February 2023

What has writing looked like this month? Nonexistent. My goal is to rest and dive back in for March. Maybe even get a short story written early in the month.

Speaking of short stories, ChatGPT and AI have been a bit of a pain for publishers of short stories. It seems there has been a flood of AI-Generated stories competing with human-written stories for the eyes of editors and slush-pile readers. It was bound to happen. Everyone wants to write stories, and this has made it possible. While they may not have officially written the story, they prompted the story. The trouble is AI is not there yet. Close, sure, but we have at least another couple of years before the work will be good enough to compete. The problem is that a few years after that it will potentially be better. I thought I had a little more time before my writing would be competing, but here we are. In a few months, emails and documents will start flagging the reader when a certain percentage of a document is generated by AI rather than a human, at least for those that care. I'll keep writing, though. 

I finished reading Tess and the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson about two days before the physical copy arrived. It's a beautiful hardcover, green and gold, with the image and title stamped right into it. Inside are a handful of colorful drawings that go along with the story. This was actually my first Sanderson novel, and I liked it. More fantasy than I usually read, but there were hidden touches of sci-fi in there. Most importantly, there was a good and interesting story.

I started Becky Chambers's Novel - A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and while different from her Monk and Robot series, there is enough to make it familiar, and I'm really enjoying it.
Grady Hendrix's new novel How to Sell a Haunted House arrived and is now sitting on a stack of books on my desk. I would pick up the new Stephen Graham Jones Novel Don't Fear the Reaper. It's the second book in a trilogy I started reading. My 'to be read' pile is about to get its own bookcase. 

I recently returned from a trip to Florida for a work event. On my last night, I was able to hit the pool. It was 74 degrees, and there was one other person there. The water was warm, and the sky was pretty. (Here's a picture of a palm, the moon, venus, and Jupiter just high enough to escape some of the light pollution.)