Salt air teased Aleixos’s hair as the ferry crawled the distance to Leaurepit. At his shoulder, Pormort huffed, unsettled by the swaying of the wooden craft, and he set a reassuring hand on the horse’s neck without looking. “Ush, ush,” he muttered. Fixed on the shore ahead, his eyes searched for the two-story inn he’d been told to find. He wondered how Gore the charmless Fighter had ever gotten near Prince Beauregard; as Ali stepped off the ferry onto the dock at Leaurepit, h

Windows 11's AI-powered Audio Enhancement feature can cause weirdly glitchy audio problems with its extra processing, and Studio Effects adds AI processing that gives people an uncanny valley look on their webcams. If these sound annoying to you, here's how to magic them away! Disable the sound-glitching Audio Enhancement Open your Settings, go to System, and select Sound. In that menu, you'll see a list of all your output and input sound devices. Image source: Chupacabra Tut

Windows Recall was a bad idea poorly executed, and even Windows recognized that an app that took screenshots of whatever was on your computer screen every few seconds and stored them insecurely was batshit bananapants to roll out to the general public. I wasn't able to find anything more recent about it than April 2026, when about 10% of Windows 11 PCs had the app available, so it's possible this isn't one you have to worry about! But just in case, this is how you check to be

Click To Do is an ever-expanding list of AI actions that interact with whatever's on your screen—text, images, URLs, email addresses, etc.—when you hold the Windows key and click. Essentially, it takes a screenshot of what you're doing and offers to summarize or rewrite text, draft an email, manipulate images, send info to Copilot, etc. If it's available to you and you don't want it, it's easy to turn off. Go to settings, then select Privacy & security. Within that menu, you'

There are few things that will piss me off as quickly as trying to perform a perfectly normal everyday action on my computer and being bombarded with AI suggestions, popups, and sneaky-ass data stealing. If you're the same, you'd probably love to see that little rainbow Copilot app disappear from your computer. Since I have to be dragged by my feet into any Windows update, I'm still operating in Windows 10 and don't have quite as much AI nightmare to deal with, so I've gather

Some time ago, we lost our senior dogs Nina & Matthias. They were already in their double digits by the time they came into our lives. They'd spent five years in a concrete shelter because they were a bonded pair. Though people had reached out to adopt pretty, sociable Nina, Matthias's standoffishness and fearful aggression made him hard to place, and they refused to be separated. In fact, when the shelter tried to separate them, Matthias broke his own teeth fighting his way

Penny settles immediately into a provided seat, then watches with amusement as Beau tries to edge the right-most chair out of view of the camera, accidentally catching the wire of his lapel mic and yanking its clip off his collar. Elias feeds it back through, clips it on, and firmly puts the chair back on its taped-off mark. He sits there, and Beau, with a sigh, takes the middle seat. Hello! Thank you so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Princely Prattle.

Hey, here's a quick thing you can do that helps me and readers near you: Give your local library a quick Google and find their 'add to the collection' page or contact form. ( This is what Hennepin County Library's looks like ). Request that they add A King's Trust and A Villain's Hope to their physical or ebook library! This is a huge help to me in helping my stories reach more people, but it's also great because library staff is overworked and underfunded, so they don

I hosted a cozy weekend reading retreat, where several of my alpha readers got to live-read a draft of A Villain's Hope aloud. We laughed, we cried, we aww ed, we kicked our feet, and I got to note down some of my favorite reactions: "Oh, it's heating up. Oh— oh !" [Wolf whistles and uncontrollable giggles] "Your honor, I LOVE HIM!" "Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! Mages?! Are there more mages?! " "Does she die, like, badly ? Tell me she dies badly. I'll climb in there and ki

So, I have a confession to make. When I originally named A Villain's Hope , I was fresh off a draft of A King's Trust and fully in Beau's headspace, so the story took a very different shape in its outline form than its current draft. The villain was clear cut, our heroes stood in obvious opposition, and things were pretty black and white. But writing from Elias's perspective does funny things to a person. Beau is all or nothing, but El lives in the shades of grey. Are

A King's Trust, A Villain's Hope, and their beautiful sister-to-be, A Queen's Lament feature ancient magic that's been lost for centuries. But at its height, Maurilel magic was divided into twelve families, each with powers based in an aspect of human nature or need. Which family would you choose, if you were a mage? Carvers Carvers' blood-red magic focused on dealing damage and was especially prized for warfare. Travelers Travelers often left orange speed trails with th

Fan fiction is one of the greatest gifts humanity gives to each other. People getting inspired by one person's creativity and using it to spawn whole new realities, beautiful relationships, explorations of the nature of humanity. I love fan fiction. But here's the thing. Fan fiction is a labor of love, not money. It's possible for authors who write books and fanfic to "file off the serial numbers" so to speak, rewriting it to write out the IP of the original and create th

Generative AI or gen AI is sophisticated machine learning that can create original content like text, images, video, audio or software code based on a user's request. Think ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Gemini, Copilot, etc. There are many things called AI, but they're not all based on similar models and don't all represent the same amount of harm. When people "hate AI," they're talking about generative AI. Now I have a deep, personal beef with gen AI because of psychos like t

In a world where every streaming service and software company seems hell-bent on funding fascism and the end of the world at an ever-increasing monthly cost that doesn't permit you to own anything, it's no surprise piracy has taken off. And maybe pirating software and movies directly hurts the corporations—I don't know. I'm not in those industries. I am in the publishing industry, where I can guarantee all the risk and costs are passed along to the authors, not the compan

I've read a lot of discourse lately about people returning books after they've read them, or after they'd read some portion and didn't like it, or without reading them at all, just changing their mind. One common sentiment keeps creeping into these conversations that made me realize a lot of people don't know the 'math' behind books: the idea that Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any given bookseller can certainly afford to eat the cost of a few returns. That's super not how

To get our books from finished manuscript to physical copy in a bookstore, most self-published authors select a print-on-demand provider who can print and distribute books as they're ordered. There are a few competitors, but the giant in the space is IngramSpark. Because they lead the space, IngramSpark takes a huge chunk of the purchase price of books, so authors are paid very little per book, but it allows us to show up in physical retailers that otherwise couldn't find

When A King's Trust was in the editing phase, the first couple of beta readers immediately disliked Beau. "He's too much," they said. "He takes up too many causes, he gets too easily overwhelmed, he's kind of annoying." And that's, you know, not what you want to hear about the character in whose head the story takes place. I spent a few days sitting on the feedback, but eventually I decided I wasn't going to change him to be any less autistic, less ADHD, or less of a passio

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