Outdoor Time

Greetings from the 12th Floor, where the end of May feels like early March. I’d pray to the weather gods for relief, but I suspect the temps will soon jump to the high 90s, bypassing the joy of an actual Spring. I suppose 50s and gloomy is slightly preferable to 100+ degrees and high humidity. Welcome to the new normal. Be careful what you ask for.

Weather notwithstanding, I went outside several times during the month and even talked to people. People I didn’t know! I might make a habit of it.

I had the great pleasure of attending Jane Friedman’s one-day intensive on building a platform for creative work. Jane shared her years of industry experience, supported by the 2025 revised edition of her book, The Business of Being a Writer. You can read more about the workshop at one of the blog links below.

The workshop convened in the old schoolhouse at the scenic Good Contrivance Farm. Close enough to the city for a day trip, far enough away that it felt remote.

A week later, about 30 writers gathered to hear Jane’s take on how AI tools are disrupting the creative community from every side. Despite her own bad experience with AI theft - you can read that horror story here - it wasn’t all doom and gloom. While generative AI firms have already scraped (ie: stolen) internet content for training its algorithms, various heavyweights, including the Writer’s Guild and New York Times, are fighting back. In some cases, writers are being compensated for the use of their work, even if they can’t take back what AI learned from it.

Reading the room, I didn’t get the sense anyone felt optimistic about protecting our work from mimicry or outright theft, not when AI is capable of assimilating human-created work and using it to generate good-enough content for audiences that crave comfort viewing and repetition and have been conditioned to expect that any creative work that crosses their path will arrive algorithmically curated to meet their niche taste. If you want more of what you already like, but slightly different, but not so different it challenges you but merely staves off boredom - which is the hallmark of commercial fandom, the modern neanderthal - AI is a gift from the gods, a literal deus ex machina.

Nonetheless, we found a bit of hope in each other, a group of people who grasp the importance of expression, creation, and human-to-human communication, which we have chosen to find through writing. While there are undoubtedly millions of consumers who won’t care that the latest target-tested, algorithm-supported consumption outputs were generated by AI or stolen from actual working people - especially if it costs a little less - there are millions more who want a human connection.

These are the people who join your social media, share your books with friends, leave a review or just a kind word somewhere. These are the people who want to talk about your process and what you’ve learned, and they don’t want to hear that half your book was generated by AI prompts. They sign up for the webinar and download the podcast. They support your Kickstarter, ask for your autograph, and come to hear you read from your book.

The recent quantum leap in generative AI has been a bit depressing, maybe especially for some of us who are blooming late, but it’s also served as a call for creative people to knuckle under and do what we do best - what AI cannot replicate - Be ourselves. Be authentic. Be human.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I made a long-overdue return to Balticon, the SF&F convention hosted by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, now celebrating it’s 59th event. I wasn’t planning to attend this year but a friend popped into town and I couldn’t miss that. Located at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel adjacent the Baltimore Harbor, the con is about a 20-minute walk from my apartment, so if you are tempted to invite me out in public, your chances of my acceptance are much higher if I can walk to the event and be home in 20 minutes when I decide to leave.

I didn’t attend the entire weekend - Saturday only - but it was enough of a taste of the con life to make me want to get back into gear. I met a few writers, bought some books, and touched base with the Maryland Writers Association, where I promised to renew my membership.

I spent a good part of the afternoon chatting with Miguel Mitchell (below), a spec poet and organizer of the BSFS’s writing workshop, which I should also rejoin. We talked about writing and some SF poets we both know. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Miguel remembered the magazine I published when I ran my small press. I don’t know if a return to publishing other people is in my future, but it’s nice to be remembered. Every time I think I’m out, they try to pull me back in…

Maybe next year I’ll have a table with my own books and you can stop by to visit.

Also in this letter:

• Posts from May 2025

• WIP News

• A Parting Song

Monthly Posts
A short month with the holiday and various extracurricular activities, but we still had time to talk about revenge writing and the red flags that might signal why your readers are tuning out from your story. I also went on at length about Jane Friedman’s new book and the workshop I mentioned above. Finally, I shared a helpful quote on writing about assholes and another suggesting when the time is right for you to bloom (hint: it’s not when you think and almost never when you want).

Writing Well is the Best Revenge
My Kind of People
A Gathering of Writers
The Business of Being a Writer
Note to Self
Red Flags
A Change in Seasons

WIP News
Nothing special to report. It’s been a busy month but I made good progress on the novel-in-progress, and moved forward with the outlining on the project-in-waiting. Good stuff coming.

A Parting Song
Another dose of introspective melancholy, with lyrical questions about purpose, meaning, and hollowness. I’ve been in a mood. Watch below or listen on Spotify.