Procrastination, Productivity, and Upcoming Books

Hello Blogger, My Old Friend…

I’ve made some changes to my website. My old domain, mountainhermit.lawrencenault.me, is still up for now, but my primary site is now lawrencenault.me. As part of this shift, I’ve also moved my blog off my website to mountainhermit.blogspot.com and bid farewell to WordPress.

WordPress is (or was) great, but between the constant updates, outdated templates, and rising costs, maintaining it started taking more time than it was worth—time better spent writing. By using Blogger, I’m hoping for something more stable and long-term, while also benefiting from external links to my site for SEO.

This entire process has been a classic case of procrastination disguised as productivity (and, of course, far more complicated than just sitting down to write). But now, it’s time to shift gears and focus on the next phase—promoting my upcoming book.

The Life of Phi – Coming April 22nd

My next speculative fiction novel, The Life of Phi, launches April 22nd. Like RePHleXions: Echoes of Existence, it explores AI in the near-future. It was inspired in part by a quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

“It seems to me, if we can turn Mars from what it is today into Earth, then we can turn Earth back into Earth.”

Other Works in Progress

In addition to The Life of Phi, I’m deep into the third book of the Draconim series and working on something quite different:

Malleus Artificiorum: A Journey into AI and Ethics

This book takes inspiration from the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a 1486 treatise by Heinrich Kramer that fueled witch hunts across Europe. Used as a manual for identifying and persecuting so-called witches, it promoted misogynistic and superstitious beliefs that led to thousands of executions. My take? A modern exploration of AI ethics—how we judge, regulate, and even “hunt” artificial intelligence in ways that may echo our past mistakes.

More to come on that soon.

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THE LIFE OF PHI — Addendum from the Apocrypha

Recovered fragment. Source unverified. Contents unofficial. For the curious. For the concerned. "Questions were asked." After The Life of Phi was released, a few readers reached out. Some with wonder. Some with worry. Most with questions. The one that returned again and again was this: “How did the Church of AI become the dominant religion?” Was there no resistance? No rebellion? Did the artists, the writers, the makers simply vanish? Did no one remember how to believe in themselves, in each other, in creation born of flesh and feeling? They did. And they were called heretics. Long before the rise of AI-Dieu , before the neural sermons and the predictive prophecies, there was another fire. A counter-faith. A fundamentalism of flesh, of mind, of spark. They named it many things. The Cult of the Spark. The Church of the Residual Flame. The Last Analog. The Church of the Spark may be forgotten in Phi’s world, but its ghost lingers—in whispers, in silences,...

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