Courtney Miller-Callihan

Just FYI, administrative warrants (like the ones used by ICE) are not judicial warrants (used by cops, signed by a judge).

You do NOT legally have to open the door for an ICE officer with an administrative warrant *no matter what the ICE officer says.*

Hello Writing Community! We are delighted to announce our First Official Bluesky *** #MSWL Day *** February 12, 2025. 🎉🎉🎉

Agents + editors can post what they ✨wish✨ they had in their inboxes; writers can find their next best fit for querying.

Learn more here: manuscriptwishlist.com/the-next-off...

Anyone have a debut book coming out this spring? Tell me about it — it’d be nice to hear about something nice! Your first book only happens once, friend!

today's installment: "malingering"

a cartoon character says hi in a dark room ALT: a cartoon character says hi in a dark room

Alrighty, we broke. After a bunch of kicking and screaming, and the usual feet dragging that comes with joining a new form of social media, Handspun is now officially on Bluesky!

We love booksellers, but don’t do this.

One thing I'm particularly pleased about re my career to date is having helped murder the rote habit of setting all non-English text in italics.

5 seats in front 7 seats in the middle 5 seats in back A haikubaru

no time to explain, jump in the Haikubaru

Mundane Halloween is back!

Today is the "Mundane Halloween" contest in Japan, sponsored by website
Daily Portalz

The idea is to dress up as something incredibly ordinary.

Here is a thread of some of my favorites from this year!

Happy pub day!! So exciting!

Illustrated cover of Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie by Jackie Lau. Blue background with red polka dots of different sizes. East Asian man in argyle sweater vest is sitting on the largest of these dots, and he's holding a phone. Cat is beside him. Woman is sitting on a slice of cherry pie. She has a book open on her lap and is glancing in the man's direction.

Here's the cover for Love Lies, and Cherry Pie! 😍🥧

Coming May 7, 2024 from Atria/Emily Bestler Books.

jackielaubooks.com/books/love-l...

would love to abolish the notion that making your audience feel joy is inherently intellectually and artistically inferior to making them feel pain, a cheap and cynical attitude which poisons everything from misogynist disdain for romance to why it’s harder for comedies to win Best Picture

Folks, look, Scholastic is only a billion-dollar juggernaut that dominates the children’s book industry. What are they supposed to do about fascist book banning and censorship in the face of 11 racists sending angry emails? Whatever they want because they literally can? C’mon. Be reasonable.

In the hands of the biggest media corporations, the term 'diversity' has become a poison pill. A way to silo and minimize the contributions of the historically marginalized. There are *real* books and 'diverse' books, which you can safely ignore. At conferences, real panels and 'diverse' panels. Etc

Happy Indigenous People's day, the crimes of the conquistadors were known and recorded not just by their victims but by their cultural and linguistic contemporaries.

As WGA leaders meet today to finalize our deal, we begin a new era for writers — and for labor in our industry.

But we also begin to face the final and most insidious form of unionbusting propaganda: a years-long effort to sell the lie that our strike was not worth it.🧵

the next time an editor asks "are you sure you want [word] and not [more commonly used word in that context]?" I'm going to embellish my STET with "you wouldn't want people to think an AI wrote it, would you?" Write weird. Comprehensibly, vividly , humanly weird.

"But writing books all by myself is hard!"

YES. I KNOW.

This is a great example of what I meant when I said "people co-opting the language of specific channels of professional or academic discussion into the public discourse" because we have AI dorks co-opting the language of social justice, of disability, of therapy to justify theft at scale.

I know others are also saying it, but a reminder that the WGA's tentative deal couldn't have happened without the support of other unions like SAG and IATSE. We should and will support them the same way they supported us.

this is SO RELATABLE

I got corrected by someone a couple of years ago (I used a word during a work call that was similar to, but not, the one I should have) and the memory is just as embarrassing as anything from my teen years. The correcter was super nice about it but I still wanted the floor to open under me haha

A fun thing about me is that even though my education is all humanities-based and I have worked a job for 20+ years where the top criterion is that you have to be good with words, I still have to look up a definition a minimum of once a day because what if I've been using it wrong this whole time.

sure do feel some kind of way about the idea of writers going to work to help chatbots put other writers out of work

It used to be that I only struggled to tell the difference between real news and The Onion when I hadn't had enough sleep but

YAY CHARLOTTE! I absolutely FLIPPED over just the sample pages for this-- I cannot wait till everyone gets to read this. 😍

Amazon screengrab of the Doomsday Books, with Secret Lives with the Editor's Pick banner, and Nobleman with a #1 Best Seller banner

Pleasing.

May you have as few boxes marked "MISC." as possible. Dogspeed!