March 2023 - talking to teenagers
Hi everyone,
I stepped out of my introverted comfort zone and spoke to real-life people, in person, about writing—and I survived. It was for a local writing group of teenagers, and six scifi writers showed up. The group was small, which I preferred, and everyone was interested.
I got to nerd out and talk about scifi worlds, collecting ideas, first drafts and editing woes. What interested them the most was the series binders, one for each of my main series, that I let them look through. They are both messy collections of all the parts related to each series ranging from character sketches, to plot outlines, to maps. Someday, if I decided to do a guide book for either series, all the info is right there.
In other news, I’m still deep in editing Subject 34 (yeah, it’s taking me longer than usual—but it’s got some great twists). I hope to also get a couple of short stories drafted in the next little while as well.
More thoughts on AI
One of the tropes I enjoy playing around with is a Pinocchio type arc for an AI (I’ve done it multiple times, both for good and bad characters), and it seems like I’m not the only one thinking about what AIs might become these days.
The new influx of AI tools have brought up all sorts of questions and potential dilemmas. For example, Clarkesworld (a scifi magazine) has seen an exponential increase in AI generated, garbage submissions. Right now the issue appears to revolve around finding the good, human generated story amongst all the garbage—I don’t think the AIs are yet writing quality stories, but maybe someday they will. Will I stop writing fiction? — probably not.
I do think AI is going to threaten my day job first (maybe), but creating fictional worlds is my passion. I get a lot of enjoyment out of crafting stories—I won’t even use an AI to write these newsletters (take the occasional typo as proof a human wrote it). That said, I use software tools to help in marketing, formatting and proofreading and I view AI as just another tool for this area.
For a better discussion on AIs replacing human authors, head over to John Scalzi’s blog for his take. Or head over to my blog for an AI generated poem about bananas.
What about you? What do you think about what the new, more advanced AI tools might bring?
Inputs
Finished - The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang - A fantasy novel with fantastic worldbuilding.
I’m currently in the middle of - Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff - I’ve been reading this while watching season 4 of Stranger Things and the two stories are merging in my mind (in a good way).
And I’m also in the middle of - Everything is F*ucked by Mark Manson. It’s a nonfiction book somewhere on the continuum between philosophy and self-help and so far it has really left me thinking.
Cheers,
Jeannette
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