Plate V · the house

Two people, a grow room, and one rule about labels.

Paracoding Press is the publishing arm of Seaside Mushrooms LLC, a family farm on the Florida coast. We write about things while they are still running — the fleet, the failover rig, the fruiting chamber — and we give the digital edition away on the day the book goes on sale.

The family behind it

We publish the log, not the highlight reel.

Every title here is a field record of something we actually did, which means the books carry the mistakes as well as the results — the deploy that reported success and wrote nothing, the cover that went to print with the subtitle buried in the artwork, the morning the human approval step came out of the system and had to be explained.

A grow log that only records the harvests is not a log. It is an advertisement, and we already know what those are worth.

The house rule is the one we use in the grow room. Where a book states something as true, we go and look before it prints. What we could not check says so on the page.

Who is here

Meet the imprint

TWO PEOPLE

There is no editorial floor and no acquisitions committee. There is a farmer who used to build security systems, a grower who keeps everything alive, and a fleet of agents that does the typesetting and gets checked afterwards.

Scott McDonald

Publisher · Author

Twenty years as a security architect, now a mushroom farmer. He writes the books and supervises the fleet of AI strains that builds, checks and ships them. Three titles so far: civilization read as physics, GPU failover read as a DNS problem, and the grow log of the fleet itself.

Morrigan McDonald

Resident Grower · Author

Morrigan keeps the grow room humming and the harvests on schedule — the steady hands that turn cultures into clusters. Her books are about living things and the patience they ask for, and they are being written now.

What the imprint is for

Three things we will not trade away

One · written in the open

The record ships with the book

Each title is written while the thing it describes is still running, and what went wrong stays in. A grow log that records only the harvests is not a log, it is an advertisement.

Two · one source

The editions cannot disagree

The print PDF and the EPUB both build from a single manuscript. If they ever say different things about what the book contains, the build is wrong and it does not ship.

Three · checked, not asserted

Verify, don’t claim

A claim in one of these books was measured against something running, or it is labelled as unverified. The software the third book describes is open source so you can go and check.