Writing trends can be weird. They can come out of nowhere and come and go so fast most people don’t even see them happening. The English language, maybe even more so than any other language on Earth, is an ever-evolving, living thing. That said—that understood—I don’t spend too much time wringing my hands over neologisms and alterations or additions to accepted usage—especially since “accepted” implies there’s someone in charge to either accept or reject things like the singular they, disrespect used as a verb, and so on.
For the record, no such authority exists.
That said, I can be at least a bit of an old school curmudgeonly copy editor, and anyway, I have a deep and abiding respect for the language. So when, over the course of the last few months or so, I started seeing author after author drop out the word under almost completely in favor of beneath, I just have to ask…
Where the hell is this coming form?
I can’t help but think this might be another grammar check hallucination (another new usage I wish we didn’t have to adopt). That is actually a thing now, and those hallucinations are easiest to see in fiction, which is the hardest form of writing to apply algorithmic rules to. This was true when all of a sudden said was being changed to spoke and I had to change it back—dozens of time in dozens of books.
Now I need to attack the creeping influence of beneath, which, yes, is indeed a word with many perfectly fine uses, but it does not replace the accepted ,and more importantly expected idiomatic uses of under. I see this now, and I see it a lot:
The ground beneath his feet.
They’re digging beneath the wall.
She jumped beneath the wagon.
Hear me, all authors of all things. It’s:
The ground under his feet.
They’re digging under the wall.
She jumped under the wagon.
It just really actually is.
Need some extra authority? Here’s what The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage has to say on the matter:
beneath. Over the centuries, beneath, below, and under have tended largely to overlap. It would appear that, by the end of the 19C., beneath had become somewhat restricted in use: ‘a literary and slightly archaic equivalent of both below and under. The only senses in which beneath is preferred are 7 (“beneath contempt”), and fig. uses of 4 (e.g. “to fall beneath the assaults of temptation”).’ (OED). Fowler (1926) judged that, apart from the ‘beneath contempt’ sense, ‘it is now a poetic, rhetorical, or emotional substitute for under or below’.
Be that as it may, beneath has a wide range of idiomatic contextual uses now. Examples: 1 (in a lower position than) Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife upwards beneath Leiser’s guard—J. le Carré, 1965; I watched a child drag a butter-box on wheels beneath the cold streaky sky—T. Keneally, 1980; drinking pre-lunch aperitifs beneath crystal chandeliers—P. Lively, 1987; his body was positively abloom beneath the riding mac—T. Wolfe, 1987; the pipes and conduits that jostle each other beneath the street—New Yorker, 1988; (fig.) The Dog Beneath the Skin—W. H. Auden and C. Isherwood, 1935.
2 (not worthy of) he considers such work beneath him; she had married beneath her (i.e. to a man of lower social status).
Here are noted three instances in which beneath is not necessarily preferred, but used anyway, with some examples of authors going it on their own. Even then I have to admit I’m working from a terrible old, third edition of Fowler’s from all the way back in 1996.
Okay, yeah, I do need a new edition of that, eh?
Still, I would respond to Fowler’s agreeing with me with these simple revisions, entirely more welcoming to a contemporary ear:
Lowe dropped to his knees, as if to drive the knife up under Leiser’s guard—le Carré was an English author so in any case in the US it would be upward, or in this case, actually, just up.
I watched a child drag a butter-box on wheels under the cold streaky sky—heck, U2 knew it was Under a Blood Red Sky!
drinking pre-lunch aperitifs beneath crystal chandeliers—though it may be terribly old fashioned to drink pre-lunch aperitifs, you’ll actually be doing that under crystal chandeliers. And, y’know, ya gotta get a chandelier!
I’d probably give this one to Tom Wolfe, but… his body was positively abloom under the riding mac works just as well.
Never use the New Yorker’s bizârre antíquarianne stile güide for any-thing unless you know you’re write-ing for The New Yorker.
And finally, Auden and Isherwood, please proceed with my compliments.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
A couple weeks ago I challenged authors to go ahead and pay the $60 a year for the non-AI (Copilot) version of Microsoft Office, and so of course y’all have gone and done that as a new year’s present for yourself, right?
If you’re just starting out, or have been using it for a little while and have gone down some of this gigantic app’s various rabbit holes, please allow me to introduce you to All the Word You’ll Ever Need.
First of all, write however you please—whatever works for you. I write some stuff by hand. I write other stuff in a more condensed single-spaced form—in fact, I’m writing this in that state, since I know it’s going to be pasted into the WordPress editor anyway, and no one but me will read it until it’s published.
But once you’re ready to share this with agents and editors, the standard manuscript format is your friend. Not only that, it’s your best and only friend. This is how you send your manuscripts to the professional world. Please, please believe me that that remains true, even in the era of tech disruption and… whatever…
What is the standard manuscript format, you might ask? Well, I made a handy document you can download here in .docx format that goes into detail on that, but especially if you’re new to Word, or are working from styles maybe set by your employer, or what you’ve cobbled together that works for you to write in, here’s how a working author sets up Word, which you’ll see is mostly by turning stuff off.
All these examples are for the current Mac version, so Windows might look a little different…? I don’t know, but most likely not. Anyway, please let me know in the comments if there are any major differences.
Let’s dive in, first with Preferences, which can be found under Word in the top menu. Click that window open and start with General, which looks like this:
General
Click on these boxes and none of the others to be exactly like me.
You’re welcome.
If you like Dark Mode or have a Pen… knock yourself out. But this keeps things clean as is.
We really get into the nitty gritty in View:
View
Notice I have almost nothing selected here, but the most important thing, especially when you get into revision and editing, is to click on All under Show Non-Printing Characters. this allows you to see into the formatting. You’ll now see if there are two spaces between words or a space before or after a paragraph mark, or if you accidentally had your finger on shift when you hit return and inserted a manual line break instead of a paragraph mark. Ever wonder why your indents all of a sudden stop working for no apparent reason? That’s the reason, and it’s apparent when you can see the non-printing characters.
Next up is Edit:
Edit
I like it set up this way, which gives me the greatest measure of control.
Not much else to say there so I’ll jump to Spelling, which is kind of a big one:
Spelling
I used to have all this shut off but have learned to appreciate the little red lines under misspelled words—or much more often for an editor working primarily in the fantasy and science fiction genres, invented words that aren’t in any real world dictionary.
But what’s most important here is that I have none of the boxes checked under Grammar. Every once in a while I experiment with that to see if they’re improved it at all, and though it’s a little better than it used to be, it returns far more incorrect results than correct results. It does not understand punctuation around dialog, has some inexplicable ideas about commas, and otherwise does not understand the first thing about fiction or creative writing. If you’re still learning the craft of writing, this will teach you up wrong. Just say no to grammar check. Instead, learn how to write.
Next is a source of almost constant frustration, AutoCorrect:
AutoCorrect
These sets of tools try to understand what you’re going for without asking you and start to format stuff in seemingly random ways, forcing sentences into lists, adding links, and otherwise causing havoc. Allow yourself to decide how you want to format your manuscript. But please do check the two boxes here to make sure you don’t have straight quotes, which are used to indicate minutes and seconds in latitude and longitude, in some stricter style guides feet and inches, but are not quotation marks! And being able to just type two hyphens and have them magically transformed into an em-dash is one of the world’s great delights!
Okay then, so you’ve got your basic settings established, now it’s time to open up a new document and make it editor-ready. What you’re going for is something that will, when edited, look like this:
Edited Manuscript
See all the non-printing characters and where I changed a manual line break into a paragraph? Here’s how you make all that work. Looking up at the Format menu on the top like, leave the Document format well enough alone—that tends to be a basic page that works. But you will need to address the Paragraph menu, which looks like this:
Paragraph
Just make yours look exactly like this, starting with everything flush left. You can go in and center a few things like chapter heads and scene breaks, but do that manually, not with styles! That’s a big one, actually. Just like there’s only font (12-point Time New Roman), one color of ink (black) and one color of paper (white), there is only one style and it’s Normal. Period. Your headers and weird scene breaks and borders and shading and literally anything else might make it look all fancy when it’s printed out but it’s 2026 already, ya’ll. No one is printing this out.
Embedded styles, especially anything you’ve created yourself, just adds unnecessary difficulty to the busy professional you’re sending this to, who is only interested in the story and the writing, not your style sheet acumen.
I know… but please believe me. No styles!
Anyway, set your Indentation to zero and select First line and use the default .5”. I know, printed books tend to have shallower indents than half an inch, but this is not a printed book we’re making, it’s a manuscript—and all of this we’re working through today goes directly to that. You are not typesetting here, you’re writing, and expecting only a few professionals to read it—professionals who are keenly aware of the difference between a manuscript and book and do not need you to show them what it’ll look like when it’s published, or what you want it to look like… Do all that when you decide to publish it yourself—or hire a typesetter/designer to do that for you—but this is a manuscript, and all this is how you make it look and function like manuscript.
And please do not fiddle with Spacing. It’s zero, zero, and Double. Be sure to check the box: Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style. Since you only have one style (Normal), that means there won’t be any extra space between paragraphs.
Next up, how did I make it so you can see all the things I changed, and read the comment about which vs. that? First, from the Tools menus, select Track Changes and then Highlight Changes.
Track Changes
Then click all the boxes:
Track Changes
There are options in terms of how you see this on your screen. Here’s how I have that set up:
Track Changes
This you’re finding in the Review pane under Markup Options (check all) then check Show Revisions in Balloonsunder Balloons, because balloons are fun.
No, seriously, this makes the text itself cleaner by showing what you deleted off to the side, not right next to what you added in its place, which can get pretty confusing pretty fast.
This feels like a lot, but it’s a one-time setup that will be your forever default, so a small bit of fire-and-forget effort that let’s you do the most important thing, and that’s writing amazing works of literature. And remember when I said don’t waste the time of busy professionals? Well, you’re a busy professional too, right?
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
This is the last Tuesday and so the last Fantasy Author’s Handbook post of 2025…
Am I really going to write some kind of year-end wrap-up for what has been a great year for me, and one of the worst years ever for me—along with seemingly everyone else here in Republican-ravaged America… a crime still in progress?
But yeah… this isn’t a “political” blog, is it, so let’s set national and world news aside (for the love of all that’s holy) and instead just be happy with our own personal triumphs, however small or even seemingly insignificant they might be in however grand a Grand Scheme of Things you’re tempted to inhabit.
Did I have New Years Resolutions from last year? I don’t even remember and feel no need to go back and check, which pretty much sums it up for resolutions in general. I will work to be a bit more like Benjamin Franklin, and I do have a nice big home repair/renovations to do list… but to do lists aren’t “resolutions” are they? Whatever you call it I do have more to finish by the end of 2026, and really, really have to get to a few “mission critical” components to that taken care of. If I’m looking back on the personal level in 2025 that was probably the biggest failure: putting the required time and energy into those home projects. I guess I’m “resolved” to get that stuff done in 2026… but you don’t care about that.
But no, wait, I was meant to look back, wasn’t I. Okay, then, let’s try looking back and leaving “the news” aside… at least once I mention that I participated in my first ever protest this year.
Okay? Now, off the politics, except that no one who loves books (or intellectual freedom, the US Constitution, personal freedom, basic human rights, and other little things like that) can fail to mention the unprecedented assault on books, authors, booksellers, publishers, and maybe especially librarians that are, in many places in this country (and one place in this country is one place too many) still going on. This is where I once again ask all authors—at any point in your career—to be a part of…
Okay, so then now no more politics.
I don’t know, y’all…
Anyway, thanks to Reedsy I’ve been super busy—that’s where the positives are. Not only was business up, but the books that came to me this year were some of the best I’ve worked on in ages. There are enormously talented authors out there writing fantastic books and with this level of quality and imagination and creative energy, oh, wow are the genres I love in good hands, with more hands being added daily. Thank you, Reedsy, and everyone who found me there in 2025. And as we move into 2026 I remain…
That really was the big moment of gratitude for me in this weird-ass year.
I read some great stuff otherwise, too, and had some fun talking about them on YouTube while I work through my 100-Book Challenge.
That’s when you read a hundred books you already own before you can buy any more books. I’ve gotten to be quite the I buy books, therefor I am kinda guy over the last almost all of my entire life, so this has been hard—the not buying books part. But reading a lot of books this year was great. I set my 2025 GoodReads challenge at 60 books and am currently at 59 with the possibility of finishing one more today or tomorrow. Of those 59 books, the last 39 were part of the 100-book challenge, which works out weirdly symmetrical. If I do finish one more before the clock strikes 2026 it means if I set the same 60-book target for next year I will finish the 100 book goal right at the end of 2026. Won’t that be tidy.
Hopefully I’m as busy or even busier with work in 2026 because once that 100-book Challenge is completed holy bananas will I start buying books. Lots of books. Like, maybe a reverse 100-Book Challenge where I have to buy 100 books before I can read one I already own. That should take me about a week to finish up, so check back with me on that around January 8, 2027.
Anything else…?
Yeah… no, that pretty much sums it up because I’m not going to talk about AI.
We’re ignoring that out of existence, right, people?
Right?
Happy New Year everybody, let’s keep this reading, writing, and editing train a’rollin’ in ’26!
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
Here in this penultimate week of 2025, thoughts turn to the next year, and dare I say New Years Resolutions? I’ve worked past that idea myself, but then this is a moment we can take to think about what worked for us in the past year, what didn’t work for us—as authors and as readers and as… people.
I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix’d opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural inclination, became at length so easy, and so habitual to me, that perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me.
Wouldn’t this be a nice change to the National Discourse?
What if we started with what we love the most: books. In 2026 can we give ourselves a moment’s pause before declaring that audiobooks don’t count, no one reads prologues, all romantasy books are “fairy porn,” men don’t read, or whatever nonsense comes along? Can we just read books and like them or not without declaring some version of a minor border skirmish over whether or not sprayed edges are a good thing?
I’d bet that if we put this idea on with some violence to natural inclination, seeing first and foremost the positives in the community of readers and authors may just become at length so easy, and so habitual to us, that perhaps for the next fifty years no one will ever hear a dogmatical expression escape us?
What if that’s the new algorithm for the 21st Century?
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
Okay, the first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem…
Hi, I’m Phil, and I’m addicted to BookTube.
You know what that is, right? It’s the loose collection of YouTube channels in which people talk about books—their favorite and least favorite books, the books they just read or are planning to read, the books they just bought, and all that surrounds the act of reading: do you drink tea or coffee? One channel I’ve watched seems more concerned with the preparation of matcha than with the books read while drinking it. Others obsess over how to take notes while reading, whether or not to directly annotate the book itself and if so then how. Do we use sticky tabs or colored highlighters? What is their color coding system? Is this book book part of a personal curriculum…?
And all the while we suffer over the necessity of not just reading a book, but close reading a book.
Because if you don’t close read a book, how can you have an opinion about that book? How can that book make you smarter/better than people who either haven’t read that book or haven’t read it close enough—haven’t made as many annotations or taken as many notes? And then what brand of notebook are you taking those notes in, exactly—and why? It better goddamn well have a leather cover, because serious people have serious notebooks, and serious notebooks have leather covers.
All of this, according to BookTube (and I assume the adjacent spaces on TikTok and Instagram—two platforms I’m far too old to engage with) matters, and matters more so—or so it would seem—than the actual content of the book itself.
Oh, but no matter what, for God’s sake, do not be seen close reading that book in public lest you be accused of “performative reading,” which is, somehow, worse than maintaining a public YouTube channel in which you perform the act of reading—excuse me, close reading, annotating, notetaking, and reviewing the same book some guy was photographed without his knowledge reading on a New York City fire escape, or wherever this guy was—that classic performative reader he is.
For years, of course, I’ve been advising authors to read books—and so has Stephen King and lots of other people who know what they’re talking about. Writing books while not reading books is exactly like writing songs without listening to music. It’s absurd. You will, absolutely, learn more about the art and craft of writing (in any category or genre) by reading well-written and professionally edited and published examples of same than you will in the most expensive (aka “prestigious”) MFA programs.
And by all means, talk about those books! I do—here, on GoodReads, and even on YouTube, Heaven help us all.
I “close read” books for a living, and as stated above, I believe authors should have a version of a “personal curriculum” around writing, too. And if you want to study anything else, terrific. I’ve done—and continue to to do the same thing. I was curious, for instance, about Carl Jung, so I spent a month reading his work and work about and around him. I found him fascinating, but yeah… way too metaphysical for me to take too seriously. I’m a Greek American and have been studying the history of Ancient Greece out of that tenuous connection and my own intellectual curiosity. Am I outlining some kind of work of historical fiction set in Ancient Greece? No. I’m just curious.
Absolutely be curious—always be curious—and satisfy that curiosity by reading.
I don’t think reading should ever be akin to taking your medicine—we get indoctrinated into this idea that reading is something we should do, that it’s good for us. The truth is that we connect with stories not because we should but because we want to. They are a force of nature. They are healing, and they are enjoyable. We don’t need to get all puritan about it.
And do that on your fire escape or in your carefully decorated home YouTube studio designed to evoke that perfect Dark Academia vibe.
Drink that matcha, damn it.
And say what you will of the book—any book—wherever you want to, however you want to.
But don’t let anyone tell you you’re reading wrong.
Unless you skip the prologue, in which case you’re reading wrong.
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
“Contrary to what many of you might imagine,” wrote Fran Lebowitz, “a career in letters is not without its drawbacks—chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to actually sit down and write.”
But how you manage to do that—to make words appear in one form or another—is as varied as the various authors themselves. And understanding what Haruki Murakami taught us in Novelist as a Vocation…
Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.
…there’s really no expensive anything that will effectively glamorize the work of writing, so welcome to the cheapest business startup in America.
Here we are creeping up on the end of another year, and another reckoning in the form of taxes. This business—editing and writing—is what I do for a living as a full-time freelancer. That means I have to run my little business as a… well, a little business, not to put too fine a point on it. I’ve been running this little business for a decade and a half now and all that time the biggest struggle I’ve had when it comes to taxes is finding anything I can deduct.
I used to see writing by hand as an unnecessary affectation. Now I rip through cheap spiral notebooks (because I see no reason to buy expensive notebooks) like crazy. I bought a bunch of notebooks when they were on sale at the beginning of this school year at my local supermarket for 29¢ each. Here they are, stacked up in my closet…
This, and a pen you can pick up for less than a dollar—or even free here and there—is all you need to write the Great American Novel. In our November 2025 GoodReads group read, Writing Down the Bones, poet Natalie Goldberg said of notebooks:
This is your equipment, like hammer and nails to a carpenter. (Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!) Sometimes people buy expensive hardcover journals. They are bulky and heavy, and because they are fancy, you are compelled to write something good. Instead you should feel that you have permission to write the worst junk in the world and it would be okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry. (I often buy notebook-size purses.)
You may be surprised how many authors are out there, pen and notebook in hand. Like, for instance, Stephen King:
I’ve still got a little bit of that scholar’s bump on my finger from doing all that longhand. But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.
The notebook is also where I write stories. Every story I write begins in the notebook and in fact is usually written entirely in the notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to realize it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well—you can’t do anything well—if you feel cornered. I am not afraid because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it wants to, it will.
You may well have a different process, and indeed I don’t write everything by hand. This blog post you’re reading right now is being typed into a Word document. Like Philip Roth…
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.
Hell, maybe you’re in with the retro typewriter crowd. Those tactile miracles worked for an awful lot of talented authors for an awful long time. Here’s how Allen Ginsberg described writing Howl:
I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.
Likewise, how much you spend on your writing is up to you, from way more than I’m sure I would ever recommend to effectively nothing at all. This is where your mileage may vary, or as Rick Rubin wrote in The Creative Act: A Way of Being:
When there are no material, time, and budget constraints, you have unlimited options. When you accept limitations, your range of choices is reduced. Whether imposed by design or by necessity, it’s helpful to see limitations as opportunities.
And for writing, there are so few limitations, it’s essentially all opportunities. This business—the business of writing, though not so much self-publishing—is so cheap to start and run it’s confounded my CPA this whole time. What can I write off to reduce my income? I don’t have any inventory because I have nothing physical to store, sell, or ship. I do not have separate office space because all I need is a desk and a computer (and okay, a few other things, but…). Having some kind of office that I can drive to and sit in, all by myself, just makes no sense. Still, “If you want a room to write in, just get a room,” Natalie Goldberg wrote. “Don’t make a big production out of it.” Though Murakami made it clear that, “Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study.”
And is writing done better at home anyway? In Essays, Wallace Shawn wrote:
To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them. It’s very agreeable to live like that, even if people don’t like your work, criticize you, whatever.
In any case, I know I would be sitting in my rented office all by myself because I have no employees. I have no work for an employee to do. I’m writing this all by myself, and if you hire me to edit your book, I will do that all by myself, too. I don’t and will not ever employ any sort of AI agent, either. Anyone who knows me even a little will know that that goes without saying.
The ongoing costs of my business are few and not terribly expensive. I think my $30/month to PublishersMarketplace ($360 a year) is my biggest expense. I pay $2.99 a month for some extra iCloud space. And I think it’s somewhere around six dollars a year for the dictionary app I have on my phone. And $60 a year (plus high Washington state sales tax) for the entire Microsoft Office suite. And that’s more or less it in terms of ongoing expenses.
This year I did buy a few things. I needed a new printer (which 99% of the time is a scanner), and my tiny little desk finally drove me to the point of buying a bigger one.
This is good news for anyone thinking of writing—or already writing. You do not need investors, unless you don’t have the initial hit for a computer, I guess. Even then you won’t be going hat in hand to the likes of Peter Thiel.
And yes, you can even save the $60 or so a year on Word (sans the hated AI, which would bring that up to $100) by using some free things like Google Docs. This will work just fine until you actually finish the thing and want to start getting it in front of other professionals, so here’s where I’m going to challenge you to spend that money, at least.
Word, whether anyone anywhere likes it or not, is the professional tool. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does everything necessary better than anything else. It really just does. And though you may be a Scrivner devotee you will eventually have to send your work to a professional of some kind—an editor, a designer/typesetter, etc.—and that’s where Scrivner ends.
It’s a never-ending source of confusion to me where authors I work with tell me they write their novel in Google Docs or even the Notes app on their iPhone because Word (at $60 a year) is too expensive. And this I discover after they’ve made the first of two payments of $1500 each for my services.
I’m not kidding. please tell me you see how weird that is.
Someone like me is actually by far your biggest expense, but someone like me who knows what they’re doing isn’t just running through your book and making a few notes and suggestions, moving a few commas around. What we’re doing is teaching you to write in a way that’s precise, detailed, and completely focused on you and your work. And I only come in after you have finished writing the complete novel from beginning to end, and have brought it as far as you feel you can on your own. For some authors I’ve worked with that’s as much as ten years of spending almost nothing.
What I bring to the table is worth it—I honestly would not be doing this if I didn’t know that for sure. And consider the cost of 3¢ a word against the probably $70,000 for a creative writing MFA.
Look, I get why we don’t want to give any more money to any of the tech giants, so who wants Microsoft to get $60 a year richer? But instead, you’re going with Google? Because you think you’re actually getting anything for free from… Google?
You don’t have to pay me, but please at least cross Microsoft’s palm with silver so the rest of the world can work with you—after you’ve spent as long as you need to spending maybe a hundred bucks a year..
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
I’ll start this with my 100-Book Challenge video on the annotated edition of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, in which I found the list to follow. Watch that for greater context…
According to Howl:
This list was tacked on wall above author’s bedstead in North Beach hotel a year before “Howl” was written. See Robert Duncan’s comments apropos in Allen Verbatim, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 143-47.
I’d like to leave it here, sans comment from me (at least for now), because I’m much more curious as to what other authors make of it than what I do.
List of Essentials
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We read Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group and for the last ten weeks I’ve been sharing favorite bits of advice from the book as well as my attempts at the writing exercises, which are the real strength of this book. This will be another long one for the final installment, with Chapter 10: Crowding and Leaping:
What Ursula K. Le Guin means by…
Crowding:
Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to “load every rift with ore.” It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and clichés, never to use ten vague words where two exact words will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I mean also keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings, and implications.
…and Leaping:
What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There’s got to be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.
Tactically speaking, I’d say go ahead and crowd in the first draft—tell it all, blab, babble, put everything in. Then in revising consider what merely pads or repeats or slows or impedes your story, and cut it. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine till what’s left is what counts. Leap boldly.
And I like Ms. Le Guin’s succinct definitions of…
Story:
I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) that moves through time or implies the passage of time and that involves change.
…and Plot:
I define plot as a form of story that uses action as its mode, usually in the form of conflict, and that closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax.
I’ve felt as though I’m out here all alone in warning authors against the proliferation of writing advice overly or even solely focused on story structure. For Le Guin it’s not structure, it’s change that matters…
Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
We don’t have to have the rigid structure of a plot to tell a story, but we do need a focus. What is it about? Who is it about? This focus, explicit or implicit, is the center to which all the events, characters, sayings, doings of the story originally or finally refer. It may be or may not be a simple or a single thing or person or idea. We may not be able to define it. If it’s a complex subject, it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story. But it is there.
Yes—thank you!
And now on to the last batch of exercises, and a reminder that if you read this book—and you really should read this book—also do the exercises as you go along. These have been eye-opening to me, and I’ve been doing this for… a long time!
EXERCISE 10: A Terrible Thing to Do
Cut one of the previous exercises of 400+ words in half. Make it half as many words.
Well, then, at 690 words, and attempting to make it still make sense at 345 words, I’m going back to:
Lala in the Basement (690 words)
The scream hit Maria like a wave of boiling water, washing over her face, burning her—then she realized she was the source of the sound.
It was the way it walked that ripped the sound out of her. Skin crawling around the sound, twitching at each echo pinging off the close-in concrete walls. Even in the privacy of her own thoughts she couldn’t call it a teddy bear. Teddy bears were cute, cuddly, innocent, harmless, infantile, and inanimate. This creature hadn’t been any of those things in a while.
Maria screamed again when it turned to look at her. Its eyes, just blank black buttons, glassy and cold, fell in on themselves. The buttons gave out onto an endless darkness. Opened onto the black pits of Hell itself.
A hand on her elbow—skin hot and rough—and she spun so fast she lost her footing and dropped to the damp concrete floor.
“Is it here?” the professor asked, his normally deep voice shrill. “Did you see it?”
Maria wanted to hit him for touching her like that—kill him, even, like she had with her husband when he tried to leave her. But she let him help her back to her feet.
“It’s—” she started, forcing herself to turn back to the hideous thing.
Nothing.
Dark. Empty. The smell of stagnant water on old concrete. The echoing drip of water from somewhere within and a metallic clank from the steam pipes that covered the ceiling.
“Did you see it?” the professor asked again, more calm now, his voice closer to its normal register, then, “Behind you!”
Maria spun again and fell again and it was there. A scream lodged in her throat when the creature bit deeply into Professor Karel’s inner thigh. The tear of his scrubs accompanied by the pop of teeth penetrating skin. The blood spread into the fabric fast. Maria pushed away with one foot and sobbed and her throat tightened again.
The professor screamed—Maria had never heard a man scream like that. He reached down with both hands and pushed back on the creature’s blood-drenched fur. The little half-circle ears gave no resistance.
It came off him and Maria screamed again, this time managing to call, “Lala!” Her own voice as shrill as the professor’s.
Professor Karel fell back, eyes wide and wet and seeming about to explode. Maria whimpered, knowing he was looking into the thing’s eyes—its dead black eyes that led to the Pits. And she screamed again at the blood.
It came out of him in waves, absorbing into his clothes, draining out of him so he bathed in it. He already seemed pale.
“No,” Maria coughed out then rolled onto her stomach to push at the floor with both hands to try to get away—get on her feet and run.
“It killed him,” she whimpered, though she didn’t know if that was quite true yet. Still, if it killed the professor—the man who’d created it—maybe that would be enough for it. Maybe then it would stop, go back to sleep, go back to being a toy.
Lala hadn’t said as much.
Lala seemed to know.
Lala, who Maria used to call “creepy” and even “Little Miss Satanist” when she first came to the institution.
Lala, who had warned Professor Karel, told him not to read any more of the book the dying patient, the man with the seventeen people inside him, gave him—warned him not to say the words out loud, not to follow its alchemical recipes or to bleed on it or sleep with it in his arms, cradled in bed with him.
Lala, who had warned them all then watched them die, one by one.
Lala, the patient.
Lala, the schizophrenic.
Lala, the inmate.
Lala, host for the spirit of a child murderer.
“Lala,” Maria begged when she felt the teddy bear touch her. “Lala—”
“Enough,” Lala said from above her. She sounded tired.
Maria sobbed and closed her eyes.
“This one is mine,” Lala said, and Maria screamed as Lala, the witch, started to eat her.
My first pass got it down to 469. I then had to find another 124 words in there somewhere…
The second attempt got me to 409 words, so I had to go back in for 64 more. This is hard!
Third attempt was 346 words, so I looked for one more and ended up adding one! Back in and… I finally did it!
Lala in the Basement (final attempt, 345 words)
The way it walked ripped a scream out of her. Her skin crawled. The scream echoed off the concrete walls.
She couldn’t call the thing a teddy bear. Teddy bears were cuddly, innocent, harmless…
It turned to look at her and Maria screamed again. Its blank button eyes gave out onto an endless darkness, the black pits of Hell.
Someone touched her elbow. She spun, lost her footing, and dropped to the damp concrete floor.
“Is it here?” the professor squeaked.
Maria wanted to kill him for touching her but let him help her up. She forced herself to turn back to—
Nothing.
The smell of stagnant water on concrete, the drip of water from somewhere, a clank from the steam pipes on the ceiling.
“Did you—?” he started. “Behind—!”
Maria spun and fell again.
The creature bit into the professor’s inner thigh. The tear of his scrubs, the pop of teeth penetrating skin. Blood spreading fast.
The professor screamed and pushed back on the creature’s blood-drenched fur. It came off him.
Maria screamed, “Lala!”
The professor fell back, eyes wide, wet, about to explode. He was looking into the thing’s dead black eyes. Maria screamed again.
Blood came out in waves, draining out of him so he bathed in it.
Maria tried to crawl away.
Lala appeared.
“It killed him,” she whimpered.
If it killed the professor—the man who’d created it—maybe it would stop, go back to being a toy.
Lala warned him not to read the book the patient with seventeen people inside him gave him. She warned him not to say the words out loud, or bleed on it, or sleep with it in his arms.
Lala warned them all then watched them die, one by one.
Lala, the schizophrenic.
Lala, host for the spirit of a child murderer.
“Lala,” Maria begged when she felt the teddy bear touch her. “Lala—”
“Enough,” Lala said.
Maria sobbed, closed her eyes.
“This one’s mine,” Lala said.
Maria screamed when Lala started eating her.
Is it bad that I like the original better? That the extra words made it extra scary? Did it? Am I not able to see the bloat in my own writing? Can any of us? Either way, I love that Ms. Le Guin said: “You are allowed to cry or moan softly while you cut them.”
And finally, from the epilogue WAVING GOODBYE FROM THE PIER…
Some people see art as a matter of control. I see it mostly as a matter of self-control. It’s like this: in me there’s a story that wants to be told. It is my end; I am its means. If I can keep myself, my ego, my wishes and opinions, my mental junk, out of the way and find the focus of the story, and follow the movement of the story, the story will tell itself.
Everything I’ve talked about in this book has to do with being ready to let a story tell itself: having the skills, knowing the craft, so that when the magic boat comes by, you can step into it and guide it where it wants to go, where it ought to go.
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most challenging—and rewarding!—genres in the bookstore. But withbest selling author and editor Philip Athans at your side, you’ll create worlds that draw your readers in—and keep them reading—with
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
We read Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin for our September group read at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group and every week since I’ve been sharing favorite bits and my attempts at the writing exercises, which are the real strength of this book. This will be a long one, mostly the exercises, for Chapter 9: Indirect Narration, or What Tells:
First of all, I adore her dismissal of formula in this chapter:
The world is full of stories, you just reach out.
I say this in an attempt to unhook people from the idea that they have to make an elaborate plan of a tight plot before they’re allowed to write a story. If that’s the way you like to write, write that way, of course. But if it isn’t, if you aren’t a planner or a plotter, don’t worry. The world’s full of stories… All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you’ll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you’re going, but the rest works itself out in the telling. I like my image of “steering the craft,” but in fact the story boat is a magic one. It knows its course. The job of the person at the helm is to help it find its own way to wherever it’s going.
And her assault on the info dump (what she calls an Expository Lump)…? Precisely!
If the information is poured out as a lecture, barely concealed by some stupid device—”Oh, Captain, do tell me how the antimatter dissimulator works!” and then he does, endlessly—we have what science fiction writers call an Expository Lump. Crafty writers (in any genre) don’t allow Exposition to form Lumps. They break up the information, grind it fine, and make it into bricks to build the story with.Almost all narrative carries some load of explaining and describing. This expository freight can be as much a problem in memoir as it is in science fiction. Making the information part of the story is a learnable skill. As always, a good part of the solution consists simply in being aware that there is a problem
In this one, the exercises were plentiful, and long, so buckle up…
EXERCISE 9: Telling It Slant
In which we’re directed to write the dialog only, a conversation between A and B:
A: I don’t think we’ll ever really know who killed him.
B: Why not? There’s evidence—hair and fluids…
A: That’s all been tested and there were no matches. No one we brought in, none of his immediate family…
B: Co-workers?
A: He’s a long haul trucker. Mostly it’s just him in a truck for literally days on end.
B: So, then, stops along the way.
A: You want to collect DNA from every gas station attendant, diner waitress, and lot lizard from here to Connecticut?
B: Okay, then, the coroner says the knife was… how did he put it…?
A: “Unusual.”
B: Yeah, so can we get more detail from him on that? Like, “unusual” how?
A: He said he thought it might have been made of ice.
B: Fuck off.
A: Seriously.
B: This guy… six-two, three hundred pounds, was killed with an icicle.
A: Fuck do I know.
B: It’s August.
A: As previously stated… fuck do I know.
B: And then he lit the whole thing on fire—
A: In a perfect circle.
B: In a perfect circle—
A: Using no accelerant.
B: There were dead leaves and… sticks… and shit.
A: And it burned the ground but not the body.B: …not the body…
I could go on, but I feel like I’ve got the gist of it. Also, I feel like I’m doing “as you know” dialog—two guys working from the same set of facts. See how easy it it to fall into an info dump?
EXERCISE 9: Part 2: Being the Stranger
A bit of story from the POV of a character you hate.
Harold sat on his front porch, in the rocker that used to belong to his grandmother, finishing his fifth beer of the afternoon. For who cares how long he’d been sitting there, drinking, staring across the street at his neighbor’s house. The house that used to be painted white but was now a bright yellow. The house where Jim and Karen Wilson used to live—good people. Church people. Friends of his. Now it was the seedy little lair of that goddamn libtard bitch and her long-haired son Harold thought was a girl for the first year they lived there. Bad enough the goddamn Kamala Harris posters now an American flag hung upside down.
Where the hell does this bitch get the balls—the balls—to hang our nation’s flag upside down like there’s some kind of crisis going on, like this country is in danger? Harold wondered for at least the fiftieth time that day. In danger from her, maybe.
A shadow passed the front window—by the height of it it was her, not the kid. Harold considered going inside, getting his deer rifle, and getting this over with next time she stopped in front of that window. Sure they’d know it was him. The rifle was bought legally—and why wouldn’t it be legal? Nothing wrong with owning a rifle or two. Hell, Harold had ten of them all together, and six handguns. His constitutional right to have them.
And his constitutional right to use them too, wasn’t it?
Isn’t it? he asked himself.
When he went in it was to get his sixth beer. Maybe one or two more and he’d know for sure it was his constitutional right to kill that libtard bitch and put her tranny “son” out of his misery.
Okay? The idea of this is to write “the other” but to suspend your judgement. Here I thought, here’s a guy who’s been indoctrinated into what can only be described as a cult. He’s also struggling with alcoholism. Is he a victim of political indoctrination, lack of access to mental healthcare and addiction counselling? The question I left unanswered: is he actually going to murder the woman across the street? Or is Harold doomed to spend the rest of his life killing himself with beer while sitting on his porch under the weight of misdirected hate?
EXERCISE 9: Part 3: Implication
With no POV character, first describe that character by describing a place that character interacts with:
A ring of rocks and a little dug out circle formed the fire pit just outside the cave mouth. The smoke from the fire mostly went up and out into the trees that grew close to the cliff wall. Not much went into the cave itself. A cache of weapons—a crossbow; a collection of knives, most of them not too rusty; the axe; and the bent sword—was lined up a few feet behind the fire. Deeper in the cave but not so far in that the darkness took over completely was a neatly folded stack of blankets in various stages of decomposition. A version of a bed. The basket against the wall across from the bed had holes in it, but none too big that the apples rolled out. There were eight of them left, and some blueberries wrapped in a dirty handkerchief that were probably moldy by now. And then deeper in, where the wind made strange noises and the darkness was near absolute, the chest.
Then, “the untold event,” in which we’re asked to describe a place where something has happened or will happen, but don’t show that happening.
Anyone passing by who didn’t know better would thiank a construction crew hand finished the foundation for a modest single family home, but hadn’t come back yet to start framing. But everyone in Eavesdale knew that just yesterday there was a house on that foundation, and it had stood there for twenty years.
This morning they woke up and the house was gone. No one heard anything—even the neighbors right next door—less than ten feet on either side—or right across the street. There was no storm, no wind. There was no explosion—no smell of gas beforehand.
The people who lived there? Their car was still in the driveway, and there wasn’t a scratch on it. A couple of the neighbors had a cell number for the lady who lived there with her husband and little girl. When they tried it it just rang a few times then went to voice mail. The police tried the number, too, and got the same thing.
The cops and some of the neighbors walked all over the neighborhood looking for wreckage—Sheetrock, roof shingles, personal belongings—but there was nothing to find. Not one thing, besides the foundation, to make anyone think there was ever a house there at all.
Well, now I want to know what happened to these people, anyway. But did I succeed in doing what Ms. Le Guin bade me do?
Remember, this is a narrative device, part of a story. Everything you describe is there in order to further that story. Give us evidences that build up into a consistent, coherent mood or atmosphere, from which we can infer, or glimpse, or intuit, the absent person or the untold act. A mere inventory of articles won’t do it, and will bore the reader. Every detail must tell.
Did I fail as soon as I brought in the neighbors and the police?
Then there’s the optional exercise, which is to write an info dump—what she calls an “expository lump,” based on this:
The kingdom of Harath used to be ruled by queens, but for a century men have ruled and women are not permitted to. Twenty years ago, young King Pell disappeared in a battle on the border of the kingdom with the Ennedi, who are magicians. The people of Harath have never practiced magic, as their religion declares it to be against the will of the Nine Goddesses.
What became of King Pell is not known. He left a wife but no known heir. Claimants to his throne have all been defeated by Lord Jussa, the queen’s guardian, but the struggles of these factions have left the kingdom impoverished and unhappy.
At the time of our story, the Ennedi are threatening to invade on the eastern border. Lord Jussa is keeping the queen, a woman of forty, imprisoned in a remote tower under the pretext of keeping her safe. In fact he is afraid of her and alarmed by rumors of a mysterious person who managed to visit her secretly while she was in the palace. This person might be the leader of a rebel faction who is said to be the queen’s illegitimate child, or it might be King Pell, or it might be an Ennedi magician, or…
Ah, now I confront my deep loathing of the info dump. But thinking about it, actually, this is easy. Ms. Le Guin has provided us with worldbuilding notes, which are the wellspring of the info dump, so let’s see if this can be accomplished just by breaking this up into boring dialog. The “walk and talk” might be the most pernicious form of the info dump because it may feel to the author as though his characters are doing something. They’re waking from here to there, and while walking one character teaches the other about the world. That’s not an info dump, it’s a conversation! Right?
You tell me…
“What did that lady mean?” Young Galen asked Old Khedron as they made their way slowly on the road through the no-man’s-land between the kingdoms of Harath and Ennedi.
“Ah,” Old Khedron replied around a puff of pipeweed, “well, that’s a good question, Young Galen. The kingdom of Harath used to be ruled by queens, which is just like a king but a woman instead of a man.”
“Like the difference between an editor and an editrix?” Young Galen asked.
“Precisely,” said Old Khedron with a proud smile. Indeed, Young Galen would make a fine addition to the Guild of Editors!
“Are there still queens?” asked Young Galen.
“Alas, no,” Old Khedron explained. “There used to be, that is known, but for a century men have ruled and women are not permitted to. Twenty years ago, young King Pell disappeared in a battle on the border of the kingdom with the Ennedi, who are magicians. The people of Harath have never practiced magic, as our religion declares it to be against the will of the Nine Goddesses.”
“What became of King Pell?” Young Galen asked.
“It is not known,” explained Old Khedron. “He left a wife but no known heir. Claimants to his throne have all been defeated by Lord Jussa, the Lady Pell’s guardian, but the struggles of these factions have left the kingdom impoverished and unhappy.”
“What else can you tell me about the kings and queens of Ennedi and Harath?” asked Young Galen.
“Well, Young Galen,” Old Khedron began, “The Ennedi are threatening to invade on the eastern border. Lord Jussa is keeping the queen, a woman of forty, imprisoned in a remote tower under the pretext of keeping her safe. In fact he is afraid of her and alarmed by rumors of a mysterious person who managed to visit her secretly while she was in the palace. This person might be the leader of a rebel faction who is said to be the queen’s illegitimate child, or it might be King Pell, or it might be an Ennedi magician, or—”
“What does ‘pretext’ mean?” Young Galen interrupted.
Old Khedron grimaced and thought to himself, Maybe Young Galen won’t make such a fine addition to the Guild of Editors after all.
And you have to believe me that I have indeed worked on manuscripts where characters do this—and do this a lot, and even ask that question: “What else can you tell me about…?”
Please never do this, and if you have, time to revise that out.
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.
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