Tristan Beiter

It's the same with crafts. I crochet, I get pleasure out of the act of creating, then I give it away. Buying a stuffie would be faster, but far less gratifying and far less personal. I like to bake cookies. Again, buying them would be faster, but they wouldn't be MY cookies. I like to create!

I wouldn't have spent a zillion hours doing this if I did not enjoy the act of writing. Even when it's hard (especially when it's hard), it's so rewarding. It's so clarifying. When I finish something, sure I'm proud of it, but I'm already itching to shove it out of my way and start the next thing.

Sometimes I wonder if our many years of jokes about writers hating writing and doing anything but writing, etc, have convinced people that the writing part is the hurdle and the goal is just to have a thing in hand. But I am here to tell you: the writing is the best part. The act is the thing.

exactly

The cover letter to my first submission: August 12, 1971 1381 East 72nd Street Brooklyn NY 11234 Edward L. Ferman The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fistion 347 East 53rd Street New York, NY 10022 Dear Mr. Ferman, I am submitting for possible publication the enclosed story, "Gem of the Gods". Too long has Sword and sorcery been dead. I hope this may help revive it. A stamped self-addressed envelope is enclosed in case of rejection. Sincerely yours, Scott Edelman

On August 12, 1971, 16-year-old me mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission to my dream market, F&SF. My tale was quickly rejected. On July 17th, 2025, I finally sold a story to that magazine. Here's why I felt I had to withdraw that story. www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/20...

and *The Knight of Swords* by Michael Moorcock, one of the first works of SFF for adults I read, which convinced me that SFF wasn't just fun, it was capable of being "serious" literature (balancing as it did, New Wave literary technique and pulpy adventure, perfect for me in 7th grade)

Other candidates include *Redwall* which, totally reframed what it would look like to value coziness and domesticity for me in middle school? The domestic as communal performance in which men participate rather than a thing women do for men? Not that I realized it did that until much more recently

Oh boy this is hard. Embarassingly I might have to go with *Collected Poems 1909- 1935* by T.S. Eliot? Even though Eliot was a horrible person and the 1960s collected poems (with all of Four Quartets) is better? It was this one that really made me believe that beatiful words could be worth it all

The only other study I've read on anything related is this one, but it's on third-year college English majors and so while concerning for rates of high-level literacy is not really about childhood reading pedagogy at all: dx.doi.org/10.1353/cea....

And even if it isn't happening, I find it concerning that a supposedly reputable pedagogy scholar would imply that it would be fine if it were (though of course if it isn't happening widely, we can then ask how much Hanford is hiding having led him to provide this example)

Obviously, we'd need more and better studies (probably by sociologists?) to assess how representative those anecdotes actually are. And then further studies to find out if flaws in reading pedagogy in elementary school are what actually cause the phenomenon

Inclduing specifically anecdotes of watching high schoolers invent words with more orthographic similarity than horse and pony (though different enough that sounding the word out would immediately reveal they were not the same) but with much more divergent meanings

I think that is absolutely the claim they are making! And while I am not a scholar of reading education (I'm a literary scholar), I see lots of anecdotes from middle and high school teachers online alleging that their students are engaged in widespread misreading.

Whether or not there is such a thing as "three-cuing." Also this paper is published by the organization it is defending and doesn't address the 2022 efficacy study by Henry May et. al (though it does refer to the earlier study showing Reading Recovery's methods effective in first grade)

but is also a radical misunderstanding of how writng and writers work. Writers do not write "pony" and mean "horse" and so I fail to see that a pedagogical practice that is not interested in word recognition (as Goodman tells Hanford he advises teachers not be) could possibly teach reading

actually said, seemingly more or less unprompted, that a student (an early learner) seeing the word "pony" and thinking/saying the word "horse" is fine. A move that is both not really possible without visuals (how do you know it isn't any other noun) and so likely to cause problems later

This is an interesting argument but it doesn't address the most damning thing that this discussion (and the journalism by Hanford it criticizes) brings up. Which is that unless one believes Hanford is literally lying Goodman (whose work I read as being positioned as the real origin here, not Clay's)

ever since I learned about three-cueing I've developed infinitely more patience for replies on social media. mfers literally do not know how to read. people are walking around conjuring random meanings into words they don't know, and they don't know a lot of words. it's crazy

Psychopomp & Circumstance Review: Eden Royce's Haunting Novel - The Ginger Nuts Of Horror Review Website Our review of Eden Royce's Psychopomp & Circumstance. We explore the Gullah Geechee-inspired magic, the eerie Southern Gothic setting, and the powerful coming-of-age story at its heart.

New Book Review: Psychopomp & Circumstance Review: Eden Royce’s Haunting Novel

"a beautiful exploration of grief, not as something to be feared, but as a process that connects us to the past "

gnofhorror.com/psychopomp-c...

@edenroyce.bsky.social

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written.

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Notice how people are using this about Elon's trillion dollar deal, which happens in 10 years IFF:

- The ai bubble doesn't pop
- He makes an army of 1 million robots
- He octuples Tesla's value
- He doesn't die
Etc

It's very much subjunctive, very much future tense. And yet.

There's an interesting grammatical tense used only to talk about powerful, wealthy people, where they have simultaneously done the thing, are doing the thing, and will do the thing.

Totally divorced from the concept of linear time, the only important element is: important person and thing.

These are terrible people who enjoy suffering they believe to be justified. I think it’s important to add that this is caused by the Conservative Protestant Work Ethic, just world illusion, and deservingness judgments, not just pure sadism. Dismantling those permission structures is essential.

I love trash, so much of what I deeply love is not good, yum yum garbage

More people on here would be more able to parse this distinction if more of us were more comfortable with admitting that we are at times total raccoons who enjoy without regard for quality

It is actually okay to love stuff that is not Great Art, get the fuck over yourself

"Women are not usually into science fiction"is legitimately one of the stupidest, most divorced from reality sentences I have ever read in my life

Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce One of the core questions of this novel is choice.

Last review of the week is the always thoughtful @tristanbeiter.bsky.social on Eden Royce’s Psychopomp & Circumstance (@tordotcom.bsky.social): “one of the core questions of the novel is choice […] what it is even to have choices—and all the many ways that choices are constrained.”

I can't articulate it well but I don't care what punctuation/ set of words is the current tell for Chatgpt. I'm not changing my voice or the way I write for this program, my writing will evolve the way it evolves. I am not panicking that it uses em dashes. They should panic and pay me.

That line of reasoning sounds very very dangerous to me. Allowing the machine to use certain tools and stepping away from them. Giving them up. It sounds exactly like what they want us to do...IMO at least.