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Casie’s Story
Sep. 27th, 2026 12:01 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
post_secret_feed—–Email—–
Dear Frank,
This past Friday night I found myself in a black hole of depression and I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the night. Not knowing where to turn and feeling like I couldn’t stop. I remembered seeing the Hopeline phone number (Call 988) on PostSecret.
I talked to someone there for 2 and a half hours and I truly feel that they saved my life.
Thank you for the website, thank Hopeline (CAll 988) for being there, and thank the people that send in their postcards so that others know they are not alone with their secrets.
-Casie
—–Email—–
Dear Frank,
I wanted to say thank you for posting the email from Casie. I was also hoping you could pass along a message to her, as well. I want to thank her for having the courage to reach out for help and then share it with you and all of your readers, using her real name and even her picture. It’s definitely inspirational.
—–Email—–
Frank,
Every time I see the new secrets on Sunday, I scroll down to see Casie. For me (a mental health counselor) she balances out the bleak postcards and reminds me that people CAN come back from the brink of suicide. She is truly an angel; I can’t imagine how many people’s lives her story has saved over the years.
5 Ways Volunteering on a Crisis-Line Can Change Your Life
As soon as I jumped from the bridge, I had instant regret, all I wanted to do was reach back to the rail, but it was gone.
— Kevin Hines
The great thing about suicide is that it’s not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean, you can always do it later.
— Harvey Fierstein
The post Casie’s Story appeared first on PostSecret.
View From a Hotel Window, 9/25: New York City
Sep. 25th, 2026 07:59 pmscalziwhatever_feed
It’s a classic view for sure.
Why am I here? Tomorrow afternoon I will be talking science fiction at the Villa Albertine, as part of the Villa Albertine’s overall fall literary festival. That link above will take you to the whole line-up (which actually started today, but inasmuch as I just got into town and might need a nap because a certain cat woke me up at 3am, I have not taken part of). But definitely check out the whole line-up. there’s awesome stuff there. And it’s free to attend! Free is good!
See you tomorrow, maybe!
— JS
t-rex and the case of the missed midlife crisis
Sep. 25th, 2026 12:00 amdinosaur_comics_feed| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about |
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September 25th, 2026: This comic inspired by a watch face I got for my Pebble watch that not only tells you how much of the day is done, but also how much of the week is done, how much of the month is done, and how much of YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IS DONE. There's a bar graph at the bottom and it's more than half-way filled on my watch. Oops. OOOOOPS. – Ryan | ||
Our Thrilling New Purchase
Sep. 24th, 2026 06:26 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Our washer and dryer set had been with us 15+ years and were really showing their age. The dryer’s closing mechanism had to be negotiated with in order to be fully secured, and our washer had finally gotten to the point where even enthusiastic cleaning of every visible interior surface could no longer get rid of a vague musty smell. It was time for their replacements, which arrived today.
I’ll note that while we could have gone with a washer-dryer set with all the modern bells and whistles, Krissy intentionally went with a set that was basically as low-tech as one could buy in this modern era. We don’t need an LED screen or phone alerts, and recent news has shown that “smart appliances” can mess you up with a bad update. We just need to laundry. It’s not, nor should it be, rocket science.
Getting new major appliances was also a reminder that as an adult, the things you get excited and happy about are very different from what you’d get excited about when you were younger. New washer and dryer? Cool! No more wrestling with dryer doors or sniffing shirts to make sure they actually smell fresh! They just work like they’re supposed to! Wheeee! Also, now I really like socks as a gift. Adults, man.
— JS
And Now, Just Because it’s Pretty, Succulent Flowers After the Rain
Sep. 24th, 2026 04:04 pmscalziwhatever_feed
How are the drops of rain suspended like that? Spider webs. Lots and lots of spider webs. Honestly, even after 25 years of living out in rural America, I am constantly surprised at how many spiders (and webs!) there are in just about every possible place. It does allow for some pretty neat photos, though.
How’s your early post-equinox period going?
— JS
The Big Idea: Mary G. Thompson
Sep. 23rd, 2026 02:34 pmscalziwhatever_feed
As the great Whitney Houston once sang, I believe the children are our future — but in Precious Children, author Mary G. Thompson posits a very different future with some very different children… and some very different stakes.
MARY G. THOMPSON:
What if you could guarantee that your precious child would never die? What parent, if they had the means, wouldn’t do everything possible to protect their child from all the dangers of the world, especially if those dangers were growing, if other people’s children were dying at alarming rates? And what if you could help society along the way, allowing people who couldn’t have children of their own to share in the joy of being a parent?
Having yourself cloned four thousand times and adopting those children out to other families sounds like an act of charity, a benevolent gift from those who have to those who have not. If you need to take one or two of those children to provide a host body for the consciousness of your child, surely the hand of the moral compass falls toward good.
But what if you are one of the children who has been promised that your life will be saved, that you will be backed up in case of the death of your body, but you know that the technology to transfer those backed up memories doesn’t work exactly as advertised? Or, worse, what if you are one of the children who was created only to be adopted out, who must watch another child who is exactly the same be raised with immense wealth and protection from death, while you are left to suffer and die and sacrifice your own body?
The big idea of Precious Children is that what you think you know about your power, your moral identity, or your own children may not be true. Humans are capable of weaving intricate psychological protective webs to convince themselves that they are good, that they are smart, that they are in control. We are capable of choosing which truths to see and of convincing ourselves that what we most desire is possible.
Nothing is more important to human beings than our children, and yet whose children are precious, and under what circumstances, is very much in dispute today. In the near future I posit in Precious Children, the trend away from community and toward nuclear-family enclaves has continued, and the wealthy are the most able to separate themselves from others. With social services in decline, every family, rich or poor, must fend for themselves. And children without strong and/or wealthy parents are left unprotected by a legal system that is not too different from today’s.
I am an advocate for the rights of children. In my opinion, rights such as basic needs, education, and bodily autonomy should flow to the child and not the parent. Our legal system often treats children as property: children must abide by custody agreements, attend schools chosen by parents, and even endure or be denied medical treatments based on their parents’ choices. Another big idea in Precious Children is that parents don’t know their children as well as they think they do; they often project their own beliefs and needs onto their children rather than seeing their children for who they are.
But children are people just like adults, with interiority, needs, and knowledge. Sometimes they know things that adults don’t, and they have the same incentives to fight for their lives. Any time a system is designed to benefit one group, the people who are disadvantaged will rebel.
If you must kill a child to save a child, you may not get the child you were expecting. Technology can do amazing things, and money can buy technology, but nothing can teach you what you refuse to understand. Inside each of our minds, there is a fight: in Precious Children, the fight may be literally against another person for control of a body, or it may be your own denial wrestling with the truth. No firewall is perfect, and in every fight you must pick a side—and you make the choice at your own peril.
Precious Children: Amazon|Barnes &Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
she got better
Sep. 23rd, 2026 12:00 amdinosaur_comics_feed| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about |
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September 23rd, 2026: Today is a good day I think to peruse... the DINOSAUR COMICS STORE?? – Ryan | ||
Trying Out A New Recipe: Eat At Maude’s “Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread With Espresso Frosting”
Sep. 22nd, 2026 09:02 pmscalziwhatever_feed
It’s been a big baking week for me, and y’all are getting subjected to my trials and errors as I try out new recipes. For today’s baked good we have a chocolate chip pumpkin bread with espresso frosting from Eat At Maude’s. With it being fall now, I thought this was an appropriate choice. I have followed Eat At Maude’s on Instagram for a few months now and I am constantly amazed at how good everything she makes looks, so I had high hopes for this recipe. Plus, quick breads are usually kind of my specialty, so I figured this would be an easy one for me.
The list of ingredients for this recipe is not exactly what I would call short. You can follow along with the recipe here. Here’s the lineup:
I think these ingredients are mostly very normal except the buttermilk definitely threw me for a loop. I can’t remember the last time I bought buttermilk. Unfortunately the store did not have their little quart size in stock so I had to get a full half gallon. Thankfully I have another recipe on my docket that utilizes buttermilk, so at least I won’t be wasting as much. The recipe calls for semi-sweet chocolate chips, of course, but I happened to only have the mini semi-sweet ones. I don’t think that really made too much of a difference, thankfully. I was also concerned I didn’t have pumpkin pie spice and was going to have to make it from like five individual spices mixed together, but it turned out I did have a bottle (from Dorothy Lane Market, even).
Oh, also, the recipe calls for some orange zest, but I had no oranges, so yeah… that ingredient got left out. I’m doing my best out here, okay!
Anyways, the first thing to do was to brown the butter (like I said last post, browning butter is a literal game changer), but what’s interesting about this recipe is that she has you add an extra tablespoon of butter to your browned butter once it’s done. I have never seen anyone else do that before. I don’t know exactly what it accomplishes, but I did it anyway.
Mix that with the espresso powder (if you don’t have any instant espresso powder, I highly recommend the King Arthur one!) and wait for it to cool before adding it to your sugar and oil. Add the pumpkin, spices, eggs, vanilla, and sour cream, but not the buttermilk yet.
Wet ingredients are a go:
And after the simple dry ingredient mixture, you get a gloop!
This batter smelled so good and so autumnal, I was definitely getting excited.
Add chocolate chips and put in a loaf pan:
Oh sheesh, that is a very full loaf pan. Hopefully it doesn’t rise too mu-
Oh gosh dang it.
Yep, she done spilled right on over! That was very much not ideal, but the fallen parts didn’t catch on fire within the hour and ten minutes it took to bake, so I consider that at least a partial success.
Ta-da…
Okay, this thing was browned and hard on the edges, but sunken in and concerningly soft in the middle. Thankfully, the recipe says the bread needs to reach an internal temperature of 195 degrees, so I can confirm that it was in fact up to temp. Even if it was overdone and also underdone at the same time.
Once it cooled a bit, I flipped it out:
I will say that usually this loaf pan’s Fall Harvest design is more.. apparent. The pumpkins and wheat got a bit lost in the extra moist super soft bread texture.
Honestly, soft is an understatement. This thing was falling apart so much that I couldn’t even get a slice out intact:
I mean, that’s a moist crumb right there, folks.
As for the espresso icing, it’s actually a cream cheese icing with some of the espresso powder in it, and it was very coffee-y but I really liked it! I would say it made a more appropriate amount of frosting compared to my last baking endeavor:
I did try some with the bread, but honestly you could just have the bread by itself and it’s perfectly good, if you don’t feel like making icing or don’t have cream cheese.
All in all, this bread was very tasty, but I’d argue it’s honestly a lot more like a cake. I feel like with something like banana bread, you can eat a slice with your hands, but with this bread you can’t pick it up. It needs a plate and a fork. And some milk on the side.
I did enjoy making this recipe but I wish it hadn’t spilled over and end up having some harder edges. My loaf pan is a perfectly normal size so I don’t know why it struggled to hold all the batter. Maybe splitting this up into two loaf pans and baking it for less time would be better? Or maybe like put it in a 9×9 cake pan and ice it like an actual cake? I’m not sure, but at least it’s really tasty.
While this recipe wasn’t that hard, I did make a ton of dishes making it. The pan to brown the butter in, a bowl for the brown butter + extra butter and espresso powder, a bowl for the dry ingredients, bowl for the wet ingredients, loaf pan, bowl for the cream cheese frosting, like two whisks, two rubber spatulas, stand mixer paddle attachment, 1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, 2/3 cup, 3/4 cup, 1 cup, 1/2 tbsp, tbsp, tsp, 1/2 tsp, 1/4 tsp, another 1 cup, and a butter knife. Not my most efficient work.
Does pumpkin bread with chocolate chips in it sound good to you? Does buttermilk seem like an odd ingredient for this? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
The Big Idea: Peter Watts
Sep. 22nd, 2026 06:04 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Times are tough, and according to Hugo award-winning author Peter Watts, they ain’t getting any better. But perhaps not all hope is lost. Optimism seems to be the surprising route Watts has taken with his newest short story collection, Fold Catastrophes. Pull yourself out of your doomer-spiral and check out his Big Idea.
PETER WATTS:
I had to be dragged into this.
I’m not pimping a novel, after all. I’m pimping a short story collection: a bunch of largely-unrelated small ideas coexisting between the same covers (or locked behind the same paywall, for those of you still in thrall to Amazon). Such collections aren’t often bound together by a unifying theme. Hell, the guidelines for Big Idea explicitly describe it as a platform for promoting novels and novellae. No mention of collections at all.
It seemed ironclad, until Rick Klaw over at Tachyon sent me links to a half-dozen Big Ideas focused on story collections. Scalzi clearly needs to update his guidelines. In the meantime, I better get started.
Big Idea, Big Idea. Some common theme uniting stories about sun-dwelling life-forms built out of spacetime microfractures, the effects of gut bacteria on human behavior, and the ways Neuralink could go catastrophically wrong if it functions exactly as advertised. Something that ties together Simulation Theory and child abuse in the Catholic church and ancient spaceships carved from asteroids. A professional killer grieving his lost son. A hypersonic missile with a crowd-sourced target. A dead fish-farmer, rebooted and press-ganged into a clandestine war against children (admittedly, very nasty children). Common theme, common theme, common…
Got it: optimism.
It might not be not the first word to spring to mind. Insofar as people talk about me at all, they tend to use words like dark, and depressing, and makes you want to open your veins in a warm tub. James Nicoll once opined “When I feel my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts”; our gracious host described me as “never cheerful” when blurbing this very collection.
I stand by it. What binds these stories together is a consistent sense of optimism. Because another term people use to refer to my work is hard SF: that end of the genre pool where at least some effort is made to cover the author’s ass in a patina of credible real-world Science to paper over the bullshit. And real-world Science has things to say about where we’re headed as a species.
We’ve wiped out over half the world’s wildlife and nearly half of all natural ecosystems just since the seventies. We’d reduced global commercial fish stocks by 80-90% by the end of the last century. Insect populations crash world-wide; 90% or more according to European surveys, 70% even in wilderness preserves in Costa Rica. Extinction rates are impossible to know for certain—we kill things off far faster than we discover them—but the estimates I’ve seen range from 60,000 to 130,000 species a year.
A series of papers from 2008-2025, reassessing the simplistic and once-derided predictions of the sixties-era Limits to Growth model, only confirm its original forecast: we’re still on the business-as-usual trajectory, and business-as-usual kills off 40-70% of us starting around mid-century. A 2021 Nature paper by Bologna and Aquino concludes that our best-case odds of avoiding “catastrophic collapse” are less than 10%. McKay et al scope out the terrain for a 2022 piece in Science, concluding that exceeding 1.5°C “could trigger multiple climate tipping points”—which seems a bit behind the curve given that we’ve already breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, and even the hopeium addicts over at the UN have been forced to concede that 1.5°C is already as dead as democracy.
To be clear, not all these studies conclude that global collapse is inevitable. The UN’s reluctant admission came with the usual lipsticked-pig insistence that we can still pull put of our nose dive if we all just come together and make the necessary radical changes to our lifestyle and consumption habits. The likelihood that we’ll manifest such self-restraint is left as an exercise for the reader, but here’s a hint: the response of the world’s governments to the recent spate of floods, firestorms, and heat domes has been to to abandon 45 climate initiatives over the past year, and to crank fossil-fuel production up to eleven.
So yeah. Business as usual. By the end of the twenty-first century, we’ll probably be living in the nineteenth. Set against these facts, how do the stories in Fold Catastrophes line up?
“Defective” portrays a near-future Human civilization able to build a device that fires artificial black holes at a bunch of unwelcome immigrants. “Giants” posits not only that we make it to the stars, but that we’ll still be out there a hundred million years from now. “Critical Mass” describes the creative redemption of an artist who has lost his way; I dare you to tell me it doesn’t have a happy ending. “Contracting Iris” shows us a grief-stricken woman afflicted by MS, finding peace and enlightenment before being drowned by a giant squid. “The Wisdom of Crowds” portrays a collective unconscious too ethical to let us cheat our way out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. And “Game Theory”? “Game Theory” is a Get Out Of Jail Free card for anyone who’s ever committed a shitty act (and really, isn’t there a little bit of pedophile priest in all of us?).
Yes, these stories tend to play out against a backdrop of environmental degradation and mass extinction; I still aspire to some degree of credibility. But they all describe civilizations replete with starry-eyed future-tech during a time when it’s far more likely we’ll be huddling in the ruins of past infrastructure, fighting over the last vial of penicillin while our kids die from scrapes and tooth infections. Optimistic is putting it mildly.
I’ll admit my stories are darker than most, but that doesn’t make them pessimistic; it only means that Human art reflects our delusional optimism as a species, although the evolutionary reasons for that are far Bigger Ideas than can fit into this column. So let’s just remember that we went into ecological overshoot back in the seventies; civilization has been living on credit ever since, and that card is pretty much maxxed out. It would be nice to think that—if it’s too late to save the planet—we could at least spend our few remaining decades hunting down the plutocrats, avoiding their killer drones, dragging them into the street and kicking them to death. (Oh right, rage: there’s another common theme linking these stories.) But that’s one arena in which I’m under no delusions. We’re more likely to just sit on the couch as we always have, snarfing pork rinds and watching AI cat videos until the ceiling crashes in.
But hey. At least now you have some light-hearted escapism to read in the meantime.
Fold Catastrophes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website
A Sweary Paean To Autumn, Told in Bluesky Form
Sep. 21st, 2026 03:02 pmscalziwhatever_feedIt went a little something like this.
And if you’re thinking, “this is kinda like that McSweeney’s post“: well, yes.
— JS
death comes to us all, so let's all stop investigating it
Sep. 21st, 2026 12:00 amdinosaur_comics_feed| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about |
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September 21st, 2026: Death, am I right?? What is even its DEAL?? – Ryan | ||
50th Anniversaries and When I’ll Hit Them
Sep. 20th, 2026 02:57 pmscalziwhatever_feed
I read an article in the Irish version of The Times about the band U2 being together for 50 years now, dating back to their first gathering as a group in drummer Larry Mullen’s kitchen, on September 25, 1976. They were literal kids then — all of them still in school — and years away from releasing their first recordings, much less becoming the globe-spanning rock icons they would eventually become, and certainly the biggest rock group Ireland ever produced.
But all things have to start somewhere, and all the principals of U2 seem to agree that September 25, 1976 is where the band begins. Good for U2, by the way; I’m a fan of the band, so I’m glad they’ve stuck it out as a group. It’s rare to have a rock group of any sort keep all the same members all the way through their run. And they all apparently still mostly like each other! Which is even better. Well done, lads.
The band marking 50 years as a band got me thinking of anniversaries of my own, in terms of my own career, and whether I would, as long as I am not hit by bus/eaten by a bear/etc, be likely to hit the 50th anniversary mark with any of them. U2 has gotten to 50, but that’s because they dated their career to their very first gathering, not, say, their first performance, or their first released recordings, or even the debut of their first album, Boy, which happened in October 1980. I feel reasonably sure the band might hit all those marks — October 2030 is only four years and one month away — but they’re not there yet. If the band breaks up between now and October 2030, the album will hit that 50 year mark, but they won’t (don’t worry, even if they did break up now they should collectively be fine; the net worth of the band is in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. That’ll split nicely).
So, looking back at my own anniversaries as a writer and author, when are they and will I make it to a 50th anniversary? Well, I have a few, and like U2, some of them go back to my teenage years. Let’s chart them out, shall we?
Writer: 1984 (42 years ago) — I had done writing prior to this date (back in my day, we had to write essays in school! Without ChatGPT! Uphill both ways in the snow! And we liked it!), but me thinking of myself as a writer dates back to the second half of my freshman year in high school, and a short story I wrote as an assignment for John Hayes’ English Composition class. As I often note, I pulled this story pretty much out of my ass in a panic the night before it was due, and out of three sections of the class, I was the only person to get an “A.” Which led me to the epiphany that writing was a thing I could do (I pulled that story right out of my ass! And got an “A”!), and that it was also a thing I wanted to do (everything else was hard!). Bingo bango bongo, I decided I was a writer, and that writing stuff was what I was going to do with my life. It worked out, thank Christ.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? I think I am likely to be alive in eight years, and I suspect if I am alive, I will still be writing in some form or another, so, yes, actually, I think I’ll make it to my 50th as a writer.
Journalist: 1987 (39 years ago) — I was an editor of my high school newspaper, and that was nice and all, but personally speaking, I clock my journalism career — the one where I had editors and deadlines and had to actually go out and about to see things and review them — as starting at the University of Chicago and the student newspaper there, The Chicago Maroon. I started working there right away too, basically within my first week of getting to Chicago (I knew going in I wanted to work at the newspaper, so why wait). This was also when I first started being a critic, because it turned out that if you reviewed music they let you keep the album. What a scam! I was all about that.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? I suspect I’ll be alive for that 50th anniversary, but I’m not actively doing journalism of any sort at the moment. It seems unlikely to me I will be hitting that mark by, say, doing any investigative reporting.
Freelancer: 1990 (36 years ago) — In 1990 I got an internship at the San Diego Tribune, in the features department, and when I came back to University of Chicago for my final undergraduate year, I used those clips to get freelance work from the Chicago Sun-Times and New City Magazine, writing interviews of musicians and doing concert reviews, which was a sweet side hustle at the time. I wasn’t worried about tinnitus or wanting to get to sleep by 10pm, like I would be today.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? Probably I’ll be alive and maybe still doing the occasional bit of freelance stuff. I mean, technically speaking I’m not anyone’s employee (I’m not even technically an employee of my own company, Scalzi Enterprises; I’m the owner), so any work I’m doing is freelance work. But even if we exclude the novels from this I still write occasional essays, short stories, scripts, etc that I get paid for. I think it’s reasonably likely I’ll still be freelancing at the 50th anniversary.
Employed/Professional Writer: 1991 (35 years ago) — I got paid for writing before 1991 (see above) but I tend to mark my professional career to starting work at the Fresno Bee in September of 1991 — and actually, I officially began this very week of September, so here we are exactly at the 35th anniversary! Well done, me. This was the point at which I wasn’t doing anything else as a gig but writing. I was getting a salary and health insurance and benefits and all that good stuff. It’s also when I started my streak, which continues to this day, of not having to do anything but writing for work. Writing was, and has always been for the full stretch of my career, my day job.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? I mean, probably; I’ll be 72 at that point and while I don’t know when I might want to retire, if ever, there are plenty of 72-year-olds regularly writing and making some amount of money from it. It’s reasonable to think I might be one of them. I don’t think I’ll have a different “day job” at that point.
Blog writing: 1998 (28 years ago) — I just recently covered this so I don’t need to do it again here, but, yeah, this totally counts. Material originally published here (or on Scalzi.com generally) has made it all over the world in the form of novels, essay collections, and reprints to newspapers, magazines and other professional online sites. It’s legit, y’all.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? I’ll be 78 when that happens, but I imagine if I’m still around at 78, I’ll be writing here. I’ve been writing here longer than I’ve been writing anywhere else, and also, it’s the easiest place for me to write. I might need to be actively edited by Athena at that point, however. I imagine I might tend to wander.
Author: 2000 (26 years ago) — I think this one will be mildly surprising to folks who think my first book was either Agent to the Stars (which I wrote in 1997 and put on this site in 1999) or Old Man’s War (published by Tor in 2005), but I mark my “Author” era by The Rough Guide to Money Online, a nonfiction book published by Rough Guides. Why that one? Because it was the first book of mine professionally edited, designed and published — all love to Agent to the Stars, but when it was on the site it was literally just one long HTML document and a downloadable .doc file, and both had lots of copyedit errors — and the first one physically printed and distributed to bookstores. I remember we took a special trip to the Reston Towne Center Barnes & Noble just to look at it existing on the shelves there. I didn’t have to sneak it in or anything! Plus I got paid for it ($18,000, if memory serves), which was nice too.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? Maybe? I’ll be 81 then. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll publish a memoir that year or something.
Science Fiction Writer: 2001 (25 years ago) — Again, possibly a surprise to folks, who might think of Agent or OMW as the start. But in 2001 I submitted a short story to Strange Horizons magazine (because they looked interesting, and also took electronic submissions, and I couldn’t be bothered to print out and mail a submission anywhere else) and they accepted it, publishing it in October of that year. I’ve just put the actual day on the calendar to remember to write about it on the anniversary, so I’ll keep it short for now. But again: Someone other than me published it! And paid me for it! Which is enough for me to count it as my official debut in science fiction.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? That will be literally 25 years from now and I will be 82 so — we’ll see!
Science Fiction Novelist: 2005 (21 years ago) — Again, not Agent to the Stars, but Old Man’s War, and again because an editor offered to publish it, gave it the editorial and design attention it benefitted from, sent it out to reviewers and then out into bookstores and libraries. It was an actual arrival in the field, and the novel debut in every sense that mattered (don’t feel bad about Agent, it was also professionally published in 2005. It did fine! It’s fine!). I wrote about OMW for its 20th anniversary, so you can read more detailed thoughts there. But, this was my big splash into the science fiction pool.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? Oh, man. I hope so? I’ll be 85 then. If I’m, like, a Paul McCartney sort of 80-something person, then maybe I’ll still be writing novels. But at that point, let’s take this all one a day at a time, please.
Screenwriter: 2021 (Five years ago) — Yup, screenwriter! “Automated Customer Service” was my first produced screenplay! The episode won an Emmy! Not for me! But even so! I’ve written several more screenplays since. I have an IMDb page and everything.
Will I hit the 50th anniversary? Absolutely not. 2071 is your problem, suckers!
— JS
Sunday Secrets
Sep. 19th, 2026 11:33 pmpost_secret_feed
Hi Frank,
Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if, among the sea of “it gets better” sentiments, there are people who acknowledge that sometimes it doesn’t? My failed attempt was 29 years ago and it has not in fact gotten better. I tried so hard for such a long time to get better and be happy, but every year that passes leaves me more and more hopeless. But I’ve never seen anyone express this sentiment. Everyone insists sunshine and rainbows and self-actualization are all just around the bend. I never express my hopeless sentiment because I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s happiness. Are the others like me just doing what I’m doing, keeping quiet so as not to burden anyone else? Or am I the only one? I feel like the only one. I’m so lonely and hopeless and exhausted and I would love to know if there are people out there who also know that “it gets better” isn’t always true.
The post Sunday Secrets appeared first on PostSecret.