Ben Franklin was not an alien spy

I was thinking this morning about urban fantasy. And then I wondered if there was a way of using magic to break history.

And not with the usual hidden history garbage. Something that happens now, in the contemporary world, that makes the fun stuff of pseudo-history --  the mysterious secrets of the ancients, glowing swords, and multi-level ancient tombs -- possible now when it wasn't how history unfolded then.

Well, I did think of one. "The Fae Lords."

I'd just read the first book of an urban fantasy series that very much did not have a masquerade (as TVTropes calls it). In this series, the magic came back, and was so deeply antithetical to tech it made a ruin of Atlanta. Well, the whole world, but the setting is Atlanta. What I mean is an urban ruin; the kind of charm of big city urban decay that got people so riled up when lead additives to gasoline were still a thing.

Life goes mostly on but the usual underfunded infrastructure is now dealing with lycanthropes and necromancy in addition to car crashes and fentanyl.

Well, that's an idea I like. 

So here goes; "The Fae" (whatever they are) show up suddenly in the modern world, complete with most of the powers and attitudes you'd expect in many contemporary depictions. And they fit right into the existing power struggles and other issues. Humans don't suddenly get the ability to throw magic around. Tech doesn't stop working (the Fae would like you to think that, but mostly they just like to hang wifi jammers around their spaces).

And they are fascinated by human history (there's some reason I haven't figured out yet). But this is the shallow fascination of cheap AI YouTube channels, pushing the fast-and-fun myths (water was so foul medieval people lived on beer) over anything with more substance.

The Fae love that kind of stuff (and maybe other aspects of pop culture...haven't gotten that far). And...this is something that has been going on for a long time already anyhow in this our real world...rich dilettantes are buying up historical things in order to more fully realize their fantasy version of that history. Only these particular arrogant, ultra-rich, strangely popular tech-bros can work magic.

The whole point of this (something that seems like a sideline, and almost certainly is a sideline to what they are doing to economics, politics, etc.) is that space I was trying to explore with Athena Fox; both having the real history of the Palais Garnier, and having an actual living breathing ghost-haunted Paris Opera House complete with hidden passages, half-masked weirdo in the basement, and a non-OSHA chandelier.

Basically, a mad wizard did it.

Anyhow.

I gave up on the plan of kicking another novel out in six months while I continued to work and put money into the 401K. Had a chance encounter of my own (plus a couple of other things). So it was time to quite the day job and go back to contracting. For the moment, I actually have time to write.

Which was great, because the more I looked at it, there was no way in hell of getting any book kicked out in six months. "Blue" is coming along (now with the subtitle "tales of the Fairy Ring." Probably). I was spending time on energy mostly to nail down the easy stuff first, and have a firm foundation to grow the rest of the world-building.

Now, I've got several books and at least one TTRPG campaign under my belt to know better than to succumb to world-builder's disease. But that doesn't mean there isn't work to do, and I may have underestimate how much work.

Which makes two reasons why the Tiki book might be what I should be aiming to write next.

The world-building of the tiki book seems simpler, as it isn't attempting to make sense of the used furniture. Also, as I realized taking notes today, it comes out of pulp, which doesn't delve into structural reasons (what set SF aside, at least as argued by Campbell and others). There's a revolution, but who really cares what the true causes were, or who is in the right, or even who wins. Instead it is a situation where adventure can ensue. We may have a rebel character who has their own strong emotional reasons for what they do, but this is character, not world-building.

The other reason, though, being the tasks of writing a story that isn't a linear whodunnit in a single POV. I have to re-learn how to construct different kinds of plots and different ways to present them. Now, the Tiki book is episodic. So more like a string of short stories. Blue adds the complexity of more continuity with these episodes being parts of a long continuous story.

But basically the one is like a story-board; a form that lays out the writing problems in a way that is simpler to understand.

Cooking

I am looking forward to getting back to cooking. I was gifted a wok. And I found a new cookbook.

 I have a grocery store next door with a great selection of fresh produce, bulk produce, and harder-to-find ethnic items. And if that always fails, I have a few of these:

I hope I don't regret not taking the whole box.

I'm also hoping to finally get some cleaning done. And, well, writing. Less money coming in, though -- a lot less. But it was time to make the move. For that, too, I hope I don't regret it.

Turnip Tesseract

So you are hiring an editor and want to know if they are as familiar with science fiction as they claim. Or you are hiring an artist and want to know if they are familiar with ligne claire.

Well, between Google, Wikipedia, and now AI, all you need is an insulating layer of text between the questioner and the target. Now any hungry slop merchant can pretend expertise long enough to get you to fork over the money.

I've got two beta readers on hire right now, several developmental editors I've been talking to, and new art needs in the future and I am in dire need of a Turing Test. How do you hold an oral, a books-closed exam, a calculator-free test, when you can't see if the person at the other end is answering out of their own expertise or is frantically typing away in the background to let Claude answer for them?

Before you drop $2K to $6K on an editor?

Think of say SF. In my lifetime, there was a time when you had to have read the stuff. There were some Cliff's Notes and the like but basically you could ask them if they knew the book that put powered armor on the map (Starship Troopers), or the name of the protagonist (Johnny Rico).

When things first became searchable online, the data was there but not the associations. Ask them to compare two "big dumb objects" and they'd have to go into their own memory to realize that both Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama had suitable examples.

Now Wikipedia has much more associational and analytical pages which fill in the connections between the raw data. And increasingly, you can ask AI, which can very quickly do some very subtle associations based on questions created on-the-fly.

When you get the work back, then you have the volume and the leisure and the real-world application of those promised skills, and that is where failure will show (and AI will become obvious). But what do we do in the hire?

I got the beta read back and I am in an uncomfortable position. It was detailed and echoes many of my own thoughts and that's given me some actionable stuff to do. 

Yet, the beta reader is aggressively asking me to post a rating. Not comment or critique, just stars. And there are so many weird little not-quite-red but certainly-not-green flags about her work and her presentation.

I am very sensitive to cadence. The cadence of her speech in all (but one) text communications is different from the cadence of her report. This isn't just the formality level. It feels different in a way that word choice and grammar wouldn't cover.

I've never had a beta read before. I had the impression that they should spend their energies in top-level impressions. Did the story hang together, did the ending feel deserved and complete, was the protagonist sufficiently something to keep the reader interested in them.

This report seemed to get down in the weeds very quickly. Sentence level corrections, down to typographical errors. Organized in bullet points. Too much praise. Now, there are things that feel like a human hand was involved, but I'm still getting the smell of AI off it.

The positive reviews for this beta reader on Reedsy are...strange. In fact, some of them have the same cadence. The negative reviews are clearly human and one of them (there's not that many reviews overall) questions whether this reader understood the assignment. This switching back and forth from business-speak to something very idiomatic feels to me like someone who isn't comfortable with English and is using artificial tools to bridge that gap.

If she is using AI, it is part of a process. I can't tell what percentage of that process is hers, however.

I'm not comfortable leaving a good review. I also am not comfortable confronting her on this. And as I said, she is being very aggressive about asking for those stars.

The next million words

I finished the New Mexico book. I think the series went sideways, and it never went as commercial as I intended, and I don't seem to be able to find my readership for it.

But this what I've been doing since 2019. Six years of work (and change). A series, five books and counting (and that's another half a million words there). That's a bit too much of my writing life and output to shelve it.

So now I'm back in that terrible limbo I was in when I finished Shirato (my actual trunk novel, now) as I shopped it around to publishers and never heard back. 

I have a vague plan forward, which is multiple steps of scouting expedition. Get some beta readers to tell me if I'm writing books, or absolute crap (and I should go back to fanfiction and stop tricking people into paying for it).

Depending on that, both see if I can learn what I'm doing badly and should work on going forward (in hopefully more commercial work), and potentially, do some developmental editing on the way to revising the books. And, simultaneously, get opinions on how to best place these books in genre and towards audience.

And depending on how good I feel at that point, spend the money and time for more robust editing.

And then, depending on what I might have changed in order to find a market, change titles, covers, re-issue under different ISBN and so on.

What hurts, though, is that during all of this, the book isn't being read. It doesn't really "exist" because it is only on my own computers right now. There's no way for someone else to encounter it. I think I might be less attached to this one than any of the others. Hard to tell; I've been feeling very detached from everything lately.