Kestrel Casey's Blog

On My Digital Reset

I’m writing this in a moment of digital platform upheaval. It isn’t the first—Myspace sank slowly under the sea, while Tumblr collapsed suddenly under the weight of investment capital—but it may be the most grotesque. I’m sure there will be plenty of retrospectives written about TikTok in the next few years. For now, I would have to summarize by saying that TikTok very briefly banned itself before thanking Trump for its return twenty-four hours later. And if you’re falling for that, I’m sorry, but you have the sociopolitical reasoning skills of a chicken.

Anyway. From here on out, this is just going to be personal.

I am what you might call a high-information skeptic when it comes to tech. I can get by in a couple of programming languages. I heavily customize all my devices. I am that friend who can fix your computer or teach you to jump a paywall. I do web dev work for non-profits because I know everyone hates web dev work.

And I tell you all this so that you know I am not a hater of change, or computers, or even social media. I am just here to tell you that the more you know, the worse they are. There are some things that have always been “hard no” for me: I won’t use a Ring doorbell, I won’t own any of the always-listening speakers with cutesy girl names, and I won’t buy any appliance that talks. Oh, and I have sworn to never again own an HP printer. Outside of those, I’ve just been along for the ride on most of the tech trains for most of my life.

So I’ve been making some changes.

A few years ago, I unsubscribed from a lot of services. I nuked Spotify and reassigned those same dollars to BandCamp or other MP3 sources. I now own approximately 3,000 songs. I have a backup of the files. I have them all on my phone. They work without needing to connect to anything. No one can take them away from me if I stop paying a monthly fee. This is a more solid way to interact with music, and to make sure artists get paid, too. It’s just better. And I honestly can’t believe I ever got sold on *renting music for the rest of my life.*

I unsubscribed from almost all streaming services for the same basic reason and employing the same tactic. I buy dvds from thrift stores, flea markets, and department stores and, since I don’t have room for that many cases, keep them all in a big binder. If I get a movie I don’t like, I send it back out into the world on a free shelf. But mostly, I get movies I really like, and I can watch them until the disk fails if I want to. Hell, I can rip them and burn a new disk, if it comes to that.

For the sake of full disclosure, I kept Amazon Prime, because I have a hard time shopping in person and it does actually save me some money. But having one streaming video service still available to me has emphasized what I already knew; streaming services are full of garbage. “We have over 10,000 movies!” Yeah? Okay. 9,990 of those are so bad that I would pay negative dollars to see them, but okay. That’s enough movies to keep a person scrolling for an hour because they think, eventually, something good must turn up. You ever spend an entire meal trying to figure out what to watch while you eat? Does that seem right to you?

In a less directly tech thing, I recently changed pharmacies. I used to use CVS, because they were everywhere and the app was convenient. Except I bought the lie on that one. CVS sucks. They’re chronically understaffed, they fuck up my refills almost every time, and the app doesn’t even work correctly. I spent more time fighting with it than I would have saved if it were working like it was supposed to. I am now using a local chain pharmacy. They have a website that works. They were extremely helpful in getting me switched over. The new pharmacy even came equipped with the standard goth girl pharmacy tech.

All of these things have shown me that I was a perfect fool for ever believing that tech giants would make my life more convenient, enriched, or functional. I am a dead-center Millennial; we grew up with the internet. We think the connected device is our childhood friend. It takes some deep work to accept that our childhood friend is now a pod person, puppeteered by venture capital, designed only to spy and sell. We know it on an intellectual level, but accepting it means we lose something we could otherwise still pretend we had. And that sucks.

I’m not going to get into AI in this piece. I think we all know that it’s bad, nobody wants it, and companies are shoveling it into everything hoping to stoke the (fundamentally impossible) eternal growth machine.

But I am going to talk about social media.

Social media has a pattern. First it connects you to your friends. Then it connects you to advertisers. Then it disconnects you from your friends to make sure you never run out of content and you do stick around long enough to see more advertisers.

And like pretty much everyone else, I rolled with this for years after it became obvious that it was no longer serving me. Why? Because my friends were, theoretically, there. Except almost nobody is actually seeing or talking to each other in most of these places. The only platform where I can currently see people I follow post chronologically is BlueSky, and that’s because it isn’t making any money yet. We’ll see how that one goes. But all of these others? I’ve finally come to a conclusion: Fuck ‘em.

Facebook ruined itself (and Instagram) a long time ago. I have stayed there because it felt like everyone was on it. But they aren’t. In fact, when someone leaves Facebook, it appears that even if they bother to delete their profile, the platform keeps a “ghost” profile of them to make sure your number of friends doesn’t decrease by one when they leave. And even if people declare that they’re leaving, they probably only say it once. Facebook immediately buries it. Facebook is no longer a social media platform. It’s a desert populated mostly by robots and wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-men posing as your friends.

Twitter was dead the day Elon Musk bought it. The new boss broke pretty much everything, tried to jack up the price on premium features nobody wanted, turned to ads for the skeeviest shit imaginable, and then manipulated the stats to make it look like none of that was happening. The end result is a nazi-adjacent cesspool that tries to sell you manly-men supplement powder. Some people stayed. Like Facebook, Twitter had a user base so massive that it generated its own gravity. Had. The more people realize the past tense, the more people leave.

There are a dozen others, but since they all follow a similar pattern, I’m going to stop there.

So. These are some things that I know. Most of these platforms are garbage. What am I going to do about it?

For years, the answer has been “nothing.” It’s technically in my publishing contract that I must exist on social media. And if I really wanted to sell books, conventional logic says that I should be desperately scraping for followers along with everyone else. I am pretty convinced that that logic is incorrect. Also to consider is that most platforms have taken our presence as implicit permission to feed all of our creative work to AI. So…I’m just not going to do it anymore.

Starting today, I will be whittling down my social media presence. Hard. I will be deleting things, unfollowing people, and uninstalling apps from my phone. I will be reaching out to people I actually know and like to make sure they have my email or my phone number. I will mark several of my accounts as placeholders only and let people know that they should not try to reach me there.

I will return to a time when the internet was a place to sit at a computer and visit instead of a network of constant intrusions and time-wasting default behaviors that live at the end of my wrist.

I think I will be happier.

Disclosure, to make sure this post doesn’t somehow get misconstrued as me elevating myself to Our Lady of Saint Ludd.

Here is a list of subscriptions I currently have and will probably keep:

Amazon Prime (for shopping)
Google One (for storage)
WordPress (for hosting)
Libro.fm (for audiobooks)
Local newspaper (for…news. Also crosswords.)

I’m not throwing my phone into the sea. I am just dialing the noise way, way back, hoping to regain not only some privacy and ad-free hours but to read more paper books and exchange more actual phone numbers with people I like. I am giving up on giving up. I am trying to make it better.

Phantasma Is Here!

Ten years, three books, half a dozen short stories, three states of residence, and one pandemic after writing the first line of Phaethon, the trilogy is complete.

I really feel like I’m supposed to say something, but all that comes to mind is “phew.”

The Phaethon books have been a lot of fun. I got to write characters that I loved and invent critters for them to deal with. Jack and Rosie let me divide my brain into parts. Zelda let me let her go wild. Cal gave me plenty of excuses to hate him, and it turned out I couldn’t. It’s been a ride. Thank you for coming on it with me.

When I first started these books, I was just realizing that I was seriously ill and I didn’t know what was happening. Now I have all my diagnoses and treatments and limits properly sorted, if not under control. My life looks very different. I am happy to be where I am, and happy to set these books down where they are.

If you haven’t started the trilogy yet, now is the time; you can get all three e-books for cheap. Many of the short stories are free in my Ko-Fi shop. And please don’t forget to review them on whatever platform you use the most. (Wink wink, nod nod, author job done.)

I’ll see you all at the next milestone.

Phantasma is Out in June!

After a whole host of pandemic-related publishing setbacks, Phantasma, the third and final book in the Phaethon trilogy, is finally ready. It will be released on June 28, 2023. The pre-order is up now, so if you already know you want this book, go pre-order it! Pre-orders are extremely helpful for authors. The most important day of book sales is day one. Of course, if you haven’t read book one yet, it’s never too late.

This book is about Jack and Rosie, hacker couple, taking a relaxing vacation. Almost. Except for the reporters. And the labyrinthine fae underworld. And of course the nefarious cloven-hooved bimbo. Okay, maybe it gets a little wild.

So go get it.

On Targeting Science Fiction Authors with Cyberpunk Dystopian Garbage

We live in a moment of change regarding the idea of AI. Large language models are slightly better at impersonating thought than they were a year or five ago. The way we talk about robots and chatbots and panopticons is evolving. And yet, the actual digitized capitalist hellscape we live in continues to demonstrate every day, in every way, that robots are just playing stupid human games at 10x speed. The most innovative thing about technology is the errors it makes. A bot made to look at pictures thinks that hills and sheep are the same thing. If you ask “How many giraffes are in this picture?” it will always say one, because otherwise you wouldn’t be asking about giraffes. When we someday make an android that passes for human and stuff ChatGPT3000 inside, the effect will be that of someone given daily doses of ecstasy in utero who somehow survived to adulthood.

But we keep letting robots do things. Both humans and robots are going to learn a lot of things the hard way. We can only hope it’s going to be Tesla Fail hard and not Paperclip Maximizer hard.

Most of the time in this experimental year of 2023, it’s just silly, frustrating, or both.

I got an email this week that appears to legitimately be from Bytedance’s “publishing imprint.” Reading it, I wondered how much of it was written by a human. It certainly wasn’t aimed at me by a human, because a human would have taken one glance at my public existence and realized that I was the worst possible target. To be completely honest, I responded to it because I want to see if a human reads the responses, and if so, what their reaction might be. And I’m posting the exchange here because it contains some advice for writers. It might even be a good exercise in spotting red flags. I enumerated a few of them. How many do you see?

How to Walk Away From Twitter

Let’s get the obvious out of the way; this bites. Twitter has been a major part of interacting with the world for more than a decade. There are a lot of reasons to want to stay there. Some of them are just little dopamine hits, but some of them are friends, news, and fun. So. This bites.

But Twitter isn’t a town square. It’s a company. And that company has been bought by a petty billionaire who may or may not be on a mission to put chips in everyone’s brains, and his ego is manifesting in ways that have destroyed the platform. Journalists are banned. Criticism is banned. Links to other social media made by people trying to flee are banned. Let me know when this starts sounding like an extremely weak cyberpunk dystopia to you. I’m ~50% certain at this point that Elon Musk is deliberately destroying Twitter out of spite for being forced to go through with buying it, but the result is the same either way.

So it’s time to walk away.

But you don’t wanna.

Let’s try some things:

Make an alternative. You don’t have to nuke your Twitter to do this; you’re just creating a different place you can go. Spend a little time there adding people you like and looking for people you already know. I’m using a Mastodon instance called eldritch.cafe (which the first 50 people can join with my invite link if a queer left flavor of server sounds good to you), but you can go wherever you want. This is the thing that Twitter is trying to stop you from doing, so now it’s more important than ever that you aren’t a captive of the hellbird. You can read about alternatives like Mastodon and Hive. If you choose Mastodon but you’re having trouble picking a server, remember that you can migrate your account to a different server later, and unless one server has blocked another, all servers can see each other, so you’re not limited to interacting with the community you pick.Move the Twitter app icon off the home screen on your phone. Delete the bookmark in your browser. Make it one extra step for yourself to go there. Having to take that step will at least make sure you’re making a deliberate choice.Use some of the tools you have to protect yourself from Twitter while you still can. Delete your phone number, if you gave it to them. Remove your real name, if it’s on there. There are arguments about deleting old tweets, but I’m doing so using Semiphemeral because I don’t want to keep them there are provide content, even if it’s old. Twitter has just banned all links to external social media platforms, but you might still be able to find some of your friends and port them over to Mastodon using a tool like FediFinder before the Twitter banhammer comes down.

You don’t have to delete your account. In fact, you probably shouldn’t, because that would free up your username for someone to impersonate you. You can change your name to Permanent Hiatus, or change your profile picture to all black (my favorite one I saw was a Spirit Halloween banner) and just leave the account there to collect dust.

If Elon Musk sells Twitter, maybe we can go back. Even if I feel like the Lorax for saying it. It’s possible.

But if nothing else, this whole thing should teach us that it’s good to have a back-up plan. Start on yours today.

On NaNoWriMo, Inkitt, and Being An Author

On Writing

I sequestered myself for the month of November and wrote the first 50k words of Hostis Humani Generis, the decopunk anarchist lesbian pirate farmer novel. So. Huzzah for me.

Unfortunately, it will probably be my last NaNoWriMo.

I’m going to finish the book! And using the same method, as well. But not using the NaNoWriMo website or hashtags, and maybe in a month with fewer holidays in it.

And now we’re going to talk about why.

On NaNoWriMo

I have been participating in National Novel Writing Month since 2015. And winning. And publishing. I used to donate every year and get that little halo over my profile photo.

I believe in NaNo as a project. I don’t actually believe, as they often say, that anyone can write a book. I think you need to read a lot and write a lot and think a lot, and on top of that, you need the freedom to section off a part of your life and say “This is where the book is happening. Nothing else is allowed.” Those things are a combination of privilege and choice. Not everyone has the privilege. Even fewer make the choice. But I want EVERY ONE OF THEM to write a book. NaNo was the thing that finally let me dedicate myself to the work, and I want everyone to have that for themselves.

And NaNo does get bigger every year. This has come with some issues.

When they redesigned the website, I think they were just trying to modernize. And every big, complicated, public-facing website will have some bugs to iron out. But I think the website redesign suffered from the same issue outlined in one of my favorite books as a kid, Mrs. Armitage on Wheels, in which a woman adds bells and whistles and radios and baskets and umbrellas onto her bicycle until it becomes unridable. There were some strange design decisions in the new website, too, like turning the bar graph into a blob graph. It was at this point that I decided to stop donating until they sorted it out. It seemed like they had spent a lot of money to ruin a perfectly good website. But I kept doing NaNo, hoping it would get better.

Instead, I’m afraid they’ve done something much worse.

This year, when I punched in my final word count, I got the usual lovely confetti and charming winner video and the little heart reacts from the wonderful people in my local NaNo discord. I felt good. Until I clicked on the “winner goodies” section, which is a set of discounts available to winners for things like writing software, plotting software, and typing devices. Those are all great, even if they are a bit of free advertising for the companies offering the discounts.

But this year, I noticed that my winner goodies included a “chance to win publishing contracts, social media spotlights, and more!” from a company called Inkitt.

And THAT is not okay.

On Inkitt

If you search “Inkitt” on social media, you will see a lot of authors begging people to read their story for free in Inkitt.

This is not a good sign.

If you click one, there is a very good chance you’ll find something minimally edited, completely unedited, or possibly missing punctuation entirely.

This is also not a good sign.

As the long-standing among you may remember, I wrote about Inkitt in TWENTY GODDAMN SIXTEEN after they targeted me for an “invitation” using a fictional publishing house account on social media.

I was not the only one who wrote about them being a scam.

So did Victoria Strauss.

And David Gowey.

And Fictigristle (twice).

And Enchoseon.

And, available by a quick search, reddit and quora and tapas posters.

There is bound to be some confusion if you read all of these, because Inkitt has drastically changed their business model several times, and each time it was going to be the Next Big Thing.

I learned about Inkitt because they replied to my tweet with an offer to ‘publish my book.’ (Which was, by the way, already published, but the bots didn’t know that.) I looked into them and found dozens of fake accounts spamming people with their single link. A little further and I found that if you give them an email address, they will hound you until you die.

When I wrote my initial blog post about them, the “co-founder” contacted me “to talk about it” but refused to discuss any of the actual issues unless I gave him my phone number, which, yeah, like hell, buddy. He then stalked me across multiple platforms to say that Inkitt was innocent. Inkitt is not innocent. Inkitt is a scam. Inkitt lures people into giving away their first publishing rights so they can’t sell the book to anyone else, and gives them “a chance to win” a contract. Or possibly be shopped around to real publishers, which is the job of an agent. Honestly, the whole thing is so screwy that I won’t try to lay it all out again here. You can read the posts above.

Here are some general pro tips about publishing: No publisher will ever reply to your casual post about writing on social media with an offer of publication. No publisher will sign a book that has already been published for free on the internet unless that book has already proven that it can sell a million copies, and probably not even then. And no author should ever sign away their book for “a chance” or “exposure.”

Inkitt Meets NaNoWriMo

Here’s where things get unpleasant. I’m making redactions, but I think it’s important to be able to talk about these things, and I don’t want to come across like I’m being hyperbolic, so I am including some screenshots.

NaNoWriMo has dedicated forums. When I found Inkitt on my “winner goodies” page, I went to the forums to ask why this extremely disreputable company had been included and suggest that people google them before signing up. I would love to show you my original post, but a mod in the forums deleted it. Then that mod started sending me DMs.

I then got an automated message saying that I should edit my original post about Inkitt “to reflect feedback,” so I went back and replaced the nuked content with this:

And then I was “silenced” from the forums.

I find it extremely distressing that NaNoWriMo, an organization that exists to encourage writers, is funneling those writers directly to a company that will take advantage of them. I hope it is an oversight (although typing two words into a search engine could have spared them that). I hope they will fix it. I am not going to assume that the org, or the mod, acted maliciously.

But I also can’t let authors fall for Inkitt if I can help it. You wrote a whole book! You should treasure that, and continue to work until it is perfect in your own eyes, and then share it in its best possible form, after close review, in a way that works for you, without signing it over to the first hand you see outstretched.

So spread the word. Do not put your work on Inkitt.

And hopefully that word will get around to NaNoWriMo as well.

And if it doesn’t…I think I’ll start writing books in June. June is nice.

Fundraising for Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom

My DSA Socialist Feminist team, Reproletariat, has started fundraising for the Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom fund! Join me in making abortion accessible for those who need it by clicking here and pitching in your spare change.

If I personally raise $300 through my donation page, this is the bribe: I will create a repro-rights-themed body paint photo shoot and post it without watermarks or DRM, so anyone can use it for future fundraising or awareness campaigns.

If you’ve never needed an abortion, maybe you haven’t thought about what it’s like. Like all healthcare in America, it’s stressful. It’s expensive. Unlike most other healthcare, it’s also stigmatized, and people who will never need one have tried to outlaw it. This means that while facing the decision, the expense, and the stigma, you may also have to travel to another state and rely on strangers to get you through an unnecessarily complicated procedure. Abortion funds are trying to be good strangers.

If you or someone you love need an abortion but can’t afford the many associated costs, please contact the fund. They will help people until the money runs out.

And let’s make sure the money doesn’t run out.

Donate Here

March News

Personal news: I will be having minor surgery tomorrow, so it may be a minute before I’m back to fully functional. Please be patient. Because of my health complexities, I never really know how I’m going to bounce back from things.

Author news: After much trial and even more error, my web presence is now in its final form. Aside from this website and my various social media, everything can now be found on Ko-Fi. My Patreon will close at the end of the month. Ditto all previous iterations of web store. Ko-Fi will be the place to support, buy, and read all things Sharp. Short stories will be posted periodically in the store for a minimum donation of $0, in effect allowing the people who donate (thank youuu) to subsidize the stories for everyone. Any purchase from my store will also grant you access to all the digital supporter content forever. You can also follow me there, but public news there will be much the same as public news here.

That’s all for now. I will hopefully be back online again soon.

Merch News

As part of my between-books author work, I make a little art merch and set it up for sale through a third party store. I’ve recently decided to switch stores. My merch is now here and will be 15% off for the next week.

In other news, I am alive and still holed up in the house. Phantasma is done and off to the editor. I am still periodically agonizing over An Epitaph for Everything Else. My leg is not working at the moment, but otherwise my body is fairly okay. I hope you are all doing at least as well in this stultifyingly long apocalypse.

Merry Book Birthday to Home for the Howlidays!

This anthology from Tyche Books is now available!

Short seasonal reads from a pack of authors, including myself.

30% more lesbians than other leading brands of holiday cheer.