My latest release, The Last Outpost, is available to buy now on Kindle.
Alex is the navigation officer aboard The Calico, a colonial supply ship. He’s far from home and can’t shake the feeling that he doesn’t belong. After dropping out of university on Mars, Alex joined the ESDC, hoping to find purpose among the stars. Instead he found himself on The Calico, in love with Eden, the XO, and desperate for a place to call his own.
Life in deep space isn’t what he imagined.
When The Calico arrives at a remote colony on Enceladus for what should be a routine supply drop, the crew discovers something far more troubling: there’s no one there.
Alex, Eden and a pilot called Jack descend to the icy colony and the mystery deepens. Where did the colonists go? What strange secrets lie beneath the surface of the moon?
Caught between his sense of longing, and a growing sense of danger, Alex must confront his most deeply held beliefs. Can he find his place in the vastness of the solar system, or is he doomed to wander, forever searching for something he can never reach?
This morning I published my first short story of the challenge: Sisterhood. I am just waiting for it to go through the Amazon approval process and then I will share the link here.
It took me 230 minutes to get the editing and publishing process done. The first draft was 8,855 words long, so that means it took me 1.5 seconds per word to publish it. I’m not sure that’s a particularly helpful statistic.
Tomorrow I will add it to the website and then, if there is time, move onto editing The Last Outpost.
The writing is still going well, although it feels a bit like I’m struggling to reach a turning point but can’t quite find my was there. It’s not near the end yet, but it’s moving forwards.
I’m enjoying the reading challenge. I have a pretty good collection of short stories I’m working my way through but I want to mix in some more modern essays and poems, so I found some to download. I think this element of the challenge is going to be very interesting.
And that’s the end of the weekend.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 26
Production
Words written today: 1,049
Words written total: 45,381
Plus / Minus target: +3,381
Currently writing: The Lottery
Post-Production
Minutes today: 22
Minutes total: 230
Plus / Minus target: +30
Currently publishing: Sisterhood
Reading
Short story: Dip in the Pool – Roald Dahl
Essay: My County Right or Left – George Orwell
Poem: I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon – Stephen Crane
Not as much as I would have liked, but enough to keep my daily average up and push me a bit further ahead.
What I need to do is apply the same level of commitment to the editing and publishing side of things, because I am not making much progress there.
The difficulty is that I can treat writing first drafts every day as an ongoing habit. There is not much complexity involved with ‘get up, feed the cats, make coffee, write 1,000+ words.’ But as soon as I move to the multi-step process of publishing a story, which I can’t do everyday, it becomes a project that I have to manage.
As far as I can see, there is no way around this, other than to just get on with things, so that is what I am going to focus on this coming week.
All this thinking about my upcoming short story challenge has gotten me thinking about the first challenge I did. This was over ten years ago and my goal was to write 1,000,000 words in the course of a year.
I think my final total was somewhere in the region of 800,000 and a lot of those I didn’t publish, but it was a lot and really kick-started my writing. Before that I was dreaming big, but not writing much at all.
I didn’t make it to the full million words because somewhere along the way, I changed my mind about what I wanted to achieve. If I had only been writing first drafts, I’m sure I would have reached my word count, but I started publishing some of what I was writing and wanted to make more of that.
As things currently stand, I am planning to write 365,000 words over the course of the year. I am focusing on short stories because the main goal of the challenge is to get me finishing things again. Making money or getting reviews doesn’t figure into this (if it did, then I wouldn’t be considering short stories).
Things change though. I might get halfway through this challenge and have an idea for a longer story that I really want to work on. It wouldn’t make sense for me to doggedly stick to the rules of this challenge and force myself to write another 26 short stories before starting on the longer piece.
That may not happen, but I am prepared if it does. And I think I could do it without really breaking the rules I have set for this challenge. As long as I continue to write an average of 1,000 words a day, and finish everything I start, does it really matter if one story is longer than the others?
The aim, above all else, is to finish stories again. The short stories are only a method of achieving that goal.
A.I., or LLMs, are probably here to stay and are going to have a massive impact on publishing and most other industries. Tech companies are investing enormous sums of money and once beloved events are putting their feet in it and losing the goodwill of people who once loved them. The technology is advancing at an impressive rate and in a short time, what we have now is going to feel like a child’s toy. So now seems like a good time to have opinions about this stuff.
First off, given the number of generated images on this website, you might assume that I’m all in on A.I. It’s a fair guess given the evidence, and when I did all of it, I probably assumed I would be too. But that turns out not to be the case and one thing I’m going to be doing during my writing challenge is removing all A.I. generated content from my website. So stake in the ground time: I am not in favour of A.I. generated content.
When GPT 4 was released, I tried it out, made some things, and it was fun. I made images of characters I was writing about, made the headers and logos on the website, I even tried using it to write some stories and that was… interesting. It certainly boosted “my” word count to new heights, but it wasn’t fun. Sure, I could look at it and congratulate myself for “writing” so much, but it didn’t feel like writing and that’s a problem when the main reason I have always had for writing is because I enjoy it.
It was easy enough to make that decision for myself and my work: there will be no A.I. because it detracts from my enjoyment of writing. It gets a lot more difficult to draw lines around using it for other things.
A.I. Generated Images
This falls into (at least) two categories:
Images I generate myself
Images other people generate
It’s easier to say that I will not generate images myself and instead hire artists to do it. But what if they use A.I. generated images? Am I going to tell an artist what they can and can’t do?
The Quality Conundrum
As things currently stand, it’s relatively simple to point out a piece of writing or artwork that has been generated by A.I. They have a look about them. But we are in the infancy of these new tools and it seems reasonable to expect that one day the content created by A.I. will be indistinguishable from work created by a human. What happens then?
One day I think it will be possible for a reader to go on Amazon and type in things they like in a story and have a unique book generated for them that ticks all those boxes. It will be their ideal book and no human will have been involved. I think they will enjoy that book.
The same will probably be true of films and other mediums.
Trying to prevent that future feels like attempting to stand in front of a tidal wave and barely factors into my decision making now. Apart from the fact I’ve decided that I don’t want to ride that wave. It seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it.
There are a lot of things that I can’t prevent that I choose not to take part in. This is just another one to add to that long list.
What my decision really comes down to is my enjoyment of the writing process. I don’t have any illusions about success. The only thing I am entitled to is the work, and with that in mind, shouldn’t I want to make the work as enjoyable as possible?
What it comes down to
With writing I have decided not to use A.I. because I enjoy the process less when doing so. With other forms of A.I. I have decided not to use it because I have decided I don’t want to contribute to the inevitable future where a shared culture no longer exists.
