Rhino Puzzlings

Just a reminder that your local author, the one that lives in your neighborhood, does not consume all the drinking water. Your local author does not run diesel-powered turbines all night. Your local author does not contribute materially to the loss of land, or the enrichment of the already-rich-enough. Your local author is not buying rare books, chopping off their spines, reading them, and then discarding the rest. Your local author is not injecting themselves in all your devices, your appliances, your television. Your local author is not reading your email, harvesting your data, selling to conglomerates.  Your local author is not treating you like a product. Just in case you had doubts. 🧩🦏 

One Last Quest  is gaining dimensions, and I'm just along for the ride. This is good news for drafting-me, less good news for future-editing-me, but that's a tomorrow problem. I cracked open this first self-published attempt hoping to salvage it, or rewrite it, or restore it, like an artifact pulled up from the seabed from a simpler time. ("This is how I used to think dialogue was written, and also I really liked this one sentence structure I guess.") I've felt all the feelings about it, from the initial pride and accomplishment, to a quiet bucket-list check-off item, to embarrassment, and now to a gentle tolerance and acceptance. But then it became a  project  and that was my undoing. This was my third-ever NaNoWriMo entry, and if I remember those early entries, I went from "barely successful" in year one, to "overblown epic" in year two, to this book "jokes and cheap laughs" in year three. It is, or at least was, paper-thin. Not bad...

 I'm spending the day roping together a story for a 500-word challenge, and if I have learned one thing this day, it is that I am  not  a terse rhino. The first draft was over three times as long as the maximum, and I hadn't even worked out the details yet. Subsequent drafts are forcing me to pare down the prose, make every adjective matter, find the details without dwelling on them. It's a challenge, and I like it. Once it's in the bag, I'll post it up here. I can't say I'll be delving into the short form any time soon, but I'm sure there's skills and muscles that will apply to the longer pieces, too. For now, it's trim and tweak and rewrite and repeat. All punches and no pauses. A tough workout for a softie old rhino! 🧩🦏 

  "AI doesn’t make mistakes," says the hypothetical author who ships off their hard-labored manuscript to a discount editing service. "It has better grammar and spelling and punctuation and is faster and cheaper than a human editor. And no errors, that's what does it for me. I bought a book and there's a obvious typo in it! AI wouldn't do that." Maybe that's true, for a loose definition of "mistake." If it rewrites your text and phrases, is that a mistake? If it corrects intentional dialect and character grammatical errors, is that a mistake? "Yes and yes," I say after these clever leading questions. "Assuming it would do an equivalent job as a trained, experienced human was the original mistake, the ur-goof  in this comedy. Editing is not spell checking, it's not applying normalized grammar rules, and it's not pureeing the life out of prose to convert it into visual baby food, textureless and uniformly bland. ...

It's lonesome in the muck. Or perhaps I should say  in the slop  as that's the tide indie authors are battling now. It's not exclusively indies, but indie creatives of all types are the Bellwether of Bad News. The ink is barely dry on the Shy Girl AI controversy before a Canadian legislator Bill Oliver decided to not do his own homework before standing up and giving his book report, prompt and all, out loud, before cameras and constituents. Whoopsie. Full confession, I work in tech for my day job, and I'm using this tech on a daily basis. The standard that I'm holding myself to is to keep it away from "art" and more generally, creativity. I am fine(ish) using the tools to perform grueling scut work and tedious, unrewarding technical chores. If my career placed me in a kitchen, AI would be relegated to the washing-dishes and emptying-the-trash duties, the necessary, messy side-effects of serving humanity. It doesn't get to cook, it doesn't invent ...