AI has been a constant whining point of late and I’ve spoken about it at some length, not that people like it very much. Guess what? AI isn’t going to go away. Learn to deal. Of course, lots of people hate that fact, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Last night, I caught a new video by Red Letter Media on it, I’ll link it below if you want to take a look, but I was thinking about it afterwards and I think that the time is coming rapidly where everything that people fear most is going to come to pass.
So let’s talk about it.
I had an interesting challenge posed to me recently, and by recently, I mean near the beginning of the year. An author friend challenged me to write a horror book, or, if not pure horror, a book with horror elements in my standard genre. In exchange, he was going to add sci-fi elements to one of his books, just to see how it went.
The original version of Phantoms was written in 1983. I’ve read plenty of Koontz’ books, but the real fan when I was growing up was my sister, who read a ton of them. I’ve been challenged to write horror elements into a book and I’ve been doing research, including reading horror-esque books, in preparation.
I haven’t done this a lot, not sure how much I will in the future, but recently, I decided to get through the huge backlog of books that I’ve had sitting around. Mostly, that’s been done by cutting the majority of social media out of my life because it’s just crap, so I went back to reading for a couple of hours a day instead of staring at a screen. Best decision I’ve made recently. So I’ve made it through a bunch of books in the last couple of weeks, but this time, I wanted to talk about Starter Villain, a 2023 novel by John Scalzi. Was it any good? Let’s find out.
I just caught a video from Film Threat on AI and the death of Hollywood and while I usually like what Chris Gore has to say, this time I disagree. Granted, he depends on the survival of Hollywood for his livelihood and he doesn’t want things to change, but I’m not at all like that.
I just got done with a long discussion with a young person on Facebook in a writing group. They were claiming that writing is automatically against any young writer. Why? Because they weren’t instantly successful with their very first book with absolutely no effort on their part. Therefore, it’s all a conspiracy!
I was at Orcoexpo yesterday and beyond having a lot of fun and spending way too much money, I got to talk to some of my dealer friends that I haven’t seen for a while. As I was poking through their boxes, there was a guy sitting next to me who said he only collects used stamps and saw that I was only pulling mint.
This tends to confuse a lot of people, especially beginners so let me give you a couple of pointers on producing a book that will possibly sell, since there are no guarantees. None of these steps are easy or quick. Prepare yourself for that. If you actually want to sell a book, instead of just stroking your own ego, strap in for the long haul because that’s what it’s going to take.