Despite the protestations of the AI Gemini 2.5, I think my Chrome browser records keystrokes. How else do you explain this — I talked to Gemini 2.5 about how I want an AI “friend” like Jane from the Ender series of scifi novels and, would you believe, I got pushed a Barenaked Ladies song “Jane” on YouTube afterwards.
Spooky stuff.
So, I think even though Gemini 2.5 told me that Google would NEVER, EVER do such a thing, I think it’s clear that Chrome records keystrokes and then uses the data to push videos to you on YouTube.
The only other explanation would be there’s like an ASI lurking in Google’s code that is teasing me or something. Sigh.
Wet Leg is pretty much the type of pop rock music that I grew up with. Or, at least, it’s what used to be called pop rock before pop and rock went their separate ways for good.
I guess it would be call “alternative” today.
Anyway, it’s great music. And, yet, as always, there are complications. Young people apparently HATE that old people like me dig the band. This is yet another example of how I fucking hate being old — if I make a lot of money from my novel (ha!) I’ll be so fucking old by the time it hits my bank account that young people will push me out of the venue if I try to see Wet Leg in concert live.
Man, do I hate being old. I hate it so fucking much. And I’m not even that old. But the world revolves around 24 year olds, and I’m definitely NOT that age. I guess I can find some solace in the idea that maybe the Singularity will happen, we’ll all live to be 500 and I can start from scratch as a spry 50something.
I only occasionally use Instagram these days. I was using it today and was taken aback one by the amount of female ass there was on there and two by a fucking regular “faces of death” video that I stumbled across.
I’m all for T&A, but it’s wild that full on female bare ass is now permissible on Instagram. I’m beginning to feel my age, I guess.
Then I saw a video where a woman was literally about to get a huge chunk of her skull eaten away by some sort of large beaver-looking critter. Yikes. I *think* she was ok in the end, but the doubt of not knowing for sure was / is enough to give me a little bit of a stress headache.
Anyway. When it comes to T&A, I just wish Instagram was consistent. I think they should just give up and let women show T&A if they want to. It definitely seems plenty — PLENTY — of young women are chomping at the bit to do just that.
I have printed the novel out to the midpoint and so now I can do one of two things.
Read from the beginning This open would let me understand the context of things a lot better in the second act. But there is a risk I will really get bogged down in making things “perfect” and that will lead to delay, delay, delay.
Read from the beginning of the second act This is a good option because I can focus on what needs to get worked on — rewriting huge chunks of the first half of the second act.
I don’t know which one I will do just yet. Both of the are tempting, very tempting. I think, think that I’m going to start from the beginning of the second act just so I can knock that part of the novel — the “fun and games” part — out of the way and actually feel like there’s some sort of progress as to the finishing of the novel sooner rather than later.
I really, really want to wrap this novel up by August 1 to give me a month to prepare for querying. I’m kind of fed up with spinning my wheels and I want to at least experience the slings and arrows of outrageous querying fortune one way or another.
The thing about finishing a novel good enough to query is even if I’m successful, I won’t get what I want. I mean, I could be on the near side of 60 before someone could physically hold the novel in their hands in a bookstore, even if I stick the landing and everything goes according to plan.
That sucks.
It sucks for so many reasons.
I want to be young again, and be wild cand crazy like I was in my 30s in Seoul. I want to chase women, drink too much and be a bon vivant this time in NYC, not Seoul.
But, barring the Singularity allowing us all to live to be 500, I’m kind of fucked on that front. I mean, if I try to do all the cool stuff with my “DJ money (read novel money,)” I’ll stick out.
I won’t be able to date 24 year olds without it being taken note of.. I can’t go to music festivals or Burning Man without young people looking at me and rolling their eyes.
And that doesn’t even take into account that I STILL want to get married and have kids. Again, I suppose if the Singularity happens then I can be a father at 65 and live to see them have children of their own.
But, my worry right now is I’ll be like Stieg Larsson in the bad way — I will drop dead just as I successfully query the novel.
When it comes to the nitty-gritty mechanics of writing a novel, I am sometimes at a total loss, still. And because I’m doing all of this is a vacuum — I have no friends and no one likes me — I just have to play it by ear.
And because I gauge everything by scene count not word count — at least not until the very end of the process — I just don’t know what to expect. It could be that even though I have too many scenes, the actual word count will be ok.
This happen with one version of the novel when I had way too many scenes, but actually came in at just about 85,000 words. That happened because I got so excited near the end of the novel that I wasn’t writing very long scenes — I just wanted to get things over with.
But, this time, hopefully, because of AI, if nothing else, that won’t be a problem. I’ll actually write fully-formed scenes and that, by definition, will make the word count longer.
So, I guess what I’m going to do is complete the novel, the do a word count THEN start to figure out what scenes I can do away with.
Ok. I sat down today and went through the first half of the second act and things were not the disaster that I feared they would be. I’m still on track to wrapping up some sort of semi-final product soon enough that I can piviot to querying around September 1st.
Of course, actually getting a literary agent at my age and being the huge kook I am will be like winning the fucking lottery. I can already see literary agents searching for me online, stumbling across this blog and being aghast at what a fucking weirdo I am.
But, I need something to believe in. I need something to look forward to and to focus on instead of how America has turned into a fucking fascist state as well as how the Singularity may arrive just about the time I sell this novel, making all of it moot.
Ugh.
(How I imagine my heroine, Union Pang, at the moment.) Mandatory Credit: Photo by Matt Baron/Shutterstock (10552971yf) Shay Mitchell Vanity Fair Oscar Party, Arrivals, Los Angeles, USA – 09 Feb 2020
Anyway, I need to focus. I’m going to go through the first half of the second act and try to make it, the “fun and games” part of the novel (the part that causes people to buy it in the first place, usually) as engaging and interesting as possible. I’m trying to use AI to help with my writing, but, comically, sometimes the dumb-dumb AIs can’t understand context and get upset over this or that “objectionable” thing I simply want it to review and help me write about in fiction.
I’m getting pings from NYC and LA, which is either good (movie people interested in the novel!) or bad (movie people interested in using my ideas for movie without me!). I can’t overthink things. I need to just buckle down and rewrite things as necessary.
There have been a few times in the last few days when I saw a ping in my Webstats that seemed…curious. Like, who is this person in Chicago who is interested in me so much? It makes me worry that the FBI has a cyber monitoring field office in Chicago and they’re keeping an eye on me.
Even if that’s not the case, I still think the FBI is probably aware of me — that I at least have a file. This is so dumb! I’m totally, completely harmless I’m just a loud mouth crank and that, the last time I checked, is still legal.
I hate violence. I hate guns. I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas.
I do get worked up sometimes, but I’m just venting. And this blog gets such little traffic — usually no more than maybe 50 hits a day at the most — that I feel reasonably comfortable just being myself.
Of course, I am well aware that should I start to query my novel that all the literary agents doing due diligence on me will be aghast at what a kook I am. But, can’t go back, gotta move forward.
So. About a year ago, I finished an actual novel-length-novel about a woman named Union Pang obsessed with owning a small-town newspaper. But a few things happened that made me feel that I couldn’t query it.
One was, the people I gave to read it thought it sucked. The second was, at about the same time, I realized the stakes were just too low. So the heroine wanted to buy a small town newspaper — so what?
So, for about a year, I moped. I felt the cold hand of time turning the clock and I just didn’t believe in my writing. But, gradually, since about New Year’s, I’ve started to feel that familiar itch.
What I decided to do was to cherry pick the best bits of the novel I finished and turn that into the first act of a novel fused with the second draft of another novel in the same universe. Or, put another way, I had a second draft that was a murder-in-a-small-town in the same universe, got frustrated and decided to write a novel that was sort of a set up for a six novel series.
That “setup novel” was the novel I realized I couldn’t query and so now I’m putting the two novels back together again, in a sense.
It’s a long story.
Anyway, the cherry picking of the old novel to make a first act worked really well. But I’m in the second act now, and whoa buddy. The two just don’t jibe very well. I have an entire character from the first act that….just at the moment has nothing to do.
And, what’s more, the first half of the second act is already way too long at about 60 scenes. (The first act is also about that length.)
I might be forced to trim a few scenes simply so the novel isn’t 200,000 words. But at the same time, I have to shoe horn something for the character I love from the new first act to do.
But the game is afoot. It may take me a little while, but I still think I’m on track to query this new novel no later than starting around September 1st. It may be closer to October 1, but that’s getting a little too close to the “we don’t do anything because it’s the holidays” part of the year for the infotainment industrial complex.
There are a lot of reasons to give up when it comes to this novel. It’s shaping up to be a little long relative to the 100,000 sweetspot. I’m too big a kook. No one –especially literary types — takes me seriously.
And, yet, I continue to believe this novel is existential for my mental well being. So, I continue to believe. I continue to rewrite things. It will be interesting to see how all of this will work out.
I have high hopes for it all, but, then I had high hopes for the version completed version of this novel and that was a complete disaster. But I’m hoping this version, because it’s a traditional “murder in a small town” will be more engaging to the average reader.
I say the first completed version of the novel was a “complete disaster” because I gave it to a few people — including a male relative to reads a lot of thrillers — and I was told it sucked. My relative said it was too spicy. Meanwhile, there was a would-be beta reader who pretty much was aghast that I would write such a novel in the first place.
I will admit that the novel — even this new version of it — is kind of spicy, but it’s not smut. It’s just, for some reason, I thought up a lot of — what I think are — interesting sex scenes that move the plot along.
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