Category Archives: writing

Glory Be to [Insert Name of Country Here]

books, internet, politics, writing Leave a comment

AI and Its Effect on the Book Publishing Industry (goodereader.com)Julie Plec and More WGA Members Detail Writers Strike Negotiations, Demand Streamers to Release Ratings: ‘We’re Mad’ (Variety via msn.com) One personal project that always seems to be on the back burner for me is an examination of the fiction written during the Cold War in the Soviet bloc countries. My interest in this started about a decade ago, after Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son won the Pulitzer. For his novel, Johnson did extensive studies…

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Shedding the Weight of Old Dreams

computing, internet, personal, writing Leave a comment

While testing out the new ChatGPT chatbot several days ago, as I detailed in my most recent blog, I had neglected to notice that the bot allowed you to post follow-up questions in your session, to ask for more information or clarifications or such. While not perfect, this makes the chatbot exponentially more useful at certain tasks, so I want to take back what I said last week and state, on the record, that ChatGPT does represent a quantum leap forward in chatbot technology. I’ve…

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This Title is a Very Ideal Title, Which Does Things Like Inform Readers About the Blog’s Subject Matter

arts, personal, teaching, writing Leave a comment

AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays — should professors worry? (nature.com) For a long time now, I’ve wanted to study Cold War-era fiction from the communist countries of the era. It’s fairly well-known that authors in those countries were restricted in how they wrote, essentially conscripted as propagandists for the state. As such, from the accounts I’ve read, most stories from those countries are stultifying in their adherence to formulas, protagonists invariably coming to sing the praises of communism (if they weren’t already at the…

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Overloaded

personal, writing Leave a comment

Since a large part of the impetus for me launching the .org in 2000 was my first go-through of The Artist’s Way, I wrote about it so much in the early days of this website that it almost became a form of self-parody. Even now that I’m teaching The Artist’s Way workshops through the Continuing Education department of our parent campus, sometimes I wonder if I’ve given the programme an outsized role in my development over the past two decades. One thing is for sure,…

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Sidelined

personal, writing Leave a comment

Between the large number of classes I wound up teaching this past spring semester, and all the other craziness that’s been sideswiping me here in 2021, my ability to do research for my next book just hasn’t been what I want it to be. When I relaunched my Patreon last summer with an exclusive-content model, where a substantial amount of that content is going to be my extended thoughts about the books I’ve been reading, I vowed that I would read a minimum of five…

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