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WordPress is (or was) great, but between the constant updates, outdated templates, and rising costs, maintaining it started taking more time than it was worth—time better spent writing.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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