Lorem…
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2023 is: If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?
Ipsum…
Immanentize the Empathy
Happy birthday to me! I have made it to 54, which now officially places me in my mid-fifties, and also firmly in middle age. One more year and I will get to choose from the next tier in the “your age” dropdown menus when e.g. signing up for a new social media platform.
This past year felt like coming out of a long hibernation, and I expect the upcoming year will continue that trend as we continue to adjust to whatever the new normal is, assuming enough stability for any one narrative to assert itself as “normal”, which frankly is asking a lot of the world at this point in time.
The last book I read as a 53-year-old was Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, and the first book I am reading as a 54-year-old is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas. Thus do years end and start on high notes.
Not much else to report at this time. Life is busy, and enjoyable more often than not.
May was a slightly better month for reading than April, if only because there was more daylight to be had and I had the occasional opportunity to sit on the porch with a glass of wine.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Short Prose
Yeah, the above photo sums up my state of mind for the past month.
Not long after posting the April IWSG response, the burnout came crashing down and my mental capacity was reduced to little more than spasmodically responding to immediate stimuli. Fortunately, in my day job I am a programmer. Programming, when you boil it down to the essentials, is really about creating specific responses to specific stimuli. We call it “input”, but why split hairs?
Therefore my entire creative output for National Poetry Month came to maybe five poems, out of which at most one shows any promise. But I did become even more sleep deprived, which is a victory of sorts.
The May 2023 Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is: When you are working on a story, what inspires you?
This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, as inspiration could change from story to story, or even from scene to scene within a story. So it might be more useful for me to answer that at a deeper level – what inspires me to be creative? And I think the answer to that is, the drive to create something which is ideally beautiful, hopefully internally consistent, and which effectively communicates the original multidimensional idea behind the story.
As I move well into middle age, and look back over the scores of stories and hundreds of poems in my portfolio, I think everything I have written is a facet of the same stone, and I am polishing that facet and presenting it to my readers and saying “Do you see?” And whether the answer is “yes” or “no,” I use that response as inspiration to hone my craft and try to communicate that idea through another facet, be it a novel, a short story, a poem, fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, a game, or a scribbled note in the margins of an old Dungeons and Dragons character sheet.
At the beginning each of my creative works is inspired by asking “what if?”
As I near the end of the process, the inspiration may mutate into desperation because I just want to be able to write THE END without, you know, skipping to THE END.
As a final note, I want to thank the IWSG community for accepting me into their ranks. I have been participating for just over two years, and writing these posts, and reading the other answers to the monthly questions, help keep me focused and, frankly, inspired.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.
April was a mediocre month for reading. I don’t know if it was post-COVID brain fog or general stress, or just a heavy work project maxxing out my brain capacity. As you can see, I read two short books at the beginning of the month, then the third one took almost three full weeks to complete, then a short book of poetry to round out National Poetry Month. Maybe May will be better.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Oh, what a month was March. The hours seemed to fly by, but the days dragged. The weather is much improved, though the warmest day of the year so far was back in February.
I have a new project at work which, while not demanding any more time than any other project, is taking vastly more mental energy than I am used to, so writing over the past month has been sparse.
April is National Poetry Month! As with the past several Aprils, I attempt to write a poem a day for the month, while primarily reading poetry, just to keep my head in that space. So far I have written four poems, which brings my total for the year to, uh, four.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2023 is:
Do you remember writing your first book? What were your thoughts about a career path on writing? Where are you now and how is it working out for you? If you’re at the start of the journey, what are your goals?
I have written six books over the past decade, thanks to NaNoWriMo. Of those six, two (one literary fiction, one magic realism/weird fiction) are completed first drafts. The rest are in various stages of “in progress” or “abandoned.”
It goes without saying, therefore, that I have not yet published any books of my own writing.
I have never expected to make a career out of writing books, or indeed any other kind of writing. The few pieces I have had published (short stories, poems) were not published at paying markets. This is fine. I used to run a small publisher, and I know how these things go.
But I suppose a “career” is not necessarily the same thing as whatever we do for our main, or even secondary (tertiary, etc.) source of income. This eases the pressure on writing by loosening time constraints and making those self-imposed deadlines more like guidelines. This works both for and against us, as I am sure all of you have discovered at one time or another.
As for writing goals, it is difficult right now to make long-term writing plans. I have a great many stories and poems bouncing around in my head, but finding the quiet time to put those words to paper is not as easy as it was five years ago. I am a little older every year, and when given the option between half an hour of writing and half an hour of sleep, sleep will win every time.
Then again, April is finally here and today the outside temperature is expected to be above 70°. That would make today the warmest day of the year so far. I don’t know about you-all but warmer weather just makes everything easier.
Even writing.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.
March was a quieter month than usual, as winter dragged on and on and on, sucking the energy out of the world and making it difficult to stay awake during my usual reading times.
Point of interest: This is the first month, since I started tracking things back in 2015, in which I have only acquired one book or book-like object. The previous record for smallest monthly haul was 3.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books and Journals
Short Prose
Back in January, I participated on two AI Art-themed panels panels at ConFusion 2023. I discussed these panel briefly in my ConFusion 2023 follow-up post, but I wanted to add some thoughts here, specifically around ChatGPT and the use of computer generated content in the context of writing.
When it comes to ChatGPT creating content, whether that content be fiction or nonfiction, it does what all of these tools do: remixes previously existing content. I make no claims about whether the thing created by an algorithm is “art” or “creative” or even “new,” but what the new content does not do is transcend its input.
ChatGPT and similar tools are trained by scanning and (hopefully) contextualizing all of the text on the internet. While ChatGPT has (or had) safeguards in place to counter the large amount of hate speech endemic to the modern internet, it still has literally centuries or even millennia of content in its input stream. A great deal of that content is regressive or even revanchist by today’s sensibilities.
And since these machine learning tools can not imagine the new, they will continue to remix the old. Even as new, human-created works become available, this new data is miniscule compared to the vast troves of work on which these tools have already been trained. And a sizeable portion of the new inputs from these tools will be previous output from the same tools, resulting in a sort of solipsism which quickly becomes untethered from any human creativity or input, thus making a large portion of the output of those tools useless except as a point of curiosity.
Additionally, here are a few points of reference:
Some more links on this general topic:
February was a good book month. Three of the five arrivals were from Kickstarters, and two of those were from Kickstarters over two years old. The rest were new purchases. Reading-wise, my reading list for the year caught up with my acquisition list, and I expect it to stay that way for the rest of the year, unless I either get sick of reading (not likely to happen) or I indulge in some serious emotional-support book buying.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books and Journals
Short Prose
The past month was kind of hectic due to a new project at work coinciding with my girlfriend and I, after three years, finally contracting COVID. It wasn’t serious for either of us, thanks to both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted, but it was a boring two and a half weeks of being stuck in the house waiting for the home and PCR tests to come up negative.
Fortunately, we had the cats to keep us entertained.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2023 is: Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?
Well, I mean, YES!!!!!!! All the time. Almost every book I read has a turn of phrase, a scene, a twist, or something like that, which makes me say, “Well, dang! I wish I wrote that.”
The first one that comes to mind is a scene from Neil Gaiman‘s most excellent American Gods. One of the characters, let’s call him “MS,” is killed, and a few of the other characters hold a sort of wake for him, trading stories back and forth. After a little while MS is there, laughing along with the other characters and adding his own comments to the stories. It is handled so subtly that I had to go back and check that I was reading what I thought I was reading. The scene was so well written that there was no sense of disconnect, just a realization that “Well of course MS is going to show up at his own wake. That’s the kind of person [sic] he is!”
This description does scant justice to the scene.
Another is Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Poet Goes to Indiana” from her collection Why I Wake Early. In particular, this section:
…and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was…
Remarkable! In the fifth line, “soft as velvet” would have worked, but it would have been mundane. Ordinary. There are a million things as soft as velvet. But soft as violets? That is something unique, and enduring.
I could go on and on. Almost everything I read has at least one sentence which is noteworthy (and hopefully more than one, but not always). The moments of awe and revelation are infrequent, and valuable in their rarity.
(Also rare, fortunately, are the lines, plot twists, and scenes which make me think, “Thank the heavens I didn’t write that.” Uncommon but not unknown.)
I will repeat one of my guiding principles, as related by author Karen Lord: “Read well.” Reading well is as much a skill as writing well.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.