Ryan Consell

14 Aug

Stealing from Wizards, the kinder, funnier, queerer, Canadianer magic school series. Read the complete quadrilogy: Pickpocketing Burglary Kidnapping Arson Wizards, thieves, and misfits engaging in high adventure and petty crime. Stealingfromwizards.com #booksky

My writing process: executive dysfunction=>missing time=>complete draft of a novel. What's yours?

Just finished a Gideon the 9th inspired spooky season vest. What do you think (about the vest, not the fact that I look like John Green failing to fit in at a My Chemical Romance concert?)

Forgive the cat hair, my dear assistant Hypatia was EXTREMELY helpful in the production of this vest.

@beebrookshire.bsky.social

Jebus cripes zoomers, you need to stop wearing track pants to interviews. What are you even thinking?

Ryan Consell reposted

Bethany Brookshire

They’re a 10 but they can be a little…too creative. In which i give you the dating profile of a body part, and you’re going to decide if you’re shooting your shot. With unsettling images by @stealingfromwizards.com youtube.com/shorts/XoQ1E...

youtube.comInsomniac anatomy academy: date that body part #science #sciencefacts #stem #datingYouTube video by Bethany Brookshire

youtube.comdate that body part! All images are by @studentofwhim #science #sciencefacts #stem #acl #tinderYouTube video by Bethany Brookshire

Sometimes we do our best work for extremely silly reasons. I helped produce some of these images, and I think the first might be the least distressing.

Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social

Today we are playing an ANATOMY GAME. He's a 10. But wow can he NOT handle change. Do you date this body part? I’m going to give you a dating profile of a body part, and you’re going to decide if you’re shooting your shot. youtube.com/shorts/LTpYy...

Indie author monthly despair pit: Online sales trackers reset, and we have the unfounded dread that nobody will ever buy our books again as we stare into the void in the middle of that zero. 😭

If you want to hear me go off on ahistorical button representation... well you're probably the kind of person who would enjoy this podcast.

EnterpriseSplaining@enterprisesplain.bsky.social

Our crew and noted vest-expert @stealingfromwizards.com are on a second contact mission this week, revisiting the #StarTrekENT episode North Star (the one that inexplicably takes place in the wild west). This episode was trying to say... something, but what it was trying to say was weird!

Disambiguation post: Obtuse: too stupid to understand Abstruse: too smart to understand.

Look, I know I'm extremely late to the Locked Tomb discourse, but Gideon the Ninth is structurally fascinating and I need to talk about it! Spoilers ahead 🧵

Everything about the first chapters tells us that Gideon is a hero's journey space opera, then a third of the way through that gets entirely derailed into a locked house murder mystery, and then explodes into a last girl slasher. IT SHOULD NOT WORK!?!

Why does it work? Muir's prose is so lurid and the POV's voice so strong that you don't notice the incongruity behind the shifts. Also, the blood and gore is built into the setting. All the goth necromancer nonsense obscures the transition to horror. I am so annoyed at how good Muir is at this.

15 Sept

Having the weirdest brain tick today: the word "soap" looks like it's spelled wrong to me.

14 Sept

Author job: write every day, post to socials, engage with your fans. Day job:

8 Sept

Classes start tomorrow; how am I already this exhausted?

8 Sept

A grad student at the table next to me was celebrating a defence and their friends made them this incredible monarch caterpillar cake! It's a work of art. Relevant to the interests of @bug-gwen.bsky.social @soundoftheforest.bsky.social

7 Sept

So I didn't go to DragonCon this year on account of my being Canadian the myriad horrors America is enacting on itself and others. This being my morning did help a little with the sense of loss.

31 Aug

So very stoked to experience overwhelming FOMO this year as all of you flood my feed with DragonCon pictures and stories? I sadly won't be going this year, on account of my being Canadian and America doing what America is doing. 😭

26 Aug

Reading Gideon the 9th, and I finally understand a weird fandom overlap. Many fans of SvW also love Locked Tomb, couldn't work out why before, but they're the same damned book: uncultured misfit fish-out-of-water faking it till they make it surrounded by well-bred academic wizards.

26 Aug

More bones, lust and mentions of titty mags in Gideon, and I rather expect it's going to end very differently (don't spoil it for me) but I'm seeing the resonance.

25 Aug

A great and terrible thing about being an indie author is that you can get up to the minute reports on sales. It's basically a skinner box for writers and we try to divine meaning from the largely random patterns.

25 Aug

Which is to say, who the hell just bought eighty copies of SfW books and why? 🫨 All I can see is that it was one order in the US and expanded distribution.

25 Aug

Is it a chain of bookstores deciding to carry it? A bunch of libraries? A school getting classroom copies? A system error? I have no way of knowing. I bough myself a cookie to celebrate, though.

stealingfromwizards.comFamiliar Quiz | What animal is your Familiar? — Stealing from WizardsThe most robust and scientific magical familiar finding quiz on the internet. (Probably)

24 Aug

But have you completed the SfW magical familiar quiz? Guaranteed less racist than IQ testing, more scientifically sound than Myers-Briggs, and with 201 more possibilities than zodiac signs.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com

I was IQ tested when I was a kid and rode that high until Briggs-Myers tests came into vogue and then I reveled in being an INTP and now I recognize that both are basically the nerd equivalents of zodiac signs, but then that's a very Taurus thing to say, isn't it

texasobserver.orgThe ‘Houston Miracle’ Shell GameHow Houston ISD’s takeover regime inflated school accountability ratings by systematically holding back certain students

21 Aug

Goodhart's Law in action. Constant problem in education when we tie resources to student grades.

Texas Observer@texasobserver.org

#ICYMI: Nearly 2,000 juniors across 16 high schools in Houston ISD were pulled from Algebra II and placed in remedial math. At some schools, about 70% of juniors were similarly demoted into less challenging classes. It wasn't due to poor grades ...

@beebrookshire.bsky.social

20 Aug

This is among the many reasons I cringe at shilling my own book. There are so many great writers out there who aren't yet another carbon copy of exactly who I appear to be.

Annalee Newitz@annaleen.bsky.social

I try to read at least one book every year that is by a cis heterosexual white man.

Ryan Consell reposted

Bethany Brookshire

20 Aug

This is the sort of question the Science Track at @dragoncon.org will spend HOURS on. Joyful, joyful hours.

This post is unavailable.

20 Aug

It seems Stealing from Wizards needs a "Do not listen with foreign objects in mouth" warning label. 💙📚🪐

Ryan Consell reposted

M31🍁

@m31author.bsky.social

14 Aug

Today for my birthday month I received an Avalon Academy shirt, the school from Stealing From Wizards.Stealing From Wizards is my fav book from a Canadian author that is better than Harry Potter and has no TERF. I have been pushing it on all unsuspecting children I know. @stealingfromwizards.com

Me: I think I've hit the limit of my ability to publish my own books. This requires someone with expert knowledge specialist skills. That's what literary agents are for right? Every Agent: You must develop a new set of expert knowledge and specialist skills before you even consider emailing me. 😭

Actually let me refine that: Every Agent: You must develop a new set of expert knowledge and specialist skills *just to draft an email I will read*

You actually need a set of specialist skills just to find their email. If you can casually contact them, and they reply, it's almost certainly a scam.

5 Aug

I'm grinding through giving detailed feedback on an assignment I know the vast majority of my students will never look at. 🫤

tieknots.howRandom tie knot generator – tieknots.how

4 Aug

Did you know there are somewhere between 85 and 300k ways to tie a tie, depending on your definition of a tie knot. Here's a random knot generator for your amusement. tieknots.how/ties.html

@williamknowleskellett.dev

4 Aug

@premeemohamed.com A question about representation, if you have time. You're a Canadian Author who appears to have an American agent. Have any thoughts about the relative merits of a 🇨🇦 vs 🇺🇸 agent? Much obliged.

Ryan Consell reposted

William Knowles-Kellett

3 Aug

Having listened to the entire* @stealingfromwizards.com series twice as of last week, I've just purchased the four DRM-free epub books from Kobo to see how names are spelled and read in my own voice. I'll buy physical copies when there's a box set with nice art 😁

kobo.comRakuten KoboSearch results for "Stealing from Wizards" at Rakuten Kobo. Read free previews and reviews from booklovers. Shop eBooks and audiobooks at Rakuten Kobo.

whatever.scalzi.comAnother Reason Not to Use “AI” For Your WritingBack in February I did a long post about “AI” and why I wouldn’t use it for my own writing, and one of the reasons I gave was “the fact that ‘AI’-generated text …

31 July

Pickpocketing and Burglary were published before the ChatGPT watershed. That makes them precious and valuable, like low-background steel. @scalzi.com says so.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com

I've written a longer piece on the book that's been pulled due to "AI" use allegations, what that means particularly for newer authors, and what, if anything writers can do in the "AI" era to prove their work is their own: whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/31/a...

en.wikipedia.orgLow-background steel - Wikipedia

31 July

Just realized that's a deeply nerdy reference. Low-background steel is steel manufactured before the first nuclear bombs were dropped, and shielded from exposure to radioactive particles. It's valuable for shielding sensitive particle detectors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-bac...

31 July

I think I biked past @astrokatie.com yesterday, and almost stopped to say "hi." Then I remembered I don't actually know her, I only know internet her, and she definitely doesn't know me. Parasocial relationships are weird.

Ryan Consell reposted

Charlie Ludwig

@chuck4242.bsky.social

30 July

A recent Raccoon sighting. This was from a family of 4 or 5 raccoons that traverse the woods along the creek in the trees. This is their decent route from the treetops. #Mammals #Animals #Wildlife #Nature #Photography #Photos #Photo #ECK

Ryan Consell reposted

Gwen Pearson

@bug-gwen.bsky.social

30 July

will always repost sparkle weevils and long bois

Ainsley S@americanbeetles.bsky.social

It never isn’t Weevil Wednesday

30 July

I've hit a weird wall as an indie author where I feel like I'm holding my work back. Folks love it, but I've reached the limit of what I have the time and knowledge to promote it. Well, I guess I'll go back to waiting for sempai to notice me.

29 July

I finished a new Captain Marvel vest last night 🌟

Ryan Consell reposted

M31🍁

@m31author.bsky.social

29 July

I started reading this this week, and I love it! A good friend of mine described it as Canadian Harry Potter without the TERF. It is boundless creativity.