Category: Literary Matters

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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IWSG, January 2024: On BookBub

John Winkelman

Pepper being sneaky

Welcome to 2024, everyone! The year started out crazy busy, so this post will be brief.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2024 is:

Do you follow back your readers on BookBub or do you only follow back other authors?

Until this question came arrived in my email, I had never heard of BookBub. So I looked it up, created an account, and LO! So many familiar names! So I followed a bunch of them. This is recent enough that I don’t know if any are following me back. Also, since I haven’t published any books, there is no reason for anyone to follow me. Unless they want book recommendations. Which will mostly be literary fiction and poetry.

But from what I can see Bookbub looks like an interesting place and seems to be in heavy use, so I will add it to the list of social media sites to which I contribute.

 

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IWSG, December 2023: Review for Who?

John Winkelman

Pepper, sitting on the arm of a sofa, looking cute.

Well, here we are in December. Parts of 2023 seem to have flown by, others have crawled.

Take this recently past November, for instance. Another National Novel Writing Month has come and gone, and I won for the eighth time out of eleven attempts. My write-up is here.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for December 2023  is: Book reviews are for the readers. When you leave a book reviews do you review for the Reader or the Author? Is it about what you liked and enjoyed about your reading experience, or do you critique the author?

[NOTE: When I talk about “reviews” here, I am referencing a review an individual person would write about a book which that person has read. I am NOT talking about professional reviewers writing professional reviews.]

Unfortunately I am not very good at writing reviews of the books I read. I leave a lot of ratings, but a rating is not a review.

Ratings are easy. You just click somewhere along a row of stars. This is just saying “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” There is no nuance; no way to say things like “The plot was great but the dialog was mediocre,” or “This was a really well-written book which I, personally, did not care for.” Everything is collapsed into a one-dimensional opinion.

That being said, a review is also not a critique. A critique is something you would find in a scholarly essay, or a serious professional review in a serious professional magazine, and puts the piece being reviewed in context with the reader, the writer, the genre, and so forth.

So a review is a personal opinion of what worked for the reader, and what didn’t work for the reader. It is all about the relationship. “I didn’t like it.” “I loved it.” “Beautiful writing, but the story goes nowhere.”

I don’t think the reviews we leave on e.g. GoodReads or Amazon are the place to critique the author. When you leave a review of a book, that review should be about that book. If, for instance, you think the author has problematic views, or has exhibited problematic behavior, then a review of that author’s books may be an easy place to post your thoughts on the subject, but again, critiquing the author and reviewing a book are two different exercises.

To sum up this ramble: When I leave a textual response to a piece of writing in a public space, it is about that piece of writing. If I have something to say about (or to) the author, I will put that on my blog, or on social media, or a similar appropriate space. But book reviews are for reviewing books. Harrumph.

Happy December, everyone!

 

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NaNoWriMo 2023 In Review

John Winkelman

Poe, worn out from being Poe

I am happy to report that, for the eighth time since I first participated in National Novel Writing Month back in 2013, I have reached (and passed) my goal of 50,000 words. So, yay me!

This year I did something new. Instead of working on a novel or collections of short stories, I started a project called “Fifty Flashes and Fragments,” with the goal of writing fifty flash fictions or fragments of stories over the course of the month.

I hit 50,000 words on November 27 with piece 39, and then wrote one more because “Forty Flashes and Fragments” flows better as a project title. About half of the pieces have some merit, and of those, maybe half a dozen are genuinely good.

In service of this project, I created on this website a simple prompt generator which produces, at the click of a button, two subjects, a setting, and a genre. The only rule I set myself was that I had to use the prompt generated. Or rather, what I would NOT do is click the generator until I found a combination of subjects, setting, and genre that I liked. I only broke that rule once, when the generator produced a duplicate of the previous prompt. Random numbers are funny that way.

This method worked wonderfully, and I plan to continue to use the generator (with some modifications of the subject, setting, and genre options) for weekly writing exercises.

For NaNoWriMo 2021 and 2022, I came up with a new method of tracking my writing which focused more on the day-to-day nature of NaNo and less on things like chapters, scenes, and so forth. In those years I created one document for each day of the month, and when I started writing for a new day, even if I was still in the middle of a chapter or scene from the day before, I put that writing in the new document.

Psychologically, this had the benefit of breaking me out of the mindset of “I need to finish this chapter before I go to bed” or “I don’t want to start this chapter/scene/etc. until I have time to complete it in one writing session.” That kind of thinking is, to me, less valuable during the month of November. November is for writing 50,000 words. December is for editing those 50,000 words. Or not.

I feel that my 2023 NaNo project is a natural outgrowth of the method I used in the previous two years, and I recommend it to anyone who feels trapped between the demands of the story they are writing, and the demands of NaNoWriMo.

As always, I want to thank the members of NaNoWriMo Grand Rapids for their help, community, and support.

Here is the complete list of prompts I used for NaNoWriMo 2023.

Index: Subject 1, Subject 2; Setting; Genre

01: Economics, Aliens; Subterranean; Science Fiction
02: Revenge, Empire; Ship; Technothriller
03: Dragons, Evolution; Ship; Biopunk
04: Cyborgs, Possession; Small Town; Mystery
05: Super Powers, Portals; Battlefield; Solarpunk
06: Super Powers, Kaiju; Urban; Adventure
07: Cryptids, Music; Boardroom; Utopian
08: Cyborgs, Portals; Outpost; Literary Fiction
09: Evolution, Economics; Virtual Reality; Steampunk
10: Spiritual Beings, Super Powers; Lost City; Spy
11: Aliens, Cyborgs; Library; Noir
12: Apocalypse, Precursors; Labyrinth; Dystopian
13: Aliens, Dragons; Ruins; Western
14: Addiction, Language; Urban; Literary Fiction
15: Dreams, Espionage; Ocean; Western
16: Empire, Death; Lost City; Adventure
17: Possession, Dragons; Bar; Horror
18: Portals, Dragons; Battlefield; Biopunk
19: Kaiju, Language; Wasteland; Horror
20: Portals, Revenge; Labyrinth; Folk Tale
21: Music, Cyborgs; Ocean; Magic Realism
22: Robots, Revenge; Ship; War
23: Dreams, Fae; Subterranean; Cyberpunk
24: Colonization, Cryptids; Wasteland; Solarpunk
25: Music, Super Powers; Lost City; Steampunk
26: Genius Loci, Reincarnation; Battlefield; Weird Fiction
27: Portals, Espionage; Library; Weird Fiction
28: Revenge, Artificial Intelligence; Wilderness; Solarpunk
29: Language, Spiritual Beings; Space; Noir
30: Super Powers, Cryptids; Ocean; Utopia
31: Portals, Kaiju; Labyrinth; Horror
32: Politics, Dragons; Wasteland; Romance
33: Addiction, Spiritual Beings; Wilderness; Spy
34: Aliens, Music; Ship; Literary Fiction
35: Espionage, Robots; Boardroom; Western
36: Relic, Apocalypse; Space; Science Fiction
37: Fae, Politics; Small Town; Literary Fiction
38: Revenge, Mutants; Academia; Procedural
39: Mutants, Environment; Bordertown; Utopian
40: Portals, Colonization; Wilderness; Utopian

IWSG, November 2023: NaNoWriMo, Y’All!

John Winkelman

Poe, helping us make the bed

Life is crazy busy, so this will be a short post.

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for November 2023 is:

November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?

Yes I have! This will be my eleventh year, and this year I am switching things up by attempting fifty (50!) flash fictions in the month of November. To aid that quest, I created a simple prompt generator which you can play with here. It produces random combinations of subject, setting and genre. Here are some examples:

Subject: Espionage, Empire
Setting: Virtual Reality
Genre: Horror

Subject: Revenge, Environment
Setting: Outpost
Genre: Western

Subject: Precursors, Dreams
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Cyberpunk

The only rule I am holding myself to is that when I generate a prompt, I have to use that prompt. Generating prompts until I find one I like is not allowed.

My user name on nanowrimo.org is JohnFromGR, so feel free to send me a buddy request.

Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone!

 

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IWSG, October 2023: An Eye On AI

John Winkelman

Yellow Garden Spider

Wow, was September busy. Very little reading, very little writing. I am in the second week of a stay-at-home vacation now, and my brain is slowly un-kinking, and for the first time in months I feel like I might actually be able to write again.

I have several projects in the works right now. The most immediate is NaNoWriMo which is a mere 27 days(!) away. This year I am going to attempt fifty flash fictions. To that end I have created a simple prompt generator which you can access here. Simply click on the button at the bottom of the page to generate a prompt (or perhaps more accurately a “seed”) made up of subject, setting, and genre. With this programmed tool in hand, I feel confident that I will be able to reach the goal of 50,000 words by the end of November.

So it is an excellent coincidence that the October IWSG topic is something very much in my wheel-house. The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for October 2023 is: The topic of AI writing has been heavily debated across the world. According to various sources, generative AI will assist writers, not replace them. What are your thoughts?

Short answer: It depends on the context, the writer, and what is being written. And it also depends on what is meant by both “assist” and “replace.”

I have been a programmer since 1999 and have been researching ChatGPT and similar technologies (hereafter abbreviated as “LLM”) for a little over a year at this point (Notebook here). Here is a bulleted list of some of my thoughts.

  • LLMs write passable prose. The more technically specific the prose, the closer their output approximates that of a competent human writer. LLMs will likely be a big boost for technical writers, assuming the data sets on which the LLMs have been trained include well-written technical documents.
  • LLMs are trained on staggeringly huge amounts of data. ChatGPT uses everything that the owners could scrape from the entire (English language, primarily) internet as of two years ago. This includes innumerable works of fiction. What LLMs produce is a distillate of the available ingredients, based on the recipe, which is the prompt entered by a user. Therefore, ultimately, the quality of the output will vary according to the quality of the prompt, with respect to the entirety of the data set from which the LLM pulls its response.
  • LLMs have been called “sparkling autocomplete” and “stochastic parrots,” both of which are accurate if incomplete assessments. Their responses to queries are not random, nor are they completely predetermined. What LLMs return is the most statistically likely collection of words based on a request. LLMs have no concept of a “right” or “wrong” answer. It’s all probabilities based on word order in their training sets.
  • Therefore technical writers and writers of non-creative nonfiction will likely be most affected by the advent of LLMs, simply because these types of writing most closely adhere to formal grammars and constrained syntax. In other words, the closer the desired output is to something that could be used as logical input (e.g. programming), the more likely that the output will be useful to human users.
  • But since LLMs have no concept of “correct”, there will always need to be subject-matter experts who can verify the output of LLMs, in order to ensure the accuracy of the responses. So technical writers may find their job descriptions changed to “technical editors”, or something similar.
  • When it comes to creative output (fiction, poetry, etc.), the work produced by LLMs ranges from “terrible” to “competent.” Just as these tools have no intrinsic understanding of right and wrong answers, they also have no concept of “good” and “bad” writing. And given that the overwhelming majority of creative content in their training sets is “mediocre” to “competent,” the distillate of that work will be of a similar quality.
  • But while the output of LLMs may never be better than “good,” in many cases, “good” may be good enough. As much as writing is a skill, so is reading, and what people like to read is completely subjective. The same story told by five different authors may have zero crossover in their readers. We like what we like.
  • Publishers of creative writing are already finding themselves inundated by LLM-produced works, and while the editors are generally competent enough to spot the difference, this wastes resources which could be put to better use publishing good content from real humans.

So I don’t think creative writers will be “replaced” by LLMs, but we do have additional competition for attention. Writers and readers alike will need to continually improve their craft if they want to stay ahead of the machine-generated slush pile.

 

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IWSG, September 2023: Happy Anniversary, IWSG!

John Winkelman

Sunflower growing against a retaining wall.

And with that, summer is over, and summer is almost over, if you know what I mean. I graduated from GVSU over 30 years ago, and still feel energized by the start of the new school year.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for September 2023 is: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?

I discovered the IWSG when I started following the blog of Jean Davis, who I met through the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids region of National Novel Writing Month. I noticed that every once in a while a blog post with an oddly familiar title would pop up, and after some investigation discovered the IWSG blog hop.

I joined the blog hop in March of 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. The connection with other writers was a welcome relief after a year of isolation.

I participate in the blog hop every month, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but I try to stay engaged every month. Jean Davis is the only IWSG participant who I know personally.

Due to when I joined IWSG, I would say that the biggest benefit is the reminder that the world is full of creative people and everyone has successes and failures, triumphs and struggles, and that communities are things actively created, not passively experienced.

 

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