aroslav: Blog

This is number 139 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I’M EASILY ADDICTED. Or maybe it’s one of the byproducts of ADHD or being a little OCD. God knows, I’m on the spectrum someplace.

Here’s what I mean.

When I was writing the Team Manager series, I started following women’s high school basketball in Iowa. It started with the high school team I was using as a model for my team in the book. Then, I had to consider what colleges they might go to and started following the American Rivers Conference Division III teams. When I was viewing that, I became aware of the buzz surrounding the University of Iowa Hawkeyes team and the phenomenon of Caitlin Clark. When she got drafted into the WNBA, I became an instant fan of the Indiana Fever. I had to try out the new Unrivaled league games as well. I was still watching my favorite ARC teams, the Iowa Hawkeyes and Big Ten teams, and the Fever.

I admit that I’m watching fewer ARC games, mostly only University of Iowa Big Ten games, only Indiana Fever games, and just my favorite three Unrivaled teams (out of eight). I no longer really watch any high school basketball, and can see that my days of watching Div III are numbered. The addiction is waning.

However, the entire Team Manager series is still available as eBooks on ZBookStore.

A while back, I discovered short dramas on a phone app that played audio episodes. I’d listened to a couple thousand episodes when I got completely caught up in my November Novel this past year. I haven’t listened to an episode in three months. (Doesn’t that sound like I’ve been sober for three months?)

But now, I’ve discovered short drama reels. These hit my Facebook feed and I quickly became addicted to some of the stories. In fact, I get 150 gigabytes of high speed hot spot each month, which is what I use for all my work, posting, television, and streaming needs. So far this month, I’ve used 177.45 gigabytes and I still have 8 days in my billing cycle to go.

Dang it.

I bring all this up as a bridge from my post on artificial intelligence to my intended subject of violence as entertainment. You see, I’m pretty well convinced that the stories on Pocket FM and the Reels I see on Facebook are at least partially AI generated. If the story itself isn’t, the audio track certainly is.

There are numerous Facebook accounts that post the short drama reels. They are usually posted in fifteen to thirty-minute episodes, and the account never posts the whole story. You are expected to purchase and download an app that feeds the reels to your phone. Watch the advertisements, pay for episodes, and bow down to the AI gods of Apple, Google, and Meta.

There are essentially only half a dozen stories, though I’m sure I could uncover a number of variants.

1. The billionaire CEO in disguise.
2. The neglected and abused child who returns to have revenge on the family that mistreated him/her.
3. The Kung Fu grandmaster who looks like a bum but saves the heiress and is revealed to the big boss as being the head of all the martial artists.
4. The child prodigy who saves the mother or father with an exceptional talent and gets a new stepparent in the deal.
5. The reincarnated ancestor who returns to punish the degenerate descendants.
6. The scorned and divorced spouse who is later revealed to be royalty or an heiress/heir to a great fortune.
7. The female drudge working on the military base who is revealed in a crisis as a retired sniper who can make an impossible shot of 3-6k or more to save a pinned down patrol.

I’m sure if I spent even more time immersed in these short dramas, I could find more storylines, but it seems they all follow a similar story arc.

An interesting (to me) phenomenon is that there is obviously a script, which may or may not have been written by a human, and in most but not all of the reels, actual human actors play the parts. Some do use AI generated images. So, the actors say the lines in some language or another. Then the AI dubs it into another language based on the audio track or script. I can tell it is AI because it will treat things like “Mr. Smith” as a sentence finished after “Mr.” and a new one begun “Smith.” It will also leave Asians in some Kung Fu dramas with completely western names like Mr. Smith, Mr. Clark, Mr. Jones, etc.

What gets me is that I often read the subtitles and they appear to be generated from the dubbed audio, not the script. They often mistake words for things that sound a little like what has been said or even spell the same name half a dozen different ways, based on what the narration sounded like. The same is true with the audio dramas as with the reels.

My currently running serial and recent eBook and paperback release, Forever Yours, is a story about a young programmer who sees potential in the development of artificial intelligence, but doesn’t consider it to be well implemented. He correctly sees that artificial intelligence has been developed for the benefit of the developers and not for the people it is sold to. Personal information is reported back to the corporation who owns the program. The programs spy on the users and turn that information into targeted advertising—a ‘feature’ that no user actually needs.

Verena Holt sent me an unsolicited review of Forever Yours that began:

Forever Yours stands out as a deeply human exploration of technology, ambition, and emotion. Blending speculative science with intimate storytelling, it captures not just the rise of artificial intelligence but the complex lives of those building it. The story’s balance of intellect, vulnerability, and vision makes it an unforgettable look at how connection endures in an increasingly digital world.

Not bad for a review attempting to convince me it is an actual human being offering the services of a non-existent Literary Pathway Curator Network to help with expanding my audience to book clubs around the world! I especially love the identification of the book as a “deeply human exploration.”

The thing is, I can’t argue with anything in this AI-generated message I received on Facebook from a user that no longer, and probably never, existed.

Forever Yours is available as an eBook at ZBookStore or as a Signature Edition paperback at online retailers. It is available in serialization at SOL online.

So, here we have the connection from artificial intelligence to my current but waning addiction to short drama reels. I’ve even included a nod to the unsolicited email I receive from AIs trying to sell me services that don’t actually exist. But what does all that have to do with violence as entertainment? I’ve already exceeded my intended length for this blog post, so that will have to wait until my next post.

I’ll just say that I have not watched a reel in which no one got slapped! Unless they were beaten by a martial arts master, or outright killed. It got me thinking: Do I do that in my books?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, if I can get around to it this week, my next post on violence as entertainment will be “Pow! Wham! Thwack! Zap!”

This is number 138 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

AI IS HERE TO STAY. The time to have stopped it was with autocorrect. Remember how funny it was when the great new feature either changed your obscenity to ‘duck,’ or surprised your boss with ‘I’m running a big behind’? That was when we needed to end AI. Like so many things in our world, it’s too late now.

That doesn’t mean it will run the world in the future or even make our lives miserable—most of the time. It does mean we will either be aware of it, or we will let it take control of things we don’t mean it to control.

That includes our own creative process. As authors and readers, how will our art be influenced?

I received an intriguing email offer to help me market my Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) novel, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. It was really well-written and convincing. It took me more than half an hour to track down that the mail had arrived from a non-existent company and a non-existent person. But it was so good that I have seldom seen a college-level book review better composed—either by myself or others.

Then I loaded the manuscript into Adobe Acrobat (as a PDF) and asked it to draft a review. Wow! I include an unedited excerpt below:

Nathan Everett’s The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a captivating blend of romance, family legacy, and corporate intrigue. The novel masterfully intertwines the personal and professional lives of its protagonists, Erin Scott and Preston Carver, as they navigate the complexities of love, ambition, and the weight of family history….

The novel’s exploration of themes such as trust, redemption, and the pursuit of happiness is both heartfelt and thought-provoking. Erin and Preston’s journey from colleagues to lovers to life partners is beautifully depicted, making their eventual union on the iconic Staircase of Dragon Jerico a poignant and satisfying conclusion.

Overall, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a well-crafted tale that balances romance, drama, and corporate intrigue. Nathan Everett’s storytelling is engaging, and his characters are relatable and multidimensional. This book is a delightful read for anyone who enjoys stories about love, ambition, and the enduring power of family legacy.

In the interest of conserving space in this blog, I left out a couple of paragraphs that summarize the action. The point is, as an author, I crave this kind of review! I want to use it in promoting my book. But I’m conflicted over the very idea of presenting this kind of AI-generated material. I would certainly never do so without clearly identifying it as being a non-human created summary!

The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, which I labored to write without the aid of AI, is available as an eBook on ZBookstore or as a paperback at Ingram Spark. It can be read free on SOL (author Wayzgoose).

I really have just two major concerns regarding AI and its use by writers. First of all, there is the longstanding and almost lost cause of how generative artificial intelligence is trained and the power consumption that is draining the world’s energy. It is not only a strain on the power grid, but also on natural resources, like water, and its contribution to environmental crises like global warming.

Artistically, I’m concerned about the way generative AI is trained. It uses, without consent, the work of other authors to build a training wall from which it can ‘create’ the work it generates. In other words, our work is copied by the AI so it can learn from our content, often using large chunks of it and passing it off as its own. It frankly plagiarizes real authors (and artists and musicians).

This has become such a common method for learning that there are even ‘training programs’ for human authors based on the concept of copying portions of famous novels!

The fundamental idea of education for humans includes things like reading and viewing artwork and listening to music. Many artists have made copying masterpieces a part of their learning process. Let me remind you, however, that if they become good enough to pass that work off as the work of the original artist, or their own original artwork, they are referred to as forgers and plagiarists!

I don’t know that there is anything we can do about this. We can complain to manufacturers of the software when portions of our works are used and passed off as the work of the AI. The AI chatbot Claude was recently sued for over a billion dollars for copyright infringement and lost the suit. But it makes the problem of plagiarism ten times more complex. Many of us have had our works retitled and labeled with a different author name, then sold as someone else’s work. And that was without AI in the mix. I worry the problem will be far more prevalent in the future.

Finally, I will say there is a moral and ethical issue regarding authors using AI in creating their books. SOL author Cly Anders had a great blog post on this on December 14. She compares AI to fire. She uses the fire to cook with while some other asshole uses it to burn down a building. Fair enough.

But there are, sadly, people who are blindly following the path of prompting an AI chatbot to write their novels or even technical manuals. It’s easy to be seduced by these offers that I receive half a dozen times a day. They offer ‘ghost writer quality’ writing of your book. I consider that to be fraudulent. You can’t just have someone or something write your work for you and slap your own name on it.

I’m not fond of any ghost writing for that matter. If a ghost writer writes a famous person’s memoir, for example, it should clearly state “The Memoir of XYZ as told to and written by ABC.” There are famous authors who became so wealthy and popular that they basically quit writing. Instead, they develop a storyline and concept, then hand it off to a staff of writers who generate one or two dozen books a year—all under that author’s name or one of his pen names.

Periodically, I receive an email from a fan that starts out “I have a great idea for a novel you should write. I can’t write it myself, but you’re free to use this idea.” In my book, that turns me into an AI that is working based on someone else’s prompts.

It has been suggested that people who use AI to write their books be referred to as ‘prompters’ rather than authors. That makes sense. In much the same way as my ‘ghost written memoir’ sample above, the book would say clearly, “Written by ABC ChatBot, as prompted by this person who couldn’t be bothered to write it himself.”

AI is here to stay, no matter how much we yearn for the day when we could blame running a big behind on autocorrect. Like Cly, some authors will cook with AI. Others will torch the industry. It will become harder and harder to tell when a novel is written by a chatbot and when it is written by a moderately talented author. The grammar and spelling will be perfect. The thing is the chatbot can generate a hundred times more of those moderately good novels (like mine, for example) than real authors will ever be able to.

That is where the danger lies.

Next, if all goes well, I’m going to comment a bit about what we see and read that is AI generated or that uses AI in its production. I call it “Short Dramas.”

This is number 137 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

EACH YEAR, I feel compelled to publish a disclaimer that covers me for everything I might fail at for the coming twelve months. No, it’s not a resolution, nor is it a list of goals or excuses. In its original form, it is simple.

There is nothing about my religion or my politics that requires me to convince you that I am right and you are wrong. Nor is there anything about my religion or politics that requires me to listen to you trying to convince me you are right and I am wrong.

Pretty simple, really. I think, however, people take that to mean I have no opinions about what is right and what is wrong. I do! I have very strong opinions about what is happening in the US, immigration, war, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, the economy, and even opinions about what is happening in other places around the world, like Ukraine, Venezuela, and Palestine. Not expressing them in my life and in my writing is the same as not having them at all. So, they come out in the standards of my heroes, the philosophy in my writing, the opinions expressed by my characters, and their actions. As a result, I have found it necessary to add this disclaimer before every new story I write.

This is a work of adult fiction. The story and characters are fiction. Any incidental mention of places, historic personages, products, or organizations are the property of the respective owners. This book contains content of an adult nature. This may include explicit sexual content and characters whose beliefs may be contrary to your religious, political, social, or world view. The content is inappropriate, and in some cases illegal, for readers under the age of 18, or anyone who cannot tolerate content that does not agree with them.

When I’m talking to most people, I find it is silly to need this kind of disclaimer, either for my writing or my life. Most of the people I interact with are adults. But some people who comment on my stories or send me email plainly are not adults in my definition and shouldn’t be reading adult fiction. Many cannot even discern the difference between fiction and reality. But I’m not going to quit writing.

I am happy to say, in fact, that I have two books that I am working on at this time.

The first should come as no surprise. I wrote the first draft of The Inheritance Paradox in November 2025. I have decided this will be a Devon Layne (aroslav) book, even though it is decidedly lacking in explicit sex. I am deep in the rewrite and am pleased (as are most of my alpha readers) with the progress, though it went a little slowly over the holidays as I traveled and celebrated. I expect the writing will pick up a bit now that I’m getting re-focused on it.

The story is predicated on the idea that a man in 1979 is recruited as a genetic courier to travel into the past and spread a particular gene through the population. How? The usual way. To impregnate women in several different centuries who will pass his genetic material on to future generations.

One of my alpha readers said she loved the concept of the genetic courier, but there had to be some way for him to pass the genes on besides getting a lot of women pregnant. Well, that was the deciding factor for me to choose to make it a Devon Layne book and not a Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) book. If the mere requirement of the MC to have sex is too much to handle, some readers need to be protected from it. That doesn’t mean the sex will be explicit in the book, but it will definitely be a major theme.

When I was in the Pacific Northwest for the holidays, I had the opportunity for a delightful luncheon with my alpha reader and good friend, Les. I told him that I had decided to make the sequel to Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose on SOL) A Place at the Table my next priority project. His immediate question was whether I had started making notes for it yet. Um…

In November of 2023, I wrote a complete first draft of A Place Among Peers. It was a little over 88,000 words and 21 chapters. I didn’t hate it, but it left me flat. I chose not to release it until I could figure out what was wrong with it and rewrite it. I opened the version I ‘annotated’ in October of 2024 when I’d ‘figured it out.’ But I had other things to be concerned with at the time.

It turns out that I hadn’t figured it all out after all. As I read through the annotated draft, which merely pointed out things that needed to be changed in order to set the story ten years later, I realized it would be more appropriate to mark the thirty percent or so that didn’t need to be changed. So, I’ve been making notes and expect I will start posting the rewrite for Sausage Grinder Patrons sometime in late January or early February. I don’t want to become too distracted from The Inheritance Paradox.

I want to mention that this is a case in which I felt I’d hit the sex and the political parallel with our universe too hard and that I needed to clean it up in order to make it an acceptable Nathan Everett offering.

I will say that while I was ‘on vacation’ I read the entire released version of A Place at the Table, a story available on ZBookStore or on the Wayzgoose page at SOL. I was pleased with how that story developed and am happy to consider it for one of my Signature Edition releases in 2026.

And thus, we begin the new year. I still plan to deal with AI and writing sometime soon. Not sure if it will be next week.

This is number 136 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I AM AWARE that this is not the post promised three weeks ago about AI and writing. That post will start the New Year of 2026, but might not be the first Sunday of January. In fact, my blog posts will no longer attempt to be weekly, but will be topical as I come across additional topics that I think merit my attention.

The topic of AI and writing is huge and will require some additional research. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the subject, but it seems to be interfering in nearly every aspect of my life, including my writing and I have to deal with it every day. So, later.

Instead, I’m using this simple post to wish you all a Happy New Year—a season’s greetings I’m confident won’t offend too many people. I’m tired of being frowned at for wishing people Happy Holidays, though most have no concept of what I’m talking about when I say Joyous Yule or Happy Solstice.

Nonetheless, I’ll say I had a wonderful Yule celebration with friends and family gathered around our table and I hope you are privileged to have such a joyous occasion in your winter.

It’s typical for me to do some form of year-end recap, but I think this one will be shorter than some in the past. I released only three new books this year and tallied a total of only 653,000 words written this year.

Soulmates was the first book I released this year and I was happy to also release it as my first Signature Edition paperback. It sold two more copies than the one I expected. Of course, the eBook sold much better, but not as well as some former books I’ve released. Can’t please everyone.

Forever Yours was my second serial release and my fourth Signature Edition paperback. It will carry through serialization into mid-March 2026, but both the eBook and paperback are also available. I’m happy with this book and content with the criticisms that have come with it. They are good ones.

Third, final, and least successful release this year was the novella Alienable Rights, a Political Satire in which everyone gets screwed. This was my contest entry in the 2025 SOL Halloween contest and came in a very respectable last place. I celebrated the honor by releasing it as my sixth Signature Edition hardcover. Why? Because I believe no matter what political opinions you have and how much you believe in them, you have to be able to see the humor in it. I saw the humor by making an expensive hardcover out of a very insignificant book.

You might ask what all this about the Elder Road Books Signature Collection is. This is my personal vanity project, and while I appreciate you visiting the page, I don’t expect anyone but me to actually buy a copy. I released six Signature Editions this year, including the three mentioned above. You will also find Signature Editions of The Art and Science of Love (paperback), Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain (paperback), and Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, in a massive single-volume hardcover of the entire trilogy.

These six books have taken residence on a special little book rack where I can look at them and feel like I accomplished something in the past twenty years of writing and publishing. My 2026 Signature Editions will include some of my Nathan Everett titles, as well as at least one new Devon Layne title.

Remember, all my books are available for free online reading. You don’t have to go buy the expensive Signature Editions. I don’t think I’m a collector item for anyone but me.

In addition to released books, I’ve written the first draft of a new book titled The Inheritance Paradox. I’m in the process of rewriting and expect to release it by March 2026 or thereabouts. I expect to launch the rewrite of my aborted draft of Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) A Place Among Peers, the long-overdue sequel to A Place at the Table.

The public doesn’t see these books until they have been written, rewritten, and fully edited. However, my Patrons do get to see works before anyone else. My Sausage Grinder Patrons ($10/mo) get whatever I’m writing at the time in weekly installments. It’s a risky proposition. Sometimes, I don’t finish a book or decide it needs to be completely rewritten. What they read is raw and unedited and subject to change. But they like it and get to give me ‘alpha reader’ feedback as I’m writing. That is a great dialog between me and my readers.

My Sneak Peek Patrons ($5/mo) get a pre-release edition of my stories, including both online serialization and pre-release of eBooks. Pre-release editions are only available until the final is released to the public, but that is always at least two weeks ahead of time. I greatly appreciate the continued support of my Sneak Peek patrons.

I don’t discount the importance of any patron. My Library Patrons ($1/mo) also receive benefits. I release one of my backlist eBooks in a Special Patrons Edition each month. It is available for all patrons to download at no additional charge during that month. Everyone wins by being one of my patrons!

And even Followers of my Patreon page are included in my monthly offering of book cover desktop wallpaper they can download at no charge. I just want to give something to everyone.

So, I feel like the past year has not been a complete waste. It has been difficult to remain productive with the kind of light reading I offer when it often feels like the world is crumbling around us. I hope that you find my stories enjoyable, even when I can’t help but let my social consciousness seep through. Whether it is equal rights, constitutional freedom, human dignity, or human value, it will always be present in what I write.

I’m hoping perhaps that in 2026, I can get on the FBI’s wanted list as a Trans Activist. I don’t need to be trans to believe they should have every right afforded to cis-gendered people. If it only takes promoting that to get arrested, bring it on.
I hope your New Year also brings you all you attract.

I won’t promise that my AI and writing series will start in the next week, but it will come soon.

This is number 135 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“DO YOU HAVE a restless urge to write? If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first important step to success in writing.” Bennett Cerf

That was the first invitation I got to be a famous writer back in the 1960s. The guiding faculty of the Famous Writers School included Faith Baldwin, John Caples, Bruce Catton, Bennett Cerf, Mignon G. Eberhart, Paul Engle, Bergen Evans, Clifton Fadiman, Rudolf Flesch, Phyllis McGinley, J.D. Ratcliff, Rod Serling, Max Shulman, Red Smith, and Mark Wiseman. Of course, there was no way I was ever going to be able to afford the $600-$900 tuition for the Famous Writers School. I was still fighting off debt for college.

By 1970, it was under fire for fraudulent advertising and business practices. It turned out that none of the twelve or fifteen famous authors who were going to ‘teach’ the course ever read anything a student wrote and apparently didn’t write any of the lessons. Jessica Mitford’s expose in The Atlantic spoofed the picture of the famous writers on the cover.

By placing twelve actual famous authors on the cover, The Atlantic cast shade at the basic qualifications of the School’s founders. Pictured in the caricature on the cover were Mark Twain, Tolstoi, Poe, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Ben Johnson, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Voltaire. Will these authors read and review your work?

Some of the ‘founders’ attempted to defend the school, under fire for refusing to refund the tuition, even before the course was begun. Mitford’s husband represented a woman in a lawsuit against the school claiming the famous authors really had nothing to do with the school.

Faith Baldwin said, “Oh, that’s just one of those things about advertising.... Anyone with common sense would know that the fifteen of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in.”

By the mid-70s, the school was pretty much defunct, though a company calling itself the Famous Writers School was still selling the coursework through 2015 according to Wikipedia.

Not to worry, though! Today there are dozens of writing instruction offers from ‘reputable’ companies rushing to fill the void.

In the Mastering Fiction course, Teng, ‘a professional novelist’ who might be any of several by that name listed in Wikipedia and elsewhere, proposes to teach Jack London’s method of learning to write in twelve days through copywork. He pretends that the twelve lessons are taught by Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Bret Easton Ellis, Suzanne Collins, Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JRR Tolkein, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Douglas Adams, Ken Liu, Shirley Jackson, Dan Brown, Stephen King, Jane Yolin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kate Chopin. Definitely a picture that belongs on the cover of The Atlantic.

Of course, what he means is that there will be copying assignments for portions of those authors’ works (with or without their permission).

I’ve received dozens of offers over the past month—partly because of the reputation of November as being a month that thousands of people still attempt to write a novel in 30 days, and partly because I was curious about what was going on and clicked on one of the links. (Click-bait! AI algorithms!)

There is no limit to the number of offers from people who have written ‘best sellers,’ shown people how to sell their book without a mailing list or social media following, have the solution to how to plot your novel using ‘these simple steps,’ can tell you how to write your non-fiction eBook in three days, or most commonly now, how to use ‘ghost writer quality AI’ to write your book.

If you are tempted by an ad that says any equivalent of ‘write an eBook in three days,’ run! This is a problem that goes beyond whether or not you have the skills to write a book. It is a fundamental misunderstanding regarding what an eBook is. It is not some different thing to write. It doesn’t fall into the category of novel, short story, poem, manual, memoir. No. An eBook is a medium, just like paperback and audiobook. You have to understand that if you are ‘writing an eBook,’ you might as well be scribbling on a wall.

You are writing a story. You are writing a novel or a play or an instruction manual. When you publish that thing you have written, it might be published as an eBook or a paperback, or a web serial, etc. But don’t let anyone suggest to you that you can write an eBook as if it is somehow easier to write than a paperback. It’s not.

That rant being out of the way, let’s talk about whether you can write a book.

If I asked if you can play the violin, you would not consider responding that you don’t know because you haven’t tried. You can’t simply pick up a violin and ‘see if you can play it.’ There are steps involved. While some people can get by skipping steps, most would need to learn to read music, know what a key signature is, and how music translates to the violin. Then one would need to learn the notes on the violin, the fingering, the bowing, and the tuning of the instrument. Finally, the fingers need to be trained to respond to the instructions received when reading the music and holding the instrument. That only comes through practice. At some point in that process, you might be able to respond, ‘Yes, I can play the violin.’

I am a big proponent of people writing, even if it is just a journal or a grocery list. Why? Because it falls into the category of practicing. You will discover, if you are interested in learning, what a complete sentence is, what character is, how plot evolves.

You might even discover a course that will teach you the fundamentals of writing. But those courses will not turn you into an overnight best-selling author. They will be the equivalent of learning to read music—which, by the way, is still a long way from learning to compose music. We write every day to strengthen our talent of weaving a tapestry of experiences out of words.

So, if you decided to pony up the $60 bucks to learn how to copy the works of famous authors, fine. Or if you pony up $90 to subscribe to BBC Maestro and have Ken Follett provide the lessons, bravo. Or if you decided to purchase the outliner for your plot (about the same as following the “Save the Cat” method), good.

It is simply important to understand that these are steps that may be helpful. As the critic of my first book once said to me, “Wow! This is freeze-dried. If you added a little hot water, it would be a whole book!” Your first instruction course, while an accomplishment and a help along the way, is still just the powder from which you might develop as a writer.

Finally, as Dorothy Parker once famously put it, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Next week, I’ll address the other elephant in the room, which I alluded to early in this post but never got around to addressing. “If It’s Artificial, It Ain’t Intelligent.”