Jodi McAlister

Cover reveal! A Study in Sparkling is coming out on 28 July in Australia/NZ and 15 September in the US. Aus/NZ preorder: www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/A-Stud... US preorder: www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Stud...

AI ain’t a peer! If you don’t want to do the work just say no! If you’re not able to do the work just say no!

"If university bots graded bots, you would no longer have a university. You’d have a tomb, an academic mausoleum in which digital phantoms murmured emptily" theconversation.com/friday-essay...

I was on the @smartbitches.bsky.social podcast (again - what an honour to be invited back)! We started by talking about my new book A Study In Sparkling, but we ranged far and wide after that (audio erotica! bonkbusters! romance scholarship! wine!)

A few words from me - based on the book on the subject that Athena Bellas and I wrote together - in this Playgirl piece on audio erotica.

I was on the @smartbitches.bsky.social podcast (again - what an honour to be invited back)! We started by talking about my new book A Study In Sparkling, but we ranged far and wide after that (audio erotica! bonkbusters! romance scholarship! wine!)

GenAI is unethical across many axes including environmental, political, and because the industry is based on mass theft from authors and other creatives. It's also incredibly reputationally damaging for people who are being accused of its use. I don't think any publisher has the right to tarnish me.

This piece is absolutely fascinating.

New record: got one today that was just under 2500 words long. Who on earth would read all that??

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New on Enough Trope, the podcast: Rebecca Lim talks about the 'Call is Coming From Inside the House' trope, via her crime novel The Graduate. Listen now! www.enoughtrope.com/podcast/the-...

...I still have to promote it, so:

Romance CAN do almost any fucking thing. Having a romance plot does not mean a book isn't full of other details, other enquiries. There is no other genre that cares so much and so deeply about human relationships in all their forms.

I read romance, I teach romance, I value romance. And I am always slightly confounded at the difference between what people think it is and what it actually is. The idea that a whole subset of novels dedicated to intimate human relations are indifferent are going to be simple and worthless? Weird.

An Academic Affair was absolutely superb. This one will go straight to the top of my TBR pile.

A LADY AWAKENED by Celia Grant, one of the books of all time

If nothing else AI is making clear that there are people all around us for whom writing, art, and music are not communion with another mind, but just - wallpaper. Just pleasant things to look at. They think AI is conscious because they have no actual grasp of what it is to encounter another mind.

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

anyway character driven stories are not, in fact, easy to generate by a thing that doesn't understand human emotion

...I still have to promote it, so:

Scholarly types! The call for papers for the next @iaspr.bsky.social conference is now open. It'll be in Oviedo, Spain in June 2027 and the theme is Choosing Love, centring around hope and optimism in a world which often does not engender especially hopeful or optimistic feelings about the future.

One thing the Australian government could do to show they're serious on AI policy is to pursue the AI companies who stole the entire country's creative output to feed to their slop machine.

I went behind the scenes on ReelShort's steamy adaptation of Sierra Simone's Lyonesse books to understand how vertical dramas are leading the charge on "trope-forward storytelling," why romance adaptations are boosting verticals in a whole new way, and more:

I taught my first years with the five steps from this book this semester, and it worked fantastically. It took some time to build up their confidence in taking what they'd noticed and using it to construct an argument, but they got stronger at it every week.

new favourite Smaug dropped

just realised this is the AI version of negging, and I hate it just as much as the original version

Today in the AI author scam spam saltmines: a breathlessly rude email saying that "I'm not here to tell you the book is broken", then summarising complaints about A Study In Sparkling in reader reviews & comparing its review numbers unfavourably to An Academic Affair. It has been out for ONE WEEK.

Congratulations to Jodi McAlister, the double threat in our shining kingdom of popular romance, on your new novel!

So my brand new book A Study In Sparkling came out in the US this week, and... well, turns out I have to promote it? If we're marketing by tropes... 🥂older woman/younger man 🥂 friends (with benefits) to lovers 🥂 competence porn www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Stud...

Got one this morning which was nearly a thousand words long. An *email*.

Just read this and really enjoyed it! The balance between sparkling escapism and all-the-feels is beautifully judged.

Today in the endless stream of AI author scam spam emails - Nicholas Sparks himself reaching out to kindly offer to help me with my metadata and pitch my book to TikTok creators. Never dreamed I would be so blessed.

This book is fantastic and you should read it.

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