Summer Bingo Results

Here are the results from my own reading this summer. Rescue mission turned out to be the easy one. I always find this a fun challenge to see which things I find naturally, and which I have to seek out. 

Rescue Mission - Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by CB Lee, Love at First Set by Jennifer Dugan, No Body No Crime by Tess Sharpe, Pugs and Kisses by Farrah Rochon, The Baby Dragon Cafe by A T Quireshi, The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold by Ally Carter, Gold Coast Dilemma by Nana Malone, Love Overboard by Adam Barumé, The Ex Vows by Jessica Joyce, If We Were a Movie by Zakiya N. Jamal

Kissing in the Rain - Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria

Cover has a sportsball on it - Love and Sportsball by Meka James, Twelfth Knight by Alexene Farol Falmuth

Texas Hold Em

Published before 2005 - Heart Throb by Suzanne Brockmann

They Were Roommates - Love in Focus by Lyla Lee, All Fired Up by M.K. England, New Adult by Timothy Janovsky, Love Overboard

Merfolk - Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova

Historical Ruins - Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe

Construction - The Ex Vows by Jessica Joyce

Fireworks- Dream On Ramona Riley by Ashley Herring Blake, Kiss the Girl

Haunted House 

Road Trip - Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, Rani Choudhury Must Die by Adiba Jaigirdar, Love at First Set, The Baby Dragon Cafe, The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold, Kiss the Girl

Character Smells Like Leather

Pizza - Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria

Grand Gesture - Call Your Boyfriend, Dream on Ramona Riley, Along Came Amor, If We Were a Movie, Twelfth Knight

Telepathic Connection - The Baby Dragon Cafe

Who Doin it - Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, No Body No Crime, The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold, If We Were a Movie

Punny Title - All Fired Up, Love at First Set, Pugs and Kisses, Twelfth Knight

It was Supposed to be a Summer Fling - Dream On Ramona Riley .  

Animal with a Job - Pugs and Kisses

Fairy Tale Retelling - Kiss the Girl

Rival Teams - Rani Choudhury Must Die, Twelfth Knight

First Day of School

It's the first day of school for many students here in DC, and even though I am neither a student, teacher, or administrator, there is just something about the first day. Something about the excitement, the nerves, the new routines, and reunions with friends that permeates the air. 

I think you never quite get over the excitement of new writing implements and fresh pages. The desire for a cool bag to carry all your things. 

And so I wish all the people headed somewhere new, or back to somewhere they haven't been for a while a great day. 

And may those who already started school, a week, or a month ago recapture some of that magic. And those of us just headed for another Monday have the best Monday possible.  

Nostalgia Glasses

I had a family event this week so my schedule is all off. But I recommended a book I hadn't read in a while that was on sale over on Blue sky and then reread it and remembered why I don't usually recommend books I haven't read in a while. 

It's because of nostalgia glasses. The thing I find is that even when you think you remember a book super well, you often don't remember large parts of it. I re-read Helen Macinnes' While Still We Live a while back and I had read it multiple times before. I remembered that the main character was a British woman in Poland in the late 1930's who kept extending her trip. And then, well, the town she was in got taken over and so she hid in the woods with some rebels and fell in love and then snuck out. And yes, all of that is true. I forgot before she got to the woods she went to Warsaw to try to leave, but then ended up staying in Warsaw and working for a German man who then tried to assault her and she ended up killing him which was why she ended up being taken to hide in the woods. Basically the book is like one third woods and I mostly had just remembered woods. 

And so this book I recommended was Heart Throb by Suzanne Brockmann. I remembered that a woman was directing her first movie and everyone thought she was all boobs no brains, but she had also written the movie. I remembered that the actor had had some substance issues and this was the kind of thing he hoped would remind people he was a great actor. I remembered that she got accidentally drugged and he sat through it with her until the high wore off. 

Here's what I had forgotten. I had forgotten the movie was a plantation era historical. Sure the main characters are good whites, who have realized that slavery is bad and are sneaking some slaves off on the underground railroad. I had forgotten there was a fifteen year old actress with an abusive and racist dad. I forgot that one of the actors who was young, but not a teen fell in love with this teen character, though he does realize that nothing can come of it right now. And I had forgotten that the actor with the substance abuse issue gets handcuffed and left in a trailer by his minder.

I still like the book. It has a single male narrator, but he doesn't do a bad job narrating. I still recommend the book. But I would have been way more up front with the content warnings had I remembered all this. 

So Many Check Ins

Some people say DC is a company town, and I didn't write a whole bunch of books set in DC where no one worked for the federal government for no reason. But the last stats I saw were that about 1 in 4 people in DC (pre-DOGE) were employed by the federal government. Other cities in the US, Kansas City to pick one example have similar numbers. But I know more people in DC than I do Kansas City, so I have been checking in with folks. 

And then museums and libraries got hit, and I checked in with my library friends and my museum friends. 

And they came for higher ed, so I've been checking in with my higher ed friends. 

And then public broadcasting got hit, so I was checking in with my journalist friends.

And then they started putting up signs at every federal park, which DC has a lot of. And then they did the thing where they made it cool for various federal agencies to comb the streets looking for local crime, even though in several cases they seemed to not know what local crime was in DC. 

And sure, a judge now says that wasn't cool. But are they going to unarrest people? 

So this year has been a lot. And I don't talk about it every week, because some days after I've checked in with all my people, I only want to talk about other things. 

But I hope wherever you are, you've been checking in on your folks and that they've been checking in on you.

A Belated Apology to the Music Industry

One of the things that frustrated me as a writer was when writers would then steal a photo for their blog and be shocked to discover that photos have copyrights and use, when, like of course they do. (Also, if you've been blogging as long as I have, you've watched this discovery occur a few times.) 

But with this AI stealing all the text it can find, I realized I had had my own thing that I had missed. I blogged a little about the town hall with Pandora I went to way back when: http://www.talkapedia.com/2007/09/pandora.html?m=1 Interestingly I did not mention in my blog post that part of the reason the Pandora team was hanging out in DC was to convince Congress they shouldn't have to pay the same rates radio stations did to play songs. But looking back this was music streamers basically setting up a service that used music and sold music access to it's users, and then didn't want to pay for said music access. 

And the AI/Large Language models need text written by actual humans in order to appropriately mimic human speech, but then don't want to pay for the very thing they need. I mean, they could of course write their own text. But that would take longer than stealing other people's text. So they don't want to do that. And then the AI people pretend that this roadblock suddenly appeared. As if the text they stole had just been lying out in the break room and they had no way to know it belonged to someone when they took it. 

So now of course our music industry is impacted by the rules the streamers retroactively forced through. And I hope we won't see the same with LLMs. Not just because some of my text has been stolen. But also, I hope we can learn from our past mistakes.