James L. Sutter

(This thought would, of course, be better expressed in conversation with friends instead of broadcast to strangers as I sit alone in my house.)

I find most reaction videos dystopian because they're so clearly serving our desire to experience things with friends—the joy of watching a loved one laugh at a joke or groove to a new song—except it's a stranger on a screen, turning our drive to strengthen connection into monetized loneliness.

Is there an app where I can follow my favorite authors and be notified when they've got a new book out? (Preferably something not owned by Amazon, and that automatically scrapes the new release data rather than relying on authors manually adding themselves.)

WATCH: ‘Portland Frog’ pepper balled by ICE agents

(I cannot count the number of times editors have saved me from stupid mistakes and lapses in judgment—or the number of authors and developers I've done the same for. Even editors need editors!)

When we were doing the first Pathfinder Bestiary, I was up very late one night writing a death-gaze variant of the cockatrice.

The next day Wes Schneider came into the office and yelled "SUTTER! Did you seriously just name this thing "the deathcock'?!" 😬

Perfection.

I'm jealous! I've been periodically googling "Hiron Ennes new book" ever since I read Leech...

Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff, King Sorrow by Joe Hill, The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes.

WIFE: "Hey babe, you wanna come sniff this garbage can?"

ME: "So this is what our pickup lines have become."

Thank you! I can't wait to see what y'all do with it!

Sorry, but I've never run an ARG—that's a very different skillset than mine. Best of luck!

James's setup for running a D&D campaign, with a laptop, GM screen, dice, hand-drawn maps, initiative tracker, pawns, D&D books, etc.

A new adventure begins...

I literally had my players ask me today about rolling to establish a donor-advised fund. 😂

Just learned that @epictellers.bsky.social is doing a single-player cRPG Starfinder video game! 🤯

Creative directing Starfinder will always be one of the high points of my career, and it's wild to see how the game has continued to grow in the years since—congrats to the whole @paizo.com team!

(For the record: I love doing Q&As with schools, book groups, libraries, gaming clubs, etc! Hit me up: jameslsutter.com)

Or barring that, just make it personal... all the AI spam I'm getting has the same intentionally vague marketing voice summarizing my career, so if I get an invitation that's more conversational—"Hey, I'm a big Pathfinder nerd and would love to have you talk to our group"—I know the sender is human.

Event organizers: heads up that authors are getting absolutely inundated by AI-generated spam inviting them to be "featured" in pay-to-play "book groups." If you're a *real* book group, I recommend being specific in your email—mention something about their work a bot couldn't get by scraping a bio!

Ha! :D

"Economies are the hardest part of designing an RPG, because no matter how well you try to balance things, once folks get a ton of money, they're able to use it to start breaking the game."

"...actually, that's true of the real world as well."

The cover of THE GHOST OF US, showing two teen girls kissing in front of a full moon.

It's still #SapphicSeptember for another week! Maybe you need a supernatural fake-dating YA romance starring a teenage ghost hunter who finds an actual ghost? If so, THE GHOST OF US has you covered!

jameslsutter.com/novels-ghost...

We are the vanguard of linguistic drift. 🗡️

Sure, generative AI is powerful, but can it fuck up the same guitar riff 37 times in a row? Can it hate the sound of its own voice, and wish it had studied audio engineering as a teen instead of staying up all night playing Starcraft?

Real musicians will NEVER be replaced. 🤘

I think AI is gonna do great things for music. Specifically, it's gonna make people hearing the flubs and imperfections in my recordings think "oh good, this was made by a human!" and not "wow, this guy needs to practice more."

Requiring customers to produce an original receipt to honor a "lifetime warranty" should be punishable by public flogging of the offending company's CEO.

Covid-19 vaccine label change, alpha-gal syndrome, leaked MAHA report, mRNA funding cuts, and... where is bird flu? The Dose (August 18)

yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-v...

(It's true that—for the moment—"high-risk" includes things like mental health conditions, which may still allow under-65 folks to get vaccinated. But given this administration's war on vaccines, I wouldn't be surprised if they tighten that restriction, and pharmacies may be skittish regardless.)

HEADS UP: if you're not up to date on your COVID vaccine, the time to get one is RIGHT NOW. The FDA (i.e. RFK Jr) is set to restrict it to people 65+ or high-risk starting Friday, and as soon as they make that announcement, pharmacies will have to comply immediately.

Go protect your community!

James with Mrs. Beguiled, the owner of Beguiled Books, who's holding James's books DARKHEARTS and THE GHOST OF US.

Swung by Beguiled Books—Seattle's amazing mobile romance bookstore—to sign some stock for Bookstore Romance Day! www.beguiledbooks.com

The covers of The Ghost of Us, featuring two teen girls kissing, and Darkhearts, showing two boys about to kiss. Also a signed bookplate sticker.

It's Bookstore Romance Day! Buy any of my books from your favorite store and drop me a DM, and I'll mail you a signed and personalized bookplate sticker!
jameslsutter.com/novels.html