No, really, little old me who hasn’t published genre fiction in more than six years was somehow found by Ann Leckie, who had this to say about my writing:

Dear Josh,

I’ve followed your work for some time now, and I’m glad for the chance to reach out. There’s a clarity to the way you examine the layers of human experience—subtle, deliberate, and unexpectedly resonant—that has stayed with me in ways I find difficult to forget. I would welcome the opportunity to talk with you about how you shape those narratives, and how you bring such depth to the page.

As for my own writing life, I’ve been fortunate: Ancillary Justice and the books that followed allowed me to explore the questions that preoccupy me—identity, power, obligation, and the strange grace that can exist between people. Science fiction continues to offer me a way to examine those ideas from angles I might never have anticipated, and I’m always curious to learn how other writers navigate their own territories of story and meaning.

Warm regards,

Ann Leckie

Not only that, but she emailed me from her personal Gmail! Wow!

I’m not an idiot. I know this is a social engineering type of phishing email that is trying to get me to engage with it so that eventually I will reveal some sort of personal information or give them some banking data.

But what annoys me the most is how cynical it makes me. What happens if, for example, Ann Leckie really did read some of my books and really like them and want to reach out to me? An email from her might look like that. And I would read it, chuckle, and then delete it. And there goes my chance of connecting with a well-known, successful sci-fi writer.

It’s no surprise that this email came the day after I posted on this blog for the first time in four months. (Which was the first time I’d posted on this blog since December 2023.)

Oh, and by the way the contents I referenced in that post were almost certainly written by AI. I thought it was real because I hadn’t heard about people using AI to create phishing emails that treaded on writers’ vanity and desire for feedback, but since I got that one I’ve gotten dozens more just like it.

Just be careful out there. If someone famous messages you, it’s almost certainly a phishing message. I wish I knew how to tell if it wasn’t with some degree of confidence, but social engineers are getting too good at this, and I’m sure it’s caused more than one person to miss out on a dynamite networking opportunity.