Eric Ross: Blog

One of the things readers may notice in She Answered is that some of the dialogue feels… a little different.

That’s intentional.

The story is set in Quebec’s Laurentians, between Montreal and Ottawa, where French and English influence one another in myriad ways. I grew up in this part of Canada, and I wanted the story to sound like the place where it happens.

In the story, you’ll occasionally encounter Québécois French in conversations or in expressions that don’t have a satisfying English equivalent. Rather than translating everything or stripping away those details, I’ve left them in where they help create a sense of place. Tabernak is a profanity, for example, although literally it's the ceremonial box that holds the communion bread and wine. If you don’t speak French, don’t worry. The meaning is almost always clear from the surrounding context.

More subtly, you may notice that some dialogue doesn’t always follow the rhythm or grammatical structure you’d expect in American or British English.

That’s also intentional.

Many native French speakers carry French sentence structures into English. It’s not “incorrect” English—it’s English shaped by another language. Word order, emphasis, and phrasing can all feel just slightly different. For example, at one point a character says this "The compass, it knows north". If you’ve spent time in Quebec, you’ll recognize these patterns immediately. If you haven’t, they may simply sound a little unfamiliar.

You’ll also notice Canadian spelling throughout the story. You’ll see spellings like colour, centre, and favourite, alongside forms that many American readers will find familiar. There isn’t always complete consistency across Canada, either, which is part of the country’s linguistic character.

Canadian English is a mongrel carrying traces of Britain, America, France, and the countless regional voices that have shaped it over generations. That’s one of the things I love about it. Writing She Answered in any other voice would have felt false, so I chose to retain the dialect.

The Laurentians aren’t just the setting of the story—they’re part of its identity. Language is part of that landscape.

Hope you enjoy the story!

E

AI-detection tools have a well-known problem: they generate too many false positives. A human-written story can easily be flagged as machine-generated, and a lightly edited AI draft can slip through. For sites that care about provenance—whether a piece was written by a person or produced by a model—the current methods are simply not reliable enough.

During a thread on the Stories Online forums I suggested a different approach. Instead of trying to detect AI text after the fact by statistical quirks, why not have the generating systems deliberately embed a lightweight, invisible watermark in the prose itself? If the major AI writing tools agreed to apply such a mark, sites like SOL could check for it and know with reasonable confidence that a story had come from one of those tools.

The reaction was skeptical. Fair enough. So I went away and built a small prototype in Python to see whether the idea was even feasible.

The system works by making a series of tiny, meaning-preserving choices while the text is written or lightly rewritten. It currently uses three independent channels:

Synonym selection — choosing among close alternatives for certain content words.

Function-word preferences — small closed-class choices such as that versus which.

Adverb and modifier placement — preferring one natural position over another for a limited set of adverbs.

None of these changes is meant to be noticeable to a reader. Taken together, however, they create a recoverable statistical pattern.

The story I just posted, “Steganography Sample,” was processed with this prototype. It contains 29 encoded points. When the detector is run on the finished text it recovers the watermark with high confidence.

Only after building the prototype did I discover that the general technique already has a name and a substantial research literature: linguistic steganography (and the closely related field of natural-language watermarking). Researchers have been exploring synonym substitution, syntactic variation, and similar carriers for years. My implementation is a modest, practical demonstration rather than a novel algorithm. Still, it was useful to work through the problem by hand and see that a lightweight, multi-channel watermark can be embedded in literary prose without obvious damage to voice or meaning.

Whether AI companies would ever adopt something like this is a separate question. The experiment does suggest that, if they wanted to, a cooperative watermarking scheme for attribution is at least technically plausible.

A couple of weeks ago I posted the original version of The Ash-wife's Cottage, which I wrote as a gothic erotic horror story. I intended to post this alternate version soon afterward, but life intervened—and as I revised it, the story kept changing.

The plot is almost identical, but the emotional center isn’t.

In the original, Mother Alis is a darker supernatural presence, and the story leans into gothic horror. In this version, I asked a different question: what if she wasn’t a monster at all, but a woman who spent her life giving of herself to others and died alone? That change transformed the haunting from something predatory into something closer to witness and remembrance.

It amazed me how little of the story had to change to create such a different emotional experience.

I’d love to hear what you think. Which version do you prefer—the original gothic telling, or this elegiac reinterpretation? And, more importantly, why?

Eric

It’s been a while, I know.

This spring has been exceptionally busy in other parts of my life, and between that, general distraction, and a little creative stuckness, new stories have been slower coming than I’d like.

I’m still working on the continuation of Djinn of the Forgotten Lamp, and I haven’t abandoned it. I’m also wrestling with another story set in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, involving a werewolf and the trouble that happens when people are alone in the woods.

Both stories are still alive. I'm just stuck.

In the meantime, I’ve finished something shorter: The Taste of Surrender.

This one is not a big mythic fantasy or a supernatural story. It’s a bedroom piece. Very intimate. Very explicit. I labelled it a stroke story, but what interested me was psychology behind the scene. We've all experienced not being able to ask for something we'd like. This story is about that moment when someone discovers a desire they didn’t quite know how to admit — and then realizes their lover has already seen it.

That’s the pay dirt, really.

So that’s where I’ve been. Busy spring. Stuck on a couple of stories. Distracted by life. And, cranking out a small filthy story to try get unblocked.

Hope you enjoy it.

E

This is where Part I comes to a close.

It doesn’t wrap up neatly, and I didn't mean for it to.

Khalid found the lamp. He woke Zahira. That was simple. But their relationship has now moved beyond anything familiar—beyond control, beyond transaction. It’s become shared, and that changes the stakes for both of them.

By the end of this section, Khalid is tied into something much larger, whether he understands it or not.

It turns out that Zahira isn’t alone in the world.

There is a structure behind her—older, organized, and very real. A kind of court, if you want a name for it. It governs how beings like her exist, and how power flows in that world. It has held together for a long time and it doesn’t tolerate disruption.

This bond between Khalid and Zahira is exactly that.

Part II, which I’ll be posting shortly, moves into the consequences. What their connection actually means once it’s seen. How it’s judged. And what happens when something steps outside the order that’s been in place for centuries.

There are more parts in development after that.

But for now, this is the end of Part I.

-Eric