Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Yes it all gets rather confusing now, doesn’t it. SPFBO 9 is now up and running, but I’m still doing my vague reviews from SPFBO 8 and I’m on my 7^th book. Voracious reader, me. (Too much internet, too little book is the truth.)

Book 7 was better than book 6! I did not think it possible! It has some YA aspects I find a little overworked, I’m always dubious when people or races veer too close to categories rather than characters, and I did roll my eyes a little at some things here and there, but I reckon that was more to do with my old-fartery than any defect in the writing.

Because it was great, a fantastic book, brilliantly plotted, well characterized, with excellent evolution of personalities and their interactions, time was given for things to develop, and used well. So nice not to feel rushed into an insta-love, but feel it brewing, and not even get to fruition in this book! There are more—I expect true love to win out, or maybe not, this author does like their twists and turns, and so far, their instincts have been excellent in where to turn, and more importantly, why, to keep the reader thoroughly bought in. Did I say I thought this book was excellent? SPFBO 8 clearly had the best writers in it ever, because I was a participant. Pause for sarcasm.

Also, the book clearly has themes, which I love (themes in general, not just the themes in this novel). And they work. Actions and events are not horseshoed into them, they simply fit, supplement and illustrate the themes, if you care to notice. Sometimes the language does thrust you face first into the theme, but not often, so it doesn’t feel like a polemic overall: you just know, and can’t help but speculate about where the characters, the story, the cosmos are going, because the themes are infused into all of them, just enough to deepen the flavour nicely.

Seriously, I am amazed by the talent I have witnessed in seven reads. There are so many incredibly talented writers out there. I keep on having to re-evaluate the bar with each book I read. I thought 6 hit it out of the park, only to find 7 going further out of the park, even with my nit-picky reservations attached!

Pause for lament about AI allowing fuckwits to produce fiction. New AI generated ebooks are flooding onto the kindle platform, and the idea that just because human generated books were appearing at about 1 million a year onto Amazon means that AI generated content is no biggie, it will just dilute the torrent of crap (sorry, low quality work), but essentially make no difference to the platform as a whole—an argument made in the insert of this interesting article on how AI will transform the publishing industry, is just fatuous. One million could become tens of millions, hundreds—how could that not potentially “muck up the channel”? Why waste server space on that much new content? It will be the excuse to make authors pay for the hosting of their work online, “to weed out the bots”, they’ll say, but just another way to monetize poor human authors. It is insane. The insert does acknowledge that if the AI quality (which is inevitable to my mind) improves, the return to human authors will decline. D’oh! And when you have joe schmoe able to pump out 300 books a year based on their ‘great ideas’, and those books are brilliantly written by their AI tool, well, I’m screwed. We all might be. And if publishing houses can use AI in a generation or two, so next 2 years at this rate, to produce work on demand to their schedule: why bother with authors at all? They’re just a drag on the bottom line after all! (For the 2 year guesstimate: see this article in Forbes from 2020 where the author pooh poohs the idea of AI writing novels (but loves the idea for CEOs to use as ghost researchers/writers for their deathless prose regarding business) and see how well it has aged. She also likens AI to the industrial revolution and while many people lost their jobs then, the standard of living rose. I’m sure that will be of great comfort to anyone replaced by AI functionality in her industry.)

Second and final paragraph of latest rant about AI. What bugs me about this is that folk who never would have put in the hard work to write a book will now say they wrote multiple books, without shame. And I am a monumentally lazy person—when not working as a nurse—why do you think it took me until 46 to finally publish a book? (Possibly putting so much effort into the day job may have had an effect, TBH.) So, as a lazy person, having an AI do the work should appeal, no? No. Absolutely and forever no. I want all the words, all the highs and hits, all the missteps and mistakes on the page to be mine. So I’m also a control freak. And to anyone who tries to minimize the impact of AI, to say it’s just a tool like desktop publishing was, that it is similar to what a current author does with word processors and beta readers and an editor that adjusts (suggests alterations to) the text for them, to those folks I say this: fine—do it the old way then and see if you can crank out five books in a month, forever. Get out of here with that crap.

Ok, third paragraph ranting about AI. The thing is, when I was a teen, I probably would have loved to be able to use a tool to do all the ‘boring’ writing for me. My laziness was at its absolute peak in those years: it is astonishing I got any qualifications out of school. I would have taken ownership, I would have said it was mine, because the ideas were mine, but that doesn’t stop it being an obvious shortcut, and that while I could take credit for the ideas, how could I possibly take credit for the writing, the characterization, the dialogue? Because I told the AI that Jojo’s dialogue should be dark but zany? It that sufficient? I do not think so. I mean in my teens I still wrote one and a half crap books, (plus a couple of choose your own adventure books) so even then I had the stamina and the drive for long form writing/complex projects involving writing, just not the skills. An AI that gave me the skills without any understanding of them would have left me forever stunted as an artist, forever questioning if I was really a writer, if the tool did most of the work at the click of a button. I believe it would ultimately have been harmful to me as a person driven to create, if I created using such tools, and never earned the hard yards myself. The people who AI helps to write the book they never had time for were never going to write that book, and with AI they still haven’t, they’ve just cheated. I’m old, get off my lawn, I don’t care. And the cheats won’t prosper long because they will in turn be replaced by ideas people, a cavalcade of James Patterson style ad-types churning out ideas and having the AI give it form rather than a human ghostwriter, and those guys won’t last long as the AI gets better at examining existing content, and writing something new, something in the gaps of what already exists. It will be the “something you know, but with that one twist” genre, (across any genre you can name) to infinity. It won’t be paradigm shifting, or terribly original, but it will be different from everything that has come before, delivered in a familiar and comforting wrapper (writing style) for consumers to consume. We will be in creative hell, and artists will be drowned out by the vast volume AI will be able to produce day in and out, unceasingly, never tiring, never slowing down, if anything, getting faster.

And that grim future, my friends, is so sad when I look at my fellow authors in SPFBO 8 and see what talent they have, and what promise. Pause to pray none of the books I have read were AI generated or assisted. And to realize what a challenge all human talent will face in the years ahead. I hope I’m wrong. I fear I am not. I will continue to write, for now, because for me it is still a drive I must answer, but I wonder if in a future landscape where AI entertainment dominates, will that drive perhaps die a little sooner than it otherwise may have done?

I will continue to read my cohort. I may continue to rant on about AI in writing. I will finish my book, (back down to 19 problems, with more to go before this day is done!), and I will write the next. And then, well by then, in a year or two, everything may have changed: I’ll deal with that future if/when it has become my present. Stay focused my friends.