This past week was the first week this year in which I didn’t put in a minimum of 45 hours at work. In theory this would mean that I could take that extra time and brain capacity and put it to good use. In practice, I took that extra time and started up a new game of Stardew Valley. Did I read much? Nope. Did I write much? Nope.

However, this mental down-time has done me some good, as my stress level is much-reduced. Stardew Valley doesn’t take a lot of brain power to play, and as a gaming experience it is peaceful and delightful, and emotionally in the same realm as having a cat dozing on my lap.

All of which is to say, this past week was for decompression and rest. Next week can be for more cerebral pursuits.

Reading

I didn’t read much this week. I looked at a couple of pages of Efrain Kristal’s Invisible Work, but will probably need to go back and re-read those pages, as nothing stuck.

In the past week I have picked up two new books – A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev, and Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life, the new biography written by Todd Goddard. I had ordered the Turgenev back in May, right before life became, er, complicated. The book was backordered at the publisher and I quickly forgot I had ever ordered it. The Harrison bio was published early last week and was also backordered at the publisher, but it arrived at Books & Mortar yesterday.

This is an interesting coincidence. I have been aware of the Turgenev for a long time, first thanks to my Russian Studies classes at Grand Valley State University back in the early 1990s, and more recently because Harrison mentions Turgenev’s book in several places in his fiction and non-fiction writing. So to have both books arrive in the same week was a nice boost to my mood.

And I had paid for the Turgenev when I ordered it six months ago, this felt like getting a free book!

Writing

I am just about ready to pound out a couple of thousand words using the following prompts:

Subject: Kaiju, Fae
Setting: Urban
Genre: Technothriller

Notice that I did not say “I will complete writing etc.” as I have not yet started this story, for reasons outlined above.

While I am following the same techniques for this year’s Month of Writing that I did two years ago, I am making sure I have a solid story idea before I begin writing, rather than just pounding out words five minutes after generating the prompt. And as you can see, this combination of prompts is a doozie. I have figured out enough of the story that I can begin writing, but considering the genre, “kaiju” and “fae” will be metaphorical.

That is, more metaphorical than usual.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Apocalypse, Cryptids
Setting: Mountains
Genre: Slipstream

Listening

“The Distance” by Cake, from their 1996 album Fashion Nugget. In 1996 I was living in Eastown, working at a bookstore, and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I think I was primed for “The Distance” to re-surface in my awareness because of a conversation I had with my partner a couple of weeks ago, discussing the music we listen to when we are in “the zone.” Also Cake has some similarities to one of my favorite bands back in The Day, Soul Coughing.

Interesting Links

• “Cities Panic Over Having to Release Mass Surveillance Recordings” (Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, via Naked Capitalism)
• “Can “adversarial poetry” save us from AI?” (James Folta, LitHub) – Folta discusses the ARXIV paper “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models.” This is some crazy shit. It is well-known that the commercial LLMs have safety guidelines built in so that people can’t e.g. learn how to build a dirty bomb in their basement, etc. However, phrasing queries as verse seems to confuse the part of the model which guards against such queries. NOTE THAT I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS!