Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

I’m….Almost Done With My First Novel?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have been going through an iteration of the third draft of my first novel at a pretty nice clip. I will probably wrap up SOMETHING pretty soon. It may take a little bit longer than expected because the second half of the novel is not as polished as the first half, but, in general, I am on track to having a “finished” first novel no later than July 22, 2024.

I hope my first novel is as compelling and accessible as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The old adage is that all novels are never finished, only abandoned and I understand what it meant by this — this novel is never going to be perfect. There’s always going to be a scene that I feel could be better worded or structured.

But, in general, I’m really pleased with what I’ve come up with.

I have a lingering concern that the novel may be too “racy” for the woke cancel culture mob, but I have settled on a vision for this novel and, as such, my heroine is a part-time sex worker (stripper) during the course of the events of the novel.

I understand how that element of the novel could be…controversial…but it really helps to not only add an unexpected element to the novel, but to flesh things out in general. The sex worker element of the story adds conflict and tension that would otherwise not be there.

But the potential problems with this element of the story has prompted me to really plunge into the backup scifi novel concept I’ve been thinking about. In fact, all I have to do before I start writing the first draft of the novel is sit down and do some character studies.

It is very possible that I will begin the querying process for the main novel in a few months. I have to admit I’m at a loss as to what I’m going to do about that. And, of course, there’s a chance that just as I’m trying to query my first novel, all hell will break loose as The Fourth Turning / The Petite Singularity happen starting in late 2024, early 2025.

But who knows. I can’t predict the future. Anything might happen. And I have to accept that successfully querying my first novel will be like winning the creative lottery. And, yet, the whole point of writing a novel to begin with was to have something bigger than myself to think about.

These Novel Writing Projects Are Existential

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It is becoming more and more clear to me that I could be nearly 60 years old before I become a published author — if that even ever happens. What’s more, it’s also clear that there is a pretty good chance that if the Petite Singularity doesn’t make all my hard work moot, that some sort of severe political crisis starting in late 2024, early 2025 might just do the trick.

My dream is that my “passion project” main novel is as accessible and popular as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

And, yet, here I am determined to keep going with two different novels that I’m working on.

The key thing is that I manage my expectations. I’ve decided on an existential basis that I’m willing to use what little time I have left on this planet to at least TRY to become a published author, problems and obstacles be damned. I have a huge chip on my shoulder about my writing ability and I want to the validation of getting the approval of literary gatekeepers.

Having said all that, I am really working on my backup scifi novel. The main novel, the “passion project” has problems because its heroine is a part time stripper at club that she owns. I am WELL AWARE of how problematic this may be to younger people — especially women — but I really like how unique and unexpected this part of my heroine’s personality is and so, lulz, fuck it.

Meanwhile, the backup scifi novel is built from the ground up to be as marketable as possible. That’s the goal, at least.

In an ideal world, one of the two novels will sell and I could use the popularity of one novel to get the other novel published. But I have my doubts about if such a cross-pollination of success is possible, given that the two novels are of such different genres.

Anyway. I am pleased with what I’ve come up with and the goal is to wrap up a final third draft of the “passion project” novel no later that around July 22.

My Backup Scifi Novel Is Beginning To Get Fleshed Out

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I am going through my main novel — which I now see as a “passion project” at quite a nice little clip. I hope to wrap up the latest iteration of the third draft in a few weeks. Then I will probably go through and really look carefully at each scene to make absolutely sure that it’s good enough to keep as-is.

Meanwhile, the scifi novel, which I am developing specifically to be as marketable as possible, is coming along as well. I’m using AI to help me develop the novel because I have no friends and no one likes me. I have had decidedly mixed results using AI for development.

Sometimes AI has given me so really good suggestions. Other times, meanwhile, the results have been rather…meh. But, in general, using AI has sped development up significantly because it has given me at least some sort of path as to where I should go. Too often in the past I’ve spent a lot of time just spinning my wheels, not really knowing what I should do.

Anyway, the next step with the “passion project” novel is to save up money for an editor. It’s going to take me a few months because I’m living in poverty. But it will be worth it. I am still rattled by the fact that I managed to scare off one editor I wanted to work with simply because I’m a freaky weirdo.

But I have to accept that within a few months — hopefully no later than July 22nd, 2024, I will begin the querying process for the “passion project” in some way — even if it’s just continuing to save money up for an editor of some sort. I may break down and just start to query the novel if I fear it’s just going to take me too long to get through the editing process.

Things Are Moving Fast With My Backup Scifi Novel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because of how “racy” my mystery-thriller is, I’ve finally decided to work on a backup novel. The novel is a scifi novel with a pandemic element to it. As I’ve said before, it’s a pretty obvious way to talk about pandemics — at least in my opinion — so I keep expecting to wake up and read in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter that a movie with the exact same premise has started production.

But I really like the idea and it gives me a sense of insurance against my main novel being too “racy’ to ever get published. I have a few other novel ideas to pivot to if disaster strikes and even the scifi novel I’m working on is somehow co-oped by someone else.

One key thing that I’ve learned working on the mystery-thriller is you have to have a proactive protagonist. Too often in the past, I’ve had very passive protagonists, which has made for a dull story. So, now that I am very aware of how important having a proactive hero is, the scifi novel concept is moving a lot faster.

At the moment, I’m just at the treatment stage for the scifi novel. But things are moving a fairly nice clip. I’m beginning to struggle with the second half of the novel at the moment. And once the treatment is done, I think the next step is to do some rough character studies so I won’t be where I am now with the main novel where I have to reverse engineer character development in a story that is pretty much all plot.

I have developed a hero for the scifi novel that resembles me, which is bad because you’re not supposed to have a “proxy you” in the novel when you write one. And, yet, at the moment the elements that are similar to me work, so, lulz, why bother fixing them.

And I’m still pretty early in the process.

I continue to worry that all of this will be moot because of the looming possibility of a “perfect storm” involving the so-called political Fourth Turning and a technological Petite Singularity.

But while there’s life, there’s hope.

What The Fuck Are We Going To Do About AI-Generated Celebrity Porn?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to grow ever more alarmed by the increase in AI-generated celebrity photos. I know there was something of a kerfuffle recently over some silly bad Taylor Swift “porn” that appeared on Twitter, but that’s nowhere near what we should be worried about going forward.

At the moment, AI-generated celebrity images are rather banal and easy to spot. What I see on my social media feed a lot these days is such imagines which usually only vaguely look like whatever celebrity they’re supposed to represent. An example of a picture that is supposed to be Margot Robbie is shown below.

An AI-generated photo of Margot Robbie.

The photo above at least attempts to replicate what Robbie actually looks like. Usually one of the big mistakes of AI-generated celebrity photos is they are clearly done in a way to show what men WISH the woman in question looked like. They’re usually a bit more curvy and symmetrical than the real deal which makes it easy to spot as a fake.

My concern is what happens in a few years (months?) when we get passed the “uncanny valley” and photorealistic images of celebrities come common place. I know because of the silliness involving Tay-Tay that there has been a move to pass some legislation, but the wheels of government move very, very slow compared to AI developments.

Add to this how many “unaligned” people want the right do do whatever the fuck they want with AI and it definitely seems as though we’re careening towards a very, very dark and rather surreal future. We really need to start to work on developing watermark technology that will allow the audience to distinguish between AI-Generated photos and the real thing.

While we’re on the subject of such things, another development I’ve noticed on the AI image front is women using AI filters on their faces while leaving the rest of their body unaltered. See below:


I find this rather surreal. But this is definitely a development to keep an eye on. It seems very possible that there may come a time when AI-filters are so good that the causal viewer won’t be able to discern that a phot has been altered. This could lead to some rather surreal developments on dating apps.

A Spoiler Free Review of The Movie ‘Civil War’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I listened to Vanity Fair’s movie podcast “Little Gold Men” this afternoon before going to see the new movie Civil War and it was interesting how harsh they were on the film. I was really looking forward to the movie and for a beat or two I wondered if it was going to suck.

I went to see the movie tonight and there were a surprising number of people in the theatre.

Anyway, my top line reaction to the movie is it’s far better than the snooty people of the Little Gold Men podcast would have you believe. And, I must note, these are the same people who were enthralled with any number of gay rom coms that tanked over the last few years. So, I think that gives you some sense of how clued-in they are to the appetites of the general viewing audience.

I found the movie a serious, compelling tale about a serious subject. It was very violent, but what else do you expect from a movie called “Civil War.” And I can understand why bloodthirsty MAGA people might find the movie “boring” because it refuses to take a stance on who the “good guys” are.

There is some hint of who the POTUS is modeled after, given his policy objectives. But there’s a chance that this will fly over the heads of most MAGA people. Add to this the seemingly surreal decision to have California and Texas on the same side and it’s easy to imagine that MAGA people might grow frustrated that they aren’t able to see their dreams of dead liberals show on the big screen.

But there was a specific reason for taking such a “value free” approach to the politics presented in the movie — the moment you grounded the movie’s scenario in reality, it would be seen through a very brutal partisan lens that would have people on both sides pointing fingers.

In general, I really liked the movie. It was really good. And I could see a chance — if the movie strikes the zeitgeist in just the right way — that it might become popular enough that it begins to generate Oscar buzz.

In passing, I will note that a real civil war in the US would be a lot worse than what is portrayed in the movie. The lights were still on for the most part. There was no talk of using WMD anytime during the movie.

Anyway. I liked Civil War. I just hope I don’t have to live in starting in late 2024, early 2025.

Of AI & Music

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things are moving rapidly when it comes to AI-generated music. There are now at least two services — Suno and Udio — that allow you to write a prompt that generates songs with lyrics.

It definitely seems as though we may be about to enter A New Age when it comes to pop music when such music, if it hits the zeitgeist just right, may become as popular as human-generated music.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of the possibility that the estates of long-dead artists might license their audio “likeness” to AI companies so a zillian songs-in-the-style of The Rolling Stones, or The Beatles or whomever could be generated on the fly in an ad hoc way by millions of people around the globe.

This is obviously a ping from a future where AI takes over all forms of art. Most art will be AI generated to the point that it crowds out human-generated art. And I still think that it is inevitable that consumers will come to value human-generated art over AI-generated art, no matter the quality.

This would be a similar situation to what happens in the movie Blade Runner where the ownership of “real” animals is a big deal. As such, I could see live experiences ranging from live theatre to sports to music concerts all seeing a real uptick in their cultural value.

We may see a day soon where young would-be starlets go to Broadway instead of Hollywood to find fame and fortune because, lulz, Hollywood will just be a bunch of 1s and 0s.

I can’t predict the future, though, I don’t know for sure any such thing will happen. But it’s definitely a possibility.

Maybe We Need To Remake ‘Capricorn One’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The moment I saw that Hollywood was making a movie about a fictional faking of the moon landing, I remembered the old movie Capricorn One. That movie involved the faking of a landing on Mars.

Given how Elon Musk is obsessed with that idea, it would make a lot of sense to make a movie about someone like Musk faking such an accomplishment. Such a reboot kind of writes itself.

It has to be noted how bonkers pop culture has become of late. People are flipping out about a fucking eclipse of all things. Everything is a conspiracy now or seen through a partisan lens to a ridiculous degree.

It really makes you wonder what the fuck is going to happen in 2025 should ding-dong Trump become POTUS again. I just don’t think any of us are pepared for how fucked up such an event would be on both a political and cultural basis. Things would get very, very dark — no eclipse needed.

‘R.I.P. Hollywood’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because of pure human greed, I do believe that there is a real risk that Hollywood as we know it may be about to be totally disrupted by generative AI. A lot of people seem blinded to the potential capability of generative AI while at the same time being so blinded by their love of human Hollywood that they miss how severe the disruption is about to be.

I can’t predict the future, so I don’t know for sure, but I do think that at some point in the future the very idea of a “movie” will change to the point that rather than one version of a movie that everyone watches, there may be millions of slightly different movies generated by AI.

Throw in the rise of VR and there’s a chance that we’ll all “play” our movies like video games in immersive environments.

I continue to believe that the key issue is how fast all of this is going to happen. It could boil down to just one severe recession. And I think there will be a lot of calls for carve outs to protect human jobs.

What’s more, in the end, the live experience will gain a huge amount of cultural value to the point that there will be a huge surge of interest in sports, live theatre and music concerts. There is even a chance that instead of going to Hollywood, young starlets will try to make it big on Broadway.

The First AI Generated Movie Might Be…A Historical Drama?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Given the generative nature of AI these days, it would make a lot of sense if the first AI generated movie was a historical drama. All you would have to do is feed a bunch of photos from the 1860s into the AI and ta-da, you could bring those photos to life in the context of a movie.

At least, that’s what I would do.

I could totally see such an AI-generated drama being the Toy Story of the post-human Hollywood age. And the more modern the timeframe you wanted to depict, the more accurate you could make your movie.

I continue to believe that anyone who doesn’t think Hollywood is about to be disrupted in a severe, significant manner is a fool. It definitely seems as though it’s just a matter of time at the moment. The Toy Story of generative AI is going to come out soon enough and change everything.

Remember, I believe that soon enough the whole notion of movies will change because we will each get a personalized version of a movie generated by an our personal digital assistant who knows our every quirk really, really well.