aroslav: Blog

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.

This is number 148 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

--Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain 51

SINCE OCTOBER 2025, I have been keeping a paper journal. It isn’t the first time I’ve kept a journal, but nine months of daily journaling might be a new record, even for an obsessive writer like me. You’d think I could be more consistent with my blog. Ah well.

In November, I saw an ad for Ellington Pens and was reminded of how I once had a collection of fountain pens. I don’t really know what I did with them, but like many things, they seemed to disappear with the dawn of the computer age. I decided to buy an Ellington Pen just to enjoy the feeling of ink flowing onto the page. Now, I have five of them! And a shelf full of journals.

And I find that I am using them more frequently, not less. My habit is to write while I am eating breakfast—nearly always in a restaurant. I haven’t really cooked at home in over a year. I was really surprised the first time a waitress stopped to tell me what beautiful handwriting I have. I always considered it to be rather sloppy and undisciplined. I don’t think the months of journaling have particularly improved it.

What it is, I have decided, is a novelty. It’s something people don’t see that often. Like paper checks. Postcards have been replaced by email or text messages. ‘Writing’ is done on a keyboard.

I’m not a Luddite. I spend eight or more hours a day at the keyboard. I have a smart phone and even worked in that industry for a number of years. All high-tech stuff.

But I love writing with my fountain pen.

On the other hand, my daughter, at less than half my venerable age, told me she saw no sense in learning cursive writing. Her printing is just as fast (and almost as illegible). She seldom picks up a pen or a piece of paper. Words flow from her mind to the keyboard and she types almost as fast on her phone as she does at the computer.

Interestingly, she and I both have keyboards that click as we type, mimicking a typewriter. Anachronisms.

So, why am I so fascinated with handwriting?

One of the things that intrigues me about handwriting today is the ambiguity of the written word. Occasionally, I need to stop and puzzle over a word or phrase I have written in order to make sense of it. Also, there is a tone in the written word that is hidden in type. When I read my journal entries, I can tell if I was angry, depressed, or in a mental fog, even without reading the words.

That is not unusual in Chinese and many other Asian languages. My waitress at a favorite Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas took time to show me how her name was written in Chinese characters.

Her English name, Amoura, is a nickname given to her when she started school in America. Her surname, Poon, is a single character written by combining three different Chinese characters. Sounds kind of like English, since we just combine letters to make words. The characters in Chinese are entire words in themselves. The three characters in her surname are ‘rice,’ ‘water,’ and ‘field.’ A good name to ensure she doesn’t go hungry. Her given name is Kam, made of the characters for ‘gold’ and ‘jade.’ A name for wealth. Finally, her middle name, Hun, is made of the characters for ‘woman’ and ‘open door.’ Combined, they may mean ‘a hospitable woman.’

Recently, I found my favorite Thai performer’s name literally translates as ‘Rainbow Water.’

Chinese calligraphy has the precision and artistry of Spencerian script. The calligrapher can express ideas and emotions in both the words made up by combining characters, and through the artistry of the brush strokes. The words might accompany a work of art and be as important to the composition as the picture itself.

In the poem I cited at the beginning of this post, Khayyam talks about the permanence of the written word. When I write in my paper journal with a fountain pen, whatever I write stays there. Even if I make a mistake or scratch something out, the ink stays on the paper. It would be embarrassing at times, if anyone else ever read it!

This makes me think more before I write. I sometimes get carried away and write more of a stream of consciousness, but most of the time, what I write is quite deliberate. By contrast, I believe fully a third of what I type as a first draft is deleted, corrected, and added to before I finish typing it.

When I transcribe from my journal, as in the case of this blog post, I do a lot of editing as well. It is different, though. I correct misspellings and embellish the subject, but I find the words I drafted are closer to what I meant to say than words that go from mind to keyboard uninterrupted. So, I have been writing more first draft material in my journals than I ever used to.

In 1969, I bicycled across the US solo and kept a journal every day. Usually, it was written at the end of the day with my thoughts about what happened and what I saw that day. I was a pretty religious peacenik in those days and, having recently uncovered that journal, I found much of the scrawling to be cringe-worthy. On the other hand, I get a clearer glimpse of who I was when I was nineteen years old. It was not the writing that was cringe-worthy!

The hand-written journal is playing a more important role in my publishable writings, and not always as a first draft I will transcribe. Rather, it jump-starts my writing for the day, allowing me to collect my thoughts and get my creative juices flowing.

Julia Cameron’s 1992 book The Artist’s Way included the exploration of ‘morning pages’ as a way to unblock creativity and discover more about ourselves and our dreams. She suggests three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing each morning. Three pages in one of my journals is about 650 words, not a great amount by my normal writing standards.

I’ve done morning pages in times past and my current morning journaling is somewhat less stream-of-consciousness and more thoughts about my upcoming day, including planning out what I intend to write that day. This isn’t the same as a first draft, but it is more than stream-of-consciousness. Here’s an example:

It’s not quite an outline and far from being a first draft. It is a start at organizing my intent for the day’s writing. As I worked, I found I wasn’t ready for some of this stuff. I needed more set-up. But I had my thoughts on paper where I can continue to refer to them.

And that is why I continue to write with a fountain pen in a paper journal. In fact, indulging myself for Father's Day, I just ordered another fountain pen!

Happy Father's Day and Summer Solstice!

This is number 146 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

This is actually just some things I learned about clothes from Chinese short dramas. I’m back on that subject because I’m about to start writing my second short drama and have been watching dozens of them to learn all about what makes them so addictive. Research, you know.

One of the prime ingredients in the Chinese short drama is the costuming.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind when we mention costuming is the period costume drama. I have to say I’m stunned by the beauty and elegance portrayed in these dramas. Most have a degree of royalty involved and everyone in the royal court is elaborately dressed. Layers of robes and dresses in bright and festive colors. Hats that define a person’s occupation or status. And even underwear that can be shown at the appropriate time. One would think, in fact, that no one ever completely undressed, even to bathe.

The warriors are always in leather armor. The martial artists in robes or gis that represent their rank in the school. The old masters dressed in unsoiled white, no matter how many battles they are in. And even the beggar’s rags looking freshly laundered.

When we move into contemporary dramas, all janitors and cleaners dress alike. All maids dress alike. All prisoners are dressed alike—and just happen to dress in the same kind of striped pajamas as patients in a hospital. Always clean and neatly pressed, even after a brawl.

Gangs are of two varieties. First are those who run around in open short-sleeved shirts and dungarees. No pretense of being formal in any way. The second are those in black. Usually, these are posing as bodyguards for a woman in black shorts, black leather crop top and various weapons strapped to her legs. Her guards wear ill-fitting black suits, white shirts, black ties, and usually sunglasses, no matter the time of day or night. Seeing one of these guys in a short drama is equivalent to seeing a red shirt in a Star Trek episode. They aren’t going to end well. They aren’t necessarily all villains. Many are bodyguards for main characters on either side of the law.

That brings us to the hard-working protagonist who may be a hidden martial arts god, a secret billionaire, or a delivery guy with a magical system or x-ray vision. Might even have mystical healing powers according to traditional Chinese medicine. He will wear jeans or slacks, a clean white T-shirt, and a colored or patterned shirt worn as if it were an open jacket. He’ll go to all kinds of events and businesses dressed like this, no matter how fancily everyone else is dressed. Eventually, someone will convince him to get dressed up for an event—his unveiling as a person of incredible power—and he’ll wear an elegant dark suit that will show off exquisite tailoring and style. He’ll have a lapel pin of a style that is connected by gold chains to a breast pin, but actually has no significance.

The tailored suit is significant in indicating an important man. If an elder or patriarch, it will be a mandarin cut with fancy embroidery. An older adult will wear a good suit and coordinated shirt and tie. The younger men who are on the ‘good’ side will wear dark and elegant suits unlike anything commonly seen in men’s stores in America. They might have an interesting button closure, a vest, coordinated panels with different patterns or textures, but always dark and sophisticated.

When you see a flashy red suit, patterned suit, or bright color with piping, that is your principal villain. These are usually worn with a bright or patterned shirt, open at the collar, often with some serious jewelry. These are the guys about to be beaten up or dismantled by the hero.

I think the only time I’ve really focused on clothing in one of my novels is in the Living Next Door to Heaven series. The family gis came about with the establishment of the clan and houses in Book 4, Deadly Chemistry. The four main houses or casas each adopted a color and the girls sewed gis and belts in that color. The unhoused wore white. Brian’s casa wore red. Other houses wore blue, green, and yellow. More were added as the story progressed.

The outfits were significant in telling which house was which in the large gatherings, but also because nearly everyone practiced some form of martial arts. Most of the time, when they were working out, they went naked. But even though the colors were unrelated to any martial arts belt ranking, when they were seen all together—or even individually—they were an imposing sight.

This, coincidentally, is often how the Daoist who has just come to the city from his mountain retreat is dressed in the short drama.

The Living Next Door to Heaven 10-book series is available in eBooks at ZBookStore or in three long serials on SOL.

Lest you think I am ignoring the women in these short dramas, let me say you will seldom ever see more consistently elegant clothing on display in any kind of movie. It seems that American movies since at least the mid-1960s have relegated suits and well-tailored looks to the likes of James Bond. But the Chinese dramas really dress up their women.

There is a range of plebeian clothes for women which are used for labor and poverty. Then there is the schoolgirl—a very popular look, but seldom seen on a girl that is younger than in the final year of high school. These uniforms feature a white blouse, buttoned to the neck, a blue jacket with a pocket patch indicating the school, and a plaid skirt that is at least ten inches shorter than is actually allowed in Asian schools. Bobby socks and Mary Janes are the completion of the outfit. A popular alternative to the jacket and blouse is a navy-style blouse with a square back collar and tie.

I’ve already mentioned the female martial artist or gang leader as one dressed in black short-shorts, leather crop top, and various weapons strapped to her legs. She usually wears black ankle-length boots. Very intimidating. Then we move to the different levels of female character. A popular character is the ‘country bumpkin.’ She has been abandoned by her wealthy family and raised in the country where she was taught extreme martial arts and can lift a car with one hand. Her outfit us usually an embroidered vest and blousy top with a full skirt that is somewhat less than ankle-length. It looks like a nod to folk wear and is often an object of ridicule, even though it is lovely and charming.

The second major female is the vain society girl—sometimes a CEO—who wears expensive clothes, no matter if they are tasteless. It’s usually a form-fitting dress even shorter than the high school girl uniforms. All the upper class and corporate women wear hose and garters. Evening wear for the vain society girl is usually also form-fitting, though longer and slit up the side.

The office worker is often depicted in a short black skirt and white blouse. There are a few variations. They are only extras. The boss lady wears a tailored suit, once again with an ultra-short skirt. When she heads for the big gala that nearly every short drama has, she wears an elegant evening gown, often off the shoulder with beads artfully draped from her neck across her shoulders. If there is a type of elegant evening wear, you will find it in a Chinese short drama—even gowns with a train on characters who can kick an opponent in the chin.

As a result of watching these short dramas, I’ve become more conscious of how my own characters are clothed. I don’t dwell on it too much—I don’t think—but I’m always aware of what kind of image my character is portraying through the way he or she is dressed. The exercise in visualizing the characters is very valuable and makes each character more real to me.