(1) THE CRUCIAL INGREDIENT. Max Gladstone reminds everyone, “Writing Doesn’t Always Look the Way You Think” at The Third Place.

A couple days ago Penny Arcade posted a great scathing comic about an ad for an LLM; the ad promised that new users could “start writing for free!” Of course you can always start writing for free. People have been writing for free. Writing has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any modern skill. As someone posted on Bluesky, where I went to joke about this: All you need is a pen and paper, and you can still steal pens from the bank.

There’s a chilling implication in that ad, of course: you might be able to start writing for free but you can only finish by buying something. It’s an attempt—ultimately doomed, I think, by the sheer perversity and orneriness of the human animal—not to empower you but to take a power away, or to convince you that you don’t have the power, or can’t develop it quite easily for the low low price of dedicating a chunk of your one and precious life to this.

There’s a lure dangled in front of all writers, myself included, a lure that promises clicks, attention, and once in a while even a tiny bit of fame. And here’s the lure: People want to know how to do it.

The dirty secret is that 99.999% of it is just time. You write. You write some more. After a while, you stop and re-read what you’ve written. You think about it. You change things so you feel better when you re-read, or so you have a more vivid sense of where you’re going, or what you’re saying.

But consistency and dedication and work and care are boring and hard. Weird tricks and secret codes are fun and exciting. Weird tricks and secret codes make you think, “that’s why this felt so hard! I was doing it wrong!” Providing weird tricks and secret codes can also reinforce (in an ego-protective sort of way) a barrier in the writer’s mind between themselves and the aspirant. Advice helps the writers who offer it feel more real….

…I think part of the trouble is that we often forget what writing looks like. I sure do! If we’re not Snoopy bent over the typewriter, are we writing? It can feel like the answer’s no. I wonder how many aspiring writers hit the point where they’re staring at the page and nothing suggests itself immediately, and think that means they’re not writing then, that they’re not writers, and get scared.

If you’re never bent over the typewriter, or equivalent, if there are never any words, that’s the point where it may help to reconsider your approach, diet, sleep. But that focus on word counts or page counts or progress bars or throughput can mislead. You don’t say that a chess player’s only playing chess when she’s moving the pieces. A lot of it is sitting at the board in silence….

(2) ATTENDING TO WORLDBUILDING. Walt Boyes is now producing a monthly column on the art of writing fantasy, science fiction, and other genres for the Writers and Publishers Network News edited by Sandy Murphy. “Let’s Talk Worldbuilding: Just how big is your fantasy world?”

What makes great fantasy novels go is not the thud and blunder of battles. You can find that in any MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). What makes great fantasy novels is the characters and their development.

Characters belong to cultures and civilizations. They belong to nations, kingdoms, tribes, and other social and political groupings. Worlds generally have more than one social or political grouping. One subplot you can develop is how your characters interact with other cultures and with characters from groups other than their own.

Their cultures and geographies mold your characters. Customs, names, where and how they live, and how they make their living are all shaped by the geography they live in and by how their culture interacts with it.

The world you are building and the characters who inhabit it must be internally consistent. You cannot have a farmer or a fisherman suddenly turn into a great warrior or even a decent magician. You need to organically develop the character so we can see their arc of growth. For example, in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, White has Merlin put Wart through many bodily and species changes so he can have a broad view of life, morality, and love, automatically generating and showing the growth arc of Wart’s character as he gets ready to pull the sword from the stone.

This is true whether you are writing fantasy or science fiction….

(3) SHELFIES.  Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was Shelfies #74: Paul McAuley.

Paul McAuley became a full-time writer after working as a research biologist and university lecturer. He has published more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, and has won or been nominated for numerous awards. His latest novel is Loss Protocol.

(4) CLOSE QUARTERS. BBC asks “Have you got what it takes to go to the Moon?” (Subscription required outside of UK.)

When the Artemis mission lands on the Moon in years to come, its crew will have to grapple with a challenging environment and extreme isolation. What will it take to thrive in a lonely Moon base?

“Space is really challenging,” says Nasa astronaut Victor Glover. “It’s harder than it looks, and we don’t say that often enough.” 

I spoke to him just before the Starliner spacecraft’s ill-fated mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Later, when the capsule’s thruster system failed during docking, the crew was left stuck in space for eight months. Which rather proves Glover’s point.

The astronaut will soon take the controls of Artemis II, piloting the first crewed Orion capsule beyond the Moon – further than humans have ever gone before. For 10 days, Glover will live in a small pressurised compartment with his three companions.

He does not take his responsibilities lightly. “We have a tank full of water, and as we drink that water, it’s gone,” he says. “We have food, and as we eat the food, it’s gone – no one’s sending a resupply ship.”

Even the simplest daily activities will become a challenge, and potential annoyance. “There’s no such thing as privacy,” he says. “You can go into the waste and hygiene compartment and shut the door and as soon as you flip the machine on, you wake everybody up – it’s the loudest thing other than the engine.” 

“These are the things that are going to require a different set of psychological preparations.”

Artemis II is the first step in humanity’s eventual return to the Moon. Future US-led missions will land humans on the lunar surface and construct a base near its South Pole. Astronauts will be days away from Earth, living for months in confinement with only their colleagues for company. With nights that last two weeks, outside it will be dusty and airless with extreme temperatures and potentially damaging levels of radiation….

… “It’s important to understand that we’re on an exploration mission and we don’t have the medical equipment we have on the ground,” Vaquer Araujo says. “To reduce risk, we have to have well-screened people – if you had an asthma attack in the middle of the mission then we wouldn’t be able to treat that.”

While that might rule out many potential candidates (this reporter included), most reasonably fit people have a good chance of passing the physical. But that is only the start of what the “right stuff” means today. Much of the selection process is about assessing cognitive abilities and psychological suitability for space missions. 

The first astronauts were hyper-competitive winners – “alpha males” – ready to put their lives on the line. It made them exciting people to be around but not necessarily spend too much time in a confined space with. Today, being able to work well with others is one of the most important attributes of an astronaut. It is not necessarily an advantage to win….

(5) THEY FOUND A PARKING PLACE. “Atlanta’s Unique Hearse Bookstore, The Grim Reader, Is Opening A Brick-And-Mortar Book Store On Friday The 13th Of March — A Moody Third Space For ATL’s Weirdest (& Best) Readers” reports Secret Atlanta.

…The Grim Reader Bookshop is an Atlanta-based horror and dark fiction bookstore that began life inside a converted hearse named Winnie. The mobile book shop was always dedicated to bringing the best horror, gothic lit, and other types of spooky stories around to different pop-up events in the ATL….

(2nd 5) FORGET MT. TBR. HERE’S THE WHOLE FREAKIN’ HIMALAYAS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Behind a paywall on the web, but available for free on the BBC app. “Anke Gowda: The Karnataka man who built a library of two million books”.

Two million books, housed across a sprawling building, free for anyone to borrow and read.

That’s the wealth that Anke Gowda, a retired sugar factory worker from India’s southern Karnataka state, has accumulated over the past five decades.

The 79-year-old made headlines last month when he received the Padma Shri – a civilian honour awarded by the federal government – for his extraordinary contribution to promoting literacy and learning.

Gowda – whose eye-popping collection includes rare editions of the Bible, along with books on every subject imaginable – comes from a farming family where books were a luxury.

“I grew up in a village. We never got books to read, but I was always curious about them. I kept thinking that I should read, gather books and gain knowledge,” he told the BBC.

Gowda’s library is located in Pandavapura, a small municipality in Karnataka’s Mandya district. It lacks the rigid organisation usually associated with libraries. In fact, Gowda’s collection doesn’t have a librarian and books are stacked on shelves and piled on the floor in a haphazard manner.

Outside, under the library’s awnings are sacks filled with an estimated 800,000 books, still waiting to be unpacked. The collection is still growing, through Gowda’s purchases and donations from others….

Text continues for roughly 30 more paragraphs. Plus several photographs from inside the library.

(6) BOB LAYZELL (1940-2026). Sff artist Bob Layzell died January 29. Downthetubes paid tribute: “In Memoriam: Science Fiction and Terran Trade Authority artist Bob Layzell”.

We’re sorry to report the passing of science fiction artist extraordinaire Bob Layzell, his death announced this week by his daughter, artist Shana Layzell. He suffered a heart attack late last year, and had been in hospital for six weeks, with diabetic problems.

His work was on display at Glasgow 2024 – his first exhibit in a decade, which was at the Dynamite Gallery in Brighton, and featured work from the early 2000s to some of his most recent pieces.

“His colourful work is instantly recognisable,” said the exhibition curators, “with his designs having a gritty, apocalyptic and futuristic feel, somewhere between the aerodynamic streamlining of Jim Burns and the industrial look of Chris Foss.”

Professor Brian Cox has said his work acted as a catalyst as a small child, encouraging his interest in learning how the way the Universe works.

Born in Brighton in 1940, Bob (also known as Merlin way back in the day, according to his artist daughter) was, and will remain, a legendary illustrator from the golden age of British science fiction art, fondly celebrated for his his memorable 1970’s book covers and, for his work on the Terran Trade Authority (TTA) project, Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 an often cited example.

Some of his original paintings once dressed the walls of now long closed Vortex Books at 50 Preston Road, in Brighton, run by Simon de Wolfe. (2000AD artist David Pugh provided art from some of its shop flyers and adverts).

Along with creating a huge range of book cover art, he may also be remembered for his contributions to the British Perry Rhodan series published by Futura.

He was also responsible for set decor for the Southwick Players for several years, on a diverse range of productions that included Far from the Madding Crowd and The Elephantman…

(7) JEFFREY A. CARVER (1949-2026). Sff author Jeffrey A. Carver, who underwent lung transplant surgery last August, died February 6 at the age of 76. He was the author of over a dozen novels and two short fiction collections.

His 2000 novel Eternity’s End was a 2001 Nebula Awards nominee.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 8, 1969 – Mary Robinette Kowal, 57.

Author, puppeteer, voice actor. Mary Robinette Kowal is an amazing individual indeed.

As I always find out who is narrating the audio works I’m listening to, I first encountered her when she was voicing some of the works that I like best, such as Seanan McGuire’s Indexing novels which are so wonderfully narrated by Kowal. 

She has an ability to give life to each character in a novel so that the listener can tell each of them apart by the way that she voices them. Her narration of her novel is Ghost Talkers is both properly spooky and horrifying in equal measure. 

While doing this essay I got curious about the idea of her as a puppeteer. She has been one for over thirty years and her production company is the Other Hand Productions. So she worked for Jim Henson Pictures in the Elmo in Grouchland film, she assisted Martin P. Robinson who was Sesame Street’s Telly Monster in “Jackstraws” piece, and her design work has been recognized with UNIMA-USA citations of excellence for Mark Levenson’s Between Two Worlds and Other Hand Productions’ Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom. The Citation of Excellence was founded by Jim Henson and is the highest award possible for an American puppeteer. Cool, eh? 

Now for the third part of her quite impressive career. I asked one of our Filers, Paul Weimer, to talk about that as I figured he’d read more deeply of her than I have. (I personally loved The Spare Man, Ghost Talkers and the Glamourist series. Her narration of The Spare Man is an  amazing experience speaking as one who only gets his long form fiction now in that way.)

So here’s Paul: “I was immediately enchanted with her first Glamourist history novel, Shades of Milk and Honey. I enjoyed the characters, the magic system and saw her homage to Regency romances, and liked it. I also particularly think that the last book in that series, Of Noble Family, engaging with some difficult subjects of class and race, is a strong entry that shows Kowal’s willingness to work with such material and face the issues therein.  Her recent The Spare Man encapsulates a lot of what she does, on a luxury liner, in SPAAACE.  And while many will point at her Lady Astronaut series as her current pinnacle of work (and I did borrow Elma York’s mental trick of composing fibonacci numbers in my head while hiking in Nepal), I think her alternate WWI fantasy novel Ghost Talkers is very unjustly overlooked as a compelling novel of a woman caught by her duty and needs in a terrible, dangerous wartime.”

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Frazz  discloses where one writer gets material.
• Free Range needs a diet. 
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pronounces a curse.

(10) DOOMSCROLLING. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Week in Geek” explores some of the whackier fan theories about the new Avengers movie: “Doctor Doom is Iron Man’s evil shadow? The most far-out fan theories about Avengers: Doomsday”.

With its enigmatic promo run for Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel has perfected the trailer that reveals precisely nothing. Teasers have consisted of portentous glances, mood lighting, and characters standing very still. Dialogue is pre-scrubbed of context. Music swells with the confidence that something enormous is happening just out of frame. Plot, meanwhile, has been placed in witness protection. The studio is clearly well aware that giving away even a smidgen of detail this early on – the film isn’t due for release until December – would result in fans cracking the code long before any bums actually go on seats.

After all, Marvel has been here before. Avengers: Infinity War’s trailers laid out just enough narrative scaffolding for the internet to calmly conclude, months in advance, that Thanos was going to win and leave the universe in binary tatters. And it happened again with Avengers: Endgame, a film whose storyline was deduced from toy leaks, casting announcements and the radical insight that actors rarely sign multi-picture deals only for their characters to die permanently.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that Doomsday nearly joined the list this week. The Russo brothers, who have returned to Marvel to direct the next two Avengers films, decided to launch a section on their website dedicated to crowd-sourced guesswork about Doomsday. But no sooner was it unveiled – alongside an accompanying video spotlighting the wildest plot ideas – than the entire project was wiped. Did somebody actually guess the whole thing? If so, they couldn’t have cooked up much to beat the following far-out fan theories currently rattling around the more unsupervised corners of the internet….

(11) BATCOIN! [Item by Daniel Dern.] Or is it Supermoney? CBR.com tells about “DC and the U.S. Mint’s Historic Partnership Celebrating Comic Art”.

In 2025, the U.S. Mint entered a landmark partnership with DC, launching a collectible coin and medal series that celebrates comic book art and its lasting cultural impact. This collaboration marked the first time the Mint formally featured superheroes from American popular culture, acknowledging comic art’s role in expressing ideals such as justice, freedom, courage, responsibility, and hope.

The series features nine iconic DC Super Heroes, depicted in original, comic-inspired designs on 24-karat gold coins, .999 fine silver medals, and non-precious metal (clad) medals. The series debuted in summer 2025 with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and continues with six additional characters scheduled for release across 2026 and 2027.This initiative represents the first public–private partnership of its kind and scale in U.S. Mint history. All obverses (heads side) are designed and sculpted by United States Mint Chief Engraver, Joseph Menna, while each reverse (tails side) is created by one of the Mint’s Medallic Artists under his artistic direction…. 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]