Mia Tsai

tl;dr hi tumblr, I'M BACK

here are links to my stuff!

BOOKS: Bitter Medicine, @tachyonpub. https://tachyonpublications.com/product/bitter-medicine/

The Memory Hunters, Erewhon Books, https://www.charisbooksandmore.com/book/9781645662082

LINKTREE: https://linktr.ee/miatsai

tone matters! if i said "you and the metronome have wildly differing interpretations of this tempo" while laughing, that'd be different than someone standing over you, saying it angrily. sometimes you mess up, laugh about it, and try again. which i do offer to students; sometimes, they finish a piece, I make a face, and ask them, "Would you like a second chance?"

not because i'm being mean, but because i know they've done better at home or in other situations and i know they want to prove that they are capable of playing better. each performance is a snapshot in time and you can't look at one and judge without the context of the others

I know this has been said a thousand times, so I won't be saying anything new, simply adding to the worldwide chorus of creatives unanimously shouting that ideas are not writing. But ideas are exciting! And writing is much less so when one has to work through all the nitty-gritty bits and think through the problems that inevitably arise.

Ideas are, to me, much more in the spirit of collaboration because it's fun to dream something up, tell another person about it, and start riffing. Ideas are the spark of improvisation. (What most people don't realize about someone who's a good improviser is that the music or scenes or what have you don't spring out of nowhere. The building blocks of improvisation are honed through practice so that when the time comes to reach for them, they're immediately at hand.) Maybe that's what makes people so enamored of genAI - they have an idea, the LLM iterates on it based on the (often stolen) input of many other people, and suddenly, idea becomes reality, even if the reality is shitty.

I do get a lot of ideas. I also forget a lot of ideas because they often don't have legs. And yet I am still beset by multiple ideas waiting to turn into books - the fated lovers, Syren, Red Envelope Husband, Rainbow Road Trip, enemies-to-lovers mascot romance, etc. These are the ones that could be books because there are characters, arcs, endings. (I do not start writing books until I know what the end is. I like knowing something will be over and I will not be stuck tinkering forever with it.) Like, I have an idea for a Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnelle retelling in space, but it's vibes only and so I've never written it because the concept is thin and watery.

I've seen people claim that AI will be taking over novel writing, music composition, etc. I've heard this all before. My own stepfather told me that teaching piano would be made obsolete by computers. That was a decade ago at least. I'm still employed because the beauty of music is in its humanity. Same with any creative art. I always forget who said this quote - I don't trust search engines on this - but music happens between the notes. And writing happens between the words. Our unique choices as humans are what make art profound.

Anyone can put notes together. A computer can play what's written on the sheet. It'll sound okay if all the directions are followed; I've heard that. I've heard students (not mine!) play that way and it's okay because they're students still learning who they are as musicians. Or they're students who don't care to be musicians but are very good at being told what to do so they'll get into a plum college or so they'll please whoever they're doing this for. And, like drafting, the practice room is where the hardest work is done. Music is not fun when you repeat two measures for a few hours. Neither is writing when you stare at the manuscript knowing something is wrong but not knowing how to fix it.