Week 19 - Frozen

 

Update – Not much went on last week. I had a boring assignment—simple typos and punctuation errors on almost every other line made it drag on and on—to the point I finally just quit working and went back to computer games. Yes, I had a relapse. I got the assignment done before deadline, but my own writing, not to mention the yard work, suffered as a result. It doesn’t help that my area has been stuck in a bad weather pattern of primarily clouds and drizzle with only glimpses of sun. I think the sun is getting back at us for being eclipsed last month. It’s just warm enough and wet enough that the grass grows like mad but you barely get the chance to mow it. Supposedly this should be prime writing time for me, but…

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I might as well come right out and say it. I’m caught in yet another writer’s block. I’m not sure what brought it on. I’d blame the tooth extraction, which restricted my diet to soft, mainly healthy foods for almost a week (and cost me almost $700 I don’t have), but this has been going on since before my dental work. Ditto for the eye exam and the new glasses—which are working fine, by the way, so I can’t blame that either. I’m also able to eat junk food again, which I proved by devouring an entire bag of potato chips (sour cream and onion ripple chips, yay!) in lieu of a regular meal. I’ve been moving around more and sleeping relatively well on a regular basis, so that can’t be it.

The last time I worked on the detective book was when I sent out the sub package. That was late April. Haven’t touched it since. I thought about going back to the romance but didn’t. I have a notebook of flash scenes to comb through in search of inspiration but haven’t looked at it. A couple of ideas surfaced briefly and then sank again. For nearly an entire month all I’ve written is nightly flash, and even that feels lifeless.

And then I gave up over the weekend and got back into the computer games. This time it was Sudoku. Spent an entire work day on that one. That’s what I did instead of wrapping up the paid assignment. It almost went to two days, except I got so furious at myself I shut down the computer, went outside and mowed a section of lawn I’d meant to tackle over the weekend. Then I went grocery shopping and bought that bag of chips I talked about. The adrenaline surge got me back on track and I easily finished the paid assignment before deadline. I’m feeling better now. But I still can’t write.

I think I’m having a crisis of self-confidence. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize how derivative a lot of my ideas are. And that I may be neuro-divergent, so my characters don’t necessarily act like normal people. It doesn’t help that the publishing world has changed drastically since my childhood, when SF and comic books ignited a desire in me to tell stories for a living. Back in those simpler, non-corporate days, even mediocre writers could earn a living wage just by churning out books. It’s not that easy now. Not to mention you can find yourself abruptly cancelled by internet trolls for, well, pretty much anything, or nothing at all. This is why I’m not on social media.

Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself. There are a lot of writers worse than me out there who are selling well and making a living. Maybe that’s what I need—hit the libraries, find a really hideously-written best seller and boost my self-esteem by figuring out how I would have done it better. I’ve already got one in mind: a recent YA book by a former romance writer that, to judge by the reviews, borrows heavily from the work of one of my favorite SF authors. It even has a plucky girl protag who speaks in current American slang even though the story takes place on an alien world with no connection to Earth. Sounds like just the thing to make me feel like writing again. That’s how a lot of us got started: we read a bad book and threw it against the wall while yelling, “I could write better than that!” And proceeded to do so, either via fan fiction or diving straight into submitting to publishers. Because you don’t need to be a good writer to sell a book. You just need to tell a good story. If the reader’s entertained, they won’t care if the book is bad. The only time you fail is when you fail to be entertaining. Or fail to write anything at all.

You can’t give the people what they want. The people don’t know what they want until they see or read it. Or, as someone once responded on an internet discussion about what editors were looking for: “Nobody was looking for Harry Potter.”

I can write. I can sell what I’ve written. I’ve done both before. Just stop worrying about being perfect and sit down and tell the story. If people like it, they’ll let me know. If not…what the hell. I’ve got plenty of others waiting in line. I just have to get myself to write them.

But not today. Today I’m going to get out of the house and see if I can find a copy of that book so I can see how bad it really is. I also want to get a copy of Last Action Hero, another story about a fictional character finding himself in the real world, with the added bonus of starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m going to need another bag of chips. See y’all next week.

Week 18 - Help! Skynet is Trying to Steal My Job!

 

Update – trying to catch up on the dates here… This should be for the week covering April 28-May 4. What did I accomplish? Writing-wise, not a whole helluva lot. I haven’t touched the detective story since I subbed the chapters and synopsis. I haven’t even combed through my files. I’ve mostly been working on a paid assignment and writing nightly flash. Part of my work week got taken up by a tooth extraction and the subsequent recovery (I’ve learned I can survive on bananas and apple sauce) and the need to leave the house to buy new glasses. And I took Saturday off because it was Free Comic Book Day and I had to drive into the city to pick through the offerings. I’ve been going to that store for 40 years, give or take. This is its third location. The owner (actually the second owner) recently retired, so it’s now on its third owner. I hardly buy anything any more but I like to keep up with the industry. Maybe I should do a sequel to the detective novel, with the detective helping out a comic book character. No, wait, that was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Never mind.

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The following is an unhinged rant based on nothing but my own paranoia. Take it seriously at your own risk.

As mentioned, I made a sub to a publisher last month. Normally agent-only, this publisher has an open call every year, usually covered by the SFF thread on the writers’ site I belong to. This year was different. The news was that subs to the open call would be sorted by an AI (artificial intelligence) program, which would skim the entries and assign them to editors looking for that sort of book. That right there killed a lot of people’s interest. Doesn’t sound like many folks bothered to enter this year. Except for me and maybe a handful of others. But now I’m getting second thoughts.

I’ve been vaguely aware of the artistic community’s concerns about AI producing artwork. Here’s how it works: you feed existing images (created by people) into the system. The system scans, or “scrapes” the data and learns how to create its own “art” based on prompts from the programmer. The more it ingests, the more it “learns,” the harder it gets to tell a computer-generated result from that by someone with a pencil or paintbrush. It used to be easy because the computer would give people eight-fingered hands, but that bug seems to have been squashed.

So HAL-9000 can “paint” a Bob Ross picture now. So what?

So there are programs that can replicate a person’s voice to the point you can’t tell the fake from the real thing. Someone’s already produced a fake Taylor Swift song. How soon before we get a “new” Beatles album? They can write, too. There’s the dude on YouTube who fed dozens of Batman comics into his system and then had it write a comic book script. It was hilarious in its ineptitude but had its own illogical logic. And the Joker’s dialogue was eerily on point.

Then there was the freelance writer who said her assignments dried up almost overnight because her clients found they could use their systems to generate press releases and ad copy. Filler stories like coverage of town hall meetings have already appeared in newspapers, generated by machines that were given meeting notes and a general template.

And now here we are, sending our prose to a publisher that told us up front it’s going to feed our words, our ideas, our writers' voices into a machine.

The Batman fan already proved AI can write a story. A story that sucks, but most first drafts by beginners suck. We get better with practice. And by reading—or scanning—and studying the work of better writers. How long before the machines get good enough to put us writers out of business?

Don’t laugh. I learned many sorry truths during my years in the work force, and here’s one of the top five: if your job can be done by someone or something else for less money, sooner or later it will be. This is why factory work went overseas, and why want ads include lines like, “Recent grads encouraged to apply. Experience not required.”

Not to mention machines don’t require a paycheck, days off or medical benefits. And they never demand a raise.

“Yeah,” I hear you asking, “but can it write a book? A good book? Something people will be willing to read?”

Yes. I think it can. If not right at the moment, then very, very soon. I doubt if the top tier, like Stephen King and John Grisham, are shaking in their boots right now. The rest of us, though, better start looking over our shoulders. Because there’s a genre out there that’s ripe for the plucking if you’ve got an AI program and a hankering for money.

I’m talking about category romances. You know, the kind Harlequin puts out. Boy meets girl (or boy meets boy, or they/them meets him/her, or whatever) and they fall in love. Details vary, but that’s essentially the plot. Harlequin used to have specific formulas (maybe they still do) for each of their imprints so readers knew exactly what they were getting each time they cracked a cover. They’re short, quick beach reads or rainy afternoon books, the literary equivalent of a McBurger. Time was, if you were good enough, fast enough, and could write to the formula, you could make a halfway-decent living at this.

That’s what I’ve been aiming for, what with all the looming bills. Except I’m not that fast, and have this pesky habit of veering off the formula.  Whereas a well-trained AI program could, in theory, poop out a readable romance novel in a matter of days. Or hours. It may not be high quality, but then again, neither are mine. Neither are most books in any genre. The difference is, a publisher would have to pay me advances and royalties. With AI, any profits go straight into the publisher’s pocket.

Let’s assume readers can’t tell the difference, or don’t care as long as they enjoyed the story. Whose book do you think the publisher is going to invest in?

It wouldn’t mean the end of human writers. There are stories only real writers can bring to life, and cream will always rise to the top. But the other eighty percent of books on the stands? The ones that go into spinner racks at truck stops or bargain bins at indy book stores? The writers of those books are doomed. Once AI learns how to crank out generic entertainment, most of us bottom- and mid-listers are going to be out of work.

Looks like I’d better get my fingers in gear before that happens. If it hasn’t happened already. Any day now Publisher’s Weekly is going to run an article revealing, “Ha ha, that book you read last week was written by a machine. Bet you couldn’t even tell.” A lot of readers will probably just shrug. And a lot of us writers will be forced to hang up our laptops.

Geez, I hope all those Hong Kong bots aren’t scraping this blog for ideas, or for training purposes. I may have just given the game away.

I think I’ll get an Alexa. When I ask it a question and it responds with, “Hasta la vista, baby” in an Austrian accent, I’ll know the jig is up. See you all (maybe) next week.

 

Week 17 - The Trouble with Goals

 

Update – other than subbing to a publisher’s open call, last week was pretty slow. I spent most of my time doing paid work and worrying about a scheduled tooth extraction, more over the cost than over the operation itself. Everything went well, by the way. By next week I’ll be able to eat crunchy junk food again. In the meantime, I’ve been surviving mainly on bananas and apple sauce and probably losing weight. There’s an upside to everything.

I started going through my old files for flashes and snippets I can use to either write stories for subbing or collect as is for a self-published humor anthology. The one file dates back ten years. So far, I haven’t found anything useful in it. All the entries pretty much all suck. I picked up one of my more recent longhand flash notebooks and I’m having much better luck. There’s the start of a whole novel in there that I began and may go back to, along with a bit that would fit the anthology. And that’s just in the first five pages. I might have considered the flash bit for expansion, except Stephen King used a similar idea for one of his earlier stories, so probably not. Even though mine would be totally different—I can even think of a romance angle—somebody on the internet would be bound to complain because the internet complains about everything. This is why I avoid social media.

My goal for this month is to get off my butt and get serious. I managed to make a sub in April; I need to do a lot more of that if I want to pay off my bills. I’ll be skimming those notebooks for story prompts on a nightly basis, and hopefully longhand some future subs. I also want to get this blog back on schedule. This update is supposed to cover April 21-27, and here we are in May already, a full week behind. So I’m going to aim to post again on Monday or Tuesday, then settle into my original post day of Sunday once I’m caught up. Hopefully that will get me back on track.

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So here we are at the start of May, almost halfway through the year. So far, not so good. I have yet to write a book (first draft) in a month. I have yet to finish either of the two books I started the year with. At least I had enough of the one book in good enough shape that I was able to make up a submission package for that publisher. Now I just have to finish the second draft, do some hands-on research to make sure everything’s good, do a spot-check third draft to iron out the wrinkles and I’ll be prepped and ready for a possible acceptance call. I’ve got a year to do all this. Can I make it? I dunno. See the opening lines of this paragraph.

Setting goals is the easy part. Seeing them through takes determination, hard work and faith in your own abilities, plus rock-solid belief that yes, things will come out in your favor. I’ve been falling short in all of these, all at once and in various combinations. A lifetime of bad luck and bad job experiences will do that to your confidence. Also, being fast and prolific helps the modern writer, and I’m neither. That’s something else that’ll have to be fixed if I’m going to succeed at this.

Because that’s the trouble with goals. They don’t achieve themselves; you have to work your ass off on a number of levels just to give yourself a fighting chance. Yes, luck helps, but you can’t count on that. Luck only works if you do. Like that open call. I’d been thinking of subbing to that publisher after the book was done, but the opportunity arose and I was ready. I had three edited opening chapters. I had a completed manuscript so I could do a detailed synopsis. I’m a member on a writing site where I learned about the open call and the fact they were taking partials and not complete manuscripts. All that is opportunity. None of it would have meant squat if I hadn’t taken action and sent my entry in.

But it’s not over yet. Now I’m on the clock. I have roughly a year to complete and polish the book. If I’m lucky, it’ll land on the right editor’s desk at the right time. If I did my job right with the partial, crafted an interesting story with original characters and just enough hook to snag attention and make Marketing think, “We can sell this,” then there should be several “right” editors.

And while I’m waiting, I can continue to work on other projects, like short stories and self-publishing and churning out romance novels. The romance books I’m 95% sure will be accepted. But how will they sell? Depends on how hard I work to meet my goals—not just in writing, but in research and sales techniques. The harder I work at the right things, the better my odds become. Then when the sales happen and the money starts trickling (pouring would be better, but I’m staying cautious) in, I can brag to everybody about how “lucky” I was.

None of which will happen if I don’t send things out. I won’t have anything to sub unless I write it first. Maybe my first goal of the month should be, “Establish a viable work schedule and stick to it.” Wait, I tried that last month. The only reason it didn’t work was because I didn’t. Back to my original goal for May: “Get off your lazy ass.” After all, I’ve got hundreds of Asian bots relying on me for weekly content, not to mention the viewer in Switzerland. I can’t just let them down. See y’all next week.