Mars Needs Writers - Blog-O-Rama

This won't be a long post

1/9/2026

To begin with, both of us forgot we needed to put a blog up. Secondly—is that the right word to use? It feels like the right word to use—we’re working on a Top-Secret Project (TSP) that we can’t share with anyone at the moment. It’s keeping us busy.

We’ll share the TSP with you, though. Just not yet.

Which left us grasping for something to post about. Then we found out today is National Word Nerd Day and ran with it. It’s twenty-four hours honoring those of us who enjoy the odder corners of our languages; those who have word-a-day apps on their phones, play Scrabble, and hate when they lose at Wordle.

We're not saying we're like that, but, one day last year, we lost at Wordle. We were inches away from a one-year streak when the monsters behind Wordle decided that Kefir was a reasonable solution to their puzzle that hot August morning. A word in the everyday vocabulary of the common man or woman.

If you know what kefir means, then National Word Nerd Day is meant for you. NWND is the perfect opportunity to find and use obscure words, mistakenly believing the use of weird phraseology makes people sound learned.

Hal’s obscure word of the day: Susurrus. A noun, it means a rustling, whispering sound. Asked to use it in a sentence, he said, “With nightfall coming, Troy Manly knew the Troodon would be hunting him soon. Listening intently, all he heard was the soft susurrus of the wind moving through the pines.”

Renée’s obscure word of the day: Cimmerian. An adjective, it means very dark and gloomy. Asked to use it in a sentence, she said, “His crocs sliding over the loose gravel, Troy Manly found himself falling into the cimmerian depths of an ancient cavern. Climbing to his feet, he realized he’d tumbled into a nest of Troodon. Armed only with an outdated vial of pepper spray, Troy was about to become their midnight snack.”

Hal wouldn’t mind if his name was Troy Manly. Renée would mind it very much.

You asked, we answer.

1/2/2026

Yes, Renée completed her “Zombies in Christmas Village” display prior to Halloween. Because zombies and Halloween. Then she brought it out again and put it up for Christmas. Because Christmas Village and candy canes and elves and Santa and… well, what is Mrs. Claus’s first name?

It might be ‘Gertrude’, since James Rees gave her that name in his 1849 book, Mysteries of City Life. This was the first time anyone provided her with a first name. But she could also be called ‘Goody’, from Katherine Lee Bates’s 1889 poem, Santa Claus. Although her name is probably ‘Jessica’ to fans of the stop-motion special, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town or ‘Mary Christmas’ to those who watched the Peanuts special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Or ‘Carol’ (The Santa Clause movies) or ‘Anna’ (the musical, Mrs. Santa Claus) or ‘Margaret’ or ‘Martha' or 'Babs'’… but I’ve let myself get distracted.

(The zombie with the candy cane through his head? That's Kevin, once the manager of the North Pole Staples. Currently on medical leave.)

In this post, per request, I'm sharing some of the photos of the finished Halloween/Christmas decoration. The zombies came from Amazon. Santa and Babs, the elves, the shotgun, candy canes and the bloodshed -- that's Renée's handiwork.

Santa's in bad shape, but Babs is on the clock tower, armed and ready. In the end, it'll all work out because... Christmas magic. And hurray for that.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Buttons

12/26/2025

The options for post-holiday recovery today are endless. Today marks the official kickoff of Kwanzaa—seven days dedicated to community, heritage, and culture. Meanwhile, as Iron John in Ontario reminds us, our friends in the UK and Canada are celebrating Boxing Day. While Boxing Day started out as a tradition of charity and giving, it’s mostly evolved into a high-stakes competitive sport of discount shopping. If you, too, are Boxing this Day, may your deals be legendary.

Here is our game plan for the day: Having spent the previous two days with wonderful people and away from Santa Buttons, we'll drive home in our pajamas with our Christmas stockings within reach. Yes, we do stockings and, yes, they contain candy. Once we're home, there's no real cooking on the menu. Everything gets microwaved today. If there's not enough leftovers to get by, there's definitely more candy.

Then, in the spirit of the holidays, we'll binge the remaining episodes of Murderbot on Apple TV. (Full disclosure: Amazon lured us into Apple streaming by plying us with a free episode of Pluribus. That show is a gateway drug. Well-played, you corporate masterminds.) Whatever your plans for the day are, we hope they bring you comfort and joy. See you next year!

Giving out loans, traveling the world, and a random number generator

12/19/2025

Bob Harris has certainly led an interesting and varied life. According to Bobharris.com, he’s an author, a stand-up comedian, a travel writer, and a frequent contestant on Jeopardy – although, really, who among us hasn’t done many of those things? One of Bob’s notable actions has been financing thousands of micro-loans through Kiva.org.

Traveling the world to meet some of the people who’d received those loans, Bob Harris traveled the world. Then he wrote about his experience in The International Bank of Bob. If you can, you should borrow it from your library. While this won’t increase Bob Harris's royalties this month, he’s got that sweet, sweet Jeopardy money to fall back on. Using the price of his paperback, you can nearly finance a Kiva loan on your own.

Financing a loan through Kiva:

Go to Kiva.org and choose a preference from twenty different categories.
Find a story that resonates with you.
Send in a payment of at least $25.

In the future, your loan will either be repaid... or not. About four percent of Kiva loans aren’t repaid, but we haven't been stiffed yet. Even if our turn comes, it’ll have been worth it.

This month, we went with a random number generator. Usually, we review several requests, then pick one that speaks to us. For a change, we decided to use a random number generator to pick among Kiva’s twenty different category of loans. The generator selected number 15: “Refugees and IDPs".

Neither of us knew what an “IDP” was, which probably should have been embarrassing. It stands for “internally displaced people,” who are folks forced to flee their homes while remaining within their country's borders. Everyone in this Kiva category was from either Palestine or Uganda.

With sixteen applicants available, we returned to the random number generator. It selected number 4, a Ugandan father with two children who needs money to buy more goods for his shop. With one click, our small piece of the $1,150 USD loan was made.

Good luck, Utamukunzi!

Ever wonder what coal tastes like?

12/13/2025

Because you’re sane, your immediate thought is, “Oh, hell, no.” There’s no way to think it would taste good, right? Plus, people who prefer to keep living know better than to have a coal snack. So, you might wonder why Santa would put these nuggets of deadly into bad children’s stockings.

There are people – presumably, with out taste buds or too many brain cells – who’ve tasted anthracite coal, the stuff used for heating. Some claim it’s like holding a dirty rock in their mouths, while others say it tastes like a dirty rock that’s unpleasantly bitter with just a hint of sulfur to remind them to never, ever again taste coal.

This all comes to mind because one half of the Turner writing team put up a Krampus plate for the holiday season. Dollar Store black coal chunks felt like the perfect accessory because Krampus, as you know, has a reputation of focusing on ill-mannered children.

When the other half of the Turner writing team saw these black-wrapped candy nuggets, he wanted to eat one. A bag of these things costs a buck. There’s no way to think any of them would taste good, right?

He unfoiled one, anyway. (Yes, unfoiled IS a word. It's been around since the late 1500s. Which is roughly as long as the male half of this team has been around.) He munched.

"Not bad," he said. "Tastes a little like a subpar Nestlé Crunch Bar."

He didn't mention any smell of sulfur, but he hasn't asked for seconds, either. Be warned.

Vanity and pride are different things

12/5/2025

That’s according to Jane Austen, anyway, and who are we to disagree with the author of Pride and Prejudice? If she speaks the truth, though, then how exactly do we explain Hal’s desire to get our monster of a book, One Bride for Seven Brothers: The Complete Saga, into print? Vanity or pride?

Oh, that’s easy. It was vanity, no question.

(For scale, we've positioned a paperback of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives beside Saga. When Levin was at the top of his game, he was marvelous. Wives is worth your attention. If you’ve never read his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying, you’re missing out.)

We have paper editions of all our other books, but we’d never taken the time to get Saga ready for print. There were reasons, but the largest one (ha!) is that our Moby Dick of a novel is nearly as long as Moby Dick. It’s four times as long as The Stepford Wives.

For its hardcover publications, Amazon has a maximum page count of 550 pages. Throw in the title page, copyright info, and a dedication, and Saga clocked in at… 550 pages. What is the Amazon ask at that length? $29.99 USD for the hardcover, $26.99 for the paperback. As pleased as we are to have a copy, we don't expect anyone to drop thirty bucks for a copy. So, yeah, this was a vanity move.

The book looks great in the bookcase, though.

Collaboration can be a challenge

11/15/2025

Collaborations aren’t easy, as this year has reminded us. A Bablecube novella translation has been delayed. Our audiobook that was supposed to come out in September? The voice talent vanished, and we had to prevail upon the Gods of ACX to kill the contract. And there’s this 2026 thing we’re doing… but that’s for another day.

Almost everyone suffers a few emotional bruises when collaborating with others. Everyone except Jonah and Amanda Strassler. Those Strasslers. They make us Turners look like weak sauce.

It started when Jonah had an idea he couldn’t shake. He wanted to create a science-fiction story about three unfortunate interns forced to do the frightening and often illegal actions demanded of them by an evil corporation. A lighthearted adventure story, Jonah thought it would work best in comic book form.

Fortunately, his sister, Amanda, is an artist. In February, he approached her about working with him on the project. By midsummer, they’d completed all fifty-two pages and were selling the published comic at the Garden State Comic Fest. In between, they sat around a campfire, singing “Kumbaya” and eating S’mores. Then they’d hug it out every evening, each of them being ever so grateful for having such an amazing sibling in their lives.

(Okay, we’re making up the campfire thing. Jonah and Amanda had to collaborate through the computer and on the phone, so the hugging it out thing didn’t happen, either. But completing this big of a project in less than six months? That happened and, from what they tell us, with a minimum of bumps and scratches. They’re kind of amazing.)

A few weeks ago, author Aki Liao invited us to talk with the pair for his NoName Storyteller podcast. Aki works with Al McDermid on their Frank Keegan Mysteries, so he knows about collaborations. Alex Sheikman, artist extraordinaire and survivor of multiple collaborations, was in the discussion, too. If you’d like to hear all of us chatting about the creative process and the perils of collaboration, the audio dropped yesterday.

Aki called the episode, "Rising Stars and Veteran Creators: Titans Together Across the Indie Cosmos." If he hadn't run out of space, he'd have called it, "Rising Stars and Veteran Creators: Titans Together Across the Indie Cosmos. Also, the Turners." And he'd have been right to do so. We didn't even know there was an indie cosmos.

This will get you to the right place on Spotify: here.
For Apple Podcasts, try here.
If Star Interns intrigues you, here’s the link.

The Bone Bar is open

11/13/2025

… a couple of weeks behind schedule, but what are you gonna do? Renée submitted her design to the neon light folks well before Halloween. The seller promised delivery in October, but there were some hiccups along the way. The sign just showed up at our door.

So, sadness, we didn’t get a chance to hang it this year. Next year, though, it’s going to look swell behind our Dean the Deathologist.

Also, those white flappy things in the sign’s upper left-hand corner? They’re Honduran white bats. Not seagulls. Don't you dare suggest otherwise.

Joe Rogan loves himself some AI-generated music

11/13/2025

Or so I've heard. There are a couple of AI-generated country hits climbing the charts, and… that sucks. Renée heard one song – although she didn't know the 'artist' was computer-generated – and told me she didn't enjoy it.

"It's missing something," she said. "Nuance?"

Humanity.

(The early AI image on this post? It's from RI, Master of Men, illustrated by Martin Salvador, written by Hal, and published forever ago.)

But it got me to thinking: What if I asked Microsoft's AI companion to help me write today's update? Would it be great? Awful? To find out, I requested it to write a 400-word post for MarsNeedsWriters on how people can recognize when AI has written a 400-word post for MarsNeedsWriters. Or anyone else's website.

The article was completed within seconds. Then, the AI-generated wordsmith asked if I'd like a more SEO-friendly version that could help it rank better on search engines. Well, sure.

How to Spot AI‑Generated Content: Recognizing a Website Post Written by AI

Artificial intelligence is transforming online publishing, and many websites now feature posts created entirely by AI tools. While these articles can be polished and professional, they often carry subtle signs that reveal their machine origins. If you want to improve your skills in AI content detection, here are practical ways to recognize when a 400‑word post has been written by artificial intelligence.

1. Exact Word Count Precision
AI systems excel at meeting strict requirements. If a post is exactly 400 words—without drifting above or below—that's a strong clue. Human writers tend to be less rigid, often producing 380 or 420 words instead of hitting the mark perfectly.
2. Neutral, Generic Tone
AI writing often sounds smooth and grammatically correct but lacks personality. The tone may feel neutral, balanced, and designed to appeal broadly. Human writers usually inject quirks, humor, or strong opinions that make their work stand out.
3. Formulaic Structure
AI‑generated posts frequently follow a predictable pattern: introduction, numbered sections, and a neat conclusion. While this makes them easy to read, it can feel mechanical. Human authors often experiment with flow, add unexpected transitions, or break the mold.
4. Repetition of Common Phrases
Because AI relies on patterns, it may repeat certain phrases like "in conclusion," "overall," or "key indicators." Humans naturally vary their language more, even when covering similar points.
5. Absence of Personal Experience
AI cannot share lived experiences. Posts generated by machines rarely include anecdotes, personal stories, or unique insights. If a piece feels informative but impersonal, it's likely AI‑written.
6. Broad but Shallow Analysis
AI excels at summarizing information quickly but struggles with depth. A 400‑word AI post often touches on multiple points without diving deeply into any one idea. Human writers may linger on a single thought, offering richer detail or stronger opinions.

Conclusion
Learning how to spot AI writing is about noticing what's missing: personality, unpredictability, and lived experience. A perfectly structured, neutral, and impersonal 400‑word post is often the giveaway. As AI tools evolve, these signs may become subtler, but for now, they remain reliable clues for recognizing AI‑generated content.

Zzzzzzz... kind of boring, right? It's probably a good thing since, now that the beans have been spilled, we can never offer an AI-produced post on this site again. You'd spot it immediately. Although Joe Rogan might love it.

Not everyone is into humanity these days.

A bad day for the Elf on the Shelf

11/8/2025

By the time Renée’s done, it’s going to have been a bad day for all the elves at Santa’s Village. Because that’s the way she rolls.

As mentioned before, Halloween is Renée’s favorite holiday. Taking out a box of decorations for the big day, she came across our very sweet Santa’s Village display… and put it with the Halloween stuff.

“You know what this needs?” she asked. “Zombies.” I didn’t ask why. Everyone who knows Renée knows why.

She ordered some tiny plastic zombies, placed them throughout the town, but wasn’t satisfied. “Zombies need victims,” she said because, after all, what is Hall-O-Mass without victims? A few days later, Santa and his favorite elf had been sacrificed to the horde.

Although Halloween has come and gone, she’s continuing the massacre. By Chris-O-Ween, there will be more elf victims scattered throughout the town. But be of good heart: Renée is sculpting a shotgun-wielding Mrs. Claus to straddle one of the village's tallest rooftops. Santa's soulmate is in a mood.

With luck, she'll save Santa's Village.