AI has officially gone mainstream—and that matters more than you think. This week on the blog, we’re looking at what the AI tipping point means for indie authors (hint: it’s not time to panic, but it is time to get your author platform AI-friendly). If your site doesn’t tell a chatbot what kind of stories you write, you’re already losing visibility.
Let’s fix that.
Alien: Earth doesn’t just mimic Ridley Scott’s industrial horror vibe—it builds on the franchise’s core themes with chilling relevance. Expect corporate overreach, synthetic humans with suspect motives, and alien lifeforms that are somehow even grosser than the originals. With standout performances (hello, Timothy Olyphant as a philosopher-soldier), tight character arcs, and a gritty, claustrophobic setting, this series delivers more than just jump scares. It’s a smart, unsettling evolution of a classic universe.
Today, SRP author Mark Posey has released a new short story in his Jacobine series, “The Things that Shall Come Upon Them”, which is included in the SRP anthology, A Gathering of Stories: Lantern Festival.
There was a glorious time — not as far back as dinosaurs, but far enough that you had to physically turn a page — when spy thrillers were built on tension. Real tension. The slow-burn, creeping dread variety that made you lean forward until you realized your spine was doing yoga poses you didn’t sign up for.
These were the days of The Bourne Identity, the early Bond novels, and le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — stories powered by paranoia, not pyrotechnics. Today, spy thrillers have traded that slow dread for weaponized anxiety and smartwatch hacking. But both eras have something to teach us about how to build suspense that sticks.
Thanksgiving comes twice a year when you straddle both sides of the border — one quieter, one a full-blown production. But whether it’s turkey, pasta, or chili dogs, the heart of it never changes. Gratitude isn’t about the meal or the decor. It’s about the people at your table — literal and metaphorical — and remembering how lucky we are to have them.
Recent DNA studies out of Iron Age Britain show that some Celtic tribes may have been far more woman-centered than we thought. With women staying put and men marrying into their communities, this evidence of matrilocality opens new doors for romance fiction, historical reimaginings—and your favorite Celtic heroines.
Two original stories from Taylen Carver—Roots of the Storm and Sylvalight—are eligible for the 2026 Hugo, Nebula, Aurora, and Dragon Awards. If you’re nominating this year, here are the details.
Before you dump your draft on an editor—or on your future self—you should be doing a ruthless cleanup pass. That starts with your own personal Weasel Word List: those sneaky, repetitive words and phrases that dull your prose and clutter your scenes. You’ve got ‘em. Everyone does. The trick is to catch them before your editor does. Bonus: clean manuscripts make ebook compilers very, very happy (and don’t randomly explode on Kindle).
Two Cameron Cooper titles published in 2025 are eligible for nomination in the 2026 Hugo, Nebula, Aurora, and Dragon Awards. If you’re voting this year, here’s what to know.
Writers love to add more scenes, more twists, more explosions… but half the time the real problem is simpler: we don’t actually know what the story is about.
Once you can answer three deceptively basic questions — What’s it about? What will the protagonist learn? How will they change? — the whole book snaps into focus. Plot becomes purposeful. Scenes stop wandering. And suddenly you’re not writing 300 pages of Stuff That Happens™ — you’re writing a story with meaning.
