Government Loans for Mystery Writers—Not!

This is as nutty as I get, folks. My latest post at the Sleuthsayers mystery blog today is heavily inspired by the government loans the U.S. feds are handing out to…well, just about anyone these days, if only to keep the economy going.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if writers—specifically mystery writers—could carve off a piece of that action? Well, now they can!

Please check it out, if you’re so inclined.

The link to the blog post is here.

If you like my work, kindly consider bookmarking Sleuthsayers. The next post will be in three weeks.

If you’re looking for reading material during this hellish time, I hope you’ll consider one of my books or my wife’s. If ever there was a time for escapism, it’s now!

The e-book versions of both of my two most recent books, Murder on Book Row and the fantasy novel, Sorceress Kringle, are available at almost every online retailer. You can order print copies at the usual suspects online, or autographed copies from Malaprop’s, the bookstore in my nabe.

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Book “collage” photo credit: Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Hacker News readers weigh in on my 2000 Discover article

Back in January I told you how an article I wrote for Discover magazine in the year 2000 was suddenly back in the news, garnering, among other things, a mention in a CNN piece. That same Discover story was recently re-discovered by a slew of readers at the computer science news site, Hacker News, sparking a thread of nearly 150 comments.

The thread is here, if you want to check it out.

A reminder: The 20-year-old Discover story asked scientists, physicians, and other experts to predict what life would be like in 2020. “What You’ll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don’t Know Now,” appeared in the September 2000 issue of the science magazine. Among other things, we reported that in 2020 we’d need to know how to talk to our homes, that we’d fret a lot about our online reputations, and we’d need to have our irises scanned to board aircraft. All sorta, kinda true, as the folks discussing it on this thread point out.

There are certainly some quibbles among the comments, which is what makes these kind of things interesting.

Does that mean I’m an “old” writer?

“Prepare Yourself for 2020”

If you’re interested, my original story lives on the Discover magazine website.

The CNN article is here. (My article is mentioned late in the piece.)

If you’re into science, my Discover story also appears in my nonfiction book, The Scientist and the Sociopath, which is a collection of my best science writing.

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Credit: Crystal ball image by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash