Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

I, Robot Author

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I was just reading about the second serious scandal concerning AI generated fiction being published by experts in the world of publishing.  In the last scandal Hatchette bought a self-published book because the author managed to attract a very large number of readers on her own.  After they republished the book, it was discovered that there was a lot of very obvious AI generated content in it.

In the present scandal a prestigious contest that accepts fiction from amateurs living in the countries of the British Commonwealth had three of the five winners flagged by readers as being AI generated by a capable software used for this function.

Here’s a sample of the text:

“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”

Okay, what the hell does “white rum hot as apology” mean?  It doesn’t mean anything.  It’s AI slop that it thinks sounds “poetic.”

Now five “Experts” picked this gibberish and declared it worthy of a prestigious award.  Why?  Well, the only thing I notice that both scandals include are woke publishing “experts” selecting the work of minority writers without bothering to see if it’s any good or even written by human beings.

The most hilarious aspect of the latest scandal is that the contest judges refuse to admit that they’ve been made to look like fools and the stories are still up on their site as the winners.

I watched a YouTube video by a young woman who considers herself a seasoned editor and although she agrees that the text is extremely unlikely not to be AI slop she does add the obligatory warning that we should remember that minority writers must not be singled out as more highly suspect just because they always seem to be the ones whose work slips through the editors who are afraid of being called racists if they look too closely at their work and find it’s not very good.

I guess it’s not enough that the publishing world gives precedence to any writer who isn’t a straight white man.  Now they add robots as long as they’re not straight white male robots or at least not working under one of their names.  Well, be that as it may, today I officially began work on the sequel to my book.  I began the outline by writing out a bunch of plot lines to choose between.

Plot Threads

  • Update on Bogey and his life
  • Update on Grace and her boys
  • President Chastain’s crises
    1. Constitutional Convention
    2. Seceding States
    3. Potential Military Insurrection
    4. Personal Problems (health)
    5. Relations with Connors’ Group
  • Connors’ crises
    1. Disaffected Groups with His Organization
    2. Relations with federal and state officials
    3. Connors’ indecision and doubts
    4. Disagreements with Cutter and others
    5. Personal Problems (Grace, Bogey)
  • America’s Crisis of Instability
  • World’s Crisis of Instability
  • Technical Instability

So that’s a lot of stuff.  I’m not sure all of these will be included but it’s always best to start with the kitchen sink and pare it back.  Well, take that Chat GPT.

Catching Up with Becky

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So, now I have to start writing my next book.  And as I decided after finishing the last one, this time I must outline the story ahead of time.  Sure, it’s less fun than just starting to type and see where it ends up.  But it’s also so much less dangerous.  I remember in the last third of “The Sniper” I painted myself into a corner and I had to delete five thousand words and start off in another direction.  And I got seriously confused and had to do a bunch of outlining anyway, so I might as well do some big picture plot planning at the beginning and leave the fine tuning to my unconscious while it’s flowing through my fingertips.

But it’s funny.  It’s not plot events that have been running through my head lately.  It’s characters.  I feel like I want more people and different people showing up in the story this time around.  I want some humorous characters showing up.  I might even want a joke or two being told.  And I think I want an academic type and maybe even an actor.  I was listening to some Shakespeare recently.  It was John Gielgud reciting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth.  And it struck me that a little poetry and a little philosophy might be a lot of fun to write into even a story like mine.  Now, mind you, I said a little poetry.  And it doesn’t have to look like poetry.  It just has to signify to me that maybe the character on the page has an immortal soul after all.

And as for philosophy, well, it can be practical philosophy.  It can be political philosophy.  And what could be more timely than political philosophy in this time of collapsing republics and demagogues.  Who knows, maybe Connors and Cutter may discuss the application of artificial intelligence to the problem of optimizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in North America after the end of Boghadair’s War.  Perhaps a completely impartial intelligence could be conjured up to play Solomon to modern day Americans who no longer seem able to live and let live.  Maybe it can cut the baby in half in some modern sense and return us to a functioning society again.  And when I mention Solomon, I think it’s partially because I think there’s a religious (or at least spiritual) dimension to our problems and for which a spiritual solution is necessary.  And Christian revivals are a recurring theme in American history.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking we all need a spiritual boost just about now.

So, yeah, I haven’t got a working plot outline yet but I think it’s time to start.  As I’ve said, I think Bogey will not be dragged into the main action any time soon but personally he’s tied intimately to several important characters and I’m sure he’ll interact with them.  Plus, I have to find out what happened with him and Becky.  That sounded interesting.

Fame and Fortune

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So yesterday I finally got my book onto Kindle Unlimited.  Huzzah!!!

An then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  A day later the page counter for KENP stood at zero.  This seemed unpromising.  So, I closed down the laptop and did something else.

I took a juvenile milk snake that I found hiding under the famous copper sheet and shot a photo shoot of his best profile.  And then we had lunch and worked on some other projects.  I put an air conditioning unit in one of the windows and I started weeding the raspberry patch and I helped clean some kind of ooze that had accumulated on the new fish pond.

And when I checked the KENP after all that, the counter was at one!  Now that’s not one book that’s one page.  So, if a book pays me forty cents what does a page earn me?  Well, you can do the math.  If the book is about two hundred and fifty-two pages long then that page is worth 0.15873 cents in cold hard cash.  If Jeff Bezos took a penny and a pair of tin snips (zinc snips?) and did some rudimentary trigonometric calculations he could probably nip off an arc from the edge of the coin that would somewhat represent this hefty sum.  So, I shut down the laptop again and began to recalibrate my plans to purchase that summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

I began reading some more of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  You know this PKD is a very talented writer but I don’t think he spent a lot of his life smiling.  In fact, I think WWIII was probably one of the lighter topics he thought about.  He’s got the extinction of most animal species, widespread human chromosomal damage, widespread human brain damage and bizarre religious tendencies as the window dressing of his highly depressed main characters.  After a little of this I decided to take a break.  Apparently, this wasn’t going to be Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah.  It’s going to be a lot less chirpy.  So, I got in touch with the First Selectman and arranged a special meeting to discuss my succession plan as his special assistant in charge of burying the bodies.  Unfortunately, the committee was unable to locate anyone stupid enough to agree to the position.  I came home a few hours later and checked my KENP counter.  It was seventeen pages.  That’s 2.6984 cents.  Well!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  At this rate I’ll be able to afford my favorite Dunkin Donuts donut (an old fashioned) by Fall.

And I think my addition to the Kindle Unlimited rolls has netted me my first troll.  He was pretending to be a fairly successful non-fiction author but was unaware that he wasn’t supposed to be a fiction author so his answers didn’t track with that.  I brought this to his attention and he started making incoherent sentences.  Well, what can you do?  Now that I’m on the road to fame and fortune everyone wants a piece of me.  J K Rowlings eat your heart out.

What’s KENP?

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So, there are a lot of things going on.  I reached 500 reads on Royal Road but out of those 500 reads not a single comment or review was left.  And since I wanted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, I had to shut down any sites that had e-books other than Amazon.  So, I deleted “The Sniper” from Royal Road and BookFunnel so that I could test out Kindle Unlimited for at least ninety days.  And of course, I’ve been checking Amazon to see how many KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) of the “The Sniper” have been read.  And, of course, a watched pot never boils.  But I also wonder if Kindle Unlimited will lower the number of e-books I’ll sell on KDP.  And now I’ll also have to figure out how to set up incentives and other come-ons that Amazon has thought up for the poor confused authors out there.

I started reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” today.  So right from the git-go PKD’s dystopia certainly has a lot of drugs to control the emotional state of its citizens.  Also, Rick Deckard apparently has a wife that doesn’t seem to like him at all.  He also seems to have artificial sheep.  So, this isn’t exactly Blade Runner so far.  But I’m a patient man and I’ll plow my way in hoping that Roy Baty shows up and offs the founder of the Tyrell Corporation and talks about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I just hope it’s that cool.

I had my weekly coffee walk zoom with the boys.  One of them was inspired by my book and is now writing several short stories.  Kudos to him.  And we were talking about how the old firm has DEI’d itself into a disaster.  They chased out all the old white guys and now the DEI hires have had to hire them back as contractors because they don’t know how the systems work.  They waited so long to upgrade some systems that the hardware is now unavailable from the manufacturers and competency will be needed to replace it with currently available equipment.  But unfortunately, these DEI hires are completely incompetent so … “contractors!”  I told the boys to drive a very hard bargain and make sure the hourly rate is ridiculously expensive.  When the project shows up as a blinking red light on the C-Suite’s monthly checklist of “problems” it will be embarrassing and hilarious when they have to admit they don’t know how their own systems are supposed to work.  And that’s not going to be easy to explain to the FDA.  Being audited by the feds isn’t fun under the best of circumstances.  When you have to admit that product was thrown away due to out of spec conditions that’s a nightmare.  Well anyway.  We laughed and laughed.  The guy who got booted used to be a good guy.  Then he became a true believer in DEI.  After that he became intolerable and we all agreed that he got what he deserved.

Well, that’s enough for now.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall from Here – Practice, Practice.

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Dystopias seem to be the dominant science fiction type in the last decade or two.  And the dopiness of the ones ending up on the large and small screens doesn’t encourage much hope in the genera.  We have the ever popular “Handmaid’s Tale” that bangs away at the female victim of the evil patriarchy trope.  And then there’s the “Hunger Games” which I suppose reflects the idea that somehow resources on Earth are about to collapse and a zero-sum game will emerge where we all will be fighting for our lives to get a loaf of bread.  Wow!  Who knew science fiction could be so much fun?

I’ve recently heard that horror is becoming a big genre with young men (apparently written stories and video and also video games).  But that doesn’t alarm me.  I think this is wrapped up with the popularity of video games and I think that is more a matter of the desire to work through puzzles and shoot monsters with guns (which is always a good thing!).

I have a theory that the current science fiction publishing model will not endure much longer.  I don’t think they can make enough money from selling romantasy porn and feminist dystopia much longer.  Of course, it’s possible that AI writing will completely destabilize all fiction writing.  In that case the whole thing becomes academic.  That would leave us just downloading AI slop at virtually no cost.  But either way the world will be changing to resemble nothing like what we old-timers remember from the before time when books were an industry and grammatical sentences actually existed.

Of course, this is a hell of a time for me to become an author.  But in a sense, it may be the best time for me to write.  The barrier to getting published doesn’t exist.  The only barrier is figuring out a way to let the reading public know my book exists and what it’s about.  But that’s far from a trivial problem.  Key words and algorithmic search engines and Amazon ad management are complicated and confusing topics and I’ll confess that I know next to nothing about any of that.  But I’m slowly picking up some practical and painful experience.

For instance, so far today my Amazon ads have 23,417 impressions.  I believe that means, that number of people had the chance to see my ad on the search pages they viewed on Amazon.  Out of those thousands, only 16 people clicked on my ad.  Out of those 16 people only two bought my book (e-book version).  And that was with the e-book discounted to $0.99.  So, there was $1.98 worth of sales.  Of which I only get 30% (~$0.59).  Now currently the cost per click is $1.71.  Which means so far today I’ve been charged 16 X $1.71 = $27.36!

Obviously, this isn’t the way to become rich through writing.  But it is a very educational exercise to understand how the current self-publishing model leaves quite a bit to be desired.  But I still have few more ideas to try before giving up on my dream of becoming the next great science fiction author.  Excelsior!

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

A Good Day to be a Writer

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Today I went to my tax accountant to discuss my “royalties.”  I waited until now because tax season is much too hectic to talk about 2026 issues to people in that profession.  I have had a few unhappy incidents with the tax man and I go way out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Now this is my new accountant.  In fact, he’s the grandson of my old accountant.  His grandfather is retiring soon so I’m sort of an inheritance.  When I arrived, I saw a kid walking in the front door and after waiting in the waiting room for a few minutes that same kid turned out to be my accountant.  But despite his youthful appearance he proved up to the job of assuaging my fears about ending up in an IRS gulag for high crimes and misdemeanors against the tax code.  Specifically, I was worried that maybe there was some kind of monthly reporting and payment I needed to perform for both the state and federal systems.  I remember when I was dealing with a state agency that required businesses to collect and pay sales tax monthly.

He explained to me that unless I was profiting to the tune of several thousand dollars a month, I wouldn’t need to send any money to the feds but even if I did, I’d be getting it back if I had enough “expenses” (like Amazon Ads and marketing fees) to cover the royalties I received.

At the mention of expenses, I barked a bitter laugh.  I told him the idea that I was profiting from my sales was laughable in the extreme.  Basically, a first book (barring some miraculous viral publicity) was a loss leader for the rest of the sequels.  He agreed that his other author clients had told him about what it took to grow a book business but he also warned me that the feds only give you three years to turn a profit before they stop considering it a business and declare it a hobby for which expenses are not credited.  Well, we’ll have to see about that.

So, we agreed I’d check back with him in June to see if I was any closer to needing to send some cash to the feds.  And he didn’t want to take a fee for his services today but I insisted.  The information I got had so eased my mind that I felt I would be robbing him of a well-earned reward if I didn’t give him fifty bucks.  I mean people who go to therapy to ease their minds pay their psychiatrists many hundreds of dollars and get less peace of mind than I did today.  I would have felt like a thief if I walked out for nothing.

And looking at my book’s Amazon page, I had two new very complimentary reviews.  One was from a friend of mine.  He disclosed our relationship but it was still a very good review.  And another one was from someone who was an Iraq War vet who enjoyed the scenes in the desert.  That kind of made my day.  So today is a good day to be a writer.

Movies, Taxes and World-Building

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Well, what’s to say today?  I was talking to some family and we were discussing this and that and I said that I wanted to see “Project Hail Mary.”  And some knew about it and some had heard a little bit.  Well, I think I talked them into getting together and going to see it.  Now I plan to see it this week with Camera Girl.  She’s not the biggest sff fan by any stretch of the imagination.  When I brough her to see the original Star Wars film she was not particularly impressed.  And come to think of it, she’s never been impressed by any sci fi or fantasy movie (or book) I ever gave her.  Well, I take that back.  She read “The Hobbit” back in 1975 and liked it.  But that was it.  When I told her to read the “Lord of the Rings,” she laughed in my face.  So, she may not be the most willing audience for this movie.  But since one of the characters is a puppet I’m guessing there may be an appeal there to her love of animals.  So, I’m going to see the same movie in the theater twice?  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever done that.  Well, I’m sure it won’t kill me.

The other thing I’m doing next week is go see an accountant about how to pay my taxes on the royalties from my book.  I have an inordinate fear of the Infernal Revenue Service.  I think they’re a malevolent force causing pain and suffering for ordinary people at every turn.  So, I’m going to find out what the process is for this kind of capital gain.  I don’t think I have to pay quarterly but you never know so I’m not taking any chances.  Also, I think there is a way to write off expenses like advertising and marketing so if I can find out whether it’s worth it I may even break even on this whole experiment (maybe!!!).

A friend was asking me about the sequel to the “The Sniper.”  He had particular questions about the back story for some of the characters like Connors and Cutter.  I said I’d love to tell him some of the details of their back stories but I still haven’t made them up yet.  I think he was a little shocked that these important facts didn’t actually exist yet.  Maybe even betrayed for investing in a story that was sort of a Potemkin Village.  But I feel justified in pushing out the corners of my little universe as the spirit moves me.  Although I will admit I’ve decided to do some outlining of the world, at least from a 35,000-foot height.  I need to decide what stories will grow out of the eucatastrophe I set off in the first book.  I mean, you don’t sink the White House, Capitol and Pentagon into the Earth’s crust without taking advantage of the elbow room that provides for political and social upheaval on a grand scale.

A Milestone and a Low Point

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So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.  One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.  Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.  And today I also got my first one-star review.  The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story.  And I can understand his anger.  When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.  But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.  And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far.  Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.

But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience.  It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform.  And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.  And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.  And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story.  After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).  So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.  But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy.  It’s not.  It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.

The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.  But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.  I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.  I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.  After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.  KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.

And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now.  Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis.  If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.  So, let’s see what happens.

Ay, There’s the Rub

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Lately there has been an enormous storm of controversy about AI being used in fiction writing.  Recently it came out that a self-published story that became quite popular was subsequently picked up by a major publishing house and re-issued with the full weight and authority of this powerhouse including professional editing and a new cover.  But then someone looked closely at the self-published edition and saw that not only was it significantly different from the professionally published edition but that the original was obviously a product of AI.  Now, that caused a firestorm and the publisher withdrew the book permanently.

But a cloud of questions swirl around the affair.  Surely the editors who revised the self-published edition must have recognized that they were dealing with a product of AI writing.  Why would they have purchased this title.  It’s assumed the reason was because the book had already found a ready audience and so the motive was monetary.  But there are other factors.  The authoress Mia Ballard is African American and Native American.  In other words, in the world of intersectional identity bingo she was a three-fer!  And so, she was exactly the kind of person that Hachette wanted for their imprint.  But there still remained the fact that she got a bot to write her story.  And that someone blew the whistle on her.  Of course, she claimed that it was an editor who added the AI sections and what she had written was her own.  Oh boy, that’s gonna be a bunch of lawsuits (or it’s just talk that won’t go anywhere).

Of course, the editors are defending themselves by saying that AI detection programs are far from infallible and so they aren’t to blame.  But supposedly the content was pretty obviously terribly written.  Of course, that really makes it interesting that the self-published book was such a hit on Goodreads with over four thousand reviews.  And that would once again jibe with the idea that the “bio” of the writer was one of the big reasons the book was so popular.

The whole scandal seems to show just what a mess the publishing industry has gotten itself into with identity politics becoming the most important factor by which authors and storylines are selected by big publishing houses for their imprimatur.  I guess the same problem is playing out with books that Hollywood is suffering from with their heavy-handed woke propaganda pictures.  People are staying away in droves and the monetary losses have finally gotten so severe that they’ve been forced to drop most of the woke plot elements just to lure paying customers back to the theaters.

Well, now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to self-publish a book I can say that a large part of the satisfaction in writing a book has to be because the author enjoys his creation.  Other than the one in a million phenom that finds the sweet spot in the self-publishing universe everyone else is talking to a small audience and in my opinion the only real failure is if you know that your book isn’t good enough for you yourself to read it for pleasure.

But how soon before AI slop is better than Shakespeare?  Ay, there’s the rub.