Month: March 2024

This Novel Is Getting Significantly Better

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have made some subtle changes to the sequence of events that take place within the plot of this novel because I’m leaning into character. This has led to the story being much better.

Of course, it’s also led to me being slowed down because it takes physical time to rewrite all these scenes. As such, I’m still on track to wrap up the third draft of the novel by around July 22.

One thing I am going to have to do is save up money for a manuscript consultant. Or at least try. That, too, is going to slow me down a lot. But it will be worth it to have a second pair of eyes look at this thing and see if it can be improved.

I have been using AI some as a stop gap measure on the manuscript consultant front to mixed results. I continue to mull potentially buying a subscription to Grok if it is willing to help me work on “spicy” scenes that other AI chatbots are not willing to.

Anyway. I have a lot of work to do. A whole lot.

It Appears I May Rewrite The Whole Novel Now

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While on a structural basis this novel is really stable – I have a very good outline — when it comes to actual copy on the page, I fear I’m going to have to rewrite pretty much the entire novel.

Lisbeth Salander is a really interesting character and I hope to write characters just as good.

The key reason for this is pretty simple — character.

I have all this plot and just not a lot of character. So, to take things to the next level, I’m going to do a lot of development about character. The more I think about character, the more I realize I just have to scrap about 90% of what I’ve written.

A lot of scenes of the most recent version of the novel were just placeholders from various different versions of the novel I’ve written over the years. Now, I have to go through and give it all some consistency.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s going to take me about three months to rewrite the novel. I think that is pretty fast, all things considered. And this is possible because of how well I know the overall story I want to tell.

I probably need to start working on the sequel to this novel as well, but it’s really difficult for me to focus on such things.

Now I’m Obsessed With Character

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve decided to give myself a few days to ponder the characters in my novel before I start to write again. Now that I realize I just won’t make my first hard deadline of April 19th, I have some wiggle room to reflect on how to take this novel to the next level by leaning into character.

Lisbeth Salander is a great character.

As such, I think I’m going to do some character studies. This will probably cause the novel to change some, but hopefully nothing structural. I have a very stable plot and scene outline, all I have to at this point is go through and fill it out (again.)

I may rewrite a lot more scenes than I originally expected, for no other reason than I know I can do better by my characters if given another chance. My fear is that all this rewriting will lead the novel to grow longer. I’m already allotting myself no more than 140,000 words — the same general length as The Girl On The Train.

I also hope to think about the next book in the series as well as a totally unrelated scifi novel.

Hume & Suno Are 2 New Cool AI Apps

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I had a telling discussion with some people on Threads about AI recently. I was making the case that Hollywood could be disrupted by AI by the end of the decade and people came out of the woodwork to poo-poo this idea. They told me that, lulz, that will NEVER happen.

Sigh.

I think it’s pretty clear that anyone who doesn’t think that AI is a serious threat to human Hollywood is full of shit. It definitely seems to me that soon enough sheer greed, if nothing else, could cause Hollywood executives to use some later version of Sora to flood the market with AI generated movies.

The upside of this will be live entertainment will probably become significantly more popular. So, it’s possible that instead of going to Hollywood, future would-be starlets will go to Broadway to find fame and fortune.

But there are two new AI apps that I’ve discovered recently that I’ve found to be really intriguing, if nothing else. One is Sono, which allows you to do text-to-song. So, you give the app a prompt and it spits out a complete two minute song. It’s pretty interesting.

I find it really interesting as someone who has wasted a lot of time in the past writing song lyrics without knowing anything about music. I think it would be a bit more useful if I could give the AI song lyrics and then it put a voice and music to those lyrics. But that’s a bit niche.

The other new AI I really like is Hume AI, which is like ChatGPT, but voice activated. As someone who likes to talk and has no one to talk to, I could see this service becoming very, very addictive. Talking to your AI takes a bit of getting used to because the synch up is not exact.

I think what will happen is the other major AI players will co-opt this feature, making Hume moot. But, for the time being, it’s fun.

Jesus Christ, This P. Diddy Thing

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about this P. Diddy drama is I’m already seeing it be used for some extremely dumb misinformation and disinformation on places like Tik-Tok. Not only are the antisemites coming out of the woodwork, but people are even suggesting bullshit like Pizzagate may be real because of the shocking things swirling around the music producer. And that doesn’t even begin to address the rank racism that causes Fox News to fixate on the situation.

Diddy

It does make you wonder how big this is going to get, especially if there is video footage of Diddy being crazy with a bunch of other well known celebrities. It definitely seems as though this is just the beginning.

If anything happens to Diddy then, of course, the conspiracy theories will grow even weirder and more elaborate. I have to admit though that it’s alarming that not only does power corrupt in the modern world, it apparently turns you into a freak.

My fear is that this is just the beginning of a pretty crazy year. I continue to fear some sort of totally unexpected Black Swan to happen that will throw the 2024 election into a different context that none of us could have possibly expected.

But, we’ll see, I suppose.

The Final Countdown

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I went through the entire “finished” rough Third Draft and found all the scenes that I felt needed to be rewritten.

I hope to write a heroine as interesting as Lisbeth Salander.

There were a lot of scenes.

As such, I’ve decided that I just can’t make my hard deadline of April 19th.

I decided this because what I want to do is take a deep breath and read up on character then write some character studies for all the major characters before I start to write again. I want this next version of the novel to really lean into character to the point that it’s nearly professional.

Like, if you read it, you would think you it was good enough that you had found it in the shelves of a Barnes & Noble. As such, it’s going to take me a little bit of time to get to that point, given where I am now.

I still think there’s a chance that I can wrap at least one novel up by July 22. That’s a really hard deadline for me for now. I really want to breath life into the characters I’ve come up with.

My heroine sports a sleeve tattoo like Megan Fox does now, even though I came up with the idea first!

The actual plot of the novel is pretty stable, which is going to speed things up a great deal. I just have to go through and use the existing outline as a guide when rewriting scenes to accommodate improved characterizations.

I suppose I could make some stylistic changes so the novel was more traditional — things like referring to characters by their first names — but I don’t wanna. I want this to feel like an Old Brown Shoe to people who remember the original Stieg Larsson novels.

I say this because it’s not like I’m going to do the OTHER things which would placate modern audiences and the woke cancel culture mob, like not writing from a female POV as a smelly CIS white male.

Lulz. Fuck it. Let’s rock.

This Will Be The Summer Of The Right Wing DEI Freak Out

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though Diversity Equality & Inclusion (DEI) is now the new “critical race theory” or “woke” in the lexicon of the Right Wing echo chamber. As such, it seems as though all the fucking misogynist, racist people who are Deep Red, will not shut up about DEI.

These people are going to pound the perceived problems with DEI into the minds of anyone who will listen. That’s all they’re going to tall about. And, I can tell you from personal experience that any reference to DEI is red meat to the base of the Republican Party.

My far more conservative relatives — whom I love dearly — are enraged by the very idea of DEI existing at all. It’s very much similar to trans issues in 2023 that was part of the Gay Scare back then. If you want to catch the attention of a Right Wing base member, you invoke DEI.

As we approach the 2024 political silly season, DEI is going to become a very, very touchy subject to the point that any mention of it will be very, very loaded.

Trump Is Actually A Really Weak Candidate In 2024

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The case could be made that but for how racism and misogyny are warping American political life, Trump would lose in a rather historic manner. Trump is just a bad candidate.

But the thing you have to accept, though, is because of the MAGA permission structure created by Fox News, et al, is that even though Trump is a weak candidate on a persona level — he could still win.

That’s why it’s so difficult for me to game out what might happen later this year. And that doesn’t even begin to address the very real possibility of a Black Swan event that will throw everything in the air.

So, there are two different forces at work. There are the macro forces that continue to give Trump the Idea momentum and there are the tactical problems with Trump that make him a very, very weak candidate. As such, I dunno. It could go either way.

And, what’s more, there is a real possibility that no matter what happens there could be severe political violence in late 2024, early 2025 because either Trump loses and there’s a civil war or he wins and he causes a Blue Revolution.

So…pray?

We Continue To Overestimate Trump The Man & Underestimate Trump The Idea

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about Trump is he is, on a personal basis, a very weak malignant ding-dong. He continues to prove day after day that he’s an idiot who is just an avatar who rides the wave of history, rather than bend it to his will. The *idea* of Trump, however, is very, very powerful.

As such, Trump is very dangerous on a political and historical way, but he as a person is so lazy and dumb that he could very well bring the country to its knees if he’s re-elected because of what he represents to the people surrounding him. That’s why even though Trump is a idiot and lazy, the forces around him are smart enough to generate ideas like Agenda 47 and Project 2025.

So, the thing is — Trump is an embarrassing idiot, but a very dangerous embarrassing idiot. Too often, we conflate Trump the man with Trump the political idea. I still continue to worry that Trump in his stupidity could destroy America because he will thrash around in his tyranny in a way that the American people won’t be able to stand.

That, at least, is the nightmare.

If anyone else was in Trump’s position, they would be able to peacefully guide the United States into a Russian-style white Christian ethnostate autocracy. That’s my real nightmare at this point — that Trump will literally snatch people off the street in 2025 and that will lead to America being pushed beyond its political limits and some pretty fucking weird things will happen.

What that might be, I don’t know — and I’m not advocating anything.

But I still have some hope that it’s possible that Biden will win and we’ll punt all of these structural problems down the road for another four years. (I’m still worried that no matter what happens with the 2024 election we will face severe political violence, but that’s just me being paranoid.)

‘GrokX’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Elon Musk is not very adept in business if he can’t see what is obvious — he could use Twitter’s established userbase to corner the consumer-facing AI market.

Now, there are signs he’s thinking about this because an Grok prompt is now organic to the X / Twitter app. But why not collapse all these features into one whereby you could absolutely not avoid seeing Grok when you tweeted. There would be one central hub UX whereby you would have the option to use Grok when before you wanted to tweet something.

Or something.

If you made Grok free and sold ads against people’s use of it like you do now with tweets then, there you go, you make a lot of money. AND you get a lot of buzz from the fact that about 200 million users use Grok as their native AI without having to go anywhere else.

It’s a very simple solution to a number of structural problems facing Twitter at the moment. Change the name to GrokX and get all that buzz AND you instantly become a name brand AI service for average people who use Twitter on a regular basis but only vaguely even know of the other AI options out there.

But what do I know. Just because it’s obvious and easy to do, doesn’t mean anyone will listen to me.