I kicked harder, sweeping another armful of water back and away, and gaining another body length toward the paddle board. With my next stroke, I pushed my shoulders up and bent back my head to see my daughter dig in her paddle and propel herself into the distant Aegean.
The Bulgarian word shamandura means “a buoy,” and not, as it seems to me it should, a mystical lamasery that only appears once every ten thousand years. Likewise, shamar, is not a diamond market on the Silk Road, but a slap across the face.
Last summer, I combined the words and invented the game of Shamarandura, in which you swim out to a buoy and give it a slap. We generally use the smaller, nearby buoys for our slapping purposes. The bottom there is only seven or eight feet down, and you can dive to see the sand bags that anchor the buoys, sheltering hand-length, curled gobies.
The gobies are black, with large chipmonk-cheeks and fat, powerful tails. On the Black Sea coast, you can buy gobies fried and eat those cheeks, but on the Aegean, it’s the cuttlefish and squid that are in danger. These are facts that should reassure me as to my place at the top of the marine food chain, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t like swimming past the little buoys.
There’s a bigger one out there, encrusted with barnacles, its line trailing into murk. I swim over depths like those and I can’t help but imagine movement. Long, langorous swirls, as of a tail. A tentacle.
But you gotta work off that calamari somehow. What better way to conquer my fear and maintain my beach bod than this offer to my wife: “They can paddle out to the far-away buoy, and I’ll swim with them.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but one stroke of my little niece’s oar was the equivalent to four of my most powerful, avuncular strokes. Going all out, I could just barely catch up with the board, and when I stopped to rest, the girls powered steadily away.
I kicked, I breathed, I flipped over and let the burn drain out of my arms. I treaded water and gave my legs a rest while the girls gave the buoy a thorough spanking. My chest and arms hurt too much to worry about sea monsters.
“Now let’s go back.”
And the paddle dug in again.
***
I have quite a lot of news. Expect a post with more details next week, but for now I’ll keep things simple: Wealthgiver will end in two weeks. Paid subscribers will read the end of the whole novel on August 14th. Free subscribers will have to wait until October. So come on:
After Wealthgiver, paid subscribers will get a little vacation treat: two short stories from my friend and colleague Emil Minchev. Get ready for some yummy Balkan horror.
Finally, Wealthgiver I: Darkness, is now available for pre-order. For those of you who prefer all the chapters together, or who want a physical book, click here.
***
And I read some things:
In Xanadu: A Quest* by William Dalrymple - Another excellent recommendation from  Jane Psmith. This is an interestingly recent travelogue, from a near three decades ago, when men were more daring and the net of managerial technocracy clung less tightly, and any feckless couple of British twenty-somethings could sneak, bluff, and bumble their way across a hostile frontier. It’s rather funny, more than a little terrifying, and very human. How to give people an excuse not to kill you through body language alone.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - I’d been putting of trying this book because I don’t like video games and I think LitRPGs are dumb. But, like Invading the System, Carl makes it clear that it’s bad when a vast, unstoppable system destroys your life and forces you to kill your neighbors to gain points. The demon was an especially nice touch.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman - Not as good as book one. It wasn’t so much the shift from pop-culture humor to fantasy adventure. Doomsday was just rushed. Fewer ideas, less heart. I home Dinniman hits his stride for book 3.
Captain Trader Helmsman Spy by Karl K. Gallagher - I was a bit leery of this book, because it switches from the story of Marcus, to that of his father Niko, whose ship has been dragooned into spy duty. I enjoyed the exploration of the Censorate, both physical and sociological, and the human side of the story was good enough to make me care. What I like most about this series is how personal it is. Characters don’t solve problems by submitting the proper form to the correct department before the deadline. They talk to each other man to man. Or sometimes fight to the death. It’s a trade-off.
Outlaw of the Outer Stars by John C. Wright - Another great beach read from Wright’s pulpy homage to Star Wars. In this, the 4th book,the overarching plot is well on its way, with Lyra, Athos, and Flint getting themselves in ever deeper trouble. Most of the book we spend with Athos, himself, who is in very deep, indeed. Frogs everywhere.
The Paladin by David Ignatius - It would have been a decent book if it hadn’t been so heavily censored. In this political thriller set in 2016. The main character refers to Trump as “the president,” for whom he voted, but now regrets it. There’s a plot about deepfake videos and Kompromat and spies betraying each other, but every now and then the author feels the need to assure us that he’s not a bad Republican.
Epic The Musical by Jorge Rivera-Herrans - I got this recommendation from Author Update, which I also recommend, as an example of the next wave of story fashion in the 2020s: ruthless and bloodthirsty. Umstattd says it’s a retelling of the Odyssea that doesn’t try to “fix” the story, but it does. It’s just that instead of shoehorning in a lesson about diversity, the message is “kill whoever might become a problem later.” Hoo boy.
Pandemonia: A Novel Plague Plague Novel by Johnson Riggs - Full Disclosure: the author is a friend. Fuller disclosure, I had to push at the beginning. I was glad I did, though. Everything straightens out once the poison is in the water supply and our hero has been sent on his epic quest. From then on it's just big, dumb epic fun. There's a wizard whose magic is based on bodily secretions ("My prostatism is nothing compared to your pro-statism!"), a ramen-loving pilot from "South Direa," and of course our hero, Pickle, who waterboards prisoners the fun way ("Hope you like shredding gnar, bro!"). Imagine if Xanth had less weird eighties sex stuff and Cracked dot com didn't signal its twenty-teens virtue. Pandemonia is a novel of the twenty-twenties: offensively virtuous, and with only normal sex stuff.
Macedonian baked giant beans from the Syntrofia restaurant in Psarades on Lake Prespa - From our third trip to Lake Prespa, an annual vacation that we undertake not only because this place makes the best baked beans from Tirana to Sofia. Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients: Fasolia gigantes or other giant white beans, dried Florina peppers, olive onion, oil, dried spearmint, paprika, salt.
Directions: Soak the beans overnight. Cut up the onion and peppers and fry them in “a lot” of olive oil. I think this is really a lot, like a third of the volume of the beans. Put the oil, onions, peppers, and oil into a clay pot or Dutch oven. Season with spearmint, paprika, and salt. Bake until the beans are soft.
That’s the recipe I got from the chef, but I think there’s another “ingredient” she didn’t mention. I tasted a fishy, meaty flavor, which I think comes from the fact that she soaked the beans in lake water. To mimic this, I’ll try soaking my beans in dashi. Not until the weather has cooled down, though.

See you next month
*All book links are Amazon affiliate links

June is always a slog. The kids are out of school, but I’m not. I have to find an air-conditioner to huddle under while I plan lessons. I teach, I write, I try to compose invoices, always besieged by my adorable daughters, who only want to be played with before we grow too old for these games, Dad. Next year we’ll be going out with boys and studying for our high school entrance exams, but this summer, this last golden solstice of childhood, while the swallows swoop low across the sweet stalks of new-mown hay, now, Father, we want to eat ice cream and go roller-skating.
So, there I was, wiping blood from Ellie’s knees and helping her back into her shoes. She wasn’t crying any more because her mouth was full of ice-cream. I let her finish it while I went to play basketball with Maggie and my nephew Stefan.
Maggie has the advantage of extensive, Go-Go-Gadget arms and legs, but Stefan has the advantage of knowing how to play basketball. He’s seven years old and shares a name with Steph Curry. He wishes I would call him “Stef” instead of “Stefi” or “Stefcho,” and retaliates by not calling me “Chicho Dan,” but “Uncle Cheech.”
Maggie felt better when she teamed up with Stefan against me and Ellie, and could learn the joy of beating someone taller than you. After they told me it was against the rules to stand one step back from the basket and bounce the ball again and again off the backboard until it finally goes through the basket, her team won.
By the time they beat me, the sun had set behind the school and the basketball court was in the cool shadow of the school. I’ve spent a lot of time in that park this year, working out in the bitterly early morning. In September, I’ll return at 6 goddamn 30 AM for more woozy chin-ups every weekday, but in June, school was over, and the cousins were visiting. We could just play.

​***

In other news, I have finished Wealthgiver. It is done and polished, ready for publication, and it’s going to work like this: on August 18th, paid subscribers and $3+ patrons will be able to read the last chapter (as well as all the previous ones). Free subscribers will have to wait until the 23rd of October. Then, in time for Halloween, we’ll celebrate the launch of Wealthgiver on Amazon. Tell me if you want to join the lunch party.
New stories are also incoming. Subscribe if you aren’t already for my next post, which will be about my plans for the year. If you join my discord server, you’ll be informed, and you’ll be able to talk about scifi and fantasy. Also, if you haven’t already, please fill out my reader survey to get a signed book plate shipped to you.
And I read some things this month.
Written in Fire* by Marcus Sakey - This is the last book in a series that, in spite of itself, was almost very good. At its heart, the Brilliance Saga is a story of inter-generational war, with Baby Boomers trying to brainwash and annihilate super-powered Millennials (Xers are just doing their best, man). In this last book, however, moralizing took over. Again and again, Sakey takes us to the edge, then says, “don’t worry, the disaster didn’t happen. Oh, you wanted to see it happen? You enjoy reading about this sort of thing, you sicko?” It’s insulting.
Giants of Pangea by John C. Wright - Sometimes I just gotta read another of John C. Wright’s pulpy candy bars. In this one (second of a series), Colonel Preston Lost, soldier, millionaire, ace pilot, and daring outdoorsman, continues to nearly get killed in all the ways a man can die on a far-future super-continent inhabited by post-human mutants, god-tech artifacts, and dinosaurs. Maybe the demon-worshiping giants and GM super-monkeys would leave him alone if only this guy would stop righting wrongs and defending the defenseless. He won't, though. This is how you write a hero.
Cræft by Alex Langlands - Unfortunately 
Jane Psmith’s review was much better than the book, itself. The author is an archaeologist who participated in a couple of “what life was like back then” documentaries, and has done many more re-enactments in his own time on his farm. His descriptions of hay-making, wall-building, and hedge-maintenance were the best part of the book, but I was disappointed by the lack of stories about working on the documentary set and in the dig-site transect. Maybe Langlands was afraid of being sued? Compared to The Craftsman and even The Wood for the Trees, Cræft is disappointingly thin. And I know this annoys no one but me, but the Old English letter æsċ did not represent a diphthong, Langlands. It’s /æ/ as in cat.

In the Palace of Shadow and Joy by D.J. Butler - The fun of speculative fiction is when you read it and think, “Ah yes! This is all in free-fall.” Or “Electricity hasn’t been invented yet, so…” or “he has to drink blood every day, which means…” But in Shadow and Joy, there are no implications in the premise to solidify into action. There isn’t much of a premise at all. Characters: check. Setting: okay. Plot: sort of. But this story never comes together. It felt like a novelized run-through of an RPG campaign.
Mr. Monday by Garth Nix - I read this in my twenties and now I’m reading it to my daughters, which is a bit spooky. “Did he know the Pandemic was going to happen?” Then there’s this point in the first chapter where the introduction to the Will of the Architect runs across an angel’s foot, and the angel realizes how very badly things have gone wrong. Yeah.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell - More fun than Tolstoy and more piercing than Twain, with the added trick of getting us to enjoy our ride with a fairly unlikable person. Scarlet is cunning, not intelligent, lustful, not loving, and so selfish she comes out the other side and saves the lives of everyone in her family. Like a lot of fallen woman stories, this one loses steam near the end when everything bad happens, but whatever. It’s a masterpiece.
One Blue’s Waters by Gene Wolf - Horn isn’t quite as much fun to follow as Silk, but, well, no spoilers. In this short review, the one thing I’ll call to attention in this generally excellent book is the way Wolfe dealt with the diary aspect of the story. Unlike Book of the New Sun, which was supposedly written by the narrator over the course of a few nights, The Book of the Short Sun was written as series of confessions interleaved with accounts of whatever the narrator happened to be doing in his old age the Raja of a small kingdom. Now I want the narrators of all the first-person books I read to take some time out between chapters to go fight a war.
Phrenotopia - Why do we have brains above our mouths and squid have brains around their mouths? On an alien planet, are brains (or mouths) likely to evolve at all? This channel narrates the evolutionary story of the main branches of our tree of life (as guessed-at based on DNA, fossils, and comparative anatomy) and discusses which outcomes were random chance and which weren’t. Pure gold!
Kiabugboy - I have never seen extinct marine invertebrates portrayed better. Look at this Mosura swim around. Look at that wobbly little guy!
Tomosteen - My kids introduced their cousins to this Japanese guy who makes lego food and pretends to eat it using stop-motion. Don’t eat legos, kids.
*Links to books are Amazon affiliate links

Prague is the most beautiful city I’ve walked through, and maybe the hardest in which to stay low-carb.
We were in Czechia to attend a wedding, walking down Národní Street on our way to meet the bride and groom, when my kids saw the dumpling shop. You could get dumplings with duck in them, mango, raspberries and cream cheese. Mystery Dumplings.
Each was the size of my fist, and we ate them on a little island in the Vltava while an amateur orchestra played under the bridge, sheltered from the drizzle. Maggie and Ellie didn’t finish their dumplings and gave the rest to me, and that was just five minutes before brunch in Café Slavia. They served Viennese coffee there that was three quarters whipped cream, millet porridge, and croque Madame.
“I’m trying to stay low-carb,” I said pathetically.
“I’m sorry we are…” the groom searched for the right word. “…an obstacle.”
This was the first time any of us had met in person. The bride had read Fellow Tetrapod and invited me to a Discord server. We’d talked once on Zoom. Going from there to Wedding Guest was a little odd for me, but she’d famously met the groom in the comments sections of a youtube video.
We talked about the upcoming wedding, of course, and the dramas of family, the Prague Zoo, and our countries’ respective science fiction communities.
“There’s a lot of Czech science fiction.”
“I know,” I said, thinking of RUR and War with the Newts. “Is there any new stuff?”
The groom escorted us to an enormous bookstore with a long row of new Czech fantastika three shelves high (names include: Blaho, Rachot, Huňová, Bakly, Kyša Šlechta, Neff, Hamouz, Heteša, Bureš, Fabian, Kotouč) as well as some of the most beautiful editions of Pratchett I’ve seen.
“We have a big convention in the spring,” he said. “I know some people there. You should come.” I agreed that I would, wondering why I hadn’t gone to any other local conventions, not even in Sofia.
“My problem is I think out loud,” I said. An excuse. “That makes it hard for me to have a conversation in Bulgarian. I’m trying to make contacts…” I trailed off, tangled up in the desire to not appear afraid.
“My dream — I’ve got to, uh, I have to really improve my Czech.” The bride looked down at her fingers, which she was bending back. “But, um, I want to translate these books into English.”
She spoke like someone who writes more than she talks. With hesitancy, fighting against perfectionism, maybe, but not against fear. This was someone who crossed an ocean to get married with far less assurance than I did. Later, in her wedding dress and dizzy with relief and Toscana Bianco after the ceremony, she would shake hands with me on an editing deal. That’s as much professional networking as I’ve done in six months.
Since the internet soured for me, I’d been trying to ignore it and build real-world connections. “Don’t work with anyone you can’t have coffee with,” I told myself once after a particularly nasty email. It’s an attitude that has handicapped me. But there we were, having coffee (and, later, white wine). There is much we can accomplish if we get out of our own way

I did some housekeeping this month. Do you know there’s an index of Wealthgiver where you can see all the chapters in order? Do you know about the poll I sent out to readers? With prizes? How about my Discord server? Join it and tell me what you think. There are prizes there, too.
I see other writers giving writing updates. Would you be interested in reading something like that? Here it is: in all the previous drafts, I told myself I’d definitely write that battle scene someday. In May, I finally had no choice but to do it. I had a flash while journaling of an oncoming shell embedded in smoke like a grape in a cloud of cotton. And I wrote that battle. Whew!
***
And I read some stuff:
1633* by David Weber and Eric Flint - I liked Island in the Sea of Time and this one is similar: an Appalachian mining town was zapped to 17th century Germany by Alien Space Bats for no discernible reason. There are some interesting characters and a lot of historical details, but this book suffers from the same problem as many alternate histories: the authors playing dollies with their favorite historical figures and political ideologies. Gustavus Adolphus was a good guy. He woulda voted Democrat.
Seize What’s Held Dear by Karl Gallagher - In the third book in the series, our heroes push back the oppressive Censorate and try to figure out what to do with the planet they’ve liberated. The pacing is a little off, but there’s a good balance of high-level military maneuvering and life on the personal level.
Cat Burglar of the Constellations by John C. Wright - This is the third book of the Starquest Series and it goes down like popcorn. Maybe buffalo wings. It’s tighter and more consistent than book two, and does a better job of weaving the big plot arcs around the central story (about a jewel heist). Risking a spoiler: a whole sequence of events I thought was a flashback to the distant past…wasn’t! Awesome.
I spent the month reading some enormously long novels and a draft of an unpublished work that I can’t yet discuss.
Apothecary Diaries - I watched season one with my wife and daughters. It’s fun as a series of little mysteries set in the harem of a fictional Chinese emperor. Yes, there’s lots of sexual innuendo and interpersonal drama. My 12-year-old daughter is very interested.
The Last Human by Trantor Publishing
 - I listened to the first several chapters on Youtube, which is not a platform that fits my life. Any chance of getting you to crosspost on Spotify, Trantor? But I kept at it because it’s a good reader and a good story. Far future, humans have become the galaxy’s endangered species, replaced by creatures mostly (but not all) descended from one or another genetic engineering project. Our narrator is an orphan raised by bugs who grows up to rule the galaxy. It’s what I wanted Sun Eater to be.

“Food for the Moon” by John Carter
 - Carter was inspired by Curtis Yarvin’s “Orbital Authority”: a polity that squats on the ultimate high ground of orbit, dropping tungsten rods on anyone who threatens their position. Carter points out that such a regime would be hellishly tyrannical, and speculates about the revolution that might topple it. Great idea-fodder.

“Bone” by Karl Gallagher
 - a short story about a miner on Europa who has a disagreement with his colleague.

“In praise of Japanese small” by Chris Arnade
 - a travel essay about the different things that the builders of Japanese and American cities care about. Arnade is the best travel writer I know of, and always both kind and insightful.

“Finland as Germania” by Razib Khan
 - in this podcast, Khan connects a pair of recent preprints about ancient DNA to an old question: where did the Germanic-speaking people come from? As always I appreciate his ability to distill complicated data, and clearly communicate the resulting best guess.

“Book Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” by Astral Codex Ten
 - Scott Alexander is at his best when his feet are on the ground and his tongue is in his cheek. This review was funny enough to make me read it aloud to my wife, and that’s the highest praise I can give. To Scott, if you’re reading this, it does get easier.

“REVIEW: Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1” by Jane Psmith
 - With her usual incisive humor, Psmith lays out the problems of modern language learning, a subject very close to my heart. I agree with her. Although it is better to be fluent and inaccurate than the reverse, if you want to understand and be understood, you have to buckle down and memorize some conjugation tables.


See you next month
*All book links are Amazon Affiliate links

Tuk ne se vzema
A se ostava
“Come on, kids!”
The alpine meadow was so close to the border that our phones got welcome messages from the Republic of North Macedonia. Grass spread out before us, speckled with violets and only slightly soggy, to a hill and a little white church.
Pavlina wanted to walk up there, and I was eager to walk off some of the Easter cake I’d eaten, but Maggie and Ellie had found a stick. Their desires were, in decreasing order: twirl the stick, take the stick from the other one, complain about the stick being taken, complain about the stick not be shared, scream, roll around on the wet grass, give up the stick, share the stick, find anything else to play with, walk up the hill.
So, we left them. Pavlina and I hiked until our children were tiny, brightly colored dots, rolling around in a field of green, almost inaudible.
Imagine a long box, covered in cement and peeling whitewash, pierced by a few tiny windows. The roof line was slightly lopsided, and there was no steeple, just a collapsing, gazebo-like enclosure that might have once held a bell. The church was completely empty, but it was not abandoned. Keys hung on a nail hammered into the door frame, along with a note: Here nothing is taken, only left.
It meant that you don’t go to church go get something from God, but to leave something for Him. Also don’t steal the candles.
“The Macedonian style,” said Pavlina. “We’ve seen churches like this in Kavala and Prespa.”
The door was not in the church’s southern face, leading directly into the nave. To the right is the templon, decorated with icons. The second to the left is the patron of this church, I think Saint George. Look up and see Christ on the cross, with a snake under His feet and Adam’s skull under the snake. Further up, and Christ Pantocrator sits at the center of the ceiling, surrounding by angels.
The builders of this church had installed columns to hold that ceiling up with a degree of craftsmanship that I am in no position to criticize. I will say that the columns had been sponged with white and gray paint and had little sculpted lumps decorating their capitals. They meandered quite a bit on their journey from the floor to the ceiling, but they got there.
On the walk up, I’d been chattering something I’d read online, which Pavlina says she finds soothing. On the way back, though, I was quieter. We commented to each other on the wildflowers and mountains visible to the north and east. When our children were our age, what would exasperate them about our generation?
When we found them, Maggie and Ellie were still arguing about the stick.

In other news, I broke through a wall with Wealthgiver, which was a big battle scene with no predecessors from previous drafts as from a few notes on the order of “that sure was a cool scene we just witnessed.” Now, the battle scene is done, and in fact higher-tier patrons can read it here.
That chapter will become available to everyone in a couple of months, which might be news to you. Yes, readers, every chapter of Wealthgiver becomes free to the public after 10 weeks. The whole first third of the book is free right now. You can read it on Substack, Patreon, or Royal Road.
If you go to Patreon, this is the page to use. The platform should automatically generate an index, but it keeps scrambling the order and dropping chapters. Use the index that I made.
Finally, I had a bit of fun in the First Knife* universe, creating a post-apocalyptic version of English called Vekhiz.

And I read some books last month.
The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe*
This book is as interesting and flawed in the same way as American nations. Where Woodard says “Yankees be like this,” Howe says “Boomer be like that.” The best parts of this book are when it’s most like a novel, with characters struggling in and remaking a world, only to be betrayed by the children they bring up in that world. I keep thinking about it, casting people I know and read about into the mold of Hero, Artist, and so on, and that’s fun. As entertaining as it is to slice people up in different ways, though, I’m not sure how quickly this lens stops illuminating and starts blinding.
Crashing the System by Inadvisably Compelled
The author sent me a copy and asked for a review, but I’d actually already pre-ordered my own. I’m glad I did, because Inadvisably Compelled usually delivers on his promises. In this case, that means the utter destruction of the magical, galaxy-spanning System. The way he takes it out is good, although I wish he’d dug in more. There are a couple of places (the bad guys achieving godhood, the side-kick’s bringing people into their conspiracy) where success came too easily. I did appreciate it, though, when those self-satisfied bumblers vanished up their own asses.
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
I wouldn’t excommunicate Tolstoy for writing this book, but I don’t want to read it again. It’s a fine story all the way up to the end, at which point it collapses into a treatise on a particular form of 19th-century land taxation, called Georgism. There’s a reason Tolstoy is remembered as a genius novelist and not a genius economics communicator. What about the characters, Lev?
Frieren
I watched this anime with my wife and daughters because it’s an interesting meditation on time and mortality. There are times, too, where the animators deciding to really put their hearts and souls into showing a character slightly change the angle of her chin. Nice. But for the love of conflict, nobody has an emotional range beyond somewhat satisfied or slightly piqued. They’ll stand in front of each other and monotone about how much they want to kill each other for half an hour. Somebody have an emotional breakdown!
Road Belong Cargo (a review) by Jane Psmith
A fine companion to Germs, Guns, and Steel. So good a companion, in fact, that you don’t need to bother with Jared Diamond. Just read about what was really going on with Yali and the Cargo Cults, which is a specific kind of civilization crab-bucket that can keep you down for forty thousand years.

See you next month
*Links to books are all Amazon affiliate links

So there I was, disapproving of a student. We were in the "big classroom," where light and noise rushed past the potted plants and through the frosted glass partition behind us. I usually avoid this room because it makes me feel I'm conducting class under a waterfall, but my problem wasn't feng shui.

"What happened to the script you were working on?"

I've learned to take most students as they come, but this one presented an unfamiliar challenge. She wanted help writing fiction, which is closer to my heart than English grammar and vocabulary. And, just a few years older than my daughter, she seemed to prefigure the dread shadow of the teenager. I'll call her Daniela.

Daniela creates short animations about characters from a particular horror movie. All of them were molested as children and a whole lot of them are gay. She should stand up straighter and not spend so much time on her phone. And she doesn't do her homework. I say, "Read these three pages of Save the Cat" or "Come to me next week with some ideas about how the protagonist could be responsible for this story's resolution," and I get nothing.

This week, I'd planned to just read through her current project, but again, Daniela had dropped it.

"Why?" I asked, thinking can't you follow through with anything? And do I have to invent another lesson on the fly again? "Why didn't your last project work?"

It was supposed to be a list of different kinds of love for a video on Valentine's Day. "I got eros and agape,” she said, “but for some reason, I got stuck on storge."

"What's storge?"

"It's Greek. Like, 'Found Family.'"
​
Ugh. Found Family. What I’d like to see is more fiction advising audiences to fix their real families instead of pretending you can trade them in for better models. I didn't say any of that.

"Have you every experienced that kind of relationship?" I asked.

"Uh, no."

"Do you know anyone who has?" I thought I was being gentle and Socratic. "Maybe that's why you're stuck. Because you know Found Family isn't real."

"Well, it's a trope.”

"Trope is one word for it, but another is cliché."

I might as well have said all that crotchety judgement after all. Daniela folded her arms and turned her face away in a pose of defense and denial.

Rather than following up with a lecture about writing from experience, or just sitting there so we could fume at each other, I asked Daniela about the worldbuilding of her stories. She was happy to talk, and make up new lore as she talked, but I was both worried and annoyed. Is this what I had to look forward to with my daughters? This sullen incuriosity? This indulgent wallowing in victimhood? Are my daughters going to stay up all night watching disturbing videos and then fail to make their own?

All of which was a defensive shell around my real fear, which was I was wasting Daniela’s time. It seemed as if she would get just as much good out of brainstorming with her friends, or bouncing ideas off a pet rock. I even asked her if my criticism and scrutiny was killing her ideas. "No," she said, "I always give up on most of my projects."

Fine, but I still wasn't happy with how I was conducting these classes. I'd never taught creative writing before, and I could tell I was spending a lot of mental energy getting in my own way. I asked around for advice, and as always, Paul Venet hit me with the good, hard stuff: "when I taught drawing, I didn't get up in front of someone and teach from a position of authority."

I didn't like the scorn I heard in his voice. I like the idea of authority; I think it would be nice to have some, some day. Did I present my profile to Paul and fold my arms? Maybe so, because he said, "Of course, when I was in front of a big lecture hall, that was a different thing. If you've got fifty students, you stand in front of them and tell them what you gotta tell them. But with one student or a small group, you don't." He told me to speak from experience, and to be patient.

Daniela's next class came around, and here she was with yet another new project. I listened and took notes on her characters' magic powers and their phobias. Once she'd wound down, I said, "Working on lore is a lot of fun. It's like candy for me. The problem is I can have too much candy. I just go around and around inventing lore without actually telling a story." You, gentle readers, may have noticed.

"Yeah," she said. "I do."

As homework, I gave Daniela the assignment of keeping a log of her writing. Where she writes and when and what. She didn't do it, but she scribbled something in her notebook five minutes before class, which we used as the start of a conversation about writing habits and patterns. The week after that, she brought in a script we could read together.

It's hard to get out of your own way. You want to be listened to, followed, and liked. You want, in fact, people to pay for your wisdom. The problem is that you need to have some wisdom first. I’m working on it.

I did some brainstorming this month about how English spelling might disconnect further from phonetics and evolve into a logographic script.

And I wrote up the third poem in Ancient Thracian from my novel Wealthgiver: The Nikolaic Theophany. My favorite line: Dégmōn iadí. Mē / Ápseran pouteté. “The Host will ride upon the ground. / Do not complain. And turn around.”

And I read some things

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Funnier than Anna Karenina, more insightful than Vanity Fair. I wish it had focused more tightly on Katherine and Dorothy, whose relationship is the sweet counterpoint to the bitter ones with foolish husbands and untrustworthy peers. The conversation between Dorothy and her befuddled old husband is tragically perfect. I wish there was a sharper climax, though, and the superior husband isn't drawn with nearly the detail as the bad one. I definitely need to read it again.

Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo
Fun and un-serious events occur after portals open up to a whole bunch of alien planets. There were some big ideas – one right at the end and seemingly attached to nothing. I guess, to the sequel? I wish Ringo had treated this book as a first draft and written another that was better thought out. General Pta-pta-pta needed a lot more screen time.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
As I was reading this to my kids, I kept thinking of Hayao Miyazaki. There's a scene where little princes Sophie and her foolish nurse are fleeing home as dusk falls and the goblins emerge. I could see Miyazaki’s blooby wobbly-outlined style. I really wonder if he based Sheeta and Pazu on Sophie and Curdy.

The Miranda Consipracy by James L. Cambias
Cambias used to be one of the authors whose books I bought on sight. I still think about The Initiate and its meditation on moral desserts. The Godel Operation wasn’t as thoughtful, but it still had something to say the godlike-AI conversation and how not to be an egotist. The sequel, thought, had a hollow space inside it where there should have been an answer to the question, “what’s the point if your civilization is a sideshow to posthuman AIs?” In this, the third book, that hollow has grown enormous. There’s some action, some sex, some death, and none of it matters. I’ll pass on the next book.

On Christian Doctrine by Augustine of Hippo
On this, my first reading, I spent most of my time appreciating what a good language teacher Saint Augustine was. I’m going to use his “the snail has no voice” example in a class one of these days. And I’ll read it again.
​
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
I enjoyed this book until the narrator went to jail and mended her ways. I put it down at that point, but after a few months I picked it back up and finished it. I would have liked a sharper edge to this story. A wrong harder to forgive or atone for. But I do appreciate the highlight of a bad mental habit: seeing your money as a pile of treasure that you can only deplete.

See you next month

I stepped out from my student’s office onto Patriarch Evtimi, where the sky was a cold, bright blue and pigeons swept up the faces of the buildings.
I’d been up for ten hours and I didn’t feel like swimming. I had to buy coffee, and I didn’t want to do that, either. I wanted to just turn left and go down the stairs into the subway. I’d read my phone on the train and go home and have a snack. I wanted someone else to buy coffee and swim for me.
But, and I know this sounds silly, I remembered a post I’d read on Substack: “Work out every day so that you can be the sort of person who works out every day.” As I walked between the cliffs of Shesti Septemvri, I repeated that to myself out loud. I hope other people thought I was on my bluetooth.
I found the coffee shop, where the bags were very small, but the grinding machine was large and impressive. The barista had an elegant little broom he used to sweep up every spilled miligram of precious grounds. That would do me for the next five days, maybe.
After that it was just one foot in front of the other all the way to the pool. Get naked, shower, swim until done, but here’s what’s strange: I wasn’t tired or hungry when I finally got home. I finished my desk work, it was now my twelfth hour awake, and I was neither stumbling nor moaning.
I was a zombie two days later, though. Thursday seemed like it lasted a week. Thank God my kids are on the spring schedule now and I don’t have to wake up every day at 6.
In other news, Upstream Reviews posted my review of the anti-litRPG Invading the System .
Another review: I wrote this one for C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows, soon to be published: A Portrait of the Future
…and that started a conversation that resulted in The Future of Humanity, a little essay I wrote thinking about future of human evolution.
I posted The Ritual of Undescent, my second poem in Ancient Thracian and English, from chapter 19 of Wealthgiver.
Finally, thank you to my new $10 Patron, Anthony. He and my other patrons at that tier and above can read up to chapter 28 of Wealthgiver. Every Thursday I’ll post whatever chapters I’ve finished that week, and patrons can join me right at the coal-face.
And I read some things:
Running Lean by Ash Maurya
I’ll have to read this book again. The first revolutionary thing it says is that in the same way businesses once switched from valuing products to valuing intellectual property, the era of IP is in turn giving way to the era of the business model. Can your process produce something that attracts customers? I’m working on it.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I first tried and failed to read Dostoyevski’s The Devils. Now that I’ve read Brothers Karamazov, I have a better idea of what he was driving at. These people are vicious, mean-spirited, self-defeating fools. Yes, and so are you, reader. Now watch: this is how you practice compassion.
The Pilgrim of Hate by Ellis Peters
Another book I first listened to 30 years ago. Ellis Peters has aged less well for me than John Mortimer - I guess because Brother Cadfel isn’t as funny as Rumpole. And although there were some action scenes, Peters’s story is so very girly. One man has a gleaming curtain of raven hair.
DanDaDan by Yukinobu Tatsu (Science Saru Studio)
One Thursday night in January, this anime absolutely wrecked me. I’ll give you the premise: teenage girl (who isn’t as much of a delinquent as she likes to pretend) gets into an argument with boy (who is exactly as much of a dweeb as he appears). He’s obsessed with UFOs, she’s embarrassed by her grandma the ghost-wrangler. After arguing about whether UFOs/ghosts are real, they challenge each-other to spend the night in a haunted service tunnel (him) and an abandoned hospital (her), where they are, respectively, possessed and abducted. That’s the first 15 minutes. You won’t get to the part that made me cry until episode 8.
And I read a draft of a book for a friend, but I can’t say more until it comes out. It was good, though ;)
See you next month.

My garden gate has a latch that hasn’t worked in at least sixteen years. To keep it closed, somebody welded a pair of hex-nuts to the gate and wound a thick wire of appropriate length around the frame. When you exit the gate, you can, if you turn around and use both hands, hook the wire through the hole in the outermost nut and close the gate.
It was a Sunday afternoon, chilly and bright gray. I closed the gate behind me and turned from it to stride off in the direction of dinner with friends. I was thinking, “Finally. I broke the dragon’s back.”
At 9 AM on Saturday, I had called Pavlina, away on a team-building, and told her I planned to relax and “play with Thracian.” I shut my laptop on Sunday, at 1 AM.
I know more or less what I was trying to do. There are two fairly good examples of the past tense used in inscriptions on Thracian grave markers: igekoa and gegeoeka. It’s plausible that they are both past tenses of “I live,” related to English “quick.” The i- at the beginning of igekoa looks like the augment that prefixes Ancient Greek and Sanskrit past tense verbs (English “I lived”). These languages also reduplicate the first syllable of a verb to mark the perfect aspect (English “I have lived”). The -k suffix might also indicate the perfect, as in Greek. Was it the same in Thracian? In pursuit of this question, I burned my entire Saturday.
There is nothing that it’s like to be caught up in an obsession. It’s a flow-state, a fugue, when awareness, reflection, and memory are swallowed up by the task. 1st person active present athematic. 1st person active present imperfective. 1st person active present thematic. I ground down my list of Proto-Indo-European verb suffixes, walking each through the sound-changes I’d derived, comparing each to Ancient Greek, Phrygian, and proto-Albanian. Every mistake or new interpretation would pull me back up to the top of the list to start the grind again.
Did igekoa mean “I had been living” and gegeyoeka “I had lived”? The truth is that there isn’t enough material to answer questions like that. If Thracian were just a little better-preserved, I’ve be able to definitively answer questions about its grammar. If worse, I could just invent whatever I wanted without fear of contradiction. But the language is just the right combination of known and unknown to draw me on. Endlessly, I now see.
That’s why I smiled on Sunday. Before, for years, there had always been family or work to force me out of my fugue. I’d think, during a class or a meal or a trip to the beach, that if only I had enough uninterrupted time, I’d be able to determine for certain how an ancient people spoke. When I finally got that time and sacrificed it, the answer I got was “You won’t.”
On Sunday, I slept in, had my breakfast, called my family and went back to my book. When people read Wealthgiver, they’ll like it for its characters, their relationships, and the atmosphere of exotic danger that surrounds them. Only once they’re drawn in will they bother to read the made-up words in italics, and very, very few will ever examine the suffixes. I want those who do to find something, but “world-building” is fundamentally decorative. These active-indicative-past-perfect flourishes might amuse or intrigue, but they will never warm a heart or nourish a soul. For that, I need to live a life.
With this in mind, I finished the translation I hadn’t even started on Saturday. It was the last one I’ll need to make, since the rest of the book is in English. With the dragon’s back broken, I went downstairs and took a hot bath. I soaked and read about determinism until it was time to get ready for dinner. I got dressed, went out to see my friends, and closed the gate behind me. Those eight seconds of messing with the hook gave me more to write about than fourteen hours of obsession.

Now, in December, it is the month of sales. My alternate history Tesla-punk romance The World’s Other Side is now on Kindle Unlimited, so you can read it for free if you’re a member. And even if not, it’s not that expensive and it has hover-cars. Treat yourself.
While you’re at it, take advantage of my sales on Patreon and Substack, where for less than $3 a month, you can join the readers of Wealthgiver and tell me whether I got the imaginary verbs right.
***
And I read some things in November:
Undermining the System by Inadvisably Compelled
The previous book in the series ends with Cato freeing one planet from the oppressive artificiality of the System. Now he has to do the same thing on as many planets as possible simultaneously, facing resistance from enemies who take him seriously. The author digs deeper into why someone might support the System, although some of the arguments are better than others.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
I listened to this audiobook on my morning runs, and it make pre-dawn exercise a pleasure. I was reminded of Tom Sawyer, except it’s set in turn-of-the-century India with international espionage as the plot. Otherwise, there similar humor and compassion, with brightly-colored impressions of broad, deep characters. “She chuckled like a parrot over the sugar-lump.”
What Christians Believe by C.S. Lewis
Lewis takes you from atheism to "a child saying a child's prayer," then to the problem of evil and the nature of Christ. I appreciate his religion as a way for people who are already adults to continue to grow up. I'll have to read it again.
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Like Innocents Abroad, this is a collection of short essays, descriptions, and reminiscences that the famous author wrote as a famous author. Some of it seems to have been written to give his readers something to do, but there are a few spots of real inspiration. The story of Twain’s past as the pilot of a paddle boat are the perfect balance of fact and feeling.
Biomedical Self-Engineering by Jon Svenson
When Carl, a divorced night watchman in his 70s, is bitten by an alien, he becomes an animorph. He absorbs DNA from every animal he touches and can use those genes to alter his body. So, after he clears out his tumors and shrinks his prostate, Carl touches a dog so he can sniff out buried gold, which he uses to invest in failing business. It’s…not what I would do if I had DNA powers, but after a while I really wanted to know if Carl would be able to turn that restaurant around! Like most LitRPGs, this book is idle wish-fulfillment, but it’s saved from being boring by an unusual protagonist with interesting things to do.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
This is the most distance I’ve seen between a book’s reputation and its content. At best, people talk about Atlas Shrugged like it’s a shoddy story straining under its philosophical burdens, but when I read it, I saw a Russian science fiction novel.
In one scene, a group of government functionaries on a train need to be in California by midnight. Because most of the rail line’s employees were hired for political reasons, all rail lines but one are closed and there is no functioning diesel locomotive. The management, also political, is less concerned about fixing these problems than passing the blame, so the decision of what to do is finally made by a mid-level manager. This manager had a brother who killed himself after his workplace was nationalized by the People, and the news of this suicide was suppressed so as not to damage the People’s morale. Now, the manager orders that the a coal-burning locomotive should pull the train through a tunnel in the Rocky Mountains, a solution that will asphyxiate all its passengers but get their corpses to San Jose on time. “And?” the manager thinks to himself, “who is on that train? I bet it was People.”
I’m going to have to write a longer review of this book.


See you next month.

So there I was, teeth gritted, knuckles white on the wheel, grinding down Vasil Kanchev on a flat tire at eight kilometers per hour. The garage was close. I could see it. I could leap the traffic meridian and be there in less than a minute. To do that, though, I would have to abandon Pavlina’s Nissan Leaf, the car I had lamed. On I ground, because I had promised myself I would and because there is no way to make a goddam left turn on Angel Kanchev.
It was my lack of experience and trusting nature that had put me in these straights. When the “Tire Pressure Low” indicator came on on Pavlina’s dashboard, I plugged a gas-station air pump into one tire after another and crouched there while it hissed, as if I knew what I was doing. The indicator stayed on.
During my next attempt, I experimented with waiting longer. I even considered the numbers displayed on the air pump’s gauge. 28. Remarkable. Would that be in PSI? Bars? The guide on the inside of the frame of the Leaf’s driver’s side door said 36PSI/2.5BAR, so perhaps I should aim for number 36. It sure was taking a long time to pump the tire up to that level.
A panicked gas station attendant stopped me before I’d gotten must past 32. Staying I’d over-inflated the tire, he depressed the head of the valve with the metal tip of the air pump. I give reader the licence to judge who was the greater fool in this situation. And now that you’ve had a moment to consider, it won’t surprise you to learn that by next morning, the tire was flat.
When Pavlina pulled out of our driveway on her way to work, the front tire on the passenger side of the Leaf made a noise like a wet tarpaulin dragged across gravel. She turned right back around and stowed the car, which she’d deal with later.
By God, I vowed, she would not.
“I am a good husband,” I said as I forced the car another meter down Angel Kanchev. “This is the highlight of my day!”
To my left, the barrier rail crawled by. To my right: crying toddlers in the arms of their parents, on the way to school. I fought the shimmy in the wheel, my ears filled with the despairing flap of flaccid rubber. I imagined the state of the rim as the traffic cavorted around me, honking. Finally, I reached the end of the street, which was an 18-way double intersection.
Like a pilot in a squall, I set my jaw and tightened my grip. There was no light to aid me and the traffic was going out. My only chance was a U-turn. So I hove to, and rounded the meridian.
The Nissan Leaf gradually flopped back up Vasil Kanchev, to where a provident parking space waited in front of the garage. The physical trial was finished, but now began the economic and psychological examinations. I only had enough money for one new (used) tire, and the mechanic didn’t want to make only one replacement.
“Can you walk with only one shoe?” he asked.
While I meditated upon this koan, he embarked on his own exploration of patience and compassion, working down a list of suggestions from replacing all four tires to just the front two to just the flat one, in exchange for my promise to have both front tires replaced as soon as possible.
In the time it took me to walk to the ATM and back, the job was done. That evening, Pavlina said, “Oh, good. I don’t have to do it,” and I felt like an admiral.

In October I began serializing Wealthgiver. As of the time of this writing, we’re up to five chapters, with another twelve edited and ready, a buffer that stretches to late January. Two thousand words a week seems like a pace I can keep to. Knock on wood, readers should be able to get a new chapter every week until the book ends in June.
Paying readers. The first seven chapters will be available to the public, but in two weeks (the 21st of November), I’ll erect my pay-wall. My goal until then is to attract as many free subscribers as possible. Please help me with that; subscribe on Substack or Patreon. If you enjoy Wealthgiver, please recommend it. You can even buy a gift subscription for a friend.
In other news, Upstream Reviews released my expanded review of Space Pirates of Andromeda, which you can read here. I’m rather proud of it, and of course I had a blast reading the book itself. I do wish someone would comment, though. I want to know what other people think. Go read the review, read the book, and tell me what you think.

And I read some books I read this month. (note: the links are Amazon affiliate links)
Invading the System by Inadvisably Compelled
I have a weakness for Progression Fantasy, where the protagonist gains skills and levels up like a video game character. Take the gamification too far, though, and you have a LitRPG. Compelled gets that.
In this book, post-singularity Earth was invaded by the System and turned into a deadly game of wizards killing monsters (and civilians and each other) in return for power. Survivors in space used biotechnology to fight back, and managed to drive the perverse incentive structure off Earth. But just as the last portal to the other System worlds was closing, one post-human super-soldier slips through. He calls himself Cato, and it is his mission to pursue the System to its source and annihilate it. A fun, fun book.
A Man at Arms by Steven Pressfield
I was greatly inspired and instructed by Pressfield’s War of Art. I got some good use out of The Story Grid, too, but here we see Pressfield’s system fail to deliver transcendence. In a story about a Jewish boy and a dishonored Greek mercenary dodge a cruel Roman legionary to help a girl deliver Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, I didn’t feel much. The story painted one numbered step after the next and rushed me into the end.
There were a few moments of grace, though. The novel’s worth reading for the line “I am all stings.”
Rich Man’s Sky by Will McCarthy
I usually give up on bad books quickly and don’t bother to write reviews of them. This book, however, wasted enough of my time that I feel it my duty to warn you off. It was very disappointing.
The premise is excellent, but I suspect McCarthy tried to stretch the first act of his story into the first novel of a trilogy. We end up with a book that is mostly filler: digressions, characters who have nothing to add, meaningless sex, and a protagonist who keeps not getting it. Because the author doesn’t allow her to see what’s in front of her face, she comes off as clueless and bitchy. Corcoran’s Aristillus series is much better, and so is McCarthy’s earlier work.
Storm Between the Stars by Karl K. Gallagher
I’m getting used to Gallagher’s style, which relies on the reader to figure out the characters’ feelings from their words and deeds. At first, it feels like you’re reading an after action report, but the effort it takes to notice them makes the emotions more serious. My heart really did speed up as I watched the oppressive Censoriate bear down on our plucky space-traders. Will they make it out with lives and freedom intact?

See you next month.

"Maybe you don't recognize me," he said. "I'm Kaloyan's dad.* I'm on a diet and exercise regime and I've lost 20kg. You've lost weight too!"
I had approached Ellie's birthday party with calm determination. She wanted to celebrate in Sofia with her friends in a "children's center," which meant Pavlina and I would have to stay there the whole time, talking to the other parents.
This wasn't my first rodeo. I pre-ate. I made myself coffee at home. I went into the parents' area and turned down the music and the space heater. Now in a bearable environment, sated on protein and coffee with milk, I could speak from a position of strength about diet and excerisze. I was profoundly grateful to be given this topic of conversation.
It was true that I didn't recognize Kaloyan's dad. The embarrassing fact is I have a habit of zoning out during Bulgarian conversations. Although I could focus on remembering people's names and faces, or even deciphering what they're saying, I often prefer to save that energy for inventing excuses for my incivility.
But that's a hard way to live. I don't want to be the guy who spends the party squinting at his phone. I want to be able to talk to my neighbors, other parents at my kids' school, other writers in Sofia.
Now comes my second admission: it's that last necessity that pushed me over the edge. I need to be able to participate in the writing scene in Sofia. In order to do that, I need to be able to sit at a table and talk with Bulgarians.
All right, then! Challenge accepted. I couldn't motivate myself with appeals to courtesy, neighborliness, or filial duty, but professional development I can do. 
I talked with Petar about his busy Saturday schedule, and the reconstruction at TSUM with another dad whose name I can't remember. Kaloyan's dad wanted me and Ellie to go "winter-skating" with him. I don't remember how we got onto the subject of Dimitar's escape from Russia.
I knew that one of Ellie's friends was from Russia, but I assumed his parents had just dropped him off and left. The bearded man at the other end of the table had spent most of our conversation squinting at his phone, but when he spoke, it seemed to me that his Bulgarian was perfect. He even had the Sofia accent where unstressed /o/ becomes /u/. It was only after Kaloyan's dad complimented Dimitar on his Bulgarian that I focused and heard his /je/ rather than /e/. But even then I might have just assumed he was from Pleven.
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It turned out that Dimitar's dad had been Bulgarian, so he'd only had to recover his childhood language after moving here last year. His own son, though, had only come to this country with two words of the language.
"That teacher is good," said Pavlina. "Ellie's older sister's teacher recommended her to us because she knows what to do with bilingual children."
"We couldn't believe it when we came here," Dimitar said. "We step out of the plane and there's a public Russian school? It's very good for us, of course, but how can you use tax money to teach kids Russian? Why not German or French?"
There are public German and French elementary schools in Sofia, too, but we all knew that the real question was "why learn Russian at all?"
"Pavlina heard some high school students ask that question," I said. "Do you remember? Last year."
She took the cue. "At the graduation ceremony," she said. "I was backstage with Ellie and I overheard some seniors talking. One of them asked, 'what will we do with Russian after we graduate? We can't go back to Russia. We can't work for a Russian company.' But another one said, 'we know a whole language. We can find something to do with it. We don't know what will happen in the next twenty years.' During the ceremony, one of those boys recited 'Monument' by Pushkin,' and it was excellent."
Dimitar was pessimistic about the next twenty years. "Russia had democracy for one month in 1917 and one year in the 1990s. Otherwise it was Fascist, then Communist, and now it's Fascist again. Next, you know, the thing in a clock," he made pendulum motions, "will swing the other way and Russia will be Communist again."
I understood that Dimitar had checked out of Russia. He wanted to think about the future of his family in Europe. I was just glad for him that they'd gotten out.
The conversation continued, but after a while I realized I hadn't understood most of what was being said. I'd been working by Bulgarian social muscles for an hour and a half and the carbs in that piece of cake weren't doing my brain any favors.
I excused myself and went for a walk until the party was over. When we got home, I lay on my bed, exhausted, until it was time to go to sleep.
We got to do what we got to do. More than that, we got to be able to do what we got to do. That means exercise. Work the muscles, develop the skills, so that when the challenge comes, you can meet it. Nobody know what will happen in the next twenty years.

As I’m sure all of you know, I have begun serializing Wealthgiver both on Patreon and Substack. That crunchy cover art is the work of Artyom Trakhanov, who is always a pleasure to work with, and whose skills speak for themselves. I literally only just now noticed the skulls on the ground under Andrei's feet. Cheers, bate.
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And I read some books this month.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

I picked up Chesterton because he was an influence on C.S. Lewis, but I have to say I got more out of Lewis. Chesterton gets preoccupied with his own choice of words, so doesn't always get to where he's going. That's fine for the autobiographical aspect of this book, but as far as theology goes, I don't think he convinced me of anything I didn't already believe - and I want to believe. Still, this book was a comfort.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

I liked it. My wife really liked it.
It's a pared-down book, which I appreciate. The Basic mental tools - definite optimism, the important truth question, zero to one - are useful. I'll have to come back to this book.

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
I tried to read this once, stopped, and came back to it as an audiobook. I wasn't put off because of the slow start - in fact my favorite part was the detailed description of outfitting an expedition through the Kalahari desert. But the lost tribe they found was disappointing. I would have been more interested in learning about the real 19th century Zulus.
Space Pirates of Andromeda by John C. Wright
It's not often you get to read a real homage, in which the writer loves the source material and extends it. Here, John C. Wright asks "what if the Star Wars sequels were good?" Space Pirates of Andromeda gives us a very satisfying answer.
Wright plays his usual trick of packing an epic trilogy's worth of detail into the backstory, of which he then reveals very little. There's a robot in a tophat and a winged pirate queen, but you don't get to hang out with them. You're mostly on a pirate ship. To be fair Wright dumps so much punishment on his protagonist that you spend most of your mental energy wondering how the boy's gonna make it out of this one.
I also have to admit I loved the little asides about why robots are all built with hands and why supertech guns shoot balls of plasma rather than bullets. Those are some sweet justifications.

Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen
Theft of Fire is a brutally honest blast, pulling us through the development of a relationship between people who cannot, but must, trust each other. I wasn't satisfied with the ending, and I don't think the science fiction goes far enough to distinguish itself from Firefly and The Expanse, but the characters really work. The sex and violence, as intense as they are, work too.

What Is Art? by Lev Tolstoy

It would be better if Tolstoy had spent more time describing what art is rather than what it isn't. There's quite a lot of complaining. But Tolstoy does answer his own question: art is the infection of a one person with the experience of what it is like to be another. I don't have a better suggestion.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict
The best anthropology is the kind that tests hypotheses. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict's posits that the apparent contradictions in WWII Japanese society were caused by a basic desire to be respected, and what is worthy of respect is to act wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. It's a good explanatory model, and more importantly it produces prescriptions that seem to have worked. Benedict unapologeticaly offers advice to Douglas MacArthur's SCAP government on how to best govern Japan according to American interests. It seems to have worked.


See you next month
*None of these names are real

We rounded the corner of the university and walked up the street, the two of us. I stooped and leaned sideways, eyes scanning the concrete as I thanked Professor Yanakieva for agreeing to meet with me.
"It's no trouble," she said. "I'm retired. I just don't know how I can help you."
We hadn't reached the cafe yet, but I took the opening. "Did Thracian have cases?" I asked.
The Thracians were a Classical Age people who lived north of the Greeks. Unlike the Greeks, however, they didn't write much down. Aside from four inscriptions, a handful of words recorded in Greek sources, and some names of people and places, there is no surviving documentation of the Thracian language.
There are coins, Professor Yanakieva said, that show the name of the Thracian king Seuthes with the spelling "Seuthou" - the Greek genitive case - but others that show "Seutha." Is that the Thracian genitive? We crossed the street and walked into the small park behind the national library, past the lawn-bowling pitches and into the shade of a circle of large walnut trees, where a cafe surrounds a mostly dry pond. We ordered a pair of espressos.
"Okay," I asked. "What about aspiration?"
"We just don't know," she said. "Sometimes a Thracian name will be recorded with a delta and sometimes with a tau or even a theta. Maybe Thracian plosives had different qualities from Greek. This is all in my paper."
It was. I'd read all her papers and input their data into my succession of huge spreadsheets of Thracian sound shifts.
"What exactly do you want to do with Thracian?" she asked. "You said you were writing a novel?"
I told her I did. When I began Wealthgiver, I had thought it would be a straightforward task to track the sound changes between known Thracian words and their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. Six years later, I have learned a great deal about classical Greek, Phrygian, Proto-Albananian, and Indo-European linguistics. I'm on my third version of the spreadsheet.
"And you want to include whole sentences in Thracian?"
I intend to include prophetic poetry in Thracian. I didn't say that, but Professor Yanakieva was still cautious. "Have you heard of the Bessian Bible?"
"Oh that," I said.
What happened is someone got a hold of a Coptic bible, noticed the Greek loan-words in it, and pretended that everything else was a descendant of Thracian.1
"I've read many conspiracy theories," I said, much to her relief. "My project is a speculative reconstruction, like paleontologists make of dinosaurs."
"But paleontologists have a whole skeleton!"
I thought I heard some envy in the thracologist's voice, and remembered my friend Vladi, who is thrilled to unearth a single fragment of a femur. But I didn't want to get sidetracked. "Okay," I said, "so we have a tooth."
She laughed. I felt like I'd passed a test. "Do you know about Zoni? It was a church in Greece, but the church was built on top of a temple to Apollo. Worhippers would write a prayer on a clay pot and smash it, so we have many examples of the ritual formula "Abolo Uneso somebody ekaie." Abolo is the god and uneso probably meant holy."
"Yes!" I showed her my notebook with copies of those inscriptions:
(they're written right to left)
"And that e in ekaie. Is that," I asked, "augment?"
She lit up. "It might be!"
I could feel the coffee taking effect, and see it in my guest, as well. But I looked at my watch. "I have to go pick up my daughter in about five minutes," I said. "I'll pay for the coffees."
I had time for one more question. "I only found one paper on the Zoni inscriptions," I said as I came back from the bar. "This one by Brixhe. But there are many more, right?"
"Yes. All the inscriptions from Zoni are published in the year-book of Sofia University 1954. They include the bilingual tablet."
"The what!?" I said, thinking of the Rosetta Stone. Also, I had to go pick up my daughter from Russian camp. But a bilingual inscription? That was revolutionary! It could blow the Thracian language wide open!
"It's damaged," said Professor Yanakieva. "The top of the Greek part and the bottom of the Thracian part are missing, so we can't decipher it. Didn't you say you have to pick up your daughter?"
"Well, she can wait five minutes."
"How old is she? Eight? She'll be frightened if she has to wait."
In fact, I was the one who had to wait because Ellie wasn't done making her noisemaker. I didn't mind because my brain was on fire. A bilingual inscription. I poured over it for the next month, and I have a sketch of a translation here. Professor Yanakieva says it's "amusing" and sent me links to more papers.
My reconstruction continues, a dinosaur based on a tooth. Maybe I got the legs wrong and put the nose on backwards, but I'm not afraid of making mistakes. I write speculative fiction, and my goal is plausible wonder. I think I got it.
***
In the month of June I finished working on the penultimate draft of Wealthgiver and...started working on the Thracian language that will appear in Wealthgiver. Here's my plan: I'll work on the language stuff over the summer (and writing up some of it for you, my readers) and getting ready to begin serializing Wealthgiver here on Patreon in the last week of September. I will polish the manuscript as I serialize it, the way I did for Fellow Tetrapod, so your feedback and advice will have an impact on what you read.  
***
And I read some books this month
The Initiate by James L. Cambias
There's a thematic point in this book where someone tells the main character, "you tell me not to do it because it is evil, and you tell me that evil is what I should not do. For we, who do not fear judgement, what reason is there to do anything other than what pleases us?" The main character answers him - I won't spoil the book by saying how. I will say that the first time I read The Initiate, I was disappointed with that answer, but now I see that Cambias had a different, better one for us. I won't spoil that, either. Go read the book.
The Knight by Will Wight
I'm trying to figure out why the books in this series bore me so much more than the excellent Cradle series. It's not the change in genre, because in fact this problem started to manifest in the later Cradle books as well. Since 2020 or so, Wright's novels have become longer and less substantial. A lot of things happen, but the connections between one event and the next are weak. The characters don't react as deeply or stand out as strikingly as they used to. Certainly, the word-level writing style has deteriorated. I couldn't even finish The Knight. It felt inflated and thoughtless, as if it was compiled rather than written. Whatever process Wright has adopted since the pandemic, I hope he returns to the old one.
The Higgs Boson and Beyond by Sean Carrol
Ironically for a summary of particle physics from the standpoint of quantum field theory, this book is too certain. Electrons ARE waves. Interactions with the Higgs field IS mass. There's none of the nuance of "according to this model," or "experiments have shown." There's too much space and too little substance devoted to the funding and construction of particle accelerators, and we're left without knowing much about Higgs boson itself. Carrol does okay with his central metaphor about a celebrity try to move through a crowded room, but he doesn't take it any farther. Why is being slowed down by the Higgs field a good explanation for inertial mass? What does that have to do with gravitational mass? PBS Eons goes deeper.
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
God damn I love reading Feynman. When other physicists proclaim, he clarifies. When others offer up half-baked metaphors, he gives us thoughts experiments that are both helpful and funny. How precisely could we determine the a bowling ball's velocity and position by bouncing ping-pong balls of it? What would an Aztec astrologer say to Galileo? What if mysteries in physics never run out, but new discoveries get harder and harder to make? In that last case, Feynman would consider himself very lucky to be born when he was.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
A friend of mine read this book and argued about it with me in high school. Maybe I wasn't ready for it then, but I was now. C.S. Lewis explains what he thinks Christianity means, for example when it comes to God as an anchor for objective good. He is not so much persuasive as illuminating.
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
This is one of those books that changes the way you look at everything. I now listen to Economist podcasts about the French election and think about DeGaul's post-war industrial policy. I see what you did there, orienting on exports. Or my wife tells me about A Suitable Boy and I recognize the importance of agricultural land reform. My friend Paul in Japan was incensed when I told him that cherries are too expensive there, but I'm right, and now I know why. What a pleasure it was to read How Asia Works. A heartfelt thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith, who recommended it.
Wintersteel by Will Wight
This is the apex of the Cradle series and Wight's best book. It asks an important question: how can you dedicate your life to improving yourself without leaving your loved ones behind? In answer, there's a kiss.
The War Revealed by Karl Gallagher
The renaissance fair that was teleported to a fantasy world has overcome their first orc invasion. Now it's time to meet the elves! Again, Gallagher's characters are very true to their natures. An agorophobe magician doesn't thank the protagonist for helping her develop her power of flight. She's mad at him! He scared her! Again, Gallagher lets this truth shine through prose that is so clear it feels like a synopsis. You have to slow down and imagine before you're hit by the emotional impact of what you're reading. I didn't like this one quite as much as the first one - maybe because there were fewer surprises. The biggest was that this is the second book in a fantasy series, and it ends. Good job!
Guest Law by John C. Wright
Hypocritical medieval courtiers...in space! As with most of Wright's work, my only complaint was that this one was too short. The future history he describes could and ought to support a trilogy at least.
Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About by Wilfred Reilly
The outline of this book is good, but it lacks something in the execution. Reilly is a political scientist, and would have done well to team up with a statistician or an economist. That could have elevated his examples from anecdote to data. Does the media really fail to report the police killing white people? Reilly found instances where that seems to be the case, but specific instances aren't enough. When I repeated the arguments Reilly made to my wife, she got angry at me. Maybe she would have been less angry if I'd had some more rigorous data? Don't worry, we apologized to each other.
 Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry
I read this book to my daughters. Ellie (8) was bored and demanded yet another repetition of Dory Fantasmagory, but Maggie (11) liked the horses and the grandpa. What struck me, though, was a scene where the child protagonists are incensed at the sight of captured feral colts being separated from their mothers, and take their complaints to the manager. He tells them that this is how young horses grow up. It's hard for the children to understand now, but when they get older, they'll see that this is for the best. And he's right. I can't think of any children's book written since the 80s where the adult was right and the children were wrong, and I'd like to see more.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm covers a lot of the same ground as The Gulag Archipelago, but in a much condensed and more impressionistic form - not so much a story as a description. I wondered as I listened to this audiobook what Orwell would have changed if he had known Russia's history from 1989 to 2022. Maybe not much.




See you next month


1 In fact, Coptic is a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. Way more interesting than a dumb conspiracy theory.