iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Deep in Pendle Witch country for research. Days are long and beautiful. Pages and pages of notes, hundreds of photos. Pestering everyone in Lancashire for information. I can hardly believe I get to do this.

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Adam P Knave @adampknave.com · 03/07/2025

REMEMBER: All the "Don't use em-dashes" "don't use rule of three" advice because it makes your writing "look like AI" is because they stole actual writers work, and their "predict the next thing" stuff just simulates what WE FUCKING DO. Keep writing well. Use every style and trick you have. Fuck AI.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Oh no, the novel I'm writing got scary and now I can't sleep. What a normal, sensible career I have.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Spent the day buried in the archives at the wonderful Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. So incredibly blessed to be able to do this sort of research.

Meg stands in front of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

A "concealed object" (a poppet, previously hidden inside a house)

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Yesterday I had to make the difficult decision to let my boy Captain cross the bar. He was my first cat - a menace who feared neither God nor man - and I loved him very much. He slipped away very peacefully, and did not suffer.

Picture of a fluffy grey cat asleep on a green couch.

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Indie Book Spotlight @bookspotlight.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

i'd rather ask ursula from the little mermaid for a favour and life advice than ask chatgpt anything

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Thankfully I work best with something playing in the background!

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Never apologise, the obsession was and is still real

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

(But also thank you I will watch this immediately)

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

NO OH MY GOD DAMMIT AMANDA I HAVE SO MUCH WORK TO DO

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Eric Smith @ericsmithrocks.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Me: Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? My Editor: Please I’m just asking for a few small changes.

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Ellie Marney @elliemarney.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Instead of using AI, I wrote a book simply by imagining things through the power of my entirely organic brain and writing them down, so now I guess I have to go edit it.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

It's like UQP somehow knew I'd be caught in a downpour today, because look what was waiting for me when I got home! So excited to be working with this wonderful team to bring Flash into the world next year.

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Meg Elison @megelison.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Alright, it's not his best work but Stephen King's newest, "Never Flinch," ends with a list of people who have been murdered for defending reproductive justice and I will never, ever quit this man. Constant reader, to the very last.

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Lee Knox Ostertag @leeknoxostertag.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

kind of obsessed with 2025 pride merch...I'm calling it cowardcore.

abercrombie and fitch 'pride mid rise jorts' which are literally just jorts with a rainbow tag inside the pant.

abercrombie & fitch 'pride long sleeved striped button up shirt' that is...a green and white striped shirt. hello am I going crazy.

beige terrycloth shorts from target. nothing about them indicates pride except that they are listed as such on the website.

levi's 'pride icon' skirt which is literally just a short dark denim skirt. nothing to indicate 'pride' except that there is one image of a male model wearing it which technically you could do with any item of clothing but go off I guess

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Diane Duane @diane.dianeduane.com · 28/05/2025

These feckers have already made off with my last almost-five-decades' worth of creative output to try to "teach" their hopped-up answering machine how to fake writing. If anyone ever *breathed* the suggestion to me that I should willingly use that soi-disant "tool"...it would not go well for them.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Migraine be dammed, I now have a full itinerary for my research trip in June/July. Highlights include talks at a school in the UK, visiting a museum of witchcraft, ghost-hunting on a very haunted hill, and visiting the national archives to see arrest records for my witches.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

(The grammar is often *not* better, but some writers do use it because they are insecure about that part of writing)

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

4. Personally, I would recommend avoiding generative AI in your writing at all costs.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

3. Young creatives are most vulnerable to the spin here. Develop your craft without AI as much as you can. Then, if it's a tool you feel you want to experiment with and you can live with the environmental and ethical compromise, you can use it *as* a tool rather than becoming reliant on it.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

2. If you are using generative AI to actually do the writing, it is usually pretty obvious after about 400 words. AI grammar might be better, but AI writing is always worse.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

1. Tech companies and AI bros are trying to push AI with the promise that it will help to reduce the disappointment, the uncertainty, the frustration, and the difficulty of writing. But those things are where creativity is forged. Without them, you don't really get the joy either.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Yesterday I did a workshop for teenagers, and a participant asked me about my stance on using AI in creative writing. Here are my main points:

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Bev Twomey @bevtwomey.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

The Cover is Here! What the Sea Brings is swimming to bookshops, August 12th, 2025 from @snowywingspublishing.com Artwork by @scarvenartist.bsky.social and Typography by Miblart Available for Pre-orders NOW! books2read.com/whattheseabrings

The cover for What the Sea Brings by Beverly Twomey. It features a young girl with braids wearing a white novice robe sitting on a rock and looking pensively towards the pastel horizon. In the background a small mermaid tail is seen in the water.

Artist is Kelsi Johnson @scarvenartist and Design is by MiblArt

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

It is (finally finally finally) official!

Matt Smith saying "Trust me, I'm The Doctor"

Photo of doctor of philosophy qualification

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I've been doing school visits for the last 10 years! Happy to weigh in.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

I cannot tell you how hard I smashed the preorder button. My computer may never recover.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

My stack so far this year. I'm a little behind but I'll catch up!

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Do you knit? I feel like you would love it.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

It's gunslinging and asexual and nonbinary and crimes and Western Australia and everything 17 year old me thought they'd never see in a book. Get ready! www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/202...

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 22/03/2025

This made me cheer. It gets directly at a problem I’ve often noticed: people don’t fundamentally understand what a historian *does*.

Ethical: There is a particular paradox that makes Al essentially useless as a tool for studying history. The entire point of what we do as historians is to look for untold stories...elements of the history of mankind that are novel and unexpected. There is a fundamental epistemological disjuncture between what PhD-holding historians do and what ChatGPT and its ilk do: the former meticulously, purposefully, and rigorously comb through a mountain of human-curated documents looking
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for revealing details that diverge from the baseline, offer indications of cultural shift, or elements humanity embedded in seemingly mundane activities; the latter processes terabytes of machine-harvested data in order to predict what will be the most likely next token in a string, and when these tokens are words they may or may not result in a grammatically coherent sentence.

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the hype @thehyyyype.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

"if we can't train AI on copyrighted works, then it'll never get to the point where we can make tons of money off of it" ok? how is that anyone else's problem? If I can't rob a bank, then I won't have $20 million tomorrow. Should I be allowed to rob a bank then?

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Mara Wilson @marawilson.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I think most of who have worked in writing or entertainment know that piracy is a fact of life, and has been for a long time now. But there’s a difference between a broke student downloading a PDF of your book, and a multibillion dollar company stealing your work for its own bullshit purposes.

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Dax, sapphic fantasy author @daxaeterna.ink · 21/03/2025

Finally found it. The average book thief makes between 60k and 99K USD. The average author makes around 10k. Most pirates are stealing from people worse off than themselves. But they cosplay as poor or use poor people as a shield to justify their class warfare. torrentfreak.com/wealthy-olde...

torrentfreak.com

eBook Pirates Are Relatively Old and Wealthy, Study Finds * TorrentFreak

A new study has found that people who illegally download eBooks are older and wealthier than most people's perception of the average pirate. Commissioned by anti-piracy company Digimarc, the study sug...

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Chelsea M. Cameron (she/they) @chel-c-cam.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

If artists aren’t workers or laborers, then it’s easy to yell at them that it’s YOUR right to steal what they create.

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Chelsea M. Cameron (she/they) @chel-c-cam.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

This fight over “should authors get paid for their work” debate boils down to this: many, MANY people do not see art as labor. If art isn’t labor, then you don’t have to change your political views to justify piracy. Easy peasy!

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

If you write a book about someone who is an expert on tea, it's research.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

I identified as a girl at the time so here it is: RENT, Drops of Jupiter, Walking on Sunshine, Jewel, Missy Higgins, Wicked, Bad Day by Daniel Powter (I feel very exposed with this list)

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

I'm so excited to share this story with all of you. Enormous thanks to my agent @bothersomewords.bsky.social , and of course to my PhD supervisors Deborah and Danielle, who helped me believe this story was worth telling.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

It's a book about being queer, and how the history of queerness in Australia has been silenced. It's also an adventure story set in Western Australia - Fremantle and Mundaring in particular.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Flash was a PhD novel, written during covid, during a challenging pregnancy, during those small hours of the night between caring for a newborn as a solo parent.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

It's been a long road, but I just signed a contract with UQP for the publication of my YA historical fiction, A Flash in the Dust!

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Last year was an agony of waiting on various things, kind of a holding year? And so 2025 has been a flurry of chickens and so much news. A long-winded way to say, something exciting hit my inbox today and I can't wait to share it!

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Anne would *censored* Calico would *censored* Read would enjoy some quiet time fishing with his love. Bram would buy Fletcher a gaudy item of clothing that Fletcher would never wear (inevitably to be stolen by Anne. It's happened before). Fletcher would agonise about the whole day for weeks.

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Dr Meg Caddy @megcaddy.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Happy days of staying up until 3am wandering around Middle Earth :)

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