Given the choice of watching Subservience and working on my novel about bots, I finally picked the latter. I thought there was some way I might make it through the movie, but I got weak and read the Wikipedia entry for it and realize it might take me days to finish it.
It really does seem that bad.
So, I think I’m going to spend the afternoon working on my novel. My novel is so different than Subservience that I just wanted to take a looky-loo to get some sense of what another person’s take on the premise might be.
I’ve decided to just continue to zoom through the first draft of my novel instead of struggle through Subservience. Though I might continue to attempt to watch it now and again.
There’s something beautifully absurd about sitting in the middle of nowhere, watching a movie you hate, all in service of a story you desperately want to tell. Welcome to the modern writer’s existence—a peculiar blend of compromise, inspiration, and the occasional existential crisis.
The Road Not Taken (Because I’m Too Old for That Nonsense)
I catch myself daydreaming sometimes: What if I was 25 years younger? Then I could have that total blind ignorance needed to pack up everything, move to Los Angeles, and attempt to be a screenwriter. I’d write something revolutionary—a screenplay that somehow marries the sleek dystopian eeriness of Subservience with the neurotic charm of Annie Hall.
But here’s the thing about being older and (allegedly) wiser: you know exactly how many dreams crash and burn in Hollywood every day. So instead of chasing that particular windmill, I’m channeling that same creative energy into a novel. Sometimes the detour becomes the destination.
The Muse Behind the Madness
Every story needs its spark, and mine comes from memory—specifically, the memory of Annie Shapiro, the woman who changed my life in Seoul. She was what you might call “late crazy Annie,” a force of nature with quirks so distinctive they practically begged to be immortalized in fiction.
Annie was the kind of person who made you question everything you thought you knew about how people should move through the world. Her particular brand of beautiful chaos is exactly what I want to transplant into my own take on the “manic pixie dream girl” trope—except in my version, she’s not quite human. She’s a bot, which adds layers of meaning to the whole concept that I’m still unpacking.
The Research We Do (And Don’t) Love
Which brings me to my current predicament: slowly, painfully making my way through Subservience on Netflix. This movie grates on every nerve I have. It’s exactly the kind of film I would normally avoid like a tax audit, but here I am, subjecting myself to it for the sake of my craft.
Why? Because I need to “comp” my novel—industry speak for finding comparable works that help explain what you’re trying to create. And unfortunately, Subservience hits some of the same thematic territory I’m exploring, even if it does so in ways that make me want to throw things at my screen.
The irony isn’t lost on me: I’d much rather spend this afternoon rewatching Annie Hall for the hundredth time, absorbing Woody Allen’s masterful character work and dialogue. But that’s not going to help me understand how modern audiences relate to stories about artificial beings and human connection.
The Vomit Draft Philosophy
Right now, I’m working on what writers affectionately call a “vomit draft”—that first, messy attempt to get the story out of your head and onto the page. Character development will come later. Plot refinements can wait. For now, it’s just about capturing the essence of what this story wants to be.
There’s something liberating about giving yourself permission to write badly at first. It’s the antidote to perfectionism, the enemy of all creative work. You can’t edit a blank page, as they say, but you can absolutely improve a terrible first draft.
Geography Is Not Destiny
Living in the middle of nowhere used to feel like a creative death sentence. How could real stories emerge from a place where nothing happens? But I’m learning that distance from the industry might actually be an advantage.
Out here, away from the noise and trends and what’s supposed to be important, you can focus on what actually matters: the characters, the emotions, the human (or in this case, artificial) truths you’re trying to explore. Maybe the best stories don’t come from Los Angeles after all. Maybe they come from wherever you are when you’re brave enough to write them.
The Long Game
So here I am, laptop open, Subservience paused on my laptop, notebook filled with observations about what works and what doesn’t in contemporary AI narratives. It’s not the writing life I imagined at 25, but it might be exactly the one I need at this stage of my life.
Sometimes the best stories come not from blind ambition, but from the wisdom that comes with knowing exactly what you’re up against—and choosing to write anyway.
I’m slowly, in dribs and drabs, making my way through the Megan Fox techno vehicle “Subservience.” It is clear that Fox wanted a hot co-star because the guy in this movie is like every middle-aged house wife’s dream — he looks like Fabio from the romance novel covers.
Anyway, it’s interesting how much my original idea for my novel is similar to what little of Subservience I’ve seen. But the more I watch the movie, the more ideas I get for my novel to be different.
I don’t know what to tell you. This movie, relative to my tastes, is very, very bad. But it is “inspiring” in the sense that it helps me understand what I *don’t* want to do.
The difficult part is I have to actually make my way through the fucking movie and I really don’t want to. What I want to do is just read the Wikipedia entry instead. But I’m a big boy, I can handle it.
I’m going to have to watch the Megan Fox vehicle Subservience. I say this because my novel draws much from the same cloth, even if it goes in a dramatically different direction from the very first scene.
I guess what I’m saying is among the movies that my novel would be “comped” to, Subservience is one of them. I would prefer, “Her” or “Ex Machina,” but, lulz, you know how the real world works.
It’s going to be painful t watch Subservience because I’m going to be thinking about how I would do things differently. But I do get to ogle Megan Fox, if nothing else.
Ugh. The things you do in an effort to get a novel where it means to be. Now, obviously, I should be comparing my novel to other NOVELS but I simply don’t know of any novels that explore what I want to explore.
Probably because either I’m way ahead of the curve or most people who want to explore what I want to explore do so on the silver screen.
Now that I’ve got a general sense of what I’m going to do with this novel, I have to start to build out personalities to fill it. The main character that is going to be a pain to figure out is the bot.
I know I always have my very Romanticized version of the late Annie Shapiro floating around in my head that I can always tap into. Even though that was a long, long, long time ago, I am beginning, in dribs and drabs to remember what made her so unique.
If I could somehow integrate all her weird personality quirks into my female romantic lead bot then I think we’re going to the show. But one thing is clear — I have been screwing around way too long.
I need to put up or shut up. I need to get something, anything done sooner rather than later. I’m not going to live forever and this is a really good idea. I continue to have a not-so-downlow fear that someone is going to steal a creative march on me, but, lulz, YOLO.
The thing I’ve noticed about movies like Her, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and Annie Hall is there really isn’t a villain. The story is about the complex nature modern romance.
That both makes writing this dramedy novel easier and more difficult. It’s easier because it’s more structurally simple — it’s about two people and the ups and downs of their relationship. Meanwhile, it becomes more complicated because I have to figure out how the two characters personalities interlock.
Anyway, I’m zooming through the first act of the first draft and I’m tentatively preparing the way to go into the first half of the second act called the “fun and games” part of the novel. Everything after the midpoint of the novel is very much up in the air.
At the moment, the second half of the novel veers into ideas about AI rights and consciousness in a way that I’m not sur I’m comfortable with. I really want this to be about two individuals romance, not some grand battle between people over AI rights.
But I still have time. I have a feeling I’m going to really change the second half of the novel and then REALLY change the everything when I sit down to write the second draft.
All the signs are there that we’re all going to have to grab the metaphorical bug out bag and head safety within my lifetime. I don’t know exactly when it will happen or why, but it’s going to happen.
I am well aware that I’ve been pontification about this possibility for a long, long, long time and absolutely nothing happens. And I’m not really saying that “this time is different.”
I’m just saying that the centrifugal political forces are gaining in speed and power and soon there is going to be a revolution and / or a civil war. And probably WMD will be lobbed by either side against each other.
Think of it as a “slow implosion” rather than a “slow civil war.” The two sides are growing more and more extreme, even though it’s really just the MAGA cocksuckers going nuts and then Blues in a half-assed kind of way *trying* to “resist.”
I think the slack in the system will tighten up should Trump run for a third term, or clamp down on freedom of speech in a more direct way than he’s been doing. Besides suing anyone he doesn’t like, Trump really hasn’t in a ham-handed way been a real dictator against the press.
When he goes full dictator against the media, then all bets are off.
Oh, Jesus, is my life quirky. Why can’t I just have a normal sequence of events like a normal human being. But, no, everything of note in my life has to have some weird quirk associated with it.
It sucks. I hate it.
Anyway, here I am, with a quirky set of circumstances that I have to deal with it.
There’s a ghost that haunts my writing process. It’s the ghost of my younger self, the one who, twenty-five years ago, would have been hammering out this story not as a novel, but as a screenplay in some cramped L.A. walk-up, fueled by cheap coffee and blind ambition.
But time, as it does, had other plans. So, a novel it is.
I recently hit a wall. A big one. The kind of wall you don’t see until you’re driving toward it at full speed. As I navigated the narrative terrain of my sci-fi dramedy and approached the threshold of the second act, I realized my foundation was sand. Key emotional arcs, character motivations, and thematic threads I desperately needed for the story ahead simply weren’t there. The structure groaned, then collapsed.
This is where the process gets modern. As an “AI-first” novelist, my immediate instinct wasn’t to despair over a sea of index cards. It was to collaborate. I turned to AI to help me reimagine the outline, to stress-test new structures and brainstorm solutions at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The brief was specific. I fed it my core concept and my primary cinematic influences: the bittersweet technological intimacy of Her, the fragmented, painful memory of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the neurotic, conversational wit of Annie Hall, and the chilling intellectual claustrophobia of Ex Machina.
The result was, frankly, astounding. In a remarkably short time, the AI—in this case, Claude—helped me architect a new first act. It understood the tonal fusion and generated a blueprint that was stronger, smarter, and more emotionally resonant. It was an incredible demonstration of AI as a developmental partner.
And then, the silence.
The AI’s job was done. The beautiful, logical, perfectly structured outline sat waiting. And I was left staring at the screen, confronted with a familiar, humbling truth: the blueprint is not the building. The profound issue of my own writing ability came roaring back to the forefront. I refuse to outsource the prose, to let an algorithm spin the sentences. Call it artistic pride or self-flagellation, but letting the machine do the final, intimate work feels like a betrayal. It also makes me feel terrible about how painfully, glaringly human my own first drafts are in comparison to its potential.
So, it’s back to the drawing board. Back to the hard work of translating a brilliant schematic into living, breathing text. My timeline has shifted. The hope of wrapping this up “pretty soon” has matured into a more sober projection. Maybe a year. I’m tentatively circling the fall of 2026 as a target to begin querying, but I’m acutely aware of how much life can happen between now and then—how a thousand unforeseen events could shift the context of this story and the world it’s born into.
After all, what am I but a middle-aged crank, a guy whose last significant life chapter feels like it was written in Seoul two decades ago? Maybe no one wants to deal with that. But the story is good. The blueprint is solid. The ghost of that kid in the L.A. apartment is gone, replaced by the man who has to actually build the thing.
What good is a perfect map if you’re afraid to take the first step into the wilderness?
The key element to this novel is I want it to be character driven. And, as such, I’ve come up with some new elements that are perilously close to causing the first act to collapse.
This has happened to me time and again in the past, but I think if I just realize this is a “vomit” draft that that won’t happen. I just don’t feel like staring from scratch just to accommodate some new ideas.
But those new ideas are pretty cool. I’m leaning into character in such a way that I think people will really like it. I’m drawing a lot upon all the kooks I experience while a wildman drunk in South Korea. To this day, I remember looking at some of them and saying directly, “You are like a character in a novel.”
Anyway, I’m trying to be careful about now succumbing to the urge to the urge to just scrap everything and start from scratch. This is a vomit draft so it doesn’t have to be perfect.
The only issue is leaning into character is setting off a series of cascading events in the novel’s plot later on that I have to accommodate. Since I’m no spring chicken, I really need to just get it over with and finish something, anything that I can use as the basis of a second draft, get beta readers to read then pivot to querying.
Thankfully, this novel isn’t front loaded with a lot of sex so maybe people won’t just dismiss it altogether and not even read it when I ask them to be beta readers.
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