X. Ho Yen's Author Newsletter (15 Jul 2026)
Greetings Dear Readers,
I don't know how to send these newsletter mass mailings without gmail. My new email provider, Proton, doesn’t do mass mailings. That's why this is coming from my old gmail address.
To subscribe: the subscription box “Older Posts >” link available at the bottom of the web newsletter
Or subscribe to my Substack (which is free)
If you’d like to UNsubscribe from this newsletter, hit reply and say as much. Easy peasy, no judgment, no problem. (Unsubscribing from Substack is separate and is done there.) Unsubscribing if you’re not interested HELPS me.
Mysubstack content replaces social media, and contains thoughtful and/or serious and sometimes even fun material (including my videos) that would never fit into tiny SM posts. (no more Youtube, which is google)
=== Dubito ergo sum ===
Allow me to urge you to watch this video in which two intelligent people discuss history and human nature. The title makes it sound like it’s all about “AI”, but it’s not, that’s just a launching point.
I have a place for Ada Palmer and Angus Hervey in my vast, mostly-empty "friends I don't have yet" space.
=== Internet Sadness ===
Draft2Digital now charges authors an annual fee for distributing ebooks. Their author fee is more than I make from sales, despite the awards and lauds. Low sales doesn’t mean low quality work.
Squarespace, the company I use for my web site, just sent me a notice that my annual web site subscription price is going up from US$276 to US$348. Because they can. And you know they’re using AI more and more, too, like all the tech companies.
Recently I had 4 new subscribers to this newsletter. Three of those four had gmail addresses that looked something like this fake example:
ut.l.5.br.pk4.rt.6f@gmail.com
Come on, that’s random generator fakery by a con artist sniffing around for material they can use to train their AI to be a better swindler. I deleted those.
Someone posted on Substack about how everything on the internet feels fake, with references to other articles predicting the death of ‘social media’ for this very reason. If posting is for people, and the internet is all bots, what’s the point of posting? Apparently, I’m not alone (anymore) in that. Yay! Not alone in abandoning social media!
I’ve posted multiple times about all the AI-generated fake identities that contact me with praise for my books that are restatements of my own web site blurbs and online reviews, with offers to ‘help’ me find my audience. These days they go beyond merely generating a fake profile on SM. They have fake web sites, some of which they’ve been faking for years. It’s quickly getting to the point where actual humans on the internet will be swamped by fakes.
For the most part, actual humans don’t contact me, even when I contact them first. To my lonely heart, that’s the true AI apocalypse.
That post about everything feeling fake on the internet brought up something noteworthy. Company web sites now spew hundreds of garbage posts and lists identifying themselves as the best provider of product. They do this knowing that humans who visit their site won’t necessarily believe their self-promotion, but that SCRAPE BOTS will digest their hundreds of claims and then report those findings to humans using an AI or AI-backed search tool, without legitimate references, of course, just fake web site references. It works because humans naively assume that those tools somehow are presenting objective, independently-researched, fact-based results.
It’s the same on social media sites, including Substack. There are countless posts that make you feel good about your beliefs but which FRAME and WORD the message in a way that serves a different agenda. And now everyone uses the white-washed term “climate change” instead of saying “anthropogenic global warming”.
In other words, the internet is full of bot-generated fakery intended for other bots, packaged by AI as truth. Fakery in all directions. [And why? Because humans don’t evaluate facts, humans just look for bandwagons and assume that if a bandwagon is full, there must be a good reason for it. Also for the free community of those already onboard. But, I digress.]
Did you know that the con men buy AI to install on their local computer in order to teach their copy of AI to be the best lying, cheating confidence trickster it can be against specific kinds of prey, the kind the con men deem to be particularly susceptible? I guess this means there are many thousands of indie authors out there so willing to believe that someone loves their stuff and wants to help such that enough of them buy the line and make this con work profitable. It’s not just tech-unsavvy boomers being swindled, although there’s overlap between those two demographics.
The post also noted that Substack has entered the second-to-last stage in the life cycle of all online communication spaces, the stage where the business model changes into one of harvesting all the subscription habits built by the humans up to that point. They’re right, it has.
I put myself out here on the web because all the advice given to authors is that you must. It’s not something I wanted to do, as it’s full of opportunities to be misjudged and underestimated.
In real life, my niceness is always met with distrust. Why? Because confidence tricksters have taught everyone that nice means bait-and-switch trickery. Men react to niceness with homophobic fear. Women assume niceness is a come-on. And rapists have taught everyone that niceness could be a pretense for getting you alone in a place where no one can hear you scream. RUN AWAY FROM THE NICE MAN! To look like a white male and be genuinely nice is the recipe for being avoided, at least in the Benighted States. It’s messed up. And I have the right to say it hurts.
To have the vast majority of my experiences on the web be fakery intended to socially engineer me or swindle me is, frankly, painful, in addition to being a colossal waste of my time (and money) from the standpoint of trying to find my audience. It all reminds me of why I didn’t want to ‘put myself out there’ in the first place.
I did a quick search on Squarespace and layoffs, to see if my suspicion was correct. The search results were full of the kinds of for-the-bots posts I mentioned above, on web sites I’ve never heard of. I tried to limit my search to legitimate sites, but the only one that ever came up in my searches was Wired.com, and its articles that came up were not specifically about Squarespace, just about tech layoffs. There were many hits on those unknown web sites with titles like “why companies are leaving Squarespace in 2026”, full of reasons like ‘these three companies will house your site for free and by the way here’s how you use AI to pull your web site design off Squarespace and move it there’. It’s all for-the-bots material, and my search for basic information led immediately to articles luring me away from Squarespace to AI web site building sites.
So, what’s a fixed-incomer to do? Keep paying Squarespace hundreds a year? Find a ‘first taste is always free’ website housing company and build my own site from scratch? Or use AI to do so? And what happens when they, after grabbing many users, switch from a free housing model to their own multihundreds rent? Or perhaps simply scrape everything I post and sell it to databrokers, like google’s business model?
Perhaps I should start writing romantasy and space opera and alien invasion after all, with AI-generated book covers with a hypersexualized white female in a tight/revealing outfit wielding a bow and arrow or blaster pistol. Then this effort might move toward paying for itself. Should I?
To all the tech con men, especially the ones sniffing around with your fake personas, have the day you deserve.
To everyone else, hi! Here’s some more status:
=== X. Status ===
I was 42000 words into my third novel when the Pandora’s Box that is the Benighted States of Murrica was fully opened by the Pedophile-in-chief, releasing its toxic, double-think rationalized, insecurity-fueled evils upon the world. Suddenly, my sardonic, hopepunk, near future story seemed like a Disney fantasy.
There’s a long history of science fiction as cautionary tale. Whatever cautions I was writing, 2024 instantly rendered them entirely outdated. Personally, I had a long history of trying to warn people about the contents of that box. Once it was opened, I became a K-T dinosaur warning everyone about the incoming asteroid after it had already hit Chicxulub.
For over a year now, I’ve been cocooning.
A few times, an idea for a story would hit me, but they were like the plaintive cries of Epstein-Maxwell victims in the halls of justice.
Recently, I went down a rabbit hole, learned something about the Barbary Pirates of the 17th-19th centuries C.E., woke up the next morning at 4am and started working on a short story about it. I finished that story, but it needs work. I promise I’ll return to it. Maybe I’ll post it here, if there’s interest.
Mostly my cocooning looks like me hiding from the heart-rending possibility of meeting yet another MAGA supporter by writing game content code to use a complex simulation game for completely self-indulgent catharsis purposes. Totally, utterly self-indulgent cathartic escape. I admit it. Because I have no influence on this world anymore, not since retiring from aerospace, and that profound lack of influence coupled with lack of connections is the same as lack of existence. It’s such a strange experience, not existing.
Well, not that strange, not to someone who was an undiagnosed autistic for over fifty years. But definitely more strange after retirement. My career had provided connection and valuable purpose that’s gone now.
Having suddenly become an extinct dinosaur in 2024 cranked up the contrast on that status.
But as I adjust to being unable to write hopepunk, something different is bubbling up inside me, writing-wise. I can feel myself allowing something I never would have allowed before. I can feel in the back of my mind the growing intent to write fiction based on a world I would rather live in. It’s not something the previous me could have allowed. Too indulgent. But there’s nothing left, there’s no where else to go. There are entire hordes of self-editing wraiths flying around in the back of my mind undermining this untrodden creative path, so I have my work cut out for me. Wish me luck.
=== Little Free Libraries ===
Last time I mentioned my discovery that Little Free Libraries had become super popular since I’d first heard of them decades ago.
Since then, I’ve donated my books to at least six LFLs, two in Canada. (This is a win-win. For each book, I had bought a box for local sales, before I discovered local sales are a huge PITA, tax wise. So this helps me run down my inventory while turning it into exposure while giving books to readers out there.) More donations are planned, although I’ve run out of copies of “Custodians of the Future”, and only have a few left of “Space Autistic Author’s Puzzling Innerverse”. Very soon I’ll be down to my box of hardcover MSDs.
And Cathy donated my books to a Senior Center in Georgia. Thanks, Cathy!
Here are a few pics of me donating to LFLs. Look up LFLs near you! https://littlefreelibrary.org/map/
thoughts in layers,
XHY
All purchase options can be found here: https://XHoYenAuthor.com/books (see the DISCOUNT links). There’s info on how you can gift eBooks.
Thanks for sticking with me! I hope it’s at least mildly entertaining to watch this author second career thing come together in the midst of one kind of strife or another.
Please do share my page with fellow realism-based sci fi fans, especially anyone who enjoys Older’s Infomocracy, Card’s Speaker for the Dead, or movies like “Arrival” and “Don’t Look Up”. I'm convinced my books would appeal to the same audience, because I wrote them for me and I'm in that audience.
Thanks for your support!
XHY
https://XHoYenAuthor.com