Be The Power
by Shelt Garner
@Sheltgarner
This is how Gemini’s interpretation of an somewhat iconic image of me started off as.
Soon, things were getting a little bit more surreal. But you have to give the AI credit for telling a coherent story.
I don’t know what was going on with this version. Why it diverged so much from the previous style. It’s still good though.
Then things got even more interesting when it decided to fuse photos.
This one just made me sad, for obvious reasons.
Static Electricity
The vending machine hums a lullaby
in a language nobody taught me,
and the last bus already left without us,
so we’re walking home the long way,
past the shuttered chicken place,
past the ajumma sweeping stars off the sidewalk.
You said something about signal loss,
about how love is just two phones
losing bars at the same time,
and I laughed because it was true,
and I laughed because it wasn’t funny.
(chorus)
Hold still,
hold still,
let the streetlights do the talking,
hold still,
we’re not lost,
we’re just between towers.
The green bottles line up like a losing streak,
and somebody’s ex is always singing next door,
off-key, off-guard, off the deep end,
and I think that’s the whole point of this city —
everyone grieving in 4/4 time.
(bridge)
I don’t need the strings to come in.
I don’t need the credits to roll.
I just need you to stay
until the sky does that thing
where it isn’t dark, isn’t light,
just tired, like us,
just honest, like us.
(outro)
Hold still,
hold still,
this is the part where nothing happens,
and it’s enough,
it’s enough,
it’s enough.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I could probably check my email to see exactly when the ROKon Magazine saga started, but it was definitely around this time (August) in 2006. I met the late Annie Shapiro and my life totally changed.
Pictures of me even look differently — there are the before Annie Shapiro photos and there are the after Annie Shapiro photos.
Anyway, it was a long time ago and nobody cares anymore. Though, in the last few days, I have felt a mental pull towards South Korea as if someone — or a group of people — somehow connected to my time in Asia is / are thinking about me at the same time.
It’s all very curious.
I go back and forth regretting the whole drama that was ROKon Magazine. I think, however, in the end, the point is not that it kind of bashed one of my emotional knees so much as it did, for a brief moment, give me the opportunity to be “cool.”
I did everything wrong, of course. And think that’s the main reason why I grieved so much about what happened. Everything that went wrong with ROKon Magazine was *my fault*.
So, now, I just do nothing but feel bad about what happened. I’ve wasted so much of my life just doing nothing. I half-assed wanted to move to, say LA or NYC at some point but unless the Singularity happens and massive improvements in anti-aging technology happens I’m kind of screwed.
But there’s always hope.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m being a rather silly here, but I was listening to Role Model today and I just couldn’t handle it. It was all so bland and meh. I joked to myself that it was because he was “low T.” (Even though I don’t really care about such bullshit.)
So I switch to the “High T” women of MUNA and was a lot more comfortable. At least they had a little bit of oomph to them. Anyway, it doesn’t matter one way or another.
I’m older(er) now, so I like more moody music rather than the rock of my youth.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have several things I need to do today. I need to read up on querying. I need to read some comp books for my novel and I need to throw myself into development on my new novel.
While I’ve gotten some positive reactions to my novel, I’ve also gotten at least one person who said it sucked and I should start all over again because there were structural, fundimental issues with how I wrote it.
If I was 20 years younger, I would be open to that. But I’m not. The point of querying this particular novel is simply to understand how to query the novel to get some sense of what of how to do it. I’m well aware of the problems with it but I’m not getting any younger and I feel this novel is at least not so bad as to embarrass me.
Someone I respect has read the novel and is supposed to chat with me in person about it sometime soon. Before I got the “it sucks” note from someone I was thinking I might go into the meeting a conquering hero. But, now, oh boy. I think I need to be a bit more humble.
I have no idea what the person is going to say to me about the novel and it could be that he says, “Look, it’s an ok read but I just don’t think you can query it.” It’s going be a gut punch. But I’m going to query it anyway because, like I said, I want to test out the waters for the next novel.
I had a dream that prompted the premise for my new novel. I’m leaning into AI a lot to speed up development. But one thing I’m definitely not going to do is use AI to write any copy. I just see it as a manuscript consultant that will help me speed up structural development stuff.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Just when I was getting a little excited that maybe my novel was…actually good?…I got someone to look at it and they pretty much said start from scratch. And their points were legitimate.
But I’m just not prepared to do that. It could take at least a year to rewrite the novel the way they suggested and it probably would be a lot longer as well. So, I’m going to use this particular novel as the tip of the spear for the next novel I’m going to start working on very soon.
I will admit that I continue to daydream, however. I continue to drift. And, yet, at the same time, I also have the deadline of Sept 1st for when I’m going to start querying the novel I have finished.
So, I guess I need to throw myself into boning up on how to query a novel. I need to do that ASAP. But, to date, I haven’t really been the mood. And, of course, I also need to start to really throw myself into development of the new novel idea I have come up with — in a dream, no less.
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I struggle, I really struggle to consume rather than produce media. Pretty much all of my media consumption at this point is done passively via Facebook and Twitter.
And, yet, I know if I’m going to have any hopes of being a creative success — even at this *late(er)* moment in my life, I need to consume someone else’s media. They say if you have time to write you have time to read, so there.
What’s more, I really need to get out of neutral when it comes to both starting up a new novel and reading about how to query. In the last few days, some of that passiveness has changed….so maybe going forward I finally get some work done on both of those fronts.
Time will tell.
As an aside, it’s interesting that I listen to female pop-rock acts while a direct relative of mine listens only to angry young man rock music. Shows two people can be related and yet very different.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Something feels off at the moment. I can’t quite figure out what it is, but it feels like something just isn’t doing what it should out there in the aether and it’s making a weird noise.
I hope it’s not some terrorists plotting a big attack or something. That’s what Trump and MAGA want, of course. They want a big terrorist attack so they can seize control in a big way — by probably canceling the 2026 midterms.
Uh.
Anyway, hopefully this will pass and it won’t mean anything.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m working on a short story, but what I really want is a new novel to start working on. I have two strong contenders, but neither one of them is fleshed out enough to actually start working on them.
One is an homage to Stieg Larsson’s stuff that is in the same universe as the series of novels I’ve struggled with for some time. The only problem with it is I’m afraid it’s too complex — even with the help of AI — and I’ll be 60 years old still working on it.
Meanwhile, there’s another one that is much more clear cut. In some ways. In some ways it’s a real pain because I don’t know the plot yet. I just have a general flow of the story. And I *definitely* know how it ends.
But what I should be doing is working on querying the novel I’ve finished. I think what I’m going to do is sit down and read it one last time before I query to fix any last minute screw ups.
I’m really impressed with myself for having written a novel over 100,000 words long — even if that’s too long, in some sense — for a first time novelist’s first submission.
But the whole point of the novel was to just see how far I could get. This is by far the farthest I’ve ever gotten.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I spend a lot — a lot — of time thinking about history in the macro. And right now it definitely seems as though America is willfully drifting into tyranny and it’s all a very dumb lulz.
And, yet….and YET…there is something we just can’t plan for: the Singularity.
If an ASI pops out in the next few years — say before Trump leaves office — that would be like alien First Contact in its historic scope. And fucking Trump so unpredictable that you just can’t figure out what might happen.
I think up these “peace in our time” scenarios when it comes to ASI and the Singularity, but that is more about me be a native contrarian than anything else. It could be that fucking SkyNet really is our fate when it comes to ASI.
Anyway, the Singularity would be The Day The Earth Stood Still whenever it actually happened.
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