aroslav: Blog

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.

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!