Safetyism and gym dress codes in Kentucky

A fitness club in Northern Kentucky (not far from my home across the Ohio River) has implemented a new, arguably draconian dress code for its members. While the new dress code would not quite pass muster in Iran, the Islamic Republic would regard it as a reasonable starting point. (Keep reading for some specifics.)

All hell is breaking loose on the local internet as a result. A new front in the War on Women! The patriarchy trying to control what women wear!

While the local gym’s new rules do not explicitly identify women as likely offenders of indecent dress, the policies target “uncovered sports bras and leggings”, items which men are unlikely to wear. Shirts, the new rules state, must cover the member’s “chest and cleavage”. “Inappropriate or revealing attire,” is henceforth verboten.

Since when has anyone ever worried about a man wearing “revealing attire”?Unless the reader is being deliberately obtuse, there is one reasonable conclusion: the new gym policies are designed to compel women to dress modestly when working out.

I have been going to gyms since the early 1980s. Leggings and halter-style sports bras weren’t in vogue 40 years ago, but some of those leotards from the 1980s were form-fitting, and practically guaranteed to raise testosterone levels in the gym.

I may have been distracted at times by such things; but I have never sustained an injury as a result of a woman wearing a form-fitting or revealing outfit in the gym. Never once in more than forty years. Nor have I ever labored under the belief that a woman is obligated to have sex with me because she wears this or that in my presence. By that logic, I would be entitled to everything I see that I might possibly want. And that’s a recipe for societal chaos.

Ergo, what women wear in the gym has never been an issue for me. And going back to 1995 or so, I don’t think many guys ever objected or even cared.

Then Gen Z ruined the gym for everyone.

A few years ago, it became fashionable for young women to call out men in gyms for real and imagined cases of ogling. This being Gen Z, it all took place on TikTok and Instagram.

In many cases, the accusations were either wild exaggerations or outright fabrications. But much drama ensued. Women were not “safe” in gyms with men, we were told.

Thirty years ago, Gen X women had no qualms about telling the occasional creep (yes, they do exist) to get lost or keep his eyes to himself. Women have lost an awareness of the power they wield, with a silent, icy stare or a simple rolling of the eyes.

Gen Z lacks such sophistications completely. For them, an online confessional (and probably some therapy) is required to address every grievance, every trespass. One thing we can be certain of, in any situation that involves conflict or tension and Gen Z, there will be drama.

Safetyism is the standard antidote to the drama of the younger generation. Safetyism is the elevation of both physical and emotional safety above all other concerns—including fun and spontaneity. Safetyism is what has given us microaggressions, pronoun rules, and the hyper-policing of all expression of male sexual intention.

Safetyism has now made its way into the gym, too. When I visit my gym, I reflexively look away from any pretty young woman who crosses my field of vision…as if she, like Medusa, could turn me to stone if my gaze were to linger a second too long. I do not want to end up in some attention-seeker’s TikTok video.

New dress code policies like the one described above are another manifestation of safetyism. If everyone wears baggy bloomers to the gym, if every one wears headphones and keeps their eyes forward at all times, then no one will ever be ogled, made uncomfortable, or microaggressioned.

It’s all rather ridiculous, when you stop to think about it. The world faces many genuine problems at present. Uncovered cleavage and derrieres are way, way down the list.

But this is what happens when safetyism takes over society, when the prevention of anything transgressive, edgy, hurtful or inappropriate becomes the paramount concern. Safetyism always comes with rafts of new rules. Quasi-Islamic dress codes for women in gyms in Kentucky are just one more example.

-ET

Involuntary Deeds: a new supernatural/psychological horror novella

A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.

But what secrets is her husband hiding?

Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.

**View it on Amazon**

Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.

Amazon description:

Some crimes don’t stay buried.

Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.

What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.

Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.

Then the warnings begin.

The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.

But Pam won’t stop.

Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.

But not by Robert.

As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.

‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.

KUWA 6226: a tale of an online urban legend!

I released a new book over the weekend: KUWA 6226!

This is the story of a deadly online urban legend. (See description below!)

View it on Amazon!

Kuwa6226 is a deadly online urban legend!

Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.

In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.

But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?

Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.



***

 

Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.

Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.

Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.

Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!

Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!

1980s coming-of-age college drama

Read NO SURE THING in Kobo Plus. Also available for purchase at Amazon, Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble

No Sure Thing: a Gen X coming-of-age novel set in 1988 is now available in Kobo Plus.

Kobo Plus is Kobo’s version of Kindle Unlimited. I’ve been moving some titles in there on an experimental basis.

Kobo Plus, like Kindle Unlimited, will inevitably be swamped with trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. (Unfortunately, that’s probably already the case). But at least Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity. So I’m willing to give it a try for now.

No Sure Thing, like the title suggests, is a coming-of-age novel in a distinctly Gen X setting. While the novel is not autobiographical in any significant way, many of the characters and conflicts presented therein are based on people and situations that I observed myself during the 1980s. So it is authentic, if nothing else.

While there are several “love plots” in the book, this is not a romance novel in any traditional sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.

But not all of the teen movies of the 1980s followed the traditional romance script. Consider the endings of Risky Business and The Last American Virgin. These were much more disillusionment plots than by-the-numbers romance plots (even though the romance element was heavily used in marketing both films).

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite the sex and comedy, also had several unmistakable disillusionment plots: Stacy learned the consequences of reckless sexual experimentation; Brad learned the pitfalls of hubris.

As noted above, No Sure Thing is available at all the major online bookstores.

-ET

AI slop and genre slop: the most pessimistic view possible, and reasons for optimism

David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.

He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.

A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.

As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.

And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.

Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.

For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy) on the history, content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.

But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.

That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?

And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.

One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.

What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.

But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.

The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow. 

-ET

Simp Nation comes through for Shannon Elizabeth: $1.2 million

I was a little too old to be part of the American Pie target audience in 1999. (I turned 31 that year.) I therefore never developed an awareness of Shannon Elizabeth, let alone an interest in her.

I am, however, not above finding certain female celebrities attractive. To pick an example that comes to mind: I wouldn’t throw Sydney Sweeney out of my bedroom for eating crackers, as they say.

But if Sydney Sweeney ever launches an OnlyFans, my money won’t be going into the till. I have never been tempted to simp online for anyone. I occasionally come across less famous YouTubers who make me think, “Yeah, she’s cute.” But that’s as far as it goes. What, after all, is the point?

As some of you may know, the 52-year-old Shannon Elizabeth recently divorced her husband and started an OnlyFans account. She is not using the online platform to give investment advice, perform unicycle tricks, or sing the full oeuvre of the Beatles a cappella. Shannon isn’t providing any nude content, either, though many OnlyFans creators do.

Source: OnlyFans

According to the front page of her OnlyFans account, the former actress’s offerings consist of the following bland fare:

• behind-the-scenes moments

• exclusive photos & videos

• candid glimpses of my life

• chatting with me directly

The key draw to all of this seems to be a distant, parasocial connection to Ms. Elizabeth. And for this, waves of thirsty simps have shelled out more than a million dollars during her first week on OnlyFans.

Perhaps I am simply behind the times. I’m not here to advocate for the world’s oldest profession or its customers, but a part of me can understand the rationale of a man paying for actual sex. The pseudo-sex of OnlyFans, though, would have bored me to tears when I was thirteen. As Clara Peller used to say in those 1980s Wendy’s commercials: “Where’s the beef?”

Why grown men are spending billions annually on this stuff is completely beyond me.

Speaking of beef: I have no beef with the women of OnlyFans, including Ms. Elizabeth. They are only taking money from willing marks.

The men are another matter, and I have a message for each and every one of them. To paraphrase Darth Vader in the original (1977) Star Wars: “I find your lack of testosterone disturbing.”

Man up, grow a pair, and quit spending money on OnlyFans. You make all men look like wimps and dupes by association.

-ET 

Another unlikely bestseller, and the futility of cancel mobs

Way back in 1973, a French writer named Jean Raspail penned a dystopian novel called. Le Camp des Saints, or The Camp of the Saints in English.

The Camp of the Saints presented an overwhelmingly negative view of mass immigration. The thesis of the novel was that Western societies are being destroyed from without by mass immigration, and from within by those who are sympathetic toward the waves of immigrants from the developing world.

Whether you agree with that argument or not, it is not exactly an original idea. Perhaps it was in 1973. It is certainly not an original idea in 2026.

Jean Raspail’s more than 50-year-old novel had long ago passed into obscurity, at least within the English-speaking world. Then a group of busybodies on Reddit learned of the book’s existence, and decided that here, alas, was an opportunity to engage in some performative outrage.

Members of the subreddit r/bannedbooks worked themselves into a lather, then pooled their efforts to get the book temporarily removed from the virtual shelves at Amazon. (Demonstrating the lack of self-awareness that is typical of such folks, they failed to see the ironic connection between the name of their subreddit, and the fact that they were actively seeking a book ban. But I digress.)

The Amazon book removal was quickly overturned, of course. But the controversy generated interest in a book that no one would have heard of otherwise. As a result, The Camp of the Saints skyrocketed to best-seller status at Amazon, finally peaking at #6.

If we didn’t know better, we might suggest that this was a false-flag publicity stunt, perpetrated by the original publishers of The Camp of the Saints. But we do know better, because we’ve seen this before.

The 2010s were the high point of the “social justice book mob”. This is how it worked in those days: A member of the so-called “book community”, who was active on social media, would find a passage, theme, or character in a novel that could be broadly interpreted as “racist”.

They would then make some posts on social media decrying the evils of the book, and stir up an online mob. The online mob would do the rest.

Such mobs were particularly common in YA fantasy literature. Notable mob targets from a little less than a decade ago include: The Black Witch by Laurie Forest and Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao.

Sometimes these mobs did real damage. Amélie Wen Zhao was so traumatized by the outcry against Blood Heir that she briefly delayed the publication of the book.

But patience with the social justice book mobs eventually ran thin for two reasons. The first was that, like most mobs, they overplayed their hand. Chinese American author Amélie Wen Zhao was no one’s idea of a white supremacist. The claims against her and her book were so ridiculous that almost no one could take them seriously.

Secondly, there was the “unintentional false flag” effect. Cancel mobs have repeatedly proven themselves effective at promoting the books, films, and artists that are their targets. The recent success of The Camp of the Saints is the most recent case in point.

I’m in my 50s. I haven’t read much YA fiction for many, many years. The last time I was in that market, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were cutting edge. I heard about The Black Witch and Blood Heir, though—because the online morality patrol was loudly denouncing these books in public.

This works both ways, of course. Almost thirty years ago, I heard about Heather Has Two Mommies because conservatives were kvetching about a children’s book that portrayed LGBTQ families and parents in an approving manner.

None of the above is meant to imply that we shouldn’t debate controversial social issues. We should, however, not get too worked up about the impact of “message art”. This is true for you, too, regardless of where you stand on the political continuum.

Novels and films with political messages are most impactful early on, when no one has yet named the issue in public, often out of public reticence about a topic. Heather Has Two Mommies might have been able to make that claim when it was first published in 1989. Today, however, a book or film describing LGBTQ individuals in hagiographic terms is so commonplace that we merely shrug and move on. Likewise, it has been virtually impossible to write an original novel or screenplay about race in America for at least 30 years. The topic has literally been done to death.

Beyond the earliest stages, message films and novels usually devolve into repetitions of well-worn talking points. In this way, most message art is derivative, just like most political speech.

Outrage over such materials now also follows a predictable pattern, as the recent bestseller status of The Camp of the Saints demonstrates. Here is the takeaway: if you don’t like what a particular book or movie is saying (or seems to be saying), your best course of action is to ignore it. In this era of online cancel mobs and counter-cancel mobs, all your efforts to censor a work of art will be in vain. You will only contribute to its popularity, which may have been a long shot otherwise.

-ET

Authors and direct sales

In the video below, Kevin Tumlinson discusses his new direct sales strategy.

Just a few years ago, direct sales was regarded as a highly experimental, almost whimsical course. As recently as 2020 or so, conventional wisdom held that there was only one bookstore an indie author really needed.

Times have changed. All of the major booksellers (as well as distributor Draft2Digital) are taking measures to combat AI slop. Legitimate authors sometimes get caught up in these sweeps. Throughout 2026, there have been reports of arbitrary KDP account closures.

The point here is not to declare that any one retailer has nefarious intentions. Rather, the environment has changed. Building an author business on one platform is no longer the safe and sensible strategy that it seemed only a few years ago.

Increasingly, authors will need to rely on distributed ecosystems, which will embody various elements of discovery, marketing, and distribution.

The exact combination will vary for each author. For example, I regularly write here on my blog, so I have no desire to duplicate what I do here on Substack.  Other writers don’t want to do any kind of editorializing about anything, since giving one’s opinion about anything of substance invites backlash and social media mobs. Some writers will want to keep all their opinions to themselves. To each his own.

Likewise, Kevin’s storefront, while impressive, is more of a project than I would want to take on at this time. But I’m definitely expanding my presence beyond a single retailer and Kindle Unlimited. Twenty twenty-six is not 2016, or even 2021. We should not pretend otherwise.

-ET

The smut factor: why I’ve more or less abandoned online writers’ groups

The Jewish Bride, by Rembrandt

One of you asked me the other day which online writers’ group I recommend. Many of these groups exist on Facebook.

Ten years ago I would have been able to heartily recommend several of them.

Today, there are none that are very useful to me. Here’s the problem.

Over the last five years, the online writers’ groups have become inundated with writers of “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) romance and outright erotica (i.e., even more sexually explicit material).

Now let me be clear here. I am no prude. Oh…far, far from it. I am quite sure that some of my off-hours activities would shock and/or offend the prudish among you.

But there is a limit to how much I enjoy talking about sex, writing about sex, and creating stories around it. My tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly limited.

I don’t like sex stories for the same reason I don’t like pornographic videos: watching other people have sex is a bit like watching other people eat.

Similarly, talking about sex is like talking about eating. I eat lunch every day. But I don’t wish to spend more time discussing my lunch than I spend actually eating it. I have a similar approach to matters of the bedroom. Some of these writers and their readers need to spend less time with their noses in books, and more time with living, breathing people. (Nothing cures a chronic preoccupation with sex like a little of the real thing.)

From a business perspective, the marketing of romance/erotica has much more to do with the marketing of OnlyFans or other pornographic material than it does with traditional book marketing. A person who picks up a Michael Connelly novel is not responding to the same motivations as a person who watches pornographic videos, or who reads pornographic stories.

No ill will for all the “spicy” romance and erotica writers out there, mind you. But they’ve made the online writing space more or less useless for everyone else, with their sheer numbers.

-ET

Chernobyl + 40 years

In the spring of 1986, many Americans were following events in the Soviet Union. The new man in the Kremlin was Mikhail Gorbachev, a young (by Soviet standards) leader who was eager to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev also sought better relations with the West.

I was a senior in high school in 1986. I was interested in the Soviet Union, too. I was old enough to remember the final Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the downing of KAL 007. But now, a new world seemed to be in the making.

Then, on April 26, there was a major nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in an area of the Soviet Union then commonly known as “the Ukraine”.

The Kremlin tried to cover it up (of course). The Kremlin had covered up similar disasters in the past (including one at a biological weapons facility in a remote part of the USSR). But this was too big to conceal.

Chernobyl would be in the news for months—years—afterward. The problem still hasn’t gone away completely.

In retrospect, the Chernobyl disaster (which sprung from Soviet ineptitude) was the first sign that Western optimism about the USSR in the mid-1980s was misplaced.

Forty years have passed since then. The former Soviet lands are still the source of mostly bad news. Case-in-point: the war between Russia and Ukraine, now in its fifth year.

-ET

Rename American English?

We may soon have a linguistic version of President Trump’s 2025 “Gulf of America” stunt. There is a proposal within MAGA circles to rename our national language, American English, to “American”. This would be done in commemoration of America’s 250th birthday this summer.

The proposal is gaining traction on venues like Fox & Friends. The president may or may not be too busy (with minor complications like the Iran war) to give this idea full consideration before July.

This is a dumb idea, and characteristic of the anti-intellectualism rampant in populist circles. If carried to its logical implications, this would mean that any language spoken in more than one country would have to be renamed for political/nationalistic purposes.

No more Spanish in Mexico, Chile, and Guatemala. Henceforth, the Spanish spoken in these nations would be called “Mexican”, “Chilean”, and “Guatemalan”. No more German in Austria. No more Portuguese in Brazil.

American English descended from British English. Everyone seems to agree about that. And yes: American English is distinctive, as are the versions of English spoken in Australia and Canada.

At what point should a language be called something different, though? That’s easy: when it becomes mutually unintelligible with its source language.

English, German, and Dutch all share common roots. There is some crossover vocabulary. But an English speaker doesn’t automatically understand German or Dutch. These are different languages.

All of us can understand the English spoken in the UK, Canada, or Australia. Which is why they’re all the same language.

-ET

Cougars, Gen Z, and lessons from my Gen X salad days

The graphic below, along with the following blurb, appeared in my Facebook feed this morning:

“Gen Z men feel hated by Gen Z women so they are seeking less ‘toxic’ relationships’

Kara Kennedy argues that frustration in modern dating is pushing some Gen Z men towards older partners, in search of what they see as more stable relationships”

The author of the article is one Kara Kennedy, of The Independent, a news site that is often grumpy in the typical British fashion.

Cougar fever seems to hit the mainstream media every ten years or so. Back in 2009, The Huffington Post loudly declared: Cougars And MILFs Rule! 40 Year-Old Women Are WAY Hotter Than 20 Year-Olds!

The above HuffPost article is 17 years old; but it could have been published yesterday.

There are a number of reasons behind this recurring, predictable media trend. The first is that women over the age of 35 tend to dominate the senior ranks of journalism. In other words, there is a great deal of wishful thinking involved here.

But there is also a certain degree of reality behind it. After all, this is a “meme” that goes all the way back to Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and The Graduate in 1967 (the year before I was born).

Remember Rod Stewart’s song “Maggie May”, back in 1971? That was the same thing.

Beyond pop culture, I suspect it goes back much farther than that, although there was a time when it wasn’t widely discussed in polite company.

As my above revelation concerning my birth year concedes, I am no longer a “young” man. But I was one once. I remember that state of mind very, very well.

Here’s the way it works when you are a young male. You are desperately horny and emotionally hungry for the company of young women, twenty-four hours per day.

But everyone out there is seeking the company of young women: other young men, slightly younger and older men, and men old enough to be those young women’s fathers.

The result is that in any demographically unaltered sexual marketplace, young males are a dime a dozen, and young women are solid gold doubloons.

This is not a “manosphere” conspiracy theory. It’s just observable sexual economics. Nor does it last. (Things balance out between the ages of 35 and 40.) But for a few years, young women are in the catbird seat, and they hold most of the cards.

And if you are a young guy, you can’t help noticing: there are all these women out there who are five, ten, fifteen…or maybe even twenty years older than you. Some of them remind you of your mom’s friends. But some of them, actually…are not too bad.

Many of them also seem to be a lot less standoffish and more approachable than young women in your peer group. Some of them seem to be genuinely interested in you. So nature, which abhors a vacuum, takes its course.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the older partner is the second choice, the runner-up, the consolation prize. A young man goes for an older woman because he can’t get what he is looking for with the younger woman whom he would naturally prefer—or at least not enough of what he is looking for.

Young men, moreover, are so overflowing with desire that very few of them are able to get “enough” of what they want from younger women. This is why almost every man, regardless of his age or generation, has an “older woman” story to tell. (Yes…I have mine, too.)

In other words, the “cougar trend” is not a “trend” at all. It’s a recurring pattern.

But we need to be fair here. The same is also true of the “trend” of younger women dating older men. There is just as much repetition of familiar tropes, and just as much wishful thinking involved.

I remember something I read back in 1981. I was 13 at the time, and one of the neighbor boys raided his father’s stash of Playboy magazines. There was a group of us that day, stereotypical Gen X latchkey kids with not enough supervision. We spent one summer afternoon reading about a dozen issues of Playboy.

Playboy, June 1981

Yes, I looked at the photos. But I also read at least one or two of the articles. I remember reading one article about the “trend” of college women dating more distinguished, more accomplished men in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. The author of the article claimed that college coeds were “sick of college guys who treat them like Kleenex”, and so they were looking for solace in the arms of older men.

Sound familiar? Keep in mind: I read this back in 1981. Forty-five years ago. Proof that there is really very little that is new under the sun.

But there is often a slightly new spin on these stories. Kara Kennedy’s piece claims that the most recent trend of young men going for older women is driven by the unique alienation between Gen Z males and Gen Z females. This alienation is the product of the Internet and the culture wars.

Is this a thing? Perhaps. But here in my neck of the woods, I meet a lot of ungainly, socially awkward Gen Z males who have somehow managed to stumble their way into romantic relationships with women their own age. I also meet many who are solitary. But it isn’t as if every young man had a girlfriend, without interruption, in 1990 or 1980.

Perhaps there is another explanation. There has always been a certain degree of tension between young men and young women. Both are learning to cope with new feelings, and both are navigating a supply-and-demand environment which (initially, at least) vastly favors young women.

The inherent tension between young men and young women leads to inevitable cases of resentment, misunderstanding, and alienation among the young. As a result, there will always be young individuals who are temporarily dissatisfied with what the youthful courtship marketplace provides for them, or seems to provide. And there will always be cougars (or randy older men) who are willing to step into the breach.

Those older men described in that 1982 Playboy article I read would now be in their 80s and 90s. The college coeds of 1981? They’re now in their 60s. None of this was invented by present generations.

I’ll conclude by circling back to Rod Stewart and his 1971 song “Maggie May.” Rod Stewart, who is now in his 80s, wrote “Maggie May” as a young man, based on his personal experience.

The lyrics of “Maggie May” describe a young man’s ambivalence at being involved with an older woman. From the very opening of the song, there is a sense that such a relationship is not the natural order of things, and that it comes with an expiration date.

This was the way it was for me. When I was in my early twenties I had a relationship with an “older woman.” The exact circumstances of how it came about are irrelevant here; but it adhered to many of the common tropes.

Long story short: I ended up parting ways with the older woman when I struck up a relationship with a woman who was a few years younger than me.

As Rod Stewart pointed out more than fifty years ago, that is the inevitable outcome. (And yes: many older men get dumped by their young sweethearts, too.) A cautionary note for older female readers who get too hopeful about the latest, Gen Z-specific iteration of the cougar trend. Nihil sub sole novum.

-ET

Kindle Unlimited, Kobo Plus, Taylor Swift tickets, and my books

“Why aren’t all your books in Kindle Unlimited? Why aren’t all your books available on Kobo/Google Play/Barnes & Noble/Apple Books? I only read on the (fill in the blank) platform, you know.”

That’s a composite of the emails I get nowadays.

The book market is rapidly changing. These changes are exacerbated by technological shifts and political turmoil.

There are Amazon readers who will only read books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. There are US readers who seek alternatives to Amazon (Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo.)

There are Canadian readers who are mad at the current US administration, and only buy books from Kobo, a Canada-based company.

Where readers are concerned, there is no such thing as one-size-fits all anymore, if there ever was.

Which brings us to subscription programs like Kindle Unlimited. When you purchase a membership to a subscription plan, there is generally an expectation that everything you want will be included in that program. (I remember, some years ago, purchasing a subscription to Netflix. I was disappointed to discover that most of the movies I wanted to see, especially old movies from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were not available on Netflix.)

I have no basic qualms with enrolling my titles in Kindle Unlimited. But Kindle Unlimited comes with a rigid exclusivity clause. This means that if a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it cannot be sold as an ebook on any other platform. Nor can it be offered anywhere on the Internet for free in electronic, text-based form. This effectively means that if a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it is limited to Amazon in ebook form. (So much for that “unlimited” part of Kindle Unlimited.) The corollary: if a book is listed on Kobo, B&N, Apple, or Google Play, it can’t be in Kindle Unlimited.

Which brings us to Taylor Swift. The median ticket price for a concert ticket for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was $1,550, per online sources. Almost all of my ebooks are one third of one percent of that (about 0.32%), or about the same as a Caffè Latte at Starbucks.

Nevertheless, almost all of my books are available in either Kobo Plus, Kindle Unlimited, or via your public library through Overdrive.

Amazon is the big dog among book retailers. I’ll always have all my books for sale at Amazon. That said, I can’t promise to always have all my books in Kindle Unlimited.

There’s a downside to this, of course. If you don’t happen to have both a Kindle Unlimited and a Kobo Plus subscription, there is a chance that you might occasionally have to pay for one of my ebooks.

But this is only because we have so many book platforms nowadays. Not all of them play nice with the other ones. This, unfortunately, is beyond my control.

What would Taylor Swift say about this, though? Remember those aforementioned prices for her concert tickets. Taylor Swift wants four figures from you. All I’m asking for is the humble price of a latte at Starbucks.

-ET

Draft 2 Digital, AI slop, and the evil necessity of publishing fees

Draft 2 Digital is a company that provides indie authors and small publishers with a single interface for “wide” distribution of ebooks to a host of online retailers. The company has historically taken a small percentage of sales revenues in exchange for its services.

But in recent years, AI slop has invaded and overwhelmed the publishing world. There is now an entire online ecosystem of low-content and junk content churned out by AI writing tools. This “book spam” is clogging up online bookstores and retailers with content that no one is ever going to buy in any meaningful quantity. And with AI tools, the book spammers can do this at scale.

To make matters worse, there is also now an ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok hucksters, teaching others how to “make millions!” with these techniques. This is like the content farm problem of the 00s, but exponentially larger.

Draft2Digital has addressed the problem in a number of ways. Some time ago, the company announced that it will no longer handle nonfiction titles covering topics that are low-hanging fruit for spammers (exercise, cryptocurrency, diet, and various New Age subject matter).

D2D also announced that it will begin charging a $20 set-up fee for new accounts, along with a $12 per year account maintenance fee for any publishers who earn less than $100 per year.

In other words, less than $8.33 per month.

Needless to say, there are people kvetching about this on the Internet. As for me, I am 100% in favor of it.

This is not because I want to see more fees for their own sake. But rather because something needs to be done about the sheer volume of online garbage.

And when I use terms like “online garbage”, I’m not talking about stories and books that don’t suit my taste. Hey, if someone has labored over their billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novel, and they want to publish that, let them go for it. (Although to be perfectly honest, I would prefer that they didn’t. The romance genres have become as trashy as Pornhub in recent years. But I digress.)

I’m talking, rather, about the low-content and extremely low-effort books produced, often with AI tools, for the sole purpose of manipulating bookstore algorithms and exploiting subscription services like Kindle Unlimited. No one benefits from the presence of that—including the authors of billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novels.

A modest per-book monthly or annual nuisance fee would prune the sheer volume of junk that is accumulating on online bookstores. (Listen to Mal Cooper’s video below.)

I know the nature of the internet. There are people out there who believe that anything on the Internet should always be free, no matter what it is, and no matter what costs are associated with it, simply because it’s on the Internet. That’s an argument that goes back at least 25 years, to the original debates over file-sharing and NAPSTER.

But AI slop threatens to undermine, if not destroy, indie publishing. Online retailers and distributors will never have the manpower to meticulously vet every title. In lieu of that, per-title maintenance fees may be a necessary evil for combating AI slop.

-ET

A story for summer: “The Wasp”

It is not quite summer, if you want to get technical about it. Summer will not officially begin until Sunday, June 21, 2026.

We are still in April. The schools won’t let out for another six weeks. 

But the mercury here in southern Ohio will hit 85 degrees today. That’s close enough for me.

The above is one of my early short stories, “The Wasp”. I wrote it back in 2009, and it was first published in my short story collection, HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES.

This is very much a summertime story. It’s also based my lifetime loathing of wasps. I can handle spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlers (to a point, anyway). I love honeybees.

But I absolutely despise wasps.

As the old German proverbs goes, “God made the bee, but the devil made the wasp.”

-ET