Background Knowledge

Playing with ChatGPT

Julia set fractal gif

I am a bit late to the ChatGPT bandwagon — people all over the internet are pointing out badly written prose. But I did want to give it a try. I have hundreds of story ideas that I have jotted down over the years. Most won’t ever be written into an actual story. So it seemed like a fun exercise to give ChatGPT an assignment of writing a short story using some of my notes as prompts. I tried three, iterating on one of those multiple times to see what differences my suggested changes made to the AI-generated story. The results are at the end of this post. The first thing I noticed is that all of the ChatGPT stories were flat — there were no unexpected twists or turns; and the endings sounded the same, each with a strange bit of morality embedded for good measure. The AI had a bit of literary echolalia — some phrases were repeated over and over again. It’s like it liked saying “like” as a verbal tic. I didn’t expect that. Stories tended to start with “In the world…” and conclusions began “In the end…”. The strangest response I got out of ChatGPT…

My Writing is My Phrontistery

Martin Harvey

Phrontistery is an ancient Greek word meaning “a place for thinking.” I love cool words and phrontistery not only feels good on the tongue, but its meaning really appeals to me — it describes a space specifically dedicated to thinking! For many people, bathrooms are a perfect phrontistery. They are for me, too. Showers score high as well. But I think I do my best thinking when I write. With my fingers on the keys, I can clarify my thinking and also discover ideas that must have been hovering around my subconsciousness, ready to be revealed to my eyes through my fingers. Writing is a metaphorical phrontistery for me. And probably in the days when diaries and journals were popular, many others found capturing words in a tangible medium clarified one’s thoughts and opinions on all sorts of matters. Luckily for my friends and family, I write mostly fiction — my phrontistery cleverly hides the true identities of many. Lately, I have been devouring books at a high rate. As a result, my little collection of notes (over a thousands and counting) has been growing. I consider my notes app as part of my phrontistery. I jut down ideas for…

Holiday Thread

2021_Happy_Winter_Topper

I follow an Iranian woman on Instagram that demonstrates in short videos her embroidery techniques. She does beautiful work — intricate flowers, leaves, curlycues, snowflakes. Her pigment choices are amazing and she does very detailed art in that multicolored thread. I know how to sew and I had a vague idea of how to embroider — I mean I can pull off a flower or a leaf if I had to. But my “knowledge” of embroidery comes from extrapolating what I know about sewing and guessing at the rest. But this woman is actually a master of this skill. And by watching her for a few seconds here and there doing her art, I realized that thread conservation is an important part of embroidery! Not only is beautiful thread expensive (e.g. gold thread), but the bulk that would be added to the material by doing the design on both sides would be awkward. Double-sided embroidery would mess up the delicate expression of the final piece of art. So there is more to this skill than I realized at first blush. Many crafts require expertise that is hidden from casual view. In many cases, the achievement of effortless grace is anything…

The Wrong Person, at the Wrong Time, Doing the Wrong Thing

Calvin Klein Ad in Times Square

It happens to everyone from time to time — you are just not the ONE. Let me tell you a little story from way back in my high school. I skipped the eighth grade and most of the seventh during my family’s relocation from USSR to New York City. I went directly into high school — the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. It was really an amazing school — tons of art instruction and a good academic program. The problem is that I’m horrible at languages and really couldn’t put two English words together, much less spell my name. This was the start of very confusing times. I’ve managed to talk my way into 10th-grade art curriculum. No idea how other than I didn’t like my classes, but I didn’t figure out that I was a grade ahead for almost a year. I struggled to answer questions in science and math — I knew the material but had no words to demonstrate what I knew. I had no words to speak my mind. I had to learn a whole new notation for showing geometric proofs. I was finally put into an ESL class — English as a…

My Book Tour for “Harvest”…so far…

virtual book tour...

I only have 4 more stops on my virtual book tour for “Harvest.” There have been a lot of fun stops and people who read my book gave it amazing reviews. Thank you! I can’t even begin to tell everyone how much those mean to me on a personal level and for my ability to introduce my stories to a wider audience of readers. Every review counts. It really does. So thank you all! Here are all of my stops so far, including one for today: August 28: Rogue’s Angels September 4: Candrel’s Crafts, Cooks, and Characters September 11: Lisa Haselton’s Reviews and Interviews September 18: Long and Short Reviews September 25: Readeropolis October 2: Kit ‘N Kabookle October 9: BooksChatter October 16: The Avid Reader  — amazing review of “Harvest.” Made me so happy that morning! October 23: Wake Up Your Wild Side October 30: Sharing Links and Wisdom November 6: Renee Wildes Weblog — a really nice review of my book on Goodreads. Thank you Renee! November 13: T’s Stuff November 20: Independent Authors — this stop features “God of Small Affairs” a bit. I hope it is a nice introduction to that story. (I liked this stop so much that I turned it into a my own blog post!) November…

A Path in Life

mind

There is a general recognition that time perception speeds up as we get older. As kids, we felt our summers lasted a lifetime; as adults, summertime slithers out of our hands before we even get a chance to pull our sun hats from storage. With each year, time shortens and compresses to practically nothing. But is that all? Are there other changes that we are simply less aware of that transform our psyche as we age? And is this adult feeling for temporal foreshortening uniformly distributed throughout human cultures (historically and geographically)? Since I’ve just published two books this year (“Harvest” and “God of Small Affairs”) that considered human development on cosmological scales of existence, there was something in those stories that tickled my brain — what else changes so dramatically over our lifetimes? And I think the answer might be our goals and expectations. As a kid, I played at how long I could hold my breath, how long could I hang from a pole, how many times I could jump the rope before getting tangled up… How many grapes could fit into my mouth? (It was really gooseberries, but who knows what they are on this side of…