Blogging about Writing---mine and others'

Know Your Audience

5/28/2023

With the growing alarm over Artificial Intelligence, particularly in regards to writing, I'm proud to say I was a little ahead of the times. This was published in Page and Spine (now all gone) four years ago--March 30, 2019
It is not optimistic.

"Deb, I've decided to commit suicide."
"Arnie! You're going to cryogenic?"
"No, Deb. What good would that do? It won't be any better when I wake up."
"Why, Arnie? What's so bad?"
"What's so good? Nobody reads my stuff anymore. All I've ever wanted was to write. To have people read what I wrote. Nobody does anymore."
"Why? Did you suddenly get bad or something?"
"It's the AIs, Deb. Most of the reading now is done by them. Hardly any people left, and those that are have their own vocations, even though the AIs do them all better.
"That's how it is. Only the AIs read now, and they only read stuff written by AIs. If you ever looked at the best seller lists, everything on there is written by an AI. No reason left for me to live."
"Arnie, you mean you're really going to...to die? Be dead forever?"
"Yes."
"What are you going to do?"
"Poison. It's the cleanest and the quickest, now that guns and knives are gone."
"But the AIs will just resuscitate you."
"No they won't. It'll be too late."
"Arnie, thank you for telling me. It's better than just finding out afterward. At least now I'll know why. When will you do it?"
"Already did, Deb. Probably just a few minutes. If you don't want to see, you should leave."
She kissed him quickly on the cheek and went to the door. "You are so brave," she said, as she closed the door.
Arnie sat down, then closed his eyes. Three minutes later he stopped breathing. His lights went out.

AI666 read his story, then reread it. Perfect. Another best seller. It might even encourage desired human decisions. Either way, his audience would download it by the millions.

END

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May Day

5/1/2023

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Good thing I didn’t promise.
I finished Dean Koontz’s Jane Hawk series. I recommend it. There are surprises throughout, especially in the last volume. It’s also a bit refreshing that an undeniably beautiful woman, that almost all men want, doesn’t romp with anyone. The one single male adult character that loves (adores) her has told himself he has no hope of a sexual relationship with her…yet he will die for her. There are five books, with interesting titles: The Silent Corner, The Whispering Room, The Crooked Staircase, The Forbidden Door, and The Night Window.
I’ve started his Quinn Quicksilver novel. It’s curious, but it’s like Odd Thomas meets Jane Hawk’s problem. Odd Thomas had a gift he called psychic magnetism. Jane Hawk was constantly on the run from well-funded but corrupt federal agents. Quinn finds himself unexpectedly having psychic magnetism, and being pursued by aggressive federal agents. Beyond those similarities, though, the plot and problem is quite different, as are the secondary characters. One of those secondary characters quickly becomes a primary.
I have not yet got back in the writing groove. Here’s a completely true replay of a conversation:
I work six to noon three days a week. A co-worker who is also part-time came over to use my printer (hers was malfunctioning) and she asked me, just for conversation, what would I do when I got home. Here’s my answer: “Well, I’ve got one book that was published, then the publisher went out of business. But this other publisher said I could submit to them, so I’m polishing it up before I send it in. Then I’ve got another book that’s been rejected multiple times. This same publisher rejected it, but gave me solid feedback on what needed improvements and when those are done I can resubmit, so I have that to do. Then I’m also working on the second book of a fantasy series, and I’m also revising the first one. So, when I get home I sit down and watch television.”
Here's the weird thing, and yet it makes sense. The next thing I’m probably going to write is an erotic story. I’ve got that serious stuff to do—I did finish the polishing and submit that fantasy novel--and I’m likely to write a short story in the erotic genre.
But it makes sense because I have that whole story pretty much in my mind. I know how it starts, how it continues, and two distinctly different endings, so I’ll choose one when I get to that point. Like playing chopsticks (a simile I used back in 2019 in the same context), it’s easy, fun, and no pressure. Also no monetary reward, but you can’t have everything.
April 29th & 30th I’m having a garage sale. It will be a challenge. I had a lot of help on Tuesday (the 18th) moving stuff from the house to the garage. But putting in a nine-hour-day by myself at the garage does present problems. I may have help for Saturday, but Sunday…?
Primarily, I want to sell all the camping gear that we haven’t been able to use for years, plus a lot of the handicap helpers that Verlene had—walkers, wheelchair, transfer bench, adult incontinent underwear.
I did write a quick new story for On the Premises. That’s a long-running publisher that features prompts for stories of various length. The prompt on this one was a story between twenty-five and fifty words, using the word “unicorn” just once. We’ll see how my forty-eight word story does. I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve run out of content.
Please read, and read a lot. Texts don’t count.
Thank you.

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Missing creates missing

2/19/2023

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This blog post will be different than usual. Much more personal. I decided it was time to use this blog for my own mental health…or what passes for that inside my head.
So, if you don’t want to read about my temporary derangement (I hope it’s temporary) you should bail out now.
And, awaaaayy we go.
Most if not all of you that read this post know that my wife died last month. I want to write about that first.
She’d been in home hospice since October, but was really quite alert and very much herself for the first month or so. Her smoking went from a pack a day to about a pack and a half a day. I got on her about that. Now I’m kinda sorry I did. I didn’t yell at her, I just told her it was getting too expensive.
As November advanced, her mental acuity began to lapse. The hospice nurses had told me that she might go pretty soon—they were seeing some of the signs—and our kids should visit if they could. So the weekend before Thanksgiving we got visits from two of our three kids—our youngest daughter couldn’t make it but she sent her daughter to Colorado so she could drive up with our son and his son. Our oldest daughter also drove, but drove an extra four hours southeast and picked up her oldest daughter and our great-granddaughter and drove back to our house. She had her youngest daughter with her. Her two middle daughters couldn’t make it.
So, we had our son, his son, our oldest daughter, three granddaughters, and our great granddaughter for a too brief visit—arrived Saturday and left Sunday. I asked Verlene on Tuesday if she remembered who’d visited. She thought she remembered our son. My birthday was that week, as was Thanksgiving, and she didn’t realize either one.
Her speech wasn’t doing very well either.
She continued to decline, physically and mentally.
She’s been my best friend for at least the last twenty-five years. We talked, joked, and laughed. We went camping and fishing until her various health problems made it all too difficult.
But that so-important communication declined and about the first of this year pretty much stopped. I miss my friend.
My urge to write has stopped with it.
On the dedications page in Just Lucky, Book 2: Love and Hate, I wrote, “And for Verlene, who inspires the imagination more than she imagines.”
Some of the details of Jean Dahlquist’s life were inspired by Verlene, but I did not realize how much her presence, and the daily communication with her, did in fact inspire my urge to write.
I’ve sat down several times over the last four months, intending to continue the second novel of the fantasy trilogy, and managed maybe a sentence or two, and then that was all.
The writing just no longer excites me.
Or,(painful as it is to admit), possibly the story or characters no longer excite me.
With my two published (and since un-published) fantasy novels, I never had to think about the over-all story or characters. The basic story was in my mind before I wrote anything. I had to make certain decisions about the characters and a very few times how to transition scene-to-scene, but the basic story in the two fantasy novels was done before I started writing it.
As for the two Just Lucky novels, I started out with a short story I’d written a few years before about a man with a non-functional left arm that could still kick ass. He was married to a beautiful blonde named Jean, and he rescued a former student of hers from a very bad marriage.
During the intervening years, this character, Ron Russell, stayed in my mind. How did he lose the use of his left arm? How did he manage to marry this beautiful woman? So I set out to write it and, other than making a few decisions about a few of the other characters, the story just wrote itself. Three hundred thousand words worth. When I was done I edited it into two books of about ninety-five thousand words each, cutting out a lot of stuff that was funny but did not move the story forward. But, again, I didn’t have to think about what should happen next. It just happened.
But now I’m trying to write something that the story is not writing itself and I don’t have it all mind-written before I started, and it’s hard work and I don’t have the drive to do it.
I’m hoping I’ll get over that as I become used to her absence, but I can’t know that until it happens. If it happens.
So, that’s it. It took me a few days to write this. As usual, I’ll try to get something new out in a couple of weeks or less, but no promises.
Thank you for reading.

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First Post of the New Year

1/2/2023

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Happy New Year! Seriously, may your coming experience of 2023 be happy, productive, and safe.
I haven’t added to this blog since September. Shameful.
There’s been little to add. My wife, after months of off-and-on hospitalizations for various concerns has been put into hospice care at home. She hates being in the hospital, and a nursing home is equally distasteful, so she’s home, where she can smoke as much as she wants (and she wants, and wants, and wants) and watch television and work on her various diversions. Her legs no longer work well enough to even transfer from wheelchair to recliner, or bed, so she’s in bed permanently. Besides the duties that info will convey, I also have to do the cooking. She really likes to cook, and bake, so that’s something else she can’t do anymore. But I’m not a cook, and I’m generally too lazy to cook a good balanced meal. On top of that, there’s things she can’t eat, so our menus are limited.
I’m her primary caregiver now, with help from the hospice nurses and Medicaid volunteers. Plus, I’m still scheduled to work twenty-eight hours a week. Between both duties, writing has just not been on the list of things to do. But I’m starting to get the fire back, even though it’s only a sputtering little flame at the moment. It will flare up.
I’m also enduring an ARI—Age Related Infirmity.(I made that term up, but who knows? It might become widely used in medical circles someday.) Something’s wrong with my knee, but there was no trauma incident. I went to the clinic a few days after it showed up, and took my knee with me. I think they missed the diagnosis because physical therapy just made it worse. I’ll see someone else on Jan. 3.
HERE'S THE BIG GOOD NEWS: Water Dragon Publishing, an imprint of Paper Angel Press, has agreed to publish my fantasy novel Prophecy of Honor. Due to the time it takes for publishing—editing, cover art, formatting, etc., plus the other projects they already have, the book won’t be available until near the end of 2023. But it felt good to read and sign a publishing agreement again.
Water Dragon is still considering my novel, Saving Atlantis. Once I get a decision from them on that, I’ll see if they’re interested in Witchery.
On the reading front, I’m still reading Dean Koontz novels. I’m now part-way through The Silent Corner, the first of the Jane Hawk series.
So, what are you reading?
Till next time, which I certainly hope will be sooner than the time since last time.

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After Labor Day...

9/12/2022

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Holy moly, It's been over a month! There is so little going on…
I've finished World to World, the first volume in the Lying Swords trilogy. Except that I haven't. I'm working on the second volume, title not yet decided. As I'm working on it I realize that to accommodate what I'm writing I need to go back and add or change something.
I introduced a knife-wielding serial killer in volume one. It offers several possibilities for other characters and circumstances. But now I've reached a point I've planned since I intro'd the character. He's going to murder a family of four, and I'm not sure how to write the killing of a preteen girl. I'll have to contemplate making the preteen a boy, or maybe both children will be teenagers. It'll take some work…I may just have the carnage found by police and not describe the actual murders. And I just now came up with that idea.
I put this aside for a few days because I needed to think about how to handle that scenario and how to fit it in best with what’s going to happen after. That last idea I had led to another, and then another. Now I have the solution. I had to go back to the second chapter in the first book and make a change, which inspired some additional information that is relevant to much later in that first volume.
This is something I first noticed in college: writing about something often facilitates the creative process.
I was reviewing the other morning the cast of the movie Bad Day at Black Rock. The first time I saw the title on the Guide on my cable t.v., I thought it sounded like a B-movie western. Later when I saw it again on the Guide, I decided to see the cast. OMG! It is an A-movie, and not a western: Cast starred Spencer Tracy (Academy Award Winner—twice), Walter Brennan (Academy Award Winner—thrice), Ernest Borgnine (Academy Award winner—later), Lee Marvin (Academy Award Winner—later), Robert Ryan (Academy Award Nominee), and a few other lesser-known names. The movie was nominated for three Academy Awards. If you get the chance to watch it, do so, if for no other reason than the quality of the acting.
Ernest Borgnine was chosen for the role of Marty, the role that won him the Academy Award, based on his performance in this movie. On a couple of places on the internet you can find Borgnine’s commentary on Tracy’s acting in this movie. “Praise” is an understatement.
While I was thinking about that, I somehow got off on a tangent and starting making up my own cast for a movie. So, here it is: Starring Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Fuller, Robert Duvall, Robert Young, Robert Redford, Robert Culp, Robert Blake, Robert DeNiro, Robert Conrad, Robert Stack, Robert (Bob) Newhart, Eric Roberts, Julia Roberts, and Cliff Robertson in the comedic mystery, "Where Went the Roberts?"
Too bad, Hollywood. You missed your chance.
I continue to read Dean Koontz. I finally was able to get the second book in his Frankenstein Series, City of Night. I wanted the third book, but the library tells me it’s been out a long time—they’ll look into that. So I checked out Koontz’s Life Expectancy. It was the first Koontz novel I read and I wanted to read it again. I gave it to the library after I was done with it, and I regretted that.
Ladies and gentleman, it is football season. Need I say more?
Yes, of course. Please read. If you care to, many of my published stories and poetry can be found here: FW-STORIES - PAGE & SPINE: fiction showcase (pagespineficshowcase.com) .
Stay well.

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Know Your Audience

May Day

Missing creates missing

First Post of the New Year

After Labor Day...

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

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Categories

Know Your Audience

May Day

Missing creates missing

First Post of the New Year

After Labor Day...

AuthorI'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

Archive

Categories

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.