Fixed how the site displays in portrait mode on devices with smaller resolutions. Let us all rejoice in the responsiveness!

I finally have a release date for my next book! May 31st 2019.

It's taken a lot longer than I had anticipated, but I hope that the additional time will crystallize into a reader experience that is so much better.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about futureproofing my career. It's a weird world we find ourselves in, and the pace of automation is such that more and more people will lose jobs as we go on. In the US, it's reasonable to expect 20% unemployment rate in fifteen years, and the rest of the world will follow.

To protect myself and my loved ones from what's coming, I began steering my skill set toward IT and mathematics, as I don't think those jobs are going anywhere soon. I think I'll have work for a couple more decades at least.

But while a person can make sure they have something meaningful to do for a while by going into IT or trades, there is no futureproofing our society. We must rebuild it so that everyone won't be miserable and desperate when unemployment hits thirty, fifty, eighty percent worldwide as this wave of automation destroys millions of jobs replacing them with thousands.

Happy 2019, everyone!

May you get done whatever you need to this coming year. And may everything else fall away if you don't enjoy it.

I’m going to see Mortal Engines this week, based on the eponymous book.

In the novel, the main heroine has an ugly scar across her entire face, and a chunk of her character development is learning that there are people who will accept her despite her appearance. In the film, her face is fine and the scar is cosmetic. Some fans got upset over the change, signed a petition, and even got a reply out of Peter Jackson.

Truth is, you cannot have the protagonist of a movie be physically repulsive, unless you make the entire movie about them overcoming that disability (and probably make the movie low-budget). A book can do mutilated characters, because when I read a book, I can be analytical: there is no moment of instinctive recoiling that I feel when I see on a person with a destroyed face in front of me.