Scott William Carter's Blog

“Strays” in Asimov’s, A Run of the House Sale, and a Summer Update

That’s a photo of Rosie, my intrepid Irish Setter, and my daughter playing on Beverly Beach on the Oregon coast a few months back. You can just barely make them out on the beach if you squint. We spent a lovely few days at Otter Rock, a moody, somewhat isolated headland tucked off Highway 101 that’s great if you want to get away from the crowds but not so great if you want what the crowds are often looking for: restaurants, shops, attractions, and the like. Fortunately, Newport is only a ten-minute drive to the south, which offers all of that and more, so staying at Otter Rock is a little like having the best of both worlds.

A little news: My short story, “Strays,” just appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. This one—which involves a husband and wife team sent to track down stray missiles in space from a long-settled galactic war—is one of my favorites. That doesn’t always mean much, I’ve found, because what an author thinks is good and what a reader thinks is good aren’t always the same thing, but it is one of those stories that when I finished it I thought, hmm, there’s something here, something that resonates, something that sticks with you. If you want to take out a subscription, you can do so here; if you want to buy this particular issue electronically, you can do it here. I believe Kindle Unlimited readers can also read it right now.

Second, I’m running a End of Summer 45% Off Sale for my comic strip, Run of the House, which brings the monthly cost down to only $1.65/month. Published twice a week, that’s 104 cartoons a year delivered straight to your inbox! While I probably split my time between writing and cartooning 70/30, I do really enjoy creating the strip, feel I’m slowly getting better at it, and I’d love your support. You can sign up today at www.runofthehouse.net. The deal expires the first day of fall: September 22, 2025. Here’s a recent strip, one that only paying subscribers received:

Our summer’s been a mix of trips to the Oregon coast and the Sunriver area up near Bend, kind of the usual, but the biggest trip of the year so far was to southeast Florida. Back in April, Heidi and I flew to Miami, rented a convertible, and spent a wonderful ten days ranging everywhere from Palm Beach to Key West. Neither of us had ever been to the Miami area, and it certainly lived up to its reputation as a world class city. Since it has very little public transportation other than busses, the maze of Interstates, highways, and other roads is constantly clogged with nerve-wracking traffic, which was really my only complaint. Weather was in mid-seventies, with low humidity and almost no rain. We drove all the way down to the southern most point in the United States, visited the Hemmingway Museum, and enjoyed margaritas on a rooftop bar over looking the Atlantic Ocean.

While we’re on the subject of famous authors, most of you know my love for John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee series, so I couldn’t resist visiting the Bahia Mar marina. In the books, this is where McGee’s houseboat, The Busted Flush, was anchored in slip F-18. After MacDonald died, the marina even allowed a plaque to be placed at the supposed location in memory of author and his beloved series. After a remodel back in the 90s, however, slip F-18 no longer exists, so the marina moved the plaque indoors. There are too many photos of our trip to drop on one page, and nobody but us would want to see them anyway, but here’s a gallery of just a few for those who want a taste of our trip. Great fun.

Driving on US1 at sunset.Hemmingway House in Key West.Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale. John D. MacDonald plague at Bahia Mar.Hard to give a sense of how awesome US1 to Key West is unless you take a shot from off the road on one of the keys.The Carlyle at Miami Beach. The Golden Girls spinoff, The Golden Palace, used this as an exterior shot.The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach was one of the most moving exhibits I’ve ever experienced.Pompano Beach, just north of Miami, where we stayed for the second part of our trip.

Speaking of fun, I’ve been enjoying writing the latest book, which, just as I eluded to above, doesn’t always amount to much when it comes to how readers might respond, but creating with joy is always more pleasant than creating with angst and frustration, even if I’ve come to accept that it is quite possible to love doing something even if it sometimes makes you miserable, maybe especially because it makes you miserable. I know that’s a strange thing to say, but I think one of the biggest misconceptions about taking a serious approach to something in the arts, whether that’s writing, painting, music, or some other pursuit, is that it should always make you happy.

Happiness is like the sunshine. It comes and goes. It can be very pleasant when it’s here, but it can be a very empty pursuit to seek it just for its own sake, and, strangely enough, often results in feeling unhappy more of the time if you do. One of the things I enjoy most about writing is that it’s often difficult. Not always. But if it was easy, I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much. Along these lines, I’d highly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People who Hate Positive Thinking. I read this wonderful book recently and was floored by how much Burkeman’s thinking mirrors my own, and how much the journey he takes in this book matches my own journey in recent years: first becoming disenchanted with an obsessive and ultimately self-defeating fixation on goals and rah-rah positive thinking that so took hold of me as a young man, to ultimately trying to fashion my own working philosophy by taking what I felt were the best (and often common) elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism, with a generous helping of modern psychology thrown in for good measure. It may sound like a terribly negative book, but it’s really about how freeing it can be to embrace insecurity, as Alan Watts memorably put it, and stop trying to force things all the time.

Hopefully back before too long, but if not, well, I’ll try not to force things . . .

Back on Social Media — For Now, At Least (Find me on Bluesky)

Daffodils are blooming and the cherry blossom trees are just starting to pop, a good sign that’s spring here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. That’s a shot of Rosie from last week on Saint Patrick’s Day.

I have a few creative projects I’ve had to set aside lately—I try not to think of it like giving up on them completely, because I often find myself returning to things even years later—but I’m feeling good about the current book. We’ll see how it goes. I have to say, it’s been tougher to stay in any sort of creative space the last few months, for what should be obvious reasons for anyone living in the United States, but that’s all I really want to say about that, at least here.  I’ll only add that I’ve never been more glad that the founding fathers of my country, as flawed as they were, had the prescience to design a system of government with the kinds of checks and balances that fears mob rule as much as a takeover by a would-be tyrant.

In a minor update, I’m back on social media, at least on one platform—Bluesky. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/scottwilliamcarter.com.  A couple years ago, I deleted all of my social media accounts—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the whole deal. I did this partly for personal reasons (to cut down on the noise), and partly for reasons similar to what Cory Doctorow articulated in his viral essay on the inevitable “enshitification” of all Internet platforms beholden to shareholders.

It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do for my creative career, but I’d finally had enough. Bluesky is trying to be different in all sorts of ways, but what I find most helpful is the control they give the user: muting, blocking, no ads, allowing me to see posts displayed chronologically, etc. I’m still pretty committed to being an Internet Minimalist—I have a hard enough time turning off the fire hose of information without constantly tempting myself—but it’s been fun to have a place again to post random thoughts on books, movies, creativity, and other things. Join me, if you like!

A Neat Milestone: 300 Published Run of the House Cartoons

I’m writing this on a rainy December day, which is frequently the case here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but I’m not complaining. Long rainy winters are the price we pay for living in this lush green part of the country. Both kids are home for the holidays, a fire is burning in the hearth, and my intrepid Irish Setter is sleeping at my feet. Life is not without its challenges (whose isn’t?), but it’s pretty good right now.

A neat milestone: I recently published my 300th Run of the House cartoon. The first one was published back in April 2019. While I did take a lengthy hiatus, I’ve been consistently publishing twice a week (one free, one for paying subscribers) for two years. Take a look a the difference between the first comic and the 300th:

#1:

#300:

It’s fun to see the growth, which, for me at least, is the whole point of creating art or entertainment. There is no end destination. You just keep striving to get better, produce the best work you can on a daily basis, and let that be enough. 

Which is a lesson I’m carrying into 2025. I’ve had both highs and lows in 2024 (as I’m sure most people did), but the joy of creating and getting better at creating is always there. It never ceases to amaze me how fast my worries disappear when I just sit down and start typing or drawing.

If you’d like to try out Run of the House, a comic strip about what a quirky group of pets do when their people aren’t around, you can do so at www.runofthehouse.net. Monday comics are always free, and there’s no obligation to upgrade to a paid account unless you’d like to get a second comic in your inboxes every Wednesday. I appreciate every subscriber!

A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow Available in Audio, A Little Update

For those of you who like to listen to books in audio format, the latest Garrison Gage book is now available for download at Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Like the last Gage book, A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow is once again narrated by the excellent Jarrod Taylor. A fantastic job.

Fall is definitely in the air here. It’s one of my favorite times of year in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, with crisp morning air, sunny but mild days, and all the trees awash with their autumn colors. The dry hot days of August recede into memory while the wet winter season is still a month or two out. There’s a big change this year, though. Outside my office window, I can see all the kids on their way to school each morning, but this is the first time in twenty years that my own children won’t be among them — at least here in town. With both kids now in college, the house is a lot emptier these days. So is my bank account, alas, but that’s another story.

Florence, Oregon

Summer seemed to go by quickly this year. Between the Iceland trip in June, and dropping our son off at his dorm a few weeks ago, there were a couple weekend jaunts to the coast, of course, as well as attending a friend’s wedding in Oregon City, but it’s a bit of a blur already, and it’s hard to believe we’re already putting up Halloween decorations.

My wife and I actually met at a Halloween party thirty years ago this month, so it’s a special one for us. With the kids out of the house, it’s almost like we’ve come full circle.

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New Book: THE GOON AND THE GLASS SWAN

They called him Goon. Not  the  Goon. Just Goon, as if it was his name, which it sort of was …

Those opening sentences kick off The Goon and the Glass Swan, my latest book.  If you’re looking for a light beach read over the weekend … well, this probably isn’t it. But if you’re looking for provocative tales of crime, lost loves, and heroic choices that will hopefully stick with you long after you finish them, this collection might be more up your alley.

More information about the book, as well as links to retailers, is below. As always, thanks for reading!

The Goon and the Glass Swanby Scott William Carter

During a mafia hit with his sharpshooting partner, a thug named Goon finds a little girl hiding in a closet. Until now, Goon has been content playing the part of the dumb sidekick, but how far will he go when the little girl’s life is on the line?

This riveting tale of redemption and sacrifice kicks off Carter’s latest collection, six stories of crime, revenge, lost loves, and heroic choices. Whether the tale involves a down-and-out screenwriter looking for a fresh start as a journalist working the crime beat in his hometown, a grieving widower meeting an assassin-for-hire on an urban park bench, or a mysterious payphone at a rural gas station that might not quite be of this world . . . every story showcases Carter’s wide ranging imagination and will leave an indelible mark on the reader’s imagination.

Ebook: Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | Google Play 

Paperback: Amazon 

Summer Update: A Graduation, A Trip to Iceland, and Helping Our Daughter Move

What, August already? Rosie and I were looking forward to getting back into the swing of our weekly hikes, but somehow half the summer is gone and I’ve barely gone on any. Part of the issue was that we went almost straight from my son’s high school graduation to an amazing two-week trip to Iceland, where we rented a car and drove almost all of Route 1, what they also call the “Ring Road,” circling the island and staying in thirteen different hotels in fifteen days. I was originally skeptical there would be enough to justify a two-week trip, but boy was I wrong. Bathing in natural hot springs, seeing puffins at the Látrabjarg cliffs, touring caves inside the Katla glacier, beholding the awesome power of Dynjandi and many, many other waterfalls … Once you get outside Reykjavik (which is a great little cosmopolitan city), this is a land of awesome yet primitive beauty.

We were there over the summer solstice, and as close as Iceland is to the Arctic Circle, we never experienced any true darkness. There’s only a few hours of technical darkness, but even then it’s sort of a grainy twilight. It certainly gave us more time to be outdoors! Of course, in the winter it’s pretty much the opposite.

Here are just a few pictures:

Barely a week after we returned, we hopped back in the car to celebrate my in-law’s 50th anniversary, spending a fun few days in the River Meadows/Sunriver area in central Oregon, bicycling, river rafting, and just hanging out. Now that our kids are both adults, I know these times when all four of us are together are going to get increasingly rare, so I treasure them. Not long after, our daughter was moving out of her apartment into a house she’s sharing with two of her friends, so she finally needed much of her furniture here at our house. It’d been a while since I’d rented a U-Haul. I forgot how exhausting moving can be.

And here we are. For those of you who missed it, I have a new Garrison Gage book out. I’m pleased to say A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow has been well-received. In fact, some of my readers have been calling it the best Gage book yet. Is it true? Well, those are subjective judgments, of course, but I’d rather hear more of that than the opposite. What really drives me, whether it’s as a writer or as a cartoonist, is the drive to keep getting better. That’s what I find most rewarding about the arts.

In addition to continuing to publish two Run of the House cartoons a week, I’ve been working on a shorter standalone novel and some short stories. I’m in the process of putting together a new short story collection that I’m pretty happy with. Hopefully get that one out soon. Productivity has only been so-so this summer, partly because of all the life-related happenings I mentioned above, and partly due to allowing myself to get a bit too obsessed about the political turmoil here in the United States, but such is life. Yet even as I slowly get back up to speed, there never seems enough time to do everything.

Then again, as the comedian Stephen Wright once said: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?“

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New Garrison Gage Book: A KISS OF SAND AND SORROW

Hope all’s well in your neck of the woods. Here at the Carter household, our son is about to graduate from high school. With my daughter in her third year of college, my wife and I are about to transition into that “empty nester” stage of life, I guess. Well, not if you include Rosie, but then we’ve pretty much accepted that we’re permanently stuck with our furry, four-legged child. (Don’t tell her that, though. She’s spoiled enough already, and I don’t want our intrepid Irish Setter to think she can just loaf around all day without pulling her weight.)

But let’s skip to the big news today: I’ve got a new book out, and it’s one a lot of you have been asking for: a new Garrison Gage mystery! 

It’s hard to believe that A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow is the ninth book in the series, and yet I’m finding it more fun than ever to spend some time with my curmudgeonly detective. Now that I think about it, “fun” is a pretty strange word considering all the trouble Gage gets himself into, both in matters of the law and matters of the heart. There’s plenty of both this time around. 

More about the book is below, including links to retailers. As always, thanks for reading!

A Kiss of Sand and SorrowA Garrison Gage Mystery

Gage might go mad. With most of inland Oregon enduring a record-setting heatwave, the hordes descend on Barnacle Bluffs seeking cooler ocean air, and it’s all the curmudgeonly private investigator can do to keep from shooting somebody. What’s the harm in one fewer tourist, anyway? Yet when a desperate young woman shows up claiming her depressed husband has gone missing, Gage will need all of his wits to find the man before something terrible happens. His complicated feelings for the beautiful but headstrong police chief, with dark secrets of her own, only make solving the case more challenging … especially when those secrets eventually bring Gage face to face with one of the most savage foes ever to cross his path.

Ebook: Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | Google Play

Paperback: Amazon

Dead-Eyed Drifter in Audio, Brief Update

For readers who prefer to listen to my books in audio, good news: the third Karen Pantelli book, Dead-Eyed Drifter is now available for download at both Audible and iTunes.

A big thanks to Cathy Crosman, who did an excellent job narrating this book. While it’s never ideal changing narrators in the middle of a series, Cathy made the switch as seamless as possible (while bringing her own wonderful rendition life).

Just a quick update, since it’s been a few months. The ninth Garrison Gage book is currently with the copy editor, slated to be published in June. Be looking for an email from me (assuming you’ve signed up for my New Release Newsletter, which I hope you have!) By the way, my copy editor is the excellent Michael J. Totten, who is not only a prize-winning writer in his own right, but one of the very best editors at all levels one can get. I can’t recommend him enough. He’s getting in such high demand, however, that it might be difficult to hire him before too long!

I’ve been in a productive grove lately. Some of this stems from staying off-line until the evening most days, but a lot of it is just being more focused and efficient, channeling my energy into what yields me the best returns. I like to split my productive time 70/30 between the writing and cartooning, with the writing getting the bulk of my efforts, and I’ve been edging closer to that ideal. The Run of the House cartoon strip is a completely different ball of wax from my fiction, especially my crime fiction, but doing it provides me with a nice change of pace. One of my fans described the strip as “frequently funny, often profound, and sometimes just plain weird,” which I thought was the best summation of my quirky sense of humor I’d ever heard! And a good tagline!

If you want to try them out, please sign up at www.runofthehouse.net to get a free comic in your inbox every Monday. And if you enjoy them, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get a second (exclusive) comic in their inboxes every Wednesday.

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A Cold and Shallow Shore Available in Audio

Good news for fans of my Garrison Gage series who prefer audio books: A Cold and Shallow Shore is now available for digital download on both Audible and iTunes.

This one took a little longer to get produced, and for sad reasons, I’m afraid. The excellent narrator for the first seven books, Steven Roy Grimsley, passed away, and I flailed around for a bit until I decided what to do. The good news is that the new narrator, Jarrod Taylor, is awesome! It’s different, of course. Instead of trying to get a voice that was as similar to Grimsley as I could get, I opted instead for someone who had a strong interpretation even if it was different. I’m quite pleased with the result.

Speaking of Gage, I’m working on the ninth book now. Don’t have a date yet. Hopefully it won’t be too long.

Why I Won’t Use A.I. to Write

Just in case any of my readers were wondering, no, I won’t be using artificial intelligence to write, create cartoons, or really, to do anything creative. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that, and I thought this post could serve as my general statement on the matter. I’ve done enough reading about how these LLM (large language model) tools work (pattern recognition on a massive, massive scale), as well playing around with ChatGPT, Bard, Dall-E, and some of the others to appreciate their possible uses, but for me … it’s a big fat nope.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t use them the way I occasionally use a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or the Chicago Manual of Style (and they’re a long ways away from being accurate or trustworthy enough to be useful even in that regard), but I won’t be using them to create. You see, it wouldn’t be me, and the point of fiction, cartoons, or any art or entertainment is to communicate a voice and a point of view. As Stephen King has said on more than one occasion, writing is a form of telepathy, a way of transmitting my thoughts and emotions to you.

What would be the point of using an A.I. to do that?

I think some people are fooled by these things just as there are people who are fooled by master illusionists. If anything, they’ve proven how far from A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence) we really are. They don’t know anything. It’s very doubtful they’ll ever develop a theory of mind. They’re just stochastic parrots, regurgitating patterns to please you. And while I don’t quite agree with Noam Chomsky that they essentially amount to high-tech plagiarism, I think you can definitely make a convincing argument that’s the case. Sure, humans copy and borrow all the time, and almost all art is derivative in some fashion, building on the works of others, but this is something different. I do agree with Chomsky and Gary Marcus that what these LLMs have done is prove just how remarkable the human mind really is.

Right now, most of what they create is just boring, which is no surprise considering how they work. It’s like taking all the ingredients of a delicious beef stew and putting them into a blender. Yes, all the same overall contents may be there, but I can assure you it’s not going to taste nearly as good.

Even if they could do it “better,” however you define “better,” it wouldn’t matter. It still wouldn’t be me. It wouldn’t be my voice, my point of view, and my decisions. What if it made my life easier? That’s another common rejoinder. And to that, I say this: I don’t write because it’s easy. I write because I enjoy it—even when it’s hard, maybe especially when it’s hard—because when it goes well there is a kind of magic that happens, a beautiful transmission from my mind to yours. It can happen across vast distances of time and space. You may be reading this post five minutes after I wrote it in a house just down the street from me me. Or you may be reading it five hundred years from now in your dome on a moon colony around Jupiter. Who knows.

It’s a beautiful thing, when it works. I’m always chasing that outcome. It’s worth the struggle to get better at it.

I suspect most people agree with me on this, which is why I’m not all that worried about losing all of my readers, but I thought it worth stating my opinion on the matter. If I put my name on something, I created it.  Simple as that.

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