iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 09/08/2026

Going to be at Worldcon at the end of the month, btw! Here's my schedule: guide.lacon.org/people/a8294...

guide.lacon.org

LACon V Program Guide

LACon V Programme Guide

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Tara Sim @tarasimauthor.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I am so delighted to share that my short story is now up on the Uncanny website! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it 💫 www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-hu...

uncannymagazine.com

A Hundred Ways the Story Ends - Uncanny Magazine

Ending 1 The world decays. It is your fault. Ending 2 The world decays. It is only somewhat your fault. Ending 3 Do I need to say it? Are you beginning to understand? Ending 4 Clearly not. End...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 29/06/2026

A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE celebrated its first anniversary this week! To celebrate, here's some absolutely gorgeous art by Sarah Skrutskie of one of my favorite scenes ❤️☀️ www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771397...

Illustration of Katrien and Emory from A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE. Katrien, a large platinum-blonde long-haired white woman, stands in the center of a galaxy of glowing lights emanating from the golden token around her neck, staring up in wonder. Emory, a blonde short-haired white man, stares up at her in awe.

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 03/05/2026

I've adored @bethfullerart.bsky.social's dreamy, intricate landscapes for years, and I'm thrilled I got to commission one from her! Beth's rendering of the Mouth of Hell from A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE perfectly captures the menace of the citadel standing over the interdimensional rift.

A massive black spire stands over a glowing, volcanic rift, framed by two cliffs. Two small soldier figures stand on the left cliff face, staring out at the menacing landscape. The style is intricately detailed, with billowing, underlit clouds in the background

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Amal El-Mohtar @amalelmohtar.com · 03/01/2026

THE RAVEN SCHOLAR has me in an absolute chokehold, what an incredibly well-paced jewel of a book, I love the feeling of looking at the 400 remaining pages & feeling the anticipatory loss of it coming to an end

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 28/12/2025

(if it seems like I was supposed to post this back in October when I started my new job, shh)

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 28/12/2025

In case you missed it, the second issue of my newsletter's up! Subscribe to catch the next update! skrutskie.beehiiv.com/p/tpigu-2-th...

skrutskie.beehiiv.com

TPIGU #2: The Summer Sabbatical

On three months of writing "full time"

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Have not been able to get this passage from @vajra.me out of my head:

How do we become inedible to the machine? The visual artists, our beloved cousins, have more tools to poison their data against the colonizers of AI, but what’s there for those of us who work with only words? How do we become inedible to the machine? How do we poison it? Here is my answer: the machine will shake your tree and peel your oranges, but it can only eat the rind, so fill your vesicles with strange juices. The machine cannot understand even the fundamental cells of storytelling (metaphor &c.) much less the more complex organs and frames that we grow to support our stories—the reverse walpolitical manoeuvre, for instance, as a political-ethical-narratological exoskeleton—so it can only approximate the flavedo, and perhaps an albedo may be suggested as an accidental byproduct of a reader’s pareidolia, but beyond that there is only a hollow. Become more than the rind of yourself, and you’ll have employment yet for the rest of your days.

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 22/11/2025

Thank you for the shout out! ❤️☀️

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K.A. Doore @kadoore.com · 22/11/2025

A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE by @skrutskie.com - bi MCs - the war against the Demon Lord is over - now it's time for Infrastructure Week™️ - but things are a little awkward around the guy you hooked up with when you thought you were gonna die - & you have to think about the future?? rude

bookshop.org

A Legionnaire's Guide to Love and Peace: A Novel

A Novel

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 07/11/2025

genuinely how it feels to go from working in vfx to working in animation

Panel from Chainsaw Man depicting Denji in the bath singing "Union job, paid days off" while beating the side of the bathtub. Off-screen Aki shouts "You're taking too long in the bath!"

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Alex White @alexwhite.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

*trying to ignore state of universe for 2 seconds* It's week 2 of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe's SUPER SALE! Just $1.99 on eBook at most fine retailers and also Jeff's. (Pls share, it helps) Bookshop bookshop.org/p/books/a-bi... Jeff's Amazon www.amazon.com/Ship-Edge-Un...

bookshop.org

A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Check out A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe - A crew of outcasts tries to find a legendary ship before it falls into the hands of those who would use it as a weapon in this science fiction adv...

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Jared Pechaček @vandroidhelsing.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

free shipping on bookshop! the perfect time to get a book! and do I have one for you! weird medieval guys, gender™️, cannibalism, living beehives, illustrations, and big monster ladies

bookshop.org

The West Passage

Check out The West Passage - THE LADIES REIGN. THE PALACE ROTS. THE BEAST RISES. Five starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, BookPage, Library Journal, and...

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Natalie Zed @nataliezed.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Getting to show you all this cover and announce that VILLAIN is officially coming out in May of next year is such a joy and a relief i don't even know how to express it. www.harpercollins.com/products/vil...

the cover for a book entitled Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots. the cover is a bright magenta with dark blue and teal lettering for the title, and the author's name is in yellow. there is an image of the silhouette of a woman carrying a cane, surrounded by the silhouettes of five superheroes.

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Kalyn Josephson @kalynjosephson.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

🌟COVER REVEAL🌟 Howl’s Moving Castle meets Six of Crows in THE LIBRARY OF AMORLIN, releasing 3/3/26 from Kensington Books. Art by Simon Prades. Preorder: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-librar... Add on GR: www.goodreads.com/book/show/22...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 01/10/2025

FEEL THAT. Especially because my primary form of exercise is climbing, so it's like my technique is getting better and I'm getting stronger, but my overall ability isn't improving at the same rate and I'm still mostly working the same grades I was a few years ago 🥲

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 01/10/2025

There's almost 190lbs of me! That's so much to pull up! But maybe if I bind it to my roguelike grinding, we'll get somewhere 😂

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 01/10/2025

Whatever I can do 12 reps of with dumbbells and a mat! Mostly upper body stuff because I have a dream of doing a pull-up someday 😂

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 01/10/2025

Playing a game I call "Swole Hades," where every time I beat a boss in Hades 2, I do a set apiece of three different exercises. At the rate I've been ripping through Hades 2, I'm on track to get both the true ending and that Nemesis Build by like... next week.

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alix e. harrow @alixeharrow.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

wrote a little essay about prose, 90s historical romances, and why fascists love AI so much 💕 subscribe to my newsletter to enter a giveaway for a physical arc of the everlasting! buttondown.com/alixeharrow#...

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

New story from me @lightspeedmagazine.com, maybe the bleakest I've ever written. It's about: -AI’s effect on teaching literature -what literature can (& can't) actually teach us -trans fatherhood -the road to hell being paved with white saviorism www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/tell...

lightspeedmagazine.com

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness - Lightspeed Magazine

USER: this is a message for Milwaukee Elementary’s curator Jude Towers, I hope this is the right address. anyway thanks for the story you had RIGHTR generate for my 10th graders’ Empathy Week. it was ...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 13/09/2025

Officially kicking off the newsletter with an intro post! If you'd like to keep up with all the hot updates going forward, please subscribe! skrutskie.beehiiv.com/p/tpigu-1-an...

skrutskie.beehiiv.com

TPIGU #1: An Introduction

On ten years as a professional author and the title of this newsletter

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Mary Robinette Kowal @maryrobinettekowal.com · 12/09/2025

It was an honor to contribute a short story for the gorgeous Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before anthology. The Kickstarter for Lesbians in Space 2: The Sapphics Strike Back funded in 24 hours. Help them reach their stretch goals: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s... @wctracy.bsky.social

Elsie the cat on a quilt, curled up around Lesbians in Space.

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E.K. Johnston @ekjohnston.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

The Third Period Comeback started in the drive-through of the Bank of Montreal in St. Albert Alberta. It's older than The Story of Owen, and grew from the same seed. I cracked a 14yo plot problem last summer. AND NOW IT'S A BOOK.

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 07/09/2025

decided to turn this mood into impetus to launch a newsletter. sign up for all the hottest skrutskie updates! skrutskie.beehiiv.com

skrutskie.beehiiv.com

This Pigeon Isn't Giving Up

The creative life of Emily Skrutskie

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 25/08/2025

monday(/eternal) publishing mood

A picture of a pigeon captioned "Hit by a Car and Dumped in the Trash, But This Pigeon Isn't Giving Up"

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Margaret Owen @what-eats-owls.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

I decided to reformat the Little Thieves preview comic I drew so it could read easier on Instagram, and realized I hadn't posted it here AT ALL despite it being four years old! Time to fix that!

This is the cover of a comic, which would ordinarily be a bit cumbersome to do alt-text for in a comprehensive manner. HOWEVER, this happens to be based on my book, so I'll just paste in the excerpts from the book that explain what's happening on each page!

Inside of the front cover, with a bit of context that reads: "THE FOLLOWING is an excerpt from an early chapter of Little Thieves . . . kind of. I’ve adapted it to be a comic! This means that there are minor changes to the text in order to give more context or explain things where words are, for once, worth a thousand pictures. If you’d like at least a little context before diving in, we can do that here too:

Our heroine (?) Vanja is on her way back from yet another party she’s attended in the guise of Gisele, the princess who she used to serve . . .
until Vanja stole her identity.

Vanja has, in fact, used Gisele’s identity as a cover to spend the last year infiltrating high society events, stealing from the rich and giving to,
well, herself, mainly.

Tonight is no exception. But Vanja is distracted by the news that Gisele’s loathesome fiancé is demanding a wedding in two weeks, and that he’s summoned highly-trained detectives to find the thief who’s been harrying his nobles.

And Vanja has yet to realize that the party hosts she stole from, Ezbeta and Gustav von Eisendorf, had a better security system than she thought . . ."

The footman helps me into the Reigenbach-blue coach, and I glance to the corner. The satchel is there, ceramic jars clinking quietly as the coach rocks from my weight. I seat myself nearby, sweeping my skirts over it, and accept a steaming waterskin from the footman. It’s been filled with boiling water for heat, and I settle it on my lap as the door shuts, then draw a soft, heavy fur wrap over myself to make a cozy cocoon against the chill. It’s going to be a long ride back to Minkja, but at least it will give me time to think.
The coach lurches forward, and I burrow deeper into the fur.
The way I see it, I have three problems.
First: I don’t have enough money to leave right now. A thousand gilden is enough to last a spendthrift countess five months, a shrewd laborer five years. It’s enough to get me out of the Blessed Empire of Almandy, through one of the borders that isn’t a bloodbath, and it will buy . . . I don’t know what. A ship? A storefront? A farm? All that matters is that it will buy me a life far from here.
And it must be far, if I am to escape my godmothers. Far enough for them to lose their claim to me.
Death told me once that she and Fortune are different beyond our borders of the Blessed Empire. That the Low Gods and their believers are like rivers and valleys, each shaping the other over time. In other lands, she is a messenger, a black dog, a warrior queen; Fortune is a horn of plenty, an eightfold-goddess, a serpent-headed titan. They wear different forms, abide by different laws.
So maybe, outside the Blessed Empire, they will no longer be my godmothers. It’s the only way I can think to be free of them. Right now, I have just enough to get past the border as is, but I will be a commoner again, alone and friendless and without a penny to my name, and I know what happens to girls like that. I’d planned to solve this problem with another theft, but . . .

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 25/08/2025

Avatar (2009) was the first time I really articulated "I want to work in film as a bridge between tech and artistry." And then I did. On Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash.

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Sandra Proudman @sandraproudman.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

✨WE ARE LIVE!✨ Almost 400 amazing items are available to help #KidLit4Ceasefire families survive the genocide in Gaza! 322 still without bids: www.32auctions.com/organization...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 19/08/2025

This is beautiful work. I love how precisely you've threaded the connection between all of these subjects!

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Wendy Xu @wendyxu.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

surprise i just dropped a new article! i had a lot of thoughts about how people don't know how to engage with fiction, which ties into chatgpt delusion & book bans among other things. big thanks to @cxorlando.bsky.social for telling me to write about it when i posted a throwaway insta story

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Darcie Little Badger @littlebadger.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Sheine Lende, a book inspired by my family’s history in Texas, just won THE LODESTAR award at the Hugos, and I am so immensely grateful to everyone who supported my story 😭❤️ I walked the stage in a Lipan camp dress that was hand-sewn by my mother.

Darcie stands on a stage and holds a little silver robot statue

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 19/08/2025

it's time to get back to my roots (shitposting about my work)

Four panel comic. The first panel is captioned Regular Couple and features A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE. The second panel is captioned Yaoi Couple and features BONDS OF BRASS. The third panel is captioned Yuri Couple and features both THE SALVATION GAMBIT and THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US. The fourth panel shows Edward Elric giving a thumbs up and is captioned I See No Difference, Love Is Love

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Katherine Lam @ LBX 431 @katherinelam.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

was invited to make a piece for an Emmy's FYC pop-up event for Andor ❤️‍🔥

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Victoria Strauss @victoriastrauss.com · 15/08/2025

New #WriterBeware blog post: A brief backgrounder on authors' class action lawsuit against Anthropic for unauthorized AI training, plus how you can find out if your books may be included and how to add yourself to a contact list for official class action notices writerbeware.blog/2025/08/15/b...

writerbeware.blog

Bartz v Anthropic: Find Out if You May Be Part of This Class Action - Writer Beware

Almost exactly a year ago, a group of authors filed suit against AI company Anthropic over its creation of an enormous library of digitized books to train its Claude LLMs. In addition to purchasing an...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 14/08/2025

For the Goodreads-inclined among you, it's the last day to enter for your chance to win a copy of A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE! Don't miss out! 💙📚 www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

goodreads.com

Book giveaway for A Legionnaire's Guide to Love and Peace by Emily Skrutskie Jul 21-Aug 14, 2025

Enter to win one of 10 free copies available. Giveaway dates from Jul 21-Aug 14, 2025. Enter for a chance to win a paperback copy of A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUID...

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 11/08/2025

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY! If you'd like to do something special for me today, I'd really appreciate any support you can spare for A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE. Here's a handy guide to five easy ways you can do so for free! 💙📚

Five Free Ways to Support (in less than five minutes)
- Request at your library
- Make a social post
- Review on a retail site
- Review on Goodreads/Storygraph
- Tell a friend!

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R.S.A. Garcia (BUY THE NIGHTWARD) @rsagarcia.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Update to my cancer treatment, or, The One Where the Doctors Scare Me Half to Death (but we're 95% sure I'll be OK now). Please boost and share. I'm less than $3000 from my goal now, and getting there would tremendous. www.gofundme.com/f/help-r-s-a...

gofundme.com

Donate to Help R. S. A. Garcia Pay for Cancer Expenses, organized by Arula Ratnakar

Hi everyone, I'm Rhonda, also known as R. S. A. Garcia, a speculative … Arula Ratnakar needs your support for Help R. S. A. Garcia Pay for Cancer Expenses

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 09/08/2025

(rip to the version of me that was actually going to touch code for this though 😅)

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 09/08/2025

Okay this isn't half bad for a single afternoon's work, and Google Sites turns out to be a great tool for spinning up a barebones set of pages with everything I need on them. So the new skrutskie.com is officially live!

skrutskie.com

Emily Skrutskie

Hi, I'm Emily Skrutskie, speculative fiction author, digital plumber, and tall drink of water.

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Emily Skrutskie @skrutskie.com · 08/08/2025

thought it would be a good little project to try to reboot my website from scratch and polish up my ancient, rusting webdev skills, but it turns out the hard part is the fact that somehow now i have EIGHT published books to add to this thing

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