💜

Whoa. :(

Have a relatively painless Monday, weirdos.

I cannot BELIEVE I haven't gone to bed yet.

The thing is, there is a small part of me that wonders if this isn't actually an engagement-farming strategy. Throw out an open-ended question, and make it so that reskeeting your account is the only way to enter the conversation.

It's worth a shot, anyway.

Battened down my own replies, for the delicious irony.

Second time in two weeks I see a skeet asking for advice from "writers out there" with the replies turned off for people who aren't already mutuals.

Which, I get the desire to not get interaction from randos. Especially toxic interactions.

It does leave going, "Ah, well, never mind."

Another day, another reminder that the Florida kidlit community does not consider me to be a part of it.

A contact form reads: Subject: Checking Authenticity Body of message Hi there Beth. I have been contacted by someone who is using the email, [email blacked out], and using you name and one of your novels 'Feast of the Starving Stone: The Chef’s Five' to engage with me as a fellow author - if it is you then great, if it is not, as i suspect, then this is a fake approach. I just wanted to be sure. thanks. [signed name blacked out] You're a real person, right? No, I'm a bot. Please don't include existential questions in a contact form. Yes.

I just found out that an AI scammer is impersonating me in their spam campaign. I am LIVID.

Please, please share this post. Warn people. I’m horrified that someone might be ripped off in my name.

No one is safe from being impersonated like this.

I play this mental game where I assume that all extra information in a statement is a restrictive element. For eg, "Here's a photo of me with my beautiful wife Janet."

I will only put one slice of pizza or bread bite on my plate at a time, to give everybody a chance to grab some. Because I am scrupulous.

I will also, however, take the LARGEST slice that's present. Because I'm no fool.

(This thread inspired by reading a book and thinking, damn, I don't have those chops.)

Salute to an all-time tweet

The truck beds are nearly the same size

And I *still* have to read and learn and study.

But, given that it took me thirty years to sell a story and forty years to sell a book, I can confidently say that it wouldn't have come on its own.

I'm not a natural.

But that's me.

For me, reading and grammar and sentence rhythm came effortlessly, but *storytelling* did not, has not, so I have had to work hard and listen to what artists have to say about what they do, and try to emulate them until some of their moves become instinctual.

Huh. Guess I did have a little bit of a thread in me after all.

fail for another.)

The art is in the tension.

Which is why LLM products can't be art. There's no tension of its 100% algorithm. And slop IS still algorithm, even if the algorithm is so dense and buried and inelegant that the very coders can't flowchart it.

I dunno, man. You feel your way, and you listen to your beta readers if you use beta readers. (If you're unpublished, you probably should.)

That right there is the tension. A big picture technique, but I can't tell you how to execute it in your specific case (and also what works for one reader will

Like you have to make some promises early, and then fulfill *some* of those promises early, so that you can then *not* fulfill some and the reader has faith that you will because you have built trust, but what's the right number? How big? How early?

how do you withhold information from a reader so that its revelation can give the reader a satisfying frisson when it recasts all they believe they have understood, without frustrating readers with the things you're being coy about, and I'll be like, I don't know man, that's what makes it art.

But sometimes I'm giving a presentation or on a panel and somebody asks a question about how you achieve some specific effect, like, say,

The same logic that pushed the teaching of phonics to the margins.

Yeah, for a lot of us who love to read and write, grammar and gestalt comprehension really did come that way, and so it's easy to assume that's universal.

But it's not, and we do kids a disservice when we assume it is.

It reminds me of three decades ago when I was a young teacher and language arts folks were beginning their successful assault on the teaching of grammar in school, arguing that nobody learns grammar this way, we all learn by absorption. (This is false.)

so they feel like everybody should be able to skip past the study of craft, not realizing how many folks *don't* find whatever definitive of success they seek when they just follow their gut.

People who denigrate all craft advice because there are no rules have a kind of survivorship bias where they don't realize how much unconscious craft mastery they have,

and how they're both kinda wrong, because what I don't feel like enough people focus on is how art lives in the *tension* between those two things.

I don't know that I have enough thoughts right now to make a thread, but I was just thinking about the folks who talk a lot about craft, and the folks who denigrate talk of craft in favor of, I dunno, feel and instincts and effect,

Palantir put out the most cartoonishly evil statement possible. They’re so arrogant and self-confident they don’t seem to believe their fascistic plans can be opposed.

We must get rid of Palantir altogether.

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