.

A much bigger problem with RP2, which the above-mentioned review pointed out so colourfully, is the basic plot is another treasure-hunt. The Easter egg has gone, and now it’s the Seven Shards of the Siren, the alliteration belying the mediocrity of an essentially regurgitated premise. I was willing to run with it for awhile. There are hunts, and then there are hunts. RP2 falls into repeated pattern of teleport-hunt-complete task-teleport again, broken only by brief instances of “bad news” being introduced, or something else to pause the hunt, and a supposed set of other clues left by Og Morrow. The secondary plot of Og Morrow’s disappearance at the hands Anorak, (think CLU in Tron), almost rescues RP2 from the dungeon of despair. Almost.

And this where I think some are right in their harsh comments about RP2. It was not written, I think, with anything more to add to the narrative finished in RP1. It was written to capitalise on the popularity of the first book and milk a bit more success out of the series. On a business level, it makes sense.

But when you compare the RP1 and RP2 books to other series, the faults become glaring. In the Dune books, each book forms a new stage of the characters’ development and the movement of the plot is into new territory, so to speak. The narrative develops from the book before and leads the reader to the book following. That is because the story was always intended to span a large number of books from the get go, or at the very least, in the very early stages of the writing process. Lord of the Rings, another series, is a second case in point. The narrative expands from the first book, taking the characters into new situations and new tensions. There is a narrative arch which ranges from the first page of book one to the last page of book three. Tolkien and Herbert had also done the world building to back up their narratives, and it shows.

Unlike Lord of the Rings and Dune, RP1 would have been an excellent story even without RP2. The latter instalment feels like it has been tacked onto the end like a poorly sewn Taylor Swift patch on a perfectly fine denim jacket covered in Rancid and Sex Pistols patches and metal studs. In my opinion, this is where the whole point of RP2 has been lost, if ever it had a point beyond capitalising on the previous book’s popularity in the first place.

Sometimes, not publishing something is better for an existing book. And this where we, as authors, need to consider things carefully. I am not implying Ernest Cline did not deeply weigh up the pros and cons of publishing RP2. Of course, he did, and he probably had a whole tonne of other stakeholders saying it was a great idea. However, I think, in some cases, it is worth refraining from putting something out there if it is not going to contribute to an existing narrative you have already established in any meaningful way.

It is possible to keep adding to narratives in meaningful ways over vast spans of books. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, and Randolph Lalonde’s Spinward Fringe are examples of great narratives continued over prodigious amounts of output. There are many more authors who have done the same. But they have done it for the right reasons: their characters’ stories were not finished yet.

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You can grab another of my book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms! And there are no sequels. Yet!

For my personal book reading, I drifted for years through different platforms, including the Fediverse’s Bookwyrm, and a bunch of others. It was not until I became a writer of anything beyond “hobbyist” that I found an actual use for Goodreads. I support other indie authors.

I do not like Goodreads and I keep my personal reading from it. Only a one or two authors know I have added their books to alternative platforms. However, I use Goodreads more for promoting other authors because that is where a tonne of readers…well…read. If the readers are there, then it is on Goodreads where a review has a more meaningful impact.

’s book Shadows of the Wall got a review (click the book cover) and the wonderfully sick mind of Zachry Wheeler produced the wicked funny Roy: The Most Chaotic Midlife in Cosmic History. Being part of the indie community has meant a bit more awareness of what it takes to get your books out there. I may not be able to buy a lot of books, but I sure can write some good reviews about what I do read.

One of the points I make is when I get hold of a book for free, which both of Zachry Wheeler’s books were, is that I make sure I get a review out there for them. This is a bit of a big deal for me from an ethical viewpoint. In my humble opinion, if an author has given someone a book for free, the least the recipient can is jot a few lines down, even if they did not love the book. I copy and paste reviews across my platforms sometimes, so I do cheat a little. But I think it is important to say thanks with a review, even a short one.

With so many cool writers out there pumping out words of wonder and delight, I cannot begin to wrap my head around the choices I have with what I can read. It is amazing to behold. The indie scene is in a really good state at the moment, even with the AI slopadrama infecting it all. There are good authors out there with real talent and human-focused processes. We can help keep it that way one review at a time.

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You can grab my debut book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

Around two years. I could be considered an overly impatient braggart, but I think two years sitting on a manuscript is a fairly long time. And this is the problem with traditional pathways to publication for the unknown and, possibly, shitty author. Is the wait time worth it?

The back story - I wrote a story called The Recast back when I cannot remember, but it is a science fiction story set in a far future version of Australia. The manuscript, written with my favourite software Scrivener, was submitted to a US-based publisher. They emailed me a year later (that was a sign!) with an interesting comment. Someone had pulled it from their mass of unsolicited manuscripts and put it to their people for more attention. The email was a sure boost to the ego, and that is the truth. I was pumped!

What I was unprepared for, as a new and emerging author, was the timeframe. This is not a complaint about the publisher. I get it. Everyone who thinks they can write a novel is sending the poor staff of any publisher who takes unsolicited works their drivel, me included. That translates into a massive workload for a staff who are already exceptionally busy people. I get it, and I have every degree of sympathy for their plight. When real life intrudes on the fantasy I entertain of me being a real author, my job as a teacher gives me some idea of what the staff of a publishing company must endure. I would not want their job, and I am teaching in a secondary school!

But the reality is publishers and their staff, like the rest of humanity, have only twenty-four hours in a day. That time is often taken up with a plethora of conflicting and competing obligations, which means only one thing. The manuscript into which you have poured your soul will often find itself on the back-burner of priorities. As far as trad publishing is concerned, this is the reality and the nature of the beast, through utterly no fault of the staff who work for publishing companies.

Traditional publishing, no matter what crap people level at it, takes time. Pure and simple. If you’re as impatient as some, maybe the indie route is more your juice.

Do I regret submitting a manuscript? Hell, no! For the purely egoistical endorsement that someone who has no idea who I am said my story was worth more than the delete button is something I am happy to live on for years! Last time I emailed the publisher, they said my novel was about 33 in line. Hell, they can take all the time they need. They have endorsed me as a writer with potential. Their decision alone means I am not entirely wasting my time in this caper.

However, all that said, I am also keen to put other stories out there as in indie author. I am planning to use Substack partly for that reason. For the first chapter of any serialised novel, expect that to be for free. After that, my paid subscribers get everything, including the full eBook at the end, if I have published it as such a thing.

In my vast experience, all of six months, I would suggest a mix of traditional publishing for the stories you are in no hurry at all, and indie publishing for those stories you are keen to get to your readers. In the end, keep it real.

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You can grab another of my book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

It’s been awhile now since Bandcamp announced they would be removing all AI-generated music from the platform in their post Keeping Bandcamp Human. Since then, has Bandcamp imploded into obscurity for the lack of AI music available? I would say a resounding “no” in response.

It seems a huge number of music fans are in agreement with me on this one. According to Futurism, fans have “exploded,” though the term it hyperbolic - the article only quotes a couple of people and makes a vague statement about widespread frustration. The fact that some people have the same feelings as myself entirely validates my own strong opinions on this matter, as far as I am concerned. Bandcamp appears to have made the right move, which the Herald Scotland calls a “much-needed decision” in fighting against “the rot of AI-generated music.” Opinions, at least in the cases of those that matter, have come out in support of the ban.

From a personal viewpoint, my own purchasing from Bandcamp has gone up since deceptive, unlabelled, AI music has been taken out of the equation. Just from an emotional viewpoint, the loss of AI music has been an absolute God-send. While I am a fanboy of a few musicians on Ampwall, getting my hands on ambient music from Bandcamp has now seen my collection grow somewhat. I am going to need much bigger mobile storage.

Of course, there have been some voices raised in protest. In an spam-pop-up-ridden article (yeah, there is no point to that adjective other than to paint the source in a negative light, - I am biased, so kill me), Undetectr lauded Bandcamp’s lack of AI detection purely because unscrupulous users could flood the platform with AI urine and not get picked up on it. The authors at Undetectr encourage AI users to distribute their tracks through streaming services like Distrokid and direct sales platforms. The main praise is the lack of AI policy or lack of detection on these platforms.

The response of Undetectr is understandably negative to Bandcamp’s decision, as their own business depends on people getting sucked into the narrative that using SUNO is no different than Mark Knopfler picking his guitar and kicking out “Brothers in Arms.” The question is rather simple: when are streaming platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and others going to make a stand for human musicians and get rid of AI-generated excrement?

Bandcamp’s decision is part of a much wider, though still nascent, resistance to AI-generated art. Some book publishers have written new policies which not only ban AI-generated books from being submitted, but also ban the users who are dumb enough to use AI to write from ever submitting to those publishing companies again. Like with a lot of new technology, the honeymoon period seemed a bit crazy, like mad sex on a beach at sunset with a new bride and her groom, but the honeymoon seems to be coming to an end. The bride has realised that her man has kind of let himself go, and he has realised he has commitment issues after all. Like a lot of people, AI promised a lot, but has under-delivered in just about everything except negative impact on the arts.

Bandcamp has not imploded in a collapsing black hole, nor has the ban been a cause for rioting and boycotts in our boycott-something-to-signal-our-virtues world. From all indications, Bandcamp can actually look forward to a time of relative prosperity with customers feeling much safer in the knowledge they are buying real music from real humans.

As a last note, Bandcamp does encourage snitching on bands who are using AI on the platform. It is an important thing to do, as by reporting suspected AI-generated sewage, you are doing every fan a massive favour.

Now, leave me alone. I have some music shopping to do.

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You can grab another of my book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

Over the last few months, I have had to war with difference voices around me and my tendency to accept what people say at face value in good faith. This has come to something of a head as I have discovered podcasts. These are my thoughts on filtering the voices you listen to, including those from within.

The first podcast I have every really listened to extensively is Live Free put out by Lakepointe Church in Texas, USA. When I started looking for social media places where I could follow either the church or the lead pastor, Josh Howerton, I was confronted with a fair amount of criticism of the man. The criticism of Howerton was not limited to left dominated platforms like Bluesky, but also some on the cesspit X and even Facebook had a few negative things to say about the guy. In my own mind, these voices were louder than those people who actually like Howerton and what he has to say. It was this incident that brought me finally to the place where I stopped listening to people who appear to be mindless trolls.

On the Live Free podcast, I have yet to hear anything major with which I disagree. Howerton and his partners on the podcast present well-supported points, even if they take a good long time to get around to the topic of the podcast itself. Howerton might use some harsh phraseology, but that is something of a positive for me. I don’t think Gen X get too ruffled about a few hard words. The point is, Howerton’s theology and ethics, so far, have matched my own fairly broadly, and I see nothing in the Bible, again so far, that has contradicted the podcast.

This same issue was brought up to me previously when I mentioned I had the book Systematic Theology by theologian Wayne Grudem. I am not a reformed Christian by any stretch, but I do find Grudem’s presentation on things theological fairly solid. A brother in Christ told me Grudem was a pretty crappy theologian, and that was a comment I took on board, as I trusted the one who had made it. That same brother in Christ also recommended as irrefutable David Bentley-Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved. I did read Hart’s book and found it far from irrefutable. In fact, it highlighted a vast gulf between myself and so-called progressive Christians who water down the Bible to suit their social agendas. Of course, a universalist would argue that Grudem is a crappy theologian because Grudem upholds the inerrancy of the Bible.

I have come to the point where if something does not align with clear Biblical teaching, such as “Hell is temporary,” it is not acceptable.

More broadly speaking, and this is where I myself am still evolving, when it comes to your writing, be very careful whose voices you listen to. I have found some to be excellent fonts of deep wisdom about the craft of wordsmithing, but others have been somewhat lacking. Choose those you trust carefully, as many have agendas which remain invisible and hidden from you. For clarity, I am not here referring to the clear scammers who pop up in our messages every now and then about Nigerian women’s cyberpunk book clubs.

Another voice to beware of is your own. I really love Ray Bradbury’s dictum.

I am the quintessential dreamer and wastrel, so Bradbury’s advice really lands home. However, I think he is actually correct. Creativity should be a flowing stream without thought beyond what you want to put out there. The refinement can come later. The main point of creativity is to create. I hate to be so obvious, but I think it needs saying. Creating does not get helped by second guessing, or wondering what people will think. Creativity is its own reason.

Related to the problem of thinking too much is that of choosing what you want to write. I am not yet a globally famous author, but I have some thoughts on this. Write what you want to write. If it is something you have an itch for, scratch the itch. Let no one’s dismissal put you off. One of reasons I have muliple sections on my Substack is I feel restricted when I limit myself to just fiction; more so when that limit is to just one or two genres. I am sure others feel the same. I like to write a lot of different things and I just go with the urge. I wonder if others limit themselves with questions about who will read it or even like it. This takes us back to Bradbury - don’t think.

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You can grab another of my book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

I make use of Buffer to schedule posts that I can plan ahead, like articles coming out and so on. Like so many services these days, Buffer offers an AI to help generate ideas, draft them, improve them, and even write them for you. Is there a space in the writing journey for people to use AI? I would say there might be a very limited space. As in, microscopically miniscule. Possibly.

I did a little experiment a long while ago with Buffer’s AI, and asked it to plan a bunch of posts across two social networks based on a group of topics which I usually post about. What I ended up with was enough posts to make at least a post a day for over a year. That meant I could schedule the posts with minimal correction and not have to really think about social media for a year.

For genuine interaction with your readers, this plan is less than optimal. If we are just here to pump out verbal diarrhoea, then such a scheme would work. But for a unique voice, the human needs to be there in what we post. Absolutely, for meaningful interaction with readers, which makes total sense for indie authors, you need to write, make, and deliver your own content with no AI writing it.

I have encountered an opinion which holds that, as long as the writing is all human, using AI for things like prompts to get that writing started is fine. I have already given my opinions about the post-draft process, so I will not dive into that here. While I think prompt generation might be the one area where using AI might be acceptable to me, I still have some serious questions about.

The first is if AI is developing your prompts, and therefore, your ideas from a massive data set of previous language it has been trained on, how unique can those prompts be? This presents critical creative issues for me as an author. Of course, I have thought of ideas, one of which I thought was a unique and novel world, only to find Drew Wagar’s Emanation series had already used the idea and done so with far more skill than I could have brought to it. Using AI for prompts and ideas plunges us even more into the derivative with, I think, fewer opportunities to take even existing inspiration into new directions. While we will come up with ideas that have been done before, this does not excuse us from trying without turning to AI.

The second question is even more cutting, I think. If, as an author, I need AI to supply me with ideas, should I even be an author? I would lean to the negative on that question. If I cannot pump out ideas that are my own, no matter how dumb they are, I have a very real problem and need to ask some deep questions about my choice of artistic output. I would even go so far as to say I probably should have stuck to drawing stick figures, as they would have been a more genuine expression of my artistic side than AI-generated prompts.

When I started planning Temporary Citizen, I honestly thought it was a really stupid idea. I initially planned it as a single-part short story, but as I got into the writing, I asked the question, “why not run with the idiocy of the story?” What resulted was a fun, light-hearted, horror-esque story which is completely ridiculous.

Temporary Citizen might be ridiculous and stupid, but it is my ridiculousness and stupidity. I would like to think AI would never have come up with anything like it. I am pretty sure AI has never come up with something this original.

Over the months since my last post about AI, I am still convinced my stated position is still fairly correct. AI is not merely a tool. It is a technology that allows us to be creatively lazy through by-passing a number of the steps needed to create a story, long or short, that has a unique and individual voice rooted in human experience and the human spirit.

In short, to ask the question some have put out there, does being pro-AI make you anti-human? In the arts, I think it does. By using AI, we surrender at least part of the artistic process to a machine. The struggle of that process is vital to genuine expression, and it is that struggle as experienced by an embodied, emotional, conscious, and sentient being which makes art so very relatable and relevent. Artistic expression and thought are part of what makes us uniquely human. To short cut this is to make your writing, at best, irrelevant from the very first step of creation.

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You can grab my pure-human book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

As a writer, I don’t think I am too bad at it. I learnt a lot with the publication of NeoTokyo Dead as a book, much of it centring on my utterly blasé attitude to editing which persisted until about a month before publication. It was at that point, I panicked. It was a very fast series of editing runs through the whole story, and I finally had a version I could live with. I think NeoTokyo Dead is better than crappy, and the fact I went independent with it was due to a massive factor concerning traditional publishing and emerging authors, as I have experienced it.

One of the first novels I completed had the working title The Exiles. Weighing in at around one hundred thousand words, it was no light-weight, but was not exactly a neutrino star, either. Almost to see what would happen, I submitted the manuscript to the open submission slush file of a publisher on the other side of the globe. That was more than a year and a half ago. I checked with the publisher several months ago to see if they were still interested in the manuscript, and they told me the process would take longer. So, I am still waiting and not doing anything with The Exiles.

This is not a criticism of traditional publishing. Such time frames are the nature of the beast, so to speak. With thousands of unsolicited manuscripts coming in every year, the publishers cannot be expected to work small miracles with the limited staffing they have. Managers and staff checking and vetting manuscripts have a tonne of other work they also need to balance and complete, so emerging authors like myself have to learn patience.

And that was the problem for me approaching the publication of NeoTokyo Dead. I did not want to wait for more than a year for someone else’s decision. Not to mention it is a novella, which is not a format many publishers look for. The format was born of my choice to move the story of Killian Devon from online platforms to a book format, and it was a move in which I shot myself in the foot.

Perhaps my biggest issue with traditional publishing is not the publishers themselves, or the agents who gate-keep access to many of them. My problem is the persistence of the belief that traditional publishing somehow bestows some form of legitimacy upon writers and the worth of their work. It is true, some independent writers should probably not publish their work due to a lack of quality, as some people have claimed. However, in my experience, I have had only one book from an indie author which I found so atrociously written, I could not finish it. The vast majority of indie authors are putting out high quality work, and it is imminently readable. The idea that a company’s selection of a book is somehow more legitimate for the author, giving them added prestige in the marketplace of ideas, is flaccid and erroneous, at best.

Independent authors like Randolph Lalonde, Joseph R. Lallo, and a whole tonne of people on Substack, lose no worth through their choices to control their own books and destiny by keeping their works out of the hands of agents and publishers. I would even go so far as to say the empowerment and enabling of independent authors and self-publishing is one of the only good things Amazon has achieved in its miserably controversial life. With other companies emerging outside the Amazosphere, the independent industry appears healthy and vital. That alone should help move perceptions away from the bias towards traditional publishing.

The response of many independent authors to the influx and arrival of Large Language Model (LLM) generated books also torpedoes arguments seeking to undermine the quality of our work. The one book I could not stomach finishing, mentioned above, was written before LLM’s became a mainstream thing. On top of that, there has been a significant “human only” kick-back across a number of artistic industries, of which writing is only one. Such responses give us a fair indication that indie authors are, by and large, not going to indulge in using LMM’s to do any of their writing for them. And many of us refuse to use AI for any part of the writing process, from research to the post-writing preparation, like covers and blurbs. It has only been in the wake of independent authors taking a stand against LMM’s that publishing companies have started to take a similar position.

Is traditional publishing a good idea to go for? Sure it is, if it is a model that fits you, and you have a lot of patience and a thick skin. For those of us who lack either or both of these qualities, self publishing can make a lot more sense. I have not given up on traditional publishing, but I am more willing to forge my own path, and make my own mistakes along the way.

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You might enjoy my cyberpunk novella, which is available on Amazon!

For those readers who may not be aware of Australian and Aotearoa history, let me explain a bit about Anzac Day and what it has come to mean. When England entered World War One against Germany and the other Axis powers in 1914, her colonies and former colonies followed suit. Australia had gone through federation in 1901, and was independent, but still answered the call. Troops were sent to Europe, but were diverted to Egypt for training out of consideration of the Anzacs’ perceived sensitivity to an English winter. When Turkiye entered the war on the side of the Axis powers, a plan was hatched to take them out of the war and open a supply route to Russia, an ally of England and France. The plan was to land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsular and drive towards the Bosporus and open up the sea lane to the Black Sea.

On April 25, 1915, Anzac troops landed on a beach now called Anzac Cove early in the morning. The beach was narrow with a steep climb up to extremely hilly country, full of gullies and steep ridges. The Turkish troops, commanded by the brilliant Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, were waiting on the cliff tops above and on the ridges around Anzac Cove. Anzacs suffered extremely heavy losses, but stayed on the beach and eventually pushed the Turks back. Other landings on the peninsular also met with withering resistance. The campaign lasted until October 1915, marked by battles which reduced units by as much as ninety percent. Ironically, the evacuation, assisted by an ingenious device which dripped water into cups attached to rifle triggers until they fired, was executed without a single casualty. With rifles still firing, the Turkish troops were unaware the Anzacs were legging it back to the boats.

The experiences of Gallipoli not only forged a bond between former foes, as expressed in the words of the first president of the Turkish Republic, but it forged part of the identity of an emerging nation. For the first time, in 1915, Australian and Aotearoa troops had fought under the flags of their own nations. The bravery, the heroism, and the losses seeded the Australian ideal of the “digger,” someone who go the job done, no matter what barriers there were. The first Anzac Day was commerated in 1916, just a year after the landings.

In recent years, a Welcome to Country ceremony has been added to many Anzac Day events to acknowledge the First Nations people as custodians of the land veterans of many wars have returned to. This has been an important evolution in the Australian mindset regarding the indigenous people who have the longest continuous culture on the planet.

In 2026, it was this Welcome to Country ceremony which these so-called “protestors” were disrupting (1 News NZ). They were not protesting a war. They were not protesting atrocities being carried out in places like Nigeria, Gaza, Iran, and countless others. These “hecklers,” as they have been politely referred to, were simply racist wankers with delusions of adequacy.1 The individuals who took part in this insulting, shameful display were only there to try to put down the First Nations people in the name of a long history of abuse, oppression, and dispossession of the original people of the land. Their “protest” and their presence was a blight on Australia.

The response of the wider crowds was, in contrast, something to be admired. Crowds clapped louder and louder so these racist bags of crap could not be heard, and police acted quickly to move them on. They arrested one of the scum, and I personally think they should have arrested a tonne more. The wider response, “outrage” as it has been described as, speaks of a wider sense of awareness and acknowledgement that the First Nations have been treated atrociously in Australia and it is well past time they were not only acknowledged, but fully involved in the public and cultural landscape of the nation.

On a day when two nations pause and reflect on the sacrifices of their fallen, which is pretty much the only time the two nations pay any attention to that history at all, communities should be allowed to come together and remember their ancestors in peace and in solidarity.

For any who hold to the myth of race, and then presume to denigrate another human being for their perceived differences, I say “screw you.” What happened in Australia was sickening and vile.

These are my thoughts on Anzac Day 2026.

Lest We Forget.

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In the above video, Brown is responding to a left-leaning lass who makes the idiotic claim that playing golf is “fascist behaviour,” which Brown roundly dismisses with some colour, as she takes jab at lefties in general. On Brown’s point that saying golf is “fascist” is a moronic position to take, I am in complete agreement. The poster child for fascism, the one who ruined Charlie Chaplin’s moustache for everyone, never played golf, as far as I am aware. Neither did the Fantasy Fetishist Himmler. The term “fascist” has become another beige, watered-down, useless filler through its overuse by the Left. It is actually rather meaningless, as far as I can tell, except to point out those with whom we disagree. Brown is totally correct when she says such claims are stupid.

However, Brown responds by making the claim the Golf Leftie does not explain why she thinks golf is fascist. And this where I have an issue. If we are going to engage other people in disagreements, we need more than selective hearing and need to respond to the whole message, not just the bits which serve our agenda. The fact is Golf Leftie did explain why golf is fascist in fairly clear terms. She states that golf uses a lot of land for the courses and uses a shed tonne of water for the pools in and the maintenance of said courses. Golf Leftie, wrongfully as it turned out, assumed all her listeners would have the brains to make some connections with experience and prior knowledge. Apparently, Brown does not know much about golf and shows this when she makes the claim Golf Leftie does not explain her reasons for her claim. Golf Leftie also adds a third reason: every golf player she’s met is basically a wanker. This third argument is her weakest, but she does make it. It should be reasonably clear that Brown has selected the bits which serve her agenda to show the Left in a negative light.

The selective hearing also seems to be manifesting as selective presentation of evidence and information. The Christian Institute (CI), a UK-based conservative group, recently reported on the assisted suicide of Noelia Castillo in Spain. CI informs readers about Castillo’s experience in a gang rape, and the fact that she was in a wheelchair. They also mention that Castillo’s father tried to block the assisted suicide by taking legal action. The important information CI leaves out is that Castillo herself wanted the assistance to end her own life. She had been in and out of care homes since she was a child, she had been sexually assaulted twice, and the reason she was in a wheelchair was she had attempted suicide by jumping from the 5th floor of a building in 2022. Her condition left her in constant pain. CI also left out Castillo’s question about her father’s motives in taking legal action when she asked why he cared what happened to her when he had had nothing to do with her up to that point. The legal representatives of Castillo’s father are another fact CI fails to mention. This was a conservative group called Abogados Cristianos (Christian Lawyers). Castillo said her whole family was against her decision, but I have to ask how much was the father manipulated by Abogados Cristianos? I am not saying he was, but by leaving the name of the lawyers’ organisation out, CI have raised the question through implication.

Brendan O’Neill, writing for The Spectator, hits the nail right on the head in his article There’s nothing merciful about Noelia Castillo’s death. In one point, CI is right: assisted suicide is a travesty of morality, but they treat Castillo like a pawn in the debate. Nothing more than a bargaining chip, if you will. O’Neill makes the statement “The government’s solution to [Castillo’s] suffering was not to wrap its arms of care around her but to give her lethal drugs so that she would die.” In this, O’Neill gets right to the guts of the issue. Castillo was not offered the compassion she needed by anyone, either conservative or liberal. The only one who stood by her, despite disagreeing with Castillo’s decision, was her mother. CI presented a very slanted view of the case and failed to supply a lot of the context, thus aiming for a much more intense emotional reaction from its readers. With the wider context, and the information CI did not provide in their article, a calmer response is possible, even if we utterly disagree with the Spanish court’s decision. With a better understanding of the complete situation, we are positioned to have compassion for the poor woman who felt the only option open to her was death.

The left have long done this very thing in order to push a certain agenda across, selecting the details which suit their purposes, rather than giving the truth per se. The right also has the same tendency. Both sides need to open their eyes and their ears and consider the whole argument, not just that which supports their predetermined political or social agenda. When the mainstream news services have sold themselves out to the aims of billionaires like Musk, the Pritzkers, Stryker, Trump, and others, it is the alternative sources thinking people turn to. When those sources prove equally selective in their presentation of the facts, serious concerns are raised. Bill Clinton got lambasted when he claimed he was being “economical with the truth,” rather than lying. We need to call out media sources as well for doing exactly the same thing.

Regardless of the issues we may debate, the people we engage with are real human beings. Noelia Castillo was a real human being with real feelings. Golf Girl is a real human being with real opinions. Isabel Brown is a real person with real thoughts and opinions. When we do not engage with each other in good faith, which means dealing with the whole message and situation, we dismiss each other as a nameless cog in an issue or cause. We diminish the humanity of the other person. When we diminish the humanity of others, we are not too far from using labels like Untermensch. We then risk becoming much worse than the emptied concept of "fascist” and entering the reality of real fascism.

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Draft2Digital has recently announced a new fee set for new accounts and low-volume books. A number of independent authors have commented on this, varying from caution to outright displeasure. I wanted to outline why I will be remaining on Draft2Digital and monitoring how things go.

The Fees

In case you have not heard, D2D has decided to implement two new fees on users of the platform. The first is a one-off activation fee of $US20 levied on new accounts opened. If you already have an account, this fee does not apply to you. The second fee is an annual maintenance charge of $US12. This fee also does not apply to you unless your books make under $US100 in revenue in a given year. It is worth noting that the $US100 does not include the commission D2D take, so your books will need to make $US100 plus the commission paid to D2D and plus the commission of the vendors themselves.

Why have these fees been put introduced? Kris Austin explains that the annual fee for authors whose books do not contribute enough commission to D2D “helps offset a portion of the steadily rising costs we pay to maintain those accounts, including compliance, security, and infrastructure upkeep.” More indirectly, Austin also states “continuing to invest in our tools, maintaining strong relationships with retailers, and protecting the legitimacy of indie authors and the trust that readers place in indie books.”

Women’s Publishing Summit has also weighed in on some reasons for these new fees, and this has also been mentioned by other commentors. WPS puts it very simply: “bookspam.” With huge increases in the numbers of books being published, and a vast amount of them being AI puke, D2D’s decision is, in a way, damage control. While I would like to see D2D ban AI crap altogether, (see my article “Burned by the Machine” for more), WSP is clear that all indie authors have been impacted by the AI deluge, which has often seen one user opening several accounts to pump dozens of AI-generated books into the market. WSP’s article is worth viewing for a wider context.

Reactions?

As an eternally emerging author, with sales in the very low figures, I will be fronted with the annual maintenance fee. While that is disappointing, after some reflection, I have concluded that D2D is still the option I prefer to go with. Allow me to expand on this and put it into a bigger picture.

First, what does that $US12 get me? It gets me a broad distribution onto a tonne of partners. D2D partners include Kobo and the Kobo Plus scheme (one of my favourites), Smashwords, Fable, Overdrive, Amazon, and a bunch more of whom I have not always heard. If I dropped D2D and managed these myself, this would be a lot more work.

Other platforms that do a similar thing to D2D are something I need to look into more, but Ingram Spark and Lulu appear a little more expensive. I only use D2D for ebook distribution, handling print-on-demand through Amazon directly. The printing is what I need to research more, but Ingram Spark already has turned out to be more expensive than my current arrangement. At the time of writing, D2D gives me wide distribution, including to the platform I have had most traction on for NeoTokyo Dead: Smashwords.

Without D2D, you would need to handle all your distribution channels yourself and find a print-on-demand distribution as well. If this is something workable for you, then maybe the fee is excessive. There are plenty of channels out there for you to explore, like BookFunnel, and the above mentioned services. For myself, I will be staying with D2D and paying the fee.

Another point is especially for new and emerging authors, or those who are not so new and still emerging like myself. Imagine your books take a decade to break the $100 barrier and get you into the fees-free category. That would mean you have paid $120 in total to D2D. I am paying that annually just for my email provider. Compare D2D’s maintenance fee to some other services you might be paying for already:

1. X Premium: starts at $US32 per year, (up to $US395).

2. MeWe Premium: $US4.99 a month, (cheaper for annual billing).

3. Snapchat Plus: $US39.99 per year.

In the wider overview, the cost D2D wants to charge for maintenance of accounts that are not generating income for them is fairly reasonable. Of course, D2D, like so many other companies, has cited the ubiquitous “rising costs” mantra as part of their justification, which raises an important question. It is $12 a year this year, but what will it be next year and the year after? That all-to-common attempt at justification of “rising costs”, used and abused by a tonne of companies with no ethics at all, could be just another case of hiking the prices. That is something we will just need to wait and see. I would hope D2D keep in mind their market and avoid going down the path of so many greedy companies.

As I alluded to above, D2D could ban AI-generated material on the platform and help keep the costs down, but I imagine they would have a challenging time not only finding such material, but also effectively stopping the flood of AI excrement getting onto the platform in the first place. By charging an activation fee, and then an annual fee, both of which are not going to break the bank of most authors, D2D have an effective barrier to spammer scum who pump written dross out by the tonne.

I have only seen one platform, an indie music platform, where a such a complete ban on AI-generated material has been mostly effective, from all appearances. Ampwall has developed a tight community where the musicians are all fervent anti-AI luddites, and proudly so (as I am!). This is precisely where Bandcamp, who have recently banned all AI music, face a challenge. Not all musicians on Bandcamp are against AI-generated music, and a good many of them do not openly label their music as AI-generated. Faced with a similar challenge, a fee is a simple, possibly very effective, method of encouraging AI users to get the hell out of Dodge.

Conclusions

Whatever your response to Draft2Digital’s new fees, I would encourage some thought on the wider issues. If you are going to blame anyone for this, I would suggest AI-users and spammers are ones who should bear the brunt of your ire. In my opinion, the fee is helping the development and the quality of Draft2Digital to continue and improve. That is not a bad thing for all of us.

A Personal Note

On a more personal note, you might have see commentators who consider D2D’s move as a move against “low quality books,” without qualifying what they really mean by that. If you are like me, and wondered if your writing was “low quality,” may I offer you some encouragement? If you have written your books yourself, edited them yourself (or had another human do it for you), and you’ve put the hard yards into the research, writing, editing, covers and all that, you are on the right track.

I have read a few books by independent authors over the years, and they have all been pure human writers. My one published book (at the moment!) does not stack up too bad. In fact, I would say it is actually very good.

The marketing is hard. We all have to learn it, and it is something I am still learning. Keep going, don’t give up, and you will get there!

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You can grab another of my story, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!

X makes the claim. Bluesky makes similar sounds. Mastodon mutters quietly to itself about the same values. Minds shouts it from the rooftops through the megaphone of its eclectic crowd. They all claim to protect speech, but what is it they are really “protecting”? Speech, in all its forms and opinions is not something any of these platforms really protects, with perhaps the exception of Minds. But then, they have flat earthers, chem-trail believers and more in their midst. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

There has been a lot of talk about X’s status as a place for free speech absolutism. This has come under question in recent years, since Elon Musk bought the platform for a ridiculous $44 billion. The cost has nothing to do with the point being made, but rather the idea that some idiotic moron would spend that kind of money on a social media platform when they could have used it to decorate the sky with more of their large-scale firecrackers is amusing. It has been reported that more than a few journalists and critics of Musk have been shadow banned. Although the evidence seems circumstantial, there is a lot of weight to the idea because of the timing of the bans. It would appear Elon Musk, the “free-speech absolutist,” is quite fine with free speech, unless it is targeting him and his ego.

Mastodon, one of the primary rivals of X, is a place that should not be mistaken for a free-speech haven. A quick view of Mastodon’s flagship instance and the rules they have in place, adopted by many instances, will immediately reveal that free speech is very limited. That said, there are some servers with very limited rules beyond “don’t be a douche bag,” but many have these rules or something similar. Some of the server rules are quite fine and understandable, considering the level of fake news and utter drivel being pushed online. However, it is clear from this that people like J.K. Rowling would get banned in a flash. Speech is protected, as long as it adheres to certain ideological orthodoxies.

Bluesky is no different. Personally, I really like Bluesky and have a couple of accounts there for different purposes. However, there are again certain rules, viciously enforced by the virulent mob. It is common for members to mass report an account if it offends their sacred values. There is a definite tendency towards the liberal, progressive, and anti-God there. A conservative Christian (and I am not talking about MAGA, Christian nationalist heretics here) would need a thick skin.

I have addressed left leaning people so far. The more centrist and right leaning are also in need of a spine. They have largely retreated to places like Gettr, Parlour, and Truth Social (falsely so-called in the most egregious redefinition of language since trans activists tried to hijack the word “genocide”). It is claimed X was taken over by the right, but it seems even right wing accounts are not immune to being muzzled. One of the other reasons X has slumped into a feral ferret pit of insanity has been the spinelessness of the left and the posturing virtue signalling of many companies. They all left, leaving X an echo chamber for those too lazy to manage their own feeds by those equally lazy. Gettr, Parlour and the other one are just as monotone.

All of this because no one wants to be challenged on their beliefs or ideologies. I am not sure how it came to be, but there is a real sense that people honestly believe they have the right to go through life and not be challenged or offended. So called ‘hate speech’ is a part of that. In embracing this concept, no one seems to have considered who gets to define what hate speech is or is not. Should calling people horrible names be socially rejected like smoking is in many countries now? Of course. If I walked up to someone in Harlem and called them a slur, I would thoroughly deserve the utter beating I would no doubt receive. But ideologies, religious or otherwise, are open to criticism and question. If you have a hard time defining what a woman is, your thoughts should be challenged. If you support wars in the name of any state, you probably should be ready to be called out on that. If you are a follower of a religion, you need to be prepared also. The Bible even tells Christians to be ready to give reasons of their faith. You are going to get offended. Deal with it.

When Germany made Holocaust denial illegal, this threw up some red flags for me. First, denying the freedom to express certain opinions and beliefs sets a dangerous precedent. First, Holocaust Denial. Next, such-and-such is sin. Finally, God is God. There are thousands of possibilities, but you get the idea. Second, why make it illegal? It is perhaps the most useless thing a government can do to curtail an idea or belief. The communists tried for decades to ban religion, but failed miserably, and continue to do so. China has failed to destroy the Christian church, just as Russia failed. Such bans are not going to stop an undesirable idea from spreading. You can kill the person, but you cannot kill an idea. Debate is how we combat the dross and move forward as a society fitting for all. Yes, Holocaust Denial is offensive to many. To many more, it is an idiotic idea believed only by the simplest imbeciles with the intellectual capacity of a brain-damaged maggot.

They all claim to protect speech, but this is bollocks. Gettr does not. Mastodon, perhaps most honestly does not. X does not. Bluesky does not. For most of them, protection of speech is merely a marketing buzzword.

You might enjoy my cyberpunk novella, which is available on Amazon!