Googling Books

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I admit to Googling my own books from time to time.  (I know, I know!  You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!)  Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it.  Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book.  Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked.  My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper.  It was still a work in progress, however.  By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page.  So here’s what I saw:

Okay, so they got a number of things right.  This is the correct book and the description seems correct.  The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book).  But what’s going on with Wal-Mart?  They have the title correct but that picture?  Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow.  What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them.  It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary).  Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here.  It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.

None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah.  That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted.  That banner, however, also has mistaken information.  It says it was originally published in 2007.  The original date as actually 1993.  Web-scraping may not help with that.  The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press.  But then, only humans are concerned with such things.  There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct.  That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right.  Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books.  It’s unseemly.

Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

Funerals

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Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.

Dark Dreams

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I’ve been pondering the role of religion in dark academia.  While not a major element, it’s certainly present in Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife.  There are plenty of plot twists, and I’ll try to avoid giving away whodunit, at least ultimately.  The basic idea is that a group of seven students, the “East House Seven,” band together at Duquette University, a near-Ivy League school in North Carolina.  They get into some college hijinks, but things turn dark when one of them (Heather) is murdered their senior year.  Jessica Miller, one of the seven, has become a corporate climber, despite her family background, and ten years later she goes to Homecoming to show off her accomplishments.  But things don’t work out as planned.  Heather’s younger brother, who works at Duquette, has been doing some detective work and uses Homecoming to confront those who remain about the murder.

The seven (which actually involves an eighth student) pretty much date among themselves.  Some of them, including Heather, are quite wealthy, but not all.  Jessica isn’t among the affluent, and another of the seven, Coop, ends up dealing drugs to make money on the side.  Heather’s boyfriend was suspected in the murder, but had to be released for lack of evidence, and he decides not to attend Homecoming.  Those present for the event are confronted by Heather’s brother and the story is told as flashbacks from the Homecoming to events that took place during the college years of the seven.  As I say, I won’t reveal who did it, but each of the remaining seven is suspected until the reveal comes near the end.

For me, these kinds of stories are a little difficult to follow because of the number of active players.  Jessica reveals herself to be an unreliable narrator, and although the story felt long to me, it takes quite a bit of space to get to know all the characters well enough to understand their motivations.  Two of them were raised religious, which is what ties this theme into the novel.  The wealthy students aren’t exactly the kinds of people to emulate, and those raised religious end up being the good ones at the end, although they do participate in Greek life with its parties and other activities that college encourages.  (Sorry about the long sentence.)  Overall, this is a good story, but it’s hard to give too much sympathy to the group as they do have shifting alliances and are mostly power-hungry.  Yet, isn’t that like life itself?  It is dark academia. 

The Power of Yes

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In going back over my fiction writing, I had a realization.  Both the first novel I tried seriously to get published (still not) and the first short story I submitted to a journal were accepted the first place I submitted.  That perhaps seemingly insignificant fact is quite important.  Like most, or at least many, writers, I’m a great self-doubter.  This probably comes from not knowing many other people personally and having a Calvinistic-level assessment of my own work.  Affirmation is rare in my experience.  Having a publisher say, “Yes, we like this” early on in my attempts to publish fiction was a tremendous boost and gave me the courage to try again.  It didn’t take long for the rejections to start rolling in, but I knew that someone believed in me.  Belief is far more important than most people think.  Worlds can be built on it.

The publisher of my debut novel decided to back out of the contract when the acquiring editor left.  I know, different editor, different game.  But this was under contract.  Thirteen years later it remains unpublished, not for lack of trying.  I began re-revising it in recent times since I’ve found a potential publisher and reading it I could see what might’ve frightened off others.  Still, I stand by it.  The book was written in a style very different from most of my subsequent fiction.  Characters speak their minds instead of being beat down by the system.  Readers of my academic work would be shocked.  That’s one reason that I use a pseudonym.  I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if the novel ever does get published.  It’s difficult to promote and keep your identity secret.

The point is that we never know what good we might do when we encourage someone who underestimates themself.  This may seem an odd thing to say when so many arrogant individuals command the world stage these days.  There are many people, however, who might accomplish great things if someone only gives them a little encouragement.  I think of this constantly in my work as well as my private life.  Is all this person needs simply some uplift?  Publishing can be a harsh world.  You put yourself out there and people like to start taking pot shots at you.  I’ve received much criticism over the years, and this has been primarily for nonfiction publishing.  The reviews some fiction writers receive, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or even in print, can be unkind.  Some of the critique may be deserved, but why not offer it up with a word of motivation rather than Schadenfreude?  It can make a huge difference.

The Lord

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“This article may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information, copyright violations, claims not verified in cited sources, original research, or fictitious references. Any such material should be removed, and content with an unencyclopedic tone should be rewritten.”  So it begins.  This quote is from Wikipedia.  I was never one of those academics who uselessly forbade students from consulting Wikipedia.  I always encourage those who do to follow up and check the sources.  I often use it myself as a starting place.  I remember having it drilled into me as a high school and college student that in general encyclopedias were not academic sources, even if the articles had academic authors.  Specialized reference works were okay, but general sources of knowledge should not be cited.

The main point of this brief disquisition, however, is our familiar nemesis, AI.  Artificial Intelligence is not intelligence in the sense of the knowing application of knowledge.  In fact, Wikipedia’s warning uses the proper designation of “large language model.”  Generative AI is prone to lying—it could be a politician—but mostly when it doesn’t “know” an answer.  It really doesn’t know anything at all.  And it will only increase its insidious influence.  I am saddened by those academics who’ve jumped on the bandwagon.  I’m definitely an old school believer.  So much so that one of my recurring fantasies is to sell it all, except for the books, buy a farm off the grid and raise my own food.  Live like those of us in this agricultural spiral must.

A true old schooler would insist on going back to the hunter-gatherer phase, something I would be glad to do were there a vegan option.  Unfortunately tofubeasts who are actually plant-based lifeforms don’t wander the forests.  So I find myself buying into the comforts of a life that’s, honestly, mostly online these days.  I work online.  I spend leisure time online (although not as much as many might guess that I do).  And I’m now faced with being force-fed what some technocrat thinks is pretty cool.  Or, more honestly, what’s going to make him (and I suspect these are mostly guys) buckets full of money.  Consider the cell phone that many people can no longer be without.  I sometimes forget mine at home.  And guess what?  I’ve not suffered for having done so.  The tech lords have had their say, I’m more interested in what people have to say.  And if Al is going to interfere with the first steps of learning for many people, it won’t be satisfied until we’re all its slaves.

Free Parking

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Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

Virtues of Fiction

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So, my first royalty statement for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived.  It is my poorest selling book ever, not even notching up to Nightmares with the Bible, and that one was twice as expensive.  A couple things: I know that nonfiction books had a hard year last year.  Also, “academic” books tend to do better in the subsequent years after their initial release, for those of us with no name recognition.  In any case I’ve decided to try focusing on fiction.  The compulsion to write is deep-seated in me.  My nonfiction books are creative explorations of ideas neglected or never before brought together.  They’re also priced too high for the trade market.  I was pleased to see, recently, that The Wicker Man is now in over 400 libraries, according to WorldCat.  That makes it my second best-selling book, after Weathering the Psalms.  A Reassessment of Asherah has been viewed over 9000 times on Academia.edu.

So, fiction.  I write my fiction under a pseudonym.  I currently have one novel out for consideration and another very close to being ready.  I have several in the wings.  What strikes me as crazy about all of this is that I’m told (as I have been since high school) that my writing is quite good.  I’m not the one to assess this claim, since I’m far too close to it.  It does make me wonder, however, what it takes to earn a little cash at it.  My last royalty check for a new book was half of what they usually are.  Good thing inflation is under control and the economy booming.  So I hear.  I do believe that the most impactful books tend to be fiction.  People like a good story.  And they can last for many decades.  The nonfiction that stands the test of time is a very narrow shelf indeed.  At least compared to our fictional siblings.

For fiction you need to keep at it to improve.  I think of all the years I’ve poured into my last four nonfiction books.  The only real critique I’ve seen of Holy Horror was that it was “too well written.”  When’s the last time someone said such things about fiction?  Oh, I’ve got three nonfiction books underway as well.  One of them I’m quite excited about.  But then I take a look at this royalty slip sitting in front of me and wonder if I’ll ever learn.  I have to write.  I’ve done that since fifth grade as a means of coping.  Here I am at over half a century at it.  There’s no danger of giving it up now. But the form it may take, well, that’s up for grabs.

The Dismal Science

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I kind of resent it.  I was was having a conversation with a friend about retirement.  He knows our circumstances (my middling and muddling career) and suggested that we might retire, noting we’d need to ask ourselves “do we really need this?” before buying everything.  I don’t resent what my friend said, but rather the fact that economists get the final word on when we rest our weary bones.  Why do we insist on measuring an individual’s worth based on the amount of money they have?  There’s no denying that’s what we do.  And there’s no denying that we age the longer we maintain this mortal coil.  We are all slaves to capitalism.  We are owned by our jobs, and since corporations are legally people in this country, that means we are owned by a person.  Oh, we can quit, but there goes your food, shelter, and medical care.  Is it really a choice?

The problem is that many people, far smarter than yours truly, have proposed much better, more humane systems.  Universal living income, universal health care, fair use of tax money we pay.  Since governments have been suborned by the wealthy—both capitalist and communist—such fairness measures are unlikely to ever take place.  Why do we allow this to happen?  Sometimes such situations lead to revolutions, a new system that will be equitable takes hold.  Only to be taken over by those who have access to more resources and who hope to aggrandize themselves.  The other day when I was checking out from a department store, the person at the register had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.  Instead of enjoying retirement, she was scanning overpriced items for people who also wouldn’t likely retire.  Our system is broken.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

More than a mere economic readjustment, we need a philosophical one.  Years ago the United States went off the gold standard.  Our system of values changed.  On the surface it stayed the same, but the slow eroding of services the government used to offer has led to the phenomenon of people who should be enjoying a rest from many decades of working continuing to work so that they can survive.  Should such a person’s ship come in, they’ll soon forget their concern, I’m guessing.  They may feel sorry for others, but they aren’t likely to be activists for change.  The friend I was talking with was retired.  He was younger than me.  And should he want to buy anything he doesn’t have to ask if he really needs it.  Some of us tire and others retire.

Loss and Beauty

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Losing someone close to you is never easy.  We of our species are closely interconnected, but family is where we feel the safest and, hopefully, most accepted.  There are many ways to deal with grief, but one of the more unusual is to take a job at the Met.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is world famous, of course.  And Patrick Bringley, giving up a rat race job at the New Yorker (where he got to meet Stephen King, I might add), to become a guard at the Met, is the kind of thing to write a book about.  He frames it as a way of dealing with the loss of his older brother prematurely to cancer.  All the Beauty in the World gives you insight into a job open to just about anybody, but that has long hours and pay hardly comparable to the costs of living in New York City.  Giving up the rat race to spend your days looking at, and keeping people from physically interacting with, art doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

This memoir delves a little bit into spirituality, but not in any kind of religious way.  Then Bringley starts a family and after ten years decides to take his career in another direction.  I’m familiar with career pivots.  In my case, the choice was made for me and anybody who reads much of my writing (either fiction or non) knows that I’m trying to cope with it still.  In any case, museum work—I’ve applied for many such jobs, on the curator side, over the years—isn’t easy to find unless you’re willing to be a guard.  I know security guards.  It’s not a job that will make you rich, but it does give you access to riches.  Art is something we seldom take time to admire since, for most of us, museums are a weekend activity, and even then, only once in a while.

Museums begin with collectors.  Generally rich ones.  Those who can afford what the rest of us can only dream about.  They’re also altruistic places, for, as well as showing off, they give the rank and file access to what we tend to value even more than money.  The creative work of those we deem geniuses.  Bringley doesn’t just focus on the “Old Masters”—they are in here, but not alone—demonstrating that art can, and should, include the creative work of African-American quilters and woodworkers ivory carvers from Benin.  Museums are places that bring us together instead of separating us (that’s the job of politics, I guess).  And this book is a thoughtful way of dealing with loss.

Whose Smile?

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Amazon’s smile logo is a mask.  I use Amazon when I need something specific and I don’t have time to run around to six or seven stores to see if I can find it (I usually can’t).  This means that many of the items come from other vendors and Amazon takes a cut.  Taking a cut, by the way, may be the best way to make a living.  In any case, I seldom write reviews of such orders.  Most of them are books and generally they arrive in the condition in which they’re described.  I did, however, receive a non-book item which did not work.  I tried contacting the seller and their email didn’t work.  I decided to alert the world.  So I took some of my precious time and wrote a review on Amazon.  The prompt promised me that if I wrote seven reviews they’d tell me a joke.  What can I say?  I’m easy.

So I reviewed books, etc. until I reached seven reviews.  The next screen simply said “Awesome! Thank you for helping other shoppers!”  Is this meant to be a joke?  What about that Amazon smile?  I just gave them ten minutes of my time for a promised joke that never materialized.  Now I’m grumpy.  By the way, I started the review process with the most altruistic of motives; I don’t want anyone else to waste money on a product that doesn’t work, and you can’t contact the seller.  To make matters worse, it was a Christmas gift, so that by the time it was open and tried out, it was too late to return it.  Is this supposed to make me happy?  I was looking forward to at least a dad joke.  None at all.  This happened a few months after I fell for a scam, so I’m not feeling especially generous to the internet today.

It’s a little thing, a joke.  I’m not good at making them up myself (although I’ve been told now and again that I can be witty).  Ten minutes easy labor, feeding the beast and the best they can come up with is “Awesome!”?  An overused word at that!  Don’t promise me a joke if you don’t intend to deliver one.  Probably some AI trick, if you ask me.  They lure you in with promises and when it’s all over you’re left with nothing.  (Kind of like the product I bought as a gift).  In the end, the joke’s on me.

Laughing Matter?

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I sincerely hope AI is a bubble that will burst.  Some of its ridiculousness has been peeking out from under its skirts from the beginning, but an email I had from Academia.edu the other day underscored it.  The automated email read, “Our AI turned your paper ‘A Reassessment of’ into a shareable comic.”  Let me translate that.  Academia.edu is a website where you can post published (and even unpublished) papers that others can consult for free.  Their main competitor is Research Gate.  Many years ago, I uploaded PDFs of many of my papers, and even of A Reassessment of Asherah, my first book, onto Academia.  This is what the email was referencing.  My dissertation had been AIed into a shareable comic.  I felt a little amused but also a little offended.  I quickly went to Academia’s site and changed my AI settings.

I didn’t click on the link to my comic book for two reasons.  One is that I no longer click links in emails.  Doing so once cost me dearly (and I didn’t even actually click).  I no longer do that.  The second reason, however, is that I know Academia’s game.  They want free users to become subscribers.  They frequently email intriguing tidbits like some major scholar has cited your work and when you go to their website, the only way to find out who is to upgrade to a paid account.  They do the same thing with emails asking if you wrote a certain paper.  If you own that you did, they’ll tell you the wonders of a paid account.  Since I’m no longer an academic, I don’t need to know who is citing my work.  I’d like to believe it’s still relevant, but I don’t feel the need to pay to find out to whom.

I am curious about what a comic version of my dissertation might look like, of course.  I am, however, morally opposed to generative AI.  In a very short time it has ruined much of what I value.  I do not believe it is good for people and I’m disappointed by academics who are using it for research.  AI still hallucinates, making things up.  It is not conscious and can’t really come up with its own answers.  It has no brain and no emotion, both of which are necessary for true advances to take place.  My first book has the highest download rate of any of my pieces on the Academia website.  Last time I checked it had just edged over 9,000 views.  AI thinks it’s  a joke, making a comic of years of academic work.

Beautiful Reality

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Although it is central to understanding all human experience, we are far from comprehending consciousness.  It’s clear to me, based on the fact that our senses are limited, that rationality alone can’t provide us with all the answers.  And brilliance often comes at a cost.  These were my thoughts after watching A Beautiful Mind.  Having hung around Princeton quite a bit when living in New Jersey, it was nice to see it in a film.  The movie is, of course, a somewhat fictionalized account of the mathematician John Nash’s life.  Although extraordinary in his grasp of math, Nash suffered from mental illness as well.  A Beautiful Mind takes liberties, but then, most biopics do.  The film is well done from a cinematic point of view, and for those of us without any real knowledge of Nash (although we only lived about 15 miles away) it effectively fools you into mistaking reality.

I wanted to see the movie because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia.  Clearly the mental illness—called schizophrenia here—is the source of the darkness.  Academia is obvious.  This biopic genre of dark academia includes a number of films and many of them explore the disjunction between deep thinkers and social life.  It seems that we may be only in the early stages of mapping the intricacies of the human mind.  I was recently reading that psychology is still, after all these years, struggling to be considered a “real” science.  The human mind is a slippery place and emotion and intuition play into making someone really stand out from the rest of us.  And also, their stories have to be noticed by someone.  In Nash’s case, a book that was later made into a movie.

Academics in general aren’t given much notice.  Many operate in the rarified world of extended study.  Those who, like myself, are expelled, often have difficulty fitting in to other lines of work.  Thinkers often have trouble not thinking.  That can get you into trouble on the job.  Movies like A Beautiful Mind have some triggers for me because I often question what reality is.  I always have.  Please don’t take it personally, dear reader, when I say I’m not sure you’re real.  (You may think the same of me.) It’s just the way I look at the world.  I’m no mathematician, though, nor a scientist.  Not even a philosopher, according to the guild.  Academia, however, was my home and seems to have been what my mind was made to do.  At this point, I’ll settle for watching movies about dark academia.

Luddism

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There are books you really want to read, and books you feel you should read.  There are authors who delight in telling you what’s going on, and there are authors whose writing obfuscates.  I’ve always preferred the former in both scenarios, but I felt I should read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  I guess I’ve grown apart from science fiction.  (It’s not you, it’s me.)  Or at least some of it.  And I encounter too much jargony writing among academics.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  Also, noir has never been my favorite.  Case, the protagonist, is difficult to like.  As a literary achievement there’s no doubt that Neuromancer is amazing.  And highly influential.  It’s the story of a thief/conman (Case) who’s hired for a mission that he doesn’t understand.  Along the way he falls in love (sort of), but, well, noir.  Dames.  The imaginative elements are pretty stunning, and some of them have come true.  AI being one of them.  And maybe that didn’t help sway me to liking it too much.  I’m no fan of AI.

I didn’t read the novel to critique it.  Admittedly, I’m a Neo-Luddite.  I use tech, and even enjoy it sometimes, but I prefer print books, movies (on celluloid) in theaters, and music, if recorded, on vinyl.  Old fashioned.  I do like some of the convenience, however.  Who isn’t addicted to getting tedious things done quickly?  Well, some of them.  In any case, I found the Molly character intriguing.  I couldn’t help but think of Blade Runner the whole way through.  William Gibson claimed that his novel didn’t copy the gritty texture of the movie, and  I believe him.  I’ve written books after thoroughly researching a topic only to discover, too late, that someone else had largely done the same thing already.  It happens.

The plot itself is quite good. Still, there’s an ethical element involved.  I wonder how much AI optimism comes from guys who read such novels as teens.  I have trouble thinking of any way that generative “artificial intelligence” can end well.  It seems a misguided and oversold idea.  Now commercials tell us how much we need Al, and he appears in new devices, wanted or not.  He’s not welcome in my home.  I’m slowly getting used to the idea of having a phone near me most of the time.  I use it seldom, but when I do I’m glad for it.  I don’t watch movies or read books on it.  My favorite times are when it’s sitting there, being quiet.  Some of us are dinosaurs in a cyberpunk world that’s become reality.  And dinosaurs, well, we prefer the world before the electronic revolution.  Maybe even before the rise of the primates.

Trying to Write

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Realizations dawn slowly sometimes.  From childhood on I wanted to be a writer.  Teachers encouraged me because I seemed to have some talent, but in a small town they didn’t really know how to break through.  Besides, terrified of Hell, I was very Bible and church focused—not really conducive to the worldliness needed to be a writer.  The realization that recently dawned is that I’m competing with people who can put full-time into writing.  I’m trying to squeeze it into a couple hours before dawn every day because 9-2-5.  9-2-5.  9-2-5.  It’s exhausting.  I often read about writers, wondering how they get noticed.  Even the people I try to get to publish my fiction read stuff others likely have more time to write than I do.  Why do I keep at it?  Sometimes it’s just impossible to keep ideas inside.

I’ve got ideas.  Some of them would make fascinating movies.  I even had an editor of an online journal that published one of my stories say that.  I’ve got a cinematic imagination trapped in the aging body of a day-worker.  Oh, I’ve got a professional job, of course.  What I really want to do is “produce content.”  I know others in publishing with the same dream.  One of my colleagues has managed to break out and she’s now publishing novels that are getting noticed.  I’m still writing for academic presses because I know how to get published by them.  My fiction has been suffering from neglect.  To stay sharp you have to keep at it.  I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve not taken a course in it my entire life, and it probably shows.  Not even Comp 101.

Fairness is a human construct and ideal.  Reality lies with Fortuna (cue Carl Orff).  I’m better off than most people in the long human struggle with equity, I realize.  For that I’m grateful.  I do have to wonder, however, if struggle isn’t essential to making us what we need to be.  The writers whose work endures often had to struggle to get noticed.  Many died in obscurity.  I wonder if they ever realized that they were leaving a legacy.  You see, writing is a strange blend of arrogance and self-doubt.  Many of us go through intensely self-critical times when even our published books seem to mock us from their shelves.  The realization, now fully day, that I will always have to struggle to do what I know I’m meant to do sheds light.  Even in the world of privilege, the struggle inside is real.