Tag: writing

It’s So Intriguing To See Someone Else’s Hot Take On A Premise You’re Working On

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.

So Far, The Point Of ‘Subservience’ Is To See Hot People Do Hot Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

‘Subservience’ Is A Bad Movie, And, Yet…

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

I’ve Got A Lot Of Work To Do

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Things Continue To Go Well With The ‘Dramedy’ Scifi Novel I’m Working On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

The Algorithm and the Agony: On Rewriting a Novel in the Age of AI

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 Scifi RomCom I’m Working On Is Maturing

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

In Defense of the Em-Dash: Why Our Punctuation Panic is Misplaced

Of all the things to get worked up about in our rapidly evolving digital age—climate change, economic inequality, the erosion of democratic norms—it strikes me as profoundly absurd that we’ve somehow landed on punctuation as a hill worth dying on. Specifically, the humble em-dash has become an unexpected casualty in the culture war against artificial intelligence, with critics pointing to AI’s frequent use of this particular mark as evidence of everything from stylistic homogenization to the death of authentic human expression.

This is, to put it bluntly, one of the dumbest controversies I’ve encountered in recent memory.

A Personal History with the Em-Dash

I’ve been using em-dashes liberally in my writing for years—long before ChatGPT entered the cultural lexicon, long before anyone was wringing their hands about AI-generated prose. The em-dash appeals to me because it’s versatile, dynamic, and perfectly suited to the kind of conversational, meandering style that characterizes much of modern writing. It can replace commas, parentheses, or colons depending on the context. It can create dramatic pauses, introduce explanatory asides, or signal abrupt shifts in thought.

In other words, it’s a workhorse of punctuation—functional, flexible, and far from the stylistic aberration that AI critics would have you believe.

The Curious Case of Punctuation Puritanism

What’s particularly strange about this em-dash backlash is how it reveals our selective outrage about linguistic change. Language has always evolved, often in response to technological shifts. The printing press standardized spelling. The telegraph gave us abbreviated prose. Email normalized informal communication in professional settings. Text messaging introduced new abbreviations and punctuation conventions.

Each of these changes faced resistance from linguistic purists who worried about the degradation of proper English. Yet somehow, we survived the transition from quill to typewriter, from typewriter to computer, from computer to smartphone. Our language didn’t collapse; it adapted.

Now we’re witnessing the same pattern with AI-generated text. Critics scan prose for telltale signs of artificial origin—the dreaded em-dash being chief among them—as if punctuation preferences were a reliable indicator of authenticity or quality. This approach misses the forest for the trees, focusing on superficial markers rather than substantive concerns about AI’s role in communication.

The Real Issue Isn’t Punctuation

Here’s what strikes me as genuinely problematic: as AI becomes more integrated into our writing processes, we risk losing the ability to distinguish between stylistic evolution and meaningful degradation. The em-dash panic exemplifies this confusion. Instead of examining whether AI-assisted writing helps or hinders clear communication, we’re getting distracted by punctuation patterns.

The more troubling questions we should be asking include: Does AI writing lack genuine insight? Does it homogenize thought patterns? Does it reduce our capacity for original expression? These are legitimate concerns that deserve serious consideration. But they have nothing to do with whether a writer prefers em-dashes to parentheses.

Embracing Stylistic Diversity

What’s particularly ironic about the anti-em-dash sentiment is that it represents exactly the kind of prescriptive thinking that good writing seeks to avoid. Great prose comes in many forms—some writers favor short, punchy sentences; others prefer flowing, complex constructions. Some lean heavily on semicolons; others never touch them. Some writers (like me) find em-dashes indispensable; others consider them excessive.

This diversity of approach is a feature, not a bug. It reflects the reality that different writers have different voices, different rhythms, different ways of organizing their thoughts on the page. The fact that some AI systems happen to favor em-dashes doesn’t invalidate the punctuation mark any more than the fact that some human writers overuse semicolons invalidates those.

The Broader Context

As AI writing tools become more sophisticated and widely adopted, we’re bound to see their influence on human writing—just as we’ve seen the influence of every previous technological shift. This isn’t inherently good or bad; it’s simply inevitable. The question isn’t whether AI will change how we write (it already has), but whether those changes serve our communicative purposes.

In some cases, AI-influenced writing might indeed become formulaic or lose the quirks that make individual voices distinctive. These are valid concerns worth monitoring. But judging AI’s impact based on punctuation preferences is like evaluating a symphony based on the composer’s choice of key signature—it misses the point entirely.

A Call for Perspective

Instead of getting upset about em-dashes, perhaps we could channel our energy toward more pressing concerns about AI and communication. How do we maintain critical thinking skills when AI can generate plausible-sounding arguments for any position? How do we preserve the human capacity for deep, sustained thought when quick AI-generated responses are always available? How do we ensure that AI tools enhance rather than replace genuine human insight?

These questions matter. Punctuation preferences don’t—at least not in the way critics suggest.

The em-dash will survive this controversy, just as the English language has survived countless other supposed threats to its integrity. And perhaps, in time, we’ll look back on this moment and wonder how we got so worked up about punctuation marks when there were so many more important things demanding our attention.

After all, in a world full of genuine crises—environmental, political, social—spending our energy on punctuation panic seems like the kind of misplaced priority that future generations will struggle to understand. Let’s save our outrage for things that actually matter, and let writers—human and AI alike—use whatever punctuation marks serve their purposes best.

Things Continue To Zip Along With The First Draft Of This Scifi Novel I’m Working On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Thankfully, virtually no one reads this blog, so I can continue to talk about working a novel without any shame. I’ve been writing way, way, way too long about working on a novel without anything of note to show for it. Though, I will point out that I do have a finished thriller novel done, it’s just not good enough to query.

Anyway.

I’m using AI to speed up the development of the first draft. I’ve figured out a way whereby I do all the writing and just using AI to guide development. I made a mistake in the past by letting AI write the first draft for me. This was a mistake for a number of reasons, one of them being it’s writing was so much better than mine I felt bad.

My biggest problem right now is how AI wants to be my hypeman. It tells me how great and wonderful my writing is, even though I know for a fact it sucks because it’s just the first draft.

But first drafts have to written so you can write the second draft and so on. I’m thinking I can probably wrap up this first draft much, much sooner than I might otherwise. I’m reluctant to give any sort of specific timeline, but…let’s just say sooner than otherwise.

Once the first draft is done, I’m going to really get into character. I really want this novel to be character driven. Now, obviously, if I was 25 years younger, I would just write a screenplay.

But I’m old and live in the wrong place. And did I mention I’m poor?

So, a novel it is.

And in about a year I’m going to query this novel. But so much could go wrong in my life between now and then that that just might not happen. And, yet, I need something to keep me dreaming.

Things Are Moving At A Nice Clip With The First Draft Of This Scifi Novel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have finally — finally — figured out some basic elements of a scifi novel that I feel comfortable with. And now that I have also figured out how, exactly, I’m going to use AI to develop the novel, things are moving really fast.

AI — specifically Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro — is laying out the nature and plot of the novel and I go through and actually write it. I am annoyed at how much “glazing” goes on even at this level, but just having someone to help me, even if it’s an AI, goes a long ways.

And when the second draft comes, I plan on ditching AI altogether. I may use it some to expand scene summaries, but, in general, I’m just going to do my own development and writing for the second draft.

I continue to be a little bit uneasy about the possibility that someone is going to steal a creative march on me because the basic premise of the novel is pretty “duh” all things considered. And, yet, you have to have hope. You have to believe in yourself and put your stick where the puck is going to be, not where it is.