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Cole Haddon, whose work I really, really enjoy, reposted a thought piece on Watchmen and the ambiguity of the message. And I know this is going to mark me as a philistine, but I find myself less and less impressed with ambiguous works. Mostly, I think, because they are hardly as ever ambiguous as they think they are. As a warning, I am going to spoil some classic pieces, but they are all more than twenty years old, so I feel okay about that.

Go read Cole’s piece, in part to help understand what I am talking about, but mostly because it is good. I’ll wait. See, told you it was good. But it is also wrong. Watchmen, like most supposed ambiguous stories, is not really ambiguous.

There are two general ways that supposedly ambiguous works fail to be actually be ambiguous. First, the works in question are actually pretty clear in their meaning. The canonical example is probably the Sopranos. People debated forever about whether Tony was dead at the end of the last episode despite the fact that the text of the show made it very clear that he had been killed. Tony was as dead as a dead thing that was very dead and also dead. No ambiguity — merely a misunderstanding.

The second way these pieces fail is that the message is not as ambiguous as the work likes to think. A great example of this is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode In the Pale Moonlight. The episode is often held up as a morally ambiguous tale of a man making hard decisions and sacrificing his own morals for the greater good. It is no such thing. The text of the show very, very, very clearly comes down on the side of what the character in question did being correct. It is a testament to the skill of the actor that he was able to sell any moral grey-ness, because the script practically jumps up and down screaming at us how right the character was to be bad. Watchmen is just as clear.

For those who have not read it, Watchmen is a deconstruction of superhero comics. Today, that is table stakes, but at the time it was rare. Watchmen was well done, better than almost any other normal comic, much less one attempting to take the piss out of the genre. As with the Star Trek episode, though, it really doesn’t earn its reputation for moral ambiguity. Cole points out that the “good guy” in the story is a mass murderer. His mass murder works — it does bring peace to the world, averting a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The only character who unambiguously says that his actions were wrong is the most sociopathicly evil of the main characters. We are supposed to question whether the means do justify the ends, and what place morality amongst the greater need. Except the text really doesn’t demand those questions, largely because the plan is so fscking stupid.

The hero who saves the world does so by faking an alien attack on New York City, giving humanity a common enemy. Yeah, maybe, for about a week. See, no other alien attack is coming. The hero had a one off monster built and used in the attack. He cannot duplicate the attack since he killed all the people involved in order to keep the secret. When no attacks come, it is clear that the two sides will start right back on the path to nuclear destruction. Maybe even faster, because the remains of the “alien” are all over New York City, and sooner or later it is very possible that some clever bugger working for the government will notice that nothing about the alien is, well, alien. In the paranoia soaked world of the comic, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand that the plan is a failure.

The point, then, has no ambiguity. The book is clearly saying that sacrificing human lives for the greater good is bad. Look, the books says, even the worst person in this world understands that the hero did evil. And for what? A plan so stupid that it would be laughed out of the Evil Overlord Open Call for Ideas to Control the World Symposium and Brunch.

I think, sometimes, that we want moral ambiguity in our works and see it when it doesn’t really exist. Being truly grey, having truly no right answer, is hard to pull off in media since stories generally have a point of view and a main character. Humans have a tendency to identify with the main characters of stories, and this includes the writers. And that tendency both undermines the ability of consumers to see that the main character could be wrong and creates a bias for writers to put their thumb on the scale, at least a little bit. More importantly, people have points of view, and those points of view tend to bleed through into their art. The creators of the Watchmen clearly thought that treating people as disposable things was bad, and that came through their work, whether they intended to or not. And, frankly, that makes is more interesting.

Ambiguity is overrated. It is not naive or childish or simplistic to have a point of view and for that point of view to influence your art. Art that says something beyond “oh look at how morally grey I am” is the most interesting kind of art, in my opinion. There is a difference between “it is hard to do the right thing” and “oh, who can say what the right thing is?”. If the latter is all you have to say, why are you bothering to talk?

Weekly Word Count

Not a lot. About 15 pages on the clone/school-shooting play and a bit of work on a graphic novel script. I thought I would try something different and learn how to write a comic script (I will not be drawing it. It is illegal for me to draw in twelve states. it is a capital offense in three.). I took the Encyclopedia Brick concept (if you know, you know. And are likely me) and am working through how to make it work as sequential art. We will see how it goes, but its good, I think, to stretch your creative muscles.

I hope you all have an unambiguously great weekend.

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In the first, he held the ball out — in a Super Bowl! — behind him as he as returning a fumble recovery for what should have been a touchdown. But because he held the ball out behind him, one of his opponents was able to knock it out of his hand, costing his team the touchdown (the Cowboys won that Super Bowl anyway). In the other, the Cowboys blocked a last moment field goal. If they had just let it sit, they would have won the game. Unfortunately, Lett forgot that the ball was dead unless touched by the blocking team and came barreling in, sliding onto the ball and letting the opposing team recover it and thus kick the game wining field goal for a second time. In neither case did Lett suffer any consequences, beyond ridicule. This on a team where a third string player had been cut for sleeping in a meeting. Why? Because he was Leon Lett, star player, destroyer of offensive lines. Which brings us to Helen DeWitt.

Helen DeWitt, if you do not know, wrote the Last Samurai. It is a brilliant book, one of the best novels of the century. A foundation offered Helen DeWitt a $175,000 dollar prize for being a good writer. The prize came with promotional commitments that DeWitt did not feel she could do. Ms. DeWitt is, to be find, not especially tech savvy and not especially gregarious. At one point in this saga, she claimed she could not respond on time to a request from the foundation becasue she had used up all her data playing mahjong on her phone. Another time, she reasonably implied that Thomas Pynchon would never be asked to do this shit. The foundation withdrew its award. All well and good — the reward had conditions and Ms. DeWitt didn’t want to fulfill them. Except the internet lost its collective mind at Helen DeWitt.

She was accused of being privileged, of throwing away an opportunity most would kill for, of betraying writers by not just being online enough. What she was asked to do was relatively easy — why didn’t she do it? Why did she get to behave that way? Because she is a literary Leon Lett and the rules are different sometimes for people who are obviously more talented that others. And that is mostly fine. Helen DeWitt earned her weird behavior (look, she wrote about this on her blog. The woman is clearly not a naif in the technology woods, at least not entirely) by being a great writer that people want to give rewards to. She doesn’t have t play the internet games, and so she doesn’t. And that should be fine. I would argue that more people should be trying to be like her than make her like the too online crowd publishing houses insist, against all evidence, sell books.

In conclusion: Leon Lett was awesome.

Uncomfortable Self Promotion

Nope, still haven’t sold anything. And don’t worry, the Weekly Word Count will return next time (about 15 page, by the by). But someone has suggested my next idea would be a good fit for Royal Road, a website where people self publish fantasy stories. So I thought I would put up an older work (one that did well with the writing group and got a couple manuscript requests but ultimately did not land me an agent) and see how it functioned. It’s about a third up, with the rest scheduled to be posted once each morning. I was curious if people would leave critiques (not so far), what it looked like in terms of an organic audience (small, unsurprisingly), etc.

I hesitated to mention this. I am not good at self-promotion (says the man with the newsletter) and it feels odd mentioning something that wasn’t good enough to get an agent. But a couple of people have asked, and some others have suggested this is good practice. So if you want to read an example of why I am a failed writer, you can see it here.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Portal fantasies are stories where modern people travel to a fantasy world that is almost always medieval in nature but with better laundry and magic and dragons and what not. Narnia is a good example. The transported people are always the key to saving the Kingdom or restoring the rightful ruler or what not. Standard fantasy tropes spiced up a bit by the presence of an easy reader stand in.

Except.

Except these are modern people. Why do they always take the side of the King or Queen or Furry Stand In For Jesus Christ? Okay, that last one is not so much of a surprise, but still. No one ever tries to reject the prophecy that stole them for their homes. No one ever sides with the nascent merchant class to curtail the power of the aristocrats. Is it really too much to expect that the children of liberal democracy would build a guillotine or two?

As I joked about being obsessed with this idea in my writing group, one person told me that while there is nothing specifically like I mentioned, there is an entire sub-genre making fun of, or at least playing with, the tropes of standard portal fantasies. Apparently, Dungeon Crawler Carl stems from that background. My writing buddy suggested that there were a fair number of humorous (which, to be clear, is not really what I had in mind beyond the silliness of the premise. I don’t really have a sense of humor. I am merely an overly sarcastic annoyance, which is not the same thing.) plays on the inherent weirdness of the concept.

That surprised me, but it should not have. Shakespeare’s Second Law of Thermodramatics is at play here: if a trope or genre exists, then there also exits an equal and opposite reaction to that trope or genre. I suspect that a lot of people, my self included, find their best work is not inspired by the things they admire. Rather, I think a lot of the best work is generated out of a sense that things could be done, if not better, then different, or more honest to the moment or with a perspective the original completely missed. I know that the stuff I enjoy having had written falls along those lines. Sometimes I think creativity is as much driven by exasperation and irritation as it is by inspiration.

And, apparently, I am writing the history of the formation of the modern state as a portal fantasy now.

Weekly Word Count

About 10 pages. Slow for a script (I am writing a play about a kid who keeps dying in school shootings but get cloned back and has to live with his re-tread life as others move on), but life gets in the way. Some business travel, some deadlines, etc. Rejections for the last play have started to trickle in, so that is fun.

Anyway, have a great weekend everyone and use that annoying TV show you hate watch but secretly love as a launchpad for your spite-inspired creativity.

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Been a bit behind with family and work and travel, and I haven’t had much but rejections to discuss, and rejections are boring. But now, as that terrible headline shows, there is Discourse. And how can I resist Discourse?

The discourse starts with another round of “writers are just lying about not using AI” stories. This is fundamentally bullshit. Now, it is entirely possible that writers are using AI in the sense that grammar checkers and Google searches use some version of AI, imitative or otherwise. But the people driving these stories are obviously trying to say that the majority of writers are using AI to, well, write. This is inevitably followed by an assertion that writing is hard and that the use of imitative AI makes a writer more efficient. Which is the dead giveaway that they don’t actually know any writers.

Writers write because they like to write. The process is the point. Yes, of course, everyone would love it if what they write is widely read, but most people understand that is not likely and they write anyway. The result isn’t the point; the process is. Just like every other hobby. Know what else is fun? Playing catch with my kids. But no one, not even the White Sox, is going to offer me a try out contract. Should I have stopped? No one will ever mistake me for a professional basketball player, but I played pick up games for years. Was that a mistake? My origami isn’t ever going to be hung in a museum. Am I foolish for indulging in the work? Of course not. Life is to be enjoyed. It is not a contest, and if you think it is, I would suggest your are doing it wrong.

But the people pushing this do think life is a contest. Or, at least, they would profit if everyone else thought life was a contest. They need people to think that the use of imitative AI in every field is inevitable, because unless it really is picked up in every field they will never make their money back. By convincing people that imitative AI is inevitable everywhere, they are trying to shape the world in favor of their. These assertions are a kind of political project, one in service of saving the economic bacon of the assertors.

And that brings us the Andy Weir.

For those who do not know, Andy Weir is the author of two books, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that have been turned into movies. Project Hail Mary is in theaters now (and I hear it is good, but have yet to see it) and so Weir is doing press. In one of the interviews, he stated that he didn’t like social commentary in his books or shows, and that the new Star Trek’s weren’t as good as the old shows because the old shows didn’t have politics. For those of you that never watched Star Trek, liberal politics were at their heart from the original series on. Weir is either lying or incapable of seeing what is right in front of his own face, even his own books.

Star Trek has always been progressive in its politics. It has always been focused on professionals trying to learn about the world and focused on how jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The original show even had the first interracial kiss on television. Weir may just be lying here. He might be trying to suck up to MAGA adjacent audiences in order to avoid the pile-on that other sci-fi properties have suffered anytime their cast looks less white than printing people. He may be MAGA adjacent and simply speaking the language of his tribe. He might, however, simply not recognize politics as politics because he agrees with the politics in the works he likes..

I don’t think Weir is a racist, so the interracial kiss would not seem important or out of the ordinary to someone his age. I think that, generally, people of Weir’s generation would have been raised to think that war is usually bad and destructive and that diplomacy has value. Since Star trek reflects back his own values, to at least a certain extent, he doesn’t recognize the politics in them. I think this is a likely explanation, since he also says that he doesn’t have social politics or social messaging in his books. He is absolutely wrong about that.

I cannot speak to Project Hail Mary as I have neither read it nor seen the movie. But I did do both for The Martian. And that book has a ton of politics. It is the story of a person who survives on Mars after being accidentally left behind. He does so using the tools provided by the government and is ultimately rescued by an international project, with China and the US both sacrificing their short-term goals in order to rescue one man. It is a clear story about the value of government science, cooperation, and diplomacy. Because Weir thinks those things are good, he doesn’t understand how political they can be. Others find privatization, corporate science, and great power competition better and so would find his work “political”. Weir doesn’t keep social commentary out of his books, he just doesn’t understand that he cannot recognize such commentary when he agrees with it.

All good fiction has some level of political or social commentary embedded in it. Good fiction is a reflection of human opinion and human emotions and human structures. Society and politics inform all of those, and so all good fiction has some element of commentary on those human creations. Weir’s work is good, and so it embeds his assumptions about what is good and valuable in those human structures. But not everyone will agree with Weir’s judgment about what is good in humanity. Those readers will understand the politics and social commentary in his books, even if Weir doesn’t.

Weir doesn’t want politics kept out of his art. He just doesn’t want to be confronted with the idea that not everyone agrees with his politics.

Weekly Word Count

Okay, been a bit more than a week. I have a few thousand words of revisions and new work. I am working on a story about rich parents cloning their kids to help them survive school shootings. Mikey 7 meets the school shooting generation. But I have also been a little obsessed with another idea.

Portal fantasies — where modern people go to a fantasy world or alternate reality — almost always have a story focused on helping the Good King retain or get back their throne. How come the modern Americans in these stories never remember that No Kings is their national creed? So now I am obsessed with a portal fantasy where at least one of the people transported to the land is a committed democrat, intent on establishing a republic in Narnia. Almost certainly my least commercial idea, which is saying something. But I keep thinking about it. Which means I will likely have to finish it. Ah, well. No one makes money in fiction anyway.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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The story did not ring true to me, even before I saw Michael’s note that his sources confirmed that the one pen name given in the article only sold thirty-seven books. It always seemed odd that the article combined her money from her page reads on Kindle Unlimited (for those unfamiliar, Kindle Unlimited is a serve where people who pay a fee — currently ten dollars a month, I believe — have access to a large percentage of the ebooks on their Kindles or Kindle apps. Authors are paid based on how many of their pages get read by the subscribers. Payments are determined by an algorithm Amazon unilaterally controls. Self-published authors make up, I believe, the bulk of the books subscribers have access to) and her business “teaching” people how to “write” with AI. The smell of scam covered the article.

I find it hard to believe that someone who is putting out a dozen books in a year is making six figures on those books. It is hard to believe that such a lack of polishing would produce books that people would want to read. And no, for those about to ask, it is not credible that imitative AI could produce books good enough to generate that level of engagement. For all the talk of how imitative AI is going to replace artists, I never see anyone pointing to a book that embodies the alleged coming masterworks. I doubt, very much, that this one person has cracked that secret and is willing to sell it to others.

That willingness should have been a thread that the article picked upon, but it dod not. In general, it seemed very credulous. As far as I could tell, the writer did not use the pen names of the writer to verify her sales claims. They seemed to merely take the person’s word for her performance. Nor did they examine the idea that a person who made so much money from producing imitative AI content would then turn around and sell those techniques, creating competition in what is very close to a zero-sum game for page reads. The article, when examined thoughtfully, seems less like reporting and more like stenography.

There is a desire among many people, in and out of tech, to overstate the usefulness of imitative AI. Some of the hype is self-serving, some of it seems to be a fear of not catching the next wave, some of it seems to be resentment at the people who are allegedly going to be the most impacted, and some of it seems to be a simple desire to live in interesting times. Imitative AI can have some utility, but reporters should be helping readers separate the hype from the bullshit. Instead, the Times lack of curiosity appears to have both spread hype rather than information and legitimized what appears to be a simple grifter. Time to close the journalism schools indeed.

Weekly Word Count

Pretty much nothing. Finished plotting out/writing out scene list for the corrupt judge/algorithm book. I also got feedback on the last version of Sarah Smith (the tech abortion book) and so I spent time planning those revisions. Honestly, just been busy and a chunk of my free time has been swallowed by the Olympics.

I know they are corrupt, but I love them so. Especially the winter Olympics, where most of the events seem like they are based on drunken bar bets. Let’s play human bumper cars in a hockey rink with knives on our feet (short track skating)! Let’s jump off a perfectly good mountain and then ask people how pretty we looked doing it (ski jumping)! Let’s ski somewhere with our guns and then shoot random shit for no discernible reason (biathlon)! Let’s take the wheels off the skateboards of our chunkier friends and then make them race down a mountain (snowboard cross)! Let’s throw ourselves down a tube made of ice in increasingly flimsy vehicles (bobsled, luge, and skeleton. I bet skeleton racers spend their downtime trying to pet polar bears)! They are all so, so stupid and so, so fun.

Have a great weekend, and don’t do anything a winter Olympian would do.

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So far, so good. But a non-trivial number of people have fallen back on the idea that publishing sucks because they are publishing only MFA novels — novels written by and for Masters of Fine Arts students. The argument goes that publishing is run by MFA students and/or teachers, and so the books that they purchase are all MFA books. Books, that is, that are formulaic and lack depth, dependent upon plot mechanics above all else. Or they are discursive, navel gazing self-indulgent bores. Either seems to work, and either seems to be somehow focused on the idea that the publishing elites are out of touch with real Americans. It is all nonsense, of course, but it is kind of interesting nonsense.

And no, I am not going to link to specific articles. I am not here to pick fights, and I understand the frustration inherent in this industry. I am a failed writer — says so right on the door. And I got another rejection today, so I am not in the most charitable of moods towards gatekeepers. But I got rejected not because I don’t write stuff that MFA students want to read but because I didn’t write something that someone thinks they can sell. Now, this is probably because I suck (again: failed writer’s journey) but it might also because I don’t have something that fits the categories they think can make numbers. Looking any deeper than that — you suck, or your book isn’t easy to market — is unsupported by any evidence. And no, it your book being rejected is not evidence.

It is interesting to me that a significant number of people took a rather commonsense description of publishing choices and rushed to blaming whatever their version of an MFA novel was. You have to want to get to that place from Gioia’s piece. It was a reasoned discussion, based on his experience in the industry and knowledge of the people who work in it, focused on how publishers fit into their larger world and how that affects their choices. It talked about business and fear and sales numbers. It barely used the letters M, F, or A and had nothing to even hint that MFA graduates were drivers of any of the issues he sees. You have to, in other words, work backwards to your preferred conclusion to reach it starting from his article. And while this hardly matters in such an inconsequential discussion, its not an uncommon event in more meaningful topics.

This is in part because basic heuristics do have some value. At this point, given how DHS has lied about events, for example, I default to not believing them absent proof to the contrary. Heuristics are often a good defense in a complex world. But motivated reasoning essentially assumes you are correct, and that is a terrible, terrible way to go through life. We don’t value expertise and the truth much in this society, so motivated reasoning seems more acceptable than it should. The push for imitative AI will likely exacerbate that that tendency — we know that they are good at persuading people misinformation is true.

I don’t have a grand conclusion here, or a pithy wrap up. I just find it interesting how we fall back on this kind of reasoning so easily. It is obviously something that has to be taught out of us, and just as obviously something we don’t, as a society, teach out of ourselves very well. Banal, I am sure, but we often needs reminders of the banal.

Weekly Word Count

The next book is plotted out, and I am working on the scene breakouts now. Yes, I do plot moderately extensively.

I like how writing it as a play helped refine the work quickly, so I may do that again. Regardless, should be putting words down relatively soon. This one is about a judge who sells kids to a juvenile center, the AI that allows him to do so, and the people who risk everything to stop him. And, yes, it is loosely based on the Kids for Cash scandal.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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The Administration is lying about a woman, Renee Goode, that one of their agents shot dead for no reason and then lied both about the victim and the event. It has also claimed it has taken control of another country for purely mercenary reasons. Things are not good, to be kind. So why waste time writing?

My writing is never going to change the world. I am a failed writer, remember. No one outside of beta readers has ever read a bit of my fiction and it is likely no one ever will. Even if I do manage to get published and read, it is vanishingly unlikely that my writing, or anyone’s writing, will suddenly engender a miraculous change of heart. People do not work like that, especially in this day and age. To the extent that entertainment and art changes people’s minds or personalties, it does so because it finds a way to express a desire that is already present in the person. In the same way that nuclear fission was floating in the air in the physics world in the 1930s, waiting to manifest, a book that “changes the world” does so because it becomes the manifestation of a popular feeling already present, not because it created that feeling. The slow, steady accretion of emotions, art, and experience drives change, not a publishing contract.

So why bother?

For the same reason that you should go on walks, or watch sports, or play music, or complete a puzzle or video game. Human beings are not meant to experience stress constantly. It wears you down, makes you sick. You cannot spend all your time focused on the worst. You must find some way to allow your mind and body to recover from the stress. Otherwise, you become less and less capable of dealing with the world. That is one of the reasons they are so blatant in their lies: they want you stressed and overwhelmed by their bullshit. We don’t know how this is going to end, or how long it is going to take to wrench the country back to a liberal democracy. We just know that it is worth doing. It is okay, it is important, to make sure you do what you need to be there for the whole time.

Nothing I am saying, of course, is surprising or new. And maybe it is just self-justification for turning away from the world for a bit. I don’t think so, but it is possible. All I know, for myself, is that writing helps make facing the world as it is easier (odd, given that my finished novel is about a woman in tech trying to keep her bosses from missing her work to punish woman who get abortions ….). Helping others requires effort. Stress saps the strength needed for that effort. Anything you do to reduce that stress, to allow yourself the space to recover, is probably more helpful than doomscrolling.

Weekly Word Count

Zero. So much for avoiding the stress.

I finished the latest draft of my political thriller and am now playing with three ideas, seeing which one falls out neatly:

1. A story based on the judge in PA that took bribes to send kids to a particular prison. In this story, a IT security expert is drawn into a potential conspiracy involving judges, for profit prisons, and AI based sentencing software. Can he survive long enough to discover the real crime?

2. An AI as literal necromancy story. Our hero notices that his coworkers becoming more and more zombie like as they use the latest AI coding and art generation tools. But when people close to him start disappearing, he discovers that the tool is literally devouring their souls. But to what end? And can he stop it before he and everyone he loves is consumed by the monster at the heart of the industry?

3. Proper English magic. A girl survives getting her head stuck in a machine during the Luddite era (something, that actually happened) by making a deal with the Fae for magic. She turns on the factory owners whose unconcern and greed nearly killed her, becoming a general in Ned Ludd’s army. But deals with the Fae come with a high price, a price high enough that it could cost her the lives and futures of everyone she cares about. I’d be leaning heavily on Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant and Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell (yes, I realize Suzanne Clark is a genius and I am not, but it always nagged at me that she had a book about English magic and essentially ignored the Luddites)

Whichever one plots out easiest will likely be my next project. I am also likely to lean into what I did for Sarah Smit: plot→script→iterate plot and script→book. Doing the plot/character revisions in script form is easier and faster for me. It seems to be a decent set of tools to get me through the process.

Have a great weekend.

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It is the fifth novel I have completed well enough to feel comfortable sending out in the last five years. There have been others that I never got to that point with and shelved and some that I got part way into and decided I couldn’t make them readable. Obviously, I was wrong about readability of the ones I sent out, or at least salability — it does say Failed Writer on the door, after all. But Smith has some interest from a small publisher, which is encouraging, and hopefully means I have improved. And since this is the Time of Resolutions, and a lot of people resolve to finish a book, and since I have nothing else to discuss, I thought I might lay out what worked for me.

Outline. I spend years never finishing novels and I suspect that is because I only half-heartedly, at best, planned out the book. I would have a vague idea of the characters and a couple of plot beats and then fail to connect anything. Once figured out that I needed a real plan, it gave me the space to really write. Since I didn’t spend time thinking, as I was writing, of what should happen next I could focus on the scenes. This does not mean the outline was a straight-jacket. Far from it. But the changes I introduced came easier, felt like I was fixing an issue rather than groping my way through the dark. An outline gives you the light to see the path, and the light to see when you need to change the path.

Lean on structure, but don’t be afraid to deviate. The novel follows a pretty standard three-act structure. That, again, is a child of planing. The three-act is pretty standard well understood process that generally gives you the rising tension that most stories utilize. But we have rules so that we understand why we are breaking them. The book has a longer third act than normal, but it works given the shape of the story. What is important, in my opinion, is the voice of the author, that the story is carried along by the actions of characters we are interested in (not necessarily like), and that some jeopardy or possibility of change is present, usually in an escalating fashion. Do that, and you probably have a readable story.

Join a writing group. The caveat here is that it has to be a good one. You need one with people who will tell you, in whatever fashion they are comfortable doing so, that your book is crap and you should be ashamed of having written it. The power of a good group is that you have people who both want to help you write the book you want to write and are willing to hold you accountable for when you fall short of those expectations. No one improves if they aren’t helped to understand where they need improvement. Now, this does not mean that you want a group of assholes. Far from it. Assholes are not good at helping you understand where you need to improve. You want people who want you to succeed, not just to hear themselves talk. The Ubergroup is the one I am in, but there are plenty.

So there you have it — what worked for me. It might not work for you, but if you have had trouble finishing with your existing plans, maybe this is an alternative you can try. I wont say its easy because its not. Writing a novel takes a lot of time, effort, and mental work. But its also not the hardest thing you will ever do, and it does not require genius. Lord knows, I am the furthest thing from a genius. And, as noted, I am a failed writer. But I think if you want to, you can find the way forward that works for you and produce something you would like others to read.

Weekly Word Count

I have no idea, honestly. Between the holidays and an insane work schedule (I was on vacation but two massive projects I worked on went live, so I needed to be around) I just put my head down and pushed through the revisions/additions. The novel ended up at just over 67 thousand words. Novel length, but a short novel. Given that this is a political/techno thriller, that probably works, but we will see.

(As a reminder, the pitch is:

WHO IS SARAH SMITH? When an elder millennial programmer finally gets her big career break as the only woman working on a woman’s health app, she discovers the company is selling user’s menstrual data to law enforcement in anti-abortion states. They warn her that if she whistleblows, they will fire and doxx her. She has to choose between her own safety and that of all women living in red states. A darkly funny, high-tech thriller in the vein of “She Said” and “Proof”.)

If the editor likes it or likes it enough to want revisions, we will go from there. If not, we will try another project. Writing is fun even when I do it so poorly no one wants to read the results. Just because I am a failure does not mean I do not get something out of the process. And, of it does get picked up by the press, I will let you know.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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The latests literary kerfuffle (and I will keep using this word until you admit its perfection) is about some poor person who said that they thought ambiguous endings were bad, using No Country For Old Men as an example. Now, I do not think that ambiguous endings are bad — if used well, they can be moving and thought provoking. Part of the problem, however, is that I think they are very often not used well. Sopranos is the perfect example, in my opinion.

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Spoilers for a very old show.

Tony is deader than a dead thing that is very dead.

The show make no bone about that. Even the “previously on” section highlights the discussion of death where they say everything just ends, goes dark. Just like how the show ended. And Tony is meant to be the bad guy. No ambiguity there. The scene where the FBI agent celebrates Tony’s victory in the mob war and his fellow agents look at him like he is bottom of the shoe scum makes that clear. There is nothing ambiguous about this ending — the writers tell you very clearly how it ends and what they thought of Tony. Both the plot and moral endings are crystal clear.

But.

But people think of the show has having an ambiguous ending because of the sudden cut to black. The writers played a game with audience expectations knowing that people would argue about its meaning, played coy about their intentions, and suddenly — ambiguous ending! The Sopranos are hardly the only show to do this. Deep Space Nine’s “greatest’ episode does something, thought not entirely, similar. It supposedly presents a tough moral dilemma that the audience is supposed to worry over. Except it doesn’t — the show absolutely takes one side of the argument, in a really lazy fashion in my opinion. There is no ambiguity in the text, only in the presentation. And I believe that is because the idea of ambiguity has been fetishized in writing.

Again, there is nothing wrong with ambiguity in writing. Some things are hard, and stories should reflect that. Some choices are all different shades of bad, the world often requires unpleasant compromises, and people often have what they consider good reasons for doing what you consider bad things. Literature and films should reflect all of that. But sometimes, things are clear. Sometimes, there is a right thing to do. Sometimes, the choice is straightforward, even if it may be hard to implement. And stories should reflect that as well, maybe now more than ever. But I think we as a society have convinced ourselves that clear is bad, that simple reflects a lack of intelligence, that ambiguity is the only measure of reality. That is just nonsense, and it is nonsense that encourages the kind of fake ambiguity the indulged in by the ending of the Sopranos and the episode of Deep Space Nine.

That is a shame, because the fake ambiguity obscures real issues. If the Deep Space Nine episode had not so egregiously stacked the deck in favor of its preferred position, it could have had a deep and interesting conversation about morality and principles and what is and is not worth fighting for. Instead, we got performative ambiguity. The Sopranos could have spent its ending interrogating why Tony was an attractive personality despite being a miserable, murdering son-of-a-bitch. Instead, we got a fake-out designed to appear ambiguous without actually earning that ambiguity.

Ambiguity — real ambiguity — is good. But it is not the be all end all of writing, its lack does not signal a lack of sophistication or intelligence, and it does not reflect reality in every situation. Pretending otherwise doesn’t get us more sophisticated works. It just gets us trickery, a lack of seriousness, and an excuse to avoid properly interrogating what you are trying to say as a writer.

Also, I have neither read nor seen No Country for Old Men so I have no idea if any of the above applies to the book or the film. I told you this was a rambling little rant at the start. You knew what you signed up for.

Weekly Word Count

About five grand. Not great, but progress. I am warming up to the “convert from script” writing style, though I am worried that I won’t have a novel at the end, or I will have one with the shape out of whack. But, again, failed writer, so most of my stories are out of whack in one way or another.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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The article lays out why Succession can feel awful to watch, as funny and well done as it is: the story removes all perspectives except those of the Roy’s. As a result, we end up invested in them to the exclusion of any other message the show might be trying to get across. The show is clearly meant, I believe, as a satire. No one is a good person, they flail all the time, and they ultimately are unsatisfied and unhappy. But they also literally get away with murder (or at least manslaughter) and ruining people’s lives with no consequences. From the dead waiter to the little boy they traumatize at the softball game to the media website they ruin, we spend no time with the people they impact beyond “look at how these people are bad! Aren’t they bad! And isn’t it interesting who is going to take over?”

That last is the issue: despite attempting to satirize the wealthy morons who too often run our world, the show invests the viewers in their struggle. They are funny and fun to watch and the show elevates their succession plans to the level of high art, making it the center of the show. People, then, naturally, start to become invested in the well being of the characters. Because the show hides the consequences of their actions from the viewers, it is hard to take those consequences seriously. And that, I think, diminishes the satire.

I have said this before, but I don’t think that satire and irony work in mass entertainment. I genuinely think that they require a shared way of looking at the world, a shared language, that pretty much does not exist in the modern media environment. And so if you have a show that centers the “bad” guys, then all you have is a show that a significant portion of the audience is not going to have the language to understand. Satire is meant to chop down the target of the satire — so anything that undermines that chopping is probably not what the creators intended. If you want a mass audience to get your point, I think you need to center other stories.

Sometimes I will hear this idea dismissed as writing to your dumbest readers/watchers. I don’t think that is the case. It is the equivalent of saying that if you refuse to write in French for an English market that you are pandering to your dumbest readers. The language for broad satire does not, I think, really exist. I think you need to have more focus on the consequences to get your point across (and don’t give me any shit about how you are just writing about people, man. Satire has targets and you know damn well you want those people to think less of those targets when you are done.). Plus, the idea that you cannot write intelligently about the lives of the less powerful is bullshit. The Fargo shows are a better satire of modern American life than the Wolf of Wall Street because it shows the consequences through the eyes of the people living through them whereas the Wolf of Wall street doesn’t really. One makes us understand consequences; one makes us understand that rich people have pretty good lives even if they are assholes.

Bluntly, stories about people who face no consequences are boring. The online media story in Succession is modeled on the Gawker media saga. The thing is, the some of people who were fucked by the private equity firm that set out to destroy them managed to create their own successful media firm, writing the kinds of stories their owners never wanted them to write. To me, that is a much more interesting fallout from the destruction of a media firm than one Roy child feeling a little smaller in front of their father. The lives of the waiter’s friends and family, of the boy at the softball game’s family, would be richer stories to mine, much more incisive and interesting and meaningful than yet another version of the Roys feel temporarily bad about something — wait, who is in the lead for the CEO job???

Maybe I am thinking too small. Maybe I am falling prey to the notion that writing should have a message. Maybe I am just too dumb to appreciate fine work. Maybe. But satire already has a a message, or it wouldn’t be satire. I think that if you are going to go to the trouble of crafting a message, you should probably craft it in a way that most people who encounter it will understand. It does not mean an end to satire, but it does mean thinking more critically about how you craft that story. And maybe, just maybe, we should stop pretending that anti-heroes are the most interesting people in their stories. They usually are not. Forgetting that, centering them, usually doesn’t get you great stories. It usually just gets you indulgent ones.

Weekly Word Count

About one thousand. Yeah, I suck. Work and life have been crazy, which I could, and astute readers will notice I am, using as an excuse. But I am going to blame my contrary nature: since many people are still doing the write a novel in November thing, even if NaNoWriMo as an organization is pushing up daisies, my psyche demands I produce nothing.

Actually, I kind of understand George RR Martin better. I am working on the book version of the tech/abortion play since I do have a very small press interested in it. But I think, since the play is done and off to a handful of contests, that I feel a bit underwhelmed by the book version, as the story has been told. Yes, books and plays are very much not the same thing, but the story itself is largely told, and I think that makes me, at some level, less interested in re-telling it.

Or I just suck. It does say failed writer on the door. I probably just suck.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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There is a bit of a kerfuffle (still undefeated in the best word contest) online about the new James Bond movie. I cannot find the original article, but the writers are concerned with canon and continuity and are thus having a hard time coming up with ways to proceed with the next story. Apparently, in Daniel Craig’s last film, Bond was blown up. The writers are having a hard time coming up with a way to bring Bond back from that, and I don’t understand why at all.

I will admit that it is a bit difficult to imagine a good way to bring back a dead person realistically. But I also don’t understand why they are so fixated on an explanation. Bond has bene played by seven or eight different actors across a time period that stretches longer than I have been alive. Yet Bond is always someone in their mid-30s to mid-50s, and each actor has played the character differently. The series is already absurd in that regard. Heck, the fans have already given you a theory you could lean on, or at least wink at in interviews — that Bond is not a person but a title, and there have been several over the years. And that I think illustrates the larger point: people overthink canon.

Canon, the “true” history and stories of a series, to be a bit overly-simplistic, is overrated by writers and fans. You are telling stories, not a real history. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be internally consistent. Yes, things like trilogies should be, as they are telling one story. But beyond that? Despite what online fans may argue, most people don’t care if there are inconsistencies across several movies or shows or books as long as they get something from the stories. Bond movies are about the ludicrous spy adventures, not about whether or not every scene is consistent with every other scene in every other movie. Heck, the existence of the Bond is a title fan theory proves that most fans will have as much fun playing with the inconsistencies as watching a perfectly internally consistent series.

Stories are what matter, not background. The overwhelming majority of people wont care that much, as long as the story is good. I suspect the best way to bring Bond back from the dead is opening the next movie with a great action sequence and then never bringing the subject up. If the movie is good, people will not, by and large, care. Yes, some people on the internet might have various farm animals, but who cares? If the movie is good, people will see it.

We as people want good stories. We as writers spend too much time worrying about being consistent rather than making sure each iteration of the story is the best it can be. Canon should never get in the way of an enjoyable tale. Audiences will forgive you for not being entirely internally consistent if you make them laugh or cry or think or feel good or feel scared. That, in the end, is what people come to stories for.

Weekly Word Count

About a thousand.

I am rewriting the novel based off the play feedback (the small press is still interested in the book version, assuming I produce credible work), and its really hard. Writing a script is relatively fast and easy and simple — plot, dialogue, a bit of description here and there. This is not to say that coming up with good plot, descriptions, and dialogue is easy. Writing is writing. It is merely to point out that all the other things that you can rely on your collaborators for when doing a script — costume, setting, appearance — can be sketched out in plays in a way that they cannot be in prose. I spent a couple months getting the play version of this story ready for submission to contests (shout out to readers and the people at the table reads for the help), and the transition back to prose has been really hard. I struggle now more with the interiority, using descriptions appropriately, etc. I am pretty sure it will get easier as I do more, but it’s interesting how our minds get into one mode of thinking and have a hard time switching tracks.

Or, you know, I could just suck. Either answer works.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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I generally trust the people who run the company I work for. I don’t know them personally, but I know that they all came up in various ways through the industry. They are all people who understand why consumers come to us, what they are looking for, and what we are supposed to provide. Yes, they are business people, so they have all the same potential problems as any executives — too much focus on the quarterly reports, disconnection from too much of the day to day, etc. But at their core, they get the business, they know what a well run firm in our industry produces and that helps mitigate the usual pitfalls. That does not appear to be the case in the entertainment industry.

Book publishers admit that they don’t know what sells (I don’t think that is true, by the way. I suspect they have a decent idea, but it basically amounts ot marketing, and they have settled on a model where they fund their industry off a few mega hits rather than try to build many smaller sustainable, if individually less profitable products.). Movie and television in the streaming era suffer from too much data, and the data owners appear to be driving the decision making. One of the reason we don’t get yearly seasons anymore is because these firms wait for the data before deciding to green light new production, so its years between seasons instead of months. And then when a show drifts from the public mind, everyone insists that it must be the quality rather than the fact that it broke its momentum waiting for a computer to give the green light.

Data also appears to drive what gets made. Sequels, reboots, etc. dominate the movie industry and to a lesser extent publishing (I recently heard that there were two genres in publishing today — romantasy and not romantasy) in large part because they resemble in the data what was successful in the past. Data shows that people are watching shows while they scroll through their phone? Better write incredibly simply, repetitive shows so people don’t get lost. Only a data maven (and I say this as a data maven) could come up with that little bit of nonsense. The solution to distraction ought to be more compelling content, possibly structured in different ways. The solution is not the same thing but dumber and less engaging.

People who don’t understand or like an industry cannot really ever be successful at it. Data, as I have said over and over again to the point where I am an absolute bore on this matter, is not expertise. It can inform your expertise but when you allow it to replace your expertise, you are, well, fsked. And since the entertainment industry is no longer run by people who understand and like entertainment, well, we can see what is happening.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money off entertainment. If I ever sell anything, I hope it makes me filthy rich (it won’t, but dreams are nice to have, aren’t they?) But you cannot be successful if you don’t understand your business, if you don’t understand why people would want to give you money for what you make. Numbers are not a substitute for understanding, whatever MBA schools might insist. The entertainment industry is just a very public example of this phenomenon — once healthy businesses driven into the wall by people who see the dollar signs but do not understand why those dollars change hands in the first place.

Weekly Word Count

Nothing, basically. I spent the week working with collaborators filling out applications to workshops and contests for the script. So, you know, wish me luck. Probably going to need a lot of it. Next week, back to the novel.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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I have plenty of ideas, all the time. I can hardly go a boring meeting without coming up with another idea for a story. What if the boy from Encyclopedia Brown grew up to be the kid from Brick? What if Batman and Catwoman had a Robin and Marian denouement? What if a necromancer murdered craftsmen and used their spirits to build factories? What if someone is magic-ed to another world as the hero destined to save the King but prefers to spend their time improving sanitation and agriculture for the peasants? What if, after a zombie apocalypse, someone realized that zombies taste of chicken (Eddie Izzard assures me that babies do, so zombies must as well)? See. Ideas are easy.

But each of those ideas can be executed in multiple ways. Take the zombies taste of chicken idea. A zombie rancher could be a horror, or a meditation on desperation, or a comparison between hunting and farming (We are not, for the record, descendants of great hunters. We are descendants of the people who figure out that if you put a mommy cow and a daddy cow in the same place, you eventually got delicious, delicious baby cows with no tracking required.) or a discussion of how we take the easier, more evil route in the face of difficulties. Or any combination of them. Or all of them. The idea, clearly, is not the work. The execution is the work. So why do so many people want to rely on imitative AI for the ideas?

I suspect part of the answer lies in our general disdain for expertise. It seems to me that we constantly seek math, numbers, validation in programs and statistics and process. All of those things have value. All of those things can assist. But they are not a replacement for thought or imagination or emotion. People need math and numbers and process to inform their intelligence. Trying to use those tools as a substitute for expertise, for any human experience, is bound to end in failure.

If you think your problem as a writer is that you do not have enough ideas, than I would humbly suggest that you are misunderstanding the problem. You have ideas — everyone does. If they do not come, it is likely because you do not understand how to call them. That is a failure of skill, of practice. Trying to shortcut that practice by substituting the median idea from the imitative AI’s training data will fail. People learn by doing, not by outsourcing their thinking, whether to an answer key or to a fancy word calculator.

I am a failed writer. Says so on the door. But my failures are ones of skill, taste, and execution. I have never failed to produce ideas, stories to chase, paths to explore. I may have never executed on those ideas well enough to sell a piece, but I have never lacked for the material upon which to build my failures. And you won’t either, if you just practice. If you just put in the work. If you refuse the imitative AI shortcut to nowhere.

Weekly Word Count

I had a lovely table read of the tech-aboriton play, and re-edited the piece based on the feedback in preparation for sending the piece to contests. It seems to have improved, and the suggested edits were more minor, less structural, than past iterations. It might actually be getting better.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

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Book publishers apparently do not know how to sell books. That, in a country that sells about a billion versions of colored carbonated flavor water, seems like a weird thing to say about a multi-billion dollar industry but it is apparently true. As a result, the Walrus article points out, sales are driven by two things: the previous sales track of the author and how large was the advance, with this being heavily influenced by the sales track. They pour money and attention into the books they paid the most for in the hopes that they will become a huge hit, and spend no time on building an author’s career as there is no money in that work. All of this is a simplification of the article, but it is directionally correct.

It is not, then, that publishers spend too much attention to the sales track. It is that they do not know how to market their products. Part of the problem, as Michel points out, is that they are not selling to readers but to book sellers. Unlike, say, movies, the main marketing of books is to the buyers at stores and chains. Publishers have decided that the way to sell books is to sell the sellers. And why that is a part of the process, surely, it seems a bit off that they see the primary customers as booksellers and not book readers. And since they cannot reach readers, they cannot build authors. Boom or bust seems to be a natural outgrowth of that mindset.

I could be all wrong about this. I am, after all, a failed writer, as it says on the door. But the focus on selling to sellers rather than selling to readers seems to be a large part of the problem. If you cannot reach readers, then you have less space for building author careers, building loyalty to your brands (no one buys a book, for example, based on who publishes it yet people have serious opinions about the difference between Coke and Pepsi), or any sense of how readers react to your marketing. If you cannot have a decent sense of how many books a mid-range piece will sell, you cannot build a business out of selling mid-range successes. You are essentially left depending on blockbusters — blockbusters that you don’t really know how to generate. Again, I might be wrong, but I suspect there is space here for a clever publisher to do things differently.

Weekly Word Count

Pretty much nothing. Been editing and plotting, but I did submit, at the suggestion of people in my writing group, the play to two regional competitions. I will not win, of course (again: failed writer), but I might get some useful feedback.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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But first, a small personal note. I narrated a story for Starship Sofa, a British SFF podcast. The story, Footsteps Among the Stars, by Richard Dansky, is out this week. I had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you check it out and enjoy it. Any flaws are the fault of the narrator, not the writer.

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Okay, back to butchering other’s ideas for my own purposes.

Michel’s conceit, like most good ideas, is both simple and clarifying: literature is like a large ballroom with many different conversations happening in its various corners. Sometimes people cross from conversation to conversation, mixing their genres, so to speak. And I think that might be a key to why science fiction seems to be dying as a genre.

Science fiction does seem to be dying as a genre. Fewer people are interested in reading the genre, and the best seller sin the genre consistently sell less than other mass market genres. I think the ballroom explains why.

The ballroom, I think, is more crowded, to butcher the metaphor. Part of the crowding is that the ballroom is shrinking. There are fewer readers of fiction, so we’ve been moved out of the main ballroom and down into one of the smaller, less appealing smaller rooms down the end of the hall in the basement. Part of the crowding is that, because traditional publishing is more open to women, minorities, etc. than it had been even twenty years ago, we get different voices who have been parts of different conversations. Part of the crowding is that the number of books, in part because of self-publishing, has increased. So, more people involved in the conversations in a comparatively smaller space means that there is more cross-communication, more people taking things from more of the various conversations. Science fiction, then, I think, is fading as a genre because it has become more and more part of everyone’s conversation.

Science fiction has always been a part of other literatures, from literary fiction to magical realism. More and more, mainstream literature, literary fiction, and other genres are incorporating science fiction tropes, premises, and tricks. This has always been the case, but it does seem to be accelerating. There are many reasons for this — our world is more concerned with science fiction concepts, such as AI, technological surveillance, etc. But I do think that part of it is that more writers are familiar with science fiction, that as it has become more embedded in culture it has been drawn into other conversations. So much so that it no longer lives in its own conversation but is on the lips of all writers.

A bit simple, probably, but, hey, at least you got a link to Michel’s excellent essay out of it.

Weekly Word Count

Practically nothing. I have been editing the script version of Who is Sarah Smith with a collaborator with the intention of placing it in a competition readers think it would be a good fit for later in the year. Between that and work and life commitments, I haven’t really done any knew words.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Apparently, an asshole came up to George R. R. Martin at Worldcon and told him that he should hand the Game of Thrones (Yes, it’s actually called a Song of Ice and Fire, but most people would know it by the name the TV show gave it)series over to Brandon Sanderson to finish (for those who do not know, Sanderson finished the Wheel of Time series after the author passed away). Now, that person, as noted, is an asshole. You should never be n asshole, and GRRM has no obligation to hand over his work to someone else just because he is having a hard time finishing it. But the fan is not wrong to be disappointed.

After what happened at Worldcon got out, pretty much every professional writer I follow on social media said some version of GRRM doesn’t owe fans anything. That writing is hard and that it comes when it comes, and that you should not have expectations of authors. That is really, really, really wrong. When you publish books in a series, you have made a promise to your readers that you will finish the books. They gave you their time, attention, and money. They are right to be disappointed with you, especially when the time between books in an unfinished series gets longer and longer.

Yes, writing is hard. I am a failed writer, I know all about hard. Yes, you sometimes write your way into corners or get lost or run out of ideas for a particular story. yes, sometimes life gets in the way. But in the case of GRRM, he had enough of an outline to allow the TV show to finish with roughly his approved ending. He has worked on other projects outside of the series and the TV show. And he is a professional writer — it is literally what he is paid to do, and he is one of the rare authors who makes enough from it that he does not need another job. It is not unfair for people to be disappointed he is breaking his promise to them.

And it is a promise. If you start something people give you attention and money for, you are making the promise that you will do everything you can to finish it within a reasonable amount of time. And when you fail to live up to that promise, as GRRM has, it is not unreasonable for people to be disappointed in you. And it bothers me a bit that other authors do not see this.

I am probably reading too much into this, but it seems that we generally think less of our obligations to others. It is okay to admit that someone has not lived up to their obligations, even if they are your friend, even if you are concerned that you might fail in the same way, as some of these other authors might. Failure is not the end of the world — apologize and try to do better. I don’t think it a good sign, however, that we recoil at even the simplest of obligations to others. I think it is a sign of the kind of coarsening of society that has helped, not by itself, of course, but helped, the world turn into the dumpster fire we see around us.

I genuinely believe that most fans would be in a far more comfortable place with GRRM if he would just admit that he has let them down, and that he is trying to do better. I genuinely believe that we as a society would be better off if admitted to more of our mutual obligations and were both more willing to apologize for error and willing to accept those apologies. Not everyone, of course. I doubt there is much hope for the asshole at Worldcon. But most people are reasonable — and if we remember that, if we cat on that, I think things would be at least a little better.

Weekly Word Count

Not much — only about 2900, all in the Encyclopedia Brick book. God help me, too — I am starting to really like that name. Life and other pursuits got in the way. Maybe I should let Brandon Sanderson finish it?

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Though I enjoy both, Star Trek is clearly better.

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When I was a young man, there was a fad of 'past life recovery'. People would get hypnotized or sit under a pyramid or wear some crystals or what not and declare that they had recovered a memory of one or more past lives. The people who recovered these lives were always someone famous or powerful. Everyone was Cleopatra or an African prince or part of Arthur's court, etc. No one, and I mean no one, was ever the guy shoveling shit in the stables. The problem, of course, is that for the vast majority of human history, most of us have been shoveling shit. Star Trek recognized that in a way that Star Wars did not.

Now, it is hard to generalize about a property that has been around for so long and in so many different guises. But to me, Star trek and its focus on a crew has always been more representative of real life, and more of a blueprint for how to lead a good life, how to make things better, than Star Wars. Luke is some universe blessed hero, a person who good fortune has smiled upon and put upon the Hero's Journey (and man, do I hate the Hero's Journey. Campbell has a lot to answer for) and destined to win. If he shoveled shit, it was merely to emphasize his humble upbringing and humanize his for the lessor people mean to follow in his wake. It is a lazy tale, pretending that if you just have the right genes and ONLY the right genes, then you can save the universe.

Star Trek is a crew of normal people who happen to be good at their jobs. I could never win the genetic lottery, and the hand of fate will never reach down and bless me. My past life, if such a thing exists, was undoubtedly shoveling shit. But I could get good at a job. I could be a science officer or an engineering office or a doctor or even a captain if I worked hard and got some luck. I could be a part of something meaningful without having to win the genetic lottery or have a watery tart toss a sword at me to grant me supreme executive powers, to quote a better writer than me.

I suspect this is part of the reason a subset of fans lost their minds over the Last Jedi movie. By making Rey a nobody, by showing that anyone could be force powerful (whatever did happen to that boy in the stable?), it turned the fantasy of being all powerful hero blessed by hate into something less special, more focused on individual and community responsibility, more like Star Trek. I also suspect that is why Andor was the best Star Wars project -- it was more Star Trek in that it took the problems of the world seriously, and showed how normal people can either deal with those problems or be corrupted by them. No hand of fate, no winning the genetic lottery. Just people trying to do their best.

Now, again, I enjoy both. There is fun to be had in watching the hero righteously kick some bad guy ass, destined to win. But it is not as satisfying as watching a group of otherwise normal people come together and make something happen. I always try to write stories that are more Star Trek than Star Wars for that reason -- I want people to have that sense of satisfaction, of hard work done well by people who are just trying their best. Now, what do I know, of course. No one has ever paid me a dime for my fiction. I could be wildly off here -- but I do think that the good Star Trek speaks to something in people that Star Wars just generally does not understand.

Weekly Word Count

Only 3100 this week and a couple of pages of editing the script. I had a couple days where I couldn’t write, but I am still making some progress on the Encyclopedia Brick book.

Hope you all have a great weekend.

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Now, this may be completely nuts. I am perfectly willing to say that this is a connotation peculiar to me. However, I cannot escape the implications every time I hear the word. Muse seems to be used as something deeper than mere inspiration. An inspiration is someone or something that causes a single burst of creativity. A muse is someone — almost always a woman — or something that drives all or the majority of the creative output of a person. That puts a lot of weight, a lot of responsibility, on the back of the muse. It seems to me to be a way to avoid the artist taking responsibility for his or her own work.

If you put your work onto a muse, then what happens when you don’t produce? What happens when the work is subpar? How much do you blame the muse rather than yourself? If they are responsible for when things go well, are they responsible for when things go bad? I am probably making too much of this — okay, I am certainly making too much of this — but it feels off to put your own creativity on the shoulders of another person. They didn’t ask for it, they don’t deserve the potential downsides, and it seems wrong to take something that should be intrinsic to yourself and transfer it to another person. When you add in the fact that most of the time, we are talking about men pushing the responsibility onto women, the whole thing feels a bit icky.

Or, you know, I am really, really overthinking this.

Weekly Word Count

4400 this week. Again, less than usual but life has been busy. The Encyclopedia Brick book is moving along, and I feel as if the outline, so far, is solid. I’m not deviating that much from it, which is usually a good sign. I always expect to get into the writing and find that the outline doesn’t fit together with the characters and their motivations as well as I originally thought it would. But so far, that hasn’t really happened.

Probably means the character motivations are crap.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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More and more media companies are making deals with imitative AI firms to allow them to use said media company’s material to train their models and to sometimes use the imitative AI tools in their offerings. I am genuinely confused by what these firms are doing.

Let us assume that imitative AI will get good enough at producing news and creative content that people will pay to have it create said content for them. Now, I do not think that will happen, honestly. The pace of model improvement has slowed, and it is physically impossible for them to not be bullshit machines — it is baked into how they operate. In addition, they cannot ever produce anything new or interesting because they can only regurgitate based on what their training data says come next. At best, you get a mid-level product based on things in the past. But let assume that’s fine for many people. Why, then, would media firms want to help them?

In the best-case scenario for imitative AI firms, they create a product that produces things that people want to see and read based on their own prompts. that last bit is key — personalization is the only way this even remotely works as a business. Given the outrageous costs of running these systems, they need to replace entire industries to be popular. If you cannot get individuals to pay for them, then they won’t work. If, say, Disney still needs to have people perfect the material imitative AI produces, then it is not likely to be cheaper than using skilled employees at the start given the break-even points of these systems. Cutting Disney or the New York Times out is the one path that seems most likely to lead to profits. But why, then would Disney agree to help their own destruction? I think there are three possible reasons.

One: These firms do not believe that imitative AI is here for the long term and are getting while the getting is good. I’d like to believe this, but given how much hype is surrounding these systems, and how little contact with hard reality many CEOs of the largest firms encounter, and how this is being sold as a people replacer, I don’t think this is likely to be true.

Two: These firms believe that they can use imitative AI to increase their own profits but that it will not ever get to a point where it replaces their firms completely. They believe in the “augment people” promises rather than the “replace people” promises. They figure that these firms will settle at a price point that allows the media firms to make money using their tools, due to efficiencies and firing people. Realistically, that is not likely, but it is a believable story in the C-suite.

Three: Capitalism just doesn’t work anymore. The people running these firms are forced to only care about the next quarter’s earnings call, and since Wall Street is incapable of seeing hype for hype, they have to be seen as participating in the imitative AI boom. The people in charge no longer have any incentive to think about the next quarter, much less the next year, and so they make moves that goose the bottom line even if they are sub-optimal for the long-term health of the company. And, hey, if they facilitate, say, Google AI summaries and thus destroy traffic to their media websites and platforms? Well, they will still have gotten their last quarterly bonus to live on.

Weekly Word Count

3900 — not great but at least some movement on the Encyclopedia Brick novel. Now I just need to decide if that title is terrible or awesome. Well, and finish it, but priorities, people. Priorities.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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It is not your imagination — there is much less TV being made, of all genres, including heavyweights like reality shows. And book sales have been soft for a bit now. Some of these are economic — a recession appears likely, and inflation is ticking up again due to tariffs, etc. so people are making a reasonable choice to pull back. But I also think that neither industry has learned the lesson of the western.

TVs and movies did not die in the 1970s and 1980s due to the loss of the western. Why? Because the people in charge then did what the people in charge now seem incapable of doing — they made decisions. Now, I can hear people screaming. Of course they make decisions! How do you think someone decides what gets on the air or book gets published! Someone decided to cut back on the number of TV shows produced! Yes, of course, and obviously there is a bit of exaggeration in the comment. But I would argue that most decisions are not decisions in a meaningful sense — they are merely regurgitation of data. And data driven decision making can never prepare you for the future.

Most Hollywood studios and streaming services try to put on things that their data promises them people will like. Since the only thing they have data on is the past, the only things they approve are like things in the past, since they are making “data driven decisions”. I believe that book publishing is a little less slavishly devoted to the algorithm, but when you query, you are expected to provide comps — books that have sold recently that yours can be considered very similar to. Backward looking processes abound.

That backwardness likely contributes to the problems we are seeing in the entertainment industries. Human beings get bored. You cannot show them the same things over and over again and expect our little monkey brains, wired for looking out for new and exciting things that want to eat us, to be happy with them for all time. You need to be open to the idea that new things can sell, can entertain, can be your next tentpole.

The previous generation of executives used to do that, used to be able to see a Jaws or Star Wars or Godfather and know that the property was a risk worth taking. Today? Today it seems as if the people who run these companies just do what the computer tells them to do and nothing more. Data should be a supplement to decision making, not, as it appears more and more, the tool to determine your decisions. The future is more important, and likely more lucrative, than the past.

Weekly Word Count

A couple grand if you count the outlining, etc. for the new project: Encyclopedia Brick — teenage noir informed by the movie Brick and Encyclopedia Brown. Says the man who just spent several hundred words railing about looking toward the past. To which I say: 1) Bite me. 2) More seriously, all stories are derivative. What matters is the willingness to execute them in new and interesting ways, not just copy the same execution over and over again. Now, I am an objectively terrible writer (otherwise I would not be a failed writer) so it is entirely possible that what I produce will be derivative crap (or just plain old crap). But the intention is to take some of the ideas embedded in those structures and do something different with them. We will see if I can do that in an interesting, enjoyable fashion.

Beyond that, still waiting for feedback for the Sarah Smith story. I like to have multiple projects going as there is so much waiting in writing. This way, I am occupied, hopefully improving, and just, you know, enjoying myself.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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