Category Archives: magazines

Almost There

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I’m about to start what I believe is the final chapter of The Seventh Law of Power. There are three threads to tie up and I believe I can do them all there, with a short epilogue. Mostly because I like epilogues, and it’s my book so I can do one if I want. If I’m wrong about the threads, that’s only one extra chapter at most. Everything that came before has led to this point in the story. I know, took me long enough, but I’m getting there.

Almost as if I knew what I was doing. Almost, that is.

On a related subject, trying something a little different on YooToob. I took one of my favorite stories, “The Trickster’s Wife,” created illustrations for it, did the narration and put it up on my channel. If anyone wants to hear me reading one of my own, it’s there. That’s not my face at the end, though. That’s a character I call “The Presenter.” My alter ego.

To AI or Not to AI? No One Asked

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Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

There’s been a lot of sturm und drang on Facebo*k and elsewhere about an article in the Atlantic about the data used to train M*ta and other Large Language Models (LLMs). First in the artists’ pages and now the writers’ as well. AI art and AI stories already clogging up submissions at the magazines and such. Curiosity and ego got the better of me and I did the DB search thing and came up with this:

Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate, Yamada Monogatari: The War God’s Son, and Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow.

All present. The only one they missed was Yamada Monogatari: Troubled Spirits, the final collection.

The online outrage has been pretty intense, and on one level I understand completely. I do have a dog in this fight. No one asked our permission, and the fact that the text (albeit tokenized beyond human recognition) is there at all can be interpreted as an unauthorized publication. Stephen King and other prominent writers have already filed suit and the courts will have to deal with it. Of course I’m curious to see how that all shakes out, since we’re in mostly uncharted territory here with AI in general and this instance in particular. Can the ones assembling the material argue “fair use” or will the courts decide the writers’ IP rights were violated? Some legal clarity here would be nice, however it shakes out.

At this stage I confess to being too ambivalent to share the outrage. Concern, yes. On the one hand, we should have been asked. On the other, is it really publication? As the data is fed into the LLM it’s barely recognizable as words. On the other other hand, will plagiarism result? Here I’ve seen with my own experiments with ChatGPT to know it can happen, and sometimes the AI puts out work purporting to be original which is an almost word for word copy of something it was trained on. That needs to be addressed. Can that be prevented? Too many questions unanswered.

What I mostly want at this point is some answers to all the above. I’m willing to wait, assuming I have the option. This may take a while.

Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow, Hachette Book Group, 2019.

January Scaller is a young girl living in the mansion of the insanely wealthy William Cornelius Locke, a mansion packed with valuable collectables from all over the world…and some that apparently don’t belong in this one.  Her father, Julian, is an employee of Mr. Locke charged with traveling the world in search of said wondrous objects, so he isn’t home very much. Sometimes Mr. Locke has to travel himself, and sometimes he takes January with him as a treat or distraction.

On one such trip, January finds a doorway between worlds. So much for plot summary, because what happens doesn’t actually tell you what’s happening. That’s a separate issue altogether. Suffice to say there are more doors where that one came from and January’s discovery of them leads into all kinds of trouble, and not just for her.

I picked this one up on the recommendation of people whose taste and judgment I trust. I’m also a sucker for portal fantasies, probably ever since I came across George R.R. Martin’s “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” in Fantastic Stories years ago. This is one of the best ones I’ve ever read. From the first page I knew I was in for a treat, for it was clear the author was a person in love with language, specifically language in the service of story. A sentence might be as long as it needs to be, and sometimes it may be convoluted, but it’s never clumsy. A sort of wordy precision which is almost but not quite a contradiction in terms, and so rare to find.

I don’t think I’m giving too much away to note that January isn’t quite what she seems, but then neither are most of the rest of Harrow’s cast. Of course their secrets are tied to the existence of the doors and the astute reader will winkle most of it out before book’s end, and that’s half the fun. There are elements that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror novel, but this isn’t one. There’s contemplation of the nature of story itself and its role in the world. Not to mention one adventure after another, which are all part of the same adventure: growing up, and self discovery.

Recommended. Heartily.

Update and Upward

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Finished Chapter 3 of The Seventh Law of Power and am well into Chapter 4. Marta has to destroy a cursed immortal monster with the help of a snarky raven and a dead girl. It’s almost—but not quite—like doing it alone. Except at this point she has five of the seven laws, which means she’s never alone, or at least a long way from helpless.

Wrote another Yamada story last week. A flash piece that I’m probably not going to expand, since I rather like it the way it is. Likely I’ll fit it into the collection when I’m ready to do that. Aside from that there are two more full length Yamada stories in the pipeline. Assuming they’re both published as I intend, it’ll be a year before both will be free to republish, so the Yamada collection is at least a year off. I’m planning ahead.

Pretty good considering I had to go into the hospital on Friday for a minor procedure…which took two days of prep. Let’s just say everything’s fine and I’m glad I did it but I’m also very glad it’s over.

 

BCS #300

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I’m running so far behind now that I thought about saving this for Monday, but I need to get my act together. Anyway, the new  Beneath Ceaseless Skies went live yesterday. Here’s the ToC:

The Hummingbird Temple—C.C. Finlay

Uzumaki of the Lake—Richard Parks

Bound by Sorrow—Maurice Broaddus

Additional stories go live April 2nd, including an audio version of Uzumaki. I’ll just note for those who keep track of these things that “Uzumaki of the Lake” is the first new Yamada Monogatari story since The Emperor in Shadow nearly four years ago.