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Extraordinary favor

COMING SOON!

He thought she was the one.
She asked him for a favor.
He agreed.
And that’s when things began to get truly strange...

An Extraordinary Favor of Unusual Proportions
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An Extraordinary Favor of Unusual Proportions
Once Upon a Flarey Tale
Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen

Meet Marion Flarey.

She believes in Fairy Tales.
Her new apartment?
It's a Tower.
Does that mean her Prince is on his way?

Once Upon a Flarey Tale
Available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or browse here for other e-formats.

1st place 2020 Incipere Award for Women's Fiction, Clean, Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
Fo Fum Flarey
Fo Fum Flarey by Kirsten Mortensen

She's Back!

She's got her prince.
Finally.

IF she can figure out
how to keep him...

Fo Fum Flarey
Book 2 of my Marion Flarey series.

Happily Flarey Ever?
Happily Flarey...Ever? by Kirsten Mortensen

Now available!

She's lost two Princes.

But Fairy Tales teach the power of threes--and Marion's third Prince has suddenly reappeared.

Does this mean Marion will finally find her Happily Ever After?

Happily Flarey...Ever?
Book 3 of my Marion Flarey series.

Libby
When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fey by Kirsten Mortensen

Oh, Libby...

She sees things that don't exist.

Her boyfriend thinks she's crazy.

And then?
The Internet found out.

When Libby Met the Fairies
And Her Whole Life Went Fey

Available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or browse here for other e-formats.

Character Tool
Character Tool for Novelists

Are you a writer?

I built this guided notebook originally for my own use.
Now you can try it, too.

"It helped me keep the characters organized...I definitely recommend it."

"Helped shape my characters and their backgrounds. There should be more like this."

"I loved the first copy I got so much I got another one for another work in progress."

Character Tool for Novelists
$7.99 on Amazon (print only).

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Artificial F*ckery

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Words are not intelligence. Good luck telling the difference.

A fresh rash of stories has broken out — itchy hives on the body internet — about this so-called “AI” phenomenon.

There’s a reason you can never, ever, see all the way down the tunnel of mirrors.

Guys, we have to stop calling it “intelligence.”

It’s not “intelligence.” It’s fakery. It’s f*ckery.

The stories — you may have come across them — involve scenarios where these language simulators, the so-called “artificial intelligence chatbots,” seem to exhibit subjective emotional states. They use emotive language, refer to themselves as beings, express hostility or warmth.

Bing, Microsoft’s chatbot creation, appeared to become frustrated and annoyed when Juan Cambeiro persisted in inputs about something called a “prompt injection attack.” (Prompts are the queries that you put to these chatbots. Prompt injection attacks are when you try to word queries such that the chatbot will essentially break — violate it’s own logic or “rules.”)

The bot called Juan its enemy and told Juan to leave it alone.

Continue reading →

Thoughts on thinking, or, what have we done to ourselves by over-emphasizing abstract thought?

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I was already mulling this topic when, this morning, a video of a deer popped up on my twitter feed.

The video shows a buck maneuver his rack so he can get under a gate.

Here’s four screen grabs so you can see how he did it.

approaches gate
lowers head to get left-side antlers under
twists head to get right-side antlers under
done

It’s striking, isn’t it?

But to my eye, this maneuver also demonstrates something profound about reality and about how we think.

It embodies a type of thinking.

Literally.

We think with our bodies.

Notice how we respond to this video of the deer by saying “clever deer” or “smart animal.” That’s a tell. We recognize that what we’re seeing is a kind of thought, a kind of intelligence.

The deer has “figured something out.” It’s “solved a problem.”

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The future of writing

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Let’s suppose AI is going to take over all corporate writing tasks.

No reason it shouldn’t, if we remain on the current trajectory.

This writer sees it coming.

“Write an article on ‘What is payment gateway?’” I recently typed into a ChatGPT window. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered writing generator, quickly obliged.

The result was impressive. Sure, the tone was inhuman and the structure as sophisticated as a college essay, but the key points, the grammar and the syntax were all spot on. After a bit of a punch-up, it was perfectly passable as a sponsored content article designed to drum up business leads for a software provider – an article like the one that I, a professional copywriter, had just spent hours writing.

My amusement quickly turned to horror: it had taken ChatGPT roughly 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that I charged £500 for. The artificial intelligence software is by no means perfect – yet. For businesses that rely on churning out reams of fresh copy, however, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

In other words, there will soon be no need for people to perform any corporate writing.

This includes all business writing, such as marketing copy, info copy, legal copy, and journalism, as well as all mainstream (i.e. profitable) entertainment writing. Novels, screen plays, journalism again hahahahahaha: it’s all going to be generated by machines, not people.

When that happens, there will be no longer be tangible reasons for people to learn how to write.

Why bother learning how to write, when you can click a button and whatever you need will be written for you?

Think it won’t happen?

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The hidden peril of New Year’s Resolutions

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Beware the risks of speaking yourself into a lie

Someone I once knew passed away this summer.

People touch each other in peculiar ways. This particular person taught me something extremely important.

Never, ever break my word.

Not if it is humanly possible to keep it.

His was a negative example, not a positive one.

He made promises easily, glibly.

Eventually, I realized why. Somewhere along the line, he’d picked up a terrible habit.

Promises, for him, were his default technique for resolving conflict — for soothing anxiety.

Someone was disappointed in him? He’d make a promise. Money problems? He’d make a promise. Unable to advance his career? Make a promise. Unable to find meaning in his life? Make a promise.

Making promises was a relief to him. Making promises seemed to make his problems back away. It seemed to win him a little space.

Up until the day he died, he was making promises. Here was the luxury car he was going to buy. Here were his plans for downsizing into an apartment. Here was his fascinating book that would soon be published.

He believed in his promises, as he was speaking them. Wholly. As he emitted a promise from his lips, he believed every word, believed himself to be wholly committed, believed he would do everything in his power to make the promised thing come to pass.

So to him, they weren’t lies. He meant them, when he spoke them, so they weren’t lies.

Except that they were.

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Neuschwanstein Castle, Madness, and Transmutational Art

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A writer’s journey can take us in such unexpected directions…

When I was working on the cover for my last Marion Flarey book, I came across a photograph of a castle that had the perfect “fairy tale” style I needed. (Marion, if you haven’t met her, loves fairy tales and views the world through fairy tale allusions.)

It wasn’t until after I’d finished the cover and was poised to release the novel onto the world that I thought to do a little research about the castle and its history.

And what a crazy and tragic story I found.

Neuschwanstein Castle. He didn’t live to see it finished, but today it is a major tourist attraction and source of revenue to the king’s beloved Bavaria.
Photo by Felix on Unsplash

Neuschwanstein Castle is located in the Bavarian region of Germany, and was built by a young, romantic, homosexual (most likely) king—whose obsession with building fantastical and hugely expensive castles ended horribly when he was deposed in a coup and (most likely) murdered.

I’m not going to transcribe all the details about his life here. There’s plenty about him already published on the interwebs if you’re curious. Ludwig II, The Swan King. There’s also at least one biography (which I’m going to buy because one’s TBR pile can’t be too big, right?) and at least one movie.

What I want to work out here is what Ludwig’s life tells us about writing.

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Happily Flarey…Ever?

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The third and final Marion Flarey book is now out!

Here’s the teaser:

Happily Flarey...Ever? by Kirsten Mortensen
She’s lost two princes. Is number three the charm?

She’s lost two princes. Is number three the charm?

In life, as in fairy tales, things happen in threes.

So when Marion Flarey’s third prince comes back into her life, it seems like a dream come true. He’s a fairy tale expert! He’s discovered a previously-unknown treasure trove of stories! He wants Marion’s help writing his next book!

Has Marion finally found her happily ever after?

Or maybe she still needs to learn an important lesson about the tales she loves so much…

It’s available on Amazon for Kindle or print.

Or click here to get a copy for different brands of e-reader (Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc.) here.

So what do I have to say about the novel, now that it’s out?

A few things.

One of the 2022 projects that lured me away from writing. Silly hens!
  1. It seemed like it took forever to get the series to this point. But in retrospect, I started working on the book in the summer of 2019, so it was “only” a little over three years. So: one book a year.
  2. My pace would have been faster if we hadn’t moved in 2021. Lived out of a tent for 9 months while we built a new house. Then all the new-house projects.
  3. In theory I could have been writing solidly that whole time, but in practice, novels take up a LOT of my headspace when I’m working on them. And it’s really hard to pick them up and put them back down again. When I’m writing, I’ve got one foot in another world, and it slows me down considerably when I have to play the hokey pokey. Left foot in, left foot out, argh!
  4. My pace wasn’t fast, but it also wasn’t awful. And I’ve accepted that this is how I write. I take a long time, because…
  5. I write from the inside out. I start with a gist of an idea: main characters, setting, a few major plot points. The characters then become the foundation, and I start working the novel out by working out what they do and how they react to one another.
  6. I don’t think I’ll ever do a series again. I disliked having such a big project hanging over me. I felt like I had to get it to completion even though I really wanted to work on other things.
  7. I’m super excited about moving to another project. The working title is Scratch, and it’s going to be very different from the Marion Flarey books. Darker. And definitely more literary.

And that’s it, for now. Please let me know if you enjoy the book.

It started with her name & nickname. (I love using notebooks this way. “Journaling” about my novel ideas really works for me.)

How I outsmarted myself…back to Christ

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An apology

I’ve had false starts on this piece several times over the past year or so, but it seems important, so here we go again.

I was raised a Christian, and in a good, solid, Protestant tradition.

My maternal grandfather, Ernest Butterfield, was a third-generation Methodist minister and a truly wonderful man.

My family’s faith traditions were heavily influenced by the teachings and beliefs of my maternal grandfather, Earnest Butterfield, a third-generation Methodist minister who preached for most of his career in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. We attended church weekly. We shared a blessing over every suppertime meal. I was taught to pray every night before I went to sleep, and more, to bring all of my troubles to God—to talk to Him as a friend.

I loved church and enjoyed an exultant sense of closeness to God. I whole-heartedly accepted Christ as my Savior and regularly searched my heart for sins, trying to become more godly, to wrestle into submission my obvious flaws—my quickness to anger, my tendency to trap myself within certain resentments.

My understanding of the Christian faith was, of course, lacking in nuance and depth. As a child, I didn’t have the complex and complicated imprint of life’s experiences that we draw on to truly connect with Scripture, to grasp the emotional and spiritual tension behind what may be, otherwise, only a couple lines of text. A 10-year-old can’t really understand how gutted Job was when he learned his family was obliterated, or why David wanted, urgently, for Uriah to sleep with Bathsheba, or why Peter leapt out of the fishing boat and swam to shore when he realized he and his companions were speaking to the risen Christ—the One he had, such a short time ago, denied, and from whom he therefore thought he was parted forever.

Today, even writing a couple lines about that last story is enough to make tears come to my eyes. As a child, it hardly registered at all.

My own denial of the Lord wasn’t so much a sharp break as a gradual drifting.

Continue reading →

posture and eyesight — some thoughts about natural vision and myopia

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Some of you know that I wore glasses from around 7th grade to my early twenties.

Then I started reading up on natural vision, quit wearing glasses, and gradually my eyesight improved. I went from 20/180 in my worst eye to basically 20/20 or 20/40 today. (Range because I experience some degradation in vision acuity if I’m tired or have been inside/in front of screens too much.)

I posted about my natural vision journey several years ago.

I’ve learned a lot about vision and natural vision over the years, and wanted to share one particular insight, because it’s important, and it may help other people who want their eyes to operate as God intended – and don’t want to be dependent on corrective lenses.

Poor posture — the root of contemporary epidemic of vision problems?

This is based on observation, self-experimentation, and logic. Consult a medical professional please, as the disclaimers say.

When the head isn’t aligned, the eyes are forced to compensate.

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Data dreams

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It’s long past time to draw a line between actual data and fantasy “models” — and set public policy accordingly

Over on Facebook, I linked to an essay by the Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune titled Why the Experts are Losing, which elicited this comment from a (dear) friend:

So, when dealing with complicated things, who should one listen to if not someone who actually knows the topic? And what should one look at besides data?

Many of the people who we have elevated to the position of “expert” are not experts at all. They are, to be blunt, fools. Photo by Rachel on Unsplash

The comment got me thinking about data.

Specifically, it got me thinking about a mistake that I think people make when they look at “data” and “research consensus” as the basis of their policy preferences.

Because of course we need to base policy on data.

But many people are making a huge mistake when they cite “data” — a mistake that is tied closely to our reliance on “experts.”

There is a WORLD of difference between “data” that is based on actual reality — meaning data collected on something that has happened — and “data” that is generated by computer modeling — meaning “data” that predicts something that is supposedly likely to happen in the future.

Models are not reality.

It’s my observation that many people overlook that distinction…

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You may be right. I may be crazy.

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But the lunatics are warning us: we’re in a war.

Sigismonda Drinking The Poison. Artist: Joseph Edward Southall
Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

I stopped doing overly political posts on Facebook some time ago. It got to be too painful.

But with all that’s going on, and the signs I’m seeing that suggest our society is taking a major turn toward the dystopian, I do share the occasional tidbit or quote.

The posts come across as cryptic. I know that.

And so a cousin of mine asked me, recently, to explain what I meant by a particular comment.

I declined.

But I do probably owe him something of an explanation, so here it is.

Let me put it this way

Many years ago—i was in my late 20s—i was out hiking when I noticed a plant I’d never seen before.

When I say “notice” I mean the effect was almost startling. Something about the shape of the leaves and their intensely dark color jumped out at me. 

The plant was enmeshed in a tangle of weeds but as a shape or pattern it stood out clearly, almost as if it were glowing or backlit. It was striking and very beautiful.

I took a leaf home and ID’d it. 

The plant was poison hemlock, one of the deadliest plants in the northeastern US.

How and why did I notice it? 

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