Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Gabi Stiteler (Monday), John Clark (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday), and Allison Keeton (Friday).
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers: Vaughn Hardacker’s newest novel, THE WAR WITHIN, is now available in both eBook and POD (UBL – https://books2read.com/u/3JdaXK )
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora
AND DON’T FORGET! One lucky Maine Crime Writers reader who leaves a comment on the blog this month will win a bundle of books!
As for writers who dump their completed manuscripts into Claude or ChatGPT, or any other AI program for a preliminary edit, I can only shake my head in disbelief. These are the same programs that participated in wholesale pirating of published works, copyright notwithstanding. What in heaven’s name makes you think they’re no longer harvesting your words (a/k/a training) simply because they’re being forced to pony up damages? That seems naïve, but your mileage and tolerance limits may vary, and I’ve been told the developmental and line edits are exceptional. They should be. They’ve used outstanding models for their frame of reference.
If that’s the case, how can authors, or anyone, protect themselves from the insatiable appetite of AI? In the spirit of everything old becoming new again, we might want to consider taking a page from our past and penning our stories with….pen and ink. Come to think of it, that would also resolve the question of AI as an author. At least until robots learn cursive, followed by pounding away at manual typewriters. Right, not much of a leap. It’s a brave new world, and a scary one.
When I’ve climbed up the slide and am at the top and the only way down is in front of me, I wake up with a new excitement – I know it’s gonna be tough-going, but at least I know there’s a single exit to where I am going.
Sometimes I wish I was writing a screenplay. During my years in Hollywood, I was told over and over that the ‘big action sequences’ could be/should be written like this: Crazy action push and pull in (pick location) that includes cars, trucks, planes and ends inside (location) finally with a face to face confrontation…
Because I write with, and about cops, in my Joe Burgess police procedural series and in my nonfiction, I have an entire shelf about cops. One of the great books is Mark Baker’s Cops, another Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know. Another, not for the faint of heart but worth getting from the library, is Practical Homicide Investigation. (A note about that: when I got it from interlibrary loan, a concerned librarian asked if I really wanted to read it before handing it over.) For anyone interested in police shootings in the cops’ own words, I co-wrote, with retired Deputy Chief Joseph Loughlin the book Shots Fired: The misunderstandings, misconceptions, and myths about police shootings.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), Jule Selbo (Tuesday), Kait Carson (Thursday), and Joe Souza (Friday).
Back in the 1950s and early 1960s the options were pretty much limited to talking on the telephone or writing letters. I’m not sure how I acquired my first pen pal, but I know there were pen pal sections in many publications, printing names and addresses of people looking for people to write to in other countries. One of those publications was a comic book I read regularly about a young model named Katy Keene. I wrote to one of the addresses in the pen pal section, possibly in Australia, and in time a letter came back. The person who originally advertised for a pen pal had done so several years earlier and was now quite a bit older than I was but she passed my letter on to a younger friend and I corresponded with that girl for a number of years afterward.
I wish I still had those letters. If any of them sent me photos of themselves, those are long gone too. Sadly, so are most of their names. If I could remember more, given today’s technology, I might be able to reconnect with a few of my pen pals. There was Heather. Was she from Australia or New Zealand? I had a pen pal in each country. There was Carole from Bristol, England. I thought of her the first time I visited Great Britain at age twenty, but by then I’d already forgotten her last name and street address. My pen pal in India was a boy. He asked me to trace my feet and send the tracing to him. Nothing kinky. A few months later he sent me a pair of shoes and I sent back a photo of me wearing them.
In college and after I exchanged regular letters with family, in particular my parents and grandfather. Later we kept in touch with college and Navy friends by exchanging annual Christmas letters. That, too, has gone by the wayside. For one thing, I realized that mine ended up being the same letter with different book titles to reflect the current year’s work. We lead very dull lives.
Meet our guest poster, Jessica Berg.
