Loosening up and pen-learning exercises. Yes, I count these: if I fill a page, it gets a number.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Going back to basics to work on my linework - an exercise from The Artist's Guide to Pen and Ink, if I remember correctly.
And, yes, I've been drawing every day, just not posting them while I was in convention season.
-the Centaur
At last, it's here! My personal copy of the Worldcon Academic book has arrived at the Boobie Hatch!
This book, which captures the articles submitted to the 2025 Worldcon Academic Track, has the first fruits of the thirty-year-old research project I (re)started with my good friend Kenneth Moorman - the Captain's Advisory Tool system, a tongue-in-cheek project to advise starship captains on how to tackle problems based on Captain's Log entries from previous episodes.
The original CAT project was infeasible - not just because Captain's Log entries don't really exist, but because Kenny's thesis project, ISAAC, was a system to read science fiction stories. For the project to work, he would need to have finished his thesis, built a time machine, and then sent it back to us. Like most solutions that require a time machine, this replaced a small problem with a big one.
Thirty years later, large language models (LLMs) made it feasible to process text, so we rechristened the project LCATS (the LLM Captain's Advisory Tool System, after LCARS, the Library Computer Access/Retrieval System from Star Trek). But we soon found ourselves back at the same problem: we needed a collection of stories, and Star Trek synopses weren't cutting it.
Digging into Project Gutenberg as an alternative source, we found that many stories contained multiple problems, so we turned to "scene and sequel" theory in professional writing craft as a way of extracting reasonable problem-solution sequences out of stories. To our surprise, dramatic scenes and dramatic sequels appear well-grounded in cognitive science, and were extractable via LLMS.
Our paper in this volume chronicles just the start of this research project, but we feel it makes a strong case for using digital humanities analysis to bridge the gap between literary criticism, cognitive science, and professional writing craft. I posted the abstract already, so here's the first paragraph, which (ahem) a little bit less dry than abstract writing:
A funny thing happened on our way towards building an artificial intelligence system that learned from science fiction stories: We discovered that techniques from professional writing craft were surprisingly compatible with cognitive science models of how readers process stories. Our work to harmonize writing technique with narrative science resulted in a model of story structure that not only helps explain why stories have the impact that they do on humans, but may help machines extract useful lessons from stories. This paper presents our work to date developing this model of story structure, first laying the groundwork in our initial motivations, then exploring how writing craft and narrative science came together in the development of our model, and then finally sketching our work to build a corpus of stories to validate our ideas.
Our paper is the first in the volume, and we feel highly honored!
So please check it out, and buy the heck out of it so Springer will publish more of them. :-D
-the Centaur
Oh my, you jinxed it, Francis, saying "is it over?" a month or so back. I had a whole presentation to complete for Clockwork Alchemy, which I "finished" only minutes before the actual presentation; then I had a breakneck two weeks working to break down my office in our home in California.
That's where it was. I hoped to finish in a week or so, but ended up packing late the night before I left and running to FedEx in the morning before my flight. But I got it done, and now my wife is free to touch up the walls and floors in there before we rent or sell the place.
So I'm not now going to say "it's over". It's never over, but at least today, I got to breathe.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My lunch at Panera, planning next steps, and our former great room and my temporary post-pandemic, post-renovation office in our house in California.
Our long national nightmare is not yet over, but, thank God, the American people came together and delivered to the Republicans the repudiation they have long deserved.
Forty years ago, I was a conservative Republican, but I slowly turned on Republicans because they put big business over people and the environment, and put discrimination over decency to our fellow human beings. Environmentalism, egalitarianism, and prejudice are dealbreakers for me.
And while I've long been a left-leaning moderate, my longstanding sympathy for conservatism itself has drained away as conservative principles seemed less important to the Right than identifying with an in-group which is protected by the law but not bound by it, and persecuting out-groups which are bound by the law but not protected by it. The recent savage history of immigration enforcement in America, where right-wing pundits almost reflexively justified the government's attempt to thwart due process by claiming that the victims actually deserved it, is one of the clearest examples of conservatives turning their backs on their fundamental constitutional principles to support the cruel and unusual punishment of outsiders, many not yet convicted of a crime.
We need to do better as a country, and we need to start by putting a stop to the people that supported that.
Yes, I oppose many of Trump's policies, and many Republican policies as well. But the real problem was civics: the willingness of the right wing to throw over the norms and rules of our democracy to get short-term political gains---or imagined economic advantages that never materialized. Illegal tariffs, unjustified trade wars, ill-considered actual wars, the bullying of our allies, the embrace of our enemies---and, at first and last, actually live-on-television treason, with Trump and his toadies supporting Russia, which has openly declared itself America's enemy, over our allies.
We need to have tough conversations about our national debt, over immigration, over our support for Ukraine and Israel, over our military, and over how to deal with our enemies abroad like Iran. And patriotic Americans who believe in our constitution and traditional values need to have a say in that process. But we've got to start that process by repudiating the party, and the philosophy, that advocated treating our elected president as a "unitary executive" - a king - and that stacked the Supreme Court with people who betrayed their oath of office by granting immunity to that king for crimes committed while in office.
For that king's minions claimed that he could knock down the Statue of Liberty if he wanted to, even if it was illegal, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.
Not on our watch.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me, just after voting.
So I'll be at Clockwork Alchemy this weekend! https://schedule.clockworkalchemy.com/
Airship Pirates in Science and Fiction
Anthony Francis, Erin Tierney, Gail Carriger
Friday, 1:00 pm–2:30 pm (1.5 hours)
Peninsula 2 (2nd floor)
Impractical as they are, airship pirates show up in a lot of steampunk stories and music.
Rogue Makers in Victorian Science Fiction and Steampunk
Anthony Francis
Saturday, 10:30 am–Noon (1.5 hours)
Peninsula 2 (2nd floor)
The rogue maker trope is a big part of early science fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era. Come and learn more from sci-fi fantasy author and engineer Anthony Francis.
Scriptwriting for screen, comics, and audio dramas
Madeleine Holly-Rosing, J. Scott Coatsworth, Anthony Francis
Sunday, 1:30 pm–3:00 pm (1.5 hours)
Peninsula 2 (2nd floor)
Scriptwriting takes many forms. In this panel, we will discuss a number of script structures, including the difference between writing a script for screen, a comic book, and an audiodrama.
Book Signings
Friday, 4:00 pm–5:00 pm (1 hour)
Sunday, 10:30 am–Noon (1.5 hours)
Aster (1st floor)
Clockwork Alchemy is a great festival of all things steampunk, so I hope to see you all there!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me from a few years ago, when I was guest of honor at Clockwork. This year I'm just a regular guest; this year's guests of honor are the estimable D&McT!
Huzzah! As I have posted over all my socials, the very first Worldcon Academic volume, Building Yesterday's Future for Everyone, is now out! Get it at Amazon or Springer! And I'm even happier to say that my good friend Kenneth Moorman and I have the very first article in the volume!
This paper explores the real cognitive science behind professional writing craft. The "scenes" and "sequels" recommended by writing teachers like Dwight Swain have deep roots in how people become attached to characters in stories and are transported into the narrative as the characters struggle with catastrophes and attempt to find new ways to move towards their goals. From the abstract:
The professional writing community and academic theorists of narrative have both developed rich theories of story structure, but there is comparatively little work on the cognitive validity of professional writing concepts or the practical utility of cognitive science theories. In this paper, we bridge this gap by examining the cognitive validity of “scene” and “sequel” theory from professional writing technique. Our contributions include a terminology of narrative unifying cognitive science and professional writing concepts, a cognitive science analysis of the professional writing concepts of “dramatic scene” and “dramatic sequel,” and a software library for extracting “narrative scenes” from narrative texts to facilitate further study in this area.
Please check it out!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it.
Welp, this was an uplifting post about accepting help and climbing out of the pit of despair, but instead, you get an irritated post about how WordPress crashed during the uploading of the above image, simultaneously creating the impression that (a) it had failed to upload the image and (b) it had succeeded in saving the text of the post.
The reality was the opposite.
So you get a picture with no context, as I have 12 minutes left and two more things to post today.
-the Centaur
Pictured: oh i can't even
i don't know. sure feels like it's over.
Technically speaking, I have 2 more weeks of "convention season" left - the lead-up to Clockwork Alchemy remains, where I'm on 3 or 4 panels, and am also taking my wife and a couple friends to see the Rush 50 Something tour - but the hard part, Dragon Con and Worldcon and the associated Worldcon Academic paper and the fall-from-the-sky Frontiers in Robotics paper edits - are over.
I am so glad I had built up a month and a half of buffer for Drawing Every Day, as I'm still a week ahead.
More in a bit, now that "the Submarine" has surfaced ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me mugging at lunch before taking my wife to the airport, just after a wonderful 20th anniversary trip to Asheville, North Carolina.
Hey folks! I somehow survived Worldcon and after a brief visit with my wife am now at Dragon Con for its fortieth anniversary! Since I went to Dragon Con, like, #1 or #2, this makes it my ... um ... let's not get too hasty on counting those years of coming to conventions, now, shall we?
I'm just on three panels, which is a relief after WorldCon's eight:
- Muddling Through the Mushy Middle
Fri 04:00 pm ~ Hyatt / Embassy EF
Anthony Francis(M), D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, David Boop, Rebecca Moesta, Sherrilyn Kenyon
The idea grabs you & you type furiously! You're going along...you know what the end looks like. You're so excited about this story – then BAM!! Everything slows down. Getting words on the page is a slog. How do you get through the mushy middle to the exciting ending? Come to this panel to find out! - Buried History: The Uncensored Stories 'They' Don't Want You to Know
Sat 10:00 pm ~ Courtland Grand / Augusta
Andrew Hartley(M), D.J. Butler, Jack Campbell, Alex Matsuo, Anthony Francis, David Hankins
Sometimes history gets messy. Maybe it's too complicated, or maybe the facts just don't fit the preferred narrative... Whatever the reason, these are our panelists' favorite stories that didn't make it into our history books. - Corsets & Kimono, Trebuchet, & Guillotine: Alt History & Historical Fantasy
Sun 04:00 pm ~ Hyatt / Embassy EF
Bethanne Kim(M), Leanna Renee Hieber, Clay Griffith, Jack Campbell, Tamsin L. Silver, Anthony Francis
When writing Historical Fantasy & Alternate History, you can't make *everything* up. Some parts must be accurate. Finding the balance between realism & the fantastical is important in these genres. We'll be discussing this and other aspects and challenges of writing history into our fiction.
Hopefully this will be a lot of fun for all! Hope to see you at my panels or around the con!
Dragon Con Forever!
-the Centaur
Pictured: There's some grey on that boat.
Hey folks! A lot has been going on on this boat ... a lot a lot, and it's been alot ... but I have somehow survived and will be going to Worldcon next week. I'll be at six panels, one talk (on the Shape of Science Fiction) and the Academic Poster Session!
The full programming guide is here https://guide.lacon.org/ and my schedule should be linkable here: https://guide.lacon.org/people/05eb0286/anthony-francis :
By day, Anthony Francis creates intelligent machines and emotional robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. Anthony co-edited the award-winning anthology THE NEURODIVERSIVERSE: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS and wrote the award-winning urban fantasy FROST MOON and its sequels BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, all starring magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost. His steampunk includes JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and stories in TWELVE HOURS LATER, THIRTY DAYS LATER, SOME TIME LATER and NEXT STOP ON THE #13. Anthony lives in South Carolina with his wife and cats but his heart belongs in Atlanta. Follow Anthony at dresan.com.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
- 15:00 PDT — Humanoid Robots
Malibu (Hilton) - 16:30 PDT — Robots in Science Fiction: Who’s Writing What in Robotics?
Carmel (Hilton)
Friday, August 28, 2026
- 15:00 PDT — Robots at War: Drones, Big Dogs and Other Robots in Combat
253B (ACC North) - 16:30 PDT — Uh-oh, Eye Contact: Neurodiversity in Science Fiction
253B (ACC North)
Saturday, August 29, 2026
- 15:00 PDT — The Laws of Robotics and Other Ways AI Might Learn from SF
Huntington (Hilton) - 16:30 PDT — Killer Robots and Rogue Computers in SF
Palos Verdes (Hilton)
Sunday, August 30, 2026
- 14:00 PDT — Academic Poster Session
257 (ACC North) - 90 mins - 16:30 PDT — The Shape of Science Fiction
253A (ACC North) - 30 mins
Hope to see you all there!
-the Centaur
Hey folks, as part of trying to get my act together on my writing and my blog, I'm working with the fine folks at Inkslinger PR to try to beat my blog, social media, and even my long-defunct newsletter back into some kind of reasonable shape. So I'm participating in a "Stock up for the Summer" giveaway in which you can enter to win a gift card (and possibly paperbacks!) for signing up to the newsletters of me and a bunch of other authors! Sign up here! https://geni.us/SummerStockUp
That's all for now! More soon.
-the Centaur
... which is great, because when you stop learning, you're dead.
Even for someone like me, who periodically takes wrong turns on purpose just to see where the roads go, you spend most of your time going over the same routes in the same ways.
And - forgive me for being a navigation researcher - if you primarily walk walk or drive purposely, rather than for recreation or exercise, those routes will make a branching tree coming out of your primary residence, with rings of cross-routes between frequent destinations. The grocery store, the office supply store, and the dump; church, a brunch joint, and again the grocery store.
This habitual spiderweb means we rarely explore intersections in a systematic, exhaustive way, except when walking or riding for recreation, or doing some kind of specific neighborhood patrol. Area rises as the square of distance, but we only have so many hours in the day, and so many trips in each neighborhood we live in in our lives; some intersections will naturally get left out.
My wife took a wrong turn coming back from the dump (we live on a "flagpole lot" with an extremely long driveway, so having garbage service would involve carting the garbage can 1000 feet and back every week, which not only I don't want to do, but also I think would wear out the wheels on the garbage can, which is not a long distance vehicle, but I digress), I SAY, she was coming back from the dump and missed her turn onto our street ... and made an interesting discovery.
She didn't have far to drive to the next cross street, and quickly made it home ... but as she did so, she found a fire station with aluminum can recycling three minutes from our house. She'd already told me about another fire station, ten minutes away on the drive to the airport, that accepted aluminum cans for recycling as a fundraising effort; this one was far closer.
We had a microwave die recently, and our mother-in-law did too; so after I took them to e-waste recycling at the Enoree dump, I then followed the same wrong turn my wife had. On the way, I saw the backsides of many landmarks that I knew from the drive. I soon found the fire station, three minutes from our house as predicted, but when I got there, I found something else: the local cell phone tower, looming over an empty lot with an excellent view of the nearby region. No wonder the cell phone coverage is so good where we are.
And on the drive back, I passed an Anglican church, in walking distance of our house. I'm kind of aggressively Episcopalian, and go to the church where I was married and whose rector buried my mother - but this Anglican church had a prayer labyrinth, also within walking distance of home.
I like where we moved to during the pandemic: we now live on the road my father taught me to drive, forty years ago. But today I took a turn that I rarely did, because I listened to my wife; and so today I learned that the place where we live is filled with amenities - a fire station, recycling, a cell tower, a church, a prayer labyrinth - that make it even better than I thought it was.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The cell tower, the fire station, and the recycling bin.
Truly epic vegan dessert pairing at Maestro's Entre Nous speakeasy in downtown Greenville. Probably our third favorite vegan-friendly restaurant in Greenville after Sunbelly and the 07, but tonight's menu they really leveled up. This was a vegan chocolate torte - much creamier than in the past - and a really great sorbet with fresh fruit, all paired up with great sauces and yin-yang plates for date night with my lovely vegan wife.
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, I said it.
We had a wonderful hike in Asheville last Friday, though we had to keep the pace manageable due to my broken toe. After breakfast at The Smokin Onion - and those great croissant muffins - we decided to work off the dessert on a nearby trail attached to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Our hike began at the Folk Art Center, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of, because I was doing quite a bit of limping. Even though I switched to normal shoes to protect my toe, I brought my flat-bottomed shoe just in case the pain got too much and we had to turn around.
There was no need. We had a long hike, with a nice Lovecraftian green tunnel (up top) and despite getting turned around a bit when we turned around, we nevertheless made it back in time to get a cocktail at Battery Park, a fantastic wine bar and bookstore in downtown Asheville, before going to the even more fantastic vegan restaurant Plant for a wonderful dinner and even more dessert.
It was a pretty good day.
-Anthony
The above amazing example of a vegan dessert is a close relative of a "cronut" - where a cronut(TM) is a croissant donut, this is something like a croissant muffin, and it's a decadently delicious dessert often found at The Smokin Onion, a vegan restaurant in Asheville that my wife and I like. Once I suggested that we split one of those desserts, and she's like, "get your own!"
Now, I thought THAT was a donut(-like food).
But that's not a donut.
THIS is a donut.
These are apparently from Parlor Donuts in Greenville, SC, "made in small batches every day." They are absolutely not vegan in any way, shape or substantial form. They looked beyond delicious; they looked Cinnabon levels of absolutely unhealthy, and I declined to wreck my blood sugar with them.
What even is that atop the upper two donuts? A fried egg?
Blogging every day, not eating those every day, that's for sure. Would you like a wafer-thin mint?
-the Centaur
So a sale just dropped out of the sky at https://bookshop.org/shop/TIP ... bookshop.org is apparently running an Anti-Prime Day Sale with free shipping and discounts across the site, and you can get Thinking Ink Press books at 20% off at the link above. This runs through Friday!
We found out, I quickly met with Betsy via Meet to discuss how to promote it, and the rest of the team weighed in with copy ideas on Signal. A quick sprint to Canva produced these graphics ...
Support indie bookstores indeed!
And indie publishers. https://bookshop.org/shop/TIP
-the Centaur
I'm sure this is obvious to most people who are not dumb that the key discovery of the person known as the world's greatest smarty pants might be a difficult subject, but I apparently have the dumb. I have been studying general relativity ("Einstein gravity") on and off, for twenty years, and while I get some of it, other parts still just keep breaking my head.
Like, why does time slow down when you accelerate? That's, like, almost THE key prediction of GR. The explanation seems so simple, but yet, when I try to work through the links of the chain, I just can't get it. I read the words and then try to recreate it in my little black grid-ruled notebook and end up right where I started, asking the question, "What does baffled mean?"
The current attempt involves having literally about a half-dozen books that have useful-seeming explanations of gravitational time dilation, which I am going through in quasi-parallel, trying to get a grip on the key feature which just doesn't make sense to me (why particles emitted in the roof of a rocket or elevator seem to "run fast" compared to an observer sitting on the floor).
I feel if I could just get this, then I'd have a much deeper understanding. But the understanding I do have gives me two wrong answers: one, it shouldn't work at all, or two, it's always been there in the equations, and Newton should have discovered it, but simply didn't because he didn't think of it.
Hopefully I'll get there. Wish me luck.
-the Centaur
Pictured: pound cake, almond milk, two general relativity textbooks, and buried between them the little black notebook where I'm trying to work all this out. Thanks, Albert.
More thigh-to-leg studies from Morpho.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
So in our mushroom farm, some of the logs are producing shiitake mushrooms, some are producing oyster mushrooms (not pictured as something ate the latest buds), some produced nameko (which I was not fond of), there was a fourth variety that didn't come up, and I think we have recently buried some maitake mushrooms logs which won't come up for a few months.
But that doesn't stop other organisms from trying to colonize the logs.
On the right is I believe turkey tail, which some people make into a tea (if it's the right variety) but which we don't eat (and didn't plant, so I don't trust it). On the left is allegedly not a mushroom, but a giant false-puffball slime mold. I did not cut it open to find out.
I believe these are chicken of the woods on the lower center, and possibly another slime mold atop. Again, this isn't what we planted in this log, so we're not going to risk eating them (at least not until we are much, much better at identifying species, which will take a long, long time).
On some of these colonized logs, we can see clear signs that the shiitake mycelium is still colonizing the logs, so we'll give it time. After a year, however, we might pull some of the logs if they are not producing (normally it takes six months to start to fruit, but we're deliberately experimenting with much larger logs, hoping to pay a longer onset to get a longer producing period).
We'll see.
-the Centaur