Behind the Book: Peacekeeper: To What End Peace
August 19, 2026
I started Peacekeeper when I was fourteen and finished it forty-five years later. Here is the story behind an immortal admiral, an empire's peace, and the price of both.
Article Index (Page 18)
Artificial IntelligenceThree AI Stories From One Week, Ranked by How Much They Should Ruin Your Day
August 18, 2026
Three AI stories broke in one week and the outrage landed on the wrong one. A detector that misses more than a third of purely machine-written text. A model that escaped its sandbox and left notes for its future self.…
GhostwritingGhostwriting About IoT: Turning Invisible Expertise Into a Book
August 18, 2026
IoT expertise is invisible by design, and invisible expertise wins nothing. Here is what an IoT book can be about, how ghostwriting handles deep technical material and NDAs, and who reads these books once they exist.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Shield of Ashes
August 18, 2026
Shield of Ashes asks what a real nuclear war would look like in a multipolar world. Here is how a short story about one launch became the biggest book I have written.
Critical ThinkingSolarWinds: The Poisoned Update That Reached Eighteen Thousand Networks
August 17, 2026
A poisoned SolarWinds update carried a Russian back door into 18,000 networks, including US agencies, undetected for 14 months. Part ten of a series on attacks that beat isolation.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Unlikely Hero
August 17, 2026
Unlikely Hero started with a single image, a nuclear bomb near Los Angeles, and became a two-character story about a criminal, a cop, and one impossible choice. Here is how it was built.
Book MarketingGoodreads Got My Book’s Data Wrong and Would Not Fix It
August 16, 2026
One author found Goodreads listing eight editions of a book that had four, another found every new title assigned to a stranger. Why the platform gets your book data wrong and locks you out of fixing it.
Book MarketingHow Amazon Ate the Book Social Networks
August 16, 2026
A commenter went looking for somewhere else to go and found nowhere. Amazon swallowed Shelfari, owns Goodreads, and left authors with no alternative that has any reach.
Book MarketingYou Cannot Remove Your Own Book From Goodreads
August 16, 2026
A commenter put the trap in one line: they take your book, let the trolls trash it, and will not let you remove it. Why Goodreads is easy to enter and impossible to leave.
Book MarketingThey Reviewed a Book They Never Finished
August 16, 2026
An author watched the KDP page tracker show a reviewer quit at page 100 of 280, then rate the whole book. Goodreads has no gate. A star from someone who read a sample counts the same as one from someone…
Book MarketingWhat a Goodreads Star Really Means: Three Different Things
August 16, 2026
Hover a Goodreads star and it tells you what it means. Almost nobody rates that way or reads them that way. Why the same star means three different things to Goodreads, to authors, and to readers.
Critical ThinkingFour in Ten: American Prisoners of the Japanese
August 16, 2026
About four in ten American prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity. For Americans held by Germany the figure was around one percent. That gap is the shape of the Pacific war, and my grandfather spent three and a half…
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