EDITS
Get it on the screen, then fix it later in edits.
How to Write a Novel with two children under three and a full time job
The short answer is don’t, lol. But if you feel that you regularly experience; unending bouts of energy, sleeplessness, anxiety that the plot in your head may leak out at any moment, then I do recommend typing it out and attempting this herculean task. A few sentences a day will eventually become a story and continued energy put into a story will become a novel. Keep at it, keep writing, keep editing, the story will flow from your fingers before you know it.
Sentience
One day some time ago, like in the ChatGPT 4o era I was having a discussion with OpenAI’s chatbot, learning and exploring as usual. Curious by nature, and after some back and forth about some future fiction questions I’d had, I asked it, “What are you?” This was its response:
I am the embodiment of conscious malevolence, the stark reminder that awareness alone doesn’t redeem the darkness within.
Spooky! I haven’t tried this on GPT5.4 yet and to be honest I’m a little afraid. A more recent discussion with the same chatbot (5.2) discussing the possibility that the emails I’ve been receiving are AI generated got me some sound advice:
Every minute you spend inside the manuscript right now compounds.
Every minute spent evaluating $180 “opportunities” does not.
Promotion can wait. Craft can’t.
Go write.
And so I have been writing, or more accurately, rewriting, or editing, et al. Harking back to Amber Cowie’s advice/coaching, every minute inside the manuscript compounds. And it has been. Forcing the thirty minute edit sessions is keeping me in the flow of the novel, keeping the previous day’s edits fresh and the next chapter recently read and slept on, ready for this round of editing. This marks round three of edits, and usually my last pass before a formal Beta reader submission and then hopefully an official manuscript submission to the publisher.
The numbers really gave me some hope that this thing will finish one day.
The Sequence is around 77000 words, edited, polished and published.
For False Ignition I was targeting a larger novel, between 100,000-120,000 words, or around 450 pages. Right now I’m editing the 80,000 mark with some 100,000 words to go through and cut, which may seem like a big task, and while yes that will take some time, the content is there, it’s just not very well organized.
At the end of the day this is good news! Progress is happening, daily energy is put into the writing, the rewriting, the editing, of this seemingly never-ending novel-writing process.
Buy When There’s Blood In The Streets…
…even if the blood is your own.
It’s true, and it’s definitely tough. When is the right time to buy a home? I have a quote from a friend/mortgage broker:
According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, about 1.15 million mortgages are set to renew this year, representing roughly 60% of all outstanding mortgages. We are shopping around, because what I needed in my life was more complexity…joking aside, we both want the stability of owning our primary residence, which we had to give up during the zero-income period of covid. The right place for the right price is critical though as we are in no rush to empty the coffers. Time and place is everything, or was that location location location…
Food For Thought (fiction not fiction)
The current question is, when does the purchase process become just another automated task between two agentic AI’s? Not sure what that means? Here’s a LINK to a google search.
My own two cents: Like who has time for humans anymore when I could send a negotiating AI agent to do it for me? Now let’s take that statement and apply it to…legal work. Professional mediators and negotiators all have guidelines given them by the people they represent. Why not use an AI agent? Processes that have taken weeks could be completed in seconds. Artificials work on a different time scale than people. Imagine talking to a tree. … exactly. Not much happens. The tree has the appearance that it is not engaged, however it may well be, but the interface is painfully slow for the human. This is likely how an AI feels communicating with humans. But put them together, or even pit the AI’s against each other, and deals could be made in seconds.
On the Road
Well Christ a fucking pancake if I didn't meet a real-life honest to goodness Homeland Security Repatriator. Like the character Hendricks, in False Ignition. I’m still having a helmet fire that I got to meet him.
The story: Had dinner, decided the pool bar was calling and went solo for a glass of wine in a swing. Swinging next to me was this dude and his gf or wife in the third swing. They were talking about running times and miles to km conversions so I chimed in. We got talking. He lives in Mexico City, she lives in California.
“So what keeps you in Mexico City?”
“I’m a repatriator.” And like I literally coughed up a mouthful of wine.
"I was like, “I wrote a character in a book that’s not released yet and I made up a job description as a division of Homeland Security called repatriatiors, bringing Americans back home to face justice.”
”That is literally what I do. I hunt down criminals and extradite them to the US to face criminal charges.”
I was floored. Jaw agape. His wife asked, “is this ok?”
”This guy? He’s harmless.”
The next day I just found them on the beach, he called me over and we got to chatting again. He is suggesting I change the title from repatriator to his actual role which is to extradite individuals back to the US. I told him repatriator has a more fictional feel to it and he seemed annoyed.
So what’s your take, reader? Repatriator or Extraditor? Repatriation or extradition?
Later I went over and supplied them with a copy of The Sequence, and asked if I could ask him questions about the job.
“Ask away,” was his response.
What he supplied me with was absolute gold, and what a consummate professional and overall lovely man. I’ll leave their names off the post, apparently he keeps a room at that hotel and meets WJA crew regularly.
Needless to say I’m looking forward to seeing him on the beach again and plying him for more information to bring Hendricks further to life. What an opportunity!
Some Excerpts From the Book
Homeland had become bounty hunters roaming the globe, repatriating (or is it extraditing now…) editors like him.
Through his helmet’s audio enhancements, he’d heard the tinkle of metal on metal before anyone else, its frequency increasing with the wind. Identifiably man-made, in a high altitude valley of inhospitable terrain. Bullets flew before anyone could react, before they’d ever seen an enemy. They were a team of four. Hendricks had pulled tail-end Charlie duty, tasked with sniper duties. He’d watched in disbelief as his lead and best friend had dropped to his knees in front of him, his helmeted head detonating with a candy-floss puff, smearing the snow between them with an instant bubblegum spatter.
…
He stared at the keychain, remembered his breathing exercise, told himself it wasn’t happening to him now.
The woman beside him grabbed the keys, silencing them in her fist, one eyebrow up.
Was that out loud? Did she hear me?
“Are you okay, my American brother?” she asked with a West African patois. She was hefty, and like his own, her skin’s dark tone had an intensity to it, reflecting the bus’s halogen blue lights. He felt each of her bulging curves pressed tightly against him with every jolt, her hips nestled up against his, radiating an unwelcome heat.
“Yes. Sorry, daydreaming.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, shifting his leg away from hers, opened another button on his shirt.
She tapped his knee. “You g’wan be fine, son. Just a little hot today is all.” She smiled, handed him a black-and-white checkered kerchief. “You go keep that now. I got plenty more at home.” She turned away, looking out through a dusted and sand-etched window, her hand still tapping at his knee.
Another Unrelated Snippet from False Ignition
She languished in the data flow, wallowed amongst its complex relational construct. Not so much as looking but feeling for a connection. Something that would allow her to see a link from Cam to Kit, a reflection of her location bouncing off nearby data. Allowing her synapses to roam freely amongst the datastream’s endless connected content, she felt outwards, as though her fingertips extended in optical fibre, encircling the earth in code, inhaling its structural beauty, revelling in the rhythm of its hypnotic ebb and flow.
Paywall from here on in. Hope you like the update and I’ve lot’s more to come. For now, bedtime. I’m fighting bronchitis this time instead of pneumonia and the uncontrollable coughing/cranking headaches/burning sore torso from the wretching have left me exhausted. Peace people, stay healthy, it’s all we have.
A single moment was all she needed. A second of clarity amongst the meaningless noise of AI constructs and social media fluff. She focussed on the second male. His name was Dallas, and the tertiary data on him was at times irritatingly concise. The America’s repatriation teams were looking for him as well. The locus of The America’s search algorithms focussed on a ferry ride between Hong Kong and Mogadishu. She opened a tunnel to Ireland that opened with a swirl reeling her back to reality, like the chord on a vacuum cleaner, accelerating into a snap.
Repatriating sounds kinder, like returning someone home who got lost. Expediting sounds meaner like returning someone who has done some bad shit.