Great, another site, another format where I’m supposed to Sell Myself. Another thing I’m supposed to keep track of to monetize my life’s passion and make it suck even more. Another number I will obsessively look at to see I’m not popular on an hourly basis. Another way to compare myself to other no-talent hacks who managed to game the algorithm with the right haircut and the proper niche. If I knew 99% of writing was just high school again, I would have went straight to Montana and started my manifesto. Anyway, welcome.
I have been blogging since before the word blog was invented over at Rumored.com. I’ve also tried Medium, Blogger, LiveJournal, and who knows what else. It’s always the same deal: a hot new platform, promises of new eyeballs, a locked-in format with no escape hatches, a sudden shift to monetization with draconian fees and policies, a swarm of make-money-fast hucksters and farms of content, now all auto-written and completely unreadable. And now I’m here to figure out how I fit into this.
There are basically two things going on in my head right now. The first is that after publishing 18 books, I had a minor crisis of confidence and basically stopped writing fiction in 2021. When I “quit” writing, I gave it a lot of thought and tried to make a list of the reasons that fundamentally stopped me from moving forward. There were eight big things, major problems I could not solve. I wrote them down, with hopes of revisiting them at some point. I then proceeded to unpublish and wipe as much of my public writing as I could.
I’m slowly getting back to it, sort of. I’ve written a 100,000-word sequel to one of my most popular books, and it’s probably a draft or three away from being anywhere near readable, but it keeps me busy. The real problem, other than those eight problems I haven’t solved, is… what is writing, anyway? The Kindle self-publishing thing is a race to the bottom I honestly cannot pay attention to. As a person who ran a lit web site, nobody reads those things anymore. I don’t care about getting a book deal or optioning a script so I can get health insurance or trying to break a best-seller list. I don’t care about any of that. I have a day job. I don’t want to attach money or fame to this Thing. But provided you’ve got the connection to the collective unconscious fully unblocked and you’re a vessel being filled with the Work, what containers do you pour it into? 240-page novels? Tweets? TikToks? Podcasts? Video games?
So, first thing: I have a lot of questions about the form of The Thing. And the eight questions I need to answer are all kinda-sorta related to that.
The other big thing: AI is going to kill us all.
Okay, on one hand, let me be clear: if you write thrillers, crime procedurals, romance, or horror, you will be 100% out of a job by next summer. Go ahead and argue with me that AI can’t write and isn’t good enough, but the point is that within a year, it will be good enough to turn out 99-cent page-turners that can be quickly read on the beach and forgotten. If you write formulaic genre fiction, there will soon be a tool where someone in a cave in Pakistan can press a button five times a minute and churn out a sea of murder mysteries that will flood the market and drive down sales for everyone. I’m not saying this because I have contempt for genre fiction. I’m saying this like it’s 1908 and I just saw a Model T Ford and I’m talking to a farrier who makes their living putting shoes on horses. Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s happening.
For a person who doesn’t care about book sales, this is a mixed blessing. If Amazon decided tomorrow that they were getting out of the book market entirely and shutting down the Kindle, whatever. I’d still write. I was self-publishing when that meant taking a printout to a Kinko’s and stapling the copies myself. I kind of like making zines; I published two last year and it was fun. If AI wipes out the electrical grid entirely, I’ve got cases of blank journals and ball-point pens here.
The other side of this: I am curious about AI. I am a computer person. I work in the field. I can’t keep up, but I try to keep up. And I have thoughts about using AI in my workflow. I already know AI can’t write what I write (more on that later) but I’m also tired of this busy work, writing one-pagers and summarizing blog posts and writing the same email 768 times and trying to find if you can DNA test feces without polluting my Google search results for a month. (Yes, you can.)
So, I did what anyone does at the start of a cyber-horror movie: I started up a multimodal large language model, gave it some simple features, and then fed it my 18 books to train on. I now have the KonGPT, which sometimes knows more about my books than I do.
I’m tired. I’m bored. I don’t want to waste my writing time doing this busy work to prop up my Brand, so I’m going to do some of it with AI. Don’t worry; it will be clear when the KonGPT is answering a question, and I’m not actually using AI to write fiction. If it’s not self-explanatory, I’ll put its answers in Comic Sans or something.
Okay, to summarize, two goals:
What is writing anymore, and how do I keep doing it?
How is the KonGPT doing on learning about my writing?
How can I solve off-by-one errors? (Sorry, computer science joke.)
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