Puzzling.

A whole lot of folks will recognize this image. It's the 4-by-4 grid of the daily Connections puzzle published by the New York Times. Today's puzzle wasn't too hard. The yellow and green categories are supposed to be the easiest, but today I got blue first; purple, as usual for me, was whatever was left over once I'd figured out the others.

Anyway, as I said, I got them all right today without making any mistakes -- but that is not always the case. In fact, it is so often not the case that when I consult Mama Google, "connections hint today" kind of pre-populates the query box. I'm beginning to ask myself whether to continue playing. 

I'm not at a loss for other games to play. There's Wordle, of course -- I'd keep playing that -- and the NYT has a relatively new game called Strands that's often fun. (Strands, for the uninitiated, is a word search for which you're not given a word list; instead, you get a clue, and the words hidden in the puzzle all relate to the clue, including the Spangram, which is often a phrase instead of a single word.)

The NYT games have a social media element; players are encouraged to share their scores, which I do. One reason I'm hesitating about dropping Connections is that folks may wonder if something's wrong with me if I stop posting my scores. (This actually happened in the early days of Wordle; I played late one day, and a college friend said she was relieved to see my score posted on Facebook. She was worried something had happened to me.) 

But these three NYT games do take some time to play, and I was already playing a roster of daily games. There's MobilityWare's Solitaire, FreeCell, and Mahjong; and Big Duck Games's Flow Free, Flow Free Hexes, Flow Free Bridges, and Flow Fit (I tried Flow Free Warps, but it messed with my head).

All this started with either Solitaire or Flow Free, both of which I've been playing for years. Here's my winning screen from Flow Free today: 

That's eight years of Flow Free every day -- and counting. I hope to keep the streak going until I'm dead.

On top of all of those, I've started playing three Apple News games, including an intriguing one called Quartiles. You're given 20 word fragments -- sometimes short words or syllables, most often neither one -- and you're supposed to make words out of them. You get one point for a word that uses one tile, two points for two tiles, four points for three tiles, and eight points for four tiles. There are five four-tile words in the puzzle, and if you find all five, you get bonus points. If you earn a total of 100 points, you achieve the rank of Expert. You can keep making words after you reach Expert level, but I tend to bail; after all, I have a whole bunch of other puzzles to do.

So yeah, my life won't be any less rich if I quit one of the NYT games. (The NYT may be less rich, though, if people quit playing; Colin Jost joked at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner that games subscriptions were the only thing keeping the newspaper afloat.)

What are y'all thinking? Is Connections becoming too annoying?

***

Now for something more serious: Today is the 55th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest against the Vietnam War, killing four students, at least one of whom was just walking to class. I remember the shooting, but what I didn't remember -- and what Michael Moore talks about in his Substack today -- is that the National Guard claimed the troops began firing in response to a sniper. The Nixon White House took that version and ran with it. Of course, there was no sniper. 

The Kent State shooting made all the papers, but Moore goes on to say that ten days later, there was another National Guard shooting, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, in which a dozen or so protestors were injured and two students were killed. The National Guard again claimed the troops began shooting in response to a nonexistent sniper. But that incident didn't make the papers -- and I bet you can guess why: the victims in Ohio were white; the victims in Mississippi were Black.

Feel free to draw whatever parallels you like to foreign students today being arrested and deported for protesting the Trump administration.

***

One more thing, and then I'll let you get on with your Sunday evening. Today is Star Wars Day, aka May the Fourth. In honor of the day, I'm sharing this meme that TrekMovie-dot-com posted on Facebook today.

Live long and prosper, y'all.

***

These moments of bloggy miscellany have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Beltane: Coping in a time of trouble.

 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

The turning of the Wheel of the Year has been on my mind for the past week or so, ever since I (foolishly) volunteered to give a presentation on the Wheel to a Pagan group later this month. (Right after I opened my mouth, I thought, "Two hours! How will I ever fill two hours on the Wheel of the Year?" And then after some brief consideration, I thought, "How am I going to cram everything I need to say into two hours?" I'll let you know how I get on.)

***

Beltane is coming up this Thursday. It's supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of spring; all around us, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are blooming, creating, procreating. It makes you want to skip and shout.

And then you check the headlines. Every day -- sometimes multiple times a day -- there's another outrage from the Trump administration. It's foreign students, legally in this country, being snatched off the street by masked people in unmarked vans; it's kids who were born in the United States being deported, including a child who was undergoing treatment for cancer; it's federal judges ordering the administration to stop any number of illegal actions and watching the Justice Department lawyers dance around those orders without outright refusing to comply; it's a judge being arrested for showing an undocumented individual another way out of her courtroom than the one where ICE was waiting to arrest him.

To say nothing of what Trump is doing with his on-again, off-again tariffs. No sane business owner can plan anything when they have no idea what the government's economic policies will be tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

And the Buffoon in Chief wears a bright blue suit to the pope's funeral and falls asleep during the service. 

Here we are, in the light half of the year now that the spring equinox is past, but it feels like we're still in darkness.

Are we under a dictatorship yet? Are we in a recession yet?

Would knowing the answers make any difference?

***

The first three episodes of season two of Andor dropped this past week. At the end of the third episode, with a major Rebel Alliance offensive in shambles and Mon Mothma's financing of the rebels under threat of exposure, the senator deliberately gets drunk at her daughter's wedding reception and dances the night away.

I wouldn't recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, but it's a way to get through a moment when everything is going to hell around you. 

And like Andor, which has nine episodes to go, it's not over for us yet.

A blessed Beltane to you all. 

***

These moments of bloggy screaming at the darkness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

The no-writing life, three years later.

 

orlaimagen | Deposit Photos

I mentioned at the end of my post last week that it's been more than three years since I published my last novel. The final book in the Atherton Vampire trilogy, The Atherton Vampire: Midnight Creeps, was released in December 2021. 

I originally wrote that series for Kindle Vella, a new Amazon platform that was half book sales and half gaming, or so it seemed to me; you had to buy tokens to pay for the books you bought. I thought it would be a place to find new readers on a brand-new platform that wasn't as glutted as the regular Amazon marketplace had become. I figured maybe I could break out there and inspire those new readers to find the rest of my books. 

It didn't work out that way. As usual, the writers who did well on Vella already had a name elsewhere. Vella must not have made any money for Amazon, either; the Zon shut it down earlier this year.

Jerry Atherton was my last-ditch effort to goose my book sales. By the fall of 2021, I'd been self-publishing for about ten years. I did pretty well with the first five books of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but the follow-on series didn't sell all that well. My top sales year was 2013. (I actually moved 15,000 copies of all my books that year. Damn! I wonder if that's enough to get me into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association? SWFA membership was one of my goals, once upon a time.)  

By the way, here's a shout-out to the person who bought all five of the Pipe Woman Chronicles books on Amazon this year. How the hell did you find them? They're all ranked at like #2,873,965...

I am off topic, a little, and now I'm going to go a little farther off-topic. Bear with me.

***

A few weeks back -- actually, it was the afternoon of the day that the legislative session ended -- I chatted with a Tarot card reader. Now, alert hearth/myth readers know that I know how to read Tarot and I do readings for myself on the regular. But it can be easy to miss things you don't want to think about. So it's not a bad practice to check in with someone else every now and then.

The main message from this reading was that I had an internal conflict. I'd left DC and moved to Santa Fe (in the midst of a pandemic!) for a reason, and since then, I had kind of lost the plot. And I needed to think about how I was going to get back on track and re-focus on my original goal.

That original goal didn't have anything to do with fiction writing, although I did have vague plans to republish all my books with new covers and maybe make audio books for them all. No, the goal was to quit working full time. And here I am, back at work full-time.

I mean, shit happens. I bought a condo in a building that needs a lot of work. To afford that, I had to go back to work. And now, to be completely honest, with Trump back in office and the DOGEbros loose at the Social Security Administration, I'm just as happy to have a paycheck in case our Social Security and Medicare safety nets disappear.

But when I went back full time, my goal was to do it for just five years, until I turned 70. After these idiots in DC started mucking about, I was bracing myself to work 'til I dropped dead.

But I'm tired, y'all. I need to go back to having unstructured days at some point. So I'm returning to the "retire at 70" mindset, and we'll see where we are in three years.

***

Circling back to the question that some of you may be asking: Am I going to write any more novels?

Honestly? I don't think so. I do so much reading at work nowadays that I can barely read for pleasure anymore; I tend to nod off after about 20 pages. (To be fair, I also nod off while watching stupid TV every evening. Maybe I just need more sleep...) The idea of sitting in front of a computer for even more hours a day sounds less like fun and more like, I dunno, I should get out and take a walk or something instead.

After I re-retire and get a few months of those sweet, sweet unstructured days under my belt, I may try writing again. Or if I get a kickass idea for a book in the meantime. But otherwise, I plan to stay retired from the writing life.

***

These moments of introspective blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, all of whose 40-ish titles are still available on Amazon. 

NaNo no more, or: Why we can't have nice things.

 Earlier today, a friend sent me a screenshot of this headline: 

Here's a link to a free version of the story. It doesn't include the second headline, which is too bad, because it gets to the heart of why NaNo is going out of business.

As alert hearth/myth readers know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. At first it was a simple challenge: Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Devote all of the month of November to churning out a first draft of the novel you've always dreamed of writing. Get the first draft out of your head and onto the (virtual) page.

I've been a big supporter of NaNoWriMo over the years, both by promoting my own participation in their events and, often, by sliding them some cash. I went back through the blog just now to figure out the last time I participated in a NaNo event. Looks like it might have been November 2020, or maybe summer 2021. I know I did NaNo something like eleven times, and I won every time I participated. But I can't check on the NaNo website anymore because I deleted my account last year, upon hearing about the change in their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their novels.

Apparently there were other problems with the organization: accusations of nefarious people using the forums for grooming and abuse. I never saw any of that because I never frequented the forums. I wasn't interested in wasting time on a message board (if I wanted to do that, I'd go to Kevin's Watch); I was doing NaNo to write my damn novel. I used it as an accountability tool to keep my word count on track. The certificate I got for winning, if I'm being honest, was mostly for bragging rights on social media.

When I started seeing things change at NaNo was about the time the founders sold the place. After that, there were deals for participants at indie-author-adjacent businesses -- stuff like discounts for having your novel printed by some pay-to-publish outfit. I don't think I ever used any of them. But I didn't call them out, either. Maybe I should have. 

Probably I should have.

Anyway, last year, NaNo changed their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their work -- and accused people who complained about the change of ableism, of all things. From the article: 

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the nonprofit's 2024 statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

Ooh, privilege and ableism! Insert haughty sniff here!

But the opponents of the change saw that for what it was: bullshit. Published authors believed -- as I do -- that the real aim behind the TOS change was to allow the new owners to scrape content written by participants to train AI so the organization could profit from it. That's just so far from the original purpose of NaNoWriMo as to be sickening.

"So many people worked so hard to make NaNoWriMo what it was," children and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall posted on Bluesky, "and it was all squandered to prop up a plagiarism machine, truly betraying everything NaNo represented: the limitless creativity of normal people."

It's the same scummy behavior that finally made me quit the dead bird app. It's people who think it's okay to make money off of stuff they stole from content creators. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's not far off the mark.

About two years ago, I wrote here on this blog, "by and large, creativity should be left to human beings." I still think so. And I still think we ought to be paid, every time, for what we create.

What I told my friend in response to the headline above was: "The founders (of NaNo) had the best of intentions and did a lot of good for writers. As usual, the capitalists fucked it up." 

It's a tale as old as greed. 

Any ideas on how to change it would be much appreciated.

***

In searching the blog to discover the last time I last did NaNo, I realized it's been more than three years since I wrote my last novel. I'm thinking maybe it's time I wrote a retrospective on how my decision is holding up. Maybe next week.

***

These moments of human-generated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!