There’s A Joke About Entrepreneurs...

There’s this old joke that entrepreneurs will work eighty hours a week to avoid working forty. It’s funny, and it feels true, but it also misses something enormously important: the impact of self-determination.

Every job I’ve ever worked, even the ones that were predominantly good, required a bunch of daily bullshit I knew wasn’t necessary to my, or anyone else’s, job function, but had to happen anyway for either vague corporate “reasons” or to calm the irrational anxieties of executives and managers.

Spending your limited time on this Earth performing bullshit saps your will to live. Sure, you’ve got your evenings and weekends “free”—though they’re increasingly endangered in corporate America—but what’s the quality of that free time if you’re so burned out you can’t even enjoy it?

Working for yourself may not be compatible with a consistent forty-hour work week, and it may not have nice, clear boundaries between your work and the rest of your life, but you get to spend your days doing work that actually feels meaningful and valuable, and that’s energizing, not exhausting.

You bet your ass I’ll work eighty good hours to avoid working forty bad ones. I’ll take that trade every time!

Speaking of working for yourself, our publishing work at Shiraki Press has the spotlight this month, leading with our upcoming third publication: The Color of Time by Millie Abecassis, launching May 19! You can get your copy here.

This is such a unique and lovely book. It’s a sapphic science-fantasy evolution of the French fairy tale Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault, and Millie Abecassis—herself a French author—takes it in her own direction, particularly in the second half, which in the original aged like fine milk but here is modernized and sharpened to an exacting point. You haven’t read anything quite like this, and you’ll still be thinking about it long after you’ve finished.

That gorgeous cover illustration is by Hugo Award winner Alyssa Winans (recently profiled by Locus), with typography and layout by me.

In other publishing news:

• We released gardencore romantic fantasy Wine for Roses by Emily O’Malley Liu last month, and it had a sold-out launch event!
• We just revealed the cover for our fourth title, Fruits of Our Labor by Ian Patterson, designed in full by yours truly.
• I’m into my second round of edits on my first Shiraki Press book as editor, which we’ll be announcing soon.
• Brianne and I were recently interviewed for Book Publishers Northwest News, where we discussed our reasons for starting the press, the kinds of work we’re looking for, and our experiences of our first year.

I love my publishing work, but I’m also starting to feel the distance from my own writing growing in an unsustainable way.

It’s not solely because of the time I’m spending on publishing: I also have a toddler at home, and two part-time step-kids with special needs, and the general work of keeping a house and keeping a marriage and keeping facing this sociopolitical hellscape where all the bad people have power and all the good people have to struggle, and it’s just so hard for my own writing to climb up high enough on the priority list most days.

Anyway, some things that have recently brought me joy:

• I’m lately finding myself backing off from Bluesky and leaning almost exclusively into Mastodon. I see more engagement, more consistently, on Mastodon, and the content in my feed is less gossipy and more thoughtful and interesting. Your mileage may vary, of course—Mastodon is still a somewhat tech-oriented community—but it’s been good for me.
• A skill- and knowledge-sharing website for the Fediverse? Hell yeah, this is praxis.
• I discovered Low Tech Magazine recently and I kind of adore their whole thing. Here’s how to run an entire website off a solar panel!
• The first Sunday of every month, di.day focuses on your move toward digital independence. Check out their recipes for switching away from exploitative Big Tech.
• I just found personalsit.es which indexes, you guessed it, personal websites. I just love this kind of pushback against the hegemony of Big Tech platforms!

And some stuff I need to yell about:

• You should already not be using Microsoft Edge, but if you need further convincing, how about the discovery that it stores all your saved passwords in memory in plaintext?
• Someone put out a fake Notepad++ for Mac. Don’t get scammed!
• This national OS-level age verification bill could make it illegal to use a computer at all without handing over your personal info, and could shut young people out from computing entirely. Here’s a great post on all the ways this gets it wrong.
• AI is being trained on liquidated companies’ employee data: Slack messages, emails, and more. As a former employee of a dead company, you don’t get to consent, or even be informed. Great system we have here!
• Not to put it all on tech, but I do wonder how much of the reduction in donations to non-profit Seattle arts organizations is a direct result of so many local tech folks losing their jobs, and with it the disposable income that would’ve fueled those donations. The collapse of the tech industry has far-reaching consequences.
• There are far too many satellites in orbit. Way more than you think. No, even more than that.

Upcoming events:

• I’ll be tabling for Shiraki Press at Bremerton by the Book on Saturday May 23, where we will have copies of Accelerated Growth Environment, Wine for Roses, and The Color of Time for sale!

That’s all for now!