Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 1-11-2026 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, enjoy a freshly-made batch of Chex Mix, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
Massive kudos to MP4 for his debut Sunday Morning Book Thread last week. CBD sent me an email saying I could take the week off and that someone else would be covering for me, but I didn't know who it was until I checked the queue of blog threads on Saturday evening. I was very pleased to find out it was MP4! He did a great job and I hope we can entice him to do more Sunday Morning Book Threads in the future!
PIC NOTE
This is a random pic I found on a website advertising 23 Unique Home Library Ideas. Naturally, this company wants you to use their products and services, but there are some decent ideas on the webpage if anyone is looking to spice up their library.
HOW A BOOK IS MADE
Technology has come a long, long way from Gutenberg's original printing press featuring moveable type. The video above shows just how easy it is to print a small number of books. Naturally, this process just scales up for huge print runs, like Kamala's New York Times bestselling book about her presidential run (stop laughing!).
In my job I've had to make frequent use of the university print shop, which has most of the machinery shown in the video. They can basically custom-print anything you can imagine, and if they can't do it, they'll outsource it to someone who can. It's just cool what they can do. Personally, my favorite machine is the massive paper cutter, which trims thousands of sheets of paper at once.
Here's a short video about how Amazon's Make on Demand service works. Amazon prints millions of books a year based on customer requests. I have quite a few books that have been printed in Monee, IL, just a few days after I've ordered them on Amazon. The audio isn't great, so you will want to turn on closed-captioning to follow along.
++++++++++
++++++++++
HOW BOOK THIEVES STEAL MANUSCRIPTS
There are a few lessons to be learned from this video:
Never email your unpublished manuscript to someone you don't know. Double-check the email address to make sure it's correct. In the example above, changing just ONE character in the email address allowed a manuscript thief working at a publishing company to publish the manuscript without the author's permission.
If you are publishing a serialized version of your story online so that you can solicit feedback, make sure you upload the finished, polished manuscript to your final publishing platform as soon as possible. Yes, you do own the copyright on your works, but it can be challenging to prove that sometimes if someone is poaching content from your website and then publishing it as their own material.
"Brandjacking" means your good name is being stolen to be used on content that isn't yours. So if you have published a few books and have had some modest sales, you do owe it to yourself to protect your brand.
I work with professors who are often leery about putting their course content online because they don't want their content being stolen by someone else. It's a valid concern. Unfortunately, the reality is that if someone can view their content--even if it's hidden on a password-protected learning management system like Canvas--it can be stolen and repurposed. This is how cheating sites like Chegg gather data. They rely on students to submit content for them to then publish for other students. I've even downloaded content from courses because I wanted to have a copy of the content for future reference. Not to sell it as my own. Just to have it as a resource. I know one professor who goes so far as to remove modules in his course as soon as the module is over. He doesn't just unpublish them from his Canvas course. He deletes them entirely. Which is kind of pointless since as soon as students know that he does this, they're going to download copies of the content as soon as the module becomes available.
+-----+-----+-----+-----+
MORON RECOMMENDATIONS
Before I read it, I didn't know that Dracula was an epistolary novel.
Clever books, like epistolary novels, have always interested me. One comes to mind which I stumbled upon long ago, and found it as fascinating as I found the characters distasteful. When Captain Pierre Laclos first published Les Liasons Dangereuses in 1782, it caused such a scandal that it was briefly banned. Of course, this only made it even more popular behind closed doors. Eventually, a publisher's note was added to the novel, insisting that the author in no way represented the truth.
The story behind the story is that a series of letters, mostly between the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, had been found and assembled, and when put into chronological order, told a strange immoral tale. These two aristocrats schemed between themselves to seduce a young noblewoman; for Merteuil, it was revenge, and for Valmont, merely the challenge.
The letters tell the story in both statements and hints, and describes the cooperation and then competition between the decadent pair. Eventually, the competition turns into hatred, and Valmont exposes Merteuil and ruins her.
Posted by: Thomas Paine at December 28, 2025 09:11 AM (0U5gm)
Comment: The central story of Dangerous Liaisons (I'm not French, so I'll use the English translation) seems to have universal appeal, as the story has been adapted numerous times around the worl, even as far off as China and Korea. It's been told and retold in many different media over the centuries. I was first exposed to the story in high school. My drama club took a trip to London one year and we watched a stage performance of Dangerous Liaisons, which was pretty cool. The 1999 movie Cruel Intentions spawned its own franchise with a prequel, a sequel, and even a television series.
People seem to be fascinated by the deliberate destruction of innocence as depicted in this story. It's very much a tragedy, as no one escapes unscathed.
++++++++++
You might enjoy Tony Perrotett's Route A.D. 66 (published in the US as Pagan Holidays). He decides to take the Roman version of the Grand Tour, using ancient guidebooks and travels from Rome to Greece and on to Egypt and Arabia. Clever and funny.
Posted by: Mary Poppins' Practically Perfect Piercing (aka Eloquent Depression) at December 28, 2025 09:16 AM (ufSfZ)
Comment: We take for granted how easy it is to travel around the world today. Back in the ancient world, much travel was done on foot. If you were lucky or wealthy you might have a horse or cart. You would, of course, have to take care of the horse and cart because your livelihood depended on them. My pastor at church has been giving us a guided tour of Paul's travels during his ministry. It's been fascinating to see how he traveled between Israel, Asia Minor (now Turkey), Greece, and Rome, as well as exploring the difficulties he had along the way.
One of you Morons sent me an email with an Amazon link for Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It was a boxed set with the first three novels in hardcover for about 1/3 the normal price. Naturally, I screamed, "Shut up and take my money!" and purchased it.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I have no idea when I'll get around to reading it, so it goes on top of my teetering TBR pile for now.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING RECENTLY:
The Final Architecture Book 3 - Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I finished Adrian Tschaikovsky's epic space opera trilogy just before New Year's Eve. That was the final book I completed in 2025. It was well worth the ride. The series as a whole took a bit of time to get going and Tchaikovsky is prone to exposition dumps, particularly in Shards of Earth, but overall it's a good read and quite entertaining. I liked the character development.
The series also featured dueling assholes--a protagonist and an antagonist. Ollie, on the side of the protagonists, is one of those professional assholes that doesn't really get along with most people, but if she chooses to be your friend, she'll be your friend for life. Ollie's major character arc was overcoming her biases against the Parthenon society, as it's composed of "perfect" Amazonian warrior-women while Ollie suffers from numerous birth defects that left her body crippled and deformed.
At first I thought there was going to be some mild wokeness in the story, but much of it was justified by the setting and characters, so it didn't bother me much. Also, Tchaikovsky didn't seem to be too enamored with perfect socialist societies, instead preferring the rough-and-tumble life of the spacers who really keep society running through their rugged individuality, scavenging and trading wherever they can to keep flying between the stars, regardless of the dangers posed by "unspace."
I won't spoil the climax, but it's pretty badass. Idris uncovers the truth behind the so-called "lords of creation and uncreation." The Architects are not what everyone thought they were, either, serving their masters unwillingly, weeping at the destruction they are forced to cause throughout the cosmos.
The Complete Chronicles of Conan - Centenary Edition by Robert E. Howard
This has been on my TBR pile for several years now. I remember being excited when the Centenary Edition came out, but then I got distracted and busy with other things. Now I'm reading it and enjoying it quite a bit. Robert E. Howard's Conan is quite a bit different than Arnold Schwarzenegger's depiction in the movies, though I think he captured Conan's spirit quite well.
I did realize that while compilations of stories by an author are a fun read, they can start to become repetitive after a while. Howard has a formula, for sure. Conan will become enmeshed in some complicated scheme or a situation that's outside his usual understanding and he'll need both brains and brawn to sort it all out. This repetitive formulaic storytelling is not unique to Howard, of course. I had similar experiences when reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories. It's probably best to read a few stories, then switch to something else, and come back to the stories again.
I can also tell that Howard was HUGELY influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their fingerprints are all over Howard's stories. From Lovecraft, Howard weaves the setting, with it's alien gods and ancient powers walking the land, unknowable to mankind. From Burroughs, Howard develops some of Conan's traits from both Tarzan and John Carter. Conan is wild, unpredictable, animalistic. He's also cunning, powerful, and strong, able to overcome his enemies through sheer determination. He's also chivalric and honorable in his own way. Not quite a Southern gentleman, though.
John Carter of Mars - Volume 1 by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Since I got a bit tired of reading Conan, I decided to mix it up by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs for a bit, starting with A Princess of Mars. John Carter is a former Captain in the Confederate Army of America who goes to Arizona after the war to seek his fortune in gold prospecting. While being chased by Apaches, he hides in cave, then proceeds to have an out-of-body experience that propels his spiritual form to Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals call it).
He meets the local native green Martians and gains their trust. Then escapes their custody to join the red Martians, who are much more human-looking, and falls in love with their princess. It's easy to see how much Burroughs influenced the pulp adventure genre with his stories.
I was a bit surprised to find out that Burroughs was American. For whatever reason I assumed he was British. But nope, he was born in Chicago. I also thought he was writing books later than he did. Although he was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard, that was more towards the end of Burrough's life. A Princess of Mars was published in serialized format in 1912, while Howard was still a child.
The Dresden Files Book 1 - Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher's latest entry in The Dresden Files comes out in a couple of weeks. I believe it's the beginning of the end of the series, since I've read that Butcher wants to finish with around 20-21 stories. Anyway, in preparation, I've decided to do a re-read of The Dresden Files from Storm Front to Battle Ground.
Storm Front introduces us to Chicago's only professional wizard--he has an ad in the Yellow Pages and an office in midtown. Butcher also begins laying out the foundations of his urban fantasy settings, establishing the core rules in which his characters operate. At this point, Harry Dresden is fairly powerful, but he still has a long ways to go until he reaches the heights of power he wields later in the series. He'll take many levels of badass along the way. For now, he's enmeshed in a scheme by a rogue wizard who is creating a magical drug that opens up the "Third Eye" of normal people and lets them see the world for what it really is. In Harry's world this is a very bad idea, because most people are not prepared for that experience without extensive training. There are things that are revealed when using the Sight that can drive you insane. Harry himself will experience one of these later and he pays a heavy price for it.
It's pretty good for a debut novel, but I think the series really gets going with Book 3, Grave Peril as Butcher expands the world considerably and introduces amazing characters, such as Michael Carpenter.
The Dresden Files Book 2 - Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
This is probably my least favorite of The Dresden Files. It's not bad, but it's not the strongest entry. Harry is called upon to investigate a series of murders that only take place during the full moon. Naturally, he reaches the conclusion that it's the work of a pack of werewolves that have infiltrated Chicago. However, his work is complicated by the fact that the FBI is investigating the murders as well and their motives are not exactly pure.
This is where we also see how Harry begins to adapt and grow as a character, as he realizes that the tools and tricks he used in the first book, Storm Front, are not powerful enough to aid him. So he upgrades his equipment using his magical skills. This will become a recurring theme throughout the series. As Harry points out more than once, a wizard who is prepared for a contingency is a very, very formidable opponent, so he does his best to be prepared. Though often his preparations go by the wayside and he has to rely on his wits, skill, determination, and raw power more than once.
