It's spring, and the weather is warming up. That means more hiking and time outside collecting a cooler brain and ideas for new stories. It's also about to get really hot and gross, but I'll deal with that when it happens.
Moving pictures, I watched
M3GAN - a fun movie about AI (Terminator singularity style) in robot form.
SWARM - was also watched, and it was an excellent serial killer slasher.
Yellowjackets - I loved the 90's cannibal movies, so this is great.
Some books I am reading (I read somewhere online that these were symbols that cause hallucinations - sorry, I was not able to credit the creative individual who came up with that)
Becky Chambers - Record of a Spaceborn Few. I'm enjoying the series, and each book is its own thing.
This is how you lose the time war by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This is interesting, so far, a science fiction story told mainly by letters back and forth by two characters goading each other on. To quote my daughter, when watching movies and folks are getting close. "Kiss Kiss Kiss"
Starting the new Brandon Sanderson Secret Novel number 2 - The Frugal Wizards Handbook. I'm gonna start this but maybe next month.
So I have a couple more books I've received because I get so much reading about writing by authors. Maybe it's the commiseration, maybe it's the hope, but I think it's so I can see how I'm connected to others with the same things that bring me joy and misery when writing something and creating a world full of people.
Ray Bradbury - Zen and the Art of Writing. It's a bunch of essays about writing, and a quote from the very first one is "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you". This comes after a few paragraphs where he describes what happens when he doesn't write for a few days. If I don't write or think about writing for too long, I start to lose it a little bit. Reality gets harder, and the basic life stuff gets harder. This shit hit hard, and I can't wait to work through the rest of the book.
The other book is Haruki Murakami's book - Novelist as a Vocation. I've read a handful of his books, and while beautifully written, they kind of weirded me out, and I read some weird books. I saw this, though, and thought, 'I wonder what he has to say about writing.' I'm ready for that. I want to read about how another writer does their thing. Where do the ideas come from, what drives them, and what keeps a writer going in a world where novels are read less and less, and the writing of them is, if I can see the future at all, going to be nudged out by AI? A bit of a doomsday comment, that's fine. I'm still trying to figure out why I write.
Speaking of writers being replaced by AI (I'm referring to language prediction and not scholarly terminators penning the next great American novel), this article is about the writer who outlined, prompted, and edited a novella using multiple AIs. (Outlining and Editing are my two least favorite things about writing)
This was the best comment was from a reader with the screen name Kieran, from Ireland, on April 20th:
Stay calm. We can still write and share ideas. We can still self
publish. And we can still make no money from writing.
Everything and nothing has changed.
Along with buying a lot of books I plan to read and reading some of them, I began working on notes for a story where the main character is inspired by one of the Simpson's Tree House of Terror episodes. I will totally mention the Simpsons and also mention that the Simpsons already did it multiple times in the story. It should be a fun one.
That is April.
Here's a picture of some Magnolia flowers being awesome today.
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