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Novelist as a Vocation —  Reference Desk #23

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Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.

Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.

King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.

The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.

For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.

If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.

Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it. 

Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA,  worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.

The Voice I Kept, by Juno Guadalupe — Short Report

Short Reports are a miniature version of my Read Reports: brief thoughts about small—often tiny—stories.

The Voice I Kept
by Juno Guadalupe
(Anomaly SF)

At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.

The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.

The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.

The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt

I first heard tell of Abraham when I was helping Miss Elisabeth with the cleaning in the big house. Two of the drivers had come in to get a break from the August heat. They had their lemonade, and then they hung around in the back hall to sneak a few sips of whiskey. If the missus of the house saw that, they’d be the ones getting a whipping.

I heard one of the drivers say that name, Abraham Arnaud. I didn’t know any French back then, but I could tell that name didn’t sound right the way he chewed it up. The other one only spat in response, and then he saw me and I ran on up the stairs with my load of linens before he could find a reason to do something I’d regret. The only Abraham I knew was the one from the Genesis.

Now, having heard that strange name, my ears were all perked up for it. The second time they caught it was when Old Jack was telling stories to the boys. He said Abraham Arnaud was being talked about in whispers all over Virginia and the Carolinas. He heard it from the new boy, Tom.

Word was that the bosses had paid top dollar for Tom, and they were mighty mad when he ran off the first chance he got. Must have hid like a jungle cat, because they never caught him. Usually nobody got away from our straw bosses; they had real sharp eyes and they knew every way to put a hurt on you without making it so you couldn’t work.

Old Jack said that Abraham Arnaud came from Haiti to New Orleans, and he had become a vodou priest. But he wasn’t no regular oungan, lighting black candles and sticking pins in dolls. He had the real power of possession, and he could bring strong lua into his own body or anyone else. To hear Old Jack tell it, Tom was convinced that Abraham Arnaud would tear down every planation house and free every slave. Tom said he had met one of Abraham’s followers, who had taught him a little magic.

That was about when my momma made Old Jack hush up and “stop talking nonsense, putting dangerous ideas in these child heads.” It didn’t matter though, because everyone started whispering about Abraham Arnaud after that.

Four months that went on. Tom never turned up, and when three new slaves came to the plantation, they brought their own stories: runaways all over. Vodou priests walking the roads at night. The Master up at the big house must have heard things too, because more men were set to guard the farm, and the big plantation owners all got their men together to patrol at night, with torches.

The night he came was dark as death, cloudy and a new moon. After midnight the drums started, first far away, then closer, like they were talking to each other. A shout went up, and we heard one gun, then all the drums went quiet. I never heard a quiet like that in all my life. Most of us didn’t dare touch the door of the slave house, but Old Jack opened it a crack and peeked out, and just about fell backward like he’d been hit.

That door swung open and we all saw it, the big house bright as day, sheets of orange flame rising up the walls like a waterfall of light. There were shadows of people running, but one stood perfectly still, outlined in that fierce firelight like the devil, long coat billowing and a straw hat cocked sideways on his head.

“That’s him,” I thought. Nobody else it could be. And that’s how we came to be free, and how I started on the road to real, honest-to-God magic.

Children of the Mind — Read Report

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Children of the Mind is billed as the final book in the “Ender Quartet.” In my opinion, that quartet is really Ender’s Game standing on its own, and sequel trilogy that is in many ways tonally different and mostly disconnected in plot.

The trilogy of Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind centers on the story of the planet Lusitania, thousands of years after Ender’s defeat of the buggers. The ticking clock of the series is the war fleet sent to destroy Lusitania. It has been delayed by the computer intelligence Jane, but now Starways Congress is aware of her presence in their computer systems, and has a plan to reset their communications network across the hundred worlds. This will not only prevent her from meddling, but effectively kill her as she’s reduced from millions of computer systems to only a handful.

The destruction of Lusitania would do more than kill the thousands of human colonists, because the planet is also home to the only other intelligent species known to humanity: the pig-like Pequeninos, whose life-cycle was heavily modified by an extra-terrestrial virus—the Descolada—and includes a worm-like larval stage and an eventual transformation into something like a psychic tree.

Ender has also brought the last of the Bugger hive-queens to Lusitania, where it is busy building enough industry to build starships and send out new queen larva to distant planets, ensuring the continuation of the species.

A final additional subplot is introduced, as if there weren’t enough. The dangerous Descolada virus has been neutralized on Lusitania, replaced with a harmless version that fills the needs of Pequenino physiology without the danger of infecting and modifying the genomes of other species. But it has become apparent that the virus is not natural. It was created, and the species that could and would send such a dangerous weapon into the universe is potentially the greatest threat humans, Pequeninos, and Buggers have ever seen.

Ender, once the titular character, has now been almost entirely sidelined in the story. As a reader, his perspective is barely present in the book, and he spends a good chunk of it effectively comatose. By the end, it’s apparent that the book is a send-off for him. His presence almost feels like an afterthought. Instead, the book focuses on Miro (his adopted son and Jane’s new favorite human), Si Wang-mu (genius emigrant from the planet of Path) and young Val and Peter, ghosts from Ender’s childhood that he made physically manifest on his brief trip outside the universe in Xenocide.

Tonal Shift

Analyzing the series as a writer, it’s interesting to see the transformation of Card’s style in the post-Ender’s Game trilogy. Ender’s Game was a relatively near-future hard SF story that focused on a single brilliant boy’s journey through military school, and the horrifying extremes the wartime government was willing to go to in order to defeat an existential threat to humanity. While there is a B-plot for Peter and Valentine, most of the story stays tight on Ender’s perspective.

The subsequent trilogy is much more scattered, and while it touches on plenty of interesting ideas, I think this lack of focus is somewhat to its detriment. The series becomes decidedly softer sci-fi, culminating in a deus ex machina mode of faster-than-light travel that also allows near-magical creation of a bespoke super-virus and several entirely new people.

My daughter and I both came to the same comparison independently—the Golden Compass series had the same seemingly tight beginning before spiraling off into odd and confusing tangents. Both feel like completely different series at the beginning and the end.

A fair amount of Ender’s Game is dedicated to his own internal angst as he undergoes indignities and abuses at the hands of the adults in positions of authority over him. The subsequent books include even more angst, spread across a large cast of characters. Long internal monologues are par for the course, and I would be hard-pressed to identify any character experiencing any kind of happiness before the final two or three chapters.

Where Ender’s frustration and eventual desperation felt appropriate to his situation, I couldn’t help but feel that this modus operandi became oppressive with so many more characters, and continuing for three books. It was unrelenting and a little exhausting.

A side-effect of this feeling was that the problems posed to the characters became so big and so multitudinous that their inevitable resolutions at the end of the series felt too trite and easy in comparison. It’s a tough balancing act to set up huge roadblocks for the characters and then resolve them in a way that feels earned.

Welcome to Ethnic Planet

I am keenly aware that I’m reading this series 30 years after its original publication. One of the strangest things about these books is the way Card has built his universe. His characters and their personalities run up against each other in a variety of interesting and well-thought-out ways, but his settings feel like cardboard cutouts in comparison.

The planet of Lusitania is the most fleshed-out setting in the series, but that’s a little deceptive because it has been engineered for simplicity. The Descolada has ravaged the ecosystem, and only a dozen species have managed to adapt. There is a single human colony city, and it is Portugese Catholic through-and-through.

The common sci-fi trope would be to construct “Star Wars” planets with a single distinguishing feature, usually an environmental biome. The ice planet. The forest planet. The desert planet. The lava planet.

Strangely, Card has managed to at least partly eschew this (though Lusitania is a uniform mix of forest and plain and Trondheim is icy). However, he has very plainly replaced these tropes with a different sequence: planets that are each a uniform human monoculture. Even more strange, in my opinion, is how these caricatures hew to a myopic 1990s American perspective. Say what you want about some of the performative multiculturalism in the still-not-very-broad-minded modern publishing industry, but I am honestly a little surprised that Card’s blatant stereotyping made it into a series that was not only mainstream, but award-worthy in its day.

Speaker for the Dead introduced Trondheim, the stoic Scandinavian planet. Xenocide introduced uniformly Chinese planet of Path, dominated by a kind of luddite, vaguely Taoist folk religion. Children of the Mind adds two more:  Divine Wind and Pacifica. Divine Wind is the Japanese planet, industrious and technologically innovative much as the US saw Japan in the 70s and 80s. Pacifica is the Samoan planet, and everyone that Peter and Wang-mu encounter there seems to be built like a linebacker, living a simple tropical life, and deeply invested in ancient, polytheistic religion.

There is an argument to be made that the book explicitly says that these planets are more diverse, and there is more to them than regions depicted in the main plot. However, I think this is a weak argument. It’s textbook telling instead of showing, and it seems to admit that the cultural caricatures, which are all we’re actually shown, are shallow and problematic.

Besides, the problem is not the lack of wokeness, it’s the abject unbelievability of a universe where each planet is almost entirely populated by uniform groups of people defined by a handful of simple traits that apparently haven’t changed over thousands of years. This is as absurd as the idea of a modern Italy that has adapted to our current world, technology, and politics while remaining culturally almost identical to the early Roman empire.

Even weirder, the term “western” is explicitly used, which is nonsensical in a far-future multi-planetary society. Of course, the core power systems of the Starways Congress and the military seem to be fully controlled by these “western” cultures, because who could possibly envision a universe where the US and Europe aren’t dominant?

The Dangers of Rereading

I have to admit, part of me wishes I hadn’t revisited these books. They didn’t quite live up to my fuzzy teenage memories of them. Those memories told me that Ender’s Game was the best of the set, and I continue to feel that way. But the sequel trilogy might have been better served by being further divorced from that book and getting a little more breathing room to explore other ideas.

In the end, I found the “Ender Quartet” to be an interesting series, but ultimately flawed enough that I had a tough time enjoying all the good bits without being reminded of the things that annoyed me. My current views are certainly affected by my age, my experiences, and the many fantastic books I’ve read in the interceding decades.

On the other hand, I might have reason to worry if I felt the same way about these books today as I did in my teens. For writers, rereading our old favorites can be a fun and useful exercise, but it’s also a dangerous one. You may find that those books were more enjoyable through the lens of nostalgic memory than they are in the cold light of a fresh read.

AI Art is Inverted Patronage

I happen to know a painter. Imagine for a moment, that I just moved into a new house, and I decide that I want new art to decorate the place. I tell my artist friend that I’ll pay her to create twenty paintings to my specifications.

Now I’m edgy, and I’ve already painted the walls black, so I decide what I really want is a bunch of paintings that look like H. R. Geiger’s work, specifically the movie Alien. I tell my artist friend that I want a shadowy techno-biological spaceship bridge for the entryway, and a carapaced, eyeless monstrosity for the living room, and for the bedroom, three damp corridors that look like the inside of an esophagus.

She rolls her eyes, but agrees to the terms. She paints the paintings and presents them to me. I like them, mostly, but I want a few changes. She makes a few modifications, I pay her the agreed-upon sum, and the deal is complete.

Here’s the question: am I an artist? I clearly have an artistic vision for my house—a vision so singular and intense that nobody seems to want to come over anymore. But should I be credited in the act of creation?

The Inversion

We already have a term for arrangements like this. It’s been around for quite some time. This kind of arrangement is artistic patronage. I pay you, and you create art to my specifications.

The general concept has evolved, from nobility and the wealthy supporting individual artists, to platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon allowing fans to support their favorite artists, to the many and varied forms of modern contract-worker abuse, where artists are treated more and more like machines that turn money into art, and preferably at the highest possible rate of exchange.

The twist in our current moment is that AI has provided a new type of patronage—cheaper and faster and even more heavily mediated by Silicon Valley technology. Instead of the wealthy paying human artists, the AI companies are attempting to build an ecosystem where mostly less wealthy patrons pay LLMs, and indirectly, their wealthy investors.

Since the process of training LLMs divorces the training inputs (the work of human artists) from the outputs, it has so far been treated (from a legal perspective) as transformative of the original work, and therefore fair use. And since machines cannot be copyright holders yet, nobody owns the rights to the resulting output.

Expression and Skill

Proponents of LLM-generated art argue that gen AI is a tool like Photoshop, and prompting is simply a new artistic skill. They argue it can be equally expressive.

As an extreme comparison, let’s look at scanning or photocopying. Photocopying generates an artistic output, a nearly exact copy of an artwork, but has little expression or skill. The only skill is identifying art that you want to copy.

AI images are more than this, certainly, but how much more? They aren’t direct copying, but the popularity of prompts “in the style of X” show that this remains a strong element. Especially since most prompters do not bother to analyze the techniques that contribute to the desired style. Most users cannot explain why the Simpsons looks like the Simpsons, or Ghibli looks like Ghibli, they just know they want a profile pic that looks “like that.”

AI art does takes creative input from the user: a description of something imagined. In this, it is similar to traditional art. While some artists, especially abstract artists, may start with a technique or a set of colors or a mood, most will start with some idea of concrete subject.

Many non-artists assume the process of creating art is all about getting that imagined thing from brain to paper with as little deviation as possible. This, I think, is simply not true. The process of generating a piece of art can be broken down into hundreds or thousands of tiny micro-expressions.

Each line and brushstroke in a painting is an atomic particle of artistic expression. Each word in a novel is a choice the artist had to make. The canvas is ten thousand interconnected empty spaces, and the artist chooses how to fill each one, accounting for the spaces around it that have already been filled.

AI proponents will say an AI prompt is constructed of many tokens, and LLM users will iterate repeatedly, tweaking their prompt. But how do brushstrokes in a painting compare to tweaking words in a prompt?

Determinism and Intentionality

LLMs are non-deterministic. With the exception of some very tightly constrained outputs, the exact same prompt to an AI will generate different outputs on each attempt. The user’s input is only partially responsible for the output. The rest is dictated by the ineffable statistical noise of AI inference. Some elements of the resulting work are inherently external to the user’s prompt.

We could argue about whether the same brushstrokes by the same artist over multiple paintings can result in identical paintings, but if they do not, then it’s due to small differences in environment, in tools, or inconsistency of skill. The artist, in the process of making ten thousand micro-expressions of their art, responds to these tiny, incremental outputs and adjusts the rest of the piece.

Differences between outputs are an expression of the artist, an interplay between the intentional and the accidental. Differences between nondeterministic AI outputs are not an expression of the user-patron. They are a mindless side-effect of AI generation. They are noise, not signal.

Art is Process, Not Product

By being directly involved in every micro-expressive decision and adapting and adjusting to the results with every output, the process of “traditional art” is a conversation between the artist and the art in progress. Even if two processes result in nearly identical pieces, the traditional process provides many more opportunities for making decisions, and adapting to the work as it’s created. These are direct expressions of skill and artistic intent.

Even if we treat generative AI as an artist’s tool, it is a blunt and wildly inaccurate instrument. It allows for relatively little input, and that input affects the output in highly variable and nondeterministic ways. Despite allowing for much faster iteration on “fully completed” pieces, there is scant mechanism for interplay between artist and art within the process of creation. It remains a black box.

In short, you don’t create a piece of art in collaboration with gen AI. You ask as best you can, then evaluate a finished output and decide if you need to ask again, trying to come up with the magical incantation that provides something approximating the desired result.

Vibe Check

Many of the most vocal advocates of prompting as artistic expression were not making art before widespread availability of LLMs. Most professional and long-practicing artists are disdainful of AI art. Yes, this is a broad generalization, and admittedly anecdotal to my own personal experience. But all I’ve seen from those in the pro-AI camp is equally anecdotal, so I figure my personal experience is as valid as someone else’s.

Why are artists not embracing AI wholesale? I believe it is because practicing artists are already used to exercising their creativity and skill constantly. They tend to recognize that prompting an AI is a fundamentally different thing from painting or drawing or writing fiction, even if painting is mediated through technological tools like touchscreens and tablets, and writing is done in a word-processor will spelling and grammar check.

Artists recognize that prompting doesn’t allow for the depth of creativity that they need and expect. They feel the way it takes away granular control and intimate feedback.

Gatekeeping

There is an argument, frequently deployed by the pro-AI crowd, that artists are gatekeeping art and resisting its democratization. A parallel argument is that AI is an artistic accessibility tool for the disabled and, weirdly, the unskilled.

This argument seems easily debunked by the many incredibly accomplished disabled artists in the world, many of whom have developed remarkable skills despite the challenges they face. Again anecdotally, it also seems like it’s rarely disabled artists actually making this argument, and much more frequently someone making it on their behalf.

There are examples of artists suffering disease or injury that made it impossible to continue creating art in the same way. Some are able to work around this. For some, using AI is an opportunity to gain some expressive ability back. But it is of a substantially different kind.

However, the frequent discussion of “lack of artistic skill” in these contexts is absurd to me. It implies that skill is inherent and not learned. It suggests that lack of effort or determination is on par with real disability, and that we should have pity on the would-be painter who hasn’t picked up a brush since grade-school and is offended that artists would dare deny them the tools to express themselves.

What these would-be artists fail to understand is that they are cheating themselves. They have not experienced the complex interplay between artist and art that is fundamental to the act of practiced creation. They believe that their AI-prompted art is giving them the same sensation, the same creative outlet, that the practiced artist gets from drawing or painting by hand. But it is only a shallow facsimile.

The artists are not trying to keep these people out of the walled garden of art. They are trying to get the prompters to understand that they are depriving themselves of a far richer experience by choosing the tool that seems more approachable.

Making Art

The sudden advent of tools that allow us to speak a few words and generate a painting is interesting and worrying and weird; embedded in complex and often problematic cultural and technological contexts. It’s that shocking sensation of science fiction suddenly become real.

Prompting AI clearly allows for some creative expression that influences the output, and that output can look quite competently rendered. But it is a fundamentally different and less expressive activity than traditional, “manual” forms of creation. It is less human. It should not be classed as the same thing as making art.

It also reveals broad cultural misconceptions about the artistic process, where only the final output is valued, and the process is not. That may sound cliché, but it is a meaningful cliché nonetheless. The process is valuable, and ignoring it is crass materialism and commodification of art; indifference to the meaning and mysticism of human creation.

Art can be sold, so corporations care about the output. They see artists and process only as a cost center. They have trained us on their viewpoint, to care only about the product (and it is purely a product to them). They call it “content,” so indifferent to the actual thing that it’s given this bland, meaningless label. The plain cardboard box of art.

I think I will have more to say on this subject, but I’ll stop here for now. I’d love to hear what other creatives think. Am I misrepresenting you? Do you see value in gen AI as a tool for artists? How much of the value of art is in the output vs. the process of creation? Let me know in the comments.

State of the Blog — November 2025

My “State of the Blog” posts are something I’ve been doing since the start of Words Deferred. Back when I was posting more frequently, I’d write these every six months. In 2024, I decided to switch to a yearly cadence—and now I dropped the ball and I’m two months late.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years Blogging: 5
  • Total Posts: ~550
  • WordPress Subscribers: 159
  • Monthly Views: 760 (avg. over last 3 months)

Noteworthy numbers in the past year include the all-time view count hitting 20,000, and highest daily views hitting 213.

The 2024 Slump

Words Deferred has never been “big,” but the stats showed steady growth from 2020-2023. During that first couple years I posted quite a lot, aided by projects like Razor Mountain and journaling through NaNoWriMo, where my fiction writing time and blogging were tightly intertwined. I was also trying a lot of different ideas, still figuring out what exactly I wanted this website to be.

In 2024, I embarked on my Year of Short Stories, where I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short stories. That was a great experience, radically increasing my comfort level with all aspects of writing and submitting work, and I also got some of my work published, which is nice.

That project set me up for one weekly post documenting my progress and submissions. My other posts were less frequent, and ultimately the blog was quieter than previous years. The Year of Short Stories was a project that took most of my writing time and energy, and since I was planning to submit the stories I was writing, I couldn’t use those as content. I also suspect that my weekly updates were less likely to draw in readers from week to week in the same way that something like Razor Mountain’s ongoing story might.

Whatever factors contributed, 2024 was the first year since the start of the blog where I saw the metrics go down—a roughly 30% drop from 2023. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the numbers (outside of these retrospective posts), but I’ll admit that a drop like that is a little disheartening. It begs the question, “have I already peaked?” It’s a lot easier to ignore the relatively low view counts when they’re at least going up every year.

2025: The Year of…Nothing in Particular?

As 2025 rolled around, I found myself once again at the crossroads where I’d finished another writing/blogging project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Over the years, I’ve learned that I work most effectively when I have some big project like this to focus on. I think it also makes for good bloggery when there’s a big project to talk about week after week. Documenting those writing projects helps me get through them, and hopefully provides something interesting to post. When I don’t have a long-term focus, I tend to flail around and procrastinate.

Going into this year, I was burned out on short stories. For lack of a better idea, I decided to try tackling a different project each month. What were those projects going to be? I didn’t really know.

For January, I picked an easy one: write a page per day. No problem. I’ve probably done ten NaNoWriMos, at least half of them successful, and this was a much easier version of that. I finished first drafts of two short stories, and even wrote some goofy fan-fiction for a game I was playing at the time, something I’ve never done before.

Then February hit, and I stalled out hard. I had several completed drafts sitting around, and I’d been struggling to find the motivation to revise them. I figured that would be a good goal, but I never really picked out a particular metric to hold myself to.

Then I was sick for a few days. The kids were sick for a few days. School activities started and I ended up being a mentor/coach. We had some family medical issues. Before I knew it, my plans were long-abandoned. I ended up having more than one month in 2025 where I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t writing much outside the blog either.

It’s never been hard for me to find reasons not to write—hence the name of the site—but the first half of 2025 was chock full of them. Without a big, clear, overarching project to keep me going, I dropped off the map for a while.

Second Wind

Looking back, I didn’t really get my feet under me, writing-wise, until summer. The kids finished school for the year, activities were over, and the medical issues were mostly resolved.

I spiffed up the blog layout ever so slightly, added Recommendations and Support Me pages, and took stock of my recurring post formats. Now that I’m into year five of Words Deferred, I’ve found a few formats that I enjoy writing and can keep coming back to:

The articles I most enjoy writing are still those that dig into the art and craft of writing, from brainstorming to revision to publishing trends. And while I enjoy having a big project to work on throughout the year, I found that I can lean on these recurring series to have something interesting to write about at least once a week, and keep my pen to the paper.

Oddly enough, my number of posts published in 2025 will probably work out similarly to 2024, maybe even a little less, thanks to how little I was writing through June. However, my views have been rising steadily ever since then, and I’m already getting way more eyeballs than 2024. Will I hit beat the 2023 peak? I don’t think so, but it’s looking more possible.

SEO for Dummies

Are there some sort of lessons to be learned about search engines and keywords and maximizing internet points in all this? Probably. The only reason I noticed my views were going up again was because WordPress sent me a little notice to say “Hey, we were surprised to see some people are reading what you wrote.” So I looked at the “Insights” tab on my dashboard, and that only confused me more.

The only app I automatically share posts on is Bluesky. In previous years, I used to share on TwiXter, back before the bots and assholes took over and they shut down the socialist blog-posting APIs in favor of their glorious, free-market, All-American blue checkmarks. So of course it makes sense that WordPress tells me I got about 6,000 shares each on Facebook, X, Reddit and Tumblr, where I never post anything.

I don’t know how this is possible. If you’re sharing my posts on Facebook and Tumblr, please reach out and clear this up for me.

And what exactly is a “share?” Clearly not the same as a “view.” Maybe a “glance?” But then, when people read my articles through the email subscription, that doesn’t count as a view either. Google also sends me monthly search statistics that appear to wildly overestimate just how much traffic they’re sending my way. They use the even more vague term “impressions.” I can only assume an “impression” according to Google means that my website was on page 10 of the search results when someone skimmed the AI overview.

I checked the WP and Google search insights. I seem to be coming up in roughly the same searches as I have been for years. I found out that I’m cited in the Wikipedia article for “Mystery Box.” That’s kind of fun, and apparently counted for 3 whole clicks. Who is clicking that? ChatGPT helpfully sent seven people my way. Why? Maybe they asked it why people hate LOST so much.

In conclusion, the internet is a unfathomable beast. It giveth and it taketh away. None can know its true heart, and those who claim to do so are false prophets.

What’s Next?

I’m itching for another big project. But when I say “big,” that might just mean The Year of Even More Short Stories. Whatever it is, it’ll be intermingled with the usual things, the Read Reports and Story Idea Vaults and random game and TTRPG musings, and maybe even another poem.

Let’s all just try to make it to the end of the year, and then we’ll see where 2026 takes us.

Reblog: The Anthropic Class Action Settlement — Writer Beware

As usual, Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware has some of the best coverage of the Anthropic settlement. If you haven’t been watching this lawsuit, the court determined that Anthropic’s AI training falls under fair use, but its illegal downloading of millions of books from pirating websites does not.

Anthropic apparently felt it was too risky and expensive to see the case to completion, with the real possibility of a judgement that falls close to the maximum statutory penalty of $150,000 per pirated work. That payout for even a fraction of the millions of books starts to look like the GDP of a small country. So they settled.

The settlement in this class action will likely grant a payout of roughly $3,000 per claimed work, but with a number of caveats. It only applies to works with proper copyright registration, currently estimated at around 500,000 books. The lawyers will get paid, and for books with a publisher who still holds rights, the publisher will also typically get about half.

If you think your work might be included, check the links from the article. There is an easy search function to see if your work was identified as pirated.

Writer Beware — The Anthropic Class Action Settlement

Unfortunately, many authors will be excluded due to the copyright registration requirement. Many self-published works, and even those with lazy “professional” publishers who never bothered to register their copyright cannot participate. For those who can, it will be months (and maybe longer) before any money sees the light of day.

Victoria also notes that this potentially record-breaking settlement is attracting the scavengers and parasites of the legal world.

Writer Beware — Predatory Opt Outs: The Speculators Come for the Anthropic Copyright Settlement

At least one law firm has targeted authors in the settlement class, trying to convince them to give up their right to participate in exchange for potential future lawsuits and the vague hope of a payout closer to the $150,000 maximum. Participants in the current lawsuit are already complaining that these advertisements and the website backing them amount to outright fraud.

Of course, the current settlement is just about guaranteed to pay something if you’re a qualifying author, and there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone opting out will get a better deal. This is a prime example of trading a bird in the hand for two in the bush.

That said, the current settlement terms are a lot less than many authors were hoping for. Part of the class-action structure gives legal right to any qualifying authors to opt out of the settlement if they have reason to think they can somehow get a better deal.

There are at least 50 other lawsuits pending against the big AI companies over copyright issues, and it’s quite possible that we haven’t heard the last word on the fair use issue, even if it’s not looking good so far for authors’ and publishers’ rights. Judging by the haphazard and questionable ways many of these companies have scraped the internet for training data, there may still be more big payouts yet to come.

Tips for Thousand Year Old Vampire

If you saw my previous post, you know I’ve been playing the solo RPG “Thousand Year Old Vampire” recently. I enjoy the game, but like so many TTRPGs, the source book is heavy on rules and light on examples. With a few rounds completed, I thought I’d offer some tips for new players, to make the game more fun and easier to run.

One Easy Trick They Don’t Want You to Know

The included “character sheet” consists of two paperback-sized pages with six headings (memories, diary, skills, resources, characters, and marks). If you abuse the book’s spine, you can probably scan this onto a single sheet of standard paper, but anyone who has played the game will know that you’ll need the world’s tiniest handwriting to fit everything on that single page. And even if you do, you’ll be carefully erasing half of it as you play.

I’ve tried playing by writing everything in pencil on 4-6 sheets of paper. It’s manageable, but not great, especially for your first run. Luckily, we have the perfect technology to improve this situation: sticky notes. They come in a rainbow of colors, and they’re the perfect size for a one-sentence blurb, which is the format of just about everything in TYOV.

I really enjoy the tactile aspect of pen on paper, so I’ve been using color-coded Post-It notes that I can stick on 3-4 standard-sized sheets of heavy tagboard. You could also use a larger sheet of paper or poster board, or just array the notes across a table, but it’s nice to have something you can pick up and put away if you have to pack up an incomplete session.

The game doesn’t specifically tell you to, but I also like to track the age of my vampire (whether they know their own age or not), the current year, and all the prompts I’ve hit in the current game. This makes it much easier to pick up a game from a previous session.

Virtual vs. Physical

In our post-pandemic world, many of us are now used to playing our tabletop games on virtual tabletops. Since TYOV involves a significant amount of adding, deleting, and copy/pasting; tracking everything on a laptop can make all that easier.

However, the typical TTRPG virtual tabletops cater (by necessity) to Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and a lot of similar games. TYOV has only a little bit of die rolling, and none of the minifigures, maps and crunchy bits that these platforms put a lot of effort into. So virtual tabletops strike me as ineffective overkill. All TYOV really wants is a big whiteboard and some sticky notes.

As luck would have it, I know from my day job that a lot of professional project management and software development jobs happen to have similar requirements. Trello, Miro, and the dozens of similar apps are perfect for TYOV, and while they may be catering to big business, they all generally have free tiers that are more than adequate here.

Min/Maxing?

It’s clear from the very light-touch mechanics that TYOV is a story-centric game. However, there are still mechanics in the form of skills and resources. These are the currency that keeps the game going.

Before beginning a game, it’s worth thinking about what your goal is. If you want to let the story develop however it may, then there’s no need to worry too much about your resources. After my first vampire met a relatively early demise by running out of skills and resources, I decided I wanted to see a game all the way through to the “end”—reaching one of the last nine prompts. In that case, you’ll want to play with an eye toward the mechanics, and staying alive.

Many prompts offer choices. Characters and memories are ephemeral. Marks can impact the story. But none of them matter toward your vampire’s continued survival compared to skills and resources. So long as you pick options that maximize those, and you don’t roll too terribly, you’re likely to reach the final prompts.

Memory Miscellany

The TYOV rules as written place a hard cap on the length of an experience: one sentence. If you stick to this, you’ll quickly find yourself writing convoluted run-on sentences full of commas, colons, semicolons, em-dashes and parentheticals. Even the few examples in the book do it.

I appreciate the purpose of the rule: to keep the game tight and quick. But sometimes it’s just faster and more fun to write a couple of sentences, rather than heaping abuse on the English language. As far as I’m concerned, a short paragraph of two or three sentences is just fine, and if you use sticky notes, each experience will still have a natural built-in size limit.

When it comes to memories—the headings that experiences must be filed under—it pays to pick something that will be easy to fill with a full roster of three memories. To this end, I find that single-word concepts work well, especially emotions and vampire-related things.

Love, hate, hope, fear, loneliness, determination.

Blood, feeding, pain, death.

Many new experiences will be able to fit under several of these memories, which means you can pick and choose to better max out your fifteen possible slots for experiences.

Alternately, if you want a highly forgetful vampire, you can try the opposite: very specific memory headings will make it harder to slot in experiences. This will force your vampire to offload to diaries and forget things sooner. This may be fun if you want to play with a monster who has forgotten his own origin, or increase the likelihood of repeatedly running across a nemesis or lover that your vampire has forgotten.

Thousand Year Old Vampire — A Solo RPG

Thousand Year Old Vampire is a lonely solo role-playing game in which you chronicle the unlife of a vampire over the many centuries of their existence, beginning with the loss of mortality and ending with their inevitable destruction.

I happened across this little hardcover book at a games store in a mall near my house. I was there to have the failing battery in my phone replaced, and I had some time to browse and meander. Since most TTRPG books are oversized tomes, a novel-sized book stands out on the shelf.

I don’t have an active gaming group these days, and most game books don’t come cheap, so I don’t buy random game books as much as I once did. But a solo RPG sounded appealing, and my kids had been asking if there was something I might want for Father’s Day. So I texted a pic of the cover to my wife with a note about where I had seen it. Lo and behold, a week or two later I was unwrapping it.

Becoming a Vampire

The rules of TYOV are simple. Your character is defined by their memories, and you can only keep a limited number over your long (un)life. Each memory is a collection of experiences, defined by some particular theme or topic. Each experience is a single sentence that describes something that happened in a turn of the game. You can have up to 5 memories (topics) with three experiences attached to each.

Although this gives you enough space to retain up to fifteen experiences, those experiences need to fit under the existing memories, which can sometimes be tricky. Additionally, you can “offload” up to four memories into a diary—a physical object that could be anything from a book to a cuneiform tablet—they’ll no longer take up space in your head, but they can be lost forever if something happens to that diary.

Along with memories, your vampire has skills. Skills are one of the two mechanically important resources that your vampire can use to survive when things go wrong (and they will go wrong a lot). Skills typically relate to an experience, and can only be used once, usually to get out of a jam. However, skills that have been used (or “checked”) can sometimes become relevant again in later prompts.

Your vampire can also accumulate physical “resources.” These mechanically important (and personally significant) items can be anything from a trinket to a castle, and are differentiated from mere possessions that you may accumulate over the centuries.

The other aspects of the game are marks and characters. Marks can be any sign of your immortality, such as the classic vampire tells: nasty teeth, failure to show up in a mirror, and sparkles. You could also choose to go big with bat wings, glowing eyes, or something more extreme.

Characters are the mortals and immortals you meet, meat, and perhaps re-meet along the way. Mortals will typically only be relevant for a few turns of your long life. Immortals may become allies or enemies, and be lost and found again across the centuries.

Play

To play, you move through a series of eighty numbered prompts. Each turn, you roll d10 – d6. This means you can move forward and backward, although statistics ensures you’ll eventually progress forward. If you land on the same prompt more than once, there are additional prompts for the second and third go round (and even more options in the appendixes).

Prompts will present a new situation, and you’ll have to decide what happens as a result. Each prompt may change your story mechanically, by granting or using up skills, resources and NPC characters. Prompts also add story context. You make choices, if instructed. And you always create a new experience that must be added to one of your memories. If no relevant memory has an open slot, you must give something up: forgetting a memory or moving it to your diary.

The last eight prompts end the game, providing a natural limit. It is also possible to use up your skills or resources. In a pinch, you can substitute one for another, creating some fiction to explain how you escaped a sticky situation. If you have no skills or resources left and the game demands one, then your vampire dies. My first game ended at prompt 25, having completed seventeen experiences. The endings at the high end of the prompts are a goal to aim for, but you aren’t guaranteed to make it there. There are a few ways the game can end: death and destruction, being trapped forever, or losing yourself in the throes of madness.

Variations

The game suggests two modes of play: quick game, where you simply track the state of your vampire with the minimum necessary information, or a journalling game, where you write vampiric journal entries for each prompt in addition to tracking experiences, memories, skills, resources, and characters.

A scant three pages in the back of the book are dedicated to suggestions for group play, suggesting that “journalling games” be treated as a long-form game of letter writing between participants that may last days or weeks, and “quick games” can be done in-person over the course of a few hours.

In multiplayer, the book suggests sharing non-player characters and creating stories that link the players’ vampires. It also outlines a mechanic for sharing or stealing resources.

This section seemed like an afterthought to me. There were minimal examples to help understand what this kind of game might look like in action. I don’t expect really crunchy rules from a game like this, but at least a little bit of rigor seems necessary, so the players actually know how to interact.

The Fun

The last time I played a solo TTRPG was A Visit to San Sibilia. That game was extremely mechanically light, and felt almost like a series of slightly randomized short story prompts (which I found very enjoyable, but might not satisfy someone who is more interested in the “gamier” aspects of TTRPGs.)

Thousand Year Old Vampire is more mechanical, and gives you more opportunities to choose whether you’ll make decisions for story reasons (do I save a favorite character?) or mechanical ones (do I save my skills and resources?). These mechanical aspects also mean that there is more stuff to keep track of over the course of a game.

Despite following the life of a single vampire from start to finish, this is less of a storytelling game. With San Sibilia, the natural result of playing the game is a short story. The artifacts that come out of a game of TYOV are more fragmented. Until I got into it, I didn’t realize how much erasing or crossing-out I’d be doing. Characters, skills, and resources all come and go. Even memories are liable to be erased eventually, and diaries can be destroyed.

It’s easy to end the game with a sheaf of scribbly, messy papers. While it’s possible to carefully document your vampire’s life in a journaling game, I think it may be a stronger experience if you lean into the ephemeral nature of the experience.  One of the more interesting things that can happen in the game is your vampire living so long that they no longer remember their origin.

It’s probably good to treat your first game of TYOV as a test run, just as you’d expect to need a few sessions to get comfortable with the rules for a “big book” group TTRPG like D&D or Shadowrun.

Delving Through History

Something that was not obvious to me at first is that this game is at least as much about history as vampires. If you begin in Spain in the 1300s, you won’t get through many prompts before you’ll need to know some things about what life is like in that time and place. And your vampire will likely travel the world as they pass the centuries, so you may soon need to learn about 14th century Africa or the New World in the 15th century.

A good general background in history helps, but isn’t necessary so long as you’re willing to go down some Wikipedia rabbit holes. However, learning about history ends up being a significant part of the game. If that sounds boring, this may be a tough game to get through.

Of course, you could always make up some alternate history, or start your vampire in the modern day and let them travel into the far-flung sci-fi future…

The Corporate Cold War Gets Hot — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The Corporate Cold War

When the history books were written, the story started with an exodus of intellectuals and policymakers from the United States and Britain. Their failure to effectively change the festering kleptocracies of their native lands only galvanized them to fight even harder for the more favorable battleground of the EU.

The opening salvo was the unexpected passage of laws that set hard limits on the size of corporations by employee count, profit, and revenue. Any company too large would have to split up. These limits would tighten over time, and any uncompliant company could do no business within the economic block.

The first front of the war was political, with multinational corporations spending billions to influence elections and run ad campaigns. They threatened to abandon Europe, an empty threat, knowing how much it would cost them. They claimed prices would skyrocket. But they underestimated the public vitriol against them.

When political wrangling failed make the problem go away, a legal arms race began. The corps found a hundred ways to split one company into many while maintaining total control and channeling profits to the same shareholders. Regulators updated the rules, and the corporations changed structure again. It took decades of closing loopholes to see the laws really go into effect.

Some of the corps followed through on their warnings, leaving the EU altogether and eating the loss. Others divested themselves of their European branches. But some of the biggest, loudest corporations gave in and broke up in a sudden cascade of shocking announcements. The continent celebrated.

However, the elite shareholder class had been busy consolidating their power in America, Britain, and parts of Asia. As their influence waned in the EU, elsewhere the lines between corporate and political power blurred and fell away.

This, the history books said, was what led to the worldwide split into two socioeconomic blocs: a new cold war. And if there was one thing the gleeful intellectuals of the EU underestimated, it was the amount of bloodshed the rich would embrace to keep their wealth and power. The rhetoric became increasingly violent, demanding that the “continent of socialists” accept “true capitalism” into their borders, no matter the cost.

Armies rallied along the borders. Fingers hovered over the controls that would launch fleets of missiles and drones. And the doomsday clock ticked forward: five seconds to midnight…