That’s why the recent author class action against Anthropic has felt personal. It IS personal to me and to thousands of other authors. To us, this case isn’t only about text files used to train an LLM. This case is about whether the long arc of a writer’s labor, my labor, can legally be treated as free input for machines.

On September 5, 2025, Anthropic told a federal court it would pay $1.5 billion to settle the certified class action lawsuit brought by authors alleging their books were pulled from pirate libraries and used to build Claude. The settlement was quickly approved, and cue the headlines. They focus on the size of the settlement, of course. Yes, this is landmark for copyright lawsuits. But for working writers (like me), and for lawyers advising creative clients (also me), the shape of the settlement matters more than the number.

At the end of the day, what does this settlement actually mean?

• Money for each book. The settlement creates a non-reversionary fund with payments allocated per qualifying book. It’s a really blunt, cold way of accounting for the collective years of sweat and tears (and maybe blood if you like to work in hard copy) that each and every author puts into a book, but it’s at least a concrete recognition that books are assets, not amorphous “content” readily available with no rights.

• No “outputs” amnesty. Critically, the release is limited to past ingestion/retention/training conduct and does not release “output” claims (e.g., if a model later reproduces protected expression from a class work). As a lawyer, I read that as preserving a lane for future disputes over model behavior, rather than declaring truce on everything AI might emit tomorrow. It’s not a perfect result, because it declines to specifically protect authors as a class from the potential effects of the training that’s already occurred. It leaves us to fend for ourselves as AI companies grow in funding (particularly among the billionaire class that has no qualms about asserting their rights to behave however they choose because that’s what money means to them) and in scope.

• Prospective hygiene. Anthropic must destroy the specific downloaded book files (from pirate sources) and confirm it, subject to preservation obligations. Even if you believe in broad fair use for training, this nods to a baseline: don’t warehouse pirate libraries. Really, at the end of the day, this is the minimum bar that needs to be met. Collecting data you don’t own the rights to and using it train models shouldn’t even be an issue, but this settlement unfortunately is a very narrow interpretation of appropriate retention and use. If I pay $8 for an ebook, should I be able to plug it into AI and train it? As an author, I would say… no, that’s not what the license you’ve been granted encompasses. I think at the end of the day, we’re going to have to see a very different licensing scheme for copyright and the licenses that are granted to readers who purchase a copy of a book. I don’t think it will be long before books are going to have express bans in using the contents of a book for training LLMs as part of every book’s copyright page.

• Who’s in? If your book appears on the works list, you’re in the class. I have linked to the public lookup tool. There are deadlines for claims, objections, and opt-outs. Also, be aware that you need to have an actual federal copyright for your work. Luckily, I did this for Compendium, but I’ve been hearing horror stories from other authors who thought the publisher was the one handling this registration for them, and are not left high and dry. As authors, it is incumbent upon us to obtain our registered copyrights. If you want to know more about this, reach out. I’m happy to share my knowledge. Link to Anthropic Settlement Page.

The moment I realized Compendium was in the list of works

Earlier this year, when the preliminary public lookup tool went live, I typed in Compendium and held my breath. When it appeared on the list of pirated works that Anthropic had used, my heart sank. Part of me knew this was going to be the case before I even did the search. Compendium had been pirated from an advance reader copy I’d provided to potential reviewers almost from the day that the final ebook was ready. It was already bumbling around the internet before it was even released. Authors trade ARCs because we have to get early reviews, buzz, and blurbs. But the ARC is also the soft underbelly of a book’s life cycle. Seeing that pre-public text end up as grist confirmed a fear I’d carried since the leak. My years-long work was reduced to training fodder without consent.

Training vs. taking?

The court record in the Anthropic case reflects the unresolved tension many of us as both authors and lawyers feel. Some judges have signaled that training use could be fair in the abstract. They may have even drawn a line at building and keeping a central library of millions of pirated books, but that’s a low bar to meet. However, it is also the crux of the ongoing tension. Even if some downstream use might qualify as fair or transformational, how you acquire your data and what you retain can still violate rights. This settlement sidesteps a concrete answer on training as fair use and leaves output liability for another day. So, at the end of the day, the battle has barely been fought.

As a lawyer, I’d tell my business clients that this settlement does NOT amount to a permission slip to train data on copyright material. As an author, I’d add that it’s going to be a long road to determine the scope and methods for ethically and lawfully training AI on copyright works.

Why Compendium and every other book is more than just words, and why that matters

When we talk about “intellectual property,” we default to treatises and the legal elements that determine whether a work has been legally protected (whether copyright, trademark, or patent) based on registration and the legal elements and factors as applied by a judge. This is a necessary model to take the output of the mind and make it concrete enough to protect, but it is ultimately insufficient. What Compendium embodies isn’t just expression. It is the accumulated judgment of a human mind (my mind!) over years. Datasets flatten that history. They treat the finished book as just another row in a table, a collection of words that form ideas on a specific subject, saved into a larger collection of words, without acknowledging the upstream investment that gave the text its coherence.

That’s why authors, myself included, reacted so strongly when allegations surfaced that pirated copies had been swept into training corpora. Consent and compensation are the foundation (maybe even the basement) of the law. Respect for provenance is the culture we build on top of that basic legal infrastructure cobbled together to somehow draw objective concepts from inherently subjective outputs. The settlement’s destruction requirement and its preservation of output claims are small but meaningful steps toward that culture, but they are only the first steps, and it’s going to be a long battle for authors and publishers in establishing and enforcing that provenance.

If you’re an author, what should you do now?

1. Check the Works List and deadlines. If your titles qualify, file a claim on time or consider whether to opt-out if you have strategic reasons (e.g., you’re a big name author with multiple potential claims already out there).

2. Inventory your rights posture. Registered vs. unregistered works, publishing contracts, prior assignments. These factors all matter and unfortunately affect your eligibility as well as any leverage you may have.

3. Track outputs. Keep examples of model behavior that appear to replicate protected expression from your works. The settlement doesn’t waive those theories!

If you’re advising AI or publishing clients

• Audit provenance of your training data, not just licenses. “We got it on the open web” is not a policy. Model builders should be able to answer: From where? Under what terms?

• Separate ingestion from training. Even courts that are open to fair-use, transformational arguments are signaling that how you assemble and retain data matters. Warehousing pirate libraries is radioactive and an immediate no-fly zone.

• Design for authors’ agency. Expect claims about outputs and invest in retrieval logging, provenance signals, and responsive takedown pathways. If you want to be seen as a trustworthy actor who has their AI house in order, this will be increasingly necessary. This battle is only in the beginning, and expect publishers and authors to keep the fight very much alive.

What I want, as both author and lawyer

I don’t want to stop technology. I actually love technology, or I wouldn’t have written a science fiction series about the cultural embrace and use of technology. What I want as an author and as a privacy attorney is consent, compensation, and care:

• Consent: Use licensed sources or honor robust opt-out mechanisms that actually work.

• Compensation: Collective licensing or revenue-sharing models that don’t force individual creators to litigate one by one.

• Care: Provenance-respecting pipelines and a willingness to discard tainted datasets. The cost of maintaining them is borne by the very people who make culture worth modeling, and if companies want a continuous influx of content worth modeling, they will need to protect the human brains behind that work.

The Anthropic settlement doesn’t resolve the philosophy of AI and art. It does sketch the very first line in a potential bounding box. You can’t treat a pirate library as free lumber. And it acknowledges, in hard dollars, that a book is not just a pile of words but the residue of a life’s attention.

Youkoso means “welcome” in Japanese, and you might see it printed on greeting signs at the airport as a sign of welcome to a city. Geri o Shimasu is finally out in the world, and so I say youkoso! In fact, some folks who ordered it from Amazon actually got the book early and have already been sending me photos of their copies. If you have a copy winging its way to you or already in your hot hands, please share it with me via email, text, or social media! I’d love to see your pictures and share them (if you permit it)!

This book has been a new publishing experience for me, as I’m used to publishing my work with a lot more control. I’ve had to work on other people’s timelines, trust new processes, and let go of knowing every scrap of data about every detail along the way. It’s been a valuable experience, and I’m lucky to have such a great and collaborative publisher. I was starting to feel like working with a press was not for me after the experience I have with Ocularum over the last few years, and I’m still rebounding from that experience, particularly financially, which has been hold up this year.

Because Geri o Shimasu has been part of the Year of Womxn 2025, it’s preorder phase and lead time has been longer than usual, and I actually feel like I had to carry this baby the full term. Sorry to those actual mothers out there, but it’s the closest analogy I could think of. At the same time, I’m already deep into working on my next memoir with Unsolicited Press, Preposterous Bloodshed, coming out May of 2027.

It’s been a long road to this day filled with uncertainties, anxieties, and hard truths about myself. But right now, it’s time to celebrate! Settle down in a comfy chair with your readers, a chirashi bowl, and a bottle of Asahi Super Dry and travel with me to Tokyo and beyond during a life-changing semester of law school.

Don’t take my word for it, though. I’ve been gratified and extremely proud that Geri o Shimasu has already picked up some early awards, including the International Impact Book Award in May for Travel, Memoir - Transformative Stories, the London Book Festival’s Nonfiction award, a Literary Titan Silver Book Award, the Independent Author Awards in Cross Genre and Travel, an Indie Reader Discovery award in Humor, and more.

What Others are Saying

Check out some of the early praise from editorial reviewers! I couldn’t be more thrilled with these amazing compliments.

“If David Sedaris, Bill Bryson, and a self-deprecating haiku master co-wrote a book about living in Japan, Geri o Shimasu would be the result. It is equal parts memoir, social commentary, comedy, and poetry—a blend as unique as the author’s experience.” — Atlas of Stories

“With a sharp sense of humor and an unfiltered voice, Luria offers an insightful look at Japan, language, and cross-cultural encounters that is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.” — BookViral

“But for those who revel in the chaos of real-life adventures, who understand that growth often comes wrapped in embarrassment, and who appreciate the beauty of a story told with fearless authenticity, this book is a rare treat. Fans of Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened or Laurie Notaro’s The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club will find a kindred spirit in these pages.” — The Chrysalis BREW Project

“Author Luria’s writing isn’t just fearless, it’s fiercely hers. There’s nothing performative here; it’s messy, it’s real, and it’s electric.” — The Reading Bud

“Luria's prose crackles with self-aware wit, right down to the chapter titles, but her gift isn't limited to humor; she writes with rich imagery and deep insight that make this a joy to read." — BookLife

I have linked to my full list of awards, reviews, interviews, and podcasts here.

Speaking of Reviews

Online reviews are critically important for indie and small press authors. Having a robust set of reviews creates opportunities for marketing partnerships with competitive newsletters like BookBub, helps people decide to take a chance on a lesser known author, and helps libraries and indie bookstores decide to carry our books. If you have ordered the book already and want to leave an honest review about it, I’ve created this page to make it really easy to go directly to your review page of choice.

If you haven’t ordered the book and would be willing to leave honest feedback in exchange for an ePub or PDF version, there are still limited slots left in my early reader program through Brooksprout.

Bookstr Giveaway!

Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin launches today wherever books are sold. To celebrate, Bookstr and I have created a Japan lover’s prize pack, valued at over $350. It includes:

🌸 A signed copy of my memoir

🌸 A special haiku bracelet set designed with one of my haiku

🌸 A Zojirushi rice cooker ($200 for those of you in the know)

🌸 Watercolor haiku postcards and limited-edition vellum overlays

🌸 Stickers, Japanese sugar candy, a limited edition ribbon bookmark and more book swag

🌸 $75 Bookshop.org gift card

Enter the Bookstr Giveaway!

Upcoming Events!

AUG 20, 8:30 PM Eastern | Literary Nights with Rosalia Scalia | YouTube

AUG 23, 6PM Eastern | Private Launch Party | Invite Only

AUG 25, 7:30 PM Eastern | Book Launch with Unsolicited Press | Sign up @ Unsolicited Press

It feels so surreal that Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin is less than a month from launch. This book will always be something extra special for me. Even before I wrote the first story in 2020 during COVID, it was a project I had always thought about. I spent almost six months in Tokyo absorbing everything I could like a sponge. Mere days after getting back to the states, David Sedaris released his book When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I remember listening to his book about his 90-day stay in Tokyo on an adventure to quit smoking and wishing I could write something like that. There was jealousy sure, but mostly l lacked confidence. Would I ever have the talent or gravitas to pull off those types of incisive essays? I wasn’t sure, and it would be a long time before I established my own personal voice.

Even before Sedaris released his essay collection about Japan, I always admired his ability to draw the exceptional, awkward and hilarious from the mundane. I don’t remember which of his books it’s from, but his story about a family of spiders living in the corner of his window in a cottage in France will always stick with me as an example of that. I still may never achieve his mastery of the craft, but even getting the few comparisons to him that I have gotten so far in my early reviews is a huge boon to my confidence.

For me, my process was quite a bit different. I didn’t go to Japan with the purpose of writing a memoir. In fact, the hard drive that stored all my photos from that six months (as well as earlier photos of a trip to India) died not long after I got back. Then, the blog that I kept during my time there was obliterated by a virus that at through my server and took over my textpattern installation. I didn’t notice until after all my backups were corrupted. If I hadn’t uploaded thousands of photos to Flickr during the trip as a way to share them with my family, I would have had no record at all of my time in Japan.

So, in some ways, it’s amazing to me that I was able to go back and reconstruct these experiences; also, thank you Google for names of places, public events, and other general knowledge. But writing Geri o Shimasu taught me something special about my own voice. The big lesson for me was that if the story, the feeling, the lesson, is still with me a decade on, maybe it’s something worth sharing. I originally kept these stories alive in my mind by recounting them to friends and family, reminiscing, and sharpening their impact through the lessons they taught me and how I’ve continued to approach them. I think the fact that they still resonated with me as much if not more now than they did when they happened was the motivation I needed to bring this collection into the world. Now, I have finally memorialized a least a portion of the experience others to laugh at, learn from, and hopefully cherish the way I do.

Right About Now…

With that, I am beyond excited to share Geri o Shimasu with all of you. If you haven’t pre-ordered a copy, there is still time. I will post links to the major retailers below. If you plan to read it and can make room on your shelf and in your budget for the paperback, preorders are critically important for indie authors. They help us make lists, help us get reviews so that libraries and local bookstores will carry our books, and they support a series of small businesses trying to survive in the publishing industry. Unsolicited Press has been an amazing and supportive publisher through this process, and I urge you to purchase the paperback not just to support me but to support a press that prioritizes marginalized voices, authors that may not have a huge platform but have plenty to offer readers, and literature, like mine, that doesn’t fit in a tidy, on-trend genre.

If you are clamoring for an ebook or audiobook, both of those versions are coming as well. I will be recording the audio with my cousin Mark as soon as we can get our act together, and that will be released by Unsolicited Press later this year. The ebook should be available shortly after launch.

I’ve been overwhelmed with all of the positive book reviews and accolades, including winning an International Impact Book Award, Independent Author Awards, the London Book Festival Nonfiction Award, and others. To read early reviews and see a full list of Geri o Shimasu’s accomplishments, check out this page.

Preorder at Unsolicited Press (the publisher - 20% off until July 31st).
Preorder at Asterism (the distributor).
Preorder at Bookshop.org (an indie bookstore marketplace - my affiliate link).
Preorder at Tertulia (an indie book co-op - sorry, my discount code is expired here)
Preorder at Powell’s.
Preorder at Barnes & Noble.
Preorder at Amazon (my affiliate link).

Over the Next Few Months…

Finally, I have some events coming up that I hope you will consider attending, whether in person or virtually. Firstly, this book isn’t just stories. It’s poetry and art. I’m going to be holding a publicly available event called The Art of Geri o Shimasu where I discuss my inspiration and creation process for the paintings included in the book as well as how my cross-disciplinary love of fiber arts, visual arts, and haiku enrich my process and a vial part of my generative cycle. I don’t know the date yet, but that will be this fall.

Some other events coming up include:

Literary Nights with Rosalia Scalia - August 20, 2025, 5:30 pacific / 8:30 eastern (virtual event)
Private Launch Party - August 23, 2025, 6 pm eastern (in person)
Book Launch with Unsolicited Press - August 27, 2025, 5 pacific / 3 eastern (virtual event)
Miami Book Fair - November 21 - 23, 2025 (in person)

If you would like to get notifications and links to these events, including my art event, please sign up here: https://alialuria.kit.com/miamibookfair

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me! I’m so grateful for every person in my life who’s supported me as an author, a friend, a family member, or a colleague. Hugs!

Ever wonder where poems are born? In this series, I break down the why behind the 5-7-5.

Each haiku has a story, and I’m telling them, one video at a time.

#HaikuReaction #PoetryInMotion #BehindTheVerse #PoetLife #MicroPoetry #CreativeProcess #SpokenWord #HaikuVibes #StoryBehindTheHaiku

First, I will say that my taste in horror movies is very specific. I’m a fan of movies that make you think, and a lot of horror movies just don’t have that weight to them. I’ve felt that way about a very few horror movies, such as Midsomer and possibly the first Smile movie. Smile 2 was terrible, and nothing you might have to say about it could convince me otherwise. I’m happy to have a really long conversation in which I point out to you all of the numerous ways in which that movie completely ruined the original, thought-provoking premise that Smile explored.

Back to Sinners… I wouldn’t even put it into the category of horror, but I supposed the marketing team had to pick some genre, and it’s not a psychological thriller. It’s not a drama. It’s not a period piece. At the same time, it’s kind of all of those things, and a whole lot more. I guess horror was as good a category as any.

Second, if you haven’t seen Sinners yet and don’t want spoilers, please close this browser window and hop onto your favorite platform and grab a ticket and go now! No, really, what are you waiting for? It deserves every dollar that it earns plus an Oscar nomination or five, and Ryan Coogler is a genius and an amazing storyteller.

Sinners is not only an atypical horror movie but also one of the best films that’s been made in years. I’m not a filmmaker, but I am a storyteller and an avid, critical reader in the speculative fiction genre, and in this movie, Coogler explores slavery, colonialism, and the idea of cultural assimilation with such artistry that I would think he was a nothing less than a reincarnation of the great Octavia E. Butler. Also, if you do go, make sure to stay all the way until the lights come up!

Like any great piece of speculative fiction, this movie infiltrated my soul. Before it was even over, my brain was whirring with the connections it was making. Sinners lingers. Its fangs aren’t just on the faces of its amazing actors. The trailer might make it seem like another slick, stylish vampire horror flick with moody lighting, fanged faces covered in gore, and a soundtrack with a blues guitar that steals your breath. All of these qualities are in Sinners, particularly the amazing music, but that’s just the Louis Vuitton suit on the meat of this movie. This movie is about colonialism. It’s about how hunger for power, desire to force assimilation, and the cyclical nature of colonialism that ripples through our history create generational echoes that linger… apparently even into one’s undeath.

Sinners deftly explores each of these themes through the vampire mythos and still manages to break your heart, make you smile wistfully, and give a sense of hope that maybe it is possible to break cycles of oppression.

One of the sharpest points the film makes is how victims of colonization often go on to perpetuate the same structures of domination. In Sinners, the siring vampire, Remmick, in one moment is explaining how he was the victim of colonization in Ireland and in the another breath states that he wants Sammie’s music and songs. It’s not just that this movie is about colonization and cultural appropriation. It’s even more specifically about the circular nature of it. One victim escaping to freedom turning around to enslave another, sometimes with chains and sometimes with lies about being part of something greater.

Vampires colonizing people by taking their bodies and enslaving their souls isn’t really the point. Colonization isn’t a vampire problem. It’s a human one. History is full of oppressed groups who, once given a taste of power, replicate the violence done to them, such as those people oppressed in Europe for their religious views who then came here to the “new world” and enslaved others to realize their dream of freedom. Sinners doesn’t flinch from that contradiction. It shows us what happens when trauma isn’t healed but inherited, ritualized, and weaponized. It also posits that it’s possible to break this cycle. It might require sacrifice and bravery and for people to choose to move past it, but it is possible.

Colonization isn’t just about taking up physical space, however, and Sinners is equally adept at discussing the physic damage of colonization, namely that many colonizing groups requiring assimilation of the subjugated while at the same appropriating the qualities that make that culture unique. There’s a seductive rhetoric to it in Sinners, as the vampires take great pains to try to convince the humans that they will be stronger, immortal, and share all of the collective knowledge of the “pack”. They try to convince Sammie, Smoke, and Annie that they’ll be part of something greater and that they’ll all belong. Remmick even talks about making the klansmen in the town vampires, and none of this horrible bigotry will be a problem anymore.

Sound familiar?

Colonial powers have always peddled a similar lie. We bring civilization. Our knowledge will enrich. You will be so much better off! In Sinners, the vampires sell transformation like a gift. But, again and again, haven’t we learned that the only ones truly thriving are the ones at the top. The rest of us are either feeding in the trenches or being fed upon.

Another subtle but chilling thread in Sinners is the idea that all the vampires are the same. All the uniqueness is stripped away from each individual, including their food, language (Remmick starts to speak Chinese after he consumes Bo), and particularly important to Sinners, their music. Remmick’s primary draw to this town in the first place was Sammie’s music. Remmick wants Sammie’s music and songs, but he wants them for himself. All the vampires sound the same when they sing. They sing the same song, play the same music, feel the same feelings, live the same way.

There is no freedom for the vampires, and that’s the lesson at the very end of the movie. When Stack and Mary find Sammie in his old age to offer him eternity, Sammie passes on the opportunity and poses the following question:

Sammie: You know something? Maybe once a week, I wake up paralyzed reliving that night. But before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life. Was it like that for you?

Stack: No doubt about it. Last time I seen my brother. Last time I seen the sun. And just for a few hours, we was free.

The last line of the movie is Stack admitting that his physical power, youth, and immortality don’t make him free. Was freedom humanity? Maybe. Maybe it was the ability to live life on his own terms instead of the ones imposed by Remmick.

Sinners doesn’t pretend that it has the cure for colonization, generational trauma, and the ripples it’s had through all of our lives—especially the lives of black people in America. It does, however, offer up a mirror. If you can see your reflection, you might just still be able to escape being a vampire. If you’re willing to look into it, you might see how you’re a cog in a system, and if you’re really honest about your part in it, you might find that bravery to stand up to that system.

It’s when you look in the mirror and don’t see yourself at all that you should be worried.

Now I have dozens of bromeliads. I left my house in Orlando to move into my grandmother’s house, and every year, I tend to her bromeliads. I always look for the first one of the season, its light pink bracts and surprising …

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As someone who’s spent her career straddling the lines between law, technology, and creative storytelling, the Library of Congress has always held a kind of mythic status for me. It’s a temple to both legal precedent, knowledge and education, and literary imagination. So I did what any self-respecting lawyer and published author with a reverence for archives would do: I applied for a reader identification card.

It took about fifteen minutes. There was a surpris…

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When Japanese people think about what to them embodies the concept of tokowaka, the usual example is the Jingu shrine in Ise. This shrine undergoes a tokowaka renewal process every twenty years called Shikinen Sengu. Shikinen Sengu is not the cosmetic facelift you might think, however. It is rather the process of completely destroying the sacred shrine and rebuilding it in its entirety in an alternate site using new materials.

How can something be considered eternal if it only exists for twenty years? is a question I asked myself when I first visited Ise in the summer of 2008. I lived in Japan during a semester of law school, and as part of my final t…

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Still, I know regret is a lot to hope for. I looked at your mug shot today when I had to circulate it around the office for notice purposes. Thanks for that, by the way. It’s always been a personal goal to explain to my co-workers that my entire weekend was a stress-fest of dealing with your mistakes and why. You didn’t look contrite to me. Your brown eyes stared straight into the camera like it was a Sears Portrait Studio shoot, and your lips had that slight curl, that sarcastic no…

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Despite the common knowledge that everyone’s opinion is different, and that every work of literary criticism is an opinion, book reviews are still very much treated as an authority on whether a book is worth our time as a reader. As a writer, it can feel like a court of public opinion is passing judgment on our hearts and souls. Despite all the feelings evinced by reviews, every ardent reader who’s ever checked out a review knows that opinions on a book can vary dramatically, even opinions on the same book, even opinions on the same part of the same book.

Why do I bring this up now? Duri…

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I'm long overdue in announcing that the countdown has begun for publication of my first full-length collection of non-fiction essays, titled Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin. Releasing August 12 of this year, preorders have already opened online at the following links:

• Unsolicited Press

• Bookshop.org

• Amazon

• Barnes & Noble

• Powell’s

• Books & Books

• and more places!

Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin invites readers on a witty, unfiltered romp through 2008 Japan as experienced by Alia Luria, a self-proclaimed "clueless foreigner." Luria dives headfirst into the quirks and challenges of Japanese culture, from decoding onsen etiquette and enduring public embarrassment to exploring the oddities of love hotels and the loneliness of bustling crowds. With laugh-out-loud anecdotes and moments of poignant self-reflection, she unpacks the universal hilarity and humanity of navigating the unfamiliar. Whether she's fumbling through train etiquette, braving bizarre foods, or embracing the messy beauty of cultural exchange, Luria's candid storytelling is blunt, occasionally cringeworthy, and always unapologetically real. This collection is a hilarious and heartfelt reminder of the chaotic, awkward, and transformative adventures that shape us all.

I'll be announcing a series of readings and events as we get closer to the date, but I wanted to share how excited I am and grateful that Unsolicited Press gave this book a home! If you want to follow my image of the day posts, check out videos, photos, and songs related to this book, feel free to visit https://www.gerioshimasu.com or follow me on social media.

This project is near and dear to my heart because the publisher, Unsolicited Press, has declared 2025 the Year of the Womxn, and my book is part of a forty book collection releasing throughout this entire year. You can read more about it here. Even if my book is not in your area of interest, I urge you to check out the full collection of titles for this year at Unsolicited Press.

Ocularum

For those of you waiting for Ocularum, I am even longer overdue in providing an update. I fully understand how long you have been waiting. I've been a bit of a bind, because I'm not happy with the editing and the direction that the publisher is taking this book, and I'm strategically looking into breaking the contract and reissuing Compendium and Ocularum with new covers in a new edition and my own editor for Ocularum. Because the publisher has assumed control of the pre-order money, that means I'm bootstrapping this reissue. If you're completely sick of waiting, and you want to transfer your preorder to Geri o Shimasu or cancel entirely, reach out to me, and I'll figure out how to make it right (including sending you back the money you paid or the difference if you want my new book).

This Substack

As you may have noticed, I transferred my mailing list over to Substack. The title of this Substack is Still Not a Robot. For those of you who have been on my mailing list for years, I’m gifting you all a year-long paid subscription to Still Not a Robot to make sure that you don’t miss any news on Ocularum or Geri of Shimasu. If you no longer want to be on this mailing list, feel free to use the links below to unsubscribe. If you’re a new reader, you’ll continue to get public posts like this in your email box. All posts go behind a paywall a week after they are posted. Thank you everyone for supporting my writing. I know it’s been a rocky road this few years since COVID, but Ocularum is ready for a proper edit, Geri o Shimaus is with the publisher, and I have two new projects in the works as well!

"You'd have tons of subscribers," he replied with a laugh.

“She tried to make a break for it this morning, and I had to scoop her up just as a truck careened around the corner. I'm pretty sure the driver got an eyeful."

We laugh, but my dog is a few months away from 16 years old, and her senior moments are increasingly senior minutes. Sometimes when she’s outside, she seems to lose her focus, and I get the impression she thinks I’m a stranger following her. It’s kind of weird and sad but also a blessing in its own way. Her aging brain has come into razor sharp focus for me because only a few weeks ago, I lost my younger dog, the one I thought I would have for a few more years, to an insidious case of kidney disease that progressed rapidly from asymptomatic to end-stage. I've lost pets before, but this was the first ani…

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I had the immense pleasure of conversing with Maureen DcDole of Keep St. Pete Lit for their Typewriter Talks podcast series. We talked about our respective writing processes, haiku as a journaling tool, books we had recently read, favorite authors, and how much we love being writers. If you want to learn a little bit more about my process for both my fiction and my non-fiction work, as well as advice I would have given my younger self, please feel free to tune in to Episode 23. I also gave a very short excerpt of my forthcoming book of essays, Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin, which will be published in 2025 by Unsolicited Press.

Please visit Keep St. Pete Lit to learn more about their organization! They have invited me to teach classes there in the coming months, so I will be sure to post my schedule once it becomes available!

If you would like to jump straight to my podcast to give it a listen, it’s available through spotify here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/typ…

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Paralysis

The man stands on a plateau with nothing but distance below. He is broad-shouldered yet too thin. He shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable, hair gleaming in the harsh, unyielding light. Sometimes he feels the fragile column sway. It might be vertigo, or it might be in his head. So he stands, looks. The distance spreads in all directions. Dusty plateaus congregate out of reach. Footsteps lead away, engraved in the dust, etched in his memory. People beckon in sweet voices, urging him across. But every time he peeks into the depths below, his heart seizes. The darkness calls. When he looks up, their faces turn from angelic pictures of adoration to masks of rot. He squints to see if they are still rot or his imagination. He can’t tell. They a…

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Part of my move to put posts like this behind a paywall is revoking some of that general availability from those that might weaponize it or even just obsess over it. The assumption is that such types of people would not be willing to give an email address and credit card to continue such behavior. And if they are, well, at least I’m paid for my trouble.

Since around December of 2022, I’ve had an unfortunate pattern of orbiting behavior that has made me feel emotionally manipulated and uncomfortable with my generative process in a way that I haven’t felt s…

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On the occasion of family turmoil, I've done a lot of thinking about anger. There seems to be a lot of it around me, although none of it is actually mine. I recently read Tiamet's Wrath, by James S.A. Corey, and the dead-inside sociopath Amos Burton makes an observation so keen it sticks in my side weeks later.

"There's only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you're afraid of something or you get angry because you're frustrated."

Amos Burton, Tiamat’s Wrath, James S.A. Corey

Amos goes on to explain that the character he's talking to is really just frustrated, and this manifests as anger. This strikes me deeply because although it seems like an obvious statement after you read it, so often we accept anger as a response without saying to the angry person, "What's frustrating you?" or "What are you scared of?" This is compounded by societal pressures which say it's acceptable to be angry but not acceptable to be scared or frustrated. Somehow, anger is considered a valid emotion …

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