July 2022

 As I write this, I'm sitting in a dark room with the shades pulled. A fan blows warm air at me, and while I'd like to turn on the air conditioner, I don't really need it, and I could use a break from the sound it makes. The constant hum of that air conditioner fan pulling warm air over the cooling coils hurts my ears after a while. It leaves me with the feeling of gritting teeth, and the dryness makes me want to cough.  

It's 90+f degrees and has been for a few days now. According to the weather websites, it will be for at least another week. In New England and especially in Maine, this weather usually happens a bit but not for as long. You can imagine what it does to the brain. As a writer, the last thing I want to do is sit down in my room, sweating and typing, but I manage to do it a little bit. This is July, and it's slightly expected but still miserable.

I finished reading Cassandra Khaw's novel Nothing but Blackened Teeth this month. It was a ghost story set in Japan. Dark, spooky, introduced me to another culture's ghosts and demons; so entertaining and educational. What more could you want from a story. 

I also started reading the new novel by Otessa Moshfegh called Lapvona, and like all of her novels, it's dark, and the characters are terrible. I will be happy to finish reading it but will then start waiting for her next one. 

For my writing this month, there has been a pause in editing my novel Disappearing, but I did write 10,000 words of a new novella. A scary story involving AI (Artificial intelligence) but not that AI is evil and wants to take over the world sort of way. More of an AI is dumb, and this is what can happen. I don't plan on putting much more into it, but I do have to write the horrific finale. Saved the best, fun part of the writing for last. I get to type lots of words like blood, meat, and gristle. I am not envisioning a happy ending.

I'm still waiting on a response from the last magazine I submitted my short story, The Last Automator. I am currently number 15 in the queue, so closer. I bet I hear something from them before the month is up. I need to start looking at when to submit it next. 

While writing about AI, there has been some crazy stuff happening with the technology. So a year or so ago, when I wrote the Last Automator, I mentioned that no one is writing books or screenplays anymore.  That no one can do as well as AI. When you are looking for a new book to read, type in a few authors whose work you've enjoyed in the past. A few books you have enjoyed, and maybe even a few movies you like watching. After you hit enter, one has been generated for you, which is good and probably better than anything you had read. The system takes in what you like, what you want for entertainment, and provides you with the best possible book in seconds, and if the first couple of pages don't grab you, you can generate a new one.  

Many applications and websites are starting down this path. It's creating small, short blog posts or generating headlines, but some will provide you with an outline for an entire business book. What a way to show the world you are an expert in your field and that everyone should listen to you. You are a thought leader, and whatever topic you want it to be about... you actually wrote the book on it. They feed the system tons of data, books, stories, and other blog articles, and it takes that information in, mixes it up, and sends it back for you to publish. I have played around with a few, and now there are some posts and articles that I read that I'm pretty sure were just generated. 

Very cool stuff. 

I am not too good for AI. I use it to edit, look for misspellings and grammar, and identify weird sentences. It's very useful. I am curious to see how far it goes. 

This next paragraph was generated by AI from the line above. I asked it to be more descriptive.

 It can be used to find and fix style issues because style is a part of editing and writing. Editing, after all, is a style issue. Putting into words that are pleasing to the human ear is a matter of taste and preference. Human beings are good at detecting style and correcting formatting issues like repeated words or awkward sentences.

See - helpful Thank you, sudowrite, www.sudowrite.com 

You can read a whole article about these tools here if you are interested in learning more. https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper 

That's it for July. 

(This picture is generated from a poem generated from a couple of keywords and sentences in sudowrite. It was not a very good poem, and the image is not super great, but it was interesting to see.) 


 

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