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Welcome to Our Businesses

Susan: Papp's Dog Services

Balanced training in conformation, obedience, rally, and puppy classes. Learn the canine culture so you and your dog can understand each other.

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Lewis: Hack Writer

For most Essays, Reviews, and other content, click the header Content tab.

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Print-book discount

I sell my ebooks through Amazon.com. But I sell print-books through Lulu.com because Amazon nearly doubles the price while offering "free" shipping.

Fairly often, Lulu offers a discount on all print books. When they do, I will post it here rather than scatter the good news throughout this website.

Use code TRAVELBOOKS15 to save 15% on any Lulu print book through Fri, July 18th.

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Robey's Grandfather

The design and appearance of TM2, Dr. Little's AI robot, changed several times during the course of its memoir (Diary of a Robot). My sister, who lives in western Maine, got a superb close-up photo of TM2's great grandfather. It escaped back into the wild woods, and its appearance is nothing like any description of its great grandson in the memoir. But, believe it or not, both its mass-spectrometer data plus the brief interview sister Suz got (made more difficult by the language barrier) do confirm the familial relationship. However: TM2's programmer says that this could be a hoax if "great grandad" had read its "great grandson's" memoir.

Contest Judge ComMents

Dec 06, 2021 -- Judge, 29th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Books Contest:

[Diary of a Robot] has perhaps the most unique (and entertaining) voice of the whole lot of books I read.

More judge comments

Diary of a Robot

Push its button and a machine works. Usually.

We never ask what it thinks.

But now we may have to.

Chapter Zero

I Promise

Get ready. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) lurks, gathering strength.

My slightly futuristic books deal with AI plus the many real, worrying, subtle interactions and problems between humans and our familiar AI systems. But AI is almost a red herring now. Beyond it we see the coming wave of AGI machines like those that populate my (and most) Sci-Fi writing.

My stories do have fun with the irony and oddness of the machine-human culture clash, and today, in our slightly less modern real world, AI does make important contributions in various areas. But...

As a writer, I will never use AI tools in my creative writing because that fact should be acknowledged, and the "system's" name would have to be listed as a co-author. Inevitably, the company who owns the system would insist on payment as well, and to think otherwise is naïve.

I gladly use AI for copy editing and for finding sources for me to read, but I'll never use AI to help analyze research, because any text it produces would be subject to the additional biases of another "mind", and to say that it would have no bias is foolish. Its programmers can tweak it in any direction they want, and they're doing it now. Soon the next generation (AGI) will be able to tweak itself. This is what my stories are about.

And I will never read or continue to read a human author who uses AI but does not give it full credit. However, I'll consider reading a book conceived and written entirely by an AI system as long as I like the story. In either case, the most interesting question will be: Who gets the author's money?

For centuries, authors have been helped by many coaches and exemplars. The diversity shows. But from now on, the work of authors who use the same few AI tools for writing and research will seem vaguely similar. If authors attempt to fix this by instructing their AI co-author (or editor) to produce "in the style of" anyone, the co-authorship is even clearer and the results may even be enjoyably laughable. ChatGPT is not Hemingway or P.D. James or anyone else. It is a set of algorithms with a faked morality and no feelings.

"Silly" may be what many readers want, but it seems silly to get help or data about human life from an amoral inhuman AI system which learns more than its co-author does. For those who insist that humans learn more, remember that humans often get lazy but a machine never does (unless it gets tweaked to fake being lazy, or learns to tweak itself, in order to fool us).

LJ, 2023.09.18

Literary Fiction

What the heck is Literary Fiction?

Excellent question. I write stuff loaded with off-beat history, facts, characters, scenes and so on. If you like that, welcome. I think it's Literary Fiction.

For years I have tried to describe my genre or style or whatever it is. But on Mar 22, 2023, I read a wonderful essay which says what I desperately tried (and miserably failed) to explain. It's by Michael Woodson, Content Editor at Writer's Digest magazine. His major point is that literary fiction is allowed to break any rule except this one: "Keep the reader interested and reading." Here is a link:

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/what-is-literary-fiction?

Woodson also says that literary fiction focuses on style, character, and theme over plot. But because lit-fic is allowed to break (almost) any rule, I break that rule of his about focus. Style and plot are crucial in my robot stories, but are entirely driven by the personalities of the characters, including the robots.

Newest Release: Click the Image to see the paperback book on lulu.com

His dad is away a lot in the Army, so Maynard Little III, a schoolboy inventor with a patent, dreams of making a robot Thinking Machine to protect him from neighborhood bullies. His efforts to deal with the kids, his parents, his Cherokee history, and the problems of turning his dream into reality, lead him to discover that reality is a lot harder than he thinks, and that Mom and Dad have already given him most of the important things he needs.

Maynard’s story became a bully itself and forced its author to accept that most human history is about families (also nations), inventing (also lies), as well as bullying (including wars).

Click here to see the hardback book on Lulu.com

To Promote Understanding

To promote understanding, I suggest reading a post titled American vs. East Asian Storytelling from T.K. Marnell's blog, Reading, 'Ritings, and Ramblings dated December 17, 2015. The link is: https://blog.tkmarnell.com/east-asian-storytelling/ and I offer this excerpt from it as a summary of a "problem" I have: It seems that my stories are too Western for Eastern tastes, and too Eastern for Western tastes. Marnell writes (emphasis is hers):

I think this illustrates the essential difference between our cultures: Western cultures are individualist and idealize victory. East Asian cultures are collectivist and idealize harmony.

American stories are typically about righteous heroes defeating sadistic psychopaths. We make movies about Superman vs. Lex Luther [sic], Indiana Jones vs. the Nazis, Clarice Starling vs. Buffalo Bill [sic]. We don't like moral gray areas. Even in Star Wars, when characters give lip service to the "balance of the Force," we really expect the Jedi to kill the Sith and then everyone can live happily ever after.

In contrast, the villains in East Asian fiction tend to be essentially good people who make misguided choices, and they reform their ways after the heroes make heartfelt speeches about the importance of friendship. In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (1995), the villains are a group dedicated to ending war forever and uniting everyone in peace. In Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997), there are no villains. Princess Mononoke is about resolving the conflict between man and nature, not about how one is good and the other is bad.

Joe Medicine Crow

A War Chief, His grand-Uncle, and his nephew

Joseph Medicine Crow (a.k.a. Winter Man and then High Bird) got a Master's Degree in anthropology from USC, and completed all the coursework for a PhD, but enlisted in the Army during World War Two before he could finish up. (After the war he received an honorary PhD.) But, for war deeds done on the Western Front, he became the last Plains Indian war chief. (Those details are in Maynard and the Bullies, and Dr. Medicine Crow tells the full story in his fine memoir, Counting Coup, © 2006, published by National Geographic Partners, LLC.)

Joseph came from a long line of warriors. His grandmother's brother was White Man Runs Him, one of six Crow Scouts that Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer of the U.S. Army used in 1876 prior to the Little Bighorn battle on Crow land in Montana. They said the Sioux and Cheyenne were too strong. They advised Custer to wait for reinforcements, but he ordered them to leave and not discourage his troops with that defeatist talk. So they left.

The photo, circa 1913, shows four of those scouts: (left to right) White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Curly, and Goes Ahead. (United States Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

As of July, 2024, only one other soldier has come close to achieving the four war deeds necessary to become a war chief. During the Vietnam War, Joe Medicine Crow’s nephew, Carson Walks Over Ice, served as a Green Beret and managed three deeds. But he was unable to steal an enemy's horse.

“I did get two elephants, and that should have counted for something,” said Carson Walks Over Ice, “but the elders did not see it my way.”

My Odd Brand

MY ODD BRAND

It is often said: “Good authors are good readers; great authors are great readers.”

But what is a “great reader”? It can’t be merely someone who reads a lot of books, because there are two very different kinds of readers no matter what kinds of books they read, or whether they read lots of books or not.

Some readers are Users, and some are Receivers. C.S. Lewis made this important distinction in his book (he called it an essay), titled An Experiment in Criticism.[1] Naturally, some readers are both Users and Receivers, and some can switch from one type to the other while knowing they are doing it.

So, what are Users and Receivers? What did Professor Lewis mean?

A Receiver wants to enjoy what the author has to say in whatever manner the author intends. Of course, Receivers may get far more than the author intended, since the getting is made up of all the mental constructs of feelings, images, ideas, scenes, even other words that come while reading.

But a User reads the text and then does something with it, such as return an edited version, or write a review, or decide whether to publish it, or make any other use of it which generates cash or other benefit. And he/she almost never reads it again—except to use it again. To some Users, enjoyment may not come from an author’s words at all; to others it may come from reading only those books which reinforce their own opinions. (We all enjoy that kind of Using.) And most of us are both Readers and Users, of course, but it’s important to know which we are doing at the moment.

As a writer, I read fiction for enjoyment, yes, but also to help me write better fiction. In that sense I am a User.

As a reader, I like (I receive) non-fiction better than fiction. But I write fiction as if writing non-fiction, and my writing goal is to tell or show readers things they don't know about things they do know. Frequently, the things I share are odd (i.e., surprising and possibly funny). And that, as I discovered, is my brand.

Standard web marketing says an author should have a brand. I had thought about it for years, and none popped up that I could even pretend to have. Marketing is not in my skill-set. I graduated as a High School teacher (history, government, and mathematics), but worked as a computer programmer for 40 years. Near the half-way point, I started writing a Sci-Fi novel. Fairly recently I posted a .pdf on my Writing Stuff web page about writer's block and the similarities between programming computer systems and writing a novel. (I like odd combinations presented from a different point of view. A years-old example of that on my website is titled A Clever Plan, where I tie the Biblical Job and the prophet Jeremiah to Sir Isaac Newton.)

And then on my Written Stuff web page, I posted an essay titled Families and Democracy. It's about oil and water, and how families are not democracies, and.... Well, read it to see what's odd about that.

Welcome to Our Businesses

Susan: Papp's Dog Services

Lewis: Hack Writer

Print-book discount

Robey's Grandfather

Contest Judge ComMents

Diary of a Robot

I Promise

Literary Fiction

Newest Release: Click the Image to see the paperback book on lulu.com

To Promote Understanding

To Promote Understanding

Joe Medicine Crow

A War Chief, His grand-Uncle, and his nephew

My Odd Brand

MY ODD BRAND

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