Tag Archives: writing

It’s Almost Here!

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London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!

Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).

This is a…strange book. It’s like…um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.

This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:

I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “…no, really, we could.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.

There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.

Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:

After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”

“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”

May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”

“Get to what, exactly?”

“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”

May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”

“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”

“No.”

“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”

“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”

Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”

“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”

“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”

Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”

The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice!

A year ago today

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Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.

It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.

I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”

We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.

A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”

I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”

Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.

And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.

She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.

Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.

And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.

She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.

We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.

I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.

The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.

We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.

And she still helps me beta-test new prototypes.

I am profoundly blessed.

Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream

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A while back, I posted on social media:

I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.

So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:

The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).

I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.

This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.

If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.

I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.

Thereupon I found a problem.

I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.

But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.

Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.

And honestly that would simply not do.

So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).

I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.

This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.

Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.

You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.

The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).

Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.

There and Around and Back Again

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I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.

I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)

And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.

Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.

I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)

I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.

I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”

My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.

We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.

In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!

There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.

We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.

I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.

It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.

Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)

Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.

Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.

Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.

After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.

All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.

More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…

…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…

…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).

I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.

Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.

When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.

So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?

Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.

A Trip to the Dominionate

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I’m typing this in Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve just returned from visiting several places that do not yet exist, and won’t exist for nearly two thousand years.

Lemme back up a bit.

My Talespinner and I are writing a novel. Specifically, we’re writing a rather chonky (~160,000 word) far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel called Spin, set in the Dominionate, a sort of quasi-Catholic/Calvinist theocracy that extends through much of the center of what is now the United States.

We are, as I write this, about 90,000 words in, and we were having difficulty nailing down a crucial bit of timing, when our protagonist is forced by an encounter with the Inquisition to head off-road through what is now rural Missouri, trying to reach the city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate and home to a character she hopes can save her.

We’ve looked at maps and Google Earth, measured distances, made calculations, and finally my Talespinner was like “You know what? Fuggit. Ima follow her path and see how long it would take.”

About this time, I received a letter from Oregon Revenue, informing me I’d made an error in my 2022 state income tax (cue heart attack)…and that I’d overpaid by $208 (whew!). So I found a plane ticket for $206, and said “You know what, Ima go with you.”

We started following the footsteps of our protagonist from modern-day Stockton State Park, a park on a small peninsula jutting into Stockton Lake.

In two thousand years, after the Great Collapse, sea level rise, and two smaller collapses, this will become the small village of Half-Circle Cothold, where our protagonist Aiyah Spinner was born and raised.

On this spot, right here, will be a church and Mother’s Cloister two millennia from now. From this very spot, Aiyah will begin her journey toward Kanzit, built on what was once Kansas City, a journey that will absolutely not go as she expects.

From here, her plan will be to cross the bridge into Bridgegate, heading toward Brightchurch and from there, Kanzit itself, following the ancient roads still maintained and used after all these years.

Ah, Brightchurch.

If Kanzit is the head of the Dominionate, Brightchurch is its heart, a walled city that hosts Brightchurch Cathedral, the Temple of a Thousand Lights, one of the wonders of the future world, destination of an endless river of pilgrims. Brightchurch Cathedral, its windows shining like God’s grace itself every moment of every day and night, thanks to thousands of oil lamps fed from a cunning engineering marvel that distributes oil through a vast system of tubes and pipes, driven by pumps powered by human and animal muscle, tended by an army of novices, awe-inspiring beyond imagination. (The idea for Brightchurch Cathedral came from a pen and paper role-playing game I ran for a time a few years back, expanded and incorporated into the world of the Dominionate.)

Brightchurch Cathedral will one day stand on this spot, right here, in present-day Nevada, Missouri.

(Honestly, I would never for a moment want to live in the Dominionate, but I nevertheless wish I could see Brightchurch Cathedral. It’s truly a magnificent, incomprehensibly beautiful place.)

Aiyah, for various reasons, never reaches Brightchurch, but instead is forced to flee overland, through what is now farmland but will be, in the age of the Dominionate, forest. We followed her path, and I’m so glad we did, because we found all kinds of treasures along the way.

Like this tiny graveyard, which isn’t on any map or on Google Maps, but lies directly in her path and some remnant of which may still exist in the time the novel is set.

As for Kanzit, while it’s much reduced and sees countless changes, some of its buildings still exist, lovingly maintained over countless years.

The administrative center of the Church and, by extension of all the Dominionate lives in what is now the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, suited by both design and location to be repurposed to the head of the theocratic government. All the various aspects of the Church except the Inquisition are administered from here.

So let’s talk about the Dominionate.

When this novel publishes, I think people will compare it to The Handmaid’s Tale. The two stories have some superficial resemblances: social collapse, a theocracy carved out of what was once the United States, falling fertility that leads to sexual subjugation of women.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Margaret Atwood has said she explicitly modeled the government and culture of Gilead on the Islamic Revolution, a cautionary tale about what might happen in a society where reactionary religious zealotry comes to power.

But when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, I came away from the story with a sense that Gilead is fundamentally unstable. On a very deep level, the society doesn’t really work for anyone. Everyone is miserable—even the people on the top of the hierarchy. Offred, certainly, and all the other Handmaids…but even the Commander comes across as fundamentally unhappy. You really can’t point to anyone in Atwood’s story and say “yeah, those folks have a pretty good life, they seem happy and self-actualized.”

Which is, I think, part of the point she’s making.

The thing that makes Spin so horrifying, so deeply disturbing, is that the Dominionate works. The society of the Dominionate has long-term stability, peace, and prosperity. Many people—most people, really—are happy. Or if not happy, at least content. There’s little violence or crime. That sets Spin in sharp contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale (well, that and the fact Spin incorporates elements of magic, and a vastly different story).

Technology in the Dominionate is limited—the thing about the modern world is that we’ve largely stripped the earth of natural resources available to anyone without a post-industrial level of technology (there are no more surface deposits of iron, copper, tin, or coal, no oil available without modern drilling techniques, and without vast and available fuel, you might be able to “mine” landfills or junkyards for metals but you will have a very difficult time indeed smelting modern steels into things you can use)—but our knowledge remains. Even without modern levels of technology, most people still have a reasonably high standard of living.

But all of it—their standard of living, their society, their peace and prosperity—rests on a foundation of subjugation of (some) women. There’s no escaping it. They hide it away, in Mother’s Cloisters administered by the Church, and it’s been normalized for so long that everyone, even the people most oppressed, accept it as natural and necessary.

That is, I believe, way more horrifying than the society of Gilead, a society that does not have peace and prosperity, a society that seems unlikely to endure for two hundred years, or honestly even for twenty.

And more horrifying still, you can make a strong argument that the oppression and subjugation of the Dominionate is necessary. Without it, humanity will likely cease to be. Squaring that circle—trying to reconcile the idea that humanity has value with the horrific bedrock strata of sexual slavery on which not just this particular society but humanity’s future rests—is the core of the novel.

Spin is by far the most challenging, most ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of. My Talespinner and I didn’t set out to write it this way. We’d originally imagined an 80,000-word young adult novel, something far more lighthearted. About 25,000 words in, we realized that story didn’t actually worked, tore it up, sat down, re-thought the story we wanted to tell, and came up with a detailed 27-page outline for something much, much different…and much, much darker.

I am absolutely thrilled my Talespinner and I took the opportunity to make this trip, following a character’s journey two thousand years from now. Everything we saw along the way will inform the novel. We have quite a lot of rewriting to do, particularly in the first third of the book, which will be far richer and more vibrant because we did this crazy thing.

I’m also profoundly grateful that one of my Talespinner’s other lovers was able to accompany us. His presence made the trip better, but even more, as we took copious notes—I still haven’t transcribed them into the outline yet—he offered ideas and suggestions that will make the novel so much better.

On Being a Writer in the Age of AI

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AI generated image of an author sitting in front of a computer writing. Can you count the flaws in this image? And who the hell puts a glass of what I assume is whiskey behind the monitor?

People—by which I mean, the great teeming mass of human beings who make their livings by any means other than writing—are deeply weird about writers.

I make my living as a novelist. It’s not a particularly good living—I make less than an average fast-food worker in Oregon—but it’s a living. Like everyone who makes a living crafting words of whimsey, I have, on more than a few occasions, encountered folks with Great Ideas.

These encounters follow a predictable path, like water flowing down a riverbed. “Oh, you’re a writer?” says the person who’s just discovered that I’m a writer. “I have a great idea for a story! Why don’t you write it for me, and we’ll split the profits?”

There’s a strange, topsy-turvy logic in this proposal, a weird notion of how writing works that’s a bit like one of those maddening M. C. Escher paintings where the more you examine it, the less sense it makes.

On the one hand, the people with the Great Ideas seem to understand they lack the ability to turn the idea into a book, else they wouldn’t be making this (in their estimation, rather generous) offer. On the other, they trivialize the act of writing; it’s the idea that’s hard, see. The writing of it is a mere formality.

Inevitably, attempts to explain that ideas are really rather common and ordinary, and the difficulty lies in the turning of an idea into a book, fall on deaf ears. I have about half a dozen ideas for novels a day, no exaggeration. Ideas are everywhere. You can’t walk down the street without encountering ideas.

And I really mean it when I say ideas are everywhere. Eunice and I are just putting the finishing touches on a novel called London Under Veil, a contemporary urban fantasy that’s sort of Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy, but with sex.

That PHP is taken from a live, in-the-wild bit of WordPress malware.

Where did we get the idea to write a novel about a young British-born-Chinese infosec worker at a London webhosting company who gets sucked into a centuries-long underground war between a group of spellcasting sex workers and a society of rage mages that has infiltrated and captured the Tories?

From a social media question.

That. That sparked a conversation betwixt Eunice and me that led to a book.

Ideas are everywhere.

The folks with the Grand Ideas generally seem to believe that 75% of a book is coming up with the idea, and 25% is the writing (or, if they’re especially generous, that the idea is 50% and the writing is 50%). In reality, it’s more like the idea is 0.25%, and the writing is 99.75%, though if you’ve never written a book that might not seem credible.

I’ve talked before about the process of writing a book, and man, there’s nothing like the Writer’s Roller Coaster…largely because if there were, it would contravene the Geneva Convention.

So let’s talk about AI.

The advent of ChatGPT has led to a ton of folks who think that since the idea is the hardest part of writing a novel, and the writing is the trivial bit—a mere incidental—that in a world of ChatGPT, anyone can publish a novel. It’s so easy! Type your idea into ChatGPT and Bob’s your uncle! Fame and riches await!

Of course, it doesn’t work like that.

There’s a peculiar thing that happens with human beings where, when you lack the ability to do something, you also lack the ability to evaluate whether or not someone else who does that thing is good at the task. People who aren’t writers may sincerely be unable to tell that ChatGPT output is bland, dreary, inconsistent garbage—not really information so much as an information-shaped space, a suggestion of what information might vaguely look like.

I’ve been asked if I’m afraid ChatGPT will make me obsolete.

No. The answer is no.

Folks who think that ChatGPT can turn their amazing idea into a best-selling book…well, let’s just say I see disappointment in their future.

Will AI get better? Sure. Will AI ever replace technical writers? Mmmmmaybe, though I think it’s more likely it will enhance technical writers by creating a tool in their toolkit for certain formulaic parts of technical writing. A good technical writer needs to be able to imagine herself in the position of someone unskilled in the art being guided through an unfamiliar task, and I don’t see AI doing that untill it actually becomes, well, real artificial intelligence, which ChatGPT and its like most definitely are not.

Will AI replace creative fiction writers? I think that’s an AI-Complete problem—a problem unlikely to be solved until we have true self-aware general AI, at which point AI people are people, and like human people, may r may not be good at writing.

But I digress.

The point I’m making here is the fascination with ChatGPT producing a novel comes, I think, from a profound ignorance of how common ideas are and how difficult it is to turn an idea into something someone else wants to read.

I’m writing this from the home of one of my co-authors in Springfield. Tomorrow, we are driving out to rural Missouri to trace the path of the protagonist in our upcoming far-future, post-Collapse literary novel, Spin, because we need to get a sense of what it’s like to make that journey…and that’s exactly the sort of thing ChatGPT cannot bring to the table.

Beware Bowdlerization of Google Docs

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Image: David Pennington

I write novels almost exclusively in Google Docs.

It’s an aggressively mediocre word processor with two killer features: you have access to it wherever and from whatever device you have Internet access, and it is hands-down the absolute best thing out there for collaborative writing. Nearly all my books are co-written with other people. Google Docs makes this effortless; in fact, many’s the time I’ve been working with Eunice or my Talespinner as both of us type in the same Docs file at the same time.

Even when we aren’t writing at the same time, Google Docs makes it easy for us to leave notes to each other within the same document. It’s no exaggeration to say Docs is probably the best thing to happen to collaborative writing since the invention of the fountain pen.

So you can imagine when I opened my Messenger app a couple days ago and found a message from my co-author Eunice linking to a story by a writer who’d lost access to Google Docs and her manuscript because they contained sexually explicit content.

I’ve spent the last couple of days poring over the Google Terms of Service, and what I found is…worrisome.

Many of the novels I write contain sex. Some of them contain a lot of sex; the Passionate Pantheon series Eunice and I write, a far-future post-scarcity science fiction series where residents of the City worship AI gods through highly ritualized group sex, is a vehicle for us to explore sexual ethics, philosophy, and society in a setting where attitudes toward sex and violence are pretty much exactly the opposite of what they are here in the real world. And these books have tons of sex, some of it so kinky the kinks don’t even have names—we looked.

Naturally, the notion that Google can terminate your Google account and delete your manuscripts in progress for (consensual adult) sexual content is a little alarming.

The issue seems to be Google’s March 2024 anti-spam update.

What does spam have to do with sex and Google? Glad you asked.

More and more often, I am seeing spam that directs to Google properties: Google Sites and Google Docs, mostly. The spammers link to a Google page, which has a link that goes on to the spam site.

Why? Because it keeps the spam emails from being filtered by anti-spam filters (Google links aren’t flagged as spam) and helps prevent the spammers from having their sites shut down.

Sex spammers especially seem to be flocking to Google:

If you click on the link, you’re taken to a Google Site (as in this example) or a Google Doc that then contains a link to the spam site. The Google page includes a little circle-I icon that, if you click on it, brings up the option to report the Google Site or Google Doc for abuse.

If you hit the Report Abuse link, one of the options is “Sexually Explicit.”

So. It seems Google doesn’t permit sexually explicit content. But is that actually part of the Google Terms of Service? Well, kinda.

Here’s the relevant part of the Google Terms of Service:

This…isn’t actually terribly clear. It forbids distributing sexually explicit material, though it doesn’t ban creating sexually explicit material, nor does it say what constitutes “distributing.”

So.

What follows is a completely unofficial speculation about what might be happening and what you might be able to do about it. I claim no insider knowledge of Google’s policies; this is simply informal noodling about the situation.

There are several ways to share a Google Doc. You can invite specific people to see it, and give them different levels of access (read only, comment, propose changes, edit, and so on). You can set it up so that anyone who has the URL can read the document, but can’t make any changes. The way you share it affects what people who view it will see.

If you invite specific people to be able to see and/or comment on the document, they will not see the little information bubble that gives them the option to report the site to Google’s abuse team.

If you set the document up so that anyone with the link can see it, which is what spammers do, then anyone who views the document will see the option to report the document for abuse.

I think—and let me emphasize again this is not based on insider knowledge of anything happening at Google—I think what’s happening is that authors who share Google docs with beta readers may be sharing it by setting the document up so that everyone who has the link can see the doc, and people are reporting the doc.

Why? Unknown. Maybe they’re undermining an author they personally don’t like. Maybe they’re just busybodies.

Point is, Google is a big company, with billions of files and docs on Google Sites and Google Docs and so forth, and they’re not generally proactive about deleting content that violates their terms. They’re reactive—they take action when someone calls attention specifically to a doc or file or page.

So it would seem that they consider sharing a read-only link to be “distribution,” and authors who “distribute” sexual content this way are prone to getting their stuff deleted.

If that’s true, what does it mean?

First of all, it suggests that sharing docs with sexual content to beta readers or reviewers is very dangerous. One person clicking that “report abuse” link may be all it takes to lose access to your Google Docs.

So if you’re sharing content with beta readers, especially beta readers you haven’t individually vetted, don’t do it by sharing a publicly-accessible link to any Google content. Create a Word file and share that, or host the copy you share on your own site…basically anything else.

But it also suggests that in the future, should they want to, Google can decide to be less reactive about enforcing their terms and simply search for sexual words or phrases. It would be trivial of them to do so. Their current terms forbid “distributing” sexual content, but of course they decide what distributing means, and they can change that whenever they feel.

The second thing it means is back up your Google content!

You can download from a Google doc to a Word file easily; it’s in the File menu in Docs.

Back up early. Back up often. (I’ve long had a policy of downloading Google Docs after every major change, because Google has been known to accidentally lose files, but this recent development has me doing so even more aggressively).

I plan to continue using Google Docs to write manuscripts. Thankfully, I don’t share the docs to dog+world, so I’m not likely at risk of having a malicious rando report me.

But I will continue to keep local copies of everything, and I’m in search of a replacement for Google if things should go pear-shaped.

Anyone out there who knows of any good collaborative writing tools, please shout out in the comments!

Big things coming up!

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We’re now a month and a half into 2024. I’m sitting on my sofa absolutely miserable—cough, runny nose, fever, body aches, stuffy head, but two tests have insisted I don’t have COVID even though I feel rather like I have COVID.

Anyway, I’ve a ton of interesting projects in the air and a lot of really cool stuff happening this year.

FiErst off, Eunice and I are just putting the finishing touches on Unyielding Devotion, the fourth Passionate Pantheon novel!

The Passionate Pantheon books are far-future, post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica, plus philosophy. We use a tick-tock cycle for these novels: odd-numbered books are upbeat Utopian stories, even-numbered books are dark erotic horror, our explorations of how post-scarcity societies can go wrong.

We were pleased to be fortunate enough to get well-known artist Matt Haley for the cover art for the fourth novel, which calls back to the Golden Age of sci-fi book cover design.

Eunice will be at WorldCon Glasgow on August 8-12 in Scotland with this and our other novels, so if you get a chance, be sure to say hi!

And speaking of covers: Black Iron. I’ve won back the rights to the book and the entire universe it’s set in, so I’m preparing to re-release a newly edited second edition of the novel, which will be available next month in paperback and eBook, significantly polished from the first edition and with a brand-new cover.

We also have another novel due out later this year, in a completely new and unrelated series. It’s a contemporary urban fantasy set in London in 2016. Here’s the basic gist:

Imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Jason Bourne…with sex. When May, a London 20something infosec tech at a Shoreditch webhosting firm, escapes an abduction attempt, she finds herself in a centuries-long underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a powerful society of Tory rage mages. Now she must learn the ways of magic if she is to survive this new reality.

Springfield bound! I have quite a number of books in the pipe this year, including a literary novel called Spin, currently about 80,000 words into what will likely be somewhere around 140,000.

It’s a post-Collapse magical realism novel set in the Dominionate, a theocracy that has taken over the midwestern United States thousands of years from now. My Talespinner and I have been working on this book for some time, and we’ve reached a point where the timing of events in the novel has become quite hairy and tricky to work out, so…we’re taking a journey, following the protagonist’s path through present-day Missouri, along the roads that will, thousand of years hence, still be in use in much the way ancient Roman roads are still used in Europe today.

I think it will be fun, taking some days to follow the path of our fictional character through the fictional Dominionate, on the run from the Church toward something she can’t even imagine. (We are hard on our protagonists in this novel.)

I should, with a bit of luck, have the Xenomorph Facehugger Gag v3.0 prototype done by the time I leave, so we can test it out (tests of the v2.0 prototype went swimmingly).

The third (and, with luck, final) variant should be lighter and more suited to…err, longer-term wear.

If Other Shows Used Star Trek Dialogue

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I recently added a whole new section on writing tips and techniques to the Xeromag site, the largest new wing on the site in many years. One section of this new wing talks about how to write dialogue, and in one of those articles, I diss Star Trek: Voyager.

Yes, Star Trek in general has awful dialogue, and Voyager takes shitty dialogue to a whole new level. There, I said it. Sue me.

I got a question from a person who shall remain nameless (you know who you are) about what’s wrong with the dialogue in Voyager. And the thing is, Voyager dialogue is so shitty it’s kind of set the tone for the whole series, so if you simply point out an example of bad dialogue, people look at you blankly and say “what’s wrong with that?” It’s like the dialogue is such crap, we’ve lost our frame of reference because we don’t believe it’s even possible for the dialogue not to be crap.

“You are beautiful when you’re scanning.” That’s actually a line from Voyager.

There’s a specific and pernicious form of crap, though, that particularly sets my teeth on edge. I don’t mean just stilted, hamfisted dialogue, though of course Voyager has that in spades.

I don’t even mean “reroute the current flow through the turboencabulator to produce a transreversed pulse from the tachyon field emitter,” though Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular are legendary for their technobabble. (“Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in our hull into a high state of temporal polarization”? Seriously?)

What really gets up my nose is the “as you know” speech. This happens when character A tells character B something they both already know, but the viewer doesn’t. As you know, Captain, the Treaty of Blinkenmuunchen forbids the use of transreversed tachyon field pulses in an inhabited star sector…”

This…is not how people talk. And it’s a clumsy tool for exposition.

So: What would it sound like if scriptwriters for other TV shows wrote dialogue this way?

Columbo: Detective, we have a photo of the suspect from a traffic camera! As you know, sir, a traffic camera is an automated photographic recording device affixed to a stationary pole, usually at an intersection. It is activated by the operation of a remote automatic trigger that causes it to fix a photographic record at that instant. Unfortunately, it won’t tell us where the suspect went, as it records only a single frame.

Breaking Bad: We’ve found a new dealer for our drugs! As you know, the drugs we manufacture are considered contraband, which means their sale is prohibited by law. We have the facilities to manufacture them, but we require the assistance of others to carry them to distant places and make them available for sale. Since this process is a violation of Federal and state laws, we will have no recourse to the justice system if our dealer refuses to abide by the terms of our agreement, so we must screen our dealers carefully.

Game of Thrones: Chaos is a ladder. And as I’m sure you know, Varys, a ladder is a simple tool that can be used to climb from a low place to a high place. So what I’m saying is that I believe political chaos can be used to climb higher in the sociopolitical hierarchy. This is a linguistic construction known as a “metaphor.”

Sherlock: I’m not a psychopath, I’m a high functioning sociopath. Do your research. And as I’m sure you know, “research” is a systematic procedure or process by which one can check their ides against a rigorous body of source materials and conclusions.

NFL Sunday Night Football: Passing interference, 15-yard penalty. As I’m sure you know, a yard is a unit of measure, equivalent to three feet. This should not be confused with a yard that is an area of open ground in front of a house or other structure, commonly planted with grass, even though we are currently standing on an area of open ground covered with grass.

As you doubtless know by now, the “as you know” speech makes your characters look like idiots. That’s on top of being unnatural dialog. Don’t do it.

Okay, so WTF is a “Talespinner?”

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I’ve been talking a bit about my Talespinner lately, so inevitably, as night follows day, that’s prompted people to ask ask, “Your Talespinner? What’s that?” (Like, seriously, I’ve had dozens of folks on Quora, several emails and PMs, and one Facebook Chat question about this.)

If you’ve been reading my content for any length of time, you know I’m not monogamous. I have multiple partners, as do all of my partners. And naturally, because people aren’t fungible, all my partners are different.

Now, when I refer to my wife, people know what I mean. “Wife” is an ordinary sort of title. We all have a context for a wife. It’s not a terribly difficult concept, and as concepts go it has deep roots, dating back to the Agrarian Revolution or somewhere thereabouts. Point is, when I say “my wife,” most folks have a vague approximation of an understanding about what that means, even if some of the assumptions pre-packaged with “wife” aren’t necessarily true (we never pledged to forsake all others, for example, sometimes leading to raised eyebrows when I talk about my wife and my girlfriend and her boyfriend and I going on vacation together).

“Girlfriend.” That’s another easy one. When I say “my girlfriend,” most folks probably have some idea of what that means. And as when I say “my wife,” that mental model is not too badly wrong, though there are a few corners where expectation may not entirely line up with reality, as when I talk about my girlfriend sounding me while my wife holds me down and my crush takes video.

Ah, “my crush.” That’s where things start getting a bit tricksy. Most folks are at least passingly familiar with the idea of a crush, even if they tend to assume crushes are (a) short-lived and (b) unrequited. I met my crush at an orgy in a castle in France, a statement that never stops being weird however many times I type it, but it remained unrequited for nearly a decade until my wedding dinner, when my girlfriend said “hey Eunice, did you know Franklin has a crush on you?” (I still call her “my crush” because “my friend, co-author, and occasional lover with whom I share a vaguely defined relationship” is a bit of a mouthful.)

And that brings me to…

…my Talespinner.

So what TF is a Talespinner?

Well, as it says on the tin, a Talespinner is a spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams. A storyteller. A person who spins narratives and fables of fantasy from the cloth of imagination and language. A creator of mythology. A chronicler of the unreal.

My Talespinner and I, working on our novel together in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on our way to Barcelona. The thing about being a writer? You write EVERYWHERE!

We met on Quora. Okay, not met, but “met”…

Lemme start over.

We “met” on Quora. We interacted with each other’s answers. At some point, I don’t really remember why or when, she said something about sex toys and I said hey, would you be interested in beta-testing some new designs? She said yes, I sent her tentacles and I think a kazoo ball gag, and so, when we were looking for titles, I became her Toymaker.

We looked for a title for her. I won’t disturb you with the details because they would…err, disturb you, but I was struck by her fertile imagination and her creativity, her ability to weave sexy stories from the most modest of threads. (In fact, we accidentally created a shared-world anthology of sexual stories with a robust and complex society, because apparently that’s the kind of nerds we are). So she is…my Talespinner.

We’re writing a book together.

No wait, scratch that, it’s not quite correct. We’re writing two books together, a rather heavy and quite dark literary novel that’s not about sex, and an anthology of erotic shorts that is.

The literary novel started because her girlfriend said “the Toymaker and the Talespinner? That should be a YA novel!” We started in that direction, got a bit more than a quarter of the way done with it, realized at about 28,000 words that it really wasn’t a YA novel but rather something much darker and more complex, tore up that novel, and started over from scratch.

She accompanied me on the extended polyfamily’s vacation to Barcelona, which was fantastic fun; in fact, my wife took a lovely photo of me snuggling my crush and my Talespinner in the orgy pit.

I love my polycule! My Talespinner told me it’s one of the warmest, most welcoming poly networks she’s seen.

So now you know.