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April 1, 2024 / 30 Comments

Generative A.I. For Writers: An Unfolding (But Not Inevitable) Nightmare!

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 “authors” straight-up remixing our books and publishing them at Amazon. This is more or less already happening — Jane Friedman notes that there are books on Amazon labeled as written by her, but not written by her at all. And Stephanie Land found “biographies” of her at Amazon.

– 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)

(anyway Black River Orchard is out in paperback June 25th bye)

March 27, 2024 / 18 Comments

In Which I Have Ghostbuster Thoughts

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

666) buy my books please or I die, the end

March 22, 2024 / 5 Comments

Adrian Gibson: Five Things I Learned Writing Mushroom Blues

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 Blues is his debut novel.

Adrian M. Gibson: Website | Instagram | SFF Addicts Podcast

Mushroom Blues: Amazon

March 21, 2024 / 5 Comments

Three More things Makes A Post

Two more things: first up, I finished the first draft of my next horror novel, THE STAIRCASE IN THE WOODS, and it rolled up at just over 100,000 words. Which for me is pretty slim! I don’t think I’ve written an adult novel that short since… maybe Invasive? Even Zer0es was like, 125k.

I expect it’ll come out in the first half of 2025 — April, I think, is the current plan, but that can change depending on a whole unholy host of factors. So don’t quote me on it. So! Its off to the editor, Tricia at Del Rey, and she’s the bee’s knees and will know how to kick it into its ideal nightmare form.

Also, I’ve had my pitch approved for my next middle grade, tentatively titled DO NOT OPEN THAT DOOR. (It’s weird how my books tend to carry little things over from their previous narrative entrants — and I guess here the parity is in architecture. Staircases! Doors! Don’t go up them! Don’t open them! Ahhhhh!) I don’t want to say more about it yet, except it’s not really explicitly horror, but is meant to evoke the eerie fantasy of stuff like Labyrinth, or Miyazaki’s work, or Neverending Story. That otherworld kind of eerie, you know? Now I guess I have to write it? Are we sure there isn’t just a way to reach into my brain and squish it onto paper? Well, dangit.

Also, third thing is, the anthology I announced being a part of earlier, New Demons, I sadly am pulling out of at present. I’ll let you know if that changes. I’m still writing my story for The Stand anthology, and I think it’s pretty all right (set in Colorado!) so more as I know it.

March 18, 2024 / 9 Comments

Hold Still, I Have Three Very Cool Things To Announce

Don’t run! I have cool stuff to talk about! Do not make me use the tranq darts again, please. You know how how you get when you’re full of the sleepytime juice. “Oh, I’m so hungover-feeling.” BOO-HOO.

Here, let me speak of cool things.

Thing the First:

Yep, that’s a brand spankin’ new cover for the (ahem) Bram Stoker Award nominated BLACK RIVER ORCHARD — particularly, for the trade paperback edition, which is coming out…

*blows the horn*

6/25/24!

(Here, actually, is the whole spread, front cover to spine to back:)

Cover designed by Regina Flath, who rules.

Anyway! You can preorder the paperback now —

If you want a signed, personalized edition, order from Doylestown Bookshop, and make sure to let them know in the notes you want me to deface your book with my ink.

Otherwise, you can get from anywhere books are sold — your own local bookstore, Bookshop.org, B&N, Amazon, and so forth.

ALSO, if you have read the book, please be so kind as to leave a review somewhere. Every review you leave gives you 3% more sex appeal. It’s true. It’s just science. I wouldn’t ever lie to you about science.

Thing the Second:

After some minor digital obstacles, Canines & Cocktails is now out both in e-book format and in print-on-demand! You can get novellas from Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson, and yours truly. Mine is called Whiskey Sour, and is set after the events of Wayward, and mayyyyyyy very well feature a Very Good Boy named Gumball. So I do hope you’ll check that out.

You can nab it on Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Apple Books, and so forth.

Cover by the inimitable Galen Dara!

NO CREEPY AI SHIT HERE, BUCKO.

Book description:

Oberon the Irish wolfhound and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, not only witness humans waste perfectly good sausage, but also a sneaky murder committed right before their eyes in THE CHARTREUSE CHANTEUSE by Kevin Hearne. Justice demands that someone pay for both crimes, and together with their Druid, Atticus O’Sullivan, and D.I. Rose Badgely of the Launceston police, they’ll show the dastardly villain they messed with the wrong good dogs.

THE BARTENDER AND THE BEAST introduces the enchanting world of Arcadia Falls, the setting for Delilah S. Dawson’s return to Paranormal Romance. When no-nonsense bartender Cassia King returns to her sleepy hometown in the Georgia mountains to help her sister, she can’t help falling for well-dressed wildlife rehabilitator Riley. But as Cash learns, Arcadia Falls has a secret, and so does the bar’s rescue pit bull, Peach Pit…

In WHISKEY SOUR by Chuck Wendig, It was the end of the world and Harry Campbell wanted a drink. He’s one of the few who remained in Ouray, Colorado, after everything went to hell — and has decided to willfully fall off the wagon and find a way to make a cocktail he once loved, the whiskey sour. His quest to make a drink will take him beyond the borders of Ouray and into the world fallen under the shadow of the now-gone White Mask disease. But, he won’t do it alone — Shepherd Marcy Reyes lends him the courage and pluck of the golden retriever known as Gumball to help him stay alive and stay sane in the process. But Harry’s journey holds a greater, more secret purpose — he has questions that remain unanswered about what the rogue AI called Black Swan did to them all, and he intends to have those answers, even if they change him, and perhaps the world, forever.

(The audio is forthcoming!)

Thing the Thirdth:

Welcome to NEW DEMONS, an anthology on Kickstarter edited by Joe and Keith Lansdale (!) and Patrick McDonough — featuring stories from such holy shit authors like Robin Hobb, Joe Hill, Owen King, SA Cosby, Grady Hendrix, Christopher Golden, Alma Katsu, Brian Keene, Josh Malerman, Linda Addison, Cherie Priest, Gabino Iglesias, Chuck Palahniuk, some other stupid Chuck guy named oh I don’t know, CHUCK WENDIG, which I think is me? And goddamnit, that’s just silly that they let me in with such a fine crowd of people. Is there no bouncer at the door? (The authors listed above is only a taste, by the way. There are so many more authors. Click the link to see who else is in this thing, because your jaw won’t merely drop, it’ll dangle from your face like a porch swing.)

It’s a Kickstarter, so it needs your backing, and I hope you’ll consider doing so. Again, you can check it out riiiiiiight here.

Thing The Fourth (Be With You):

Sorry, did I say three things?

Four things.

Four things.

You, me, April 6th, 2pm, Exeter Library here in Berks County, PA.

I’ll be there, talking, signing books, and maybe doing a jig or two. No promises on the jigs. Unless you get me drunk. Then a jig is guaranteed.

OKAY THANK YOU BYE

March 17, 2024 / 4 Comments

I Am Now officially Ride Or Die For Premee Mohamed

I recently finished this book — the one pictured above, hovering slightly over a single Hellraiser Lament Configuration pillow. It is The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed. It is easily one of my most favorite things I’ve read this year. And of last year. And of the years prior. It is excellent. Then I also recall that another of her novellas, The Annual Migration of Clouds, is also excellent, and one of my favorite things. (And it has a followup coming??) And I also read her novel, Beneath the Rising, which was also really fucking good, and I think it is at this point I must declare my allegiance to Premee Mohamed. I am ride or die for her.

I note this because I also want you to be ride or die for her, not simply because I want her to be able to write more books that I selfishly get to read, but also because, hey, I like you. You deserve good things. And her books are good things, ipso facto, you deserve her books. Am I using ipso facto right? I have no idea. And I’m not going to check.

Now, understand, I have not read everything she’s written. I failed to finish her series through no fault of hers but rather because I am a slow reader and have a lot of books to read, and reading a series just sucker-punches the time right out of me. She has a new novel out, Siege of Burning Grass, that I have not read but unsurprisingly everyone says it is truly great, and then there’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight, which also sounds amazing, and — I mean, what I’m saying is, I still have more to read, and I have ordered these books posthaste. Because I deserve good things, too.

And you may want me to convince you further, and I know I’m going to have to use my words to do so, and yet, I’m having a hard time doing that without it just being just a bunch of bleats of delight accompanied by various frantic gesticulations — still, hey, lemme try.

It is rare to find an author who operates in a near-perfect balance. Storytelling and writing requires a lot of balancing, and very few of us get it all right. And that’s okay! Stories do not require perfect balance and can in fact be purposefully out of balance in a way that is really successful. Still, just the same, when you find it, when you find a story that just feels like it’s really operating at that level, it’s a thing of wonder. And here she’s done it more than once, somehow, like a weird miracle.

What does balanced mean? Well, for one, she knows how to tell small, personal, intimate stories amid big, complex worlds and ideas without losing the impact of either. The prose, too, runs an exquisite thread of poetry through the needle eye of clarity — poetic writing can kind of drift into estoterica, and clarity can sometimes hit like a brick, but again, rare is the writer that does both at the exact same time, and I find that’s what she’s doing. Her work is also a little bit funny, a lot sad, considerably tragic, yet also, somehow hopeful at the same time, and reads both like a warm hug and a cold kick to the face. There’s tension and adventure and she knows how to worldbuild like a champion, gently folding it all into the text like the most delicate of egg-whites — none of the airyness or detail lost, no rough club-like beats here. Nothing is overmixed and overexplained. Nothing is underbaked and underexplained. This is Goldilocks-level storytelling. Everything feels just right.

Like, right now, if I had to tell you my top five novellas, Butcher of the Forest and Annual Migration of Clouds would be in that list. (Other recent novellas from other authors that might go in that list: Bloom by Delilah Dawson, When Among Crows by Veronica Roth, and jeez, just spin the wheel and pick any one of Eric LaRocca’s. Wait, is P. Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout a novella, too? Shit this list is getting hard. Whatever, there are no rules, that’s also an amazing one, so go get it. God, novellas are really having a moment, aren’t they? Also just got ML Rio’s Graveyard Shift on deck and am excited as hell for that. I will shut up now.) Point is, I just think you need to go out and get these books and trust me when I say, they are excellent in a way that stories rarely are, and somehow she just keeps getting better, which honestly isn’t even fair. I mean, what are the rest of us supposed to do? Also get better?

(Ugh, fine, we’ll try.)

I tell you all this because it’s sometimes important to share THE BOOK LOVE and I’m quite certain I don’t do it often enough. So I’m doing it now. Go to your bookstore, or online book merchant, or library, and seek all the work of Premee Mohamed immediately ASAFP please and thank you.

HURRY

Links to purchase (from bookshop dot org)

Butcher of the Forest

Annual Migration of Clouds

Siege of Burning Grass

Beneath the Rising

All her other books because jfc just buy all of ’em