Title Unavailable; December 16 2025

Sometimes, blog posts need to happen a day early. It balances out the late or missed ones.

No, but truly, I have an announcement about a hard decision I’ve made. As some of you may know, I had two books up for purchase on Amazon, e-book format only, self-published years ago without any fanfare. I kind of just wanted to put them somewhere, at the time. I had no idea what it takes to self-publish books properly, but I did hire graphic designers for the book covers, and I still love and appreciate the work they did.

Cover by icedmako.

Cover by Vincent Roy.

But that was all I did, really. I learned later how much should go into a properly self-published book, but I never had the finances to revamp them, so I just left them on Amazon. They were old stories with inherent problems, but they were still mine, and I liked having them up.

Well, yesterday, I officially took them off the virtual shelf and deleted my author account with Kindle.

The short of it is that they’re including an AI bot that goes through your book so that readers can ask the bot questions about it as they read. This might not sound like a huge thing to you, but there are some factors I’m hugely opposed to, here. I don’t want AI touching my work. As AI goes through my writing, it ‘learns’ from it. Copies it. Steals the style I write in, the voice I’ve developed, and does it while destroying the environment as it sucks up so much energy that other actually-crucial resources are drained.

I hate genAI. I will never endorse it, I will never willingly use it. And Kindle has said that the implementation of this bot is not something authors can opt out of.

So, those books have been taken down.

If you still have your copies of The Wishing Maiden and Virtually Reality, that’s great – thank you so much for supporting me while they were still available! I’m not sure if I’ll be republishing these works elsewhere, though I’ve had an idea about that; I might, starting sometime in 2026, release both books via a chapter per month in my author newsletter. I’ve had the subscription option open for a while, but don’t often do newsletters just because I update this blog so often on its own.

I hope no one’s terribly disappointed by this news. Honestly, I’m disappointed, but not in myself. I’m disappointed that corporations/companies continue to insist genAI is an inevitability we need to embrace.

Have some spine. Don’t use it just because they say we have to. We’ll find our way around it.