I’ve just been to an ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting
Society) focus group meeting. Amongst everything
else, we debated AI and what we authors ought to be doing about it. Unless you’ve been living under a rock or
travelling in the past, you have to be aware that this element of the future
has been rushing towards us recently.
There was a large debate about it at Eastercon too, and I was on that
panel. As I write this, for example, I’m
watching another of those YouTube videos that has AI generated images –
extraordinary things.
There’s an author planning to ‘write’ and publish 10,000
novels this year. That’s the accurate
number, I’ve not hit a few zeroes by mistake.
10,000, which, if he works 9-5 with an hour off for lunch, 5 days a
week, works out at one every ten minutes.
It cannot be possible to even read the novels he’s ‘writing’.
This’ll swamp the market with cliché ridden stories. Is that what we want?
(They are cliché ridden as they take all of literature that’s
been stolen for them and average it for their output.)
Of course, they will improve until eventually they will be ‘better’
than humans can write.
I’d suggest that, as a species, we should be deciding what
we want to be doing. Is it that machines
produce art and writing, and we all do the tedious jobs for greedy rich people?
Art with a big ‘A’ is, to my mind, human-to-human communication. Remove one side of that and it’s not. Part of being human is expressing
ourselves. I have stories I need to
tell. AI threatens to take that away
from us making us less human. (Mind you,
we’d need AI to read 10,000 stories a year, so maybe AI will be writing for AI,
and we’ll all be sitting on the patio drinking Pimms.)
I suggested at the focus group that ALCS ought to campaign
that writers should be compensated for the use of their writing as material
poured into these AIs’ dataset.
“You need to run the campaign and save civilisation and the human race,” I said. Slightly over the top, but it is all the stuff of science-fiction. For my part, the back of my latest novel (Dawn and Dave of the Dead – https://amzn.to/3JOJ50h) has a jokey “☑ Not written by a robot” on the back. Perhaps it is needed.
I’ve started watching The Cleaner, about a crime
scene cleaner written and played by Greg Davies. These are lovely character studies and
episode 2 was no exception. David
Mitchell plays the eponymous writer in question. He’s the archetypal blocked writer
desperately trying to get enough peace and quiet to recapture the muse. Of course, it’s cleaner Wicky who comes up
with the word that the writer is stuck on.
“Stumbled.”
I’m reminded of the marvellous Throw Momma from the Train,
the Danny DeVito film starring Billy Crystal as a writer similarly stuck on a
word.
I’ve only had – touch wood – that sort of writer’s
block once.
I did a trial script for Doctors once. You could do your own idea or one of
half-a-dozen of their pitches. I decided
to do one of their pitches. I thought it
would demonstrate my ability to write to order.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
“As long as you like, but most of our writers produce
something in a week.”
So, I’ve a week then.
I thought I’d have lunch, watch that day’s episode live and
then, having got in the zone, I’d write my script. The theme tune starts and… oh no! The episode was the one outlined in the pitch! Very quickly, I got a tape and hit record…
and turned the telly off.
There followed days of angst.
Should I watch it and then write my episode? Was that cheating?
In the end, I didn’t watch it, promising myself that I would
once I’d submitted my script. I’d lost a
few days, so it was a rush. It passed;
they liked it – woo hoo! (Though they never
picked up any of my pitches.)
So, torture over, I went to watch the episode with a certain
relish and reluctance. However, due to
my writer’s block, I’d written on the VHS cassette’s label and I’d taped
something else over it.
I’ve just finished watching the first season of The Sandman, the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic series. I binged with a month of Netflix before the cancel and go somewhere else.
The TV series is quite as wonderful as the comic and I liked the sense of telling different stories. It does have a sense of a series of interconnected short tales. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, because I’m not reviewing it. I’m interested in the way writers are depicted in fiction. The advice is ‘write what you know’, which is why so many protagonists are writers.
Anyway, the last episode, Calliope, featured Arthur
Darvill (Rory in Doctor Who and it was good to see him doing something
different) as a writer. There was also
Derek Jacobi (the Master in Doctor Who) as another writer. You can spot a theme.
These writers suffer from a lack of inspiration and tells
the story of their desperate measures to gain inspiration. They need ideas. That’s all they need to be successful, one
whacking great lightbulb hovering over their heads and then fame, fortune, canapes
and chardonnay.
It does seem odd that there are so many stories play with
this cliché. I mean do writers still lie
in the gutter and suffer in their garret, while awaiting some divine and
magical muse.
But all these writers must have written and must know that
you just have get on with it. They’ve
done so in the commercial world full of deadlines and constraints – particularly
comic and screenplay writers. So they
must know that sitting around staring out of the window or sacrificing chickens
isn’t the way. Surely?
Although, to be fair, the muse makes a character, conversation and conflict flashes of inspiration can make magical scenes and actors tearing at their clothes in desperation makes for good performances. In reality, someone simply sitting at a computer typing is… well, dull. You see, all the amazing fantasy, all the dragons and heroes, space battles and car chases, romance and discovery, mystery and suspense are all internal, unseen and imaginary. It’s all just made up.
I was in Norwich recently and ended up reading the local paper, the Eastern Daily Press to be exact. Imagine my surprise when I turned the page and read about a competition: ‘Can you write a drabble for our Norfolk Day competition?’ In association with the National Centre for Writing and an independent children’s bookshop, Bookbugs and Dragon Tales, no less. What a lovely, a delightful and surreal discovery for, you see, I invented this literary form.
Way back, we wanted to do an anthology for the Birmingham
University Science Fiction and Fantasy Society – good idea, but, you know,
it seemed like hard work. Well, I
thought, why not restrict it to… I don’t know… 100 words… exactly. It’s the last clause that made it work. Someone else remembered a Monty Python book
had a game called ‘drabble’ – apparently – where people sit in a circle and the
first to finish a novel, wins. We wrote
to Michael Palin for permission to use it – he couldn’t remember anything about
it, but said ‘yes’ and the name stuck.
I wrote the rules and then the first-ever drabble. The dashed off first draft came to 98
words. Ooh, this is easy, I thought, I
just need to add 2 words. But this took
ages because every time I crowbarred them in, the added pair looked like
obvious padding. It’s that last clause.
We also thought we’d ask a few famous SF writers to
contribute – 100 words doesn’t sound like much, so the request suckered them
into trying and the challenge has them in its clause. They all replied. Let’s ask a few more, and a few more and The
Drabble Project was born. It’s a
sold-out hardback from Beccon Publications. I personally numbered every one of the limited
edition with my calligraphy pen.
Yonks later, I was browsing in the dealers’ room at a
convention and happened to pick up a collection of drabbles.
What’s this, I thought.
The woman behind the table gushed to me about how wonderful
they were ending with, “Have you heard of drabbles?”
“Er… I invented them,” I replied.
I’ve even met someone who described himself as a
‘drabblist’.
It’s good to know that this short thing is still out there
being fun. A competition in Norwich –
extraordinary.
These days I’m writing novels of between 80,000 and 120,000
words.
What’s a drabble – a paragraph?
Now, I just need to cut 308 words exactly from this blog.
There were two stories on the BBC website today about non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In one, a surgeon tried to sell the ‘ownership’ of a woman’s x-ray. It showed a bullet lodged in her forearm. He acknowledged it was a ‘mistake’ – also an invasion of privacy and a misuse of medical records. The other story was Julian Lennon selling the ‘ownership’ of memorabilia associated with John Lennon, including two guitars. These are both NFTs, i.e. you ‘own’ it, but can’t have it.
Now, I can see the point of selling digital items. Someone makes a virtual yacht, then it’s fair that they should be paid. Ebooks are digital items after all and I sell those. However, NFTs are insane! They aren’t things. And environmentally they are madness. Just like cryptocurrencies, all these computers need to be running to prove so-and-so owns this x-ray, guitar, coin, $908,000 virtual yacht, and that there’s only one of it, two, 18,925,000, as many backups as the owner made (’cos if I’d paid $908,000 for a virtual yacht, I’d back it up a few times).
It’s been suggested that authors supplement their meagre income by selling parts of their intellectual property. Not the publication rights, copyright, physical copy or virtual ebook, but the NFT ‘ownership’. So, you could buy Magdalene Chase from my Derring-Do Club series, a murder weapon from my next book, or a character. Hang on, wouldn’t selling Charlotte Deering-Dolittle make me a white slaver? And ‘ownership’ isn’t defined here in the same way as a dictionary would have us believe.
You’re buying bragging rights and nothing more in a get rich
quick scheme aimed at parting the gullible from their money.
It really is the Emperor’s new clothes. Can I sell these as NFTs? You might argue that I don’t own them
already, but I could write my version of the story and then sell the
non-existent clothes featured as non-fungible tokens. In fact, in my version of the tale, not only
can you buy the left sock and the right sock, but also the other 49 pairs of non-existent
items that the Emperor kept in his sock drawer.
It’s pushing non-fungible towards some sort of limit.
But they don’t exist, you might say.
Ah, but that’s the point.
P.S. If you wish to own this blog post as an NFT, please get
in touch with your bid.
I’ve been to a real, actual in-person convention with non-virtual avatar-less human beings. ArmadaCon (Hello, to the new sign-ups) is held in November, often clashing with Novacon, but sometimes doesn’t. This year’s didn’t, opening up the possibility of going to both.
We took a lateral flow test before going – phew – and then drove down to Plymouth.
The con was the usual round of silliness, sensibleness and sundries. I won the Just A Minute by 29 to 28 and other scores beating Dave and Dave and Dave. I interviewed one of the guests of honour and formed a third of a writers’ panel on publishing with guests Dave Turner and Chrissey Harrison (see above). On the Sunday, they gave me my own slot for a talk on computers in science fiction, which was a mere excuse to prattle on about computer keyboards. Regular readers will groan at this, but it was to a new crowd.
Conventions are amazing.
Where else can you touch the same parachute fabric as was used on missions
to Mars and Titan?
But it’s all about meeting fans and friends – we all have similar interests – and it’s a chance to be around wonderful,
inspiring people. And it did its trick. I came home with inspiration, ideas and
incentive.
So, fired up by this renewal, I considered Novacon, wondering
if I could manage a late booking.
However, I’d also bought back from ArmadaCon a raging cold. I took a lateral flow test – phew, again, but also
bleurgh. I mean, who wants to be around smelly,
infectious humans? Well, me, but… I
could do without viruses.
I’m sitting here with effectively seven keyboards. I haven’t grown extra arms. To be fair, the gamepad and the foot pedals aren’t connected and my old trusty Logitech K350 is languishing to one side. The Logitech is there ready to leap back into the fray if the replacement hits a snag.
I bought an Ergodox off Gumtree. This is an ergonomic, split, columnar, ortholinear, tented, mechanical, underlit keyboard and completely customisable.
What does all that mean?
A writing colleague asked if I had RSI and I don’t, but surely the trick
is to get an ergonomic keyboard, one designed for your hands, before you
get RSI.
So, to explain:-
‘Split’ means that the keyboard is in two halves. You move these apart to reduce shoulder strain.
‘Columnar’ means that the keys are arranged in straight columns unlike the usual staggered layout. (Look at your keyboard now: it’s a honeycomb pattern.) This change is because your fingers are straight.
‘Otholinear’ means that these columns of keys are shifted up for your middle finger and down for your little finger, because your fingers are not all the same length.
‘Tented’ means that the middle is raised and looks a bit like a tent. This is to avoid twisting your wrists to lie on a flat keyboard. Technically, the two sides ought to be vertical, but I’ve found 15o is about right for me. This keyboard doesn’t have a tenting kit, so I made one from MDF. It looks terrible! It needs painting, but it is more comfortable (or will be, once I lower my desk by 3 cms).
‘Mechanical’ means the keys make clicky noises and is therefore more exciting. Yeah! People go on about it, but I don’t really care.
‘Underlit’ means that there are LED lights tucked under each key. If you have keys with transparent letters, they shine. All the reviews, particularly those on YouTube, really go to town demonstrating the glow, rippling patterns and flashing as if writing in a disco helps you concentrate. I thought this would be another ‘meh’ feature, but it turned out to be useful. I can see the keys in the dark and I’ve used the keyboard as a torch! More importantly it turns from white to red when I switch to Layer 1. I’ll have to explain that too and it’s in the section after next.
‘Customisable’ means that every key can be turned into something else. If you don’t like where the ‘@’ symbol happens to be, then move it. I write fiction and Shift-2 for double quotes is a pain, so I moved it to here, there and everywhere. Indeed, a one point I had five different ways to start dialogue. I’ve narrowed it down to the US keyboard layout and then swapped the apostrophe and semi-colon. I created dedicated keys for ‘!’, ‘?’ and ‘#’ as well as one for interrupted speech. Indeed, the keyboard is rarely the same from one week to another, which makes it tricky to learn. I have a map printed out as well as writing on blank keys with a sharpie pen. Some changes have been easy to learn. I get the apostrophe right, but a colon tends to be the following sequence: double quotes, space, swear, backspace, backspace, shift-semi colon. There are extra keys too, so I’ve dedicated one to italics. Add this to AutoHotKey and Macros (see earlier blogs) and who knows what’ll happen when I press, say, this key here.
The layer concept is like pressing ‘shift’ for capitals. On Layer 1, the red layer, I’ve set up the cursor
keys. Layer 2, the green layer, is a
numeric keypad, although I’ve yet to really use that in anger. The idea is that using keys for multiple
functions reduces the space taken up on your desk and finger movement.
Overall, the new keyboard does make touch typing straightforward, but it doesn’t forgive bad habits. I’ve discovered that I must have been reaching way over with my right hand to press ‘b’. The extra centimetre was something my right index finger could do, but now with a split keyboard, it’s more like 20 cms – that’s an impossible reach. The letter ‘p’ is tricky as my right little finger is slightly bent and goes for the ‘o’; this has been going on a long time as my right ‘ring’ finger presses the ‘p’ quite happily. I’m trying to train myself out of it.
I do mistype and suddenly Word brings up some madness
because I’ve managed to press control-alt-b-u or whatever, and it’s some esoteric
shortcut for something you’d never need.
Numbers are a problem. I used to just go along the top row with my right index finger, but that’s counterintuitive when 1-5 are over here and 6-0 are way over there with F8 and F15 in-between.
Another major issue is going back. Recently, I tried typing on my old Logitech,
which is ergonomic, but only slightly in comparison. My fingers couldn’t cope with it at all. It was like fumbling around in boxing gloves.
But it is easier. This blog has just gone over 1,000 words
(sorry) in one sitting and my fingers, wrists and shoulders are fine.
I did find I missed the dedicated cursor keys. You can put them on the Ergodox, of course, and
I bought special yellow arrow keys for this.
With the old keyboard, I was in the habit of resting my fingers up
against them when rewriting. I bought another
keypad with four keys to replicate this old setup… and then another keypad
for nine keys, so I can have dedicated volume controls and keys for copy, paste
and cut, and to type my email address, make a cup of tea… etc.
Unfortunately, the little keyboards were fiddly to reach. I moved them to sit between the big Ergodox ones and the tenting creates a barrier.
My obsession for the perfect keyboard (much like Stephen
King’s search for the perfect desk, see his excellent On Writing) knows
no bounds. I bought a gamepad and, after
a ludicrous amount of Googling, found a utility to customise it. It’s called ‘antimicro’ and it enables you to
change all the buttons and thumb sticks.
I had the idea to use it to navigate a Word document as a macropad. Instead of fiddling with the cursor keys,
say, I can use the exciting thumb stick to nip about as if writing about
spaceships needs a more futuristic set of controls. (I’m currently writing a novel set in 1901,
so it’s not really apt.) The gamepad also
extra buttons which I can use to do… er, stuff.
I have managed to get it working, but I’ve not used it in
anger as such. This is partly because I
have a full keyboard in front of me (stop press: 2.5 keyboards) with perfectly good
cursor keys (and autohotkey and autocorrect (see previous blogs) that do
everything anyway). However, it’s mostly
because it feels awkward. That’s probably
only the learning curve. I really ought
to practise.
I suspect the gamepad is merely a stepping stone to overleap
towards the ultimate setup. Other ideas
have made this one positively, er, last month.
It might come into its own later.
I can see a genuine use when editing and beta-reading, but I’m not currently
doing any of that.
But I can sit back and browse the internet, so that’s a step
that’s not backwards. And it might give
you ideas.
A BBC website story today talked about whether Enid Blyton should
lose her English Heritage blue plaque because she was racist. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57517254) Enid Blyton?
Racist? Surely not? They had an example and… oh dear; oh dearie,
dearie me. Ouch.
Further down, and the point of this blog, they mention Rudyard
Kipling’s “racist and imperialist sentiments” as being beyond the pale. Now, I’m currently writing a novel set in the
British Raj and it’s soaked through with racism and imperialism. And sentimentalism. Well, of course it is; it’s set in the British
Raj. However, the article is a pause for
thought.
There’s a scene early on in “The Man Who Would Be
King”, the Sean Connery/Michael Caine film based on Rudyard Kipling’s
tale, set in a train carriage. A middle-class,
well-to-do Indian gets on and Caine’s character tells him to shut up.
“Thank you, sir,” the Indian says, deferentially, before Caine
physically pushes him out of the moving train.
There’s racism in the scene – clearly – but it doesn’t follow that
Kipling was racist. He’s describing things
as they were, holding a mirror up to reality.
Considering how things go for Connery and Caine, you could argue that the
story is anti-imperialist. It’s really about
people getting above their station: you could easily translate it into two business
consultants arriving at an office. The
Man Who Would Be CEO perhaps?
(Hmm, I’ve just looked up Kipling on Wikipedia and he wasn’t
exactly that woke. Perhaps, I guess, you
can say he was a product of his time. I’m
not going to back myself into a corner trying to defend him.)
My point is that fiction has to reflect the time it’s
set. (Or be such fantasy that, say, the
British Raj was not racist.) You can’t
have anti-slavery Romans, for example.
Spartacus, and all those who claimed to be the great slave revolt
leader, did not want to get rid of slavery.
They just didn’t want to be slaves –
fair enough – they wanted to
own slaves – ah, hang on – maybe even their former masters. The system, you see, was just the way of things.
I blogged recently about AutoHotKey, but that’s quite a complex program. A quicker way to change text is to use Word’s AutoCorrect. Just follow the rabbit hole that goes File>Options>Proofing and you’ll find a button called ‘AutoCorrect Options…’
It’s preloaded with things
like “do’nt” being replace by “don’t”. (It
was tricky to write that as Word, of course, changed the typo.) I see it also corrects “drnik driveing”, so
it’s quite a moral feature.
I added “teh” and “adn” for “the”
and “and” as I often make that error.
But I’ve highlighted an
example of one that makes things really easy for writers. I write the Derring-Do Club and the heroines
of that are Earnestine, Georgina and Charlotte.
Those are long names to type, so I’ve set up an autocorrect to change “e#”
to “Earnestine” (see image) with “g#” and “c#” for the other two. It becomes easy to think of the ‘#’ as whoever’s
name, and I chose the ‘#’ because my little finger can reach it when touch
typing.
It’s also another reason to
have your characters start with different letters of the alphabet.
Currently, the sisters are facing a man called Maçon and he has that tricky cedilla under the ‘c’ – no problem, just set up “m#” and no more labouriously inserting that single character from the menu.
In the cosy mystery that’s currently
being edited, I have a suspect called “Mrs Entwistle”, but I kept spelling her
name “Entwhistle”, six backspaces and then “istle”. Now, it’s just “me#”
Note that they are all in lower
case, not upper case. This means it
catches both “e#” and “E#”, whereas if it’s in upper case, then you have to type
upper case.
Finally, if it corrects
something and you don’t want it to have, as I have needed in writing this, then
simply do a Control-Z to undo. “Earnestine”
becomes “e#” again.
This all comes down to that Big
Rule of Computing:
If you are doing anything
repetitively, get the computer to do it.
