Now more than ever, being you is what makes art. AI-prompted images and text are here, and while much of it is still apparent, it’s not going to be long before it gets really good. I see people saying AI will never create something on the same level as humans, but it’s already eclipsing the […]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m friends with quite a few artists. Lately, I’ve seen quite a few of them share thoughts about artificial intelligence generating “art.” Feelings range from machine-learned art taking jobs and stealing styles to it all being just another tool. AI Writing I friend recently posted a work of micro fiction on […]

I’ve mentioned some of my writing close calls over the years: a large studio interested in a screenplay they said they would have fought for, but…they were being acquired by another studio wanting a new direction; and I’ve had partial and full manuscript requests from agents over the years. (In some cases, from people representing […]

It snuck up on me this year: September. I’ve been busy at work and working on the next Not About Lumberjacks story. Other things have had my attention. And then someone mentioned Labor Day weekend almost being here and… Well, like I said: September snuck up on me this year. The September Silence Each September, […]

I never liked the term “Trigger Warning.” It quickly became synonymous with mocking people who wanted to know what might pop up in a story — as though that’s such a bad thing to consider. People who wanted to know what might be in a story were deemed weak…it’s literature after all, and we survived […]

I used to be in a writing group with two good friends. One evening, we let another friend — someone who doesn’t write fiction — sit in. He was impressed by the effort my friends and I put into the stories we wrote. It wasn’t our friends’ intent, but he said something about how he […]

The September Silence begins tomorrow. Each year, for all of September, I take a month-long social media break. I treat it like my writing new year — despite the heat of Texas still making summer drag into late October or early November. When September rolls around, I’m like a little kid still living up north. […]

I’ve been a fan of Lilah Sturges’s writing since a friend (Mark Finn) joined a shared world fiction anthology called Clockwork Storybook in the late 90s. In a Twitter thread this morning, Lilah talked about a concept I hate: Wanting/Not Wanting something enough. And then she said something that really hit me: …maybe I don’t […]

The last entry, here, was about the first week of the 2021 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge. (To be fair, for some reason, calling it a challenge always seems a bit…not right. It is a challenge — you’re shooting for a daily word count. But it’s never felt like other challenges in the way […]

I mentioned last week that I’m taking part in the 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge. So…how did the first week go? Week One I wrote 5,315 words in the first week. (Some years I blow past daily word counts, and other years I don’t even hit 3,000.) A friend is curious about how the […]