Toot Sweet Ink

We finally cancelled Adobe Creative Cloud. We can’t sustain such a horrendous subscription cost. And their AI slop tools are of no use to us.

On to other professional publishing tools. Adobe wasn’t our first and won’t be the last.

Feels good. A small win in these grim times.

UPDATE

SFWA backed off in a hurry

bsky.app/profile/cstr...

Slop is now eligible for the Nebula Awards? What?

Astonishing decision by @sfwa.org, a professional organization for writers whose creative work was used without license or consent (stolen) to “train” LLMs to be able to spew out similar content.

Small publishing 🧵 worth reading 📚

Looked at our website, thinking updating thoughts—noticed it has a link to an ancient FB page that basically points back to the website. Just seeing that icon is ugh. We don’t ever look there. If only long covid would cut us a break so we can spare the three breaths to fix that.

Cold Blood: Yamabuki vs. the Sword Master Sword of the Taka Samurai, Book One

Covid joined us for the holidays, fun fun, but we’re on the mend, back at it. @katelore.bsky.social continues work on the Yamabuki novels. COLD TRAIL is coming! And more! (Heartfelt thanks to all who’ve inquired!)

If you’re among the many who don’t know Yamabuki or Kate’s work, it all starts here:

“How do you pronounce that?” On challenges and limitations translating across writing systems, a fascinating 🧵

Sharing this for, oh, no particular reason 👺

Social media note: Our ex-birdsite account is long-since dormant, as is our FB page. No plans to go back.

We are on Mastodon but will be moving our account to another Fediverse instance bc the current one’s TLD is “.ai”—which, um, sends the wrong message.

And we’re here!

btw SWORD OF THE TAKA SAMURAI author @katelore.bsky.social is on bsky!

An ink drawing for a cartoon by Tom Gauld A figure stands in a dark alley holding a pile of books talking to a police officer who is making notes in a small book. “It all happened so fast, officer! One minute I was walking down this alley and the next, I'd been loaned four novels and a cookbook!” Caption: The Masked Librarian strikes again!

I've added some new drawings to the Art for Sale section of my website: www.tomgauld.com/art-for-sale

Over here in our obscure unlisted corner of the blue sky, we want to reassure those who’ve emailed us (and those who haven’t) that

yes! COLD TRAIL is indeed coming!

And more to be announced.

The pandemic has tried us, but we persevere. Thank you for your patience and support!

We’re back and busy
*waves*