Merritt Daniel McDowell

i’m gonna tell the flowers what you did. and then they’ll tell the bees and the bees will tell the birds. good luck next time you come to the meadow bro

*fully restores your HP as you scroll past*

Large blue text reads, “Why do so many book people keep forgetting to credit illustrators?” Beside the text, a roundish blue winged horse contains the text “#Pictures Mean Business.” At the bottom is the credit: “Illustration: Sarah McIntyre along with a website link.

To publishers, authors, & others posting about illustrated books, including covers that have illustration: Please credit the ILLUSTRATOR.

This not only helps boost the illustrator, but also shows that you value HUMAN illustrators.
#PicturesMeanBusiness

Martha Wells' next 'Murderbot Diaries' book is 'the family roadtrip from hell on Ringworld' (interview) In an exclusive interview, bestselling author Martha Wells talks "Platform Decay," from its moral stakes to Murderbot's bitter humor.

Interview with me about Murderbot and the upcoming Platform Decay at www.space.com/entertainmen...

a reminder to my fellow writers: if you have written anything in the midst of the horrors—literally anything at all—that is a win and you should be proud of it

Entries close Wednesday, Oct 22.

Winner/s, if any, will be announced on Friday, Oct 24, alongside the official new book!

great book, more people should read it

I had a judge presiding over one of my cases ask me if I had been a defendant in one of his cases because he recognized me. I was like nope. I'm counsel. I was dressed impeccably in a vintage Calvin Klein suit that I'd paid way too much money for. It happened in 2005ish and I still think about it.

The Official Guess Form Guess which book in the 2025 Derby is written by M. Daniel McDowell (nee Jay Wolf) !

The form to enter is here:

forms.gle/A5gy5WhdHcsG...

Guessing is free, but I encourage you to buy a few books or read them on KU, etc. Everyone worked really hard this year, like always!

So, I'm running a contest:

Find my book! Win a cool prize!

The more entrants I have, the more Prize I will add; if I receive multiple correct guesses somehow, the hierarchy is in order of guess received.

Right now, I have a signed copy of the paperback edition of BRINGER on the line & more...

in any case, it worked: I have a new book!

Now, I'm not allowed to promote this book on 'main' for almost a month yet, but I'd like to draw more attention to the derby in general. The promotion opportunities for the event have taken a lot of hits, with every social media platform rapidly devolving

I entered again this year, mostly to have something new on the boil in the background during care work.

There's a lot of down time where I can't do anything really productive but also can't shut my brain off, and I wanted to teach myself to be more efficient about some things, craft-wise.

2025 Publishing Derby - The Books The books of the 2025 Publishing Derby

Hey all! I'm finally finding some equilibrium, after months of intensive care work with my mother, and seeing daylight on several creative projects.

Including: the 2025 Publishing Derby.

My latest book is one of the books on this page! Can you guess which one is mine?

2025pubderby.carrd.co

Books on a carpeted floor. From left to right, top to bottom: Mistress of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts, Bringer of the Scourge by M. Daniel McDowell, and The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Hear of Sea and Fire, and The Riddle-Master of Hed, all by Patricia A. McKillip,

Last book buys till next week's Among the Burning Flowers. @mdanielmcdowell.bsky.social's came too and it really is MMP!

I still kind of can't believe it, but my gruesome twosome Ilwyn & Vencario will be in SHATTER THE SUN!

This is the last thing I wrote before the wheels came off my personal life again at the beginning of the year, so it carries a perhaps-disproportionate amount of my emotional freight in it.

I think one of the complicating issues is that it’s a dual issue twice over - the desire for romantasy is coming both from YA and from fanfiction, into SFF. (Not saying romantasy IS either of those things, and fwiw, I come from YA and fanfiction, too.) Excellent piece by @readingtheend.bsky.social 🎉

Stop reposting terrible takes that are in the process of being monetized. Particularly when published by the NYT.

"Are resold books ethical?" What utter rot. Settled for hundreds of years.

No links. No clicks. Starve this risible trash and mock those responsible.

It's 2025. We don't have to feed this any more. Uses bookstores are among the best place on the planet. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Lmao. Okay so, this is a serious account. We love making art. We try to be "professional." But: some words from the heart.

Imagine. For a second. Needing fucking AI to write your books for you. That's so fucking embarrassing I think I'd ask it to dig a hole for me instead to crawl inside.

Caw caw new Thing coming soon

the labor of art is mostly invisible. what you don't see in a finished piece is all the hours of thought it required, all the little discoveries and surprises and tragedies of production. art IS the process. if you aren't interested in the process, then i don't really know why you want to be artist

Also, begging people to realize that if they want more quality art of any time and don't like paying for it, then for the love of the universe support UBI and Universal Healthcare. Then creatives can create more art without having to turn it into a side hustle.

The easiest way to transfer non-Amazon ebooks to your Kindle - Alex Pendragon Just because you read on a Kindle, doesn't mean you have to buy Amazon ebooks. Transferring itch.io purchases is surprisingly easy.

Seeing some great queer book promos on #itchio recently, and I figure that some readers might be second-guessing them because they're not sure they can read those ebooks on their Kindle. But hey, I have a guide to help with that!

💙📚

That’s exactly it. It’s not that it’s wrong but wrong in so many unknowable ways. That breaks the scientific method’s only way of adjusting for errors. Can’t systematize, can’t falsify, cannot document, cannot collaborate on best practices.

And the stakes of
human error are so sufficiently high (oh I don’t know that lib lady demon can latch onto you) that you cannot really outsource this.

I could do more work when I was much poorer and less institutionally embedded because I could trust publications, citations. I could aggregate high quality sources, untouched by advertising influence.

Now I just made sure that a paper I read was actually from the journal it says it’s from

I’m sure it’s been commented upon but everything takes me so much more time to accomplish now than it did even seven years ago.

The information ecosystem has been sufficiently trashed to the point that every basic task of writing and publishing takes twice as long to complete. And I’m PRIVILEGED.

The headphones I got with my iPhone 8 years ago aren’t compatible with my current phone. Why would I let Apple put technology in my brain?