aroslav: Blog

This is number 152 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW, I was a theatre kid. I did both my undergraduate and graduate work in theatre, specializing in design, though I was accepted into a doctorate program in Dramatic Theory, specializing in playwriting.

Well, that didn’t go very far.

What brings this all to mind is that this week, I’ve been in Portland, OR to see a couple of plays and join my friend Angus in polishing a tip rail or two. The plays I saw were Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear performed by Salt and Sage Company at the Artists Repertory Theatre.

Both shows were played on the same set and I had a seat in the front row center. It was a good seat. Sadly, that’s because there were only 40-50 people in the audience in a theatre that could seat at least 150. People missed a good show. It's playing for another week so if you're in Portland, get a ticket!

The setting was versatile and adapted well to both plays. They made use of quite a lot of original music, played and sung by the cast. Good voices. There were fifteen in the cast, and as most repertory companies, the same actors played in both plays. Many traditionally male roles were played by women or non-binary actors. The opposite of what would have been done in Will’s day. Very well staged.

It got me thinking about my own design for King Lear at UIndy, back in 1971. It was considerably different than what I saw in Portland this week. It was the first really big show I got to design and tech direct. (And play the role of Albany. We did everything in those days.)

I knew the director liked lots of levels. When we’d first met to go over the concept he’d drilled that idea into me. Lots of levels. Cast of 40 or 50. It was huge. I did all the usual drafting of floor plans and Prof. Williams approved. So, I built a model. I showed it to the director and he shook his head.

“I like the platforms and levels and steps. It just needs to be more rustic.”

The next model needed to look more ancient. After six models using the same platform design, but with different decoration, Prof. Williams threw his hands in the air and said, “It needs to be more cliffy!”

Bells and whistles went off in my head. I was back in two days with a model that remarkably resembled the finished set. Wish I could show a picture in this blog, but I'm not going to post a link as it would cut the visibility of the post. If you want to see it, ask. "Cliffy" was a magical word, and I developed a construction technique that enabled me to make it ‘cliffy.’

And that has been a phrase that has stuck with me ever since that fall of 1971 college production.

There is a reason I decided to write about this, besides a trip down Memory Lane. When writing, there frequently comes a time when I try several different approaches to a story, often discarding entire drafts. I know the books in The Props Master went through as many as fifteen drafts before I reached one I was happy enough with to publish. The unpublished Book 3, Child of Earth is currently in its sixth or seventh rendition and I’m still not happy with it. (Much to my editor Pixel the Cat’s displeasure.)

I find myself going back to Prof. Williams’s words in that smoky office of his. “It needs to be more cliffy!”

That’s not an instant solution, but it reminds me to look at the problem in a different way. Look for where the inspiration is. Look into the heart of the work and you’ll find where the cliffs are.

I’m far from an expert. I think I’m still learning things about writing every day. And sometimes what I need is simply that old reminder.

Make it cliffy.

This is number 151 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

MITCH TOLD ME I was one of the “good liberals” because I didn’t keep trying to change him. I knew there was no chance of ever changing him, so I didn’t try. In fact, that made me a very bad liberal, not a good one. I went about trying to mitigate the damage he did instead—through my writing and my votes. In fact, I voted just this week.

And Mitch wasn’t a bad person. He bought all my books, for example—not to read, but so he would have an autographed copy in case I got famous one day. To Mitch, everything was based on the payback he could at least potentially get from it. Don praised him and that behavior as being a great businessman. Profit motivated.

Mitch and I agreed on many fundamental concepts. Courtesy was good. Rudeness was bad. But our general principle could be overturned. For example, Mitch drove from Eastern Washington to Seattle. He exercised common courtesy on the road. Someone signaled to change lanes, so he slowed a little to let them in. Common courtesy. But when he signaled to change lanes, a driver sped up and cut him off.

“If that’s the way they’re going to drive here, then hell if I’ll let them in!”

From that point on, no Seattle driver deserved his courtesy. He did not consider that he had become part of the problem.

In Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose on SOL) duology, City Limits and Wild Woods, I explored these moral dilemmas from a different perspective. Gee Evars, a man without a memory, struggled to determine what would make him a better man, and his high school work crew often engaged in conversations with him. On one occasion, he overheard the boys talking about an upcoming basketball game.

“Those guys are mean on the court. And the refs give up and stop calling them on the fouls. I hate having to play them in the first game after we get back to school.”
“What are we going to do?” Jim asked. He was another of the basketball players who had joined the crew.
“I say we give it right back to them,” Lonnie said. “I’m tired of getting kicked around the court by them.”
“I agree,” Barrett said. “I’m not going to put up with it. They play nasty, we play nastier.”

Gee stepped into the conversation and asked if they considered themselves to be ‘nasty’ players. If not, why would they let someone else control the way they played? It was a point they hadn’t considered. Were they no longer clean players because their opponents were nasty?

At another point, Gee witnessed his nemesis, who opposed him at every opportunity, miss a turn on icy roads and crash into a freezing river. At considerable risk to himself, Gee went into the river and rescued the unconscious man from his flooding car.

“Why would you save his life when God put him in a river to drown?” Trevor asked.
“Would I be a better person if I let him drown?” Gee responded.

Surprisingly, many conservative readers responded to the chapter saying, “Yes! He would.” Gee was not convinced.

City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks from ZBookStore and the paperbacks are also available online. City Limits is this month’s free Patrons Edition eBook for my Patreon members.

To Mitch and the observable conservatives in our government, the good principles we profess to adhere to—like courtesy, kindness, and aid—should be freely given to those who deserve it. To liberals, those good principles should be freely given to all.

That in a few sentences, is what I consider the difference between conservatives and liberals.

NOT ALL CONSERVATIVES! And certainly not all liberals. And not all men. And not all white people. And not all of anyone else. Just enough to make it observable.

I am convinced, for example, there are many conservative congressmen and senators disguised as liberals. They’ve decided being called a Democrat defines them as a liberal, even though they live and vote for the benefit of those they consider deserve it, or from whom they can realize a profit.

That might be good business. It’s poor government. In fact, it is poor humanity.

Even though this post is short, I won’t dilute it by adding other characteristics or examples. Don’t look at me as if I consider myself a good liberal. I do what I think I can, and it often shows up in the behavior of characters in my novels. I’m frequently accused of being too political. I don’t consider it political. I try to be realistic and humane. I don’t see an end to that.

This is number 150 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT it to do?” an engineer asked me when I joined a publishing software company in the mid-90s. “It’s just code. You tell us what behavior you want and we code it.”

I was at the company to help enhance a new artificial intelligence publishing software. You just “threw content at the page and the program laid it out.” The first demonstration had blown me away. It was so cool. Change the layout from vertical to horizontal and the software automatically repositioned the content and made it look good on the new page.

It took me a while doing research and analyzing documents to discover what the reality was. It wasn’t artificial intelligence. It was just code. In fact, it was just a series of lookup tables that indicated what to do in each of the covered situations. Change the orientation: Look up these specs.

I was seriously disappointed. I set out to make that software intelligent. I developed several algorithms that would compute the correct size of the type, the correct line length for good readability, the right contrast when colors were changed or a graphic scheme was applied.

But it was still just code. It was marginally smarter code than the previous version. It no longer required a lookup table. It could compute the correct specifications. But it wasn’t really intelligent.

Computers were becoming more powerful, faster, and more intricate. We laughed and joked that there was more computing power in the first smartphones than had been used to send the first men to the moon in 1969. As computer power increased, so did the complexity of our software. We used the new core technology and larger storage capacity to make our software more powerful.

The world of artificial intelligence has also progressed since my rather elementary entrance in technology in the 90s. Sadly, no one seems to be out there seeking to rein in the bloat, as I’ve been working on my writing. When I think back on the early days of computing, I remember the warehouse-size room the early computers required to function—which had to be air conditioned because of the amount of heat generated by the vacuum tubes.

Then it all got smaller and we hold more powerful computers in our hands every day.

And then it got bigger.

You see, the artificial intelligence in use today requires vast server farms that cover acres and acres of land and consume billions of gallons of water to cool. Because at the heart, it isn’t intelligent. It’s still just code. The lookup tables in the form of Large Language Models consume as much power to train as it takes to run an entire medium-sized city for a year!

And where does that data in an LLM come from? It is simply harvested from the internet. After all, the internet is free and open. Everyone has equal access to the data stored “in the cloud.”

Except it’s not just “data.” Yes, what is stored on the internet is just “ones and zeroes.” Or other encoding. But those ones and zeroes represent the creative work of individuals. Artwork, photographs, writing, correspondence, music, videos, love letters, poetry, novels, journals, searches, computer code, web pages, cloud storage, email, mathematics, scientific experiments, drug formulae. It’s all available on the internet and AI learning has been exempt from respecting people’s ownership and privacy.

The various generative AI applications, collect your content without your permission and then sell it back to you in the form of chats and ‘creative’ works. That is done only after passing it through the massive heat-generating server farms that contain the LLM wall the AI uses to make its decisions.

And yes, it’s still just code—code running on thousands of computers to extract the data people generated and sell it back to them.

And none of that is fundamentally why I am opposed to the unbridled development of AI and server farms. Like the development of software over the past thirty years, the code bloats to fill the available processing and storage. As a person who remembers the days when one had to swap 400k floppy disks in and out of a single drive in order to store a document, I know I can’t even purchase a software application on a disk of any sort today. It has to be downloaded because only the internet has the capacity to run, install, and license the software.

We’ve abandoned the search for greater efficiency in coding and simply use all the capacity we can get for it. We no longer have the mental acuity to do the basic tasks we now assign to software tools. Our heads simply no longer work the way human intelligence was designed.

Enjoy!

Today the final chapter and epilogue of The Inheritance Paradox posted, bringing another of my stories to an end. A fond farewell to Eugene and Nathaniel, the narrators of this little time travel and family drama piece.

The score doesn't reflect well on the story. I know SOL is a site especially for sex stories, but I'm afraid as long as people open my stories looking for juveniles humping each other on every other page, they will continue to be disappointed. It's not that I never wrote stories like that, but after seventy stories on SOL, it got a little boring. I became more interested in real characters in interesting situations rather than what one of my readers several years ago referred to as "Not the typical "insert tab A into slot B" nor the bizarre "masturbatory fantasy played out with wooden models"."

I'm working on expanding my skillset with new formats, storylines, and themes. I'm only 76 and I think I'm making progress, to borrow from Pablo Casals. And so, glutton for punishment that I am, my next story will begin posting on SOL on July 19. It's called Just My Luck! --a short drama. I'm introducing it to my patrons this weekend and may make a few more adjustments before the final is posted here.

Until then, enjoy!

This is number 149 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

Those words that you found on the written page
That sounded so wise, the thoughts of a sage,
They weren’t really mine—I confess to deceit,
They just came from my pen as I sat in my seat.
The words and the thoughts of someone, I think,
Who works in a lab mixing India Ink.
I know that each bottle I buy at the store
Is filled with great words of wisdom and lore.
Great poems, a novel, a play, and short story,
Fantasy figures and tales of glory,
Thought up in front of a stainless steel sink
By the chemist who mixes India Ink.

THOSE WORDS, I confess, were penned by me back in the 1970s or 80s. And in large part, I believed them. It was all I knew about inspiration and having a muse. The ideas just flowed from my pen without being beckoned. When I was in high school in the 60s, I wrote volumes and volumes of poetry, and I continued to write poetry volumes for at least two more decades. I was filling books with poetry when I courted my wife in the late 80s and even had a few penned later.

After all, I was once told that if a man doesn’t write poetry in his twenties, he has no heart. If he’s still writing poetry in his forties, he has no brain. I almost believed that, too. After all, John Keats died at 25. Percy Bysshe Shelley died at 29. Lord Byron at 36. Alexander Pushkin at 37. Emily Brontë at 30 and her sister Anne at 29. Sylvia Plath at 30.

Need I go on? I’m 76 now. Writing is my life, but poetry not so much.

I’ll put together a collection of all the poems I wrote that were worth anything one day and publish it. I expect it will be a thin volume. Just writing it doesn’t mean it was any good. However, many of my own poems were credited to Nate Hart in the first five volumes of Living Next Door to Heaven, read in speech competitions by Brian. Some others showed up in my most recent work, The Inheritance Paradox.

I glanced through the box of poetry I’ve managed to retain over the years, and there is one thing they all have in common.

Not one was composed at a keyboard.

Yes, I’m going to continue talking about what it means to write on paper with a pen and ink—like the poet at the beginning of this post suggests.

Ink on paper is a medium that requires some degree of inspiration. One actually needs to think through what one is about to write. The connection from the mind to the writing hand is much stronger than the connection of the mind to the keyboard. It requires a more complex set of muscles than typing and therefore is much slower. In my heyday, when I earned my living as a typist, I could type at 110 words per minute or more, error-free. The age of my muscles and tendons have slowed that considerably. My handwriting speed is somewhere around 20 words per minute, give or take.

I admit that sometimes my thoughts race beyond the speed my fingers move. Not so much on the keyboard as with a fountain pen. Typing at that speed can sometimes outrace my thoughts.

On the other hand, my handwriting is not interrupted by squiggly red lines and autocorrect. My errors are committed to the page. I don’t backspace. I don’t rewrite as I compose. The worst I can do is scratch something out or make a mess writing over something.

What does all that have to do with handwriting? I can genuinely say that AI has no interface with my fountain pen. In spite of what the opening lines of this post suggest, there is no connection between any outside force and what I write with a pen.

For that reason alone, I am writing more and more with my fountain pen on paper. It isn’t archived and searchable in the cloud. It’s archived in a box under my bed. Some things that I write are transcribed onto my computer, but even in the transcription process, they are edited, revised, and disconnected from the original thoughts.

It’s not artificial intelligence. As an author seeking to maintain integrity of my writing and not to render it over to an automaton to compose for me, the pen is truly becoming mightier than the sword—or the keyboard.

If you are an author, I encourage you to consider returning to the pen. I know not everyone will see this as I do, but consider how much of your creative work you are turning over to a non-creative entity. Artificial intelligence is based on data. Data is all past. It cannot look forward beyond what data tells it. In other words, generative AI is not creative.

And if you depend on it for your writing, neither are you.