“In a world that encompasses so much pain and fear and cruelty, it is noble to provide a few hours of escape, moments of delight and forgetfulness.” — Dean Koontz
Quotable
11
Author Archives: James Scott Bell
Exercise Your Head
Writers are always there, seldom here.
More often than I care to admit, my wife will say something like, “Jim? Jim, are you listening to me?” And I’ll say, “That’s an odd way to start a conversation.”
But she’s right. After nearly 40 years as a working writer, I am in the “write mode” all the livelong day.
Even when I’m not writing. I was at a Starbucks once, sitting in a nice chair, looking out the window at the parking lot. By which I mean I was working, thinking about my novel-in-progress, picturing how a scene might go, then changing it and watching it again. My blank stare moved a fellow in the chair across from me to lean over and say, “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m a writer. Pray for me.” (Is what I should have said.)
And yet, that is the part of our brain that is most precious to us, the creating part, and we need to nourish and cherish it (which is another reason to avoid the atrophy caused by overuse of you-know-what, the thing that shall not be named).
What If? + Conflict
When my kids were young they loved a show called Ghostwriter. It was a program designed to encourage kids to read and think. Imagine that!
Anyway, one of the stars of the show was a young actor named Sheldon Turnipseed, who would do a little promo by looking at the camera and saying, “Exercise your head! Read!”
I liked that. Young, developing brains need regular exercise. Writers’ brains, too. That’s why I like to brainstorm with myself, even when it only produces a light shower.
Which is why I’m always thinking with the formula What if? + Conflict.
Try it.
Let’s say you’re driving down the street and see a billboard for some sort of sunscreen. A beautiful woman in a bikini and sunglasses is lounging under a hot sun as a bronzed Adonis applies the protective glop to one of her honey-colored legs.
Apply What if? + Conflict.
What if…he’s a hitman who is supposed to kill her? What can we do with that? He’s fallen in love with her, which brings up all sorts of conflict with those who hired him. His own life may be on the line now.
What if… she’s having an affair with him? Who is she married to? Maybe the most dangerous man in Las Vegas. Or, for a more literary take, an older man she has fallen out of love with.
What if… he is rubbing her not with sunscreen, but a substance from another planet that will turn her into a half woman-half squid monster with a thirst for blood?
Heck, I’d have fun with all of these. Coming up with good ideas shouldn’t be the issue. Deciding which ideas to develop should be. (I’ll tackle that subject next week.)
For now, try this:
- Come up with at least 10 “What if…” scenarios by the end of the day.
- For each one, have a Lead character and an Opposition character in conflict.
- Tomorrow, choose your three favorites.
For each of these, come up with an elevator pitch.
My formula for the pitch is:
Sentence 1 is character + vocation + current situation.
Sentence 2 starts with “When” and is what I call the Doorway of No Return––the thing that pushes the Lead into the main plot.
Sentence 3 begins with “Now” and the death (physical, professional, or psychological/spiritual) stakes.
Example:
Dorothy Gale is a farm girl who dreams of getting out of Kansas to a land far, far away, where she and her dog will be safe from the likes of town busybody Miss Gulch.
When a twister hits the farm, Dorothy is transported to a land of strange creatures and at least one wicked witch who wants to kill her.
Now, with the help of three unlikely friends, Dorothy must find a way to destroy the wicked witch so the great wizard will send her back home.
Play What if? + Conflict all the time. Soon your writer’s mind will do this on a sort of automatic pilot, and you will have the pleasure of hearing conversations start with, “Hello? Are you listening to me?”
What are your favorite ways to get creative? Do you ever “space out” thinking about your WIP?
In The News
(Note: Kay DiBianca is currently on hiatus)
Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery Expands
From Amazon News:
Amazon’s Prime Air service is rapidly expanding and plans to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the United States by the end of 2026—a sixfold increase from its current footprint—bringing ultrafast drone delivery to communities with tens of millions of customers across the country.
Amazon’s diverse operations: warehouses, delivery, and pharmacy services
8 ways Amazon is delivering orders faster, from drone delivery within hours to Same-Day Delivery of fresh groceries
From demand forecasting to specialized delivery vehicles, here’s how Amazon is bringing faster delivery speeds for a better shopping experience.
Prime Air offers the widest selection of items by drone, including millions of groceries, electronics, cosmetics, medications, and household products at everyday low prices, delivered in as fast as 30 minutes.
Prime Air drone delivery sites have the highest average delivery volumes in the U.S., with thousands of deliveries made daily. Prime Air drone delivery currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon.
“Customers already turn to Amazon for fast Same- and Next-Day Delivery, and Prime Air provides them an even speedier option when they need it, with deliveries in as fast as 30 minutes,” said David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air. “We’ve already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages to customers by drone this year, and by the end of 2026 we plan to reach customers in nearly 500 cities and towns. We’re pairing the convenience of ultrafast drone delivery with the low prices and selection customers love about Amazon.”
***
Don’t Panic Over Gen Z Readers (h/t Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line)
From The Conversation:
A trove of recent articles bemoan the collapse in recreational reading among younger Americans, with COVID-related reading declines, artificial intelligence and social media often described as causes.
But as the authors of “How Gen Z Discover and Consume Books,” we think many claims about Gen Z’s reading behaviors miss the mark.
Some long-standing, influential studies aren’t designed to capture how Gen Z often reads: multimodally – bouncing between print, e-book and audiobook for the same book – and on web platforms such as Wattpad, Webtoon, Kindle Unlimited, DC Universe Infinite and Marvel Comics online.
In fact, according to our 2025 data, a growing proportion of Gen Z – 66% – is identifying as readers, up 14 percentage points from 2022. In the previous 12 months, 65% of Gen Z read at least one print book, up from 59% in 2022. These findings roughly correspond with those of the Pew Research Center for the general population across all ages.
In other words, Gen Z shows us that reading isn’t dying. It’s changing….
Identifying as a reader used to mean sitting alone with a book. That is less true for Gen Z than any previous generation. Gen Zers are more likely to experience reading as a social activity.
The growing popularity of silent reading parties, where groups of people come together to read quietly and independently, suggests that Gen Zers enjoy finding community around books, even as they immerse themselves in a largely solitary act. We also note how some young people are bridging the distance between story worlds and real life by participating in literary cosplaying, in which readers dress up as characters from their favorite books and gather at conventions or themed events. Then there’s “book excerpt aesthetics” – a social media trend in which readers post memorable passages and quotations from books.
Unionizing at Hachette (From PW)
Last month, around 600 Hachette Book Group workers joined the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, forming the largest trade publishing union in history.
***
In each union’s public statements, employees expressed strikingly similar reasons for organizing: inadequate pay, large workloads, and limited potential for advancement. They all cited, in their own words, what HBG organizer Julia DeVarti, an associate editor at Little, Brown, called publishing’s “passion tax”—workers’ tendency to “be exploited for working in an industry we love.”Oftentimes, the impact of the passion tax is most visible in corporate publishing, according to NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss. Entry-level employees come in because they love books and might “initially give up decent pay and decent benefits, because they can then say, ‘I’m working at one of the Big Five publishing companies.’ ” Many times, he adds, these sacrifices become permanent fixtures of employment.
***
An organizing committee member at Dark Horse, who spoke with PW on the condition of anonymity, says they and others who were hired during the pandemic spearheaded the union drive for similar reasons. In August 2024, Dark Horse ordered employees near its Portland, Ore., offices to start coming in two days per week, after being fully remote since the start of the pandemic. In addition to the added transportation costs, a wage freeze implemented in December 2024 and rising insurance premiums worsened workers’ quality of life, according to the organizer, even after raises resumed this January.
The specter of AI has also heightened workers’ sense of uncertainty. The NewsGuild has so far won AI protections in 90 different contracts across the journalism and publishing sector, Schleuss says. The model clause he shared with PW prohibits employers from replacing employees with AI or using automation to decrease salaries.
In many cases, these are preventative guarantees. University of Chicago Press, for example, prohibits its authors and peer reviewers from using AI and is not using AI tools internally, according to senior promotions manager and organizer Adrienne Meyers. Still, she says, she wants to “make sure that doesn’t change if a management position changes, or if the university puts pressure on us.”
***
When the HWC went public, Hachette distributed anti-union infographics around its Manhattan offices. The posters, which the HWC shared on its social media, framed unions as “third parties” intruding on the manager-worker relationship.
A Hachette spokesperson explained to PW at the time that the publisher meant to “encourage workers to consider all the facts to make an informed decision” in their union election.
Trust is Your Greatest Asset
Roughly half of all internet traffic, from what I’ve been able to gather, comes from bots. Let that sink in. An overwhelming army of non-human scrapers and crawlers are clicking, copying, analyzing, and spitting out information that humans use to find stuff. Which means that the old days of buying ad space and sitting back to await the results are kaput.
Think about it. You pay $1000 for an ad, and half the responses are not sentient human beings looking for your product. You’ve just tossed $500 into the dumpster, and the dumpster is on fire.
Five years ago, someone searching for a good book to read might head over to Amazon and put in a search term like “Action packed thriller” and see a bunch of cover thumbnails. Then they could browse, like in a bookstore. That made keyword selection in KDP so important. Maybe it still is, but increasingly readers will go straight to Google or an LLM for a search. So how do we optimize for the bots? Like being in love, it’s complicated, and life is complicated enough as it is. Thus, I have not done a deep dive on this, but if you want to you can start with this post from Thomas Umstattd’s AuthorMedia podcast.
I would rather spend my time doing what I do best, writing the next book. Because, in the end, that is still the #1 marketing tool.
Why? Because of trust.
There are only two ways to grow a business. The first way is to find new customers through marketing and advertising. The second way is to sell more to satisfied customers.
The first way is expensive and, now, increasingly difficult.
The second way works if—and only if—your product delivers the goods.
For a novelist, the goods are stories that readers love. If they love one of your books, and that gets them to read another one, and they love that, too, you’ve made a fan. Which is why an email list is crucial. This lets you keep in communication with happy customers. Writers do this via emails/newsletters, which avoid the fog and noise of the internet space. The care and nurture of your list is a subject beyond the scope of this post. But if I may offer two bits of advice:
- Don’t hard sell.
- Don’t overstay your welcome.
These days, people are looking, across the board, for people they can trust because they have been hosed so often.
This, I think, is what’s behind the recent news of a Big 5 publisher pulling a book because of suspected AI use. The pub knows that most readers want a human being to be the sole author, and don’t want their reputation for providing that to be compromised. I’m not going to delve into the various uses of AI tools. I’ve stated that my “red line” is at the actual text that appears on the page. This is not, however, an opinion shared by all. One bestselling (and controversial) author openly states:
“Artificial Intelligence was used in both the research and composition of this book. I have asked the AI to mimic my writing style so you, the reader, will not be able to tell what was written by me and what was generated by the AI. I am also not going to tell you or make any indication of what was written by me and what was generated by the AI. It was I, the writer, who decided what words were put on the pages of this book, so despite the contributions of the AI, I still consider every word of this book to be mine. And I don’t care if you don’t.”
You know what? I have to give kudos to this fellow for being open about it. I don’t agree with his practice, but at least he isn’t trying to hide it. That’s far better passing off AI-generated text as one’s own words, which is what these scandals are all about.
In an episode of Downton Abbey, when it becomes clear that the old ways of life are on the way out, Carson the butler muses, “The nature of life is not permanence, but flux.”
Hoo boy. We’re in flux right now, on steroids.
What hasn’t changed—and never will—is the value of trust. Whatever you do, however you do it, don’t violate that trust in your work.
Comments welcome.
Quotable
The Three “Selves” of a Writer
Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (1950)
Gregory Peck is one of my favorite actors. Most know him for his immortal portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. But he turned in many brilliant performances over his long career, sometimes unappreciated because his acting was subtle and low key. (If you want to sample Peck’s acting chops, two of my favorite performances are in The Gunfighter and The Big Country.)
Once, Peck was standing in line with a friend, waiting for a table in a crowded Los Angeles restaurant. They’d been waiting for some time, the diners seemed to be taking their time eating, and new tables weren’t opening up. Peck’s impatient friend said, “Why don’t you tell the maitre d’ who you are?” Peck said, “No. If you have to tell them who you are, then you aren’t.”
Reminds me of the old saying: “Be who you is, ‘cause if you ain’t who you is, you is who you ain’t.”
Which brings me to you, fellow writer. There are three “selves” we spin like plates.
First is the self presented in the writing. The major aspect of this is voice, often talked about but rarely defined. (Someone wrote a book about it). Voice is at the center of the whole AI debate. If you use AI’s words, you ain’t you who is.
By the way, you may have read that Anthropic’s Claude is now adding “watermarks” to generated text (and text that has been edited with it). That invisible coding stays with the output when it’s copied and pasted into a document. This has teed off a large number of Claude users who’ve canceled their accounts. But other models will probably follow suit. The way to avoid this detection is to write your own words. Shocker!
The second self is your public profile and social media presence. Choose wisely how you go about it. I try to follow Ben Franklin’s admonition: “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation” (and, I would add, ranting and raving. That never brings in new fans, but it does alienate a segment of your current and potential readership. Up to you whether you want more readers or fewer).
Also be wise about how much time you spend on social media as a marketing tool. Don’t make the mistake of thinking social media is a great way to sell books. It never has been. Recently, a trad-pubbed author dropped $10,000 on a “TikTok influencer campaign.” Result? Three (3) sales. “It just doesn’t convert,” says the author. “Views are not sales. People watch a 40-second video about your book the same way they watch a video about a raccoon eating grapes: entertained, moved even, and then they keep scrolling.”
The last self is who you are in private, with friends and family. This is the place to “let your hair down” (obviously just an analogy for some of us). You get your support here, your solace, and sometimes a needed kick in the pants. But it’s all done “behind closed doors,” which is a good place to keep it. Guard your writing time, but don’t hoard it. Be present with people, knowing that your writer mind will always have a little wander in it. Many a time Mrs. B has said something like, “Jim? Jim, are you listening to me?” And I’ve thought, That’s an odd way to start a conversation.
If I may paraphrase Polonius: “To thine own selves be true, give each due consideration, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be a phony baloney to the reading public.”
What about you? Have you given much thought to your own three “selves”? Any other advice or warnings to offer?
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Your Writing Routine
Ian Fleming enjoyed a writer’s dream life. He owned an estate he called Goldeneye on the northern coastline of Jamaica, with a house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was here that he wrote all his James Bond novels. (Goldeneye was named for a secret operation Fleming planned for British Naval Intelligence during WWII.)
A meme recently circulated that describes his writing routine (click to enlarge):
More details can be found here.
This daily schedule of producing 2,000 words a day enabled Fleming to finish a first draft of his novels within approximately six weeks. After that, he would spend a week going through and correcting the errors as well as rewriting passages. Then the manuscript was sent off to his publisher.
Fleming said, “I find that unless I stick to a routine, if I just wait for genius to arrive from the skies, it just doesn’t arrive. I just get on with the work.”
Back in 1988, when I decided I had to follow my inner compulsion to write, and began devouring books and articles in Writer’s Digest, the first lesson I took to heart was to set myself a quota of words. Not time, because it is quite possible to sit in front of a computer for a couple of hours without getting many words done at all. I started aiming for 1,000 words a day. Later I modified that because, let’s face it, not all days are the same, and life has a way of intruding upon you, unbidden.
So I settled on 6,000 words a week, taking Sunday off to rest and recharge (essential, IMO). I kept track of my words on a spreadsheet (still do). That way, if I missed a day for some reason, I’d do a little more on the other days. If I got to the end of the week short of my goal, I forgot about it and started fresh the next week.
As I look back on the books I’ve managed to write, I can honestly say it was made possible only because of the quota system. Like Fleming, I couldn’t wait for “genius” or “the muse” to arrive. Indeed, I came up with ways to “goose the muse.”
My writing routine was not as time-clocky as Fleming’s, but has remained roughly the same.
I wake up early, while it’s still dark, and make the coffee. I spend an hour or so getting the motor running. I used to do that by reading a book or newspaper, but I regret to say the smartphone era has crowded in with emails and scrolling.
Anyway, I then get some writing done. If I can knock off 250 words (a Nifty 250) or even 350, it makes meeting my quota so much easier.
My wife awakens and we spend time together sipping brew, doing some devotional reading together, planning the day to come. The hours between 7 and 11 a.m. are my sweet spot. I write on my main WIP, first by doing a light edit on yesterday’s output, then charging ahead until I’ve hit my quota. If I’m going good, I keep on going. Or I do some development on other projects. I keep everything in Scrivener.
Around 11 I do some exercise and strength training (I need to up these) and have lunch. While I munch, I watch half an hour or so of an old movie (have you discovered Tubi yet?) and then take care of business matters.
I love to work in a power nap. When I had a law office I got real good at putting my feet up on my desk and nodding off for 20 minutes. The afternoon is open time for anything that needs to be taken care of, and is the best time for me to get some reading done. I have a big TBR pile, and usually am in one fiction and one nonfiction book, with several others in various stages of ingestion.
From 4–5 I might get some more words in.
From then on it’s wife time, meaning dinner, games, and watching a movie or show (we’re currently going through Person of Interest again). On occasion we’ll go out to dinner with friends, after I take out a home loan.
Then bed, and then the whole thing starts over again.
And that, for what it’s worth, is my writing routine. What’s yours?
Quotable
Act First, Explain Later
We have a thriller first page for critique today. Read it and join me on the other side.
At first the sound didn’t trouble him. The lake’s placid. Minimal wind.At least two miles away. Maybe a chainsaw.Still … Anthony grabbed his military-grade binoculars from the wooden chest. He knew details would be hazy in the mountains in mid-October, especially at dusk. But it was worth a look.
Not a chainsaw.
A motorboat. Sprinting north. Maybe five minutes out.
Anthony King had enjoyed three years ofperfect solitude. No phone calls. No visits. Few concerns. Three more weeks until the first hard frost. Need to split more wood, check the roof for loose shakes, maybe head into Stehekin for supplies.
A decade ago, he’d been the only Asian in his Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL class. At five feet nine and a hundred sixty pounds, he was an average-sized well-muscled Korean American. But BUD/S—the first phase of a program based entirely on merit—hadn’t conferred brownie points for his ethnic background. That’s how he liked it. In school he never cheated on tests. He preferred actually earning his grade, even if it meant settling for a C instead of an A. To him, garnering kudos for grade he didn’t deserve was stupid, asinine. Cheaters were losers.
At age nineteen, Anthony was one of 114 young men who signed up for the rigorous SEAL program. Many were exceptional athletes. But most quickly learned that outrunning someone at a track meet or pinning a wrestling opponent or grabbing the most rebounds in a basketball game didn’t guarantee success. A year after starting BUD/S, Anthony was one of only six from the original cadre to receive the coveted SEAL trident. Most dropped during “hell week”—day after day of sleeplessness and chilling cold, when they’d struggled to steer rafts along the turbulent Pacific coast and jogged down the Coronado beach until their sand-covered thighs ached from chaffing and strain. Some quit because of injuries. Others settled into supporting roles. Several restarted one of three training phases. But the majority threw in the towel—or, more precisely, rang the brass bell three times—signaling their intent to “drop on request.” For them, the dream—or nightmare, depending on one’s perspective—was finally over.
Anthony raised the binoculars again. The boat was drawing closer. Definitely heading toward his dock. He stepped into the cabin and lifted the Glock 19 from his holster on the nightstand. Checked the chamber—loaded, as always.
***
JSB: Writer, in our archives are years of first-page critiques, many of which deal with how do deal out backstory (which makes up the bulk of your page). Click here and do some reading. See also John Gilstrap’s post on managing backstory, and my post wherein I say:
A wise writer (I’m not sure who) said, “A story begins when you light the match, not when you lay out the wood.” Give us some heat from the get-go.
It doesn’t have to be high heat. Just something that disturbs the Lead’s ordinary world. A portent of things to come.
I’ve critiqued many a manuscript at writers conferences, and when I find a “lay out the wood” opening it’s usually because there’s too much backstory. The author thinks the reader has to know a certain amount of information to understand what’s going on.
Not so! Readers will wait a long time for background information if they’re seeing a disturbance happening on the page. My axiom is: Act first, explain later.
You begin promisingly. And then it’s like you drop in a character dossier writers sometimes prepare in their pre-planning. Let’s do your opening this way (with minor tweaks by me):
At first the sound didn’t trouble him. The lake’s placid. Minimal wind.At least two miles away. Maybe a chainsaw. Still … Anthony grabbed his military-grade binoculars from the wooden chest. He knew details would be hazy in the mountains in mid-October, especially at dusk. But it was worth a look.
Not a chainsaw.
A motorboat. Sprinting north. Maybe five minutes out.
And definitely heading toward his dock.
He stepped into the cabin and lifted the Glock 19 from the holster on the nightstand, and racked the slide.
Now we’re cooking. Immediate threat. What do we know about Anthony? He’s hiding in the mountains, has a military background (or equivalent) and can handle weapons. That’s enough to keep us reading.
But wait, you say, we don’t know about his background and training. You’re right! And that creates mystery, which is what keeps readers reading. (Hint: All page-turning fiction runs on mystery, meaning we want readers wondering Why is this happening? What’s going to happen next? I need to keep reading to find out!)
My suggestion to you is write this whole chapter/scene with nothing but action. Make it work like you were watching it on a screen.
Then step back and look at all your backstory information and ask yourself:
- What part of it is absolutely essential for the readers to know on the first pages? (Hint: Your answer should be Not that much.)
- How can I provide that info in the fewest words possible?
Save the rest for later.
One exercise I’ve given to writers is this: In your first 5,000 words, you can have three sentences of backstory, used all at once or dropped in separately. In your second 5,000, you can use three paragraphs of backstory, all at once or separately.
At the very least, this will force you major in action. You’re writing a thriller, after all. And the material you have here is promising. Now comes the skill part: how to deliver on the promise in the most effective way. That, of course, is the meta-task for all us writers. Welcome to the club!
And now I will leave it to our community of commenters to chime in with their suggestions.
Fear Not the Tsunami of Manure
Entertainment news this week has been dominated by the blockbuster success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. “Boffo BO,” as industry wags put it (also Matt Damon’s costumer).
Of course, it has generated some online heat, because what doesn’t these days? But there is also substantive discussion among Classics scholars, some of whom say that whatever the movie’s merits, it’s not Homer. (Reminds me of the line from a college essay years ago: “The Odyssey was not actually written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.”) Others have no problem with a “re-imagining” of an ancient epic.
I have no opinion either way, for I have not seen it. But I do extend a laurel and hearty handshake to Nolan for a couple of reasons. This is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras. IMAX is almost always used for loud set pieces, because the cameras themselves make a lot of noise. They are not good for quiet, intimate scenes.
But Nolan, working with his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, designed a soundproof housing, called a “blimp,” to cover the camera. It suppressed the noise and allowed them to film soft exchanges.
But that created another problem. The blimp casing was so large that two actors couldn’t look at each other eye to eye, which is essential for emotional connection. So Nolan came up with the idea of using mirrors to let the actors see each other’s faces. Love it.
What I appreciate most is that Nolan eschewed all AI (and most CGI) in order to capture the traditional look of classic “cast of thousands” movies. That’s worth championing. Nolan believes, and the anecdotal evidence suggests, that young audiences are quick to reject AI slop. He says:
“They [Gen Z] see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well,” he explained. “And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”
I think what Nolan says applies to AI-slop books. Yes, they can be churned out, but readers are rejecting them. There are a millions of slop books on Amazon with zero reviews. Because they suck. Oh, they’re made out of competent sentences, because that’s what LLMs do. But they’re missing a human soul. It’s just so obvious. For want of a better phrase, they “ring hollow.”
Here’s the opening of a slop novel on sale now:
The city doesn’t sleep. It just changes tempo.
You learn that if you stay up late enough.
There’s a moment—somewhere between two and three in the morning—when the traffic thins, when the noise drops from a constant roar to something more honest. Tires on wet asphalt. A distant shout that might be laughter or might not. The hum of streetlights that have been buzzing longer than anyone remembers.
That’s when I work.
That third paragraph is a hoot. What’s dishonest about a constant roar? Is it hiding something? How are tires on wet asphalt more honest than tires on dry asphalt? In what language is a shout the same as laughter? When was the last time you heard a streetlight buzz? How about never?
What’s happened here is an AI word salad, only it’s made out of the poop lettuce that’s been in the news of late. This is why people churning out 300 “novels” a year are just wasting their time on earth. Maybe some of them make a little Starbucks money, but what kind of existence is that?
My conclusion is that we who actually write (not prompt) fiction don’t have to fear the tsunami of manure being shoveled up to Amazon on a daily basis. That stuff goes nowhere. Write with your soul and that alone will set you apart from the stink pile.
Your comments are most welcome.