Not much reading this month, as National Novel Writing Month took all of my time and brain space. I started reading Pachinko, but only made it through a couple of hundred pages before the end of the month. And next month is Dostoevsky December, so I will be burying myself in a work of classic Russian literature.
I picked up some new reading material in November, thanks to a visit to the 2023 Grand Rapids ComicCon, and also to Jason of Lakeshore Literary for his gift of the most recent issues of The Lakeshore Review.
Acquisitions
Jean Davis, Chain of Grey (self-published) [2023.11.03] – Purchased from the author at the 2023 Grand Rapids ComicCon
Jean Davis, Bound in Blue (self-published) [2023.11.03] – Purchased from the author at the 2023 Grand Rapids ComicCon
Nina Varela, Crier’s War [2023.11.05] – Purchased from the author at the 2023 Grand Rapids ComicCon
The Lakeshore Review #3 [2023.11.11] – Received as a gift from the publisher
The Lakeshore Review #4 [2023.11.11] – Received as a gift from the publisher
I am happy to report that, for the eighth time since I first participated in National Novel Writing Month back in 2013, I have reached (and passed) my goal of 50,000 words. So, yay me!
This year I did something new. Instead of working on a novel or collections of short stories, I started a project called “Fifty Flashes and Fragments,” with the goal of writing fifty flash fictions or fragments of stories over the course of the month.
I hit 50,000 words on November 27 with piece 39, and then wrote one more because “Forty Flashes and Fragments” flows better as a project title. About half of the pieces have some merit, and of those, maybe half a dozen are genuinely good.
In service of this project, I created on this website a simple prompt generator which produces, at the click of a button, two subjects, a setting, and a genre. The only rule I set myself was that I had to use the prompt generated. Or rather, what I would NOT do is click the generator until I found a combination of subjects, setting, and genre that I liked. I only broke that rule once, when the generator produced a duplicate of the previous prompt. Random numbers are funny that way.
This method worked wonderfully, and I plan to continue to use the generator (with some modifications of the subject, setting, and genre options) for weekly writing exercises.
For NaNoWriMo 2021 and 2022, I came up with a new method of tracking my writing which focused more on the day-to-day nature of NaNo and less on things like chapters, scenes, and so forth. In those years I created one document for each day of the month, and when I started writing for a new day, even if I was still in the middle of a chapter or scene from the day before, I put that writing in the new document.
Psychologically, this had the benefit of breaking me out of the mindset of “I need to finish this chapter before I go to bed” or “I don’t want to start this chapter/scene/etc. until I have time to complete it in one writing session.” That kind of thinking is, to me, less valuable during the month of November. November is for writing 50,000 words. December is for editing those 50,000 words. Or not.
I feel that my 2023 NaNo project is a natural outgrowth of the method I used in the previous two years, and I recommend it to anyone who feels trapped between the demands of the story they are writing, and the demands of NaNoWriMo.
As always, I want to thank the members of NaNoWriMo Grand Rapids for their help, community, and support.
Here is the complete list of prompts I used for NaNoWriMo 2023.
October was an excellent month for books, thanks primarily to me having a couple of weeks off from work to rest and recover and read and visit bookstores. I didn’t read as much as I would have liked, due to overall burnout, but again, what my reading list lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality.
Elmore Leonard, When the Women Come Out to Dance [2023.10.06] – Purchased at Argos Books and Comics in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I recently read Get Shorty, because the movie version is one of my all-time favorites. This collection contains the short story “Fire in the Hole,” which is the basis for the TV series Justified, which is very good.
R.F. Kuang, Babel [2023.10.06] – Purchased at Books & Mortar Bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I read Kuang’s Yellowface a few weeks back and quite enjoyed it. This one has been on my TBR list for some time, so I when I saw it at Books & Mortar, I grabbed a copy.
Jim C. Hines, Amelia Sand and the Silver Queens (self-published) – This is the reward for Hines’ latest Kickstarter.
Antonio Machado (Stanley Appelbaum, translator), Fields of Castile/Campos de Castilla [2023.10.15] – Purchased from Books and Mortar Bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A few months ago, after looking up interviews with Cormac McCarthy, YouTube began suggesting clips from a movie called The Counsellor. I had never heard of it, but it looked intriguing. The first clip I watched was from the end of the movie, and consisted of a conversation between Michael Fassbender and Rubén Blades. It was a powerful scene and the poetry of Machado figured prominently. I watched a few more scenes from the movie, enough to realize that (a) I really need to see it, and (b) I need to be in the right frame of mind because it is VERY dark. So I have not yet seen the movie but I do have some Machado to read in the meantime.
Paul Celan (John Felstiner, translator), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan [2023.10.15] – Purchased from Books and Mortar Bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I ordered this after reading about fifty pages of Under the Dome. I knew Celan’s name, but nothing more. I am very much looking forward to reading this one.
Jean Daive (Norma Cole, translator), A Woman With Several Lives (La Presse) [2023.10.23] – Purchased from Books and Mortar Bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Also purchased after reading a few dozen pages of Under the Dome. Also looking forward to reading it.
The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for November 2023 is:
November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?
Yes I have! This will be my eleventh year, and this year I am switching things up by attempting fifty (50!) flash fictions in the month of November. To aid that quest, I created a simple prompt generator which you can play with here. It produces random combinations of subject, setting and genre. Here are some examples:
The only rule I am holding myself to is that when I generate a prompt, I have to use that prompt. Generating prompts until I find one I like is not allowed.
Wow, was September busy. Very little reading, very little writing. I am in the second week of a stay-at-home vacation now, and my brain is slowly un-kinking, and for the first time in months I feel like I might actually be able to write again.
I have several projects in the works right now. The most immediate is NaNoWriMo which is a mere 27 days(!) away. This year I am going to attempt fifty flash fictions. To that end I have created a simple prompt generator which you can access here. Simply click on the button at the bottom of the page to generate a prompt (or perhaps more accurately a “seed”) made up of subject, setting, and genre. With this programmed tool in hand, I feel confident that I will be able to reach the goal of 50,000 words by the end of November.
So it is an excellent coincidence that the October IWSG topic is something very much in my wheel-house. The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for October 2023 is: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts?
Short answer: It depends on the context, the writer, and what is being written. And it also depends on what is meant by both “assist” and “replace.”
I have been a programmer since 1999 and have been researching ChatGPT and similar technologies (hereafter abbreviated as “LLM”) for a little over a year at this point (Notebook here). Here is a bulleted list of some of my thoughts.
LLMs write passable prose. The more technically specific the prose, the closer their output approximates that of a competent human writer. LLMs will likely be a big boost for technical writers, assuming the data sets on which the LLMs have been trained include well-written technical documents.
LLMs are trained on staggeringly huge amounts of data. ChatGPT uses everything that the owners could scrape from the entire (English language, primarily) internet as of two years ago. This includes innumerable works of fiction. What LLMs produce is a distillate of the available ingredients, based on the recipe, which is the prompt entered by a user. Therefore, ultimately, the quality of the output will vary according to the quality of the prompt, with respect to the entirety of the data set from which the LLM pulls its response.
LLMs have been called “sparkling autocomplete” and “stochastic parrots,” both of which are accurate if incomplete assessments. Their responses to queries are not random, nor are they completely predetermined. What LLMs return is the most statistically likely collection of words based on a request. LLMs have no concept of a “right” or “wrong” answer. It’s all probabilities based on word order in their training sets.
Therefore technical writers and writers of non-creative nonfiction will likely be most affected by the advent of LLMs, simply because these types of writing most closely adhere to formal grammars and constrained syntax. In other words, the closer the desired output is to something that could be used as logical input (e.g. programming), the more likely that the output will be useful to human users.
But since LLMs have no concept of “correct”, there will always need to be subject-matter experts who can verify the output of LLMs, in order to ensure the accuracy of the responses. So technical writers may find their job descriptions changed to “technical editors”, or something similar.
When it comes to creative output (fiction, poetry, etc.), the work produced by LLMs ranges from “terrible” to “competent.” Just as these tools have no intrinsic understanding of right and wrong answers, they also have no concept of “good” and “bad” writing. And given that the overwhelming majority of creative content in their training sets is “mediocre” to “competent,” the distillate of that work will be of a similar quality.
But while the output of LLMs may never be better than “good,” in many cases, “good” may be good enough. As much as writing is a skill, so is reading, and what people like to read is completely subjective. The same story told by five different authors may have zero crossover in their readers. We like what we like.
Publishers of creative writing are already finding themselves inundated by LLM-produced works, and while the editors are generally competent enough to spot the difference, this wastes resources which could be put to better use publishing good content from real humans.
So I don’t think creative writers will be “replaced” by LLMs, but we do have additional competition for attention. Writers and readers alike will need to continually improve their craft if they want to stay ahead of the machine-generated slush pile.
This was an excellent month for acquiring books funded through Kickstarter. Three of the four new arrivals are crowdfunded, and the last is from my (surprisingly persistent, but not unwelcome) subscription to And Other Stories.
For reading, September was a slow month. I had a lot on my mind, and multiple side projects demanding my attention, and my reading pace therefore suffered. But what my reading pile lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. So it goes.
And with that, summer is over, and summer is almost over, if you know what I mean. I graduated from GVSU over 30 years ago, and still feel energized by the start of the new school year.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for September 2023 is: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?
I discovered the IWSG when I started following the blog of Jean Davis, who I met through the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids region of National Novel Writing Month. I noticed that every once in a while a blog post with an oddly familiar title would pop up, and after some investigation discovered the IWSG blog hop.
I joined the blog hop in March of 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. The connection with other writers was a welcome relief after a year of isolation.
I participate in the blog hop every month, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but I try to stay engaged every month. Jean Davis is the only IWSG participant who I know personally.
Due to when I joined IWSG, I would say that the biggest benefit is the reminder that the world is full of creative people and everyone has successes and failures, triumphs and struggles, and that communities are things actively created, not passively experienced.
Oh, what a month was July. There have been hotter summers here in Grand Rapids, and there have been more humid summers, but I don’t remember a summer when it was so unpleasant to be outdoors for so much of the time.
I imagine the perpetual smoke from the Canadian wildfires might have something to do with it. But there are up-sides. As Ray Barboni said in Get Shorty, “They the f*cking smog is the f*cking reason you have such beautiful f*cking sunsets.”
Last weekend, for the first time since well before the COVID lockdowns, I attended a writer’s group. It was…wonderful! And now I have a plan for what I am going to work on for the rest of the year.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2023 is: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?
Occasionally. Less so now than in the earlier days of my writing, simply because I have had more practice and am more likely to spot problematic passages and ideas earlier in the process. But sometimes something slips past and makes it into a later draft.
Then there are projects like my first NaNoWriMo story, back in 2013. It was a technothriller set about fifty years from now in Gabon. I chose Gabon purely for geologic and climate reason, with no thought given to the history and culture of Gabon and Libreville, Gabon’s capital city. There isn’t much information on the culture of Gabon right now, and was much less 12 years ago. So while I still think the bones of the story are good, if I want to complete it for publishing I will need to seriously rework every character, as well as my assumptions about what Gabonaise culture will look like in 2075.
A more mundane example: For my 2018 NaNoWriMo story (NaNoWriMo again!) I wrote a book which was basically a transcript of multiple interactions with a terrible neighbor, rearranged and with a wish-fulfilling ending tacked on. I used everyone’s real names, so if I do try for publication, I will need to make some changes. I do this not to protect the innocent, or preserve privacy, but because, in the extremely unlikely event that the neighbor in question reads the book, I don’t want to get sued. So perhaps this isn’t something I feel conflicted about so much as a timely application of enlightened self-interest.
