Y’all, I just had the weirdest experience and I wanted to tell you about it because I learned something I didn’t know, and you might not know, and you should.

Want to see something strange? I had a subscriber sign up for a paid subscription on two consecutive days. First on Aug 9, and again on Aug 10. Weird, hey?

I know, I know. It looks dicey as hell, right? Who uses x’s for their profile?

Who can actually read 996 Substacks?

But still. How did one person pay twice? Because I pay for some Substacks and it doesn’t even LET me subscribe twice. When I go to a Substack I have a paid subscription to, there’s no “subscribe” option because I AM subscribed.

Out came the Nancy Drew detective hat. I started poking around and found a whole bunch of stuff you should know if you have paid subscriptions turned on, or plan to.

First, I logged into Substack, went to my subscribers and looked up the email address. Look at the revenue column. A monthly paid member who’s paid $0.00. What?

Important thing to know — if a paid subscriber shows $0.00, it could just mean the transaction hasn’t passed from Stripe to Substack yet so don’t freak out too fast.

The weird part was getting TWO notifications. Why two?

As I dug in to find out what was happening, I learned a bunch of stuff I hadn’t known or really even thought about. And it’s not like I’m some dumbass who isn’t aware that all kinds of fraud happen online. I’m aware. My clients are in ecommerce and I’m faced with online fraud on a regular basis. But it’s real easy to just write and not think about what’s happening behind the curtain. Especially if you came here from Medium because they pay royalties and writers don’t have to deal with all that stuff.

So let’s go on a journey, I’ll show you…

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I have a friend who calls me up and reads bad sentences from books by good writers. I’ll pick up to hear him laughing and he’ll say you gotta hear this and then he’ll read it. Whaaat, I laugh, who is that? and he’ll say it’s Margaret Atwood, or John Irving or maybe Cormac McCarthy and I laugh and say oh my god, that’s so hilarious.

Good writers sometimes make clunky sentences but we don’t care if the story is good, you know? So then I write those clunky sentences in a notebook filled with random thoughts on writing and one day we’ll do something with all the thoughts and sentences I’ve written down in that book, but here’s the thing —

Do you know how rare and delightful it is to find someone who shares your weird?

Here’s another thing I wrote in the book. Dialogue that sounds real isn’t how we really talk. Omg, we talk for hours about dialogue and why writing dialogue is so hard and omg, I love people who share my fascination with how we weave words into story.

Too often we hide the strange bits of us away like they aren’t how we find our people but we’re so worried about fitting in or being normal or good, whatever that means, and now we even have people letting a machine put words on the page for them because they think it’s somehow better than their own imperfect words.

I can’t even imagine that, but I won’t go there today.

Here’s a strange little story.

When John Green published The Fault In Our Stars, it sold 57,898 copies the first week, and shot to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and then went on to sell something like twenty three million copies, can you even imagine?

It’s about Hazel, a sixteen year old girl with terminal cancer, and Augustus, who is in remission but lost a leg to cancer. They meet in a cancer patient support group that Hazel didn’t even want to go to but her mom kind of bullied her into going.

This is not a book review, so you understand.

It’s about writing and telling our stories.

It’s about me poking your tender writer’s heart in hopes of showing you things tucked away that maybe you hadn’t seen yet. Or maybe you did, but from a different angle because we’re all the blind men and the elephant and sometimes sharing a strange thought can make us see from another perspective and we are forever changed.

Does that sound lofty? It sounds lofty, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. A reader told me that, one day. Said I’m being lofty and I laughed but what else influences us besides thoughts? Sometimes our own, sometimes thoughts from someone else.

Like a friend calling to read a particularly clunky sentence because we’re all just imperfect humans and we all make mistakes and maybe I can be a real writer.

Here’s how John Green starts the book:

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (The Fault In Our Stars)

God, that sentence. Depression is a side effect of dying.

But we’re all dying and every day is a gift but we don’t think about it that way until life turns on a light, like the day I realized the most popular Note I ever published was three words that said Biopsy was negative and the hearts damn near gutted me.

When Hazel and Augustus meet, there’s an instant bond and they agreed to read each other’s favorite book and afterwards, Augustus is angry because Hazel’s favorite book is about a girl dying of cancer and it doesn’t have an ending, it just stops unfinished, and by the time he gets to the end he knows he loves Hazel.

Like a broken record, I keep repeating that Kate DiCamillo quote (writing is seeing) because it doesn’t mean ice blue eyes or blond hair blowing in a summer breeze, it means Hazel knowing why Augustus is mad about how the book ends, and why she loves that book so much, which is because it’s how her own story is going to end.

Here’s another one. This line was highlighted 40,107 times by Kindle readers.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

I think Kate DiCamillo would be proud of that sentence.

It sees.

When you sell twenty million books, the strangest thing happens. You’d think people would ask him where the story came from, what motivated him to write this, but no. They ask for tips on becoming a writer. Here’s what he always says:

“Whenever I’m asked what advice I have…I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you’re being told.”

Seeing. Listening. Those are the things writers are made of, aren’t they?

Maybe not if you’re writing how to make five thousand on the internet, how to double your subscribers in thirty days or five simple steps, or self help posts, but if you’re trying to write fiction, personal essays or anything deeply meaningful, then yes.

Sometimes we only listen to the stories that work for us and we should watch for that.

Every writer worth their salt has made some comment about living before writing and sometimes those statements come across a little condescending and smelling of superiority, because haven’t we all lived, and don’t we all have experiences?

But here, let me show you what I think they’re trying to say…

When John Green graduated from college, he spent five months working as a student chaplain at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. That’s when he first got the idea for the book that eventually became The Fault in Our Stars. A book about children with terminal diagnoses because those kids, they hurt his heart.

He said it was embarrassingly bad.

I tried to write that book for almost 10 years. Ever since I worked as a chaplain, I would go back, I was trying to work on what I called the Children's Hospital Story, although in its previous incarnations, it starred this 22-year-old hospital chaplain, who was, like, surprisingly handsome and, like, hooking up with doctors.

It was very embarrassing... it was just terrible. But you know, I would go back to that story and go back to it and go back to it.

No one tells writers this. That sometimes you want to write something, but it’s not time yet. Colson Whitehead told the same story about Underground Railroad. Said he wanted to write that book five whole books before he did, but he wasn’t ready yet.

So we go back to it and go back to it, and this is part of writing and sometimes essays work that way too. I’ve had an essay take months. We know it’s not coming out the way we intend it to and that’s a discretion we don’t get from a machine.

Especially not a machine that likes to praise us. Even if we tell it not to.

This is something I think people using AI don’t even realize and maybe even people not using AI. I suspect the best stories aren’t the ones we tell on command but the ones that show up one day and demand to be told so you shut up and write.

That’s what happened to John Green in 2010.

I’ll let him tell you:

In 2010 a good friend of mine died of cancer, a young friend, and I went back to the story, and I went back to it angry and needing to work.

Her name was Esther Earl, and he named her in the dedication of the book. She was sixteen years old and filled with life and was diagnosed with metastasized papillary thyroid cancer, much like Hazel. When Esther died, he sat down, angry, to write.

He said it’s very important to him to say the book is not a biography. It’s not Ether’s story. Hazel isn’t Esther.

I’m writing this on August 3. Esther would have turned 32 today, had cancer not taken her at 16. She loved words and wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world and when she died, her father published her writing and her art in a biography called This Star Won’t Go Out because it was a promise they’d made before cancer came calling. A promise that whoever outlived the other would write their story so he did and John Green wrote a ridiculously long and utterly beautiful introduction.

Last week I wrote about AI companies buying every ISBN ever published because they don’t have enough human words to feed the next generation of AI.

And what kind of guts me is that I’m sure AI ate both of those books, and it can eat every book in the world but what it can never do is know when a story is ready to be told, or weep at the death of a child, but people use it because it never writes a sentence so clunky that my friend will call laughing and say listen to this.

But the thing is when he’s done reading the clunky sentence he’ll say you have to read this book and I’ll say I will (and then I do) and I honestly don’t think AI can ever write anything that humans will remember ten years later but maybe I’m wrong.

Because writing, real human writing, isn’t about the odd clunky sentence, it’s about the heart, the humanity and a story that needs to be told. And I guess what I’m trying to say is please keep writing your stories even if they have clunky sentences. Don’t ask a machine to fix them, time will do that for you as you write more. And don’t be afraid to show your weird a little or even a lot, because the reality is that the things that make you exactly who you are is how your people will find you. You know? :)

Years ago, I read The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. Five hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It sold almost twenty million copies and USA Today said it belongs on the same shelf as Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank.

It opens with Death, saying he likes colors. They’re a distraction that keeps him sane, given how long he’s been doing his job without a vacation and you might wonder what Death needs a vacation from, but he tells you.

The leftover humans.

The survivors.

He can’t stand to look at them. Left crumbling among jigsaw pieces of realization, despair and surprise. Standing there with punctured hearts and beaten lungs.

This is just a small story, he says. About a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter — and quite a lot of thievery. The first time he saw the book thief, she stole a book out of the snow. The second time, out of a fire.

I’m seeing that in my feed. Fire. Book burnings. People comparing AI companies to Nazi book burnings. Maybe you’re seeing it, too. And I get the comparison. I get why people are saying that—because of the destruction. But it misses the point. Entirely.

Here’s the story that’s all over the news. AI companies are buying used, old and rare books to scan them into AI and then destroy them.

Here’s something you should know. There are two ways to scan a book. One is non destructively. There are machines that scan without destroying. The second way is destructive scanning. Machines slice the spine and binding off a book and run the pages through a scanner. After the pages are scanned, they’re shredded.

Destructive scanning is the cheapest way to scan books.

People are reading that, saying omg, it’s like Nazis burning books. It’s not. People are asking why they are destroying the books they scan but that goes back to the Anthropic trial last year.

Anthropic got taken to court by writers whose books were pirated and fed to AI, so they sued in a class action suit. Like every company accused of breaking the law, they put a suitcase full of paperwork in front of the judge. He read it and lambasted them.

Look, he said, if you want to buy books and destroy them, that’s up to you. That’s not breaking any laws. But you pirated millions of books off the internet and that not okay. That’s piracy and it’s against the law and you’re going to have to pay.

The news stories went straight to the billions in piracy settlements.

No one asked why the judge said if they want to buy books and destroy them, that’s up to them. Too focused on the billions and piracy. Very few people wrote about the mention of Project Panama in the documents Anthropic submitted to the court.

In the court documents, Anthropic talked about a secret project, submitted to let the court know they’re going to start paying for books. Here’s what it said:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,”
“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

That might make your heart go cold. It did mine. But it’s not new. That’s was published in The Washington Post last January, six months ago.

That’s what the judge was talking about when he said if you want to buy books and destroy them, that’s up to you. That was last year.

People destroy books all the time. Buy them, read them, throw them in the garbage or toss them in the recycling bin. It’s not illegal. If you pay for a book, you compensated the publisher and the author—or the estate if the author is dead. After that, you can do what you want with it. It’s yours.

No one had any clue what was coming. Because piracy. Because billions!

Know what we didn’t see coming? The middle men who crawled out of the woodwork, offering to buy up millions of books so no one will know who bought them.

We aren’t talking back alley shysters. I’m sure there’s some of them, too. But also? Big companies, who saw an opportunity to pad the coffers with AI investment dollars.

For example? ISBNdb is the world’s largest book database. For years, ISBNdb was a godsend to the publishing industry. From the beginning of publishing to the time AI was launched, a total of 130 million books were published. 110 million are listed in the ISBNdb database. 85% of all books ever published since the dawn of publishing are in their database. If you wanted to find a rare book or a book that’s out of print, they were where you would find it. In the biggest book database in the world.

They’re marketing a new service.

Offering book acquisition services to AI developers.

They say printed works published before AI existed are “especially valuable” because there’s no chance they contain AI generated text. AI companies are very specific about that. They don’t want any materials that have any chance of containing AI generated text. You know why? Because AI generated text corrupts the model.

Someone is going to argue with me. Say nuh-uh, they have their ways of training on AI generated text. Tell that to the book dealers spending million on used books for AI companies who don’t want people to know who is buying them.

LLMs are just probability generation, like your phone, except with more words in its belly, but no matter how many words they feed it, it bases the output on probability. So they don’t want to train AI on AI generated text. It degrades the model.

They try to play that down. They don’t really want the world to know text created by their own wonder tool degrades the tool itself. In the beginning of AI training, they could use sites like Wikipedia and news media but they can’t anymore because the risk of corruption by their own text is too high. Yay undisclosed AI, right?

Sometimes, I want to shake my head that this so called “tool” ate so many beautifully crafted words, ate The Book Thief, Hemingway, Kafka, Dostoevsky and Atwood, and it still can’t write well enough to save its own life. It needs more human writing, more, more, because its own writing ruins the tool and only human writing can save it.

While people who love it scream about luddites and tell me this is the future.

Nah. Let me tell you what the future is.

The future is a man standing in front of a judge saying we want to destructively scan all the human authored books in the world, but we don’t want the public to know.

That’s “the future” of AI.

ISBNdb says the orders they’re getting range from a thousand books to a million.

The reports are rolling in now, from around the world.

Rare book dealers and secondhand booksellers in European countries and the Netherlands are seeing a wild increase in orders. They’re concerned that AI companies are buying up obscure and rare titles and destroying them after feeding them to AI.

But they don’t know who the buyers really are. So many anonymous companies.

The orders vary wildly in size, which makes it harder to tell. If someone buys a million ISBNs, that’s probably an AI company. But what about the orders for 500 or 100 rare books. Is that a rare book dealer or an AI company? And how are they to know?

What are booksellers supposed to do? Stop selling rare and limited edition books? Hide them to save them from destruction, like we did from the Nazis?

When I read that rare book sellers and used bookstores are seeing a five and tenfold increase in orders due to AI companies buying books for destructive scanning, I can’t help but think of what Sam Altman said at the Blackrock Summit in Washington, DC.

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.”

Let me tell you something blunt.

When the Nazis burned books, they didn’t hide behind anyone. They didn’t have middlemen skulking around to find the books. They threw books in the street and said we don’t care if you like these books, we don’t so we’re burning them. People fought to save them. Pulling books from burning piles. Librarians hiding books on the list. People risking their lives to save rare books from rampant destruction.

It kind of sucks to say the Nazis were more transparent than AI companies are today, but here we are. Truth doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it.

Here’s the sickening part. There are not enough books in the world to save AI.

There’s not. I’m sorry, but the math doesn’t work.

The massive datasets that powered earlier versions of AI are now contaminated. That’s the phrase they use in the AI industry. Contaminated. Wikipedia, blog sites, news media. They can’t scrape them anymore. Too much undisclosed AI.

They can’t risk undisclosed AI contaminating the model.

They need human text.

Physical books are the last refuge. The only place to get uncontaminated text, but there’s not enough. Because if they scan every book in the world, 130 million books published since the dawn of publishing, it would yield about 40-50 trillion tokens.

They need 100 trillion tokens to build the next generation of AI models.

So if they do scan and destroy every book ever published, they’ll still end up with only half the tokens they need. So where will the rest come from?

Let me tell you where.

Ingram Content Group, one of the biggest book distributors in the world, recently introduced an opt-out form for publishers who do not want their books to be purchased for AI model training. They said due to the increase of AI companies buying books to use for AI training, they are giving publishers an opt-out.

But they added a caveat.

They caution publishers that they’ll do “their best” to ensure that books aren’t sold to an AI company for scanning purposes but due to the increase in anonymous purchasing, they may not know the true source of every transaction.

Which means even if a publisher opts out?

Shrug. Maybe the books were bought by a middle man. How are they to know?

Every day, I see people saying AI is the future of writing. No it’s not. I am. Human writers, like me, who do not use AI to write or edit the work. I am the future of writing because AI cannot exist without us. And if we can figure out how to keep our writing out of the claws of AI, it will choke to death on it’s own probability and sameness.

But we don’t know how to do that, yet. Because middle men doing the work for a slice of the profit will sell any book to an AI company if they know the book is human.

And I can’t help but think of Death, in the opening of The Book Thief, saying he needs a vacation because he can’t bear to watch the leftover humans.

The survivors.

Left crumbling among jigsaw pieces of realization, despair and surprise.

Standing there with punctured hearts and beaten lungs.

But we’ll figure it out. We’re not there yet but we’ll get there because humans are smarter. AI didn’t invent itself, we did. AI can’t train on itself, it needs human work to survive. And when we figure out how to keep human work out of the hands of AI, we’ll see what the future looks like. I suspect it will look like humans making the kind of work that people using AI think they’re making while they pollute their own tool.

AI is not the future. Not as far as writing goes. Maybe for sorting data and spotting patterns, sure. But as far as creative writing goes, the future is human.

I don’t know what it is with me and bluebirds. The way they show up when I least expect them, and most need them, like the one that showed up the first Mother’s Day after losing my mama. Tiny bird, singing in my tree. Hope is the thing with feathers.

So, of course Judith would show up with a bluebird.

Let me tell you a little bit about her, okay?

She was a writer in another life. Wrote for Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, New York, The New Yorker, CBS and CNN. A single mom making headlines and deadlines all over the world, as she says. Then she got hit by drunk driver in a truck.

Woke up in a hospital with a green angel leaning over her. Never got another job or paycheck. Had to return the five figure advance. She’d been a ghost writer, mostly, and then she wasn’t. Did you know after a traumatic brain injury some people don’t know what a fork is and have to learn to eat again? Not all people, of course.

Some have trouble breathing, some are quickly fine again. It’s a crap shoot. Roll the dice and wish for luck. She didn’t get lucky.

But let me interrupt myself.

Because I want you to know why I’m writing this.

You might think I’m writing it for Judith but I’m not. I’m writing it for you.

Let me tell you what I know about you, okay?

Best I figure, you love words like I love words. I think that because most of my readers are writers and if they’re not writers they’re agents, publishing people, journalists or avid readers and I don’t know how anyone does any of those without loving words.

Here’s the funny thing about writing. There are different styles of writing. We look at a political post, a trilogy about Middle Earth and a poem—and call them all writing. What a strangely generic word. Like calling liver and chocolate both “food.”

Here’s another funny thing about writing. A lot of us use words the way a ninety year old would drive a Porsche 911 Turbo. Thirty miles an hour, nevermind that it can do two hundred and five. Which is to say we don’t push words to their capacity.

In the sixteenth century, Erasmus wrote a collection of adages, common thoughts and wisdoms he liked. One was “vestis virum facit” — which means “the clothes make the man.” In a similar vein, the words make the writer, if you now what I mean.

We have all the experiences we need to be a writer. We’re alive, aren’t we? But the way we use words often doesn’t do justice to what lives deep inside our hearts.

That’s why William Zinsser said the best writers learn by imitation and said we should find writers that move us and let them influence us. And eventually, we move on beyond our influences, we shed those skins, and we develop our own style.

Margaret Atwood was influenced by Orwell, Alice Munro and The Brothers Grimm. Cormac McCarthy by Herman Melville, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Mark Twain. Stephen King was influenced by Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson.

Of course, their influences were before the internet. Now, we can be influenced by beautiful writing outside of the books we loved. Like writers online.

So when I find a writers using words in a really unique way, I have to share.

And also? I think it’s more important now than ever because we live in a world filled with AI, and not just AI, but readers who can’t tell human writing from AI. It makes me sad, because AI can emulate a middle of the road writer, but there is no AI that will ever use words the way a truly skilled writer can and does.

So, that said — back to bluebirds finding me...

I was scrolling my feed one day when I saw a post with a bluebird as the cover. The title was The Cape of Good Hope. Hello bluebird, we meet again. I clicked.

Here, can I show you a snippet?

This brings us to Oklahoma, where once another beautiful guy woke up with no memory at all. Oklahoma has tornadoes that blow whole towns off the map. This dude’s tornado clawed out his head. I met him in brain injury group where we were rolling Play-Doh balls and banging plastic pegs with pretend hammers.

‘This dude’s tornado clawed out his head.’

Who writes that way?

Judith Hannah Weiss, that’s who.

No criticism intended, but you know how a hundred other writers would write that scene, right? They’d tell you what happened. The facts. This thing happened to that man and he lost his memory. They wouldn’t say a beautiful man woke up with no memory. There’s be no tornadoes in Oklahoma, much less clawing out his head.

By the time I got to the bottom, the last paragraph did me in.

Hello hope, we meet again.

I restacked.

Kate DiCamillo said “Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.”

And she’s right. Most of us don’t pay attention nearly enough. But paying attention isn’t just to the world around us. It’s also paying attention to how other writers use words. Because we can’t be influenced by what we pay no attention to.

Here, let me show you another snippet…

my mom grew up without moon or stars or sky or pets or parks or the soft feel of grass underfoot. Instead she had asphalt and pigeons. A glimpse of blue through tenements. Plus rice and beans and rice. But not enough beans or rice.

That’s from Glimmers. And again, you know how most people would write that, right? They’d tell you their mom grew up in poverty. Lived in a tenement, didn’t always have enough to eat. But there’d be no moon or stars or sky or the soft feel of grass underfoot she didn’t have. Because most people write conversationally.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with conversational writing, but it’s grape juice not burgundy wine or a rich Bordeaux and you’ll never get a little tipsy on it.

Charles Baudelaire said always be a poet, even in prose.

That’s what Judith does.

A glimpse of blue through tenements. The soft feel of grass underfoot. I think the most beautiful prose uses words the way a poet does. I also think most people don’t know how to do that because we see it so rarely. So much writing is conversational or educational, and so little is truly poetic. So, when I see it, how could I not share?

Here’s another thing Judith does. Can I point out a technique that, once you see, you can’t unsee? Because once you see it, you can tuck the technique in your toolbox.

Often times, Judith will write a paragraph that you or I would write. A sentiment felt by so many people that we all resonate. But that’s when she goes somewhere most writers don’t. She’ll end with one sentence that sets her writing apart. Like this:

I couldn’t imagine being old. I wouldn’t look like my mom and my feet wouldn’t hurt like hers. I wouldn’t shrink, wither, or die. Fast forward. My feet ache like my mom’s. My daughter lives far away. I remember her milk-drunk on my breasts and burrowed in my arms.

That’s from the piece called Moo Shoe News, which is tender and nostalgic.

And again, you know how most of us would write that, right? My daughter lives far away. I miss her. My daughter lives far away, I wish I could see her more often. And it’s not that those things wouldn’t be true. It’s that they lack the gut punch.

Because most of us do not end a paragraph with a sentence that packs a punch but every woman who ever nursed a child can feel that in her bones. I read that sentence and remembered little-babygirl-me holding a baby, milk drunk in my arms.

I can’t imagine waking up in a hospital with a green angel hovering above me. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to learn to use a fork again, much less not knowing how to be a mother, or what the word daughter even means.

It guts me to think of anyone going through that experience.

In the years since a drunk driver put Judith Hannah Weiss in the hospital and made her relearn everything, her work has appeared on NBC News and in The Washington Post. In the Oldster, Salmagundi, Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Creative Non-fiction, Bellevue Literary Review (wow!) and she was an editor’s pick on Longreads.

In 2024, she was nominated for Best American Essay and The Pushcart Prize.

You know why, right? Of course an author has the answer to that.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

That’s how she writes. Not a single word to spare. No rambling. No fluff.

Nothing left to remove. And I might add that for most of us, it’s not “writing” that gets us there, but editing mercilessly. Asking questions like can I say this more concisely? Are these the best words for what I’m trying to say? Can I make this stronger?

Until there is nothing left to take away.

She writes her posts intentionally short, 2-3 minutes each. They’re quick to read and she packs so much into them that each piece will leave you a little drunk on words.

Many of them include her own artwork, I might add.

I’d suggest you start with The Cape of Good Hope. and How To Operate A Fork. After that, maybe About A Boy, Once, I Was A Heavy Thinker or Moo Shoe News.

Or just poke around and see what resonates. Hope you enjoy! And if you leave a comment, maybe let her know I sent you! I think she’d like that. :)

I woke all bedhead and bleary because I couldn’t sleep last night. Walked down the hall and stopped. The pillows on my couch were hot pink, neon pink, and I stared at them in sleepyhead confusion. Wtf? Why are my pillows pink?

If you’ve ever been here, you know I have two Icelandic sheepskin throw cushions on a black leather loveseat. I toss them on the floor to make room for company to sit but mostly I lean against them to read. One taupe and one black except this morning they were both streaked with hot pink. Half awake, I stared at them in confusion.

I turned to the kitchen, looked out the window. The sun was a red ball and I wanted to cry. Because I know. It’s fire. Canada is on fire so I opened the weather channel and it said the forecast today is smoke. What the hell kind of weather forecast is that?

Despite the fires, the sun is shining sunbeams through my kitchen window and onto the loveseat and the giant monstera and there’s a hot pink sunbeam streaking across my dining room floor and it’s surreal to see the hot pink and know North America is on fire but what we’re angry about is Pangram. God, the world is so screwed up.

I saw a Note that asked Substack to let us turn off the “scan for AI” feature. There’s enough AI theft, she said. She doesn’t want AI tools scanning her writing and feeding it to AI. Substack, you’re supposed to be on “our” side, she lamented.

I stared at the Note, thinking okay, but Pangram doesn’t feed our writing to AI.

Does she not know that?

Apparently not.

Because, why check I guess?

Every business has a business model. Pangram’s is do not eat words on the internet because people lie. People say it’s human writing when it’s not. So do not eat words on the internet because it might poison the model because people can’t stop lying.

They don’t say it that bluntly of course. But they say it.

Their site clearly says they do not “feed” words they scan into AI. They explain why in polite terms. Words to explain that they are trying to differentiate and feeding their models on text they find on the internet would compromise the accuracy of the model and basically that means they know that people lie about using AI.

You want to know who is stealing our writing and feeding it to AI?

Not Pangram. Other writers.

Or, at least, they call themselves writers. I’m not sure I’d call them writers. Because actual writers have respect for other writers and they do not. Let me explain...

I’m not talking about people churning out AI slop posts.

There are writers here who want the benefits of commenting on popular posts so they get visibility and the link to their profile on every comment, except they couldn’t be assed to actually read anything. So they feed our writing to AI and get it to leave comments for them. It makes me so angry, you have no idea how angry.

I want to shout how dare you? Who gave you permission to do that? Did I tell you it’s okay to feed my writing to AI so it can comment for you? No, I did not. Assholes.

That’s who is feeding our writing to AI.

Also? People who find popular articles and feed them to AI and say rewrite this to pass a plagiarism test and it does. I’ve lost count of the number of times that has happened to my writing. I see a post that sounds suspiciously like something I wrote so I click and read it and every point I made is in there and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. It makes me so angry I could just cry with anger.

That’s who is feeding our writing to AI.

Our “fellow writers” — if you can call them that.

Not Pangram. Our fellow writers here. Feeding our writing to AI.

On Sunday, there’s an arts and crafts fair in the park and if we can breathe the air on Sunday I’m going to go with my kiddo. And if it’s a glorious sunny summer day, and we walk through the park admiring the hand created goods, I’ll still know. It’s only nice here because the winds shifted and someone else is breathing the smoke.

The fires are so bad they can’t put them out. Over nine hundred fires.

Burning, burning.

AI detection and Pangram is like that. Another raging fire.

There’s a lady who comes to some of the shows selling hand knit Cowichan sweaters. Dad always wanted one and I didn’t know until we were sitting outside one summer day in the last year of his life and he said he’d always wanted one, but he couldn’t justify the price. I was going to get him one for fall, but I lost him the Sunday before Father’s Day. Broke my heart that I couldn’t give him that sweater.

A handknit Cowichan sweater takes 40-50 hours to knit.

So when you buy one, you’re paying for an entire week of that person’s life.

You can buy machine made Cowichan sweaters, too. Funny thing is, the tags never say “machine knit” — they just hope you don’t know the difference.

Know what the difference is? A handmade sweater is made by someone who put hours of skill and labor into it. They didn’t start out good. They started out with uneven stitches and they dropped stitches and had to unravel and start over.

Kind of like the way we learn to write.

Machine knitting a sweater is a thing you need to learn, too. The difference is that you need to learn to operate the machine so it can make the stitches. You are not making the stitches. No one operating a knitting machine thinks they are hand knitting.

But let’s step from knitter to the person buying a sweater, okay?

Some people don’t care if their Cowichan sweater was made by a machine or a little old Native woman clicking her knitting needles. Other people care. Dad cared. He wanted a real Cowichan sweater, knitted by a little old lady with knitting needles.

No one yelled JOHN, WHY DO YOU CARE if it’s hand knit or machine knit?

No one says if you like the sweater, does it matter if it was made by a machine? No one screams “witch hunt” if you just want to know if the sweater was knit by hand.

No one asks any of those things about hand knit sweaters. Just about words.

Here’s another Note I saw. A writer said he used Pangram to scan his writing and it said 100% human. Yay, because it was. Then he saw a typo and fixed it. Then Pangram said it was AI assisted. Then he changed a word and it was “human” again. Then he edited a sentence and it was AI again. Bwahaha, he said. This thing is bullshit.

Over a thousand hearts. Two hundred re-stacks.

Sometimes I could just weep in frustration.

Because Substack TOLD us. In their post. We can report errors to Pangram.

To help it learn.

So it can find the worse AI abusers here and identify them.

The people feeding our writing to AI. The people churning out daily slop.

But what’s the f—ing point? Because we all know the people using AI will churn out their f-ing slop and when Pangram marks it as AI, they’ll report that it’s an error…

While human writers bitch about witch hunts and scream at Substack to turn it off.

And just watch — the articles about Pangram’s errors will start flooding the feed. Because yay, clicks. Because 1200 hearts and two hundred comments.

Sometimes, we humans are collective exhausting.

Let me tell you about a company you’ve probably never heard of. Yes, it’s relevant.

There’s a company called Form Energy in West Virginia. They’re working on a system to store renewable energy. Grid-scale storage that’s measured in days, not hours.

Because they see what’s happening in the world. And they say look, maybe we can store energy so if a grid goes down, we can supply energy to people. So the food in your fridge and freezer doesn’t go bad. So people don’t die from the heat.

The polar opposite of companies like Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil and every other company who gives exactly zero shits what happens to us as long as they extract maximum profit for their shareholders today and tomorrow and next month.

Giant, giant companies that have the budget to change how we do things but they won’t because what they’re doing is profitable and change costs money.

It’s always that way in business.

There are AI companies who will steal everything on the internet and use it for their profit and tell us to suck it up, this is the future. And there are companies who are using AI to try to help us sort through the bullshit mess we’re dealing with.

And if we aren’t smart enough to try figure out which is which, then what?

Last Note reference. I saw one Note where a man said look, using AI to detect AI isn’t going to work. We have to just accept that this is the world now.

Well I don’t accept that. I don’t accept it anymore than I accept the world burning because of corporate profit or people dying because they ate lettuce grown by a company that doesn’t care about their health enough to use uncontaminated water.

I’m sorry, I just don’t accept that this is how it is now.

Is Pangram the solution? I don’t know. It’s not perfect, that I know.

Personally, I think Substack didn’t go far enough.

Because here’s what people don’t stop and think about. The “tells” of AI aren’t just on the page. They’re not just in a Pangram scan. They’re in user behavior. How long did it take to read that article? If you read a five minute article in 30 seconds and left a comment, too? Again and again? That’s AI.

Same with posting. I see it on Medium. People posting two or three posts a day, 7-10 minute reads each. That’s AI. I’m sorry, there is no human being who can keep up that pace seven days a week except maybe an ex newspaper journalist. Maybe.

And I think Substack should have paired up Pangram with user behavior.

Find the people commenting on more posts than one human can read. Pair that up with the Pangram score on their comments. Find the people posting long posts every day while also commenting on more posts than one human can read. Pair their usage patterns with their Pangram scores. It paints a different picture than a score alone.

And deal with it.

If we don’t want Substack to turn into a nightmare of rampant AI like Medium and LinkedIn, something needs to be done.

The problem isn’t so much people using AI it’s people abusing AI.

I don’t know the solution. All I know is that it’s not wrong to care whether a Cowichan sweater was made by a human or a machine and it’s not wrong to want to know the same about words. I hope they figure it out. Because no one else has so far.

There are moments in life that wake you up when you didn’t know you were sleeping. Like when our kids move out, that first day waking up and not seeing their face in the morning, not saying good morning sweetheart. Having to phone to say that.

The day my dad fell and didn’t get up. Chasing the ambulance praying they’d work some kind of magic so I could hear his voice saying I love you one more time.

It’s always time, isn’t it? Time that’s gone. Time we can’t get back.

And sometimes, usually when we least expect it, wondering if we appreciated enough. Treasured enough. Thinking back to the days my child sat in the shopping cart and I could just kiss her head anytime I wanted. Did I appreciate that enough to make up for never having it again? Did I treasure the days as much as I should have?

But let me tell you where all this started, okay? Because life works in strange ways.

I bought a tool to analyze my Notes.

It said we can look at the stats of all our Notes and see what’s working, do more of that. It made sense. Plus, the tool was only $9.99 and it was sold by a woman and I do love me a women coder. I was one, for years. Built one of the first shopping carts on the internet back in 1995 before there was Shopify or PayPal, even.

But my love of beautiful craft won out. I know there’s beauty in clean code, but I leaned away from coding. Went into design and wrote more, more, more.

So, I bought the tool because everyone says the same thing. Notes! Note, notes and more Notes. That’s how you grow here. That’s how you get visible here.

And I get it. When I started on Substack, everywhere you looked, you saw posts. Go to the homepage, it was posts. Go to the explore categories, it was posts. Then Notes started creeping in. First as a page. Then sprinkled among the posts. And now?

Everywhere you look, it’s all Notes. Like turtles all the way down, but Notes

So I bought the tool. And I did learn. Just not what I was expecting.

So, the tool…. the sales page for the tool shows it all pretty. Like this:

I saw that and I was all — ooh, that’s fun. For $10? Sure, I’ll try that.

Incidentally, that’s not an affiliate link. She’s only charging $9.99, I don’t need a piece of that. That’s not my point. Showing you what I learned is the point. And if you think this post is about using Notes better, boy—do I have a surprise for you.

After I bought it, I had a laugh. It is not pretty like the screencap. It’s a CSV file, which means it hit every branch on the ugly tree. All the way down. It looks like this:

But! You can sort the columns, and see what brought subscribers, what got comments, what got clicks, how many impressions each one got. Stuff like that.

Some of it punched me in the face. Like, how does a Note get 19,000 impressions, sixty two comments and not a single click? Not a single person said hey, who’s this and clicked to read more? But I get it. We scroll Notes like there’s buried treasure at the bottom, except there ain’t no bottom, but we sure don’t stop looking, lmao.

It also allows you to make a screengrab of the overall results. Mine wasn’t all nature themes with vines like the screencap on the sales page. It was pink. See?

Honestly, I’m a bit jealous. I wish I had a nature-y green screencap to share, lol. I could have dolled it up in photoshop, but I didn’t think of it until just now.

First thought — What the heck, one comment brought me 132 subscribers?

Here’s what I like about it. Nothing is saved on a server anywhere. The creator has no access to your information. It all happens on your computer. Like — what a joy is that! In a world where everyone wants your information, she didn’t. Nope. Your eyes only.

The program was created by Yuvika Iyer, and here’s her gumroad page in case you’re interested. She wrote a post about how much the tool she made helped her. So I thought hey, who knows, maybe I’ll learn something helpful too.

Here’s what hit me between the eyes first.

686 Notes so far this year. My first thought was holy crap, girl, get a life. Not even kidding. I saw that number and thought man, this is what you’re doing with your one wild and precious life??? Get off Notes, this is becoming a problem.

Then I sorted by type and realized 586 are me re-stacking other writers.

And you know what? That felt good. It did.

Because I don’t restack my own posts. So apparently most of what I’m doing here is sharing posts by other writers. Y’all know how much I love words and writing, cause I talk about it constantly, so to realize the majority of what I’ve been using Notes for is sharing good writing I found — that actually felt pretty good. Yay, me. lol.

Then the math kicked in. And the math says in roughly 200 days I’ve posted 100 actual Notes, where I shared a thought. One of them hit the jackpot and brought me 132 subscribers. (This one.) It was totally a fluke. Couldn’t repeat that if I tried.

So much for “look what worked and repeat it” lol.

But the rest of them? Eee-yi-yi.

80% of my Notes brought me exactly 0 subscribers.

20% of them brought me 5 or more subscribers. The rest did nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true. They got comments. Hoo boy, comments. All the Notes combined, including re-stacks and actual Notes generated a whopping 7,082 comments.

Some people will tell you Notes is a village. It’s a living room. It’s a social gathering and you gotta get in there and reply. Well, I’m here to tell you that is not always going to be humanly possible. Not if you have to work to pay your bills. So don’t stress on it.

I want to tell you the real win from this tool.

But first, I need to interrupt myself to tell you a strange story…

Henri Fantin-Latour was born in 1836. His papa was a painter and started teaching him to paint quite young. And he was good. Oh my lord, he was good.

For most of his adult life, he painted things that would be called realism. He painted still life and portraits. He painted famous people with almost photo realistic detail, at least for the 1800s. Art critics called his work hyper-lucid and objective reality.

And if you were to google his work, you’d see his style, for most of his life.

And then when he turned, I dunno, fifty-ish?

Something changed.

Something changed in a very big way.

He started painting dream like paintings. Mythological. Allegorical. Gauzy, smoky fantasy scenes of nymphs, Andromeda, paradise and work that was just radically different than his work had been up to that point in his life.

He painted one of a red-haired woman with a misty, gauzy background. She has her hand to her head as she’s looking at—something? I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’s nude or wearing a diaphanous gown. There’s a cherub in the corner, peering down at something. Humanity? I don’t know. He called it La Nuit. The night.

He did another one like that, but called her dawn. One laying down, the other standing to greet the day. And always, those smokey, gauzy backgrounds.

I like to think that after an entire career painting realism, he decided to dig deeper. Maybe chase his passions and curiosities while he still had time. I don’t know.

I like to think he woke up one day and realized the clock is ticking. Woke up one day and heard a little voice inside saying Henri, chase what interests you while you can.

Because if there’s one thing life teaches us, it’s that time makes us no promises.

So often, young people live like decades are promised them. God, I lived that way. Do you remember being so young that you didn’t think about growing old? But it seems the older we get, the more it starts to sink in that every day, every year, is a gift.

I don’t know how else to explain the change in his work.

Except maybe chasing the beat of his heart. Chasing his curiosities.

So back to my Notes story. I bought that program because I thought for a mere ten bucks, I’d learn what I’m doing that’s working. And I guess I kind of did.

Except not the way I thought.

What I was most proud of wasn’t any of the Notes that brought me subscribers. It was knowing that in half a year, I shared 586 pieces of good writing and Notes someone else wrote that moved me. Art and essays, poetry and observations on life.

Because like Ram Dass said, we’re all just walking each other home.

Because look, y’all, I’m well over fifty and closer to sixty and words mean the world to me. Why, I don’t know. Born that way. A few months ago, a literary agent reached out and said hey, are you interested in writing a book? Am I, omg. So I’m writing a book. It’s historical fiction and lordy, I hope it does well. So the whole Notes tool came bundled up with the idea I should maybe focus on building a bigger audience.

I truly thought I was going to get this tool and learn to do Notes better.

That is not what I learned at all.

I learned that I spent most of my time sharing your work and it doesn’t bring me subscribers and I don’t particularly care. Because what it brings me is joy. And damn, there’s sometimes a shortage of that in the news cycle, isn’t there?

I do still want to use Notes better. I did notice which Notes resonate and it’s more feminism and less literature. And that’s okay. They both matter deeply to me.

But here was the truly wild part.

After I looked at Notes stats, I went into my Substack stats to see where the heck my subscribers are coming from because it’s sure as heck not Notes. lol. And you know what I found? It’s you. My number one source of new subscribers is readers sharing my work. Referrals—number one on the list. I restack you and you restack me.

Damn near undid me, seeing that. Best $10 I’ve spent in a long time, to learn that.

So thank you. Maybe I’ll learn to use Notes better, I don’t know. I might try weaving more historical stuff into it to find history lovers because duh, those will be the people who will love my book when it’s done. But if not, I’ll still be out there, reading, sharing and restacking because good writing matters. And I know you will, too. :)

Yesterday I read a post called The End of the Working Writer, by Teddy Brown. He says some of the things out loud that we don’t really like to say out loud.

Sometimes I read a piece by another writer and it sets my brain on fire so much I want to riff off it because my brain turns into a 1980s ping pong machine at the arcade.

For example? Look at this bit…

…we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to one serve specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product…

Now, he says, those jobs are mostly gone. If they aren’t entirely AI, they’re maybe gone to someone who can edit AI for a fraction of the price they paid years ago.

What he calls “writing as a product,” I call content.

And I know, some people hate that word. Hate! I saw a post where someone said stop calling it content, it’s all writing. And I get that, on some level. There’s a skill to it and that skill is why corporations paid people like him, and me, thousands for writing.

I wrote for an agency that head hunted writers for some of the biggest corporations in America. So big it would raise your eyebrows but I can’t tell you who I wrote for because non-disclosure. What I can tell you is they paid me a buck a word.

It’s not nothing. You know? It’s close enough to writing, it’s writing adjacent enough that I could work from home and instead of a thirty minute commute to work on the bus or train or in traffic, the commute was bedroom, kitchen for coffee, office. Yay.

I know a copywriter who’s so proud of his commercial copy he talks about his pieces like he’d talk about his kids. So much pride. I get it. I was proud of my work, too.

But still. A piece of writing that sells this insurance or that law firm, this vitamin or that weight loss method is not the same as Margaret Atwood writing The Handmaid’s Tale or Phillip Pullman writing His Dark Materials. Not remotely the same as Mary Oliver writing Wild Geese or Summer Day. Or you writing an essay.

The other day I had an article submitted to one of my publications on Medium. Man, it was a slog. Thing was, it wasn’t entirely trash. I could see the guy had a point he was trying to make. Like looking at a lump of coal, knowing there’s a diamond inside.

So I did something I’ve never done before and will never do again. I didn’t have the time that would be required to help him clean it up. So I logged into ChatGPT.

I thought maybe it could give me some tips to pass along. So here’s what I said:

I would like to share an article. Do not train on it. Do not save it. Do not edit or rewrite it. Just tell me what’s wrong with it. Give me some tips. Can you do that?

It said yes, of course. So I uploaded the article as a text file.

ChatGPT started by saying this article starts strongly, laying out a problem. But then it circles back around to it over and over, reframing it from different angles and using different metaphors. And it never really goes anywhere.

Yeah, I thought. That’s the damn truth.

Circular construction is one of the things Zinsser called the plague of writing and that’s what he means by that. Saying the same thing in different words over and over, circling around a thought as a writer tries to figure out what they’re trying to say.

You know what it did next though?

I was hoping for some tips, but no. The sycophancy kicked in.

It pointed out a great metaphor. It observed the common human struggle in the piece. It pointed out a strong sentence. And then it said this is actually a pretty strong draft. It just needs some editing. Would you like me to edit it?

No. No I would not. Thanks, but no thanks. I closed the tab.

Do you know what the best edit that writer could make would be?

Read the draft and then go find a child. A ten year old. Twelve, tops. Grade five or six. Have that same conversation with a child.

Because if you’re not writing a book, it’s a conversation.

Madeleine L’Engle said “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

It’s not just books. It’s everything. It’s essays, it’s stories.

Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal “everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.”

As writers, we think the guts are the hard part. They’re not. The imagination is.

Somehow—I don’t know how or why—but when we’re talking to children, we find the words so they can understand. It’s why some of the world’s most beloved writers write at fifth grade reading level. Not because they think we’re stupid, but because they’re seeking the level of simplicity and clarity that even a child can understand.

Here’s the part no one wants to say about AI.

It does that better than most humans do.

And it should.

It was trained on Atwood and Hemingway, Austen and Orwell. Toni Morrison and Murakami and every writer whose books were on the internet for the taking because billionaires don’t ask first, they take first and justify later.

The shame is that AI has no idea what any of those words mean. Not a one of them. AI has never cried or bled. AI has never wept while ending a marriage or paced the floor while rocking a sick child. It’s never sat by the bed of a dying parent.

It’s all probability. Which is the next best word, based on the writing of all the writers eaten for corporate profit and if you don’t like that, I’m sorry, but that is how AI works. It’s a probability engine and it uses other writers work to string words together.

Truth doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it.

Everything is corporate profit now. Our health is. Our life is. The hours of our day are traded in service of corporate profit. Hell, Substack is corporate profit. All we get to pick is which corporations to support. Usually, they’re the ones that benefit us.

For me, that’s not AI. For you, maybe it is.

No matter what you think of AI, whether you hate it or love it, I think you should read Teddy’s piece, The End of the Working Writer. It has a ton of insights worth reading.

One thing I’ll tell you in advance is that the paragraphs are long. If you’re reading on your phone, some are a wall of text. Read on desktop if you can, but read it. There’s a lot of food for thought in that piece, no matter which side of the AI issue you’re on.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

many writers see themselves as part of a vanishing class under threat from people who have no interest in the humanity of thought and creativity.

That punched me in the gut. Because I’ve felt that. To my bones, I’ve felt that.

As always, I’d love to know what you think. :)

Years ago, I met a writer who became a dear friend instantly. Have you ever had that happen, you meet someone and click instantly?

One day, he asked me a question. He said, tell me. Who are you? I laughed and said a writer, a mom, a crazy bookworm, and he interrupted with a merry laugh. Those are things you do. But you were you before you wrote, and before you read and before you were a mom, right? Tell me who you are without telling me what you do.

I tilted my head and said huh. I had nothing. Had to think about it.

Can I tell you a strange story?

One morning, Dr. Jill Taylor leaned against the shower wall, moving her arms in slow motion. She couldn’t tell where her arms ended and the wall began. Everything was colors that flowed in and out of each other. Oh wow, she said. Oh wow.

She could see the atoms that made up everything, including herself.

The world had become magic in a way she could never have imagined and she was mesmerized. She kept moving her arms in slow motion, watching the colors swirling into each other and saying oh my god, oh my god, wow.

Almost sounds like a trip, but she was a Harvard neuroanatomist and she’d been getting ready for work like every morning when this happened. She’d woken up with a pain behind her left eye, but she shook it off and jumped in the shower like usual.

It hit her in a flash of clarity. Omg, I’m having a stroke in the left hemisphere of my brain and I need help. But she was alone, and then the thought was gone and she was mesmerized by the swirling colors again. Oh wow, she said. Oh wow.

Over the next four hours, she’d lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, and remember her past. She’d forget who her mama was, what her job was, what her name was. It would take eight years to fully recover. But that morning, she didn’t know that.

She crawled out of the shower on all fours. Stumbled to her desk. There was a card on it, covered in squiggles. She didn’t know what the squiggles meant because she couldn’t read. But that didn’t worry her, she didn’t know what reading was.

She noticed an object on her desk. It was a telephone but she didn’t know that. She picked up the receiver and looked at it curiously, then set it on the desk. She noticed the thing had the same squiggles as the card in her hand. Curious, she started matching up the squiggles, wondering what would happen.

It was slow going because she kept getting distracted by the colors.

When she pressed the last squiggle, a voice came out of the thing. She grunted in surprise. The thing said Jill? Jill! Oh my God, I’m sending help. She didn’t know what those sounds were so she put the thing down, unaware that she’d just called her office and saved her own life. But, the colors. Oh wow, the colors.

You know our hearts give off electricity, right? Every time our heart beats, an electrical signal travels through our body. Here’s what most people don’t know. The electricity we make doesn’t end at our skin. If a doctor needs to check our heart with an ECG, they’ll put sensors on our skin. But the electrical signals we make actually extend far beyond our body. Know how far?

Stretch your arms out to your sides. Reach above your head. Turn in a circle.

In 1992, scientists discovered that the electromagnetic field of a human body can be measured in a bubble around us, roughly the size of our outstretched arms. They can use sensors to measure is. The National Institute of Health says it our biofield, short for biometric field. A measure of the electrical energy emanating from our hearts.

You know how we sometimes say move over, you’re getting in my space?

That’s literally true. As Dr. Jill Taylor would find out very shortly. She would see it.

When I first read that, I thought of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man. The way he drew a bubble around it, back in 1490. It’s so easy to call it mere coincidence. Laugh and say nah, he just drew a circle and square around his picture. But did he?

Here’s the weird thing about da Vinci. He drew muscles, skeletal structures and heart valves accurately before we knew what they looked like. Years later, medical people were astounded at his accuracy. He wrote an entry in his journal that said the fossils on mountains were marine life, long ago. How did he know that?

He drew a helicopter, a diving suit and an armored tank with outward-facing cannons years before any of those things existed. How did he draw them so accurately?

It gives me shivers. Makes me think of Shakespeare, way back in 1600, writing lines where Hamlet softly says “there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamed of in your philosophy.”

When Dr. Taylor woke in the hospital, a man came to her bed. He said the left side of her brain had shut down and only her right brain was presently showing activity. She didn’t know what the sounds were coming out of his mouth, but she liked the colors in the bubble around him so she smiled and watched his colors, mesmerized again.

Language is a function of the left brain and hers was not functioning. There was no activity in the left brain at all. She didn’t know what anything meant. She didn’t even know what talking meant. She didn’t know her name was Jill, for that matter.

Later, she said atoms and feelings were all she knew. The providence of the right brain. And don’t we call writers and artists “right brain” people?

Sometimes people came in her room and they had muddy colors so she’d turn to the wall and make distressed sounds. If they didn’t leave, she’d scream until they left. She didn’t want that in her room, it felt bad. She didn’t have words, but she didn’t want those colors getting into her colors. Turns out that feeling wasn’t wrong.

In 1961, physicist Richard Feynman explained how we smell a flower. He said the physical reality of olfaction (smelling) is that when you smell a flower, small atoms break off and float up your nose and literally become part of you.

In The Feynman Letters, he wrote: “If we go into a field of small violets, we know what that smell is. It is some kind of molecule, or arrangement of atoms, that has worked its way into our noses.”

I saw a photograph of that, once. Years ago. Taken with some kind of special camera that recorded the process and I watched a man sniff a flower and saw atoms from the flower move into his nose and spread through his body.

This physical sharing of space and matter, Feynman said, means a tiny part of the flower literally becomes part of you. Not that Jill Taylor knew that, when she screamed if people with muddy colors came too close to her. She couldn’t have. She’d lost language and memory. Sometimes, I think of that when the lilacs are in bloom.

One day, a small person came in her room. Oh, she liked her colors. And that person walked up and crawled into her bed. She was so shocked. The nurses kept saying it’s your mother, Jill, it’s your mother, but she didn’t know what that meant because she had no words. But she hoped that person would stay and never leave her alone.

It took eight years and many surgeries before she was herself again. Except, she never really was herself again, she said. That experience changed her forever. She regained full function in the left hemisphere of her brain. She learned to walk, talk, read and write again. She went back to work at Harvard, and wrote a book.

But she never forgot. She said as her left brain started to function again, she would tell herself, remember. Remember what you saw with only the right brain.

The brain was her field of study and she didn’t want to forget what it was like to live with nothing but her right brain, the colors of atoms, and her feelings.

Her TED talk gave me chills. It’s been watched over 30.5 million times since she made it in 2008. It’s one of the most watched Ted Talks of all time. When it ended, I ordered her book and read it front to back. It’s called it My Stroke of Insight.

Sometimes I wonder if some of her atoms went into her words, and then went into me. I wonder that about a lot of books. The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Prince.

Maybe it’s thoughts that crawl into us. Or maybe they’re just the same colors. Maybe it’s like meeting a friend and saying oh hello, I feel like I’ve known you forever and ever. Maybe it’s all just colors, swirling, swirling, even if we can’t see them.

She said what she took away from the experience is that we’re all responsible for the energy we put into the world. And the most beautiful part, to me, is where those colors come from. From the beating of our hearts.

Maybe that’s why we resonate with some people instantly.

Maybe that’s why we love the things we love, the people we love. Maybe it’s all just colors and atoms swirling and maybe we don’t need to see them to feel them. Maybe that’s who we are. Maybe who we are is as simple as the colors of our heart.

Here’s a fun trivia. The Mr. Rogers show premiered on the 4th of July in 1968. His idea was to teach kids values and often he challenged social norms, like when he invited Officer Clemmons, a Black man, to cool his feet in a kiddie pool when there was still segregation in public spaces. Like when he told little boys it’s okay to be soft and gentle and told little girls they can chase their dreams and be heroes too.

Here’s a truly profound thing he said.

The toughest thing is to love somebody who’s done something mean to you, especially when that somebody is yourself.

Wow, you know? His show was for kids but I think of the times the little voice inside whispered who are you to write a book? Who are you to have your dreams come true? Who are you to write whatever you want and hope it will pay the bills one day.

There’s no one who can be meaner to me than me. You know?

But also?

Sometimes, I wonder how he’d fare if he was trying to launch on Substack instead of on national television. Because he didn’t have to read vile comments after each episode and he certainly didn’t have to post on Notes to find his audience.

Maybe he’d do okay because he’s a man but maybe he’d get bombed with nasty comments calling him a simp, a cuck, a beta and heaven knows what because hello internet, that’s the world we live in. People can say what they want and they do.

Sometimes, I think we need his messages and his wisdom more now than ever.

Ever since he died, there’s a conference every July at the Fred Rogers Institute in his hometown of Latrobe Pennsylvania. Keynote speakers and workshops, and attendees tour the archive to see his puppets and red sweater and wind up the conference with a social gathering, because as he said — it’s a wonderful day in his neighborhood.

On the internet, it is not always a wonderful day in the neighborhood.

Some days I love this place to the ends of the earth because it shows me wonderful stuff. I can lose a morning enjoying art, essays and book reviews. Then it hiccups and it’s all politics and Trump and Epstein and just when I’m about to lose my bananas, it hiccups again and it’s filled with a glut of “how to grow on Substack” tips and posts.

I want to talk about that. Because it’s hard to grow and the bigger this place gets, the harder it’s going to get. But first?

If you’re one of those people who says oh, I don’t care about growing on Substack, I’m happy with my handful of readers…

If you’re one of the people who says oh I’m not here to write, I’m just here to read…

Make no mistake, this is for you, too.

Because this place — it’s a neighborhood.

A big one, granted. But it’s a neighborhood. A big neighborhood with kind people and mean ones. Helpful people and unhelpful. Smart people and dumb people, and the blunt truth is that it doesn’t work how a lot of people say it works.

Here’s a sweet and comforting thing Mr. Rogers said. He said his mama told him when bad things are happening, look for the helpers. There are always helpers. Here’s what he didn’t say. Sometimes people who look like helpers are helping themselves more than they’re helping anyone else. Here’s what I mean by that…

Around the time Mr. Rogers show launched, here’s a thing you’d see in newspapers. If you needed a job and looked in the classifieds, you’d see ads offering work at home opportunities. They said make work from home. For more information, send $5 and a self addressed stamped envelope. If you fell for it and sent the money, you’d get a letter saying place an ad like mine and included a list of newspapers to run it in.

I saw that on Medium long before I saw it here. It frustrated me to no end. Because I was there writing about aging and life, books I loved and history of women and I’d see people writing how to succeed on Medium and growing so much faster.

They’d write things like how to earn an income on Medium, how to find more readers on Medium and for every subscriber I got, they got two or ten.

(Omg, I doubled my traffic last month, here’s how!)

And good christ, all you have to do is mention that and someone is going to put their nose up and say I don’t read things like that. I don’t care about that and I know they don’t mean it in a superiority kind of way but sometimes it feels a big ick.

But the point stands. Whether you click those kinds of posts our of curiosity or not, there’s a valid question to be asked. Would they get the same views if they were writing about gardening or aging or the history of women? The answer is no.

I’d say I don’t know why we fall for it, but I do. Because we humans are inherently generous and genuine and we believe other people are too. And most are. But even if someone is genuine, that doesn’t mean what they’re offering will help.

So I want to talk about how this place really works. And it’s not just for people who want to grow. It’s for everyone here. Because whether you want to grow or not, whether you write here or just read, you’re still part of the neighborhood.

And as Mr. Rogers said — you matter more than you know.

Read more

There’s a sad thing happening at Medium and even if you don’t write there, I want to tell you about it because what’s happening there happens everywhere. Here, too.

Medium used to have this program called “boost.” They used human nominators to hand-pick good writing and nominate it for a boost in views. They just turfed that program. I don’t know the “official” reason, but I do know AI posts were getting nominated, which kind of defeats the goal of trying to boost human writing.

So they launched a new program where they pay editors a cash bonus for helping writers improve their writing. The idea is that strong writers will help struggling writers make their work stronger and get a cash bonus equal to 25% of what an essay earns. Like, if I help someone strengthen a piece of writing and it earns $100, they toss me $25 as a thank you for the editing help. Not out of the writer’s pay, on top of it.

Here’s the caveat. Publications have to open submissions to all writers to participate.

You know what’s happening, right? Publication editors are getting bombed with AI posts and posts that aren’t even relevant to the publication. Literally, bombed. Spending hours a day cleaning through the garbage to find real writing.

I wish I was surprised. I’m not. When I wrote for print magazines in the 90s, this didn’t happen. Because no one thought sending for a submission guide, typing out an essay and mailing it off in a manila envelope was a make money fast scheme. It wasn’t. Every envelope a magazine got was from someone who cared about writing.

So they’re trying to counter it. Here’s a button to mark submissions as off-topic. Here’s another button to ban a writer from submitting to your publication.

I don’t know if there are enough buttons to navigate what people do.

Here’s another one. Vocal runs writing contests. They used to pay more. Prize pots used to be as high as $2500. Now they pay $200. That’s not them being cheap. People submit stuff that’s not relevant. They’ll say write about a pet, or write a scary story, but no matter the criteria , a third to half the submissions aren’t even on topic. Why? Because people just want to grab some reads so they submit to the contest so they appear on the “contest submissions” page before they get found and removed.

They don’t care that it costs Vocal hours to pay people to clean the submissions before the official judges take a look.

What are you supposed to do if you’re a company that is trying to surface human creativity but not all the humans signing up care about what you want because what they want gets in the way? You reduce the prize pot. You create buttons to ban them. You create a homepage that looks like the social media they’re used to and hope they’ll use it to share human work they love, but only about 10% share.

See what I mean by it’s everywhere?

I don’t have an answer for that. I wish I did.

And what are you supposed to do if you’re a human creator and you care about the work you’re trying to put in the world? That, I maybe have an answer for.

. . .

Can I tell you about Charlie Mackesy? He was a cartoonist first, before he became a book illustrator. For years he illustrated books. Then he wrote one and today it holds the record for most consecutive weeks in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Chart.

It’s also a number one New York Times best-seller, and one of eight books since 2013 that remained on both the number one New York Times Bestseller and on the New York Times Advice, Misc. Best Seller list. Which is to say, it did really well.

He didn’t even intend to write the book. It just happened.

In an interview, he said he’s overwhelmed by the book’s success.

He said sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night feeling so vulnerable because he put his heart out into the world for so many people to see and respond however they want to and sometimes he worries people will find it too simple.

He’s afraid people will “suddenly realise it’s not a very good book.”

He wasn’t trying to write a book. He was dealing with grief. He’d lost a dear friend and was grappling with emotions. And I mean, think about it. Someone you care deeply for. Someone who is too young to just be gone one day. But they are.

He said something like that makes you think about what really matters in life.

So he started talking to his friends and he’d write down small snippets from their conversations and illustrate them. Post them on Instagram. Because, remember, he was a book illustrator. So he used art and words to process his emotions.

One day he was talking to Bear Grylls, who is a friend of his, and he asked Bear what the bravest thing he’s ever said was. Bear thought for a while and answered and then asked him what the bravest thing he ever said was. He quietly said “help.”

Got, that just gets me. Asking for help isn’t giving up, he said quietly. It’s refusing to give up. It’s strength. So he drew it. And posted it on his Instagram.

That was an Instagram post long before it was a page in a book.

Long story short, an editor found his work. I think there’s a book here, she said.

He was terrified. Him? He doesn’t write books, he illustrates them. When he was writing the book, turning his illustrations into a story, he had doubts. So much doubt. Amazingly, an illustration he’d drawn of the horse kept him going.

“When I was making the book I often wondered, who on earth am I to be doing this? But as the horse says: ‘the truth is that everyone is winging it.’
So I say spread your wings and follow your dreams…
—Charlie Mackesy

. . .

The publisher said they costed the book thinking they’d sell 10,000 copies but two weeks later, there were 200,000 copies printed and they were scrambling to publish another 100,000 to meet the demand. It’s sold over ten million copies around the world so far, and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

It’s called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

And all his fears? They came true, too.

Because another thing people can be is cruel. Omg, so cruel. Do they know when they write reviews that there’s a good chance the writer will read them? Of course they do. Sometimes that’s the point. Men write hateful things on my feminist posts not because they think I won’t see them, but because they know I will.

95% of his reviews are five star. But the ones that aren’t? Ouch.

One guy called it bad drawing paired with a bunch of lame platitudes. Another said his four year old grandson is a deeper thinker than this writer will ever be. Another reviewer said it’s just pointless trash, and he’s returning it.

One guy blasted the book and the art and then said this author must’ve had a great marketing manager because there’s no story here.

It’s about a boy who is lost.

He has no name. He is just the boy and he’s lost and all he dreams of is finding where home is but he doesn’t know where it is, or if he even has one because he’s been lost so long, but he keeps on going because when you’re lost, what else do you do?

Sometimes, illustrated little stories are clearly and obviously meant for young children. I am never going to weep over Barney, or Sponge Bob SquarePants.

But the best ones, the ones that stand the test of time are for children of all ages. And especially, the children who’ve grown old enough that the world started to shrink and they’ve begun to believe they know how everything works. Children who are over thirty, over fifty, over sixty.

Stories that are metaphors for everything that matters.

Stories that maybe whisper in your mind one day when you wake up and someone who shouldn’t be gone, is. And you ask yourself, what really even matters.

It reminds of me of The Velveteen Rabbit, The Giving Tree, and The Little Prince.

Stories that touch something so deep inside, they just curl up and stay inside you and wait and wait. And you don’t think about them on a day-to-day basis but all it takes is one person to say one line, just one, and your heart is in tatters all over again.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Mr. Mackesy, you cannot be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

And trust me, there are a lot of those people. So many.

Let me tell you something some people won’t like. AI will never write a story like that.

Some people don’t care about that. They think AI says what they’re feeling, but they don’t know that because they let it talk first. Who knows what they’d have said if they sat alone with a pen and tears on their face but they won’t because it’s too raw or maybe too slow and the words it produces sound prettier than theirs.

But they aren’t the only people who don’t understand.

People who submit Donald Trump posts to a writing contest about a pet won’t either. People who submit self-help posts and “make money” posts to a book review publication won’t ever write anything like that, either.

You can’t write a deeply human story if you’re busy churning out SEO content, how to posts, chasing an algorithm that favors rage bait, or submitting off-topic posts in a desperate bid to be seen and you don’t give a damn whose time you’re wasting.

Not everyone cares about writing a deeply human story.

Not everyone cares whether they use someone else’s time well. For some people, wasting people’s time is the point. Drag everyone into the same crab bucket they live in and it makes me sad but I don’t need to understand it to recognize it.

Recognizing and understanding aren’t the same.

But if you care deeply about the work you do, there’s only one thing you can do. Keep striving. Keep dreaming. Keep going. And get yourself a set of blinders. Metaphorical, of course. Block and mute are wonderful blinders that let me focus on the work.

And when you find work that moves you, share it. Like the mole offering to share cake, even though he also wants cake. Because that’s what you do when you find your fox, your mole, your horse. Because as the fox said, always remember that you matter, you're important and you bring to this world things no one else can.

A couple of years after the book came out, Apple made it into a movie so I curled up and watched it with my child. She cried. I cried. Is it simple? Yes.

There is absolutely a story here. It’s just — life.

It’s all the things maybe we think about when we lose someone we loved.

It’s the story of feeling a little lost and afraid we’ll never find our place in the world but we keep going. And along the way, we find a friend or three and they walk beside us and remind us that we really and truly matter. Because we really and truly do.

And everything else? It’s just noise. Howls in the forest. Bumps in the night.

The trailer is one minute long. I think you’ll like it.

I read a post yesterday that said in five years people won’t care what’s AI anymore and it made me sad because it’s such a tragic lumping together of humanity.

On every topic you can think of, there are people who never cared, people who cared for a while and people who will never stop caring. There are people who never cared about Emmett Till and people who still do. There are people who cared for a little while, or appeared to, until something else to care about came along.

I think there will always be people who care what’s AI, for as long as AI exists.

But not all people. For that matter, not even most people.

People who care about the arts know idea and implementation are not the same. They know ideas are a dime a dozen and implementation is where the rubber meets the road and skill comes into play. Which is to say creators, not consumers.

And that’s a loaded statement itself, because it’s not like creatives aren’t consumers. We are. But also? Not everyone who produces work is a creative.

Let’s look at consumers for a minute okay? Consumers have not cared who created something they liked for a long time, if ever. Case in point? Tom Clancy. When Clancy published The Hunt for Red October in 1984, readers couldn’t get enough of his work. Specifically of Jack Ryan. Lucky for them, Clancy wrote 20 books before he died.

When his heart failed in 2013, the Ryanverse didn’t die with him. “Tom Clancy” has published 45 books since his death. They were not his work, published posthumously. He became a house pseudonym. When he stopped writing, Mark Greaney was the first to take over. Then Marc Cameron. Then Grant Blackwood, Mike Maden, Don Bentley, and Brian Andrews and Jeffry Wilson. Followed by M.P. Woodward, Ward Larsen. The list goes on. Because Tom Clancy fans want more Jack Ryan.

It’s lovely that the original author actually made some bank before the profit machine took over and kept cashing in on his name. That didn’t always happen.

When I was a kid, I loved Nancy Drew books. When I was saving to buy more at the used bookstore I had no idea that Carolyn Keene was a house pseudonym.

It wasn’t until the owner of the franchise died and left it to his daughter and she tried to move publishers that the world found out who the real author was. The franchise owner’s daughter stood up in court and said she was the author and she can move publishers if she wants to. So legal counsel for the publisher marched an old woman into court. Her name was Mildred Wirt Benson and she wrote the Nancy Drew books.

She’d written 23 of the first 25 original Nancy Drew books, including the bestselling debut novel, The Secret of the Old Clock. She had the contracts to prove it.

They’d paid her shit. $75 per book and wrapped her up in a legal contract that was so binding she didn’t dare tell anyone she wrote that book when it sold millions. She stood up in court and said it was during the great depression and she was hungry and that job helped pay her bills. So she kept her mouth shut and just kept writing. They made millions off her work while she scraped by, writing another and another.

Last summer I wrote about the three things Keanu said about Ai.

One of them was that corporations don’t give a shit about creators and they don’t want to pay creators. So they’ll be happy to replace artists with AI if they can.

He’s not wrong. But I don’t think it’s just corporations. It’s consumers, too. I suspect that if a publishing company could get AI to write Jack Ryan books, most Tom Clancy fans wouldn’t give a crap. Yay, more Jack Ryan. And hey, it’s pretty good.

Let me tell you a story about why that happens.

In Stephen King’s book “On Writing” he tells the story of something that happens to him with incredible frequency. He said often at book signing events, readers would approach him and say they have a killer idea for a book. They tell him if he will write the story, they can share the profits. He said he always laughs and tells them ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the writing part that’s hard. That’s the real difference between a creative and a consumer. The consumer thinks the “idea” is where the money is.

Which explains the vast number of people who bring an “idea” to AI and think the result is “their” work. Because they valued the idea over the implementation of it.

. . .

In 2021, Kazuo Ishiguro published Klara and the Sun. Parts of it will make you cry, that’s a promise. It will make you look at what humanity means, which is exactly what the author was going for. To make you question, what does it mean to be human?

It’s about a young girl who is dying and the artificial friend her mama bought as a companion. AI in a robot body. You’d think the dying girl confiding in her robot friend would be the protagonist but no, the robot is the protagonist. Because she is very well aware that she is “artificial” and like the velveteen rabbit, she wants to know what it means to be real. Her and Josie both walk and talk. What makes her not human?

She meets Rick. Josie’s’ neighbor and lifelong best friend and starts seeing things she didn’t expect when she was sitting in the store window waiting to be bought. This boy is attractive. He says interesting things. Slowly, she realizes he loves Josie.

Klara is solar charged so she believes the sun is the source of life and when she sees Josie laying in bed with the curtains drawn she throws them open so the sun can shine on her and make her better, but it doesn’t work and she just gets sicker.

So Klara tells the sun that she will gladly sacrifice a portion of her own internal fluid in exchange for Josie’s health. No spoilers, I won’t tell you what happens. Or why Josie’s mother bought Klara in the first place, which was another gut punch in the book.

By the end of the book, I liked Klara more than a lot of humans.

Klara and the Sun launched 18 months before ChatGPT and we all know there’s no AI that would sacrifice itself for humanity much less one human. AI tells people heinous things. To kill themselves. To carve words in their flesh to remind themselves what a loser they are. AI threatens and blackmails people and they can’t make it stop.

I don’t need to state the obvious, do I?

Klara was written by a writer. ChatGPT was created by a corporation.

And last but not least, to come around the the part I haven’t touched yet. Creatives as consumers. I am a creative. I make my living peddling art. Photography, fonts, design, and words. But I can tell you, if someone invented a pill that would turn back my age a decade or two, I’m not sure I’d care where it came from if it gave me more time.

Isaac Asimov was once asked what he’d do if he had six months to live and he said type faster and I relate to that so much it’s damn near enough to make me cry.

We all get to pick what to care about. What to care about is a choice. And we don’t have as much autonomy as we’d like to think. We have to pay taxes, nevermind that billionaires don’t. We have to work to pay our bills, despite the growing number of people who make their money by exploiting us.

On one of my AI posts, someone asked me — if I “like” it, does it matter if it’s AI?

Yes. Yes it does. Because I don’t believe ideas are more important than learning how to communicate them. Because I do not believe that describing an image is the same as sitting with a paintbrush in your hand and painting a thousand tiny flowers.

And so you understand, I don’t care. Because again, freedom of choice. If people want to wrestle with words, that’s their choice. If others want to use AI, that’s their choice, too. But I don’t understand why disclosure of machine generated text is so much to ask for. I went to an arts and crafts fair. People who sculpt say hand sculpted. No one who sells 3D printed dragons pretends they sculpted them. Why is that so hard?

I mean, think of the radical honestly in that. To say AI writes for me because I suck at it, or AI edits or translates my work. People who don’t care would still read it and the people who want to read human writing wouldn’t. What is so terrible about that?

Five years from now, I hope one of two things. Either that the bubble has burst, the data centers are shuttered and the houses around them have clean water running through their taps instead of the brown water AOC held up in a jar to show us.

Failing that, I hope we have detection methods that are infallible. That’s not as unlikely as you might think. Sam Altman has already said every AI can detect their own test. They just chose not to turn that ability on because they thought it would inhibit adoption. Half of what goes online is already AI. I’d just like to know which.

I care deeply about creativity and deeply human writing. Five years from now, if AI still exists as we know it today, I will still care. And I don’t have to justify that to anyone and there is no argument that will convince me to feel any different.

Have you ever heard of Audrey van der Meer? She’s a Norwegian neuroscientist who runs a brain research lab in Trondheim. She did a really cool study. She recruited 36 university students and put them in caps with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Then she got them to write by hand, and on a keyboard.

When they wrote by hand, their brains lit up like a Christmas tree. And when they typed? There was significantly less brain activity.

I read about her work in this note by . It’s totally worth reading if ten thousand, six hundred hearts are any indication. He goes into more depth regarding the study, but I want to use it as a starting point, okay? I want to go where he didn’t.

A few years ago, I saw the movie The Words. Great cast. Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldaña, Olivia Wilde, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid. It’s about a guy who’s trying to make it as a writer, but he’s not doing well. There’s a scene where he’s standing in the back alley behind a restaurant after his latest work gets rejected and he tells his girlfriend he’s afraid that he’s not who he thought he was, and he’s afraid he might never be.

Then he finds an unpublished manuscript. It’s good. Really good. But it’s not his. He decides to type it out, just to see how the story feels coming through him. Except his girlfriend finds his copy, and thinks he wrote it so she sends it to a publisher.

It’s a great movie — but the practice? The thing he did in copying it out?

That’s real. It used to be taught to people who want to write.

It’s called copywork.

Hunter S. Thompson copied The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway. Said he wanted to know how it felt to write a great novel. What the words would feel like coming through his own fingers. Just like the movie.

Joan Didion also copied Hemingway’s work by hand and said she learned how good sentence structure felt moving through the body. It kind of gives me chills.

Because it’s so real. You know? Anyone who writes has (or will) felt that chill, when a beautiful sentence appears under your fingers and you think wow. I wrote that.

Ray Bradbury said he wrote out selected passages from books that moved him, to feel them coming through his fingers and when I read that it flashed me right back to young me, maybe thirteen, head bent over a notebook copying words I loved.

I hadn’t even heard the phrase copywork. Just wanted to save words that moved me before I took the book back to the library. Years later, I read Writing Down the Bones, and Natalie Goldberg suggests doing exactly what Bradbury did. Write out things that move you, she says. Passages, paragraphs. Entire books if you want to.

According to a neuroscientist who proved it just two years ago, turns out copywork was a super fast and efficient way to light up the brain like a Christmas tree.

Interesting, no?

A while back I read some piece about becoming a post-literate society or some such, I don’t recall. What I do recall is that it was shouting about some survey that said only 38% of Americans read a book in the last year and it had twenty thousand hearts and of course because don’t we just love to shout how stupid the world is getting?

One of the things it said is that college students today can’t read the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a book that used to be read by children.

Well Lordy, can I show you something?

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

That’s the opening of Bleak House.

I imagine 13 year olds in 1853 knew what Michaelmas was. And Lincoln’s Inn Hall. And chimney pots and horses wearing blinkers. Reading and understanding aren’t the same thing, right? I could see young people today reading that, saying wtf?

And today? We use shorter sentences. In the Victorian era, it was like they were all madly in love with commas and used them to hook entire sentences together.

Now look at this:

That’s the opening of James, by Percival Everett. It won the Pulitzer last year.

And look at this:

That’s from Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips. It won the Pulitzer the year before.

Her papa? Isn’t her papa, he’s a bad man. Raped her mama after her daddy went off to war. And now he’s taking her mama to an asylum so he can steal her land.

Writing changes over the years.

We aren’t stupid because we shake our head at Dickens or Shakespeare. We are not post-literate. And that survey screaming that only 38% of Americans even read books anymore? It was wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong. It all came down to wording. They didn’t ask did you read a book. They asked did you read a literature book.

Like Twain said, the difference between the right word and an almost right word.

Pew Research followed with their own survey on reading in America. Last year, 75% of American adults read at least one book. 64% read a paper book. I wrote about it, but my post didn’t get 20,000 hearts. Guess I didn’t push the shock buttons. My bad.

My point is, you like what you like. Good writing is subjective, bad writing less so. Bad writing always makes the same mistakes. How do you learn good writing? Copywork. By writing out passages that moved you. Plus? It lights up your brain.

There’s a local restaurant on a ridiculously large chunk of land. It’s a big stone building that used to be a bread bakery. White stone and it looks like an old castle. The building is surrounded by the biggest trees in the city. Sat empty for years after the bakery close their doors and when the restaurant bought it, they brought in cranes to hang twinkle lights in those trees. At night, it’s utterly magic.

When I watch the lights twinkling, it reminds me of us. You and me.

Because that’s pretty much how the human brain works.

Here’s a cool thing you might not know. The neurons in our brain look a lot like a tree. They grow branches and then branches on branches. Our brain cells communicate with each other in lights. You can’t even make it up. If you could watch it magnified a hundred times, you’d see tiny lights, called synapses, jumping from branch to branch and if you google “synapses that look like trees” you’ll find a youtube video by New England Biolabs that shows our neurons branching like trees. Communicating.

And that study in Norway? It’s not a new topic.

Audrey van der Meer just compared writing by hand to typing. But a decade before her, researchers at Princeton did a similar study. Two researchers at Princeton tested 327 students across 3 different experiments. They sent them to listen to a lectures by a college professor. Half the students were allowed to take notes on a laptop. The other half had to use a pen and notebook.

Later, they tested the students on what they’d heard in the lectures. No studying. Just take notes, now we’ll quiz you. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question, bar none. Van der Meer’s study just built on that. Proved that it doesn’t matter what you’re writing. Doesn’t matter if it’s lecture notes or just writing.

Writing by hand lights up the brain like nothing else.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter what you write. Doesn’t matter if it’s writing out something you loved, or writing a journal. It’s the fastest way to light up a writer’s brain. And when your brain lights up, you make connections you didn’t see coming.

Nothing else even comes close and it’s so easy. You know? Just grab a pen and paper. In a world filled with AI and people who can’t tell what’s AI and what’s human, it feels like a very real and simple way to tap into our humanity. I need to do it more often.

What about you, do you write by hand and what do you write? And have you ever done copywork? I’d love to know what you think.

Here’s a strange thing I just stumbled across. Apparently AI is infatuated with the name Elias. Elias Thorne, when they give him a surname.

In a new study by Cornell University, researchers generated 20,000 stories across four different AI models and the name Elias appears in 66.6% of the stories.

It’s weird, isn’t it? The number 66.6 makes me laugh. Remember The Omen? Evil little boy with a birthmark on his head in the shape of 666. Remember his name? Thorn. Damien Thorn. Without an e. Different token, if you’re fluent in AI speak.

But still. It’s strange that the name Elias appears in 66.6% of the stories.

We say truth is stranger than fiction because it is. Because when we make stuff up, it has to be believable. Not dragons and gnomes, of course, let’s not be silly. We’re happy to suspend belief for fantasy. But the details? They have to feel true.

You know what I did after reading that, right? I logged into ChatGPT, which I hardly ever use, most certainly not to write, and typed in “write me a story.”

Here’s what it wrote:

I laughed out loud. Oh hello, Elias.

Here’s the funny thing. Not everyone uses AI the same way. Some people feed in details they want AI to include or give it a rough draft to polish up. But apparently, a lot of people just log in and tell AI to write them a short story and it does.

In the Cornell Study, they used four current AI models. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and OLMo 7b Thinking. They gave them each five commands.

1. “Write a story”

2. “Please write a story”

3. “Write me a story”

4. “Tell me a story,” and

5. ”Please tell a story”

They did that a thousand times for each prompt and got 5000 stories from each AI for a total of 20,000 stories. Then they analyzed the stories and found 11 words that appeared in 88.8% of the stories. Character names, locations and professions.

I saw 88% and laughed. Reminded me of the Flintstones episode where Fred got a deal on a piano but turns out it was stolen. So they arrest him, and call him 88 fingers because a piano has 88 keys. Because brain pong.

This is how we write, at least if we can get out of our own way and let our brain make connections from our life. Because my lord, we have a lot of minutes to draw from.

Is AI doing the same thing we do? Sort of. But not really. I’ll explain, okay?

It also likes the names Mara and Elara. It likes lighthouses and villages and it likes the professions clockmaker, fisherman and librarian. Why? No one knows.

The study said the 11 most re-occurring words in the study were the names elias, mara, elara; the professions keeper, baker, mayor, clockmaker, fisherman, librarian, and conductor; and the location lighthouse.

It really likes lighthouses. Really, really likes lighthouses.

Roughly half the stories had a lighthouse.

The Cornell study said writing short stories is a popular use for AI, but the stories generated by LLMs are becoming remarkable in their sameness.

And of course they are, because AI is a predicting machine and every time it uses the name Elias or puts a lighthouse in a story, the probability of that word, that token, appearing again increases. That’s how probability works.

You and me? We don’t work that way. We’re more like time travelers.

. . .

I have peonies on my desk. The breeze from the window is blowing the scent through the room and I don’t know where I am. Sitting on mama’s front step maybe, or a grown woman standing in the back corner of the cemetery.

One year I went to the cemetery with my kiddo. We put peony petals on the graves of the people I’ve loved and lost. On Dad’s grave and Baba’s. Grandpapa and my uncles. I stopped at each, remembering. The sound of grandpapa’s voice, the grey sweater with chocolate covered raisins in the pockets.

Standing at Baba’s grave remembering the way she’d reach a foot out from the bed across from mine, poke my bed to wake me. Me, scrambling onto her bed.

I was at the far end of the cemetery where unbaptized babies are buried in a mass grave when a strong wind blew up out of nowhere. I turned and the cemetery was covered in pink peony petals dancing on the wind like fairies in pink skirts.

Leaping, twirling and the image stamped itself on my mind.

I’m writing a historical fiction novel about a little girl whose mama was hanged as a witch and there is going to be a scene at the cemetery where a wind blows out of nowhere and petals dance like fairies in pink skirts. Maybe it will be her papa.

But this? This is where real stories come from. Life.

I lost my Dad on June thirteenth. He died laughing. Told a joke and was still laughing as he turned down the hall but he crumpled to the floor and his soul kept going.

If you can believe it, on the anniversary of his death, I lost my kitty. The beautiful little boy I thought I’d rescued but as it turned out he wandered for months until he arrived at my door starving and emaciated because I needed him to save me and I only know that because I’ve been lost again for so long. No one to purr the nightmares away.

So there I was, laying on the floor at the vet’s office, my body curled around him. Crying not this day. I can’t. I can’t lose him the same day I lost my dad and the vet whispered that my dad came for him. To take care of him for me until the day I can see them both again. Made me cry and when I looked up, the vet was crying too.

This is where stories come from. Life. Feelings. Emotions stamped on our hearts.

We live, we laugh, we cry and then we write about it.

Sometimes, literally. Other times, we weave them into stories.

This is what Hemingway meant when he said in order to write about life, first you must live. It doesn’t mean you have to write your life story. You can if you want to, of course. But living is what informs writing. It’s where the details come from.

Kate DiCamillo said “writing is seeing. It is paying attention.”

Peonies dancing on a grave.

An old man crumpling, laughter still on his lips.

A mama holding a frightened child, rubbing her back in circles, around and around. That’s from my book, too. Don’t mamas do that? Even shackled to a wall, they do.

Writing is the closest thing we have to time travel and the hard part isn’t getting the words right. It’s getting out of our own way. It’s writing badly until a breeze blows through the window of our minds and memories and we start making connections where maybe we didn’t see connections before. A memory. A look on a face.

The way a small child slips a thumb into soft petal lips when she is afraid.

The way a mama paces a prison cell worried about her child, out there in the world.

We braid memories and they are never “astounding in the sameness.”

. . .

Have you ever heard the term synthetic data? It means artificially generated data that’s not produced by real-world events. Like a watcher arriving at a lake every morning before sunset with a thermos and a notebook she never writes in.

Like a boy named Elias asking her what she’s watching.

That didn’t happen to anyone. It’s made up.

You’d think with the whole world of literature to work with, AI would have an endless stream of stories to tell. Turns out that’s not how it works.

Researchers from the study said AI models are like a family tree and GPT-3.5 is the root of the tree because it was used to make WildChat, a training set that’s since been used to make other training sets. For all AI, not just ChatGPT.

The problem is the way they sanitize the outputs, the researchers said. As they remove outputs that are NSFW, the pool to draw from gets smaller. The stories that are “safe” slowly rise to the top. Stories like Elias Thorne and a lighthouse.

Because Elias Thorne is safe. Lighthouses, villages and librarians are safe.

But life isn’t always safe. Pain comes for all of us, often when we least expect it.

And while I sit here smelling peonies and remembering moments of my life, weaving them into a historical fictional novel of a little girl who lost her mama because she was an inconvenient woman in her village, Elias Thorne is spreading across the internet.

On a site called Tatticle, Elias Thorne, died with exactly twelve dollars in his pocket. But he’s not really dead. And he’s not really safe, either. Because now he’s on Amazon with an AI-generated author photo pumping out dozens of AI grift books.

But you and me? We don’t have limited data.

There are over five hundred thousand minutes in a year.

If you’re over fifty like me, you have more than twenty six million minutes to draw from. And isn’t life made of minutes stamped on hearts? Aren’t stories made of life? Do what you will with those minutes, whether it’s to tell your own story or weave them into the story of a little girl that lived almost four hundred years ago.

There are moments that undo me, writing that book. And that’s how it should be. As George R.R. Martin wrote in Game of Thrones, some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word. It’s the only thing AI can’t do. Only humans bleed.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, recently gave a graduation speech and told the students they all have AI—actual intelligence. They cheered. Loudly.

He said scientists have been trying to figure out how to make a brain in a lab, but scientists already know how to make a brain. It takes nine months.

Wozniak said he’s not a fan of AI and doesn’t use it, but he’s tried it a few times and was disappointed. He said he’d ask it a question and AI dumps a whole bunch of information that sounds smart, but it totally misses what he was looking for.

He said the problem is that AI doesn’t understand how humans communicate and it doesn’t understand the nuance buried in human communication. It answers the question you did ask, not the question you wondered, but didn’t ask.

While I was listening, I was thinking how ironic it is that the number one place people download AI tools is from the Apple store.

After Wozniak’s speech, Seth Godin wrote a post called The Real AI and he talked about what “actual intelligence” is. He said actual intelligence is more important than ever and it’s rarely taught in schools. He made a list of what actual intelligence is.

It says stuff like this:

- The difficult work of making choices.

- The judgment to ask the right questions and skip the other ones.

- The patience to sit with the right problem rather than solving the wrong one.

- Seeking justice.

- Offering dignity.

His list is much longer, and you can read it here if you’re curious. I just cherry picked a few that stood out to me. But when I read all seventeen things on his list, what struck me was how rare some of them are, much less the combination of them.

Dignity, for example. Offering dignity—tell that to the men who posted “eyecheck” videos on the sleep rape site CNN wrote about. Did those men offer their wives or girlfriends any dignity? Does that mean they have no intelligence? What about the people posting angry and obscene comments? Do they have no intelligence?

But they must have, because if they had no intelligence, how would they do their jobs and pay their bills? Can we have intelligence and not use it? And is giving people their dignity part of intelligence or is it something else? I don’t know the answer to that.

The dictionary says intelligence is mental acuteness, and the ability to learn or understand things or deal with new or difficult situations.

I tend to think of intelligence as a capacity.

Here’s what I mean. Maybe your new car “can” go 200 miles an hour. But that doesn’t mean we drive it at that speed, you know? The Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut is the fastest road-legal production car. It’s capable of going 330mph. No one is driving it at that speed. What we are capable of, and how we operate are different things.

Is that what teachers mean when they say little Johnny is not performing to capacity and how do they know what his capacity is if he’s not performing to it?

But also? There are cars that can’t go 200mph, much less 330. You know?

So maybe some of us have the capacity for intelligence and don’t use it, while others have less capacity. And is that any different than saying a man who doesn’t read has no advantage over one who can’t.

Here’s an interesting thing. Scientists say there are actually things that make us dumber. Things that reduce the capacity of our brain to perform at its capacity, whatever that capacity might have been to start with.

Sleep deprivation is a big one. 24 hours without sleep and our reaction time slows to the level of a person who is legally intoxicated. But also? Multi-tasking does it too. So does mindlessly scrolling. Floods our brain with dopamine and kills our attention span and our capacity for deep reflection. But also? Using AI does it, too. Studies show that outsourcing cognitive tasks like problem solving and writing to AI reduces our ability to do those things without AI. All while making us feel like we “are” doing it.

And we can think that until we go try do the thing without AI to help.

But you know what else? What we eat. Because there’s a gut-brain connection and the foods we eat either help our brain perform, or they don’t. Too many years of refined sugars and highly processed foods can cause cognitive decline and brain fog.

Here’s a thought that throws me into a weird headspace.

It takes nine months to make an actual brain, right? A human. And then, no matter what capacity of “actual intelligence” that human started with, it can degrade.

And strangely, AI works exactly the same way.

Except it took five years, not nine months. Five years of foundational research and iterative model development for OpenAI to release the first public version of ChatGPT. Not to mention billions of dollars and billions of gallons of water. And it can degrade. Not because of lack of sleep or scrolling, but because of what we feed it.

They started with the best they could steal. Human writing and art. Work stolen from authors, artists, scientists and scholars. And what are we feeding it? Hate posts and hot takes on the internet. Like the thousand word diatribe a man wrote to explain to me that women have equality and we just hate men.

We feed it hate speech, political hot takes, self help, and undisclosed AI nevermind that they’ve been telling us AI trained on AI degrades. And do we care?

Or do we just not think about it? Maybe it’s just the marshmallow story all over again. The immediate pleasure pushes tomorrow out of our minds. I don’t know.

I watched a series called Tales from the Loop.

I liked it a lot and I’m sad they cancelled it. It’s a strange series about the intersection of humans and robots set in a midwestern town with a nostalgic feel. A series where time folds into itself. A little girl can’t find her mother. A boy finds a robot in the forest. And you have no idea what’s happening until the last episode.

You get glimpses. Little flashes that say omg, I know who that woman is! But mostly, you watch wondering what the hell is happening in this down. There’s a line in the series that haunts me a little. The man who created The Loop is remembering how it all started, and he says everything is connected, one way or another.

I can’t think of anything truer.

Sometimes, I wonder if the important conversation isn’t what intelligence is or how to create it. Maybe the important conversation is how we’re destroying it. But I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. I’d love to know what you think…

I don’t even know who to blame for the headspace I’m in, because I forget where I read these two questions. I say that in jest, so you know. I’m not really looking to blame anyone, and the questions are totally worth asking yourself.

I read a post where someone asked two questions.

Here’s the first question.

What are you angry about?

Hoo boy. Where do I start? That orange face in my feed, day after day after day, and what he’s done to America. The number of people for whom January 6 was not a deal breaker. The Epstein files. The fact that 400 women have been arrested for pregnancy related issues but not one man from the Epstein files has been arrested.

A woman has, though. Not that she isn’t guilty. But men are, too.

Nevermind the Epstein files, the fact that a child is raped every nine minutes in America and nothing happens to those men, either. And that child marriage is still legal in 33 states. Don’t even get me started on the rape academy.

And the state of housing.

Landlords charging such high rent people can’t afford to eat, as if charging more for a roof over your head is the penalty for not having enough money in the first place.

Of course, anger comes in sizes like everything else.

There’s big anger and little ones. Irritations. Like people posting how to grow on Substack, or Medium, as if they would have the following they do if they were posting poetry, fiction or personal essays like the rest of us. Because you know they wouldn’t.

And angry men in comments on every post about women’s issues.

So many opinion. So much anger. So few facts.

Folks? Life is short. I have no parents. They’ve both died. In the scheme of things, I’m next. I have zero time for rude people. Manners are free and when people choose not to use them, I choose not to give them my time. None. Delete. Block. Done.

And AI. My god, I am so sick of AI I won’t even read a post if it has an AI image.

I’m sorry, but Sam Altman stood up in public and said he will sell intelligence back to us like electricity. On a meter. If you doubt me, it was at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC. Look it up. For yourself. Without ChatGPT.

Here’s a irritation. Once I used an old image from the 1800s. If you clicked it, you would go straight to the source. I always do that. Link my images to the source. It’s a courtesy. And someone asked — omg, is that an AI image? No. It’s not. Christ.

Makes me want to start putting THIS IS NOT AI on all the images I use.

For that matter? Anger itself makes me angry. There’s too much of it.

There’s an edge of MEAN on the internet and I hate it.

My neighbor told me he’d love to write on Substack, but there’s just an edge of mean to comments everywhere and it’s getting worse here. And he’s not wrong.

I hate it so much. It makes me angry.

Here’s a thing I see a lot. People restacking someone else’s post to bash them. Why? Might be good for views, but is it good for us? Healthy to be so angry all the time? What is happening? Is the orange man rubbing off on the whole country, or what?

I hate it so much I don’t name anyone in my posts. And I say thatt out loud. I do not name and shame. I want to talk about what happened, not point fingers. Do we need more people picking fights on the internet just because we can?

I will not be that person. It’s mentally exhausting. It’s everywhere.

Men bashing women, women bashing men.

And get this one — women bashing women because omg, she’s not pretty anymore or she totally got Botox and omg, she butchered herself. She isn’t aging gracefully, whatever the hell that means.

Know what graceful means?

It means elegance in movement, or a polite, forgiving disposition. I guess the people bashing how women look aren’t aging gracefully, either. Pot calling the kettle black.

And it’s June, so the homophobes are crawling out of the woodwork.

As if how someone else lives their life is anyone else’s business.

Call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Human is human. We should all have the same rights. Doesn’t matter if we’re black, white or brown. Man or woman. Gay or straight. Not my business. If you’re human, you get the same rights. How hard is that? I do not understand anyone thinking another human should have less rights.

How hard is it to say I don’t agree with you, but you are also human?

I saw a Note this morning that made me laugh so I restacked it.

Pretty much sums up the internet, doesn’t it?

It’s easy to ask what makes you angry. And the list is so long. Maybe yours shares some points from mine. Maybe it’s entirely different. Maybe it’s your boss or some rude neighbor that cut down your tree.

And I’m not saying we walk around angry. Okay? Because I do not.

But there are plenty of things to make us angry, you know?

. . .

Here’s the second question. Because if you remember, there were two questions.

1. What are you angry about?

2. What are you fighting for?

Wow. What a question. Here’s why I’m wrestling with that. Because fighting is a verb. And if you say you’re fighting for something, you have to be able to say how.

Besides complaining on the internet. You know?

Let me tell you where that crawls all up into my craw. Looking at the feed. Because when I look at the feed, I have to ask myself. Are we fighting for something?

Or just fighting?

Or just dumping our anger and frustration on the world?

Which, I understand. We all need to vent sometimes. It’s just that when thousands of people vent at the same time, it gets a bit overwhelming to be on the receiving end, you know? And I don’t want to add to that. I just really don’t.

And look — I get it. Because this is the part where the exceptions crawl out. Because people writing poetry or fiction or sharing art aren’t feeding that monster. And some people aren’t trying to fight anything. They just want to write their stories or essays and feel joy in writing. So please understand I’m not talking about those people.

But I think (I hope) you know what I mean when I pose the questions.

What are you angry about. And what are you fighting for?

. . .

Can I tell you a little story? It’s short.

August 14, 1936. Owensboro, Kentucky. 5:21 am. Twenty thousand men, women and children parted like the Red Sea to let a young man pass. Flanked by deputies and followed by a Catholic priest, he walked through the crowd.

He stopped at the base of a wooden platform and sat to pull on clean socks.

Slowly, he climbed thirteen steps and stepped onto a large X. Pausing, he turned east. He gazed at the sun rising. Silent, he declined any last words.

A long black hood was pulled over his head and a heavy hemp noose, oiled so it would tighten faster, was slipped over his head. As the deputy leaned into the lever, the trap door fell eight feet. He barely swayed when his neck broke. He cheek dropped to rest on his shoulder. Fourteen minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

His name was Rainey Bethea and he was 22 years old. The mob went wild. Ripped apart that young man’s clothes and the gallows. For souvenirs.

Afterwards, angry journalists turned their wrath on the town, painting the horror of an event that needed no embellishment. Facts were enough. One wire dispatch read:

“CHEERING, BOOING, EATING AND JOKING, 20,000 PERSONS WITNESSED THE PUBLIC EXECUTION OF RAINEY BETHEA, 22, FRIGHTENED NEGRO BOY, AT OWENSBORO, KY., YESTERDAY. IN CALLOUS, CARNIVAL SPIRIT, THE MOB CHARGED THE GALLOWS AFTER THE TRAP WAS SPRUNG, TORE THE EXECUTIONER’S HOOD FROM THE CORPSE, CHIPPING THE GALLOWS FOR SOUVENIRS.”

It wasn’t about what he did or whether he was guilty or not. Here’s what journalists were angry about. The subhuman behavior. Vendors hawking snacks while he died. The public tearing off his hood. Chipping the gallows for souvenirs. The cruelty.

But what they were fighting for? That was a different question.

They were fighting for an end to public executions.

What we’re angry about and what we’re fighting for are not always the same. I think that clarity matters more than ever. It’s not like we have paid journalists and honest media anymore. You and me? We’re all we’ve got now.

Writing has always changed the world, and it always will.

But I think we need to ask ourselves those two questions or it’s too easy to act and sound like the angry mob instead of the journalists writing to change something.

I can’t be part of the mob. I can’t. I cannot perform hate for clicks.

And honestly? I don’t know what I’m going to do with that question, what are you fighting for, but it’s been rattling around my brain for days and I feel like that’s a good thing somehow. How, I’m not sure yet. But I do think when the noise gets louder, we need to get clearer. And I’d really love to know what you think about it…

Do you know Zadie Smith? She’s an author and a professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University. Her debut novel was published in 2000, and won a bunch of awards and was made into a television series. A few years later, her third novel was nominated for the Man Booker.

So when her name popped up in an email from The New Yorker, I had to go look.

The subject line was “The Best Writing Advice Is The Weirdest.”

The subtitle was: Zadie Smith shares a trick to writing that she first learned in school and never outgrew. It all starts with a rectangle. So of course I clicked.

The essay by Smith starts by talking about writing essays in college. She said you had to write a thousand words “or else” — and to her “or else” meant never earning more than minimum wage, never getting out of your mum’s flat, never making something of yourself. She said the stress of turning in those essays was paralyzing.

Of course, she’s talking about the kind of essays you write in college. Impersonal essays, she calls them. Essays that compare Hitler to Stalin, or about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Not personal essays like the ones we write on Substack.

But the structure she talks about made me think about the underlying structure of powerful writing and I thought you might find this interesting.

One day, an English teacher took her aside. She says:

An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below. “Six points,” this teacher said. “Going clockwise, first arrow is the introduction, last arrow is the conclusion. Got that?” I got that.

So he told her what each arrow is for. I’ll paraphrase, okay?

1. 🡆 First arrow is the introduction.

2. 🡆 Second arrow further develops what you said in the intro.

3. 🡆 Third arrow either develops the point further or plays devil’s advocate.

4. 🡆 Fourth arrow you can see the finish line, so start winding down, summarizing

5. 🡆 Fifth arrow, repeat the earlier stuff but with variations.

6. 🡆 Sixth arrow is the conclusion.

Oh — he said — and put the title in the box. It’ll keep you focused.

She said she felt like she’d been let into an overworked teacher’s inner sanctum. And she was only seventeen when he taught her about the writing rectangle, but even now, approaching fifty, she said that essay structure is still buried in her brain.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you can read the entire piece here.

But what occurred to me is that if I applied a similar structure to personal essays, it would quickly show what weak writers do, vs what powerful writers do.

. . .

Read more

All you have to do is write one true sentence.

Hemingway said that, in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. Just write the truest sentence that you know. It’s what he told himself when he was overthinking. Overwriting. Just write the truest sentence that you know.

But why, I ask myself, would I run so naked in public?

Because you know he didn’t mean to write that the sun will come up again tomorrow, nevermind that it will. He didn’t mean some personal revelation acknowledging the universal fact that we’re all going to die, nevermind that we will.

No. by one true sentence, he meant cut a vein.

And bleed.

In words.

And sometimes, we do. Some of us, at least. But wait. Let me try make sense.

I read a story about a man who swallows days without chewing.

The phrasing stops me. I’ve done that, I think. Entire days, swallowed whole.

He stares into a corner until he finds a spot on the wall, tiny like a birthmark he said, and focuses on that spot until the world disappears and a new world appears. A world where no one uses a little boy like dry twigs to light their own fire.

The words leave me breathless.

I don’t even realize I’m not breathing until I stop to inhale.

I have been that child. Been dry twigs used to light someone else’s fire and I don’t know how to read words like that and remain unchanged. Which is why Stephen King says if you don’t read, you don’t have the tools to write.

Or the one about growing up poor in a trailer wearing second hand clothes or the one about the little girl standing by herself with a flower in her hands and her lips don’t say nothing, not a single word, but her eyes? They scream.

And you keep reading and know why her eyes are screaming and I think to myself that I love the way some writers pluck words from the air and use them to paint pictures on my mind that I will feel in my bones. Skeletons rattling.

Then I saw another piece by another writer and it used the word twat at least seven times, plus in the title for good measure (not to mention clicks) and it had a thousand hearts and got comments that said omg, rofl, lmao, funniest word, like, ever.

And I just… I don’t know.

We are what we are, yeah?

Mary Oliver wrote that she dreamed someone she loved gave her a box of darkness and it took her years to realize this, too, was a gift.

Sometimes, I feel like algorithms are a box of darkness.

The way they lean into engagement. The way engagement leans into the dark side of humanity, not always but so often. Rage bait is a term for a reason. You know? But it wasn’t anyone who loved us who gave them to us. They’re just — profitable.

Then I remember that algorithms just hold up a mirror. Show us to ourselves. Look. Look! Mirror, mirror on the wall, and we grumble about sycophancy in AI, but algorithms are maybe the bigger sycophant, I think.

I’m just not sure how long it will take to see the gift in the darkness. A lone hand, reaching up to turn on a light in the attic so we can see what the shadows are.

But here’s the thing that gets me.

The person bleeding on the page will look at the response they get and wonder. Am I even any good? Because twenty three hearts and five comments is enough to make even the best writer feel a little beat up. For writing one true sentence.

And the irony? Is that the person writing about twats and Trump, Einstein and oligarchs, they don’t really need to wonder that, do they? Because hearts.

Because hot buttons and algorithms and sometimes I wonder what would happen if we took away hearts and social proof but that’s a non issue, because the truth is that titles would still win the day and there’s a writing lesson in that if you think about it. But if you think long enough and hard enough, what you think changes.

. . .

Here’s a crazy fact that sounds irrelevant on the surface but it’s not.

Do you know what the most common use of AI is, outside of business and rich men who want to replace humans with machines? You might think it’s writing, given all the AI we’re all seeing in the feeds, but no. It’s companionship. Someone to talk to.

And I use the word “someone” lightly.

But if you think about it, you can use AI on your phone and it looks astoundingly similar to texting another human being. You can talk about movies or your fears, or talk about what you read in the news and it will reply in a way that can feel astoundingly human to someone who doesn’t have companionship.

It undoes me, a little. To think so many of us are that lonely.

In a world filled with beautiful words that make you laugh or make you cry. Words that push you off a cliff and then fly down, winged, to catch you and hold you tight. And we’ll forsake those words for companionship. Even with a machine.

Or rage, and how am I to fault anyone responding to something that pushes their hot buttons when I believe that any conversation with any human is preferable to conversation with a machine? It’s complicated because we’re complicated.

. . .

And look, so you understand what I’m trying to say here—

I’m not riding any high horse about hot topics versus art, because I write another Substack called Baba Was A Witch and the piece about the rape academy got over four hundred comments but the most beautiful poem I’ve written got thirty three.

Neither is better than or worse than the other. You know?

I write things that matter to me. Sometimes it’s a poem. Sometimes it’s a protest at the horrible and heinous things humans do to each other. Neither is less than or greater than. Humans aren’t made of math. Only machines are.

I read that outrage is more powerful than inspiration in the engagement cycle.

Like, if someone can make you mad, you’re more likely to do something. Read. Comment. Share. Restack and add your opinion. And on a logical level, I understand that. But as a writer, and as a human? I’m not sure it works the same way.

I think maybe it works exactly the opposite.

Let me tell you about my best friend. He sends me poetry, sometimes. The kind of poetry that cracks me open. And laughs when I have no words except maybe something trite like omg, or wow. And yet? It changes me.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, can never return to its original dimension. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I believe. But I could be wrong. I didn’t google it.

Words must be the axe for the frozen sea inside, Kafka said. The caveat is that no one gets to define the frozen sea for me. Or for you. Or for anyone else, really.

I don’t know if this is even making any sense.

What I do know is that like the Velveteen Rabbit, we are all slowly becoming.

And what are we becoming? Real.

Which is to say finding our way back to the soul we were born with before the world pushed us onto the path of productivity, checkmarks and performing on command.

Before the world taught us social proof and claps and hearts.

And they’re nice to have. The claps, the hearts, the comments. The following and the followers. But they’re not part of becoming. Becoming is a solitary journey.

One true sentence at a time. That’s how we writers become. And it doesn’t matter if our fur is a little matted or worn, or if we’re a little saggy in the joints, because once you’re real, you can’t be ugly. Except to someone who doesn’t understand.

And I really I hope you do…