Category Archives: Writing

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.)

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy…on a societal scale?

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What if leading healthcare “experts” are psychologically motivated to generate widespread suffering?

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

If you’ve ever heard of the psychological disorder Munchausen Syndrome, you have probably also heard of a related disorder called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, defined as

a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care…

–“Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital Health Library

Most of the time when you hear news stories about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, it’s because a caregiver is caught deliberately injuring a child or other vulnerable person, such as an elder or someone who is disabled.

But what if the syndrome also affects public health officials — including the person leading the U.S. response to COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci?

Does that sound preposterous to you?

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7 ways writers self-sabotage

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And how to avoid them!

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

I hang out on twitter primarily for the writer community. It can be a lot of fun, but it’s also a learning experience.

For one thing, I encounter quite a few newer writers who have come into “the business” with unrealistic expectations.

Unfortunately, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment.

I know. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself.

So I thought I’d list a few of the ways that writers inadvertently sabotage themselves. Hopefully this will help us avoid at least some of the bumps in the road that we encounter as we write, share, and publish our novels.

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Dragons, courage, life

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Maybe it’s better to run toward our dragons — instead of running away

In our stories, it is the hero that runs toward the dragon. So, question: what must you do to be a hero in our own story?

I’m struck, so often these days, by how afraid we are.

Why?

What are we so afraid of?

Why do we so often acquiesce to being fearful instead of challenging ourselves to overcome our fear and become the opposite? Brave, courageous?

I think about this question. A lot.

I believe it’s one of the most important questions we face today.

Let me me explain.

To start, we have to stop looking at things as if the truth is what is on the surface. We have to go deeper.

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Novels and the author’s mind

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Thoughts on Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dresier

There are so many different ways to read novels.

One, of course, is to just let yourself be carried (no pun intended) along by a story.

sister carrie by theodore dreiser

Now that I have a few years under my belt, I also really enjoy reading novels because of the clues they reveal about authors’ minds.

I’ve written, before, about the similarities between writing fiction and dreaming. (My longish essay on that topic, Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness, is available for Kindle here although, full confession, I haven’t looked at it for years. Probably should pull it up and rewrite it!)

I’ve also touched a bit on philosophical idealism, which I think is the most plausible metaphysical framework for describing reality. At some point I’ll post more about that topic (I have a post in draft that riffs off the works of Bernardo Kastrup, who has made the case to my satisfaction for idealism) but the short version is that we humans are participating in an interconnected dream or mental simulation. The seeming “solidity” of reality is a function of how it is generated; even though our interaction with reality is entirely subjective, none of us as individuals “owns” it or controls it. It is generated collectively and that mass attention to “what is real” stabilizes it.

What is fascinating about this, to me, is that “other people” are known to us via an interface between their minds and our own. If I encounter another person, talk to that person, form a relationship with that person, everything I experience is a mix of perception and projection — and probably a lot more projection than most of us realize.

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An old man stirs the fire to a blaze

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An old man stirs the fire to a blaze,

In the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother;

He has over-lingered his welcome; the days,

Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other;

He hears the storm in the chimney above,

And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,

While his heart still dreams of battle and love,

And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old.

–WB Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin

Everything about me is new again

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The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerourac
1958 paperback edition of the hardcopy original… a bit worse for wear :)

Not really. In fact, the opposite is true.

Everything about me has already happened, somewhere, to someone else.

That’s just how it is, when you are one of 7+ billion and that doesn’t count the dead.

And yet, as I experience life and interpret the complex events that unfold around me — in my relationships, the accidents that befall me, the consequences of my decisions — it certainly feels unique and new. It feels like this subjective model of reality that my brain-mind builds and that my awareness occupies is “mine” and mine alone.

And so there is this paradox. My experience is unique; my experience is universal. I may not have an exact doppelganger, but if you break “me” down into granular enough pieces, they will each have exact replicas out there, somewhere.

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