Tag: writing

IWSG, May 2025: Fear, Hope, Whatever

John Winkelman

A closeup of a small morel mushroom among blades of grass in an unkempt lawn.

[A closeup of a small morel mushroom among blades of grass in an unkempt lawn.]

Oh, what a month it has been. Last week was the first week since early March in which I did not have to work at least one 10, 11, 12, 14, etc. – hour day. This week I am on vacation, working through my vast backlog of tasks, chores, and errands. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

April was National Poetry Month, and I made a better showing that in the past few years, with about a dozen first-drafts of poems added to my journal. One or two of them even show promise, which is statistically pretty good.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2025 is:

Some common fears writers share are rejection, failure, success, and lack of talent or ability. What are your greatest fears as a writer? How do you manage them?

My greatest fear is a writer is that, despite all the drafts of books, short stories, essays, and poems which fill my hard drive and countless old journals, I will never actually complete any of them to the point where they can be considered for publication.

While it is true that if I have time to write a new story I have time to edit an existing story, I easily and repeatedly fall into the trap of believing that I need a guaranteed minimum of X consecutive, uninterrupted hours to even attempt an edit of even the shortest of short stories. I can mull over new work in my head when I am e.g. walking to work or driving to the store for groceries. The new stuff doesn’t need to be written down write away, and much of the creative process is subconscious.

But editing is not the same. To edit requires singular focus.

I am aware that there is no such thing as a perfect moment for specific work; or at least such moments are rare enough that they might as well be snipe hunts. Adequate time is good enough. I understand that in my head, but I don’t yet understand it in my heart.

So there it is: For want of an hour, the manuscript was lost.

One of my goals for my vacation is to print out a large pile of first-drafts which I can carry around and edit by hand in my spare moments at work or sitting around the house. While not ideal, it is much better than staring at the television with a vague feeling of unease as the days turn into seasons and the pile of possibilities turns into compost.

Happy May, everyone. Write well!

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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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Weekly Round-up, August 24, 2024

John Winkelman

Poe, helping with the yard work.

[Our ginger girl Poe, helping me with some weeding.]

This past week was the latest in a long streak of days in which my time is not my own. One would think that summer is a time of rest and rejuvenation, but that apparently only applies to people who are old enough to go to school and young enough to not have to work during the summer months.

Reading

My morning read is Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal. My lunchtime book is Maurizio Lazzarrato’s Captital Hates Everyone, and my evening book is Thomas McGuane’s Gallantin Canyon. All are going well. All are excellent.

Writing

For the first time in more than twenty years, I attended the River City Writer’s Group, which I first visited at the old UICA space on Sheldon and Weston, back in the late 1990s. My after-work time is limited, but I do plan to attend at least once a month. Though writing is mainly a solitary pursuit, I miss the community aspect of reading and critiquing.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Mutants, Empire
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Noir

Listening

Fat Jon the Ample Soul Physician, “Rain Dance”. I first encountered Fat Jon on the compilation album Ropeladder 12, published by Mush Records. The album is out of print but can be heard online here and there. I listened to it a LOT back in the early 2000s as I tried to figure out what I was doing with my life. And here I am, listening to it again.

Interesting Links

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, 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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Weekly Round-up, February 17, 2024

John Winkelman

Ice sculpture of a castle at the Elliptic at Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, Michigan

The warm weather comes and goes, and it seems that all of winter was packed into a couple of weeks in late January. I have a friend, Mark, who I get together with weekly to practice martial arts. This is much easier outside, because we don’t need to worry about walls, ceilings, and cats. Of course practicing outside in the winter is difficult, except for this winter. Our last outdoor practice session for 2023 was the week before Christmas, and our first of 2024 was the second weekend of February.

Reading

Still working my way through short books. Currently reading Not One Day by French writer and Oulipo member Anne Garréta.

Writing

Not a lot to report, though I did come up with a couple of ideas for last week’s writing prompt (Genius Loci, Reincarnation, Lost City, War). There is something interesting to be mined from that particular random assemblage of words.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Colonization, Kaiju
Setting: Ship
Genre: Literary Fiction

Interesting Links

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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and supporting insecure writers
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Weekly Round-up, January 13, 2024

John Winkelman

Constant pain is a great tool for focusing one’s attention. If only that attention could be focused anywhere other than the constant pain.

I spent most of the past two weeks in thrall to a tooth which first appeared to be tender, then cracked, then infected, and finally diagnosed as both split in half and infected. My dentist removed the tooth three days ago, and my life was thereby much improved.

The pain was more manageable than the previous impacted molar back in 2008, but there was nothing about the experience which was at all pleasant.

So 2024 is starting out kind of…unpredictably.

In order to distract myself from the chronic pain of life, I have several things in the works for 2024:

First, Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu and Tai Chi Jeung.

Second, after several years of volunteering, I am now part of the Convention Committee for the ConFusion Science Fiction Convention. For the 2024 iteration, “Labyrinth of ConFusion”, I will be the Head of Operations, assisted by past Ops people as I settle into the role.

Third, I am part of the newly-formed Grand River Poetry Collective, which is dedicated to publishing Grand Rapids poets. As we get up and running I will be posting many and frequent updates.

Reading

Still working my way through Dostoevsky’s Demons.

Writing

I got nuthin’.

The writing prompt for the next week is:

Subject: Empire, Economics
Setting: Labyrinth
Genre: Procedural

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, December 9, 2023

John Winkelman

Hello. This is me trying to get back into the habit of weekly blog posts about goings-on in my life. We will see how long it lasts, and how my intentions endure the slings and arrows of *gestures at everything*.

***

I have been thinking about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, and also about Frank Wilhoit’s quote about capitalism.

Ashby’s law states, more or less, that in any control system, the control apparatus must be able to account for (e.g. be as complex as) all possible variants in the system being controlled.

Wilhoit’s quote is as follows: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

There is some resonance between these ideas which I have been exploring in my (almost non-existent) downtime, and I will post updates to these thoughts as they crystalize.

***

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, and I have logged my eighth win out of eleven attempts, I feel like I have the energy to continue writing. In past years that has not been the case for many and varied reasons, but this year, though I am well into my mid fifties, I have energy reserves which were simply not there in years past. So I will take advantage of that.

Writing, be it creative, work-related, keeping a journal, or blogging, is a habit which requires practice and maintenance. And when pulling out of a slump, there are two parts to restarting the practice: getting out of the habit of not doing the thing, and getting into the habit of doing the thing.

***

Currently reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Fields of Castile by Antonio Machado, Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

***

The writing prompt for the past week was:

Subject: Undead, Addiction
Setting: Ship
Genre: Magic Realism

I didn’t do much with this one, other than to come up with a few interesting scenarios during my walks to and from work.

The writing prompt for the next week is:

Subject: Addiction, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Border Town
Genre: War

***

Random links for the week:

 

 

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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and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.