FULL BLEED: CUT THE CONVERSATION, JUST OPEN YOUR MOUTH

I know, this should have a more Christmas-like or Solstice-like title. It is that time of year, right?

Of course it is. That’s why I’m wiped. All that obligation dragged around, begins to weigh on ya. Yes, it’s joyous and a time of being together with your family (only this year it’s not, by and large – long story which I’m not relating here). No, nothing’s wrong with the immediate family, not any more than usual. Just weirdness with relatives. And oh, making it over to my family involves driving a couple hours over the Sierras which can be fun and relaxing when it’s not sleeting and heavy fog. But hey, if I’m cooking for eight, that’s basically like cooking for four, only we know that there’s a bunch of folks missing this year ‘cause it’s normally cooking for fourteen. Going from two full tables to one pretty full table is, yeah, a lot to chew on.

Not like I have much else to think about. (This is a weak joke.)

Changes, lots of changes. Some are easier to process than others.

I used to joke about being feral in this business, no publisher, no agent, no reputation, or only a bad one. But watching what’s going on in all the creative industries, maybe being feral is the only thing that makes sense. (If you’re not trying to make a living at things.) Watching professional organizations and publications and publishers come down on the side of the pushbutton content machine is a sobering thing.

Look, I fully expect influencers and the like, social media-based mini-tycoons, to adopt the slop machine. They’re in the business of as much content as possible. Even the YouTube deep thinkers, they’re all about the numbers. And if you think that well-groomed English deep thinker who talks and talks and talks and talks about philosophy and spirituality with legions of guests but somehow you get the feeling that he doesn’t believe a word of it, not even what he’s saying, yeah, those folks are all into pushbutton content to keep those channels filled. You think that Joe Rogan wouldn’t pass off a segment to AI Joe just so he could duck out for a smoke? You bet he would. And it’s not all that far from there to go to heck, Joe’s taking a vacation this week but it’s like he was never away. Just AI up a solid guest, or better yet a historical figure. Joe talks to Jack Kerouac about Vietnam and where America went wrong. That’d do numbers.

I’ve seen Kerouac talking about Vietnam and where America went wrong. You can find the videos on YouTube. They’re sad. He’d destroyed himself with alcohol and saw the world turning away. Only for the strong of stomach to track down.

Thing is, everyone who’s dependent on the churn? They’re running at AI with arms open. People with no technical ability suddenly look like they have it in spades. And it’s all trash, only interesting to study from some deranged cultural anthropology standpoint. It’s disposable, what’s more it’s meant to be disposed of. A million billion little suicide drones slamming into the attention span of the collective conscious mind. A trillion cultural bits that nobody asked for or wanted suddenly shrieking for attention or money.

I harp on this example, but there’s dudes who are mad that Amazon will only let them upload eight books a day. That’s good for nobody, and if anything, reveals a kind of suicide wish on Amazon’s part as to how they look at publishing. If any of these get a click, then it’s fine, right? Everyone profits! Nevermind that nobody can find what they want, so far as books are concerned.

But Amazon lives on the churn, too.

What about an entity like Publisher’s Weekly? When they start setting the table for LLM slop output because it’s “an important development” in publishing, what’s that gonna do? Publishing is being smacked around as it is. There’s only so much that can be released because there’s only so many people buying books to begin with. Suddenly you have exponentially more content in those pipelines? None of it having any value? All that does is sludge up the works for everyone.

Okay, what about author’s organizations? Surely they’d have a clear stance on this, this thing that only exists because it was fed all of human cultural work to seed its probabilistic strings of word output. Surely they’d take one look at this and say “No.”

Well, SFFWA didn’t. Yes, they recanted last week and put out a survey asking writers what they thought of LLM/AI content, so they could explore this complex issue. But before that, they were setting a place at the Hugos for this stuff. Not its own category, but to let work considered for any category use LLM output. This should have been a non-starter. Period. And I’m not sure why it wasn’t. Did people really believe that this is the work of a novel technology and they didn’t want to appear Luddite? I know that Data is a beloved character in SF, but fiction is fiction. What’s being thrown around is not intelligence, artificial or any other.

So yes, when organizations who should know better are letting this in? Yeah, I feel just fine about being feral. Yes, I’d love to have more folks reading my books. But with slop content getting in, I doubt people will be finding what they want in written entertainment. Maybe people really do want Star Wars books where they are the central figure and save the universe and get to call Luke a dork and have Leia in the slave chainmail the whole time. Maybe people do want that. If they do, I don’t suppose it can be stopped. The forest of mirrors envelops all.

Couldn’t be me.

I mean, who’d go to the trouble of lining up the material that I write and trying to get an LLM to copy it? But then I’m a guy who’s come out and said that readers don’t necessarily want franchises, but a solid authorial voice. I might even get proven right one of these days. (I know. People really do want franchises. And publishers really want to make safe money. I get it.)

Right. Onward.

Seeing lots of year-end lists coming up now. I don’t really do that, haven’t in some time. Even looking over my work output for the year is pretty grim. I’m sure that I’ve written more pages for the blog than for any novel this year. You can check it out for yourself in the archives, if you wanna. They’re free. No paywall. Now, how much of that is original material? Eh. I do run around over the same ground like a Pink Floyd song, I know.

I’ve written 2/3 of a novel this year. That’s My Gifts Are Hungry. It’s a haunted house story. It’s a running away from home story. It’s a story about fandom and toxic love. It’s the fourth Hazeland book, but it also takes place at the same time as the first one, so you could go in totally cold. Yes, I’m insane. One of the advantages of being feral. I can write the books I wanna write and don’t have to worry about maintaining shareholder value or keeping things safe. Not that my work is risky or hard to read or structurally intricate or whatever.

That said, 2/3 of a book in a half a year is pretty not great. Feels like a letdown. I know. Olivia Nuzzi should clear up any of my imposter syndrome and yeah. Fun fact: she’s gonna make more money off that deal that I’ll ever see for all the books written in my lifetime. Who’s the imposter now? Who could get editors and publishers to sit up and take notice? Yeah, I’ll take my answer off the air.

I did publish a book this year, that being Fake Believe, after the Kickstarter campaign for it way back in March. That’s an accomplishment, right? Nevermind that I wrote the substance of it in 2021, back when I thought I had a publisher who had my back. That part’s still tough. It was a lot easier to write when it wasn’t feeling like things being tossed into the churn. And it’s hard to see it as not that.

Let’s see, I did three covers this year, and some miscellaneous marketing art. I redesigned all the Hazeland covers with a much more noir/Black Lizard sort of aesthetic in a moment of panic. But again, these books don’t go into stores, so the branding is a little more flexible. Oh, what’s that? I’m too hard on myself? You can get your local store to order copies of your books? Yes, you can. I did that too. Now try getting a genre bookstore halfway across the country to do so. Little harder.

Not a lot of accomplishments this year, really. And the majority of what got does was day to day survival stuff. And no, I’m not talking about the political landscape or any of that. I’m just talking brass tacks getting stuff done. That feels harder, harder than it’s supposed to.

But still I keep going. Stumbling sometimes.

Finish My Gifts Are Hungry first up. Then lay it out. Then the next book. My own work. Not a machine. I don’t have much use for machines other than as stenographers and spell checkers.

So stick around. I might even figure this stuff out.

I’ll probably try to get another entry in before the end of the year. This is feeling a little slight, even by my posting on fumes standards.

Well, enjoy the Christmas card if nothing else.