Foz Meadows
@fozmeadows
queer SFF author, essayist, poet. he/they 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
“months of planning” and instead of events for people to attend, early crowd control measures, de-escalation tactics or anything else positive, it just means “we figured it was easier to mass arrest a bunch of teenagers while inflaming the crowd than to create a safe event”
the day has finally come: my dedicated danmei shelves are full. when the next release drops, I’ll have to decide whether to try and fit a new shelf in here somehow, or if the special editions should be moved to be on top, thus slightly delaying the inevitable
so most of the first Austin Powers has not aged terribly well but this exchange remains lamentably on point
breaking news: the AI scammers targeting the writing community are now running scams purporting to protect against [drumroll please]…. other AI scammers!
this is the third email this person has sent me in less than a month, the previous two being:
it is with a heavy heart that I inform you all that the people targeting writers with AI spamslop have discovered guilt-tripping
went to the bookshop on a whim and was blessed with four (!) slightly early releases! @isabel.kim @antonhur.com
note that the above are truncated excerpts - all these samey ones run much, much longer. here's a single unexpurgated example of the form, courtesy of extremely real person "Seniqua Pettiford:"
it's depressingly fascinating how many of these, though sent from different aliases, all possess identical formatting, structure and cadence. these four were sent by, in order, "Lauren Coleman," "Samantha Sloan," "Esther Taylor" and "Sharron Preston."
this is just standard slop - note the almost identical summary of Finding Echoes from the previous attempt! - but the fake professional credentials and graphics that won't load on the signature really lends it an extra something
this next one is both particularly heinous and particularly stupid: heinous, because it's aiming to charge me a "one-time Curation and Program Management investment" fee for a fake Goodreads accolade for my novella Finding Echoes; stupid, because it's trying to be a 2026 award for a 2024 book.
starting out strong, we've got this pitch, which manages to get both the protagonist and the setting of A Strange and Stubborn Endurance completely wrong! ren is a *title* within the work, not a character name, and the book, being secondary world fantasy, is assuredly NOT set in Renaissance Venice.
for anyone wondering how dire the current glut of AI-enabled, author-targeted scam emails is, this is what the spam folder for my professional email address looks like:
more new releases from @marthawells.com @sunyidean.com and @fondalee.bsky.social! 😁
new releases acquired! 😁 @annleckie.com @sarahgailey.bsky.social @johnchu.bsky.social @shannonchakraborty.bsky.social