Trigger Warning: The following might be considered “cultural appropriation adjacent.” (Whatever that means.)
Caveat #1: I was born in California, and have never lived in the American South.
Caveat #2: I have not made a study of this.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
The Power of Y’all
Posted in Culture, Writing, tagged business correspondence, customer service, language, y'all on 16 Feb 2026| 3 Comments »
Vignette 06Dec2025
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged atheism, atheist, creative writing, death, mortality, vignettes, Writing on 06 Dec 2025| 2 Comments »
This morning, I awoke surprised as last night, in my dream, I died, that fearful thing we were always told would mean we’d seen our last waking day. Yet here I am alive and telling my tale of how I dreamt that, after a struggle, I’d succeeded in my grand task, but failed to save myself.
I lay in a hospital bed. The room was bright, the machines beeped, but when the klaxons sounded I turned my head and saw the monitor’s lines go flat, its numbers tick down to zero. I know it was it I who watched, as I felt my conscious self hanging on for a few brief breathless moments as my candle guttered out. There was no sudden pain, no last struggle against the dark, or if there was, I was unaware as my form and I had already parted ways. I heard no celestial choirs, saw no flights of angels. What filled me as my vision faded was neither terror nor fear, not even anxiety.
I felt free.
Free. Released, unfettered, one final exhalation filled with serenity and peace, the struggle over, the grand task complete, a life, concluded. I wanted nothing after, did not pray for heaven, feared no hell. I was simply content to have loved well and done my best.
That’s it.
Love well.
Do your best.
Naught else is worth tallying.
Why We Can’t Have Anything Nice
Posted in Creativity, Hi Tech, Politics, Writing, tagged ai, AI slop, ai-generated books, amazon, ardern, books, booksellers, cheney, kamala, knock-off versions, publishing, reich on 28 Aug 2025| Leave a Comment »
AI; the grift that keeps on grifting. Feed it, press a button, and (in the immortal words of our president) “Bing Bong Bing,” there you have it: AI slop.
It’s everywhere, now including your bookshelf. If you’re not careful, that is.
And we weren’t.
We wanted to read Robert Reich’s new memoir, Coming Up Short, so we went to the Evil Empire (aka Amazon) and searched. “What format?” was the question. Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, or Audio? Paperbacks are easier on our ancient hands, so that’s what we picked. And there was our first error. I did not see the red flag, did not twig that this was a new release, available in both Hardcover and Paperback? That never happens. If you get a hardback deal, publishers aren’t going to undercut that with a simultaneous paperback release. Sadly, all we saw was the reduction from the hardcover price (expected in a paperback), so we dropped that turd into our cart and hit the checkout.
My bad on that score.
When the book arrived, it was (as my wife described it) like opening a door to an alternate universe. I was coming up the stairs as she first viewed our purchase, and all I heard her say was, “….the hell?” The cover (pictured, right) was unlike anything we’d ever seen on a new release from a major publisher. It was also about half the thickness of a major release (150 pp vs the 400 pp of the hardback).
….the hell? Indeed.
What we had purchased was a bunch of AI slop.
Someone—definitely not Shem Grant, the named author of this tripe, whose magnum opus has now been de-listed from Amazon—fed a bunch of open source info into an AI chatbot, had it spit out enough slop to fill the 150 pages required to give it a spine, slapped a cartoonish rendition of its subject on the cover, and voila, instant grift. I’ll admit, I’ve not read this “product,” but in skimming through I found it repetitive, composed much like a high schooler’s book report, and rife with errors (within three minutes I fact-checked two: Reich was born in Scranton, not New York, and he was a Rhodes Scholar, not a Marshall Scholar).
Yup . . . AI slop.
Is this a thing? I wondered. Heading back out to Amazon, I executed similar searches for new memoirs and found similar AI-generated knock-off versions:
- Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power had half a dozen slop versions
- Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor had a few grift versions, plus about a dozen “workbook” editions
- Kamala Harris’ 107 Days had fifteen (!) “books” that included the phrase “107 days” in their title, all by “authors” who had no other titles to their credit
In addition to these obvious attempts to con buyers by piggybacking similarly titled slop onto the sales of new releases, there were many self-styled “biographies” that had dubious authors, were listed as “independently published,” and often had obviously AI-generated covers (some that were really bad, and I mean like embarrassingly bad).
So, this stuff is out there, and there is a lot of it.
Remember when self-publishing became a thing? Remember how everyone wrung their hands over that? “There’s already enough crap out there in the book-sphere, and now everyone who can hold a pencil is going to think that they’re a writer!”
Hehe. Good times, eh? Because now, not only can anyone with enough grip strength to hold a pencil pose as a writer, but all those who are too lazy to even pick up a damned pencil are able to churn out utter rubbish, slap a fake name and an SEO-optimized title on it, send it into the Amazonian jungle to sting the unwary, reap the grift, and move on.
It’s enough to make one want to give up.
But, lesson learned. Once burned . . . .
k
Scented Pathways
Posted in Seattle, Writing, tagged creative writing, Life, Memories, nature, Travel, vignette, walking, Writing on 17 Aug 2025| 1 Comment »
I took my nose on a walk, today, and let it lead me from one memory to the next. It was a cool overcast midsummer morning, the land still damp, leaves still plump from yesterday’s sudden rain. Flowers nodded heavily, leaning from tidy beds over paved walkways like old men rising from a heavy sleep. Birds sought ripening berries through branch and bramble, and dogs led their owners from spot to spot, following their own noses.
First I tramped uphill over needles and cones, a well-trod path winding beneath conifers that lost their heads in the lifting fog. The air was redolent with resin and bark, soft earth and dew-soft ferns, and my nose remembered my time as a student at music camp, days and nights spent tucked up amidst giant sequoias, so close, so tall, that their height could not be seen, and my mind echoed with the opening beats of Copland’s Fanfare, an unexpected reveille to wake teenage musicians and fashion a memory never to be lost.
I walked onward along the ridgeline as the morning cleared, the slanting light breaking through the southern sky, the avenue warming with the summer’s rising sun. The scent of August grass, dry and seed-heavy, a mixture of soil and wood and hay and warmth, took me back to the rolling hills of my youth, slick and golden, begging us to take our cardboard squares to their tops and slide down their gentle slopes.
Farther, I passed beneath a plum tree, the path beside it filled with fallen fruit. The air was thick with a sweet, sun-stewed aroma that filled my brain with scenes of kitchens and bushel baskets and Mason jars and food mills and sacks of sugar all at the ready, as the thick preserves bubbled quietly on the stove.
Heading home, I walked along the main boulevard, wide and now sun-drenched, busy with cars and trucks. I sniffed the scents of diesel exhaust and hot pavement mingled with dust and the wafting aroma of brewing coffee. I closed my eyes and was met with the image of Jerusalem streets as I walked to the bus stop on my way to morning classes. The only thing missing was the adhan, broadcast from minarets, blaring across the awakening city.
It was a wide-ranging journey, though found within but a few miles on foot, a surprising trip through time and distance.
To Old Friends
Posted in Creativity, Poetry, Writing, tagged aging, creative writing, friendship, getting older, modern poetry, Poetry, Writing on 25 Jul 2025| 1 Comment »
to these old eyes
we none of us have aged
and all are as when first we met
though days and years
and decades all
have trundled past our feast
though unforgiving fate
has called a few away
and left their seats unfilled
and loft-bound bitterness
and joy have played for us
their varied minstrel tunes
it’s just the failing candlelight
that limns us each
in haloed wisps of age
for if I squint I once again
can see us clear and bright
with vibrant youth
all straining ‘gainst the slips
and hungry soon
to master dreamed-of hopes
so charge your glass
and be upstanding so
that we may raise a toast
to all we’ve known
and all we’ve loved
and all that yet remains ahead
for life with all its sorrowed pain
is better lived than not
and better still
with friends beside
Old Influencers
Posted in Writing, Creativity, tagged Writing, Characters, books, novel writing, creative writing, novels, short stories, short fiction, Bradbury, pern, mccaffrey, zelazny, amber on 20 Jul 2025| 2 Comments »
Having been pleasantly surprised by my recent re-read of a sci-fi/fantasy series I’d loved as a teen, I decided to extend this run of good luck and re-read another series that was influential to my own writing style (when I eventually got one).
I first crossed paths with Roger Zelazny’s works—both short form and long—in high school. It was before I’d read much fiction at all, and thus I did not have a lot of knowledge to bring to the experience. Despite this lack (or perhaps because of it), Zelazny’s stories and novels stuck with me, shaping my appreciation of the written word from then on. Zelazny was one of the triumvirate of authors who influenced my youthful enthusiasm for fiction, along with grandmasters Anne McCaffrey (a major influence, I discovered last week) and, of course, Ray Bradbury.
Each of these authors drew a different type of appreciation from me. McCaffrey’s prose was not what stayed with me, but rather her characters and their relationships, which were crucial to the workings of her plots. In considering Bradbury, I admit that none of his novels stuck with me, but his short fiction! Oh, what magic I found there. The books that collected his short works in a thematic whole—The Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles—were treasure boxes to read and re-read.
Roger Zelazny, though, held a special place in my pantheon, and not just because he was the only one of the three I actually met. Back in the ’70s, I didn’t have the breadth of experience to understand what I so enjoyed about his works, but yesterday, as soon as I began his Nine Princes in Amber, I could pinpoint it precisely. Where McCaffrey’s prose was straightforward, and Bradbury’s was as near to poetry as one can get in prose, Zelazny’s writing has a distinctive “voice,” matched to the mind of the character, and integral to the tenor of the storyline. As I began this book, I heard echoes of Hemingway, of Chandler and Hammett, along with the flow and descriptive power that was Zelazny’s own. That “voice,” that touch of the hard-boiled detective, was a crucial element of the character in that opening chapter—Corwin, a man out of space and time, without memories, must navigate a dangerous world filled with people bent on his demise. It was all fedoras and noir on silver nitrate and razor-sharp repartee and chiaroscuro lighting until, amazingly, subtly, color crept into the world along with Corwin’s recovered memories, and the “voice” shifted as well, matching again the mindset of the Corwin’s evolution.
I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Zelazny in the early ’90s, after I’d made my first professional-level short story sale. It was at a sci-fi convention here in Seattle, and I was trying to learn as much as I could about the craft, and meet as many “pros” as I could (a terribly difficult task for an introvert like me), but I’d been met with nothing but condescension and rudeness from nearly every established writer I approached. But I put that aside as I’d come primarily because Zelazny was a featured guest. I’d heard him read from his forthcoming book (A Night in the Lonesome October), and I’d brought my limit of three books for him to autograph (my beat-up vintage copies of the two-volume Amber omnibus and a dog-eared paperback copy of Four for Tomorrow).
Having been scorched by other authors at the convention, I expected a perfunctory meeting at the signing table, but I was determined to let Mr. Zelazny know how influential his works had been on my own nascent attempts as a writer. Instead of just signing my old books and moving on with a nod, he asked if I was submitting my work; I said yes, and that I’d been in a recent issue of a small professional magazine. He knew the magazine, actually had back issues, and wrote down my name so he could look up my story. After all the bristles and cold-shoulders I’d received that weekend, a kind word from a writer so important to me was a gift dearer than rubies. Did he really have back issues of a small-run magazine? Was he really going to read my story? I don’t know; he might have merely been encouraging me, a gentlemanly gesture to a budding young man who had kept three of his books safe and secure for a score of years. Still, I like to think he might have.
Reading these old favorites again, though, now with my older, wiser eyes, I feel the old desire to craft words renewed. I want to finish reading all of these titles I’ve pulled from the stacks, but after that . . . after that, I think I have work to do.
k
Finding My Wellspring
Posted in Creativity, Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing, tagged books, Characters, creative writing, Creativity, dragonriders, Fallen Cloud Saga, fiction, mccaffrey, novel writing, novels, pern, Reading, Writing on 13 Jul 2025| 1 Comment »
A friend asked the hive-mind for book suggestions—preferably science-fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction—to flesh out her summer reading list and (naturally) she got more titles than she could probably read in a year. I tossed in one title I’d read recently; it was less “spec-fic” and more what I’d call “magic realism,” but I had found it delightful and passed the title¹ along.
In perusing the suggestions from others, I saw a mix of genre classics along with (what I assumed were) newer titles. I used to read nothing but sf/f novels—they were my introduction into fiction, back in the late ’60s/early ’70s—but over time, for reasons (painful or practical), I drifted away from the genre, and have zero experience with many of the newer authors.
There was one particular suggestion, however, that caught my eye, It was a title² of which I’d not thought in decades, even though I adored the series when I was young. I was in my teens when the books were first published and I devoured them, thankful there was only a year between release dates.
In recent years, I’ve occasionally gone back to re-read some old favorites, but that proved a dicey proposition. At sixteen, seventeen, I had no comprehension of—much less appreciation for—writerly things like structure, characterization, world-building, foreshadowing, allusion, or pacing. If you gave me a brisk plot and a compelling reason to turn the page, I was all yours. Going back to those old, familiar titles led, more often than not, to disappointment. Clunky dialogue, predictable plots, heavy-handed setups, wooden characters, and banal prose were common, and that’s before considering the rampant sexism and gender dynamics of the period.
But, oh, I did so love these books, this series, this world. So I gave the first in the series a try.
What I found within shocked me.
It’s not that it is bad; far from it. Yes, the author has some annoying (to me) quirks, and is inordinately fond of multi-syllabic adverbs, but the characters are full and distinct, the world has a long and detailed history that affects the current action, the social structure is coherent, strong with rituals and patterns, and there is humor and passion and drama and risk aplenty.
What shocked me, though, were the echoes I recognized between these books and my own. Understand, between the time I read these books and the time I began writing fiction, two decades had passed. When I was writing my own books, I never thought back on these titles, not for inspiration, not at all.
And yet, as I re-read these old books, I see in them the seeds of the worlds I have built. From the psychic connections along ley lines in “Spencer’s Peace” and my Ploughman Chronicles, to the bonding between riders and walkers in The Fallen Cloud Saga, to the convolutions of time travel in Unraveling Time, here in these books lie the kernels from which my own books grew. These books, this series, they are my source, my wellspring.
All writers, I believe, are influenced by the writings of others. We’re all, as Stephen King once said, like “milk in the fridge,” picking up flavors from whatever we’re near, accreting reverberations from the artistry of those we admire. But to find so many thematic origins in one place, well, it’s like finding a loved one, long-lost, long-forgotten.
I’m exceedingly glad I took a chance on these old friends, and I will definitely read the six or seven titles that I read when I was a boy. I feel a need, after this difficult year, for an infusion of youthfulness and hope, and these books, for me, flow with those gifts.
k
¹ The Lost Bookshop, by Evie Woods
² Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey, first in the Dragonriders of Pern series
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 