Fallout is, so far, the most videogamey of all the potential video game adaptations. When I say it is the perfect adaptation, I don’t simply mean in quality — though the quality is high! — I mean that it somehow has distilled the experience of the game into the sweet narrative liquor of a television show. Game mechanics are represented organically, and in a way that makes sense, down to (and these are first episode spoilers, very light, but be warned) using stimpaks and having a scene of “presenting my skills for character creaton” and the bloody mess perk and the junk jet gun, and, and, and. Every time I see a game mechanic lovingly folded into the story I’m like
It feels like it’s not trying to transcend the material, which, honestly, is pretty refreshing. Transcending the material is fine! But it can also feel like, “Oh, we can do better,” in a kind of looking-down-your-nose-y way. “We’re making art here, turning the raw unprocessed pablum of the video game into something so much more.”
This isn’t that. It isn’t so much more. It’s exactly the game. Not the story! The story is new. But if you play the Fallout games and feel like you’ve lived in them, this show will also feel like you’re living in it. It is, in a weird way, the same comfort of playing the game. It feels like going home. As long as, y’know, “home” is “a brutal cartoonishly violent satirical nuclear wasteland.”
Ooh, also, the violence and gore are off the charts but at the same time, don’t feel… upsetting? Is that weird? There’s a cruelty and a cynicism to the violence in some shows, from Game of Thrones to The Boys. And it works in those places, don’t get me wrong. But here it’s a little more Looney Tunes? Someone on Threads said that it was more EVIL DEAD 2 than SAW, and I think that’s definitely a good way to put it.
Anyway! Only a couple episodes deep but it’s great. It’s kind of a shame they released it all at once? Not sure why they did that. I’d rather savor it week to week. Parcel it out instead of wolfing it all down in one go.
Hey, here are ten songs I’ve been listening to and enjoying.
You know, if you like music.
(Links all go to YouTube.)
(I don’t dig on the Spotify.)
1. All the new Girl In Red album, but hey, check out Serotonin.
4. Okay, more Tom Cardy, this time with Ninja Sex Party, Dance Till You Stop, which is about being at a party and hating being at parties
5. Last Dinner Party, Nothing Matters, is lush and sad and excellent
6. Mama Zu’s whole album is great, and here I’ll shout out Lip as maybe my favorite. I was like, “wow, Mama Zu is great, I want more,” and then I Googled the band and found out the lead singer died a few years ago? And this album is only just coming out and I’m sad about this in so many ways. Lost a great artist and we’re only just discovering the artist who is lost. Anyway, Lip may be one of the truly best songs of recent memory.
First, just go get Sarah Langan’s A BETTER WORLD immediately. It’s a little bit satire, a little bit speculative, a little bit thriller, lot of social commentary, and it’s just racing through my head even after I’m done it. It shares some sort of spiritual terrain with Rob Hart’s THE WAREHOUSE.
Also, M.L. Rio has a novella out soon you need to look for — GRAVEYARD SHIFT. It’s a lot in a little package. It’s rats and fungus and great character work and has that nice balance of mystery and thriller and “literary.”
I’ve heard Paul Tremblay’s HORROR MOVIE is fucking great, but no one has sent me a copy yet, PAUL, which is of course fine because I’m an adult and can buy my own books, PAUL, but where is my book, PAUL, goddamnit. You can never, ever, not even once, go wrong with Paul Tremblay. Unless you try to feed him a pickle. Then it’s game over.
Cina Pelayo’s FORGOTTEN SISTERS was really, really good, and it’s out now. I technically sent in a blurb for it but I don’t think it ended up anywhere? I said in that blurb, “Pelayo’s darkly poetic prose captures you like a river current and pulls you into its embrace.” Anyway! Go get it!
Got the newest ARC from my homie Delilah, GUILLOTINE, too, so I’m excited to read that this weekend. If you haven’t read BLOOM yet, fix your shit immediately.
I’m always on the lookout for good standup comedy, but man, it’s fraught turning on nearly any comedy special by A WHITE DUDE in the year of our lord 2024. Not to get all “””woke””” on you but the moment your comedy devolves into a grievance rant about how you can’t say this or that anymore and something-something trans, I’m noping the fuck out. Can’t you just do comedy? Just be funny. Make jokes that work instead of making a special of shitty signals an increasingly marginal audience. Don’t be an asshole.
Anyway. Good (recentish) comedy specials out there to watch, though, still — Jacqueline Novak, Taylor Tomlinson, Marc Maron, Dimitri Martin’s newest, Sam Jay, Tig Notaro, Trevor Noah, Mike Birbiglia, and so forth.
What else? Shit, I dunno. GODZILLA X KONG was really silly and a lot of fun, and I’m happy to hear that the Monsterverse is continuing in more TV iterations, too, because Monarch was great.
I also liked The Gentleman on Netflix a lot? Haven’t seen the movie.
I continue to be on Threads. It’s fine? My quick capsule review of it is that it’s effective at reaching people, the algorithm is over-reactive and also terrible by its very nature, and the UI is hostile and I can’t ever seem to get a grip on really using it well. It still seems designed to broadcast more than it is to converse? But, it’s fine. It’s a thing that exists and I don’t hate it, and these days, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, that’s next door to an endorsement.
The one thing that you have to know is, the algorithm really does rule all — which means that when someone has a WEIRD IDEA or a CONTROVERSIAL TAKE, people responding to it or quoting it for “the dunk” instantly help that thing spread. The system is designed to see fire, and when you say, “Hey, look, fire,” the robot then pours gasoline on it.
(The robot is not here to help.)
As such, you tend to get just truly nonsense ideas about writing and publishing — bizarre opinions and worse, absolutely batfuck advice, often given by people who would seem to have little to no actual credit in the writing and publishing space. It’s like asking driving directions from someone on a different continent.
You’ll be scrolling through Threads and you’ll see someone say, like, “If a sentence has more than one comma, it’s a bad sentence.” Or, “Agents don’t really read queries; the only way to get an agent’s attention is to enter their home at night through a pet door, and leave your manuscript in the refrigerator, topped with origami rose petals made with Post-It notes, scented with your zesty authorial pheromones.” Or, “You can’t have potatoes in science-fiction.” Daily, someone just waltzes onto that website, fills a bottle with urine, and throws it into the crowd. And then, then, all day long you get Comma Discourse, or Don’t Stalk Agents Rejoinders, or Fiery Debate Over Sci-Fi Potatoes. It’s the cheapest, easiest bait, and we all take it. I’m not immune! I’m a fool! We’re all rats and there’s cheese everywhere — we cannot help to take a li’l nibble here and there.
Initially this was just going to be a post of me gesticulating wantonly and screaming DON’T TAKE THE BAIT THE BAIT WANTS YOU TO TAKE IT and maybe just writing that a hundred or so times. On your face. With a Sharpie. In reverse so you see it in the mirror when you look upon yourself.
Then, I thought, oh, ha ha, I’ll write a bunch of fake things about writing and publishing but honestly, no fake shit I write could be as good as the fake shit people spread around as if it’s already real.
But then I was like, “Well, what about sincerity and earnestness about the subject of writing and publishing?” And someone in the back made a barf noise and yelled “cringe” at me, but whatever, I’m cringe, I get it, it’s fine, I accept my role in this life.
So, I figured I’d just offer a few actually sincere thoughts about writing and publishing today. None of this will be particularly new, none of it earth-shattering, none of it so controversial it’ll goose an algorithm with a tasty pinch of contrarianism, and certainly I’m just one dipshit on the internet and everything I say here should be considered suspect.
Let us begin. Here, then, is a quivering dumpster of random thoughts about writing and publishing in the Year 2024.
1. Write the thing you wanna write. You can be strategic and whatever, you can and maybe even should try to figure out what people want to read and what publishers are willing to buy, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people in and around this industry know almost nothing for certain. They have institutional knowledge! They have expertise! But the intersection of art and commerce is a car crash and we’re all just trying to make sense of its wreckage. Plus, life is short and art is weird so go on and lean into it.
2. Be weird but don’t make it weird, you know what I mean? Just be cool. Be cool. It’s a community. Writers are cool. People in publishing are cool. Don’t make it weird. We’re just hanging out over here.
3. Try to be honest and open. With yourself, your peers, your readers, your editor, your agent. That’s not to say: be a dick. But be honest and open. Keep an open mind but also don’t let anybody just put anything they want in that mind. Have limits, know the hills you’re willing to die on.
4. Don’t kill all your darlings. Darlings are nice. We all deserve our darlings.
5. People are messy. Books are messy. Stories are messy. Publishing is messy. Art is messy. It’s all a mess. Know that going in.
6. There’s a lot of advice out there. It’s all bullshit, but bullshit fertilizes. If it helps your garden grow, use it, spread it. If it doesn’t? Wash it away.
7. When your process is failing you, change your process.
8. Lists of writing rules are often written by older, successful, able-bodied white guys and, like, that’s not to say they’re wrong about everything, but that’s also not to say they’re right about everything. Survivorship bias is king, alongside, well, all the other biases.
9. Your writing, your story, isn’t a product, it isn’t quote-unquote “content.” It gets packaged that way, sure, but it’s so much more than that. Let it be more than that. It’s footprints, fingerprints, heartprints, bite marks. It’s not a widget. It’s not a dongle. Writing and storytelling is art.
10. You can’t put potatoes in science-fiction, that one is true. That’s just rookie shit right there. I mean, what the fuck. Do better. Be better.
11. Don’t believe everything you read. Question everything. Except the thing about potatoes in science-fiction. Do not question that.
12. Publishing sucks. People in publishing are generally pretty great. It’s not their fault publishing sucks. And it doesn’t always suck, it just sucks generally. It’s a big half-broken-but-still-functional city-sized robot, jankily tromping about. It works, but it doesn’t work great, and it’s really too big to change easily, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to get stepped on.
13. I think the greatest challenge right now is just reaching audience. Both existing audience and new audience. Social media broke into islands and there isn’t as much Literary Weight packed into one place. It’s more diffuse and publishers outright don’t know how to handle that and they aren’t free with money, and got used to being not so free with the money, because it was really easy to just say, “Authors should build their platforms and stand on those platforms and yell about their books, ta-da, that’s called marketing and advertising, baby.” It didn’t even work so great then but it worked a little, and now most of that reach is gone. And they aren’t so keen to just like, spend money to put up actual ads for books (which they should!), so I think the greatest challenge is not only being heard, but finding the ears to hear.
14. Plans within plans within plans. I have so many contingency plans. I think you have to if you’re in publishing for more than ten minutes. We watch cities rise and worlds fall every few weeks. At some point you realize that the door in front of you might not be unlocked or even there next time you look, so you have to mark the other doors, the windows, the places where the wall is weak and you can kick your way through it. A one-year-plan, a five-year-plan, a ten-year-plan, a contingency plan, an escape plan.
15. The ground is shifting a lot right now underneath our feet. It has been for a couple years but the tectonic rumbles are really going good now. No real advice here except, I guess, hold onto something and have friends.
16. Having friends in this gig really matters. It’s hard, too, because we’re all a garage full of cats on fire. But having community is really important. Writers are the only people who understand the writer-part of writers.
17. Publishing is really dysfunctional, you think, until you work in comic books or Hollywood, and then publishing feels like a warm, soft hug.
18. Ideas are just costume jewelry. It’s all in how you wear ’em.
19. You can’t do everything or be everything to everyone. Good life advice, I guess, but also good advice in writing and publishing. You can’t blurb everything or read everything or support everything, you just do your best and try to be nice and pick your champions and in a perfect world do so with an eye on empathy and inclusion. But you do have to make sure your oxygen mask is on and fitted well, first, before you attend to others.
20. I think it’s nice to feel things when you read a book and when you write a book. Not just the cold calculations of plot but the deep feels part. I also think it’s okay be coldly calculating, too, and say, “This is the part where I make the reader feel [insert emotion here: sorrow, anger, lust, hunger for a very specific Japanese KitKat flavor you can only get once a year, like Sakura Ennui or Miso Gunpowder].”
21. Sometimes you have to say “fuck it” and do the thing, whatever the thing is. You probably already know what the thing is. We all have the thing. Sometimes many things. And we all have to say “fuck it” sometimes. So, y’know, fuck it. Do the thing.
22. Cultivating your instincts is pretty key, meaning you know when something (an edit, an offer, a marketing plan, a day’s writing) is right and when it’s off-kilter, and you really only cultivate those instincts by working a lot and thinking a lot and oops you thought too much now you’re anxious.
23. I mostly follow a 50/50 path of “what I want to do/what seems like the smart thing to do.” This is selfish and privileged. But I’m in this game for me and also I am a raccoon-crow hybrid who favors shiny things and I will chase the pretty shiny things and write the things I wanna write because I don’t know how to do differently. But strategy does factor into it. I won’t write something I don’t wanna write just because Ta-Da Strategy, but I will gladly line up the shiny things I want and try to decide which one of them you the audience will also like best. I want our interests to align. Storytelling is a shout in the dark and I want you to hear it so we can find one another.
24. My probably only really controversial Threadsy take here is that I think writing Licensed IP is getting trickier and less ideal in terms of that strategy. I want to say we were in a golden age of writing it but I think the pay hasn’t kept up and the rights are garbage and now with AI creeping into things, I’d say there are more red flags there than usual, and you might just be better off writing something that you own in terms of ideas, rights, material — you can just write a book, for free, and it doesn’t need to be like, someone else’s shit. It can be all your own shit. Actually, owning your own stuff is really important in general: owning a space to write, owning time to write, owning a space online that can’t be taken away if Elon Musk shows up and takes a cyber-shit upon it, owning your rights to the work, owning a jaunty capybara in a monocle and a top-hat who brings you coffee on his back like some kind of cool Miyazaki shit. Also P.S. it’s not “writing IP,” because your original work is IP, too, everything is IP except AI shit. You mean writing “licensed IP,” which is different. Anyway. Yeah.
25. It’s hard being a writer. So be good to yourself. Learn to love the work more than you love the publishing because the work can always be there for you even when publishing won’t be. Also block assholes online. Just clear your day of jerks. It’s a nice favor to yourself.
I wrote a book that has more of this kind of thing in it if you like that, it’s called Gentle Writing Advice. And yes I’m shilling, but like, I gotta be proud of my stuff and also, I need to pay my mortgage, as the banks get real salty about that. It’s like, settle down, banks, jeez. You can get a signed, personalized copy of it or any of my books through Doylestown Bookshop. Or head to Bookshop-dot-org. (Er, also, I’m noticing my “anxiety-based ant thriller with an Elon Muskian villain” is on sale for a buck ninety-nine again at your various e-book places, so, feel free to grabby-grabby.)
With some books, I know the exact moment the story seed arrived. With Wake of Vultures, it was trail riding on my horse and watching a vulture circle overhead while an obnoxious donkey tried to hump my boot. With Bloom, my latest cottagecore Horror novella, it was my teen daughter asking me why all the hot serial killers are dudes.
But with It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, I… do not remember.
Which is also a big part of the book.
It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, which we will call IWOHFAM from here on out to avoid wrecking the internet with too many words, is about Sarah Carpenter, a woman in her mid-twenties who’s waking up from an unhappy life in thrall to a narcissistic ex-boyfriend. As narcissists tend to do, he insidiously shut down all avenues of escape and joy, which means Sarah, once a pottery major, has completely given up on her art. But now she’s won a scholarship to the Tranquil Falls artist retreat in the north Georgia mountains and can’t wait to commune with her fellow creators and rediscover herself.
Instead, she discovers something dark. Something dangerous. Something that’s been waiting in the cellar of the once-resplendent resort overlooking the valley.
If Sarah’s strange, half-forgotten dreams are true, there’s a reason the other artists are going slowly crazy. The fiber artist is knitting an endless scarf. The calligrapher’s teeth are stained black. The musician can’t stop playing this one maddening carousel song. And then people start getting hurt.
But even worse, there’s something Sarah can’t quite remember, something horrible that was done to her. Something that also happened to me. You can read about it in the Author’s Note when IWOHFAM is on shelves, but until then, I promise you the same thing I promised you in The Violence: in this book, the people responsible will get what they deserve.
I hope you’ll preorder a copy of IWOHFAM, which is out October 22, the day after my birthday, which kinda makes it a gift for us both. It’s available in hardcover, e-book, and audio.
I have seen the sentiment around that generative AI for writers and artists is “inevitable,” which is a message that I think falls right in line with the myth of the starving artist — meaning, they’re two bits of pervasive folklore put forth by the Powers That Be, because it rewards and enriches those powers. To put a finer point on it, it’s fucking capitalism. It’s capitalist propaganda bellowed from the deepest, most cankerous cave of moneyed interests, because if they say it enough times and make it true, then they make more money because we make less money, the end.
Just the same, I’ve seen some actual writers and actual artists start to… really take this to heart. They are taking on the inevitability of Gen AI sure as a broken-hulled boat takes on water — but that boat doesn’t have to sink, and nor does AI have to be inevitable. I do think it is inevitable that Moneyed Interests will continue to push AI as a catch-all solution to problems that don’t exist, and they won’t just let that bone go — but I do think, just like crypto and NFTs and what-have-you, that the actual value of Gen AI and the inclusion of Gen AI is far, far from confirmed prophecy.
So, this is a post talking about what we are, I anticipate, likely to see regarding artificial intelligence and both our writing lives and our writing careers. Note: none of this is good, but again, none of this needs to be inevitable, either, and I feel like blah blah blah, forewarned is forearmed.
Real quick, a quick sum-up of where we’re at with Gen AI in art and writing (and arguably music and game design and pretty much everything else):
a) It is built entirely on stolen work, colonizing the efforts of human creators, milling everything into artbarf and content slurry — and it is worth reminding too that it is not the AI that has stolen our work but rather, the creators of the AI who literally directed their artbarf robots to build themselves out of pilfered material.
b) It is environmentally damaging, increasingly so, guzzling water like a man in the desert and contributing overmuch to carbon emissions — see this article here, from Yale. Immigrants crossing borders are dying of thirst, but meanwhile, we’re feeding a half-a-liter of water to the machines just to ask it a couple-few dozen questions (which it will probably get wrong).
c) It continues to chew at the beams and struts of our information fidelity, and in those holes and in the inevitable collapse, mis- and disinformation will flourish like an invasive species.
With those three things in mind, it is fair to say, I think, that use of AI in writing and in the arts is unethical at present until the problems of stolen material, environmental damage and information erosion are addressed and solved. There’s a fourth thing, one that arguably is too true of everything we touch, which is that Gen AI exists largely to make Rich People Richer, and does nothing for everyone further down the ladder. (This is a much harder problem to solve because, well, welcome to the water in which we swim.) It serves companies. It does not serve people. It doesn’t help writers or artists or the audience. It’s there to make stuff fast, cheap, easy.
And, to opine a bit here, even outside the ethics of this, I also think use of Gen AI in this way is supremely lazy and completely betrays the entire point of making art and telling stories in the first fucking place. It’s not helping us make the work better and get paid more. It’s relegating art and writing to a hobby only, while simpering incel chimps press buttons and get their rocks off by having the AI make images and stories of whatever mediocre garbage is passing through their minds at any given moment.
But, but, but —
Again, I don’t think this is inevitable.
Here I’m really going to switch gears and talk more explicitly about Gen AI in writing, and the problems it presents beyond the lack of ethics and the fact it’s really just there for lazy people who actually like the idea of writing more than they actually want to write. (Ironically, some people want to be a writer without doing work, but AI doesn’t fix that for them — they’re still not writing jack shit, they’re just zapping the Fancy Autocorrect Robot and making it shit out words for them. The software is the writer, not them.)
So, for me there are two key problems with Gen AI in writing —
1) It sucks.
It really just sucks. It’s not good. It can make the shape of the thing you want it to write (article, story, blog post, review) but then it fills it with half-assed hallucinations. Gen AI isn’t here to get things right, it’s here to make things look right, which is a very different thing. AI is vibes only. You don’t get an article — you get an article-shaped thing that’s just a really, really advanced version of Lorem Ipsum.
Gen AI isn’t true artificial intelligence. It isn’t “thinking” per se about input and output. It’s just barfing up the raw-throated bile of effervescent copypasta. It’s just a program tapping the predictive words button. And it knows to do this because, again, it’s stolen a whole lot of material to feed to its Judas Engine. So what it’s outputting is a broth steeped from tens of thousands of illicitly-yoinked human-created pieces of writing.
It also isn’t good at sustaining anything with continuity. Continuity is really important for writing — in an article, in an essay, and especially in longer-form material. When we talk about Chekhov’s Gun, that’s a shorthand that means the pieces of narrative information we use early are just the start of the trail of breadcrumbs that will carry us through the story. The gun appears early and must be used later — but that’s true of so much inside our work. We introduce things that are important, that have continuity throughout the work, that appear again and again and form a kind of constellation of narrative information — and that information comes in the form of themes, motifs, motivations, descriptions, tension-building plot points, and so on. AI has literally no understanding of that. Because it doesn’t understand anything. It just sees a pile of stuff and attempts to ape the shape and colors of that stuff. Gen AI artbarf can show you a house in image, but it has no idea what building a house means, it doesn’t know what’s behind the walls or how bricks are laid or how fucking molecules and atoms form together to make everything — it just horks up the architectural hairball on command, like a cat with the Clapper in its stomach.
CLAP CLAP GIVE ME A VICTORIAN MANSE MADE OF CANDY HA HA LOOK MOTHER, LOOK, THE GOOD KITTY VOMITED FOR ME A CANDY HOUSE, I MADE ART, I AM AN ARTIST, MOTHER, PRAISE ME
Anyway. What I’m saying is–
AI doesn’t know shit and can’t sustain shit.
And here the retort is often, “Well, sure, but this is what it can do now, imagine what it can do in a year or two.” And that mayyyyy be true, but I have a gut feeling that — particularly when it comes to writing — it has some very hard limits. It can never really go beyond the fact it is Fancy Autocorrect. Because it does not truly think, it will always be janky. It will never sustain information for long. It will always lie. It may be able to fake shorter pieces, but I also think that, like humans spotting Terminators, we will develop a keen eye to be able to spot this bullshit with an increasingly refined Uncanny Valley detector in our guts.
2) The second problem is that it can’t be copyrighted. That’s a real problem, a true vulnerability, though one that hasn’t been entirely tested legally, yet — what if you push the AI-Do-My-Work-I-Suck-And-Am-Lazy button and it spits out a 5,000-word short story but then you change like, every 100th word? What does that mean for its copyrightability? I don’t know because I am a stupid person and not a lawyer, but I do suspect that it remains a very real weak spot in its defenses.
So, these two things mean we’re free and clear, right? The AI will eventually fail to be a Good Writer. It will collapse under its own mediocre hallucinations! It’ll be like the aliens in War of the Worlds, felled by pigeon herpes and rat poison, same as Brave Flaco.
(I apologize, I just really wanted to write “pigeon herpes.” RIP, Flaco. Poor owl. People are bad and pigeons have herpes, the end.)
Sadly, we are not free and clear.
Gen AI will come at us from a dozen different directions, and we need to be eyes up in terms of what happens next — because eventually it will become clear it cannot sustain itself as a Pure Form Generator. But Money Shitheads are still Shitheads who want their Money, and so that means Gen AI will continue its ceaseless march upon our territories. After all, they’ve already invested, and they’d much rather not pay actual humans (because, god forbid, those humans might start getting sassy and unionize, oh fuck).
So, AI is still coming for us all.
Question is: How?
The myth of its magic and potency will be a cudgel used by companies to bash us into taking less money for our work.
Meaning, they’ll say, “Ah, look, the AI is so good, it has generated this script, this story, this idea. It’s done the hard work!” And here we must remember that AI is very much about the fetishization of ideas. “So, now I just need you, Word Janitor, to come and, you know, sweep these ideas into a pile for us.” The writer will just became a wrangler, a jockey, a plumber clearing story clogs — at least, that’s how it’ll be described. In reality, the writer will be even more vital, because the writer will be handed some inane, insane piece of shit from the Artbarf Robot, and told to turn that horrible thing into art — which is harder than just allowing a human to refine their own idea into something amazing. “Turn this AI turd into a profitable Ryan Reynolds movie” is a Herculean task, but will be paid with Sisyphean money.
(Real-talk, licensed IP is already set up for this pretty easily. Most of these licensed worlds are already miles deep in terms of storytelling and worldbuilding — it would be no shock to see Marvel or Star Wars or whoever feeding all their existing material into The Machine in the hopes it will extrude favorable content, whether as an idea or as a full “story.” Again, it’ll be slop that will require an actual human to make palatable.)
This will probably fail, too — eventually they’ll come back around to the idea that humans are better than the Artbarf Robot, but by that time the aim will be served, which is, writers get paid less. Here, the AI serves almost more as a threat than as an actual foe. And it doesn’t take much to imagine some company in the future telling its writers, “We’re paying less now because honestly we could just get The Robot to do it, but we’re throwing you a bone.” It’s a lie, of course. The Robot can’t do it, or they’d have it done already without you, for sure. But, that’s the AI trick, isn’t it? AI is here to build to a convincing lie. A useful lie. Artifice wielded by power.
That’s the more direct way it’ll come for us, but this is a death by a thousand cuts situation, and it would not be shocking to find:
– AI implemented in generating descriptions of our written material online, or Amazon using AI descriptions above the flap copy written by us or our publishers, orrrrr
– Publishers saying “fuck it” and using AI to write the flap copy in the first place, pre-appeasing the robo-tyrants
– Publishers replacing human editors with AI, though again here the reality is likely that they’ll still retain and require human editors, but they’ll just pay them less (or heap other duties upon their shoulders, burning them out through strain and crunch) because “well, the AI did most of the work, now you do the cleanup” — meaning, editors will just edit the shitty editing done by the shitty robots. Or, they’ll let the AI rewrite whole sections of your book, and leave it to you, the author, to fix it.
– Book reviews written wholecloth by AI. I think I’ve already found a couple of these for my books. Here, you can find one here, a review of Black River Orchard at what looks like a reputable place. Is it AI? Maybe not. But it gets some details totally wrong and other details seem simply lifted from the text, as if the book was fed to a machine in order to defecate out the review. And some of the sentences are… just weird. “Calla is not fooled by its appearance and refers to this new blend situation as trapping her between the Scylla of Golden and the Charybdis of the apple. Along with the narrative of a now older Calla and her father, we are treated to time spent with two other kindred spirits: life partners Emily and Meg. Their stories will become intertwined with each other, as well as a horde of other interesting characters with whom Wendig peppers his tale.” Like, what the fuck is that sentence? Hell, the whole review starts off suggesting I’ve been praised by Stephen King, which… trust me, if Stephen King had praised me, I’d be spraypainting that shit on the walls of your homes. We’d all know it.
– And even if the above review isn’t AI, the simple possibility of it being so poisons the entire ecosystem. It’s like The Thing. Any one of your friends or co-workers could be the monster.
– AI as an insult, too — “It sucks. ChatGPT probably wrote this.”
– AI picking and choosing what books get made based on the trends it analyzes and farms. It’ll be wrong, of course, and worse, it’ll be wholly pedestrian in its tastes — the best case scenario is that it’ll get stuff so wrong and so weird that it accidentally picks some interesting books. One could argue in a sense this is already happening with algorithms on social media…
– Publishers passively or actively letting AI onto book covers. This is, of course, already happening. Gothikana, Fractal Noise, etc. Sometimes it’ll be art directors not realizing that AI was in the stock imagery they’re using. Sometimes it’ll just be someone plugging the cover idea into Midjourney and seeing what the Arfbarf Robot barfs up.
– Companies feeding written material into the machine in order to train the machine. This is again likeliest amongst freelance work or work done in service to licensed IPs because you do not own that work and they can do whatever the fuck they want with it. (And I’d argue this is a reason to start reconsidering doing licensed IP work, by the way. The juice is increasingly not worth the squeeze.)
This is all just a sampling. AI will come to fuck us in so many worse and weirder ways. And in the larger sense, it’ll simply add way too much noise into an already noisy process — lots of uncertainty and threat, all designed to, again, direct money upward and not toward writers and artists.
So, what the hell do we do about it?
Is there anything we can do about it?
Absolutely. This stuff is really not inevitable.
First, push back on it. Whenever you see it, push back. I am really appreciating that when I see AI pop up somewhere, people hop in the comments to say THIS IS AI, and then explain why. It vibes to me that there is a strong public sentiment against the intrusion of AI, and I’m all for it.
Though, also worth noting, it is possible to get it wrong, and it’s why it’s important to do your best to enlighten and engage rather than throwing sharp rocks at individuals. And when it’s not an individual, when it’s a corporation — well, sharp rocks work juuuuuust fine.
Second, AI does well with formula. The most vulnerable writing is the kind of writing that has at its core a formula, an equation of how the thing is written. This isn’t always escapable, but when it is, definitely escape it. It’s as good a reason as any to go big and weird and personal. The AI can’t do shit with wild swings. It’s not clever enough or smart enough. The more humanity you put into the work, the less it can ape it — and, ideally, the more likely it is you connect the work to other human readers and not just info-scraping robots looking to render the text into replicable hot dog paste.
Third, if you see it in contracts, do your best to kill it with fire. It’s also why agents are very important here, especially agents who understand this stuff and are on your side. If they don’t and they’re not, get a new agent. Good to get ahead of this, too, by talking to agents and editors — be they current or potential suitors for the work.
Fourth, get good at spotting it. AI imagery, even in its advanced state, is still obviously AI with a few cursory glances, and there are good groups on, say, Facebook that will share tutorials on how to spot AI. AI writing is a little harder but even still, it usually gets a bunch of shit wrong and has a kind of… fakey-fakey sound to it, the prose as plastic as the weird TikTok voice or the creepy sheen on so much AI-generated artbarf.
Fifth, don’t use it. Not even a little. Don’t dick around with ChatGPT even for shits and giggles. Avoid it. Spit upon the lens of its cybernetic eye-stalk.
Sixth and finally? Don’t quit. It’s tempting. It is. But don’t quit. Stay in the game if you can. Keep your boot on the Terminator’s neck. Assert your human-ness through your art and through your stories.
Generative AI does not need to be inevitable. It doesn’t need to write our TV shows and movies, it doesn’t need to write our books, it doesn’t need to be all up in our articles or legal briefs or bios. It shouldn’t edit us, shouldn’t make our book covers, not any of it. Leave AI to help us figure out when milk is on sale or to alert me to what birds might be migrating into my area overnight. I don’t want AI to write or draw comic books — I just want it to help me plot a better route to the comic book store. Okay?
The Artbarf Copypasta Content Slurry Thieving Magpie of a Robot can fuck all the way off. And when it won’t go willingly, we need to hit it with a stick until it does.
Anyway. I am a human. Buy my human-written books. Shit, when I say it that way it sounds like I’m protesting too much. I wrote them! Me, a human! A person of BLOOD AND MEAT oh god it’s sounding worse I AM NOT A ROBOT MY HEART IS NOT METAL
(also p.s. I’m realizing that I’m posting this on April Fool’s Day and boy that is totally appropriate given how AI is trying to make fools of us all)
This is a silly post and nobody should care about it, least of all me, but sometimes things enter my head and knock around like a poltergeist instead of simply passing on through. And the only way to, well, exorcise these thoughts is to purge them somehow.
Thank the gods I have This Old Thing, this —
*lifts up website, squints at the word etched into its underneath*
— this blog.
I have Ghostbusters thoughts.
I mean, really, they’re story thoughts, mostly, but it comes via the conduit of the most recent Ghostbusters flick, and ostensibly, all the Ghostbuster flicks before them.
[note, below contains some mild spoilers, though honestly nothing I didn’t already know going into the movie, but please stay frosty]
[get it, frosty]
[because frozen empire]
[whatever]
I saw the new Ghostbusters movie, which is essentially the old Ghostbusters movie, in that there are Ghostbusters who live in a decrepit NYC firehouse fighting ghosts with hand-held nuclear weapons, and there’s some kind of ancient ghost god, and there’s also animated stone monument, and there’s marshmallow people, and there’s a coming apocalypse, and there’s ghosts getting loose from the ghost containment unit, and there’s a Keymaster guy except it’s fire and not portals, and there’s literally the same dickless guy trying to shut them down, aaaaaand it’s barely even a remix of the first movie and honestly, it’s fine. It’s aggressively fine. Again, your mileage may absolutely vary here but, I had a good time, not a great time, and it left minimal impression upon me, merely sliding off my brain like a fried egg off a non-stick pan. The jokes only half-landed. The action was sometimes thrilling, sometimes enervating. It was fine. It was a movie that happened and that I saw. Pretty much… the end.
(Special note must go toward the fact the best people in the movie are the stand-up comedians: Patton Oswalt, Kumail Nanjiani, James Acaster.)
That said, it did make me Think Some Things about storytelling in this current era, and I thought, what better use for this raggedy old blog than to opine fruitlessly upon those things.
The first thing, and arguably the biggest thing, is that I think nostalgia is a poison. It’s a nice poison! A sweet poison. Like a sugary tiki drink. The sugar isn’t good for you, the alcohol isn’t good for you, and it makes you feel nice for a time while it’s trying (and probably failing unless you drank 20) to kill you. It’s there for the slow death, the long con.
I think nostalgia is not great because generally it relies on some likely incorrect or at least incomplete, hazy veneer, rose-tinted glasses view of things that would simply be better off if we simply shut it in a drawer. You can pull it out of the drawer once in a while to look at it — okay, totally fine! But pack it away. It’s done. Move on. Nostalgia is about memory, about remembering — it should be passive, not active.
Problem is, capitalism has weaponized nostalgia. (Politics has, as well. I mean, MAGA? C’mon.) In terms of storytelling, though, capitalism gladly slithers together with nostalgia, the two coupling wetly, popping out their half-formed story babies. It doesn’t keep the nostalgia in a drawer. It refuses to let a thing simply be what it was, a memory of “better” times — no no, it must be pulled back out, waved around, given a new paint job, and of course, given a price tag. Nostalgia isn’t just nostalgia, now. Nostalgia is a product, a service, a gland you can stroke and milk for that glorious hit of nostalgia juice, all at a premium price. And when I say this, I obviously am making it sound like a Very Bad Thing, but at the same time…
You know, I’m a sucker for it, too. I went to see the Ghostbusters movie. I gave them money, even though it was like, four thousand dollars to see the thing on IMAX and endure 12 (!) minutes of non-movie commercials and 12 (!) more minutes of trailers before a movie actually started. And it’s not even always all bad! Dune and Dune 2 aren’t really relying on nostalgia, per se, but are still both… rehashes of books and movies and miniseries that came before. The new Alien movie, Romulus, looks like it’s going to scare the absolute piss out of me, and I look forward to that. Barbie was great, and I saw it, and yet, it’s based on a toy and exists in part because it’s trying to capitalize on your nostalgia and knowledge about that toy. Am I going to see the new Godzilla Kong movie, even though there has been endless iterations of each and it’s probably not even going to be great? I mean, I guess? Part of me would almost rather not at this point? But… ennh?
(Note: have not seen Godzilla Minus One yet, but totally want to, really bad. Heard it’s great. Nostalgia or not. Shut up.)
This is such a basic-ass plebian cry, I know, but it would be great if we got something new for once. Just entirely new! It can be a remix of stuff, it can be inspired by other things, but a lot of the material we continue to reiterate was actually new once, and how great is that? And here is where someone correctly notes that we are getting new things, smaller movies like Love Lies Bleeding (which is apparently great, and maybe even revolutionary, and I’ll see it soon as I’m able), and yes, absolutely, and we should endeavor to see those movies and tell everyone about them.
But I’m talking like, pop culture geek nerd shit, sci-fi stuff, fantasy stuff, action stuff. (Note, I’m not including horror in here, because damn, horror actually seems to go for it as often as not.) Here someone will surely note that there are movies out on streaming that definitely break this cycle and do new things but… I wish they were stickier, and overall, better?
Like, Marvel managed to speed up the nostalgic human centipede cycle, right? It made us feel nostalgia for shit we just saw. Like, “whoa, a Captain America cameo in this movie, I’m fond of him and missed him for those fifteen minutes when he was not on my screen.” The machine keeps churning and pushing the content so fast that I think it’s why we’re burning out on Marvel and, potentially, superhero shit in general. You don’t even have time to digest the one thing before it’s cramming more into your open maw.
All right, I’m even boring myself with this take. I’d just love to have some new shit is all. TV is a pretty good place to find the new shit, to be fair, so that’s great. As are books! Yay books! We like books! More books for the book god! But I just feel like all the big movies my kid’s gonna grow up with are… really just the same shit I grew up with, aggressively rebranded (but not too much) and aggressively marketed and treated like it’s mythology and folklore rather than just, y’know, capitalism at work, filling up all the empty spaces at the box office with the next Godzilla John Wick Spider-Man Villain Mad Max Spinoff Beetlejuice Ape Kingdom Garfield Crowfield Beverly Hills Quiet Place Despicable Deadpool Star Wars ahhhhhhhHHHHHh.
Ahhhh.
Ahh.
Yeah.
Anyway.
It’s fine, just ignore the Old Man Yelling At Nostalgia. I’m even boring myself at this point.
Okay, what else?
(more spoilers inbound, BIG ONES THIS TIME, fyi)
(no for real)
(spoiler spoiler spoilers)
a) in Ghostbusters why are there weird non-human ghosts, like there are dragons and weird gremlin things and shit, but then there are also very human-looking ghosts, they never take time to explain any of this wtf
b) I wonder if the new movie is set somehow in an alternate timeline where the city pays them to be ghostbusters, because nobody is paying them but they’re not starving to death, and NYC is seriously fucking expensive, and yet they seem able to follow their bliss of *checks notes* destroying half the city to trap mostly harmless ghosts
c) as you grow up you realize that the guy who wants to shut them down is totally right, what the fuck are these unregulated spectral janitors doing, stop fucking around with GHOSTS and cramming them into that BOX, yes obviously this is very bad, a child could tell you this is bad, what the shit, do we hate government that much that we really don’t want someone to regulate the dudes with portable nuclear weapons shooting lasers at wraiths
d) listen did that movie totally just queerbait everyone, like, there was a romance between Phoebe and the pyro ghost girl, right, that they just decided to lean away from instead of into? that was a thing, right?
e) you know how Carrie Fisher used to be quietly renowned for “punching up” scripts that needed it? this flick needed Carrie Fisher rill bad
f) you saw all the big stuff in the preview
g) I liked Afterlife a lot and found it more filmic, whereas this felt more like… TV, if that makes any sense?
i) why am I still talking about ghostbusters?
h) technically h comes before i, oops
j) I could’ve used some frozen empire in my Frozen Empire
k) the Monster Villain is cool looking but literally has no motivation beyond Monster Villain, there’s just nothing there, absolute zero
l) the movie wastes so many of its characters, chief among them Lucky, played by Celeste O’Connor, she’s just… she’s just a tokenized non-entity?
m) the villain’s entire plan relies on Phoebe using a device that isn’t meant for humans that seems like it could hurt her and that nobody knows could work on people so it’s one of those weird villain plans that is essentially impossible without a series of intense coincidences paired with absolutely inane character decisions
n) I may be talking myself into disliking this movie, oh shit
o) quick quick uhhh some things I liked: loved the guy’s hand breaking off and still turning the phonograph handle; loved Zeddemore getting some prime time; loved the sort of Institute-level version of the Ghostbusters; McKenna Grace is really great in it; liked Fire Girl though again why are some ghosts Fire Girl and some are Slimer and some are uhhh a sewer dragon; the Gary-Called-Dad beat was the one emotional beat in the movie that hit me like a fist to my heart; when the movie gets really weird it really works, like the weirder it chooses to be, the better it becomes; actually, Ray’s emotional beats kinda work too, like this is what the dude loves and he’s all in, which makes me think he probably should’ve been a character who sacrifices himself for this job because honestly, that’s how Ray needs to go out; also I’d watch a whole movie about Nadeem’s grandmother
p) oh my god why am I still writing this post
q) oh my god why are you still reading this post
r) am I the only one who needs to recite the entire alphabet to remember what order the letters are in, don’t answer this, I’ll just pretend you all do it and I’m not a weirdo
342) fuck it I’m switching to numbers
343) okay I know it’s based on pre-existing material, but FALL GUY looks like a lot of fun, and there’s nothing wrong with fun, oh and no, this has nothing to do with Ghostbusters, I’m sorry
344) why are the mini-puft marshmallows
345) does trevor even do anything in the movie
346) you guys remember that time Ray got oral sex from a ghost, what the fuck was that shit
347) I’m going to stop now before I go mad, anyway, the movie is fine, nostalgia is weird, stories are hard, a lot of scripts could use a hefty dose of punching up by talented puncher-uppers, and I’m tired now
Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.
As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.
In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?
Writing and self-publishing a novel is no small feat (especially a debut). The whole process is constant trial-by-fire, and, oddly enough, those are experiences I began to embrace. The good, the bad, and the ugly—all of it has taught me valuable lessons. For me, learning is one of the best parts of life, so, here are five things I learned writing Mushroom Blues:
Fungi are the coolest (and weirdest) organisms on the planet
I’ve been obsessed with mushrooms for much of my life, ever since I roamed the temperate rainforests of British Columbia as a kid. But as I’ve gotten older, my research into fungi has brought myriad insane facts to my attention. For example, the ways that mycelium and tree roots coexist in mutualistic mycorrhizal relationships, where they exchange vital nutrients and permit communication between plants (think a chemical-based information highway). Forests as we know them wouldn’t exist without the role fungi play as connectors, communicators, and decomposers. Mushrooms are also more genetically related to humans than they are plants—they breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, after all. Even weirder, the primary building material that makes up mushrooms is chitin, the same polymer that forms the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. Simply put, fungi are freakin’ cool and so very strange.
All of this contributed to my decision to write a fictional world inhabited not just by humans, but by fungal people. Their society, culture, architecture, communication, and more all center around fungi—even their human-like biology is symbiotically interconnected with fungi. As a result, the very story of Mushroom Blues is tightly interwoven with mycelium, mushrooms, and mold, so much so that its foundations would crumble without them.
Self-publishing is harder than it seems
Many authors I’ve spoken to over the years have gone the traditional publishing route because self-publishing seems daunting—there’s too much information and there are too many hats to wear. Well, in some ways, they’re right. The stigma toward self-publishing is wearing off, but the reality is, the indie route does involve a lot of research, a ton of entrepreneurial multi-tasking, a good deal of financial investment, and plenty of fucking up.
Leading up to the release of Mushroom Blues, I realized that no matter what anyone told me—no matter the vast quantities of helpful advice I’d received from fellow authors and friends—the only way I really learned the lessons I needed to was by making the mistakes myself. Writing a book and having it edited are not easy. Marketing your book and budgeting efficiently are not easy. Getting a quality cover, along with exterior and interior design, is not easy. In my case, I did most of that myself (aside from the professional editing), but all of my experiences hammered home how complex creating and releasing a book actually is.
But there’s a bright side: It is possible. You don’t have to be rich or market savvy, or the greatest goddamned writer in existence. All you have to do is write the best book that you can, research enough that you feel ready to release it, package it in the best way possible, and then let it out into the world. I messed up, of course, but that was the most effective way to drill lessons into my stubborn author brain.
Routine is everything, but writing takes many shapes
As I became more serious about writing, I started to read numerous author autobiographies and writing craft books (including a few of Chuck’s). Routine is something that came up, a lot. My years as a self-employed music journalist and then as a self-employed tattoo artist taught me that I needed to get my shit together on my own in order for things to actually happen. I wouldn’t get any writing gigs or tattoo clients if I didn’t set strictures for myself with a daily routine, and it was often too easy to squander much of my “free time.” As a result, I learned to make work habitual enough that it didn’t feel like work—or, at least, not daunting.
Applying that to writing was a tough stem to snap. Writing Mushroom Blues revealed to me how difficult this craft could be, and that it required a certain part of my imagination/mind that didn’t do well with incessant distraction. That proved particularly problematic, as I’m a stay-at-home dad with two boys under four-years-old. But you know what I rediscovered? Routine really is everything. In the same way that babies and toddlers require routine to have a sense of stability in their developing noggins, adults need routine to feel that they’re in control of their lives.
For me, though, I’d applied routine to everything in my life except writing. The result? My days were streamlined enough that I could squeeze in more opportunities to write without sacrificing family time. I also gave myself a golden rule: Write or work on the story every day. No set word count. No forcing myself to write at a specific time, or for a certain length of time. Instead, I encouraged myself to make progress, however that took shape. Whether I fleshed out a scene over five fifteen-minute chunks, or I jotted down some great dialogue in my phone, or I wrote by hand in a notebook while hanging out in the backyard with my boys, anything meant progress. From my computer to my phone, my notebook to my iPad, I would utilize a variety of mediums to keep my mind engaged with the story, even if I couldn’t dedicate more than five, fifteen, thirty minutes to write. Piecemeal progress was the name of the game, and the consistent routine of life outside of writing afforded me the ability to do that. Otherwise, I would’ve been stuck in a vortex of frustration, blaming my kids for never affording me time to fulfill my dream. If that were the case, I’d never have written this book
Community is essential
A common adage in the writing world is that it’s a lonely business, but that’s a half-truth. It can be lonely, sure, when you’re wringing your brain of its creative juices to create a fascinating world filled with fascinating characters doing fascinating things. That is fucking hard, and it’s not exactly a communal activity. But the “loneliness” ends there, at least as far as I’ve experienced. Taking my early drafts to writing critique partners opened my eyes to the faults of my story, but that constructive criticism was also key for me to realize: “This story isn’t shit.” Then there was my editor, followed by close friends and beta readers, all of whom brought more external (and helpful) opinions to the project. And this is just as a self-published author, mind you—traditionally published authors have many more cooks in the kitchen.
Beyond the writing side, there are so many collaborators who contribute to a book’s creation: Cover artists and designers, authors who provide blurbs, reviewers and book bloggers and booktubers who help to promote a book or offer their honest critiques. On the trad side, there are also publicists and marketers. Then, the book goes out into the hands of readers, who make the book their own by choosing to engage with it. At that point, the book isn’t wholly yours anymore.
What I’m saying is, a book is not the sole effort of the person whose name is on the cover, and Mushroom Blues showed me how truly marvelous these various collaborations could be. Working with my cover artist was a dream, getting feedback from trusted early readers improved my manuscript by leaps and bounds, setting up a virtual book tour with bloggers, podcasters, and booktubers was invigorating. All of it taught me that community is essential to my social and psychological well-being, but it’s also given my book a better chance in a crowded marketplace. You’re not alone in this journey, unless you choose to be. So, why not choose to put yourself out there and find people you connect with? ‘Cause at the end of the day, the people in your community will be the ones cheering you on and helping you out when you need it most.
Genres are more fun when they’re mashed
Mushroom Blues is a big ol’ mishy-mashy blend of genres, and I did that on purpose. Earlier versions of my shared fictional universe called The Fungalverse weren’t working, but the fungal people were. So, I took them, their culture, religion, customs, architecture, and forms of communication, and smashed it all together with genres that I adore. Cyberpunk? Check. Police procedurals? Check. Noir and murder mysteries? Check and check.
My decision to mash up these genres stemmed from the desire to give the fungal world I’d created a more engaging framework. Everything I’d written up to that point was boring, and kind of preachy—that’s not fun to read, is it? And if I was aware of it, then readers would be, too. What I didn’t realize until speaking to a fellow author and interviewer was that blending genres provided a deeper value: It could ground readers in familiar story structures and beats, while allowing the surreal, unnerving, and unfamiliar aspects to bleed through in a subtle way.
This is exactly what I’d done with Mushroom Blues, albeit unconsciously. It brought me so much enjoyment to take tropes and beats from police procedurals, for example, and twist them, subvert them, and colonize them with fungal oddities. Do you want the quintessential crime scene opener? I’ve got you covered, except mine is brimming with slithering mycelium and moldy flesh. In the mood for an interrogation? I’ve got you there, too, but it’ll be more disturbing and psychedelic than any interrogation you’ve ever read. Familiar genres are comforting in a lot of ways, but I had a ton of fun manipulating the beats I love pulled from the genres I love. I did it not only to satisfy my own creativity, but to surprise readers while concurrently meeting their expectations. After all, stories should be fun for the people who create them and those who consume them.
Adrian M. Gibson is a Canadian SFF author, podcaster and illustrator (as well as occasional tattoo artist). He is the creator of the SFF Addicts podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow author M. J. Kuhn. The two host in-depth interviews with an array of science fiction and fantasy authors, as well as writing masterclasses. He lives in Quito, Ecuador with his family. Mushroom Bluesis his debut novel.
