Category: Literary Matters

IWSG, December 2024: Is There More?

John Winkelman

The Month of Writing is over, and for the first time since my first attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2013, I did not participate at all. This year has just been too busy and distracting to allow for concentrated creative efforts. I did attend the opening and closing events for the regional group, the West Michigan Author Alliance, but in between, other than cultivating a mild angst about not writing, I did nothing.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for December 2024 is: Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

I don’t write cliffhangers. I like to wrap things up at the end of a story. Where aesthetics allow I will keep things open-ended to allow for sequels, etc. I have nothing against cliffhangers, they’re just not my style.

 

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IWSG, October 2024: Scary Stories

John Winkelman

A young opossum on a white wooden porch rail, sniffing a green watering can.

Happy Fall, y’all! We finally have some seasonally-appropriate weather. And some seasonally-appropriate animals, like this young opossum which stopped by for a visit a few days ago.

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for October 2024 is: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

Maybe it is because I have recently been reading a collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, but the first story which came to mind when I read this month’s question was Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” While not a ghost story in the traditional sense, nor supernatural in character, it is the story which most disturbed me when I first read it as a teenager. I had read many more immediately frightening stories – Jaws, the Stephen King collections, and scores of others from books and magazines of the 1980s. Those stories bothered me for days or weeks (lookin’ at YOU, The Shining!) after reading them, and caused many a sleepless night. But they eventually faded into the background radiation of the larger horrors of my childhood. Eighth grade, for instance.

But it was Bierce’s story which threw me off-kilter in the long term. In fewer than 4,000 words, Occurrence cast into doubt the entirety of my lived experience. I had no way of knowing if I was not experiencing something of the kind at any given moment. Maybe I had been hit by a car and the past week was all a hallucination as I slowly slipped off this mortal coil. Or maybe I had been crushed in the barnyard as I tried to coax recalcitrant cows into the milking parlor. I couldn’t be certain if that which felt real was actually real, or if it was some combination of dream, memory, and imagination.

[At the time, I was unaware of Samuel Johnson’s “appeal to the stone” and likely would have broken my foot trying to prove that this was, in fact the really real world, even though the pain of a broken foot is experienced by the same mechanism that tells us we are in reality in the first place, and thus this would have been a pointless experiment. Reality may not be subjective but it is often contextual.]

Like all the other scary stories of my childhood, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” slowly dissolved into the larger morass of my teenage years, leaving me with a continual sense of existential angst long before I had heard either of those words.

Then I read the story in college. And again after college. And as the 1990s became the 2000s and The Real suddenly found itself in competition with The Virtual, “An Occurrence” made its way back to the surface. People began asking interesting and uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, perception, and the mind. If we had a sufficiently lifelike Virtual Reality environment, could we fool someone into believing that it was the real world? And if something is indistinguishable from the real world, does it matter that it is not, in fact, real? Are we all just brains in jars hooked up to something like The Matrix? Is the entire universe really just a simulation running on a vast computer network? Barring obvious and unambiguous breaks in causality, such things are impossible to prove or disprove.

A few years ago I began reading essays by the late Mark Fisher, particularly those concerned with hauntology – the ghosts of lost futures which haunt the present. The protagonist of “An Occurrence,” Farquhar, is experiencing the ghost of his lost future in the time between when he is dropped and when the noose snaps his neck. Objectively the rest of his life lasts about a second. Subjectively it lasts several days. Which is the real future? In a sense, both and neither.  For an infinite moment he is neither alive nor dead. Schrödinger’s protagonist. Solipsism and nihilism fistfight in heaven.

And that’s not even getting into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Somewhere out there is a version of reality where Farquhar slipped the noose off of his neck and dove into the river, alongside another version where he never traveled to Owl Creek Bridge in the first place.

So to sum up, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” did a serious number on my head, and continues to do so to this day. Reality may not be real. The most useful thing we can do is choose to believe and behave as if it is.

After all, what are ghosts, but restless spirits mourning their lost futures?

 

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IWSG, September 2024: Incompatible Advice

John Winkelman

Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan.

[ Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan. ]

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for September 2024 is: What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

Honestly, other than standard grammar, and oddball things like “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after C”, I don’t remember any rules which might have been sent my way that really stuck. For instance, “The first word in every line of poetry must be capitalized” was disproved the first time I read a poem written after about 1900.

The writing attitude which messed me up the most, and which still causes me some angst here in my mid-fifties, is that  writing is meant to be published. The quiet parts here being “for other people to read” and “and monetized.” With such debased motivation and viewpoint, the characters in a story are no longer living, they are performing.

Here we can easily be pulled into the infinitely-regressive fractal layers of reality, simulation, imagination, dream, metaphor, nothing, Nothing, memory, wu-wei, etc., until Baudrillard and Laoze are fist-fighting in heaven.

(And don’t get me started on AI [sic].)

Writing is meant to be written. Everything else is secondary.

 

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IWSG, August 2024: AI, Yea or Nay?

John Winkelman

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.”

 

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IWSG, July 2024: Tools of the Trade

John Winkelman

A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[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:

  1. It is online. I don’t need to install anything
  2. Auto-save (!!!)
  3. Stored remotely. A computer crash or errant cup of coffee won’t erase my text
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Happy July, everyone!

 

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IWSG, June 2024: What To Do?

John Winkelman

Pepper, doing the best impression of the Sphinx, with a mlem.

Today (June 5) is my birthday! The above photo is Pepper, expressing her excitement at the thought.

May was another busy month, though the writing was sparse. I spent some time reviewing some old manuscripts and rearranging my virtual space so I am ready to begin edits on the more promising of my many, many drafts. I feel like this is a make-or-break year for my writing, for no specific reason. I need to get out of the habit of confining all of my creative writing to November, and the best way to do that is to just start writing. Again.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2024 is: In this constantly evolving industry, what kind of offering/service do you think the IWSG should consider offering to members?

I view the IWSG as a support group more than a resource, though I am probably in the minority here. That aspect of the group is invaluable.

For me, the biggest industry change over the past several years is the advent and growth of ChatGPT and related tools. Therefore perhaps the most pertinent offering would be a list of publishers which expressly forbid the submission of AI-created content.

Happy June, everyone!

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IWSG, May 2024: Squirrel!

John Winkelman

Pepper, basking in a beam of April sunlight

April was insanely busy, even by the standards of my already-overfull life, so this post will be brief.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2024 is: How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?

Writing for me generally doesn’t start until after I have already dealt with most potential distractions.  Therefore my writing time is fairly distraction free, aside from interruptions from the orange maniacs (one of which is pictured above).

And as for the internet-as-distraction (social media, doomscrolling, etc.), well, that is kind of the background radiation of 21st century life, and if I am not immune to the lure of arguing with strangers on FB, or whatever, I have become fairly good at compartmentalizing.

But don’t let me keep you from your writing. How’s YOUR focus these days?

 

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IWSG, April 2024: About A Blog

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper in a rare quiet moment.

Happy April, everyone! This is National Poetry Month, so I hope you-all are reading and/or writing some verses. My creative time so far this spring has been non-existent, so maybe I’ll listen to some lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University while I am writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the twenty-fifth year in a row.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2024 is: How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?

I built my first website in 1997. It had a tilde (~) in the URL, something like www.wmis.net/~jwinkelm. I used it to play around and learn just enough to get my first real web development job in 2000.

I started the first iteration of this blog in 1999, though the content thereof is lost in the mists of time. Once I had my own domain name, the contents became recoverable through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and thus this blog has continuity back to August of 2000.

In the past 24+ years, Ecce Signum has gone through many changes.

The first few versions were created using static HTML and CSS, created locally on my hand-built desktop computer, and then uploaded via FTP to a directory at a web host, which I think was originally MissoulaWeb, which shortly thereafter became Modwest. Updates were intermittent, due to the many steps necessary to create a post, and also because of how easy it was to accidentally over-write existing content, rather than add to it.

The first version of my website which used content management was also hand-rolled. This version used PHP to generate HTML from hand-written XML files using an XSLT pre-processor. While not necessarily easier than using static HTML, it did allow me to create everything on the website rather than having to upload new files when I wanted to add a new post.

My career was just taking off at the time, so I was blogging frequently, mostly about web and game development topics. I also uploaded a great many Flash files and code examples, which just demonstrates the ephemeral nature of information technologies.

When I decided that what I wanted to do with my website was more complex than I had the time or energy to implement myself, I went looking for blogging software, and landed on TextPattern, a beautiful, simple software package created by the late Dean Allen. This change simplified my blogging practice to the point that I was making updates almost every day, and also created websites for friends using TextPattern, as well as creating a subdomain wherein I could post class notes and communicate with my students when I taught Intro to Web Design at Kendall College of Art and Design.

A few years later I decided that TextPattern was no longer sufficient for my needs, so I re-created this website in Drupal, hosted at the newly-created Drupal Gardens, a hosted service which had been inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, which was itself a huge influence on my career.

When Drupal Gardens closed down in 2016 it caught me by surprise, as I had my own website, as well as the websites for our martial arts class and others I had built for friends and their businesses which had to be migrated or rebuilt. This led me, finally, to WordPress, which is what I am still using today.

Here are some snapshots of previous versions of my site.

I mostly use my blog as an online journal. I post weekly updates about what I have been reading (lots!), what I have been writing (nothing!), and other interesting tidbits. When I have time and energy I post longer essays about various topics I find interesting. In that way, not much has changed in the 25 years I gave been running this blog. It’s where I post things which interest me, which I hope others will find interesting as well.

I have several social media accounts, but I am trying to dial back my presence thereon because, with few exceptions, social media platforms are a shitshow and a time sink and a place where creativity and attention spans go to die.

That being said, social media can be useful for marketing. When I publish new blog entries I will often make posts in my various social media accounts with links to those entries. I try to follow the principles of POSSE, which keeps my content in my own space and less subject to the whims of fascist billionaire manbabies like Musk and Zuckerberg.

If I had to make a distinction between the two, I would say that blogs are “this is me”, and social media is “look at me.”

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you find it interesting.

 

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IWSG, March 2024: So This Generative AI Thing…

John Winkelman

Pepper, looking out the window.

February sprinted as much as January dragged. Now here in March maybe we can settle down into something resembling a predicable routine.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2024 is: Have you “played” with AI [sic] to write those nasty synopses, or do you refuse to go that route? How do you feel about AI’s [sic] impact on creative writing?

First, the answer to the first question: I haven’t written a synopsis in a very long time, and in the event I write another I will do it myself. I suppose one of the LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) could be used (if not necessarily useful) but given the time I would undoubtedly need to spend fine-tuning the output, I might as well write the thing myself.

Now on to the second question.

In every case where the (creative, not business-related) output of an LLM has been compared to “real” writing, the output is inferior to text written by a human, unless the original text was also…not that great. Since the output of an LLM is not writing, as such, I will focus on the reaction of writers and the craft of writing, rather than the impact on the culture of creative writing.

As I stated in an earlier IWSG post, the biggest issue is the flooding of markets with the output of LLMs which (in an analog to Gresham’s Law), will inevitably drown out the work produced by real people. And if these machine-produced texts aren’t as good as that which can be produced by a human, that won’t matter to readers who settle for “good enough” when looking for reading material. And, frankly, that’s the majority of readers.

So the current, ongoing, and inevitable flooding of the marketplace with LLM-generated texts will have two major consequences.

First, writers will need to continually improve their craft in order to produce work which is notably more accomplished than that created by algorithms.

And second, the percentage of works which are human-created and genuinely good will continue to dwindle (even if their actual numbers increase) simply because LLMs can produce texts much (!) faster than humans can, and statistically, the number of genuinely good works produced by LLMs will increase (even as, again, the percentage decreases, as the artificial output continues to flood the marketplace), which puts additional pressure on human writers to (a) improve their skills, (b) increase their output, (c) make their writing voice uniquely their own, and (d) spend more time marketing themselves and their works in order to distinguish themselves from the mountain of scratchings extruded by stochastic parrots.

So the effect on creative writing will be that generated writing drowns out creative writing. Readers will be less able – to the extent that it matters to them – to distinguish between text which was written and text which was generated.

There are few easy ways to counter this trend. Such is the world we live in.

For authors the easiest is probably to create, build, and maintain real-world connections with other real people. Establish and strengthen your bona-fides by proving that you are a real person, and by interacting with other real people – readers, editors, publishers, fans, all of them. And this means having a presence outside of social media (which on the major platforms at this point is well over 50% bots and spam accounts). Even a personal blog is a big step in the right direction.

That’s the one thing LLMs, neural nets, and the other technologies can’t do: Impersonate us in the real world.

Yet.

 

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IWSG, February 2024: Website or Webshite?

John Winkelman

Frost on a car.

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone! Welcome back for another visit to my humble blog, where I talk about whatever is front and center in my mind at the moment.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for February 2024 is: What turns you off when visiting an author’s website/blog? Lack of information? A drone of negativity? Little mention of author’s books? Constant mention of books?

I have been a web developer, and have run this blog in one form or another, since 1999. Therefore on the topic of what makes a good website, I have Opinions.

In order from most-worst to least-worst, these are the things which will most turn me off about an author’s website:

  1. Not having a website. If you are an author who publishes, then you need a website of your own. Full stop. Social media is good for boosting your signal, but social media platforms are ephemeral and, as we have seen with Twitter (and, increasingly, Facebook), vulnerable to the whims of the petulant billionaire manbabies who run them. Any author who wants readers to be able to find them needs their own website which will be the final source of truth for any information about their person and writing.
  2. Unusable/unreadable website. Bad font and color choices, broken images, broken links, background scripts which consume so many resources that the page never loads, or a browser freezes or crashes. So much style that there is no room for substance. As a corollary, websites which look okay on a computer but which are completely unusable on mobile. Smart phones have been around for decades now, and having a website which can’t be accessed or read on a mobile device is immediately cutting out at least 50% of your viewing audience.
  3. Website full of ads. Nothing wrong with bringing in some passive incomes from Third-party ads or affiliate links or the like. Displaying third-party ads on your website is fine, as long as they don’t consume so much real estate or so many resources that they become unusable. Also if your site doesn’t show more real content than ads by at least two orders of magnitude, then you are actually running a clickbait site with a thin veneer authorial intent.
  4. What is this website even for? If you are an author with a professional author’s website, and on that website the information about you as an author and the works you have written and published is difficult to find, then I as a user will give up after about 30 seconds. Take my blog for instance. I have not published much, but right up at the top is the PUBLISHED WORKS AND LITERARY MATTERS link, front and center. If I ever become a Famous Author, my readers will immediately know where to go to see the complete list of my published works.

Other than that, the things which turn me off of a website are all content-related, like gatekeeping fandoms, displaying a world-view which would cause me to insta-block them on social media, or complaining about evolving tastes and reading habits without also putting in the effort to learn to navigate the increasingly diverse and fragmented pool of potential readers. An author’s website is their personal space where they can post whatever they want. If their content turns me off, I’ll go elsewhere.

And that’s all I got to say about that. How about y’all’z opinions? What makes for a good or bad web browsing experience?

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