hello children.

Stories stall when everyone behaves. Real tension appears when someone:

• asks the wrong question • says something they shouldn’t • notices something uncomfortable • refuses to drop the topic • misunderstands something important • interrupts at the worst moment

They want something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but for some reason they can't ask for it -- or can't have it even if they did ask.

They don't notice something that the audience HAS noticed (like in a horror movie when the monster is sneaking up behind the protagonist, or if someone drinks a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak because they don't know about germ theory)

Takes a risk (or otherwise does something they "shouldn't" do) which the audience has to sit through for a prolongued period of time (e.g. slips away from the party to go into the host's private office and rifle through their papers before the guards catch them)

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.

2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.

3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.

4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!

No weekends

Child labor

Slave labor

"The king said to do it"

Fidenae Stadium Disaster of 27AD. A huge gladitorial stadium, built fast and cheap, collapsed and killed 20,000 people, as well as injuring many more out of the total audience of 50,000.

The Sagrada Familia was started in 1882. It is still not finished.

Mingun Pahtodawgyi was started in 1790 but a prophecy said the king who commissioned it would die when it was finished, so he stopped building it.

The Pyramid of Neferefre was never finished because Neferefre died early and his successor didn't bother.

Alai Minar was supposed to be twice the diameter and twice the height of Qutb Minar. Didn't get past the first storey, abandoned in 1316.

Bara Kaman, abandoned in 1672.

The Basilica of San Petronio was started in 1390. The main facade was never finished. In 1514, they hired a guy to construct the dome, but the pope ordered the "megalomaniac dream" halted.

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

It is not thinking. It is not comprehending.

It is spitting out the reply that, according to its data, looks the most like it would be a reply.

It does not understand the meaning of things it says. It just knows the statistically likely arrangement of those words, given the words said so far.

The idea that "artists need to make their more palatable for wider audiences, especially if their work becomes popular, because people are currently media illiterate and it's the artist's social responsibility to make their art digestible for mass audiences" is fascist rhetoric. It is especially fascist rhetoric when you say it about queer art.

You are repeating fascist propaganda about the "function" of art in society that has blatantly worked on you.

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It's not hate – we're scared and frustrated. Not just for ourselves, because AI is a genuine threat to our livelihoods, but also for the next generation of writers, like you. It's going to be a lot harder to get discovered or published with AI-generated content flooding the Internet and the book market.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Meta trained Llama 3 on a massive body of pirated work. You can read more about it here. Meta employees knew this was morally wrong, but they did it anyway, because (1) they didn't want to pay anyone for the use of copyrighted work, and (2) they knew they could get away with it, and they have. They took our stories, born of real human experiences, and used them to feed something that's designed to be able to replace us. There are other reasons writers may be anti-AI, like the impact on the environment, but hopefully that gives you some context for why writers, specifically, are reacting to this so strongly.

You've said you wouldn't use ChatGPT to write your novel, which is great to hear. If you did, I would tell you that you weren't, in my opinion, a writer – just as I would never claim to be an artist if I used ChatGPT to create images, or a musician if I used it to generate a song. But I would also gently question why you feel like you need it to give you morale boosters or tell you if something makes sense. ChatGPT is not a human reader; unless you specifically instruct it not to flatter you, it will say what you want to hear. It isn't reacting to you, or to your story, with a human gut or a human heart. To me, any praise or encouragement it offers is empty. There's nobody and nothing behind it.

As for asking it to help you work out if something makes sense: I really do understand the temptation. I'm chronically ill, so I write at a slower pace than a lot of my colleagues, and it might help me churn out books faster if I asked ChatGPT to help me unpick a knot in the narrative, or fix a plot hole. But I don't want to surrender the ability to think and problem-solve for myself, and I would caution you against doing that – not just for the sake of your writing, but for everyday life. In this era of disinformation and propaganda, our ability to think, interrogate and analyse the world around us is more important than ever.

Talk to other writers. Make friends. It's not rocket science, it's what a human being is wired to do. Just be kind and friendly and interested in other people and their writing, and they'll be interested in you and yours. And then if you can't figure it out, ASK FOR HELP. There is NOTHING wrong with asking for help. Asking for help is, in fact, a beautiful thing that will bring you closer together with a new friend. That's what you're sacrificing when you turn to ChatGPT for it -- you're losing out on the possibility of making a really profound, lasting, potentially lifetime friendship with another human being. You're missing out on something sacred and beautiful because you're impatient and scared and insecure.

Insecurity doesn't just vanish automatically. You have to file it down gradually over time, like filing your nails or sanding a piece of wood butter-smooth. You can do it. It is WORTH doing. It just takes some elbow grease.

NOTE: A comment does not have to be long or complicated. You're not writing an essay or a book report, you're just engaging with a person about the art they made. A short and sweet comment is GENUINELY just as precious to fic authors as a really in-depth one.

Here are some prompts--if you wrote a comment with even just ONE of these, you'd be doing great. If you do TWO, you're a pro.

Quote a line you reacted to and describe your reaction. Example: "[quoted sentence] omg this made me laugh so hard I scared the cat" "[quote] This got me really choked up. ;_;" "[quote] This is so hot holy shit"

Offer a compliment. Example: "I loved this! So good!" "Your writing is so beautiful" "I love how you write this character, you understand them so well"

Ask a question or display curiosity. Example: "Omg, what do you think would happen if [other character] knew this was going on between [ship]?" "I'm so curious about your thoughts on [thing]!" "Plz plz plz give me your TED talk about [thing], I want to know all your thoughts"

Offer connection. Example: "YES! I've never met someone who has the same theories that I do about this! Desperate to be friends with you, can I slide into your tumblr DMs and yell about this!?"

Express appreciation, excitement, or gratitude. Example: "Kudos!!" "Thank you for writing and sharing!" "💖💖💖" "Can't wait for the next chapter!"

That's it! That's the basics to a solid, respectable comment that will keep your fic author warm during the winter.

It's like... Imagine you're at a neighborhood cookout, or a book club meeting, or any other gathering of strangers, and someone has brought some really REALLY delicious muffins to share. The kind of thing you would say to that person ("Omg these are so good" "Where did you get the recipe?" "Thank you for bringing these, I love muffins!") is exactly the kind of thing that fic authors are yearning to hear from their readers.