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The Atlantic, because its primary purpose is to make upper class, boomer and Gen X white people feel smug, recently had an article about how reading is dead. it is not a good article — it cherry picks stats and makes dubious assertions — but it does perfectly capture the “the kids today are wrong wrong wrong!” vibe that is essential to the ongoing subscription and advertising sign-ups that the Atlantic depends upon. Unfortunately for them, and kind of hilarious for us, two new news items appeared shortly after the article dropped. First, book reading is actually increasing. And second, there has been a mini-wave of AI controversies over publishers using Pangram and other evidence to claim that books were AI written. I think these are all connected in the odd corners of our collective minds.

Books and reading, whatever the Atlantic might think, are not in terminal decline. Book sales — both in terms of dollars spent and units purchased — increased in 2025. People are spending money on books and buying more individual books. Reading is neither dead nor the habit of a few weirdos. People still value reading. The imitative AI kerfuffles (still the top word in the English language), however, may tell us that people do not still value writing.

Two books with major deals were both subject to claims that they used imitative AI in their writing. One book was pulled by their agents, one book was kept by the publisher and did well (to be fair, it was a self-published book in a previous life and self-published books with a significant sales record tend to do well when they are picked up by major publishers). I am not going to get into the ins and outs of each case, but they are interesting, if contradictory. Some publishers an agents do obviously care about human writing — the agents walked away from a lot of money when they pulled that book. Part of that is simple legal exposure — putting aside the ongoing plagiarism and copyright lawsuits, you cannot copyright the output of imitative AI (yes, yes, Mr. Lawyer reader, that’s a touch of a simplification, but it is directionally correct). But at least some of the reluctance comes from the conviction that human writing has a higher ceiling than imitative AI writing. By its very nature, imitative AI is, well, imitative. It can only mix up what is in its training data, and that is going to tend toward a blander middle. But there is money to be made in the blander middle.

The book that succeeded was a genre book, and in a genre where readers are very tolerant of tropes. They like those tropes, and read them for enjoyment. And I include myself amongst them. As much as I like stories that play with tropes and subvert them or our expectations about them, I still read and enjoy stories that just use those tropes unironically. A decent number of writers have made their living writing those stories, and even more learned to write the more unique pieces by starting out with the tropes. That the book sold well says that at least some portion of the market does not see a human being as a necessary component of the process.

All smug (see, what did I tell you about Gen X?) snark aside, I think the Atlantic author might be responding, at some level, to the general sense of AI doom hanging over literature. We are told constantly that the AI firms can replace writers, and many of us realize that means replacing the most compelling and interesting kinds of writing, the writing most likely to move people. And that feels like a real loss, like reading is under threat. Having a book that might have been written by AI sell well only reinforces that notion, even if editors, agents, and most writers still see the value in human stories. So where does that leave writers? I’m not sure.

As an aside, if your inclination after reading the next section is to rant to me about how I am anti-tech or a Luddite, then spare me. First, the Luddites were right. Second, I am not anti-tech. I switched majors in college because I loved technology and what you could do with it so much. I have spent more than two and a half decades in technology and contributed to open source projects multiple times. I bought the first generation Kindle as soon as it was available. I have never thrown away a computer because, well, I can always throw Linux on it. I am working through quantum programming for fun. I am a dork, through and through. I don’t hate tech — I hate what the powerful have done with it.

Back to rambling.

I think that self-publishing is most likely to be swamped, for the next little while, with bad imitative AI stories pushed out just to try and make a few quick bucks. But I also think that we will see more and more books written substantially by imitative AI be accepted into the market. This will be a short to medium term effect — I do not think people who use these systems understand just how deeply subsidized their usage really is — but in that short to medium term, I suspect getting published as a debut author will be harder, there will be less money for human writing, and we will possibly see fewer and fewer lasting works as the quick middle drives out the business model for the longer, but higher quality, edge. I don’t think any of that is good.

I am going to miss the works that would have had a chance to grow from the middle to the high-quality edge that I won’t get to read now because those authors were never given the chance to build that kind of career. There is a low ceiling for imitative AI work, but there is the real possibility that it is high enough to prevent authors who could eventually produce works that really move us from surviving or entering the field. We will have lost something precious if that comes to pass.

Look, I am a bad writer. If I was not a bad writer, I would have had something published or produced by now. This means my writing is largely for myself, for my own enjoyment of the process. None of that changes in this weird new world. But there is also the hope that someone will read my work and find it fun and interesting and thought-provoking in some way. If a flood of quickly produced imitative AI works makes that harder to achieve, of course I am going to lament the loss and wonder if the voices telling me that it’s not worth trying to improve are right. We are, after all, the storytelling ape. Education, culture, community — all stem from the stories we tell ourselves. I am not sure what becomes of us if we stop telling those stories and rely merely on the recycled and regurgitated. I doubt it is anything good.

Weekly Word Count

Well, that was cheery.

My word count isn’t any happier. I have been largely struggling with the re-structure/re-plotting of the tech/abortion/privacy thriller. I have had a very hard time breaking this story in a way that I am happy with in terms of themes and still feels like a thriller. Combined with not being able to fix the clone school shooting story and I do pretty much feel like the world’s most incompetent writer, unable to even compete with Grok. Well, maybe not Grok bad. But pretty bad.

Did I mention I do this for fun?

I do think I am moving in the right direction on the thriller, though. If not, I may drop it for a bit and work for a few days on the Pratchett meets Rockford Files novel — that one at least has a reasonable plot. I did promise an editor I would make the thriller changes (nope — not sold. Just right of first refusal thing with a new small press as mentioned before. Still a failed writer), so I do want to give myself every chance to make that work.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

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This is beautiful.

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This, in case you did not follow the link, is a scene from Shane MacGowan’s memorial service. Shane MacGowan, for the heathen amongst you, was the front man and primary song-writer for The Pogues, an Irish band. MacGowan, after years of abusing himself, died too young. At his memorial service, people celebrated his life by performing his music. It was sad and joyful and comforting. Those are the purposes of art, after all. And that is the false promise of imitative AI ‘art’.

I think that at least some of the people who desperately want AI art to be as accepted as any other kind of art want that kind of response. If you read imitative AI art reddits, or see their discussions in social media, you can see them argue about “prompt plagiarism,” complaining that people are taking their prompts and not using their own “creativity.” Irony may not be dead, but it apparently is well-hidden.

I don't think these prompters understand that they will not get the appreciation, the connection, that they desire. MacGowan and the Pogues were loved because they produced music that was unique to them. Because it came from humans, it spoke to other humans in a way that imitative AI art really doesn't, not in any lasting form. MacGowan’s obsessions, quirks, history, and flaws all combined to produce music that moved people, not because of the specific arrangement of notes, but because of the specific, human emotions behind the notes.

Weekly Word Count

A couple thousand in the Pratchett meets Rockford Files novel. Not much, but it’s been a busy couple of weeks in my family and my job. But every little bit counts. I also did some restructuring of the abortion/tech story based on editor’s notes, so I am likely to spend a lot of time on that project in the near future, as that has a small publisher interested (interested, not purchasing, mind you — still a failed writer).

I also put the cloned student/school shooting play in a drawer. I wrote that with some constraints on purpose — small cast, two locations, etc. — in order to try and stretch myself. The consensus is that it simply does not work as a story in its current form. I know how to correct the piece, but the corrections mean exploding the constraints, and I am not interested in that now. I am likely to revisit it in the future, perhaps as a screenplay rather than a stage play, or maybe even a novel. But for now, while it does have perhaps my favorite character I have ever written, into the drawer it goes. Sometimes things don’t work. But that is the point of experiments, is it not? Even failed experiments, especially failed experiments, teach you something. So I wrote, I failed, and I learned. Hopefully, the next piece will be better.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Stories are universal. Well, maybe not mine, as no one has bought any of mine, but in general, stories are universal. You can tell Macbeth in a billion different ways. Same with Rashomon. The fact that the first was popularized by an English writer and the second by a Japanese filmmaker does not restrict them to forever belonging to those respective cultures. There is no Magnificent Seven without the Seven Samurai, but those are not the same story because of their different artistic and cultural contexts. Even historical pieces fall under this umbrella.

Generally, if you are going to do a straight story about, say, the Easter Rebellion, and you show up with a bunch of Chinese actors, people are going to understandably raise an eyebrow or two in your general direction. But if you are using that casting choice to make an artistic point, then even that can be a valid decision. Hamilton famously used a mixed-race cast with several of the historically white figures being played by non-white actors. That, combined with the use of hip-hop, made a point about how close and how far the country has come to living up to the ideals those people professed. “Oh, but what about whitewashing?” I can hear people wailing. That’s not the same argument.

Yes, yes, I know. It appears superficially the same. But the context is different. Taking a role written for a non-white actor and giving that role to a white actor in a system that to this day has denied non-white actors roles that were more general and/or not specifically written for non-whites is not an act of colorblindness. Nor is it an artistic choice (well, at least it’s not an artistic choice you should respect). It is perpetuating a wrong. It is, in other words, a dick move.

And, yes, if another film culture that traditionally treats actors outside its nationality poorly took a character meant for, say, an Englishman or an African-American and used a member of its nationality instead, that would at least raise questions. I don’t know where that happens — if my ignorance about non-Hollywood film culture was water, we would all drown — but I am sure it does. People are, sometimes unfortunately, people. But Hollywood obviously draws the most attention because of both its past and its outsized cultural influence.

All those words to just say this: if you object to Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy, you are just a gutter racist. Full stop. Stories are universal and the only reason to object to a myth being told with people who do not look like you is that you do not like people who do not look like you. And that is simple, boring, old-as-time, uninteresting, easy, gutter racism. You are not transgressive, or daring, or dangerous, or anything else you might think you are. You are just a racist — and that is the oldest, weakest, least interesting form of asshole there can possibly be.

Weekly Word Count

Not a ton, mostly planning and decisions this week. I am putting the play about cloned kids and school shootings away for now. I set out to write it because I liked the idea, but I also used it as an excuse to try some constraints. A limited cast (four characters) with limited settings (only two locations) as an attempt to make something theatrical. The experiment failed, as all my writing does (the consensus is that the limited cast and locations are just too limiting for this story), but the failure was educational.

Beyond that, I did plot out a Rockford Files meets Discworld story. Is that incredibly dumb and obvious? Yes. Is it incredibly arrogant to think I, of all people, could pull off a Terry Pratchett homage? Even more yes. But the story is fun, at least to me, and what is the point of writing if you are not going to enjoy what you write? It’s obviously not set in Discworld, and I am obviously not as funny as Pratchett, but I still like the idea and ideas I like tend to nag me until I put them on paper, in all their failed glory. In addition, I am likely to turn the Encyclopedia Brick graphic novel (which still needs a title that does not make people want to kill me) into an actual novel and am waiting on notes about the Sarah Smith novel.

I do tend to do multiple projects at once. My brain just kind of works that way (I am also doing some security research — I wasn’t kidding about how interesting the field is to me now in the age of AI script kiddies). I feel more comfortable when I can move to another project if I feel stuck on the main one. And since it doesn’t keep me from finishing work, I don’t so far see it as an issue.

No, I have never been tested for ADHD. Why do you ask?

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Netflix’s problem is that it does not understand television. When it got into the streaming business, it had a library of decades of movies and television shows that it could put in front of people. People, not surprisingly, would watch their old favorites in a splurge fashion, several episodes at a time and in a row. Netflix saw, however, reasonably, that it needed to make its own shows in case the owners of its stable of shows backed out and put up their own streaming services, which eventually did happen. But because they did not understand television, they assumed that people wanted to binge watch everything. And they assumed that people would come back after a long hiatus while their algorithm decided whether or not to continue the shows. And that sort of worked for a while, especially when it was new, but they are now paying the price.

Television settled on long running shows released regularly because that system worked. People kept coming back week after week, and audiences had an opportunity to find out about the show as people and critics discussed it as it ran. The longer episode runs gave characters time to breathe, and characters helped hook viewers. The need to have a show every year for advertisers ensured that there were only months between seasons, not the years that is Netflix’s standard. There is a reason that the golden age of television largely resided in places like FX, AMC, HBO and other traditional television channels — they had shows with lengths that allowed people to grow attached to their characters, regular airing to give people time to talk up the shows, and regular seasons so that people did not have to wait years for the next installments. Netflix has none of that, and likely never can.

Capitalism, today, is not about running a profitable business. It is about running a growth business with the not-so-quiet expectation that the growth be built on software of some kind. In Netflix’s case, it is the all-mighty algorithm. There are several problems with algorithms as decision tools in general, but in the case of television, it needs to wait for data to come in in order to be able to work. And that means that production is delayed until the point where seasons are separated by years, not months. And people drift away. I do not watch new shows on Netflix — I am tired of waiting years to find out what happens. The algorithm is also geared toward generating new subscribers. It is not good enough to keep people, it is not good enough to make money — it must drive new customers, the only kind of customers that Wall Street likes.

There are other ways to run a streaming service, of course. Apple, Disney, HBO — they all release shows one week at a time and have new seasons that are much closer together. Several shows on Apple, for example, I would never have watched if it were not for the slow awareness their regular schedule built in me. People talked about them over the course of several weeks, allowing me to become aware of and then curious about them. That has never happened with a Netflix show. Now, none of those services is as large as Netflix, but that has more to do with Netflix’s early advantage than current efforts. They are much better positioned, I think, to be here in five to ten years than Netflix.

I suspect that Netflix is doomed long-term. It is run by people whose first loyalty is not to entertainment but to Wall Street. And Wall Street creates incentives that are poorly designed to sustain entertainment companies. Netflix was a giant success because of whims of modern capitalism. Those same whims are likely to keep it from surviving.

Weekly Word Count

About 30 pages of new material and re-writes on the cloning-school-shooting play. It is ready for another round of critiques/table reads.

I write such happy material.

While we are here, I am going to go completely grumpy old man on a completely meaningless topic: rejections. I got a couple in over the last few days which is never pleasant. Having proof that you suck is slightly worse than the expectation that you will receive proof that you suck. But they all had some version of “this is not a reflection on the quality of your work” in them. Yes it is! If it was good, you would have accepted it! I know the intent is to say that they had a lot of good works to choose from, but it still remains true that the work was not good enough. Pretending otherwise feels so, so patronizing. I don’t get better by not being told the truth. I am not arguing that the rejections should go full jerk, but a simple “we are sorry we could not move forward with your piece” should suffice. To me, that feels so much more professional than the equivalent of “good try, buddy!” that most rejections provide.

But I am a grumpy old man who wishes everyone would just get off my lawn.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

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Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini are two up-and-coming, young hockey players whom both of their respective teams tanked (deliberately creating teams they knew would lose) in order to try and obtain them. Neither player was a superstar in their first year, though both were good. Both, last year, played at a very high level (at least until Bedard got injured). Both teams expect the players to lead them, respectively, back into contention in the near future. Part of that expectation is that their teams expect both players to get better as they get more experience and learn how to play the game more effectively. And these two players are not an exception — every sport behaves like this. And if you understand how to identify potentially good players before they reach their peak skill — not, I should add, an easy task — then you can build a contender relatively quickly. But the key is that you let your young players learn and grow — you do not expect them to be superstars right out of the gate. If Bedard and Celebrini were authors, however, their careers would likely already be over.

In publishing, only the out-of-the-gate superstars have a real chance, anymore, to build a career. It is very hard to build a sustainable career by starting small, improving, and growing into your skills. Publishers do not take the time to build authors. There will be no Forslings or MacKinnons — extremely good players, one of which has won the NHL’s most valuable player award — who did not live up to their initial expectations. But each player kept improving and eventually they became stars, players you can win a championship with. Instead, publishers expect all authors to be Sidney Crosby — instant superstars. They hand out large deals to new authors and then abandon those authors if they do not live up to expectations. They fill their roster with authors on much smaller deals, provide little to no support, and then dump them when they fail to reach superstar status. It is, to be gentle, a less-than-efficient means of running a business.

It also did not use to be this way. Many authors, such as Cormac McCarthy, started with small books and were nurtured until the point they became the literary equivalent of all-stars. This no longer seems to be a viable path. Publishers, possibly driven by analytics, an internal conviction that they do not know how to sell books, and a marriage to the ironclad rule of Wall Street to have mega hits, have abandoned the concept of a writer’s career. They instead seem to be stuck cycling through debut authors and hoping that the money from those authors will carry them through to the next set of debut authors. Outside of the handful of megastars, the only way to have a writing career that involves a traditional publisher, it seems, is for authors to get a traditional publishing deal and then either sell directly to fans introduced to them by those books or transition into something like teaching based on their publishing credentials. We have an industry, then, so afraid of building talent that it overspends in the free-agent market and destroys its salary structure in the process — to go all in on the sports team metaphor. And no one wins that way.

One has to wonder how long this can continue until some publisher tries to spend $50,000 per author over a number of years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars once or twice. If that ever happens, I suspect that a publisher that spends the time and money to learn how to build author careers will find itself astride the industry.

Weekly Word Count

Not sure, honestly. I rewrote a screenplay to submit to the Academy Nicholl Fellowships contest. That had to be dozens of pages, and I did a fair amount of work on the Encyclopedia Brick project. It has been fun trying to learn how to turn my very wordy output into a graphic novel. It is an interesting and eye-opening way to think about building stories. I find as long as I am doing things each week, I am happier if I don’t worry about the number of words. There is, I am finding, such a thing as too much data.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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I am now, though I have not always been, a fan of plotting before writing. Before the last six years or so, I did what is usually called pantsing — writing the story without an outline or a plan. I hardly ever finished anything that way. I would get too caught up in thinking about what had to come next and eventually spin my wheels into the metaphorical ditch. Since I started working from outlines, I have finished five novels and three plays — pretty much everything I set out to write, I finished. The one exception was a historical novel where my ideas outran my research. But even that got converted into a script. With an outline, I can concentrate on the writing without worrying about what happens next, allowing me to get though the material. Plotting ahead of time, for me, works.

Now, I do not use a specific recommended process or strictly adhere to a given method. I work in a much looser fashion, using various techniques that make sense to me. I do try and maintain two thing rules, both courtesy of Graig Mazin: tension should steadily increase, and it should increase because of what characters want. I do use, as a basis, the kind of beats that people like Syd Field and Larry Brooks suggested because it helps maintain that tension. But they are not hard and fast rules — the latest play I am working on (kids who can be cloned back to life deal with school shootings and their parents complicity in allowing those shootings to happen) has a more spiral structure (at least, that is the intention) but Mazin’s rules are still the basis for all my work.

The planning comes to life in a kind of living document. I start with hashing out the general rules of the story and the kinds of things about the characters and mechanics I want to ensure I keep top of mind as I write. It is mostly just me talking to myself, but the process of recording these musings helps refine them. An example from the Encyclopedia Brick graphic novel script is below (apologies for the length and size — the newsletter software won’t let me block quote it):

General principles

1. Find a title that does not make people want to kill you

   1. Still a problem

2. No longer a murder required, so no fridges needed.

   1. Though, killing Alice, if she is friends with Ginger, would have a good reason for Ginger to change.

   2. Nah, it works better with her as more load bearing – gives a nice parallel with Isaiah and Calvin, her and Ginger

3. Synopsis too event-y not enough character arc in it.

4. Paulie older to show recruitment chain

   1. This means Ginger need a rejection moment

   2. Ginger clueless racist, Alice not

5. Single POV – tight noir-ish style

   1. Maybe first person? Not sure that works in a graphic novel

   2. And if ginger is the rejection, then is this really a dual POV piece? Do we need to see her pov?

6. Make sure ending fits noir but not hopeless – Calvin cannot succumb, but others can or get killed, etc

7. Do I need the patsy role?

   1. I think I don’t.

8. NO FRIDGING!!!!!!

   1. People can die, but we either have to know them or it has to happen in a way that does not provide a cheap excuse for emotion from Calvin

9. Don’t do a synopsis for planning, do one just for the char arcs

10. Maybe give Isaiah a name I can spell.

    1. All characters will now have one letter first names ….

11. What do these little fuckers want

    1. Calvin: to not be such a fucking loser and do some good

    2. Ginger: she wants love and falls for Paulie because he love bombs her

    3. Isaiah – impact character so he doesn’t need to want anything? If he does, he wants to be taken seriously as himself, not as a stereotype

    4. Alice – same I think she’s an impact so she may not need anything in that sense. If she does, she wants out for her and her friend Ginger to get the fuck out of cape may

12. Table below assumes Calvin is the POV, so everything mentioned should be something he sees, even if the mechanics are not present or obscured.

As you can see, I was getting moderately frustrated with myself over the character arcs. And the lack of a title my writing group didn’t hate. And the fact that I cannot spell. And obviously this is me talking to me. No one else could build a story out of these notes, I do not think, since there are assumptions and already made choices that I understand reading the notes back, but are likely not useful to anyone else. (And no, I am not worried someone will steal the idea. Ideas are easy — execution is what makes a story worth reading) But writing all this out allowed me to work out where I wanted the main characters to start and then end up.

Next, I lay those journeys out for each character, tied to specific beats. That way, I can make sure the character beats work across the story, influence each other at appropriate moments, and ensure that character driven tension actually exists and rises throughout the story. An example for one beat is below:

Marvel at the many typos. Not every beat/section is going to have character instructions or movement for every major character. The inciting incident does, here, because all the main characters have some measure of change or arc to them, so it made sense, at least to me, to have them kick off in roughly the same place. These work in concert with the general principles to tell me what has to happen. I know, for example, that the party is where Calvin is going to get drawn into the main plot by choosing Ginger and her group of “activists” over Isaiah and Alice’s commonsense and misgivings. So the shorthand here works for me.

Next, I create a list of scenes. The process is similar, in that I create a table tied to the beats. But obviously different sections/beats can have many scenes in them. And since I am working with scenes, the plot mechanics matter in a way that they did not in the character arcs. People have to get from A to B reasonably, and their emotional arcs have to play off each other in a way that can be seen, foreshadowed, and derive from their individual personalities and failings. And since this is a living document, the scenes often change, expand, or emphasize something in the character arc grid, as you can from the example below:

More typos. It’s kind of impressive how poorly I type. As you can see, this is one beat focused on Ginger and Calvin — not everything that was in this section in the character arcs table makes it here. Those items follow this moment — you will see them in the party, so they are in the same general story geography. But this is the scene where Calvin is pulled into the story proper, where he is exposed to the recruitment process that eventually leads to him having to choose between belonging or his morals.

Does this result in good stories? I mean, it does say Failed Writer’s Journey on the door, so: no. At least not from me, at least not yet. I wrote a lot of words about a process that is probably only useful to me and has not resulted in a seller, much less a best-seller. If you are struggling to finish works, however, working your way into a planning process that fits you is likely to help you actually get projects done. This process does allow me to focus on writing as I write, not planning as I write. And that, in turn, helps me complete works. And if I complete enough works, who knows? I might eventually cross the line into not sucking.

My typing probably won’t get any better, though.

Weekly Word Count

After the table read, I re-wrote the entire fist act of the cloning/school-shooting play, about fifteen pages of new material. I didn’t have a valid first act, according the people at the table read, and I think they were correct. I now have, I hope, a better setup and a better propulsion into the main story with seeds planted well enough to ripen as the play progresses. Or, you know, it still sucks. But iteration is one way to progress, so iterate I do.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

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The second question actually ties into what I had planned to discuss today. This newsletter really does not have a brand, in the normal sense of branding. This probably contributes to the lack of real growth for the newsletter (I mean, the poor quality is likely doing a lot of that lifting, but still). This newsletter, to be blunt, meanders. I mostly talk about the intersection of tech and society, but I also do random book reviews and a couple times a month talk about the process of writing and failing to be published. And that is in addition to random politics, art, and other topics. Basically, I write this not so much because I have a specific goal but because I like the process of writing. Writing is how I think, and this newsletter gives me an outlet. Obviously, I like having people read what I write, or I would just keep a diary, but not so much that I want to “hack my growth” or whatever the buzzword is today at the expense of letting my mind work.

Which brings me to the real topic of this newsletter: the difference between ideas and execution.

This is not a new topic for me, obviously, but it keeps coming back up, at least in my head. The excellent Cole Haddon (go subscribe if you have any interest in the craft of writing and how art intersects with capitalism. I’ll wait) recently asked how people foster inspiration. My answer was essentially stealing. I recently finished writing a play (table read in a few days with some very generous SAG actors associated with my writing group. Never let people tell you writing is not a collaborative process) about society dealing with school shootings by letting wealthy parents pay to clone their kids after they are killed in one. I know I stole that idea from somewhere, though I could not tell you where. And it occurred to me that a lot of people who think that imitative AI can produce art or even ideas claim that my ability to mesh together ideas is all that is required for creativity. And I think that is fundamentally incorrect.

First, and most mundanely, this idea could be brought to life in a lot of ways. You could do a grand sci-fi epic. You could do a complete farce. You could make an intimate horror piece. I choose a small play focused on how three kids and one of their teachers deal with how society has made a profitable business from their suffering, and how the unequal distribution of safety affects their lives and relationships. This applies to all ideas. I am working on a graphic novel script for a mash-up of Encyclopedia Brown and the movie Brick. I am also working on a noir meets Terry Pratchett fantasy. Each of those could be done in very different ways, and each author would have a slightly different approach. That range of options points to how creativity is not about ideas, but rather about execution.

My play is a function of my experiences. It is tied intimately into my experience of how money makes a clear difference in access to health care, and thus how healthy people are. It is also tied to the weird horror of lockdown drills that my own children experienced in school. And, since I do appreciate dark sarcasm in the classroom (sorry, Pink), it has a real strong thread of dark humor and sarcasm as defense mechanism running through it. Mix that with all my other conscious and subconscious influences and you get something that is both mine and different that I would have done a few years ago. Not only because, I hope (though, again, failed writer, so there is not a ton of evidence to support that hope) my craft has improved but because life has worked on me. I am not the same person I was a few years ago. The changes may be subtle, but they are there. The combination of all those factors are what make art.

Ideas are easy. They are in the air all around you, and humans are already good at mashing them together or looking at old things in interesting ways. Executing on those idea is where art happens, in my opinion. And that is why iitative AI so far as yet to produce anything that stands out and very little that feels real. Because all it does is imitate. It does not bring the unique and deeply human quirks that every creator brings to their work. it does not grow, it doe not change it only, at best, remixes. And while remixing can be a part of creating art, it is not the most important part. Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, the only component. Art requires human quirks and perspectives. Anything that just re-mixes what has been done before is going to feel stale and derivative. It is going to lack the connection to humanity that makes art feel like art.

Weekly Word Count

About 48 pages on the play and a couple thousand words of prep for both the Encyclopedia Brick and Dashiell Pratchett works (it occurs to me that my naming conventions are really just bad dad jokes in disguise ….). The graphic novel will almost never see the light of day, given that it is illegal for me to draw in eighteen states and six countries, but I like playing with different forms. I think they help inform and deepen my creativity, such as it is.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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I also said that I am not surprised it won a contest. Frankly, a lot of people, especially a subset of people who consider themselves literary fiction aficionados, like this kind of writing. And who am I to gainsay them? People like what they like. If the contest is going to reward easily imitable writing over stories with emotional or experimental heft, then, eventually, an imitative AI produced story is going to win. Bad stories have won contests since the first time Grog the Caveman got applause for the one hundred recitation of the time he brought down the antelope all by himself. The only question I have, really, is why did the author bother?

You are suppose to do things for the fun, not the reward. No one is going to think highly of this writer because he won an award — everyone is going to know he didn’t write the piece. The only tangible effect is to lower the impression of the reward itself with normal people. You get neither acclaim nor the satisfaction of having created something. This idea that the only thing that matters is the output is soul destroying. The satisfaction of being done is that you did it. You created something. You wrestled a story to the ground. You. Not your friend, not your writing group, not some jumped up Markov Chain. You. What else is the point?

The more I contemplate how people are using these word calculators, the more I think their danger is embedded in the idea that work doesn’t mater. A chatbot will be your “friend”, if you want. It will always agree with you, always tell you that you are great, a real special person. But you won’t have done anything to earn that friendship. You won’t have been a good person, you won’t have done anything to justify that praise, you won’t be worthy of the displayed affection. It is hollow and empty. I didn’t date my wife because she agreed with me all the time. Far from it. I dated her because she is wonderful — smart, kind, opinionated, fun to spend time with. Part of that fun was that she her own person, willing to challenge me, willing to make me think, willing to make me earn her respect and affection. It is a real relationship, not a shower of sycophancy.

I get the desire to have your stuff seen (I mean, I did this. And then reminded you I did, just now), but if it’s not your stuff, why does it matter of it is read? The art I create, as bad as it is (there is a reason this section is called Failed Writer’s Journey, after all), is real. It comes from my experiences and imagination. It exists because I worked to make it exist, and the voice is mine, not an amalgamation of training data. The work is rewarding because I did it. The sense of satisfaction belongs to me, was earned by me. If you aren’t willing to earn the rewards, why are you bothering at all?

Weekly Word Count

A fair bit this week. About 16 pages of a script about kids who have to deal with school shootings, cloning, and how to be a good person in a world that doesn’t reward good. It’s been stuck in my head for a bit, and so I just kind of needed to get it out.

I am also working on a script for a noir-ish graphic novel — think Encyclopedia Brown crossed with Brick. I have no illusions about its future (if you think my writing is bad, you should see my art), but I really do think that learning different kinds of formats, different ways of telling stories, deepens my own storytelling abilities.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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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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