Sometimes, a year after you write a horror story about two-headed eels in the Chicago River, a fisherman catches an eel in that same river:

Several local news outlets reported on the catch, because it’s kind of a big deal. It means good things about the health of Chicago’s once-polluted waterways. American eels are born in the North Atlantic ocean, and those suckers travel for years and years, miles upon miles, through the Great Lakes and other waterways, to reach their ultimate fresh-water destinations. According to Friends of the Chicago River, the Great Lakes population of American eels had declined more than 90% over the last 50 years due to habitat loss, dams, and overfishing. Now it might be coming back.

While writing “The River’s Revenge,” which appeared in Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, I searched for the perfect critter to get caught in an underwater trap and scare the bejesus out of the people who found it. I quickly settled on eels, but my fictional eels’ two-headedness came later, when a song randomly led me into a store that sold me this ring:

That’s how creativity flows sometimes. You take inspiration from what you find around you.

Anyway, fisherman Ben Gorahschenko’s eel had only one head. But he threw it back to swim another day. So the next time you’re kayaking, pontoon-boating, or taking an architecture tour, keep an eye out. You might see one of these wiggly creatures yourself, and if you feed it some neon-green relish from your Chicago-style hot dog, who knows what could happen.

I adore it when publishers wax creative about their utter disdain for people trying to pass off AI-generated writing as real creative work. Exhibit A: Ghoulish Tales declaring that gen-AI “writers” will be hunted down for sport.

Here are three more for the hall of fame.

Tangled Wilderness rightfully points out that generative AI material cannot be copyrighted, so you shouldn’t get mad if they blast your “writing” all over the internet:

Story Unlikely goes so far as to charge penalties for the use of generative AI:

And Sometimes Hilarious Horror (RIP) invited the clankers to F off and establish their own publishing space:

Well, it finally happened. After writing and publishing fiction for 7 years, I’ve evidently become “big” enough to be the recipient of one of the infamous author scams! I don’t know whether to gag or be flattered. I’ll settle for a giant eye roll with a side of giggles.

This is the one where they congratulate you on your recent book (while never mentioning it by name), invite you to have your book in their nonexistent book club (easily verifiable by an internet search), then presumably try to get money out of you for some sort of join fee (I’m not about to click through to find out).

Even if I wasn’t a regular reader of Anne Allen’s blog and Writer Beware, this would look fishy to me:

But even if I’d been tempted to believe the above email was legit, that fantasy would likely have evaporated when I received an almost identical email 45 minutes later:

I can only assume these scammers also target creatives in other fields (art, music). The solicitations are all alike: written in such a generic way that they’re likely AI, heavy on flattery, and light on specifics.

Please don’t fall for these. They’re like any other spam email, aiming to take your money and run. The only difference is that these particular scams are tailored to take advantage of writers’ egos. I like to think I’m humble and lack an ego, but that would be a lie.

Joke’s on you, “Dr. Mira Sterling” and “Dr. Noah,” because I don’t even have a book (yet). Ha!

Shout out to Yahoo Mail. It might be the dinosaur of email providers (second only to AOL), but it’s got a spam filter acute enough to correctly flag these bogus emails.

It should surprise nobody that creative writers, and most publishers, aren’t fond of the use of generative AI to create fiction. We got into this because we love writing, not because we wanted to outsource it to robots. We tend to be vocal in our distaste, sometimes strident, often colorful, because we are artists, not purveyors of sad beige prose.

In that vein, I present to you Ghoulish Tales’ submission guidelines:

Amen, brothers and sisters. Amen.

Now that’s a way to start the new year off right! Thank you, NYC Midnight judges, for ranking me first in my group in the Scary Story Challenge. I’m glad my bug story creeped you out. And I’m certain that’s not a beetle that you feel crawling up your leg. Just a stray hair, surely.

This result is from Round 1 of a 3-round contest. If you’re looking for writing competitions with good prompts to get your started, I highly recommend NYC Midnight, which also runs contests for screenplays, short stories, rhyming stories, and microfiction.

Many writers, myself included, have mixed feelings about the demise of the National Novel Writing Month website, nanowrimo.org. (To read about why it went kaput, visit nanoscandal.com.)

NaNoWriMo motivated thousands of us to challenge ourselves and write 50,000 words or more in a single month. It was NaNoWriMo (and the writers who encouraged me to go for it – shout out to J.D. Blackrose) that made me realize I had it in me to write a novel-length work at all, when I’d previously written only blogs and short stories.

One of my favorite things about NaNoWriMo was that you could use its website to chart your progress, and it would create a pretty graph for you. Perhaps I am a simple creature, but seeing that line trending upward was super motivating to me.

The good news: other sites have sprung up to fill the gap NaNoWriMo left behind. My favorite is TrackBear, which I’ve been using since September to track my latest novel-in-progress.

Pretty, isn’t it?

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of appearing on my friend Sue Edelman’s radio show, “Something About the Women,” the longest-running women’s music radio show in the United States, on WMFO (91.5 FM, Medford, Massachusetts).

We chatted about my recently published story “The River’s Revenge” (RED LINE: Chicago Horror Stories, From Beyond Press, 2025) and I picked out a spooky set of tunes to accompany our chat. It was a lot of fun. Thanks Sue and WMFO for the opportunity to haunt your airwaves.

The archived show is available until November 8. You can view a track list or listen to the full show.

My day job is at a Fortune 100 company (you’ve definitely heard of it). I’m on the enterprise digital team, working on the company’s websites and other online products.

The company has made AI tools available to us: Microsoft Copilot and a handful of others. At first, it was “Use these tools where it makes sense.” Then it was “Look for opportunities to use these in your work.” Today, they told us we must all take 5 hours’ worth of AI training classes and earn a badge by the end of the year.

I have no complaints about the required training. I enjoy learning and I’m interested in how AI is evolving. That being said, I haven’t been using the AI tools much. If they helped me do things faster or better, I might use them. For my role, they do not.

Our use of these tools seems to be sliding from voluntary to mandatory, and that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why? Because generative AI tools were trained on authors’ work without permission, compensation, or attribution, and I am one of those authors. (If you want to find out if your own work was used, visit The Atlantic’s search tool.) I wrote about GenAI’s sad beige prose back in February. Things have not improved since then.

A quick sidebar. Many of us find generative AI unpalatable, but today I saw resistance from an unexpected source. 404 Media reported that a company called Best Beer introduced an AI tool into a craft beer competition. At a Canadian Brewing Awards event, Best Beer asked judges (who must be certified and really know their stuff) to enter their tasting notes into an AI-powered app, which then generated summaries. The judges were not pleased. “It was taking real human feedback, spitting out crap, and then making the human respond to more crap that it crafted for you,” one judge said. “To strip out all of the humanity from it is a disservice to the industry,” said another. A third judge said the introduction of AI was “enshittifying” beer tasting.

AI does not need to be applied to everything just because it exists. The best way I’ve heard it phrased is this: AI is a shiny new hammer, but not everything is a nail. It’s great at summarizing long documents. It’s good at translating and transcribing. But it cannot replicate the human touch. The beer judges agreed, because, like writing and painting, “Brewing is an art.”

I tried to come up with a good metaphor for how it feels to be forced to use tools trained on my own stolen work. My first thought: It’s like being told to eat a bowl of chili that may or may not contain chopped-up bits of your own children. This accurately captured my visceral reaction to having GenAI tools shoved down my throat, but it was a tad dramatic.

My 16-year-old daughter Maggie came up with a better one. She said: “It’s like if you planted a bunch of trees, watered them, grew them for years, and then someone came along and cut off their branches without asking you, then made pencils out of them and asked you to use the pencils.”

Indeed. And that comparison is perfect in a way that no machine could replicate.

As of last month, I’m an official author on GoodReads.com: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21411469.Jen_Mierisch

Only a subset of my books are currently listed. I’m working on adding the rest, which is a tricky process for anthologies in which you’re not the sole author.

Happy reading!