[A recently-hatched cicada adult, drying out before its first flight.]
This was another busy week and most of my mental capacity was occupied by the current chaos of American politics, as well as stories coming out of the Olympics, though I have yet to see any actual events. I will need to look for recordings when my time frees up. So somewhere around summer 2035.
This past month was an uneven mix of exceptionally busy, quiet and dull. Most of the quiet parts were when I was recovering from the busy parts.
Last week I spent a few days in Chicago with my partner Zyra, where we walked several miles, visited some museums, and ate a lot of exceptionally good food. The food highlight was breakfast on our last day, when we visited Kasama, the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. It was…amazing.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2024 is: Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?
I don’t use AI [sic] for any part of my writing process, though I do write about AI [sic] fairly regularly. As has been discussed previously, AI [sic] is here to stay, and it will be to the detriment of all of the creative arts as well as a large chunk of business, where business is art-adjacent (writing, design, coding, etc.) AI generative tools are, at best, the equivalent of an enthusiastic-but-inexperienced intern or apprentice, in the sense that they can produce something like a first draft, or maybe the rough notes or sketch which can be edited into a first draft. But the process of making AI output usable takes as much time and effort as it would otherwise take for a human to do all the work without help [sic] from an AI [sic].
The one place where AI is an unqualified boon is in corporate capitalism, where companies are riding the hype wave to a minor spike in profits, much like they did with NFTs, cryptocurrencies, etcetera. It’s all glitz and grift, and though something genuinely useful might come out of the current mess, it will likely be something we haven’t thought of yet. As William Gibson wrote in “Burning Chrome“, “The street finds its own uses for things.”
At the beginning of this past week my partner and I drove to Chicago for a few days of visiting friends, sightseeing, and eating a wide variety of amazing food. Travel and prep for travel didn’t leave time for much else.
Vacation travel left little time for more than some brief journaling, though I did write the beginnings of a poem after returning home from Chicago. We’ll see if anything comes of it.
“Israel: Armageddon?” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – This is a good article exploring the possible reasoning behind Israel’s latest tactics, specifically political assassinations. However, the real meat of this link is in the comments, where many Naked Capitalism readers are filling in more details, history, motives, and possibilities around Israel’s ongoing conflict/genocide with Palestine.
July was not my best reading month. Too much work, plus prep for, and participating in, my first vacation of the year. But what my monthly reading lacked in quantity it more than made up for in quality. Plus, Viriconium was a long, extremely dense book. But well worth the effort.
And things continue to be exciting, here in the USA. As of this past Sunday (July 21), Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris as the new candidate. Assuming the Democratic party power players don’t fuck this up – and there is every reason to expect that they will, in fact, fuck this up – I look forward to voting for Harris. I don’t think she is a perfect candidate, but she is the best one at present for beating Trump and slowing the inevitable slide into full-on Nationalist Christian (or “Nat C”, which has an appropriate ring to it) totalitarianism.
Reading
I finished M. John Harrison’s Viriconium after almost a month of steady progress. What a beautiful, dense, poetic, difficult read! As I commented on Bluesky, I would shelve Viriconium between Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. More for writing style in the latter case than for content.
Writing
Though I am on vacation this week and next I find it difficult to put my head in the space necessary to put words to page. That said, I am making some good progress in my world building for Cacophonous (and slight progress for Up the River to the Mountains), and have come up with some interesting ideas for past weekly writing prompts. If only I had the focus to follow through with any of these.
And I also wrote a poem! And made some notes for improvements!
“Free George R. R. Martin from The Winds of Winter” (Maddy Myers, Polygon) – This article caught my attention (ha!) due to its discussion of ADHD and “ADHD paralysis“, in particular the line “you do want to write — you just cannot get yourself to start.” That is where I am and have been for most of the year. I don’t know if I have the ADHD part, but I definitely have the paralysis part when it comes to long-form writing.
[Our ginger girl Poe, checking out the neighborhood.]
Well, it’s certainly been a week. Just after I posted the previous roundup, word came out that disgraced former President, adjudicated rapist, and convicted felon Donald Trump was slightly injured in a shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania. Much more importantly, one of the attendees, Corey Comperatore, a retired firefighter, was killed, and two other attendees seriously injured in the attack. The gunman, a 20-year-old white male Republican armed with an AR-15, was immediately killed by secret service agents.
Already Trump’s bootlicks are blaming anybody except young white male Republicans with easy access to assault weapons. And they are blaming anything except the violent rhetoric of the previous president, who lost tremendously to President Biden and then threw a temper tantrum and tried to stage a coup. At every stage of his political career Trump has advocated for and encouraged violence in the political arena. The only way it should be a surprise is that, rather than targeting a classroom (as young men with easy access to assault weapons usually do) the gunman targeted Trump.
And already, Trump’s bootlicks are trying to make him out as a hero. This is demonstrably false. There is nothing different about Trump today than there was in the hours before the attack. He is the exact same violence-cheering fascist he was before one of his own tried to take him out. Trump is not a victim. Mr. Comperatore is a victim. Comperatore’s family are victims. Trump is not. David Dutch and James Copenhaver, the two attendees who were critically injured in the attack, are victims. Trump is not.
Trump is spinning his survival and minor injury during the attack as proof that he is fit to be president, which demonstrates a level of political intelligence expected from a failed reality show host. And the people who vote for him are eating it up. From their point of view, anyone who encourages such high levels of violence and division must be doing something right, and they feel if Trump returns to office they will be part of his in-group and will be allowed to indulge in the violence which Trump has been advocating for his entire political career. They’ll just turn it outward against their myriad imaginary enemies and oppressors, rather than inward toward the ideology which has given them permission to openly be fascists.
As the meme says, bad things happening to bad people doesn’t turn them into good people.
On Monday, Trump’s owners picked J.D. “Bougiebilly” Vance to be Trump’s running mate.
At the moment this post goes live, Trump and Vance are holding a rally about a mile from here, accompanied by a massive fleet of emasculated manbabies in big trucks which are covered with decorations which advocate for violence both abstract and particular. Which is redundant, since the existence of MAGA is an act of violence.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Reading
I am still reading Viriconium. The events of the past few weeks are keeping me distracted enough that I don’t have the focus to dive into this beautiful book as deeply as I would like.
Writing
Based on a recommendation from a member of my writing group, I set up an account at Notion.so, and am playing around with building a wiki for my work-in-progress Cacophonous. I want to test things a little before I move several years of notes to a new platform.
[The bloom at the top of a six foot tall thistle plant in our back yard.]
This past week was, like so many of the previous weeks, too busy to do much beyond working, working out, and the myriad maintenance projects which come with owning a house.
Reading
I am well on my way through M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and loving every page of it. The writing therein is difficult to read quickly, and Harrison’s prose worth lingering over, so this might be another month-long read.
Writing
My world-building documents grow in size and number, and I have taken up, as a writing exercise, writing and re-writing the first paragraph or page of Cacophonous. I think of it as revving my engine, in the hopes that one of the revs will turn into a launch. If nothing else, I will have a SMASHING first paragraph.
Book Marks – A new review aggregator site (think Rotten Tomatoes) for books. A project of Literary Hub. Browsing through here brought to my attention a new book called Black Pill by Elle Reeve. A quick search of “black pill” brought me to the following link:
“Misogynist Incels and Male Supremacism” (Megan Kelly, Alex DiBranco, Dr. Julia R. DeCook, New America) – Because it needs to be repeated ad infinitum, any time a member of an in-group thinks their problems are caused by members of the corresponding out-group: Never in the history of the USA have men been systematically oppressed or marginalized for being men. To believe otherwise is ignorant. To act in support of that belief is cowardly.
[A baby rabbit hiding behind a weed in our back yard. Since the major landscaping work last year, the flora has rebounded astoundingly, and this has brought an influx of fauna, like the wee beastie above.]
Oh, what a week. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision, the USA is now officially a monarchy. The USA has always, thanks to our style of capitalism, been a neofeudalist country, but the confirmation that the President can do no wrong (as long as his actions align with the wishes of the religious and moneyed interests which determine who gets to hold which office) makes the USA no different from any other failed state run by a dictator. And the difference between an authoritarian democracy and a straight-up monarchy is really just splitting hairs.
Reading
Many years ago I picked up M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. I thought I had read it cover to cover, but upon re-opening the book I realize I never made it through the first section. This is unfortunate, as Viriconium is currently one of my favorite reads of the year.
Writing
I had the week off from work, and I managed to sneak in some writing time, mostly world-building and some thoughts about the recent confirmation by SCOTUS that the USA is, in fact, a fascist state.
“How white victimhood is shaping a second Trump term” (Zack Beauchamp, Vox) – This is an interesting title, because never in the history of the USA have white people been victims because they are white. Never in the history of the USA have white people been repressed, oppressed, or marginalized for the color of their skin, in any context, at any level. Never once. The white supremacists and christian nationalists (who are really all the same people) at the core of Trump’s fan base are indulging, as they always do, in “DARVO” (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender). But since the American version of conservatism is nothing more than the continuation of the Confederacy, which itself was nothing more than the continuation of European Feudalism on American soil, the white supremacist mindset is at the heart of every conservative idea and action. If that were not the case, there would be no uproar about the teaching of Critical Race Theory. QED.
[A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]
After many months of burnout, distraction, sleep deprivation, and something which is almost certainly depression, I have written some words.
Not many, granted, and those words will almost certainly be swapped out for other, better words at some point in the future.
But for now, I have written some words.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2024 is: What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?
The first draft of most of my creative work starts in one of my journals. For poetry, journals are where I create first, second, and sometimes even final drafts. Sometimes, naturally, the first draft is the final draft, never to be touched again.
For prose, journals are where I write outlines, snippets, character names, and descriptions, and so on. Again, many times that is as far as things go.
But for those ideas which have promise, I exclusively use Google Docs.
I use Google Docs for everything, for the following reasons:
It is online. I don’t need to install anything
Auto-save (!!!)
Stored remotely. A computer crash or errant cup of coffee won’t erase my text
Easy to export/download in a variety of formats, if I need to pull the text into a more feature-rich tool like Scrivener or MS Word.
Can access my files from a variety of devices.
Regarding point 4, I have almost never needed to use a tool more complex than a Google Doc. If I create an epic fantasy novel, I imagine Scrivener will become vital.
