| 234567 | > |
This is number 141 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“DO YOU TAKE THIS…”
Author???
Oops! Wrong kind of engagement. No. I am not getting married. I’m actually responding to a serious question I received from a patron the other day. I answered him directly, but the question was important enough that I thought it merited a more in depth and public response.
“I wanted to ask you about how to encourage a very good author [REDACTED] to get back into the groove. He is the author of the acclaimed [REDACTED] serials and books. I know that a bunch of his Patreon followers have tried to encourage him back, but he has been fallow for almost a year.”
Wow! What a hard question from a real fan who wants to encourage a favorite author. And it merits more of an answer than ‘It depends.’ But it does depend. There is honestly no one size fits all authors response.
I’m personally 76 years old and whenever I hear this about a fellow author, my first thought is “Is he still alive?” I’ve seen all too many cross over in the past few years. I’ve lost editors, fans, reviewers, and fellow authors. And a number of others popped back up a few months or years later as if they’d never been missing. But check on the well-being of your favorites now and then. Some folks thought I’d passed on a while back when it was just two months between the end of one story and the beginning of another. [SPOILER: I’m still alive. The last time I checked. But thanks for asking.]
There are probably as many reasons for an author to have gone silent as there are authors. We never know which it might be. Illness? Depression? New job? New baby? Deported? Burned out? Expatriated to a country that blocks certain kinds of content? Said everything they had to say? Married someone who disapproves of their stories? Married someone who keeps them too busy with other things to write?
That last one, by the way… I started getting up before five o’clock in the morning when I was in seventh grade. It was a habit that continued through high school, college, grad school, and two marriages. I got up early and if I was writing, I could get more written before eight a.m. than I could for the rest of the day. Then, at 39 years old, I got married again and discovered that I no longer wanted to get out of bed in the morning! Imagine that!
Anyway, encouraging an author really depends on their condition and what motivates them. [As I wrote this, an ambulance arrived to take away my next-door neighbor.] There are also almost as many motives for writing as there are authors, so it will depend a little on how well you know them.
I am personally not motivated by money. Not that I don’t need money, but if money was my major interest, I’d be a greeter at Walmart where I’d make about the same amount as I make working around the clock writing. You see, I used to write for a living. I’ve written training manuals, documentation, newsletters, marketing materials, and just about anything else that required words. Except novels. I didn’t have time to write novels, even though that was what I wanted to do.
Since I retired, I’ve published over seventy of those pent-up novels. I didn’t do it for a living! I write to live.
But it is important to some authors and if income falls off, they become discouraged, depressed, and may become silent. I’ll repeat an oft-quoted bit of advice: One of the best things you can do for an author is leave a review of their work wherever it is sold. We all appreciate that, even if we aren’t ‘in it for the money.’
And that brings me to the title of this post: Engagement! It is very hard to encourage an author by means of an intervention. It needs to be done before they go silent. Preferably a long time before. Once an author has shut down, it’s really hard to get him ‘back in the groove.’
There are many kinds of engagement, like leaving a review as mentioned above. Commenting on serials or on forums or on blog posts is a great way to engage the author. Voting for stories. Direct email is a good form of engagement. Checking out their Discord channel is good. And even giving a thumbs up on social media can be considered engagement and encouragement.
I’d only just begun my endeavor to write erotica in 2013. My first short entry was well-received. The second, not so much so. I was still pretty enthused, so I decided to return to the art theme I’d started in the first story. In the Model Student series, I wrote the story of a depressed art student struggling with loneliness and self-doubt at an art school 1500 miles from his home. It was heartfelt. I understood this from my daughter’s experience. But people seemed to flock to the story and at the end of the first part, Mural, I received this email comment:
“My God. I have just read 5 and 6. Now I understand your blog and the forum when you talk about the feedback you've been getting. Your work is amazing! You have a gift. You really don't need hints on where the story should go next, because these characters inside you will tell you exactly what you need to do, and which step to take next. That they are so alive on paper (well, on the screen), means they are living and breathing inside you, and there is no skin between them and the words you write. Oh my god. Thank you for daring to do this, to open your heart like this. I don't know whether these people exist in real life or not, but they for sure exist inside you, and now they live for us. Incredible, and thank you.”
I don’t know how long it took this reader to pen the paragraph above, but it truly held me together for nearly two years! And now, fourteen years later, I still look at it and feel a fresh burst of pride and power to go out and write another. You simply can’t imagine the power readers wield.
Mural and the entire Model Student series are available as eBooks on ZBookstore and in paperback at other online vendors.
It was about that time that I also realized this was what I write for. I hadn’t made a penny off my Devon Layne books yet. I recognized there was probably an opportunity to earn some money there (and I began publishing them for sale), but what I really wanted was to touch readers in such a way that they were moved by my books. I wanted to engage with them.
I also noted that many of my readers were older people on limited income, just as I was. They flocked to the free reading site (SOL). I promised myself and my readers that I would always make all my novels available for free online reading. Stories don’t necessarily make it to all sites at the same time, but specifically, I offer all of them as online serials at StoriesOnline and at DevonLayne. My patrons, for their kindness in supporting me with monetary contributions, get the stories first, both as online serials and as eBooks.
So, kiss an author—if they’re willing. Show your engagement with the stories. Even just say hi when you see him flit across your screen.
By the way, the ambulance left without my neighbor, so either he wasn’t in as bad a shape as they thought, or he couldn’t afford the transport.
Enjoy!
This is number 140 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, I was driving through a shopping center parking lot to my company’s mailbox. My three-year-old daughter was safely strapped in the back seat in her car seat, on a fun outing with Dad to the ‘maybops.’ I stopped at a stop sign, then started through. A large white pickup truck came blasting up a cross-street and through his stop sign, turning next to me.
I was shocked and slammed on my brakes, yelling out, “Geez! You don’t even stop at a stop sign?” I paused to catch my breath and be sure no one else was rounding the corner to approach, then proceeded a few hundred feet to the parking space in front of the mailbox rental store. I rolled up my window, got out, and opened the back door to get my daughter out of her car seat.
Just at that moment, the white pickup pulled up across the back of my car and the driver yelled out the window at me.
“Did you say something to me?”
“I was just commenting on how I was nearly hit when you ran the stop sign,” I answered, a little hot under the collar.
“You should be more careful then, shouldn’t you!” he yelled back.
Oh, I was ready for a fight. But I had just enough presence of mind to think of my daughter sitting waiting for me. Was taking on this belligerent and reckless asshole worth the risk of having my daughter grow up without a father?
“You’re right. I should,” I answered. He scowled and peeled out as he drove away.
I recalled this event when I was speaking to a church group later and one of the older parishioners said, “I was hoping you’d finish the story by saying you saw him in a ditch later on.”
That would have served him right. He’d have gotten his just desserts. Righteousness would be rewarded.
And the entire point of the story was missed.
It wasn’t about him getting what he deserved. It was about my daughter growing up with a father who loved and cared for her every day of her life. And still does.
But I think the majority of us believe he should have been punished, no matter the cost. We’ve been conditioned to that all our lives.
Oh, yes. The title of this post. “Pow! Wham! Thwack! Zap!” If you had a television in the sixties, it was hard not to be exposed to the somewhat campy antics of Adam West as Batman. It wasn’t proper to actually show fighting on-screen, so the show adopted fight noise signs (I think they tallied 86 of them) to flash whenever a fight started. “Krunch zlonk klonk bam kapow ouch whamm zap kapow urkkk zok biff zzzzzwap.” That was just in one episode!
Of course, we’d been conditioned to television violence in the mid-fifties when nearly every episode of Gunsmoke featured James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon outdrawing a bad guy on the main street of Dodge City. Maybe you watched Wyatt Earp during that era or The Lone Ranger, even earlier.
I’ve become accustomed to a huge number of ‘reels’ in my feed on social media. And some of them have fairly good storylines, even though the AI generated dubbing and subtitles are often strange. I’m told that many of those reels are based on Chinese telenovels, but the AI translation, dubbing, and subtitles often result in humorous juxtapositions. In nearly every episode I watch, someone gets slapped for being an idiot or offending someone, spits up blood after being hit in a Kung Fu fight, or is simply killed by the stronger of the contesting parties. The violence is a feature, even of stories that are supposed to be romances and period dramas.
I’m sure we could go on with dozens of examples from our lives—entertainment featuring violence. But why?
It’s all about people getting what they deserve, without having to wait for the slow wheels of justice to turn. Punishment is instant and final. If it isn’t final, the perp rises to offend again until he is put in his place permanently.
In entertainment, we’ve come to expect this kind of frontier justice. The one-time popular legal dramas, like Perry Mason, focused on proving guilt or innocence in a court of law. But we don’t see as much of that kind of slow grinding of justice as we see of the instant punishment. The TV episode only lasts an hour or the movie lasts two hours and change. We have to get to a resolution in that time and the quick and easy way to get there is to have the bad guy confess or kill him.
I see other reasons for this, as well.
1. It’s a quick way to resolve an open plot element.
2. It satisfies a natural desire to see evil brought to judgment.
3. It avoids complications that an author doesn’t want to deal with or simply doesn’t have the knowledge to deal with.
4. It’s thrilling and gets the blood pumping.
5. It’s good for an emotional release or catharsis.
6. It’s what we wish would happen in real life.
And when I look at these issues, I have to ask if I fall back on them in my own writing.
Oh, yes. I’m actually ashamed to admit it.
I can’t help but wonder if this has taken a toll on our society. At least in America and possibly worldwide. We know there are evils in our world, and it is much easier to create a superpower to get rid of them, whether legal or not. Why wait for the wheels of justice to turn? Just fucking kill them!
But we lose something in the process. What we fail to ponder is not whether the evil one gets what he deserves, but whether we live a better life because of it. If I had given the truck driver what he deserved thirty years ago, would my daughter have a father?
The biggest danger of a steady stream of violence in entertainment is that we become so accustomed to it that we begin to see it as the acceptable way to resolve conflict or offense. Your colleague is acting like an idiot? Slap some sense into him! An insurance executive raises rates? Shoot him! A protester yells at you? Kill him! A spouse objects to your plans? Beat her! It is the example we see in entertainment every day—and it looks very realistic.
I find it is harder and harder to preach a gospel of ‘de-escalation.’ That was the theme of the fifth LNDtH1 volume, The Rock. How can we de-escalate when our very existence causes increased ire on the part of others—even justification for them to reach a final solution?
How will we face our children when we openly embrace the concept of violence as entertainment? I wonder if there is any other way.
I’m afraid I don’t have an answer.
This is number 139 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I’M EASILY ADDICTED. Or maybe it’s one of the byproducts of ADHD or being a little OCD. God knows, I’m on the spectrum someplace.
Here’s what I mean.
When I was writing the Team Manager series, I started following women’s high school basketball in Iowa. It started with the high school team I was using as a model for my team in the book. Then, I had to consider what colleges they might go to and started following the American Rivers Conference Division III teams. When I was viewing that, I became aware of the buzz surrounding the University of Iowa Hawkeyes team and the phenomenon of Caitlin Clark. When she got drafted into the WNBA, I became an instant fan of the Indiana Fever. I had to try out the new Unrivaled league games as well. I was still watching my favorite ARC teams, the Iowa Hawkeyes and Big Ten teams, and the Fever.
I admit that I’m watching fewer ARC games, mostly only University of Iowa Big Ten games, only Indiana Fever games, and just my favorite three Unrivaled teams (out of eight). I no longer really watch any high school basketball, and can see that my days of watching Div III are numbered. The addiction is waning.
However, the entire Team Manager series is still available as eBooks on ZBookStore.
A while back, I discovered short dramas on a phone app that played audio episodes. I’d listened to a couple thousand episodes when I got completely caught up in my November Novel this past year. I haven’t listened to an episode in three months. (Doesn’t that sound like I’ve been sober for three months?)
But now, I’ve discovered short drama reels. These hit my Facebook feed and I quickly became addicted to some of the stories. In fact, I get 150 gigabytes of high speed hot spot each month, which is what I use for all my work, posting, television, and streaming needs. So far this month, I’ve used 177.45 gigabytes and I still have 8 days in my billing cycle to go.
Dang it.
I bring all this up as a bridge from my post on artificial intelligence to my intended subject of violence as entertainment. You see, I’m pretty well convinced that the stories on Pocket FM and the Reels I see on Facebook are at least partially AI generated. If the story itself isn’t, the audio track certainly is.
There are numerous Facebook accounts that post the short drama reels. They are usually posted in fifteen to thirty-minute episodes, and the account never posts the whole story. You are expected to purchase and download an app that feeds the reels to your phone. Watch the advertisements, pay for episodes, and bow down to the AI gods of Apple, Google, and Meta.
There are essentially only half a dozen stories, though I’m sure I could uncover a number of variants.
1. The billionaire CEO in disguise.
2. The neglected and abused child who returns to have revenge on the family that mistreated him/her.
3. The Kung Fu grandmaster who looks like a bum but saves the heiress and is revealed to the big boss as being the head of all the martial artists.
4. The child prodigy who saves the mother or father with an exceptional talent and gets a new stepparent in the deal.
5. The reincarnated ancestor who returns to punish the degenerate descendants.
6. The scorned and divorced spouse who is later revealed to be royalty or an heiress/heir to a great fortune.
7. The female drudge working on the military base who is revealed in a crisis as a retired sniper who can make an impossible shot of 3-6k or more to save a pinned down patrol.
I’m sure if I spent even more time immersed in these short dramas, I could find more storylines, but it seems they all follow a similar story arc.
An interesting (to me) phenomenon is that there is obviously a script, which may or may not have been written by a human, and in most but not all of the reels, actual human actors play the parts. Some do use AI generated images. So, the actors say the lines in some language or another. Then the AI dubs it into another language based on the audio track or script. I can tell it is AI because it will treat things like “Mr. Smith” as a sentence finished after “Mr.” and a new one begun “Smith.” It will also leave Asians in some Kung Fu dramas with completely western names like Mr. Smith, Mr. Clark, Mr. Jones, etc.
What gets me is that I often read the subtitles and they appear to be generated from the dubbed audio, not the script. They often mistake words for things that sound a little like what has been said or even spell the same name half a dozen different ways, based on what the narration sounded like. The same is true with the audio dramas as with the reels.
My currently running serial and recent eBook and paperback release, Forever Yours, is a story about a young programmer who sees potential in the development of artificial intelligence, but doesn’t consider it to be well implemented. He correctly sees that artificial intelligence has been developed for the benefit of the developers and not for the people it is sold to. Personal information is reported back to the corporation who owns the program. The programs spy on the users and turn that information into targeted advertising—a ‘feature’ that no user actually needs.
Verena Holt sent me an unsolicited review of Forever Yours that began:
Forever Yours stands out as a deeply human exploration of technology, ambition, and emotion. Blending speculative science with intimate storytelling, it captures not just the rise of artificial intelligence but the complex lives of those building it. The story’s balance of intellect, vulnerability, and vision makes it an unforgettable look at how connection endures in an increasingly digital world.
Not bad for a review attempting to convince me it is an actual human being offering the services of a non-existent Literary Pathway Curator Network to help with expanding my audience to book clubs around the world! I especially love the identification of the book as a “deeply human exploration.”
The thing is, I can’t argue with anything in this AI-generated message I received on Facebook from a user that no longer, and probably never, existed.
Forever Yours is available as an eBook at ZBookStore or as a Signature Edition paperback at online retailers. It is available in serialization at SOL online.
So, here we have the connection from artificial intelligence to my current but waning addiction to short drama reels. I’ve even included a nod to the unsolicited email I receive from AIs trying to sell me services that don’t actually exist. But what does all that have to do with violence as entertainment? I’ve already exceeded my intended length for this blog post, so that will have to wait until my next post.
I’ll just say that I have not watched a reel in which no one got slapped! Unless they were beaten by a martial arts master, or outright killed. It got me thinking: Do I do that in my books?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, if I can get around to it this week, my next post on violence as entertainment will be “Pow! Wham! Thwack! Zap!”
This is number 138 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
AI IS HERE TO STAY. The time to have stopped it was with autocorrect. Remember how funny it was when the great new feature either changed your obscenity to ‘duck,’ or surprised your boss with ‘I’m running a big behind’? That was when we needed to end AI. Like so many things in our world, it’s too late now.
That doesn’t mean it will run the world in the future or even make our lives miserable—most of the time. It does mean we will either be aware of it, or we will let it take control of things we don’t mean it to control.
That includes our own creative process. As authors and readers, how will our art be influenced?
I received an intriguing email offer to help me market my Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) novel, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. It was really well-written and convincing. It took me more than half an hour to track down that the mail had arrived from a non-existent company and a non-existent person. But it was so good that I have seldom seen a college-level book review better composed—either by myself or others.
Then I loaded the manuscript into Adobe Acrobat (as a PDF) and asked it to draft a review. Wow! I include an unedited excerpt below:
Nathan Everett’s The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a captivating blend of romance, family legacy, and corporate intrigue. The novel masterfully intertwines the personal and professional lives of its protagonists, Erin Scott and Preston Carver, as they navigate the complexities of love, ambition, and the weight of family history….
The novel’s exploration of themes such as trust, redemption, and the pursuit of happiness is both heartfelt and thought-provoking. Erin and Preston’s journey from colleagues to lovers to life partners is beautifully depicted, making their eventual union on the iconic Staircase of Dragon Jerico a poignant and satisfying conclusion.
Overall, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a well-crafted tale that balances romance, drama, and corporate intrigue. Nathan Everett’s storytelling is engaging, and his characters are relatable and multidimensional. This book is a delightful read for anyone who enjoys stories about love, ambition, and the enduring power of family legacy.
In the interest of conserving space in this blog, I left out a couple of paragraphs that summarize the action. The point is, as an author, I crave this kind of review! I want to use it in promoting my book. But I’m conflicted over the very idea of presenting this kind of AI-generated material. I would certainly never do so without clearly identifying it as being a non-human created summary!
The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, which I labored to write without the aid of AI, is available as an eBook on ZBookstore or as a paperback at Ingram Spark. It can be read free on SOL (author Wayzgoose).
I really have just two major concerns regarding AI and its use by writers. First of all, there is the longstanding and almost lost cause of how generative artificial intelligence is trained and the power consumption that is draining the world’s energy. It is not only a strain on the power grid, but also on natural resources, like water, and its contribution to environmental crises like global warming.
Artistically, I’m concerned about the way generative AI is trained. It uses, without consent, the work of other authors to build a training wall from which it can ‘create’ the work it generates. In other words, our work is copied by the AI so it can learn from our content, often using large chunks of it and passing it off as its own. It frankly plagiarizes real authors (and artists and musicians).
This has become such a common method for learning that there are even ‘training programs’ for human authors based on the concept of copying portions of famous novels!
The fundamental idea of education for humans includes things like reading and viewing artwork and listening to music. Many artists have made copying masterpieces a part of their learning process. Let me remind you, however, that if they become good enough to pass that work off as the work of the original artist, or their own original artwork, they are referred to as forgers and plagiarists!
I don’t know that there is anything we can do about this. We can complain to manufacturers of the software when portions of our works are used and passed off as the work of the AI. The AI chatbot Claude was recently sued for over a billion dollars for copyright infringement and lost the suit. But it makes the problem of plagiarism ten times more complex. Many of us have had our works retitled and labeled with a different author name, then sold as someone else’s work. And that was without AI in the mix. I worry the problem will be far more prevalent in the future.
Finally, I will say there is a moral and ethical issue regarding authors using AI in creating their books. SOL author Cly Anders had a great blog post on this on December 14. She compares AI to fire. She uses the fire to cook with while some other asshole uses it to burn down a building. Fair enough.
But there are, sadly, people who are blindly following the path of prompting an AI chatbot to write their novels or even technical manuals. It’s easy to be seduced by these offers that I receive half a dozen times a day. They offer ‘ghost writer quality’ writing of your book. I consider that to be fraudulent. You can’t just have someone or something write your work for you and slap your own name on it.
I’m not fond of any ghost writing for that matter. If a ghost writer writes a famous person’s memoir, for example, it should clearly state “The Memoir of XYZ as told to and written by ABC.” There are famous authors who became so wealthy and popular that they basically quit writing. Instead, they develop a storyline and concept, then hand it off to a staff of writers who generate one or two dozen books a year—all under that author’s name or one of his pen names.
Periodically, I receive an email from a fan that starts out “I have a great idea for a novel you should write. I can’t write it myself, but you’re free to use this idea.” In my book, that turns me into an AI that is working based on someone else’s prompts.
It has been suggested that people who use AI to write their books be referred to as ‘prompters’ rather than authors. That makes sense. In much the same way as my ‘ghost written memoir’ sample above, the book would say clearly, “Written by ABC ChatBot, as prompted by this person who couldn’t be bothered to write it himself.”
AI is here to stay, no matter how much we yearn for the day when we could blame running a big behind on autocorrect. Like Cly, some authors will cook with AI. Others will torch the industry. It will become harder and harder to tell when a novel is written by a chatbot and when it is written by a moderately talented author. The grammar and spelling will be perfect. The thing is the chatbot can generate a hundred times more of those moderately good novels (like mine, for example) than real authors will ever be able to.
That is where the danger lies.
Next, if all goes well, I’m going to comment a bit about what we see and read that is AI generated or that uses AI in its production. I call it “Short Dramas.”
This is number 137 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
EACH YEAR, I feel compelled to publish a disclaimer that covers me for everything I might fail at for the coming twelve months. No, it’s not a resolution, nor is it a list of goals or excuses. In its original form, it is simple.
There is nothing about my religion or my politics that requires me to convince you that I am right and you are wrong. Nor is there anything about my religion or politics that requires me to listen to you trying to convince me you are right and I am wrong.
Pretty simple, really. I think, however, people take that to mean I have no opinions about what is right and what is wrong. I do! I have very strong opinions about what is happening in the US, immigration, war, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, the economy, and even opinions about what is happening in other places around the world, like Ukraine, Venezuela, and Palestine. Not expressing them in my life and in my writing is the same as not having them at all. So, they come out in the standards of my heroes, the philosophy in my writing, the opinions expressed by my characters, and their actions. As a result, I have found it necessary to add this disclaimer before every new story I write.
This is a work of adult fiction. The story and characters are fiction. Any incidental mention of places, historic personages, products, or organizations are the property of the respective owners. This book contains content of an adult nature. This may include explicit sexual content and characters whose beliefs may be contrary to your religious, political, social, or world view. The content is inappropriate, and in some cases illegal, for readers under the age of 18, or anyone who cannot tolerate content that does not agree with them.
When I’m talking to most people, I find it is silly to need this kind of disclaimer, either for my writing or my life. Most of the people I interact with are adults. But some people who comment on my stories or send me email plainly are not adults in my definition and shouldn’t be reading adult fiction. Many cannot even discern the difference between fiction and reality. But I’m not going to quit writing.
I am happy to say, in fact, that I have two books that I am working on at this time.
The first should come as no surprise. I wrote the first draft of The Inheritance Paradox in November 2025. I have decided this will be a Devon Layne (aroslav) book, even though it is decidedly lacking in explicit sex. I am deep in the rewrite and am pleased (as are most of my alpha readers) with the progress, though it went a little slowly over the holidays as I traveled and celebrated. I expect the writing will pick up a bit now that I’m getting re-focused on it.
The story is predicated on the idea that a man in 1979 is recruited as a genetic courier to travel into the past and spread a particular gene through the population. How? The usual way. To impregnate women in several different centuries who will pass his genetic material on to future generations.
One of my alpha readers said she loved the concept of the genetic courier, but there had to be some way for him to pass the genes on besides getting a lot of women pregnant. Well, that was the deciding factor for me to choose to make it a Devon Layne book and not a Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) book. If the mere requirement of the MC to have sex is too much to handle, some readers need to be protected from it. That doesn’t mean the sex will be explicit in the book, but it will definitely be a major theme.
When I was in the Pacific Northwest for the holidays, I had the opportunity for a delightful luncheon with my alpha reader and good friend, Les. I told him that I had decided to make the sequel to Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose on SOL) A Place at the Table my next priority project. His immediate question was whether I had started making notes for it yet. Um…
In November of 2023, I wrote a complete first draft of A Place Among Peers. It was a little over 88,000 words and 21 chapters. I didn’t hate it, but it left me flat. I chose not to release it until I could figure out what was wrong with it and rewrite it. I opened the version I ‘annotated’ in October of 2024 when I’d ‘figured it out.’ But I had other things to be concerned with at the time.
It turns out that I hadn’t figured it all out after all. As I read through the annotated draft, which merely pointed out things that needed to be changed in order to set the story ten years later, I realized it would be more appropriate to mark the thirty percent or so that didn’t need to be changed. So, I’ve been making notes and expect I will start posting the rewrite for Sausage Grinder Patrons sometime in late January or early February. I don’t want to become too distracted from The Inheritance Paradox.
I want to mention that this is a case in which I felt I’d hit the sex and the political parallel with our universe too hard and that I needed to clean it up in order to make it an acceptable Nathan Everett offering.
I will say that while I was ‘on vacation’ I read the entire released version of A Place at the Table, a story available on ZBookStore or on the Wayzgoose page at SOL. I was pleased with how that story developed and am happy to consider it for one of my Signature Edition releases in 2026.
And thus, we begin the new year. I still plan to deal with AI and writing sometime soon. Not sure if it will be next week.
| 234567 | > |