Writing - Good Work in Bad Times
... and some important "save copyright" actions for now at the end
This newsletter is about writing and publishing. The AI campaign stuff is at the end.
This lizard is not letting the state of the world put him off. Francesco Ungaro, Unsplash.
I’m as pessimistic about the world as I have ever been. And yet right now, I feel on a writing roll. I have made the conscious decision as follows
1. I can’t sit on my hands about the state of the world. Morally and mentally, I can’t.
2. But I cannot do everything. Worrying about that will drive me mad, making me to spiral uselessly between 1000 valid concerns.
3. So, I will select things I can do to bind up wounds, right wrongs, and stand up for truth. Trying to do a couple of things a week, or more.
4. I will do things that engage directly with people. The digital world has its advantages but it also can distance us from each other, if that’s all we do.
5. I’m going to keep writing stuff which shows the dark but also, that we are not helpless. Stuff more optimistic than I am. Partly, because I couldn’t live with a gloomy book for two years.
6. OK, people who want to say everything is hopeless because people doing stuff makes them guilty, please don’t. At least not out loud and next to me.
7. Finally, I’ll make sure the people I love/like/appreciate know I do.
Zanzibar 2025
I am re-reading John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a SF classic. He’s an author who avoided simplistic books and wide-eyed optimism. He is out of fashion. And yet, Stand on Zanzibar, Shock Wave Rider and his best other books dive into a future which was messy and contradictory, driven by different forces, where people talk slang, old and new coexist, with diverse human responses to their fucked-up times. People talk about science fiction as prophetic, so excuse a dip into theology. Prophets were usually ‘warning’ and speaking truth to power, more than they were ‘predicting’.
So Brunner’s 2010 was written in 1968. He has many things right and many wrong. It’s amazing that the fake future prose and style reeks so much of the late 60s. Shock Wave Rider gives us tyrannical data, hackers, false IDs and false news.
Brunner has Heinlein disease, a wise and wise-cracking old male character to explain stuff to us. What Brunner did get was that despite all the dystopias warning us, we still ended up in one – and in some ways, one which would have been dubbed extreme satire. For all his faults, Brunner is a writer much better deserving of our memory than some successful old dinosaurs.
Writing objectives
My lovely partner thinks I’d be happier if I stopped worrying about getting published, or publishing myself, and just wrote for its own sake. Like an Ancient Roman, having a few friends around for dinner and inflicting his latest book on them, by reading it. If you wanted a copy, you sent a scribe to hand-copy one for you.
It’s great to have goals under your control, so ‘not being published again’ or ‘indifferent whether I’m published again’ are very wise goals and perfectly achievable. It’s just I am not there yet.
My issue is - people liked Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds. They found it heartfelt but also smart. It suited the SFF crew who want feelings and the people who thought no SFF had real characters in it.
People who have seen them, like the novel, DEAR HEART, and my two novellas DARK DEEDS IN SUNCUP FALLS and TOP TIPS FOR LOVING A LIZARD. (Oh boy, I look forward to talking about that one.)
Don’t I owe it to people who like my stuff to get it to them? I’d rather have 600 or 6000 people read it than sixty. Ideally 60,000+.
The paradox of giving something away free is, many free eBooks aren’t read, certainly not read immediately. Some self-publishers charge purely to weed out non-readers
So I continue to push DEAR HEART where I can, I’m planning to submit both novellas as I can, and I am exploring all my options. Except, for now, giving up.
Charles Gouweloos, Artvees
“I love your AI polemics” – a reader
Government consultation ends 25th February, ie next Tuesday. 2500 respondents so far. Apparently “a lot” but rather less than the two million creatives this might hit. One last push to stop the theft. Good advice on filling this out here, concentrating on key questions.
On the 25th there’s going to be a social thing, sharing concerns, actions, idiotic replies from pro AI people, etc. Me, I’d have started this in the last ten days to encourage more people to act. Society of Authors says, Make some noise: Share your letters to MPs and more on social media on 25 February with the hashtags #PayTheCreator and #MadeByHumans.
Contact your MP -before, on, or after the 25th. The battle moves to Parliament and to the Government. Couple of ways here.
I’m working with around 40 creatives at the All Good Bookshop to lobby our local MP, Catherine West. She really liked Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, so I hope sympathetic. As a cooperative, largely run by volunteers, the shop supports all sorts of writers, performers, artists and film and photo folks, as well as working with schools. They can order anything so use them as an alternative to Big Muddy River.
I could give a selection of “AI search wrong” “AI summary wrong” “Extraordinarily bad thing done by AI company” stories. But I’m not going to.
I will emphasise that using machine learning, by subject experts (1) , on a specific consented data set (2), for a clear ethically thought through end result (3), not claiming it is intelligent (4), could very well be productive. Medical examples abound. Even so, its use needs to be properly tested. Most “AI” fails all four.
Corporate response sent with evidence that licensing works and copyright law isn’t uncertain. Personal response sent to local MP who’s toeing the party line, much to my disgust. Probably goes part of the way to explaining why I didn’t vote for her at the last election. I was at a meeting yesterday when it was said there were over 4,000 responses but still far fewer than should be sent.