Kit Walker's Blog, page 7

nobody is normal about Irene Adler

For what may be obvious reasons, I recently read every story in the original Sherlock Holmes canon — all four novels and 56 short stories.

(This is not bragging. 56 is not that many. Harlan Ellison, one of my favourite writers, is said to have written over 1 000 short stories in his lifetime. You’re welcome to try and verify that claim, but you’ll probably get distracted by the “Controversies and disputes” section of his Wikipedia page.)

The Holmes stories were written before we as a culture f...

new novelette: "Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger"

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Revenge brings black-hat hacker Jay Moriarty and former SAS operator Sebastian Moran together once again, with an egomaniacal real estate developer in their crosshairs. Derek Chapman is obsessed with high society and will do anything to climb the social ladder--which makes him the perfect mark for a confidence game involving a West End producer, a private sex club, and a live Bengal tiger. What could possibly go wrong?

"Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger" is part 2 of The Casefile of Jay...

i have a goodreads author page now

Enough of my work is now listed on Goodreads that I decided to claim my author page--mostly to keep anyone else from claiming it, and also to try and clear out a few works from an entirely different Kit Walker. At no point in the 90s was I recording meditation tapes, as I was busy attending elementary school instead.

I don't intend to use Goodreads to track my personal reading, since I use the Storygraph for that. But I've hooked up my blog feed and opened the Ask the Author section, on the off...

new novelette: Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act

So, you know how Sherlock Holmes is now fully in the public domain?

My new novelette, "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act," is a modern-day interpretation of Holmes' most famous adversary that tells the story of how he met Sebastian Moran, his loyal partner in crime.

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When ex-SAS security consultant Sebastian Moran runs afoul of a rich and powerful corporate client, he's thrown into the path of a brilliant hacker named Jay Moriarty. To survive, both of them must work together to u...

Lockout

When Jackie first met her next-door neighbor, she had no inkling whatsoever that there was six figures’ worth of military hardware grafted onto his body.

The man who answered her knock at the door of the neighboring apartment was somewhere in his early 20s, with the permanent five ‘o’ clock shadow of someone who only shaved with an electric razor. It was early autumn, not even cold, but he wore a hoodie and kept both hands tucked into its front pocket.

Jackie did her best to look friendly (a red...

"The Devil Who Loves Me" available now!

The Devil Who Loves Me is out today! It's the second anthology by startup indie publisher GrendelPress and features my story "Move Fast and Break Things."

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This collection of fourteen stories explores love in the darkest of places. From an executioner drawn in by a handsome witch, a knight set on avenging the loss of his friend, to a mercenary touched by the abyss on a rescue mission gone awry, these stories will capture your heart and imagination.

That last bit, about the mercenary touched b...

scabby the chatbot

So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.

No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. ...

Runners

It’s the end of the fiscal year. Hunting season has begun.

Ultimately, it all kicked off with the invention of the “workplace transparency plan.” As ad revenue stagnated, social platforms instead offered corporate clients access to their employees’ private messages. For a small subscription fee, employers could learn who their workers were communicating with and retaliate as they saw fit.

Within months, an entire industry of talent recruiters found themselves stonewalled by a terrified workfor...

yeah, no fucking shit

And in September 2019, Amazon announced a deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who had just swept up six Emmys for the second season of Fleabag. The plan was for Waller-Bridge to collaborate with Donald Glover on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, based on the 2005 film. But within a few months, Waller-Bridge departed the show due to clashing creative styles.

This is, by far, the funniest thing to come out of The Hollywood Reporter's article on Amazon Studios. Even funnier than the revelation that their L...

how to prevent amazon from ruining your life

(a.k.a. how to sell ebooks on places that aren’t Kindle)

Let’s face it, Amazon has a history of screwing people over. Especially those people who depend on Amazon to make a living. If you sell ebooks on Kindle and you want to insulate yourself from whatever raw deal those maniacs come up with next, you should make sure your ebook is also being sold elsewhere. And by “elsewhere” I mean “everywhere.”

Please note: following this guide will make you ineligible for KDP Select. If you’re mostly depe...