Last week, I watched a live interview with Erika L. Sanchez about her book Crying In The Bathroom. I had never read anything by Sanchez before, but her interview made me pick up a copy of her memoir. “What are some reactions that you’ve received from other people about your memoir?” the interviewer asked Sanchez. “Well the most surprising thing as I mentioned was you know people thought I wrote too much about my pussy… or that I’m too vulgar or I swear too much. Whatever.” Through out the interview there was “fuck,” “shit,” more “pussy” and “damn” and I cringed each time as I looked around the room at my five attendees— between the ages of 17 and 60— hoping not to see them offended by the humorously crass interview. I don’t swear myself— or at least, it is not a big part of my vocabulary. It has never been part of my vocabulary and I’m not saying it out of some need to sound high and mighty. My parents never swore around us kids. My grandfather was famous for using alternatives like “Great Googa Mooga!” and “Cheese And Crackers!” (instead of “Jesus Christ” or “jeez”). My mother used “Fudge” as a substitute for Fuck. The real words just never sounded right coming out of my mouth (and I tried…. I sound like a dork, especially when I ended up stuttering! We can’t all be Samuel L. Jackson). Reading such words in books always filled me with giddiness as I hunkered down over the book like a coveted secret, snickering as I read the “real” word. To this day, I can't help myself from displaying titles like Nightbitch and Boyslut front and center while I picture myself becoming the purple devil emoji. …And so, I checked out Crying in the Bathroom, sold on Sanchez’ easy way of speaking and unwillingness to sugarcoat her words. “I write the way I speak,” Sanchez said. This has got me thinking: why do we have a fascination with swear words? How is it that I still get a reaction from reading curse words— It's everywhere. The first time I’d heard a swear word (that I remember) was in the first grade. We were walking single file across our school campus when a boy in front of me said “bitch.” The other kids giggled mixed with a few “awwws.” Me, being the intellectual know-it-all-wanna-be at a very young age said “Do you even know what ‘bitch’ means?’ (I didn't). My teacher had overheard me, and I was the one who got in trouble for saying the word… and then again for arguing that I wasn't the one who said it first. My first lesson in swearing came from a high school English class that follows more or less from Writers Digest:
The Writer’s Digest article then goes on to say: we use these words because we are human. We get angry. “Well-written raw talk can make your characters seem lifelike and more authentic.” This is why, while the words are not in my spoken vocabulary, I have no problem reading them or writing them in my pieces. My fictional characters have their own way of speaking just like I do. You’ll find Aminat in The Red Lord particularly obscene, while Genta in The Path of the Cave Stars can be prone to profanity and swearing using his deity's name in not the best of light. I do these things for a reason. Genta, for example, has lost all faith in the gods and goddesses and doesn't care one way or another how he speaks about them. On the how to use vein, “Spicy language generally works best when it’s used sparingly, or at least in moderation" (WD). Since we are in the Romance (of various spice levels) Era, I feel its safe to update the WD’s list:
In this context, I cringe. I like Romance/Erotica as much as the trend dictates, but, while reading the “bad words” thrilled/s me, reading the “spicy” words makes me feel dirty. Like a voyeur peeping into the explicit thoughts of lovers. I am not a prude (that's it… there is no following “but”). Reading smut doesn’t offend me or make me clutch my pearls. The Red Lord is my first venture into the spicier side of writing. Aminat and Thane go pretty hot and heavy on multiple occasions… in multiple locations. On the scale, it would be a Level 3. What keeps it from being a Full-Frontal-4 would be my lack of graphic talk. In the context of Spice, I just can’t make the words sound sexy… because it doesn't sound sexy to me (sorry!). What are your thoughts on foul language? --------------------------------------------- Bonus Article: I Can’t Believe Readers Are Still Getting Upset Over F*cking Swearing by Amy Poeppel (Musical Chairs)
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While my Generative AI post was more informational rather than a critique of AI, this post will share my thoughts on the topic. My preconception of AI, ChatGPT, and generative AI was that it created lazy human beings. My thoughts on when the media was saturated with it were:
....until SF/F author L.Penelope's Footnotes newsletter where she mentioned a cool new tool: "ChatPDF--Upload a PDF and the chatbot will summarize it for you!" By this point, I felt like I was failing with my query letters and summaries and had no one to turn to. So my reason for following the link was to get an idea of how this chatbot would summarize my novel. HOWEVER, I ended up using it for something else entirely. Like all chatbots, ChatPDF will essentially have a conversation with you. Once you upload a your PDF and it "reads" it, it waits for you to talk to it. I asked it questions like "who is the main character and what do they want?" I was gleefully surprised when it told me about my main character and what exactly her motivations were. I asked it another question, "what's this novel about?" to which it replied "not enough information given".... which was understandable since I only uploaded the first three chapters (the paranoid skeptic in me didn't want to upload the whole manuscript). I uploaded more and more, asking it questions about various characters and plots, taking notes on the ones where the chatbot seemed to struggle with and noting the character summaries it gave me. I came to realize that, if chatbot struggled with my questions, then I hadn't written the character or the plot point well enough and therefore had to return to it and edit it. For example, I asked the bot about my Main Character's love interest. This is the response it gave me:
Oof! That was not what I wanted to hear. Its response wasn't as detailed as its characterization of my MC. It seemed to pull scenes but not interpret them like it when deducing my MC's motivations.
I made a note so that I could revisit this character's introduction to make it evident who he is and the role he will play in the story. ChatPDF is like having a critique partner. It never told me what to do or how to write, but helped me see the weak spots in my manuscript. I'd say, its a good tool for the initial editing phase, before it reaches a Beta reader, for example. I actually really like it! However, I stand firm in the belief that this tool (and all the others like it) cannot replace human interaction and input. My manuscript still needs human eyes, human thoughts, and human emotions to tell me whether or not what I am trying to convey comes across beyond just the words. I give this tool 3 out of 5 stars. Where it failed to earn the other two was that I found, the longer the PDF, the more chatbot "skimmed." There were questions I asked it where it said "no information" but the the answers I knew were in the story. I even directed it to a specific page ("that page does not exist") and a specific chapter ("that chapter does not exist"). So, it seems that it reads up to a certain point in longer PDFs. 50 pages at a time seems like the sweet spot, though. ----------------------------------------- Have you used this tool? What are your thoughts on AI and bots? This post is about race: I thought about putting a “warning” behind it, but realized it defeats the whole purpose of this post. Because, until anyone mentions race other than “white,” it is met with controversy. My race should not have to come with a trigger warning: I am a black woman and a BIPOC writer. Terms that have to be entered or applied in a world where the default function is set to “white.” The Default Argument, in programming language, is a function that when a value is not specified, results will return to the values initially specified in the parameters. This is why when you search for a term in images (depending on your location), the images you get will always be of the standard default (white) unless specified otherwise. Growing up, I never realized (or paid attention to) the defaults of the world. From a young age we were conditioned to associate the “default” with “white.” There is the idea that, unless a book character’s race is explicitly stated, then he or she is “white” (check out White As Default). Most recently when receiving feedback on my manuscript, a beta suggested I describe my main character’s description in chapter 1 so that they (singular “they”) could visualize her from the beginning. I sprinkled in a few key details throughout the first three chapters, stating that her mother was a black woman in the very first chapter, and detailing her physical features in chapter 2 and 3. “Aminat is not the typical Eurocentric heroine, just as Rivercross is not the typical Medieval-Renaissance-esque town. You should make that clear from the beginning,” said the Beta. Good feedback. However, you have the Janet Watson Chronicles, a retelling of Sherlock Holmes starring a queer black woman living in a dystopian society, where the author takes Every. Single. Opportunity. to hammer in that this character is black in the most stereotypical ways possible (from stares whenever she walks into a room, the “don't touch my hair” quips, the afro, people clutching their belongings when she walks by). Then you have the reverse: Book covers primarily featuring/favoring white characters regardless of their in-book description such as the case in the Liar controversy. I first came across this story in my first year of public librarianship researching displays. The story has been around since the book’s 2009 publication but has been popping up as a prime example in visibility (or lack thereof) when it comes to book covers and minorities, most recently mentioned in The Sistah Girl Next Door. “Default” once again resurfaced in library school where we learned that, when it comes to programming technology, black and brown faces are primarily kept out of the algorithms, leading things like automatic faucets not to recognize black and brown hands, and even facial recognition software to struggle. Generative AI technology needs specific descriptors to generate characters, or else it will automatically default to giving “white” results. You would never have to type “White woman reading” in Midjourney or other text-based generative AI applications. the cover photo for this post compares the results to “Woman reading” on Canva. Canva generates 4 results each iteration. All four results to this text for every iteration yielded the default white woman reading. Minorities must type “[insert race] woman reading." This is the same for stock photos. Nappy.co An ad on my newsfeed inspired this dive into “defaults”. Nappy.co states, “I love Unsplash, Pexels, and Shot Stash, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that all of their content could use a little more diversity. As an influencer mgmt agency for black and brown creators, we’re very intentional about cultural representation in the work that we do. And because of that, we aren’t always able to find the photos we need from those sites.” The site is simple: it provides diverse stock photos as a default. From hiking, families, office spaces, the people in the stock photos are of BIPOC. It eliminates the need to have to type in "black_____" to yield results. As an amateur photo manipulator (Gimp and Canva), when I illustrate my characters, the pool just got a whole lot broader with Nappy.co. Further Reading: *Long Post Ahead* Today is Juneteenth, the day in history 138 years ago that slaves in Texas learned that they were free (two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863). Under one of my many hats in the library, I hosted a Lunch & Learn where my guest speaker said something very powerful: Juneteenth is a recognition of how important knowledge is to freedom, for it was a lack of knowledge that kept them bound to slavery, and knowledge that eventually set them free. Francis Bacon famously said “knowledge is power.” Truer words this occasion. It wasn't until six years ago— at twenty three years old— that I first learned of Juneteenth. So in addition to the Celebration of freedom for all, this day is also about Reflection, Knowledge, and Power. Reflection: My coworker and I recently received an award honoring the diverse books we bring into the community on behalf of the library. Not only did we give away books about Juneteenth, but we gave away books written by Black authors, like Octavia Butler, Kai Harris, and Kennedy Ryan (in 2019, became the first black person to win a RITA) and for children, “Remi Blackwood”. We don't just stop at black books; as an ordering librarian, I am amazed and excited each time I see a book written by and about people of color (and an extra surge in LGBTQ fiction). It also saddens me. As a child (and really, into my adulthood), there was zero visibility for BIPOC authors and stories. I'm sure there were some out there, but again… visible. Diverse books were either written by white authors (Chu Ju’s House by one of my favorite authors at the time was written by a white author, and sixth grade required reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, an important story about racism and black pain through the eyes of a little white girl also written by a white woman) or about the trauma of being "other" in a white world (required reading in eighth grade was Black Boy by Richard Wright and Diary of Malcolm X by Alex Haley). This isn't to knock required reading, I was exposed to some of the greats through required reading: Toni Morrison (Beloved in high school and Song of Solomon in College), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God in High School), Nella Larsen (Passing in College). But, as a child and really into adulthood, these things I couldn't relate to. They were topics I did know enough about (because they weren't taught and taught well). I had no connection to it. I received my first "black book" from my aunt when I was in middle school: Belle and the Beau, an Avon Teen Romance written by Beverly Jenkins. Though historical fiction, it did not focus on black trauma as a plot device. At its core, it was about a black girl falling in love with a black boy. I asked my aunt for the sequel, Josephine and the Soldier after I ate up the first. Until then, the first black book I bought for myself was after seeing an ad in an American Girl magazine, Honey Bea by Kim Siegelson, about a slave girl on a Louisiana Plantation who, on her 13th birthday, realizes she has a certain power and uses it to thwart the romantic advances of her master and save a boy she likes…. Are you seeing a theme in black books? I frequented Borders Books and Barnes & Noble. I spent almost every day after school at one library or another and read voraciously. I didn't know enough to seek them out, and happening upon them was rare— especially in the genre I gravitate more toward: horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Knowledge: In Tananarive Due’s Introduction to her book, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, she writes: “As a creative writing student learning from the “canon,” I lost sight of myself as I began writing contemporary realism about white male protagonists having epiphanies. Not genre. Not black women… Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day taught me that a Black woman could be respected writing Black characters and the metaphysical” In a similar situation, the stories I told as a child and wrote were of the default. In my mind, they were either white or undefined. Black characters, in my mind back then, suffered and were slaves. Working at a public library opened my eyes. Going through the stacks, I saw all these books that were not displayed (I found Jason Reynolds’ Track series, and read them all in two weeks!). Paging through ordering magazines and Ingram lists and Publisher’s Weekly, I saw a rise in black (and other marginalized) authors (I JUMPED on My Sister the Serial Killer the moment it hit my library’s shelf, and how I came to discover the work of fellow SHU grad, Michelle Rene Lane). I focused on displays and curated lists highlighting the diverse collection we had (At Night All Blood Is Black, for the speculative/horror fans). I didn't start with the intention of “diversifying the collection.” I started ordering diverse books because I finally had the access I never had growing up to diverse materials. And, because of this, it inspired a push in my library to continue to order and highlight diverse books. In a year, the combined efforts of the Children’s collection development department, and Adults (my department) increased the diversity of the collection by 88% in a single year. Power: #WeNeedDiverseBooks trended on Twitter in 2014 and snowballed into a non profit organization dedicated to bringing the stories of marginalized communities to the forefront so that everyone can see themselves on the page. The movement created by the lack of diversity in children's books, spawned the #OwnVoice movement by Corrine Duyvis meant to inspire authentic stories written by those of the communities written about (“OwnVoice” movement and hashtag are no longer in used as of 2021. Check out Book Riots to learn why). Both movements also lit fires under the publishing community which historically has been “unbearably white” and has favored the careers of white male authors. I read about Serendipity Literary Agency in Publisher’s Weekly at work. Serendipity’s founder Regina Brooks, stated in the feature, “After I saw the dearth in the number of people of color in the business, I made a commitment to try to bring more people into the business and train them.” Serendipity was founded in 2000 and has since cultivated a number of bestselling and award winning authors of color. In my querying journey, I came across literary agent, Hana El Niwairi, a founding member of BIPOC Publishers of Canada. Just as the list and visibility of BIPOC authors are growing, so are efforts within the publishing industry. “Times are also very different now than when I first began testing my skills as a writer,” Due writes in the concluding paragraphs of her Introduction. “With the growing respect for the late Octavia E. Butler, the rise of Jordan Peele, and a slew of talented writers of all races and ethnicities, no speculative fiction syllabus would be complete without a much broader spectrum of voices.” To the person who said about Juneteenth that the slaves should have known that they had been free, and that they should have taken it upon themselves to find out/learn: you don't know what you don't know. Since the release of Across the Spider Verse, my Facebook Newsfeed has been flooded with the various Spiders. Most notably, Spider-Punk. Now, don't crucify me here, but as of writing this post, I have yet to see the movie! I have, however, seen and listened to the Spotify playlist that the writer of Spider-Punk (Cody Ziglar) made for the character. The playlist is….. FIRE! Not because of the songs, but because it introduces me to this character before actually “meeting” the character on screen. Creating character playlists is not a new concept. I distinctly remember my elementary and middle school years when the first Twilight book came out in 2005. Stephanie Meyer was still unknown to much of the world and the saga had not taken off yet. I was going into the seventh grade when I happened upon it. I remember going to her website (back then, it was an angsty black background with neon green accents) and coming across her playlist for Twilight. I listened to it again and again. There were some bands I recognized, like Relient K and My Chemical Romance, but others my angsty middle-school self gravitated towards. It was through Stephanie Meyer that I fell in love with the band, Muse (Hyper Music). Though her original page no longer exists, the awesome folks on Fandom created a wiki page of the songs here. Fun little reflection: Breaking Dawn came out the summer I qualified for the Junior Olympics in Track & Field. Unfortunately, I did terribly in all of my events (my first time running in a stadium, I was so nervous!), and to cheer me up, my mom bought me Breaking Dawn! Character and manuscript playlists are growing in popularity. In my querying journey, I came across an agent that asked for a link to a character playlist or manuscript soundtrack. It was optional, but still an interesting request. I’ve always written to music, and yes, a song or two has come on at the right moment that emphasized the scene or character. But I never gave thought to putting together an actual, narrative playlist. Author, Elijah Menchaca (Glintchasers series) challenged himself to create a character playlist. He writes, “Making playlists for your characters is, at worst, a really fun way to procrastinate actually writing, or whatever else you’re actually supposed to be doing right now. But, at its best, it’s a fun way to explore characters in a way you probably wouldn’t be able to with your standard character profile.” His playlist challenge: make a playlist with a minimum of 8 songs. No repeating artists, and no more than one song per character aspect/event/relationship. To help with the process, he provides these prompts:
Check out the full article here See what playlist I came up with in Bonus Content! And post yours in the comments below :D Earlier this year, I attempted to submit a short story to Clarkesworld, but was met with a message about the publication submissions being closed due to the influx of AI submissions. With all the negativity in the world, I’ve kind of just put blinders on to most things, but this… This put AI on my radar. What did Clarkesworld mean by “AI submissions?” Clareksworld wasn't the only publication I went to with a “Closed because of AI” notice, and “ChatGPT” was a topic on the rise in the writing forums I frequent. It frustrated me… angered me like it angered tons of other creatives. What does this mean for my craft? How can editors sort through AI submissions and human generated submissions? Will creatives become obsolete? This post isn’t about that, though; this post is about the facts. According to a Forbes article published on June 1st, this is only the beginning. Generative AI tasks are projected to evolve and integrate into the following areas:
What are your thoughts on and experiences with AI? It's taken me until recently to discover its potential as a tool (vs. creator)— but that's for another post! Mentioned in post:
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