Lord of Ruin

I held an idea in my head: the colossal necrotic lord of a wasteland empire lumbering through the ruins of his kingdom. I imagined a towering creature formed of bones, millions of repurposed femurs and fibulas piled and fused to shape a god-like behemoth that’s inhuman gaze stared down from a cold sky. I didn’t surface this idea for any noble reason, nope– there will be no tale of cyclopean elder-gods or any eerie vision to post to Instagram. I wanted to feed my idea to an AI and see what came out.

Moving to Instagram

This is not a rant about what used to be Twitter. This is simply a modest announcement that I’ve spun up an Instagram (and Threads) account for this holiday season (the Orange Season). The current data suggests that I’ll be visiting my “X” account rarely– but that’s not an indictment, it’s just capitalism. I’m moving my “attention currency” to a different market.

Pantsing With Robots

Fiction writers often find themselves confronted with a question: are you a pantser or a plotter? This essentially means: do you sit down to write a plot before you tear into the details– sometimes taking months to tune and sequence every layer of events– or do you dive right in, putting one word after another without any outline in place.

ChatGPT has been swirling at the top of every creative conversation in the last couple of months, especially for indie writers. A new cottage industry of folks pumping books from their browser with the tool and pasting them right into Amazon has emerged, flooding the market with… with, what? I can’t really say, but I did give the tool a spin myself and it’s, in the least, very entertaining.

I gave ChatGPT the chance to approach a premise I started exploring on this site. The Twilight Rambler is a bit of a pantsy project, and it’s lost a lot of steam as I’ve been immersed in my true passion lately: plotting without ever finishing. ChatGPT, however, is the ultimate pantser. Unlike the humans who write the stories we read, it has no idea what it’s going to do between words. The tool puts down one word at a time, what it deems to be the best fit, with some randomization for realism’s sake, and then runs the logic again for the next word, always bouncing its progress off of the prompt and the wealth of human generated data that informs its decisions.

This is a bit of a fallacy, at least for most, since a pantser probably has a good idea of where they want their story to go and what beats they need to hit. They just don’t write them down… or count the syllables between them. Stephen King is undoubtedly the most famous pantser, and as prolific as he is, technology has given him a rival!

Warts and All

I am a dedicated plotter. You should see my spreadsheets… BUT, I’ve poked a hole in my dedication to charting the details of my fiction like I’m Galileo sitting over a map of the stars. I’ve made a decision: I’m going to let the weirdness flow.

I’ve decided to tell a story, a story I’ve sat on and never thought I’d publish, one episode at a time. It’s time to let something fly, piss into the wind, and ride my trike without a helmet… starting today.

The Twilight Rambler has been unearthed from piles of notes and isn’t entirely pantsy. It’s not clean, but it has a direction– and it’s fun. It’s a good time to write and I hope that equates to a fun read. If my brain wants to test the limits of my skull by veering left instead of right, I plan to let it do so. Let’s go nuts.

So, with convulsions, I present to you the first episode of the first arc of the Twilight Rambler: Ep.1, Desert Tax. Hope you make a friend, and enjoy!