Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 5

Update: Deep in the Weeds of Proofreading

I have a t-shirt that reads, “Stay Clam and Proofread.” I could use several more, in difficult colors, because proofreading just takes over my life in the last three weeks or four weeks prior to publication, and here we are for Sekaran.

I have applied the corrections from one proofreader so far (this does not count the casual typos found by non-proofreaders). In between sending the draft to this proofreader (Anna S) and getting it back, I read the whole thing myself on my computer, tweaking and trimming and fixing whatever typos I found. I can therefore tell you that my ratio is roughly 1/22 compared to Anna. I literally caught less than one in twenty. Lots were subtle, I’ll say that.

I have another set of typo corrections in front of me now, which I will do tonight … maybe tonight and tomorrow depending on how long this takes … and my bet is that the set of typos Linda S caught will overlap by about 50% with the ones Anna caught. If you both weren’t especially gifted, I would predict a lot less overlap, more like 20%. We’ll see what it really turns out to be.

MEANWHILE

Yet more proofreading, though it’s not the same. I mean, I’m reading the draft on my phone. I catch relatively few typos that way (some, yes, and some of them are humiliatingly obvious and how is it POSSIBLE to miss those?), but I do A TON of tweaking; an average of one tweak every other page or so, which means hundreds. Things like changing “almost” to “nearly” because I decide it sounds better, or changing the order of sentences in a paragraph, or deleting a few words here or there, or noticing that someone “murmured” five times on one page. This is exceedingly annoying and tedious. Not the reading part, the part where I actually go through the manuscript and make the changes. I am completely aware that no one will be able to point to overt changes, but I feel it does make a noticeable difference to the overall smoothness.

However, I also wrote the next section of the story that focuses on Thaniel Hale and his first encounter with Ubez. This story will in fact lead forward, eventually, into another book in that universe. I know the title of the next book, for a wonder. (Adamantine.) I know the main pov characters. (Erec Chatham and Desya.) I know the plot, in very broad terms. (Redacted.) I just don’t know when I’m going to write it. Next year is already looking desperately crowded.

Regardless, the Hale story is going to go to slightly over 15,000 words, I think, and therefore will appear in chunks in my newsletter and then drop whole onto my Patreon. Still not sure about the actual upcoming October newsletter. I sort of feel I should write something Halloween-y for October. On the other hand, not sure I have time, plus the newsletter will go out weeks before Halloween. We’ll see.

During the coming week — proofing proofing proofing! Plus preparing for Archon, which is this coming weekend. I’m going to drop posts related to some of the panels each day, so that I can say, if so inclined, “And there’s a post about this with examples at my blog.” For several panels, that might be useful.

Oh, also, I did make time to take all the dogs to the park this past weekend, early in the morning because it’s been nice and cool in the morning. I wanted specifically to see if Ish was willing to go for a walk in an exciting location, and he was. He had a significant episode of back pain recently. (I know, everything landed on Ish over the past three months, old age is terrible.) That’s much better, but he doesn’t want to go for walks the way he used to, so I thought the park might be different. It was, so I had a chance to watch him move, and I think he has a specific weakness in the right rear leg. Not lameness. Doesn’t look like pain, thankfully. Instability of some kind that’s causing him to move that leg in an odd diagonal path. That’ll be something to keep an eye on. Big trackmeet of some kind, so he got to meet a few kids, and he liked that. They all did.

Fall

Back to proofreading!

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Reconnecting with your WIP

Via Jane Friedman’s blog: How to Reconnect with a Draft You No Longer Want to Write

I bet we’ve all slogged through a draft without being able to trigger “flow.” Not the fun way to do it. Slow, painful, even scenes you want to write are hard and the ones you just need to get through are worse. Ugh. This is what I’m thinking of when I see the title of this post. Is this what the post is actually about?

There comes a moment in many writers’ lives, sometimes early, sometimes much later, when the manuscript they once felt passionate about suddenly falls silent. You open the file and feel … nothing. Not dread, not excitement. Just a dull, gray emptiness. It’s not “writer’s block”—it’s not that you can’t write. It’s that you don’t want to. And in many ways, that feels worse.

I doubt very much that it feels worse than writer’s block, but this is pretty much what I had in mind. The rest of the post offers reasons this can happen and suggestions for getting through this feeling:

1) Burnout.

Yes, I should think so. How to get over that? Here’s the brief version; click through to read the whole thing.

First, give yourself full permission to pause without guilt. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a (creative) necessity. What about this story excited you when you got the idea? Reconnect with these feelings.Reread a scene or chapter you loved. And when you do start writing again, do it gently: set realistic expectations and honor them.

I strongly suspect the first point is the key. This is one reason I’m taking it easy this month, making time to read as well as write. I also think maybe it might help to ditch the project that slowed way down and got unfun — if possible — take a break, and pick up something else, something that feels more fun. Setting aside a project might be impossible, of course, and in that case there’s nothing to do but keep moving

Oh, here’s another one that rings a bell:

3) The WIP needs incubation time.

If you can’t write forward, write around it. Write about your character’s motivations, fears, or their backstories. Incubation thrives in unstructured thought. Take a walk, do dishes, stare out the window. Track your sparks: Keep a notebook handy for sudden lines, images, or plot fixes that drift in. Incubation often delivers gifts in flashes, and your job is to catch them.

Some of the other points look potentially useful as well. Basically, a good post with suggestions that seem as though they might be helpful.

Though I’m REALLY HOPING my next novel goes zipping right along. I don’t necessarily expect ever to complete a novel as fast as I did MARAG — eighteen days — but I sure am hoping the next one triggers flow and the novel pours itself onto the page. Each novel is so different. They’re hard to predict.

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Poetry Thursday: Fine, let’s have an actual Sonnet for once

I’m not actually that keen on sonnets as sonnets, but someone commented that St. Vincent Millay actually used the word “turn” where the sonnet turns in this poem, and I thought that was funny and elegant.

Also, we’re at the turn of the season right now, bidding farewell to summer.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

*** *** ***

“The rain is full of ghosts tonight” is a lovely phrase. I seriously want to steal that line.

Photo by Nadia Valko on Unsplash

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AI Tells: What Words Does AI Use with Uncommon Frequency?

Here’s a tweet about this (I saw the link on Astral Codex Ten)

If you want to spot AI writing, here are some words to look out for: pic.twitter.com/TRXmeTD7Nh

— Samuel Hume (@DrSamuelBHume) July 5, 2025

I feel this sort of analysis is … mildly interesting? And mildly irritating, especially if someone says, Oh no, don’t use these words in case someone thinks you’re using AI to generate your posts! My feeling is that I’m not going to be bullied away from using a great word like delve — which I should use more often — by the mere fact that ChatGPT uses this word more often than random people.

Also, it’s irritating to have someone declare that words such as “additionally” are used a lot in generated text. Who cares? There’s nothing wrong with transition words that lead the reader through the passage, and there’s no way to get creative with words like “first” and “finally” — and “additionally” is just like that. This is reminding me of the time I ran a section of a paper I wrote through AI detectors and got flagged for possible plagiarism for — ready? — “See Figure 1, below.” And laughed. Why yes, clever AI detector, I bet “See Figure 1, below,” does indeed occur in many, many other papers all over the internet.

But my actual first reaction in this particular case is: Steatotic? I perk up: this is a new-to-me word! What does it mean? And how is it possible that text generators are FREQUENTLY using a word I’m not familiar with? That seems so unlikely!

Google, define “steatotic” —

ste·a·to·sis /ˌstēəˈtōsis/ noun

Medicine

infiltration of liver cells with fat, associated with disturbance of the metabolism by, for example, alcoholism, malnutrition, pregnancy, or drug therapy.

Oh, come on. “Steatotic” cannot possibly be a common word in generated text. Questions about why this word is on that graph do come up in the responses to that tweet. But I don’t care why people think it might be a common word in generated text. It can’t be. That’s just silly. The sample of generated text from which these words were drawn must be highly limited.

I do think the way AI text puts words together is a much better tell than the specific words used in the text. Even that gets tricky, as I think we’ve seen here — though some commenters seem REALLY sensitive to generated text. Here, how about this?

Me: Good morning, ChatGPT! Please write a paragraph about Death in Terry Pratchett’s style.

ChatGPT:

Death, as ever, arrived precisely when he meant to, which was rather unfair on those who had been counting on another five minutes, because Death never miscounted minutes, and besides he quite liked punctuality. He loomed in the way only a tall skeleton in a black robe with a scythe could loom, and he did it with a certain professional dignity, the kind that suggested he had turned up to an appointment with eternity and found the waiting room full of people still reading the magazines. His voice, when he spoke, rattled around the air like the echo of an empty church bell that had just realized its job was to make people nervous. YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF THE STORY, he intoned, not unkindly. Then, because he was not without a sense of courtesy, he added, BUT AT LEAST YOU GET TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.

Would you like me to try another paragraph in a slightly funnier, more satirical register (like Mort) or a more solemn one (like Reaper Man)?

Me: Sure, try doing it like Reaper Man.

ChatGPT:

Death stood in the field, the scythe resting lightly in his hand, as though it weighed no more than a feather, which in a sense it didn’t. The grass swayed around him in the night breeze, whispering its own secrets to the dark, and the stars overhead looked down with the calm indifference of witnesses who had seen everything before. Death, for his part, was not indifferent. He watched the little farmhouse on the hill, the dim glow of its lamp, and the slow breathing of the old man inside as though each rise and fall of his chest was a note in a long, familiar song. EVERYTHING HAS ITS SEASON, Death thought, not without sadness, and if the wind chose to bend the words across the meadow, that was its own business.

Want me to spin out a bit more—give you a whole short scene, the way Pratchett would linger on a moment before shifting to the wider Discworld shuffle?

Me: No, thank you, this is fine.

What do you think? Besides noting that obviously ChatGPT has been fed all of Terry Pratchett’s books, which is, of course, copyright violation. If someone handed you five paragraphs and four were from Pratchett’s books while the other was one of those above, would you be able to tell which was fake?

I think the very first sentence:

Death, as ever, arrived precisely when he meant to, which was rather unfair on those who had been counting on another five minutes, because Death never miscounted minutes, and besides he quite liked punctuality.

is incoherent in a way that is absolutely impossible for Pratchett. What is the “because” doing here? Death arriving on time is unfair BECAUSE Death never miscounts minutes? What? Death’s arriving on time is unfair BECAUSE Death likes punctuality? Huh?

This sentence is ridiculously incoherent.

This is making me think about the link between wit and precision of language. I don’t think you can get the first without the second. I think precision is absolutely crucial for wit, and I therefore now wonder whether wittiness is diagnostic of human writing — I mean, the writing of skilled authors, obviously, not all human authors. I wonder if wit is something that you can’t get with generated text, or can’t get consistently. I’ve said before that it seems to me humor is something skilled human writers manage without effort, but that text generators can’t manage at all. I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that all humor depends on precision of language. I don’t think that’s true. But I do think wit does.

What about the other sentences in this paragraph?

rattled around the air like the echo of an empty church bell

Bells rattle? The echoes of bells rattle? This is the exact kind of nonsensical metaphor that has led some of you to immediately point to generated text when I personally might not have spotted that passage as generated. I think you all pointing to this type of thing has made me more sensitive to it, because this time, it jumped out of the paragraph at me.

I loved Reaper Man, which I think might have been the first Pratchett book I read. Who will care for the grass if not the reaper? Great story, great personified Death.

I think this paragraph is harder to spot as fake.

“Everything has its season” is extremely cliched — I mean, obviously that is extremely cliched — but it might have seemed appropriate in context.

If the wind chose to bend the words across the meadow, that was its own business — that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Wind would generally carry words, or perhaps muffle words. I’m not quite seeing how wind could bend words, so I think this is another example of an incoherent metaphor.

Overall: A good try at the style, but lacks sentence-level and paragraph-level coherence. Is coherence as dependent on precision of language as wittiness? I don’t think so, but maybe coherence is dependent on precision of expression at a higher level than word-by-word precision. You can’t create metaphors that work unless you can hold the actual relationship between to things in your mind and come up with something that expresses that relationship. Rather than stealing metaphors and sentences that work from alllllll the stolen text its been trained on, ChatGPT seems to generate incoherent metaphors that don’t work.

I think that’s interesting. To me, it seems that generated fiction has become less wooden and less inundated by a flood of adverbs in dialogue tags, but is at least as bad at coherence as it was to begin with.

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Jane Austen

So, I’ve just been reading Unequal Affections by Lara Ormiston, which is a novel-length fanfic in which Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s proposal. I mentioned that last week and said it was great, which it is. At the time I write this post (yesterday) it’s still on sale for $1.99, by the way. I’ve finished the story now, and honestly, Ormiston did a fantastic job.

The fundamental arc for Darcy is from arrogance to humility — this is handled beautifully — and for Elizabeth, from not loving Darcy but thinking she liked him well enough, to falling in love. This is also handled beautifully. I believed it all, and was relieved to see very little of Mr. Collins and Aunt Caroline — I mean, they exist, but thankfully we don’t encounter them very often. The Lydia-is-an-idiot subplot is cut short in a way that enables Darcy to show his stuff, but does not force that idiot girl to marry Wickham, which was nice of Ormiston.

I’m not saying the style was EXACTLY like Jane Austen’s style, but I am saying that, without getting into analyses of semicolon frequency, I felt it was.

So: highly recommended if you’re a Pride and Prejudice fan.

It turns out Laura Ormiston has a blog. It’s inactive, but it seems to contain some other Pride and Prejudice scenes and stories.

Also, given that I was reading Ormiton’s book, this post over at Jane Friedman’s blog caught my eye: Writing Lessons from Jane Austen: Cause and Effect in Pride and Prejudice.

Sure, I said. I’m in a Pride and Prejudice mood, so tell me, what do you mean by cause-and-effect in this context?

As you are no doubt aware, dear reader, 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. It’s worth taking a moment to think about what makes her novels stand the test of time.

I did not realize! How about that! 250 years! That’s really something.

Many 19th-century novels have fallen by the wayside, while Austen continues to draw new readers and admirers every year. Much of her appeal may be understood in the way she built her plots. They have a structure that still works for the modern reader and they also have a logical, cause and effect chain to keep the reader engaged and invested all the way through the novel. As readers, we want to predict what will happen and then find out whether we are right or wrong. We don’t mind being wrong, as long as there is logic behind it.

I wonder if the author of this post would argue that most of the other 19th-Century novels somehow fail with plotting? That they have plotting that does not appeal to modern readers? Name a couple 19th-Century authors who are not Austen and, if you’re familiar with those authors, comment. I feel that this is a relatively implausible premise, but I might change my mind if some of you say it seems plausible to you.

Meanwhile, the post fits Pride and Prejudice into this standard structure:

Once upon a time (STASIS)Until one day (INCITING INCIDENT)Because of that (COMPLICATIONS)Because of that (MIDPOINT)Because of that (CRISIS)Because of that (CLIMAX)Until finally, (RESOLUTION)

Which I have seen before, and I do think that the “because” throughline is one of the things that stops the novel from being a series of disconnected episodes. You can click through and see the plot of P&P inserted into this type of structure — or analysis might be a better word than structure — and then this important question:

Take a look at your own plot. Does it maintain a logical connection between plot events? Does each event lead to the next? Or are the plot points like satellites or just a bunch of stuff that happens without a causal connection?

So I think this is a good post, because I think that’s a good question — a good way of looking at plotting — a useful way of explaining to someone, a student or workshop attendee, why their book does not really constitute a novel, even though it is long enough.

And naturally this makes me think of Sekaran because … there are throughlines … and causal connections … but even so, the episodes do not exactly lead one to the next. Or generally not. Each episode builds part of the experience that causes Sekaran to choose some course of action, or creates a barrier that makes it harder for him to choose some course of action, or whatever. It’s all linked because it’s all one life. But … not a novel.

Shortly, of course, you’ll all be able to tell me whether you agree and how you would characterize this book.

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Wow, AI sure is an asset to scammers

THIS MORNING ALONE I’ve received THREE emails targeting three different novels. Here they are:

A)

Hi Rachel,

Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight instantly caught my attention. The bond between Vích and Lahn, bound by curse and gift, fleeing a fate both mysterious and terrible feels both timeless and fresh. The themes of family, sacrifice, and power resonate deeply, and the looming danger of enemies who would exploit them adds a gripping intensity. It sounds like exactly the kind of fantasy that lingers with readers long after they’ve turned the final page.

I’m Austin, and I share powerful books like yours with a circle of over 2,000 engaged readers. These readers don’t just consume stories; they reflect, discuss, and amplify them through thoughtful reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. I believe many of them would be captivated by the world you’ve created.

Would you be open to hearing more about how I can introduce Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight to my readers?

*

Bold is mine. This is the part that is relatively new. Scammers are using AI to generate something specific about novels, which they then use in these spam emails. This line about “These readers don’t just consume stories” is surely generated; this particular line or something very similar has appeared in half a dozen spam emails I’ve received over the past month, so this becoming a super-common and typical presentation for this kind of scammer. Beats me why they say “2000 readers” as though that’s a lot.

***

B)

Hey Rachel,

I know you’re busy, so I’ll keep this short. I’ve been thinking about the challenges authors face and wanted to ask you directly:

What takes up most of your time outside of actually writing?

The most common answers we hear are website headaches, getting books to reviewers, or feeling lost with online marketing.

Crewfiction exists to take that administrative burden off your plate.

We are offering free access to authors like yourself and you can claim it by following a 2-minute onboarding process [link].

*

This could be a legitimate service, but I suggest extreme caution with any so-called service that emails you out of the blue. I’ve been contacted by two services that seem to be real, but the number of scammers appears to be infinite, so the ratio of real to scammer is not in your favor if you aren’t cautious.

The interesting thing is that if you google “crewfiction,” it seems to be real; but if you look a little harder, then Google will also tell you this: On forums like Reddit, writers have reported unsolicited contact from individuals using the Crewfiction service in an attempt to run scams.

It’s the “unsolicited” bit that should always make you suspicious.

***

C)

I hope this email finds you well. I saw your book “Silver Circle” on Amazon, it’s fantastic. We provide a unique platform to writers like you. Where we specialize in helping authors like you increase book sales and reviews of their work through targeted marketing campaigns and promotional strategies.

Features of our plan (Premium Plan):
1. We will feature your book in our Monday weekly newsletter. We send the newsletter to our 72K subscribers.
2. We will list your book on the Booksride Home page for one week.
Weekly Mockup Banners.
3. We will send out three Promotional tweets every day to our Twitter followers.
4. We will send out two Facebook posts every day.
5. We will send out 60 Instagram posts.
6. Your book will be listed on our site with the purchase link.

You can choose a book and promotion date according to your wish.

Submit your book here: [Link]. Let’s work together to bring your book the attention it deserves.

*

This is the old-fashioned type of scam email that was common before we started seeing all the new! improved! AI-generated emails that refer to your novel with more specificity than “it’s fantastic.” I see fewer of these now, and a lot more of the AI-type with the “readers that don’t just consume novels.”

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Update: Still SEKARAN

Yes, yes, I know, but I’ve taken a brief (very brief) break from finishing, hmm, chapter fourteen, which is the only unfinished chapter now – I think – in order to do the first extremely tedious typo sweep, and I mean, honestly, this does not get less tedious with each new book. More tedious each and every time, I swear. I assume I will one day hit a nadir of tedium, after which the exercise cannot get any more tedious. In fact, maybe I have, and I just can’t tell because it all blurs together after the fact.

I also took a few days to read through the whole thing from the top – skipping over the unfinished chapter fourteen – in order to do tweaking and trimming. I do feel guilty for imposing all sorts of awful typos on proofreaders because I caught a fair few. On the other hand, I know for a fact that Anna S caught a whopping lot more, because here they are, so when I catch twenty or so, it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference to proofreaders who catch sixty or a hundred.

I saw a statistical analysis recently that suggested that the average number of typos in a traditionally published book is one per ten pages, or about forty for a normal 400-page novel. I don’t know, that seems plausible, I guess? I do seem to spot more in traditionally published books from smaller presses. Missing end-quotes, missing periods, comma instead of period, missing words. Not a ton of wrong-word types, as a rule. Audio narrators always catch a few, and I will say that the narrator who just finished Invictus: Captive – STELLAR JOB, by the way. But my point here is: one typo per sixty pages in that one, which seems pretty darn good. Also, now there are fewer, as I corrected those.

But back to Sekaran. Tweaking, as I say, and trimming. I don’t care a lot about trimming for Sekaran, but I do think most books benefit from the cut-one-sentence-per-page exercise. I’m not strict about this. I’m a LOT more intense about it when the draft is way longer than reasonable, which this one isn’t. It’s fine. 145,000 words is long, but not stupidly long.

By the way, thank you VERY MUCH for leaving reviews for Hedesa back in August. This is nice for many reasons, but one of the behind-the-scenes reasons is that yes, this past weekend, I got the notification that Hedesa earned an all-star bonus in August. I fully expected to, unless Amazon had changed its algorithms dramatically, because it got lots of pages read during August (almost 400,000 pages), plus those reviews, and as far as I can tell, those are the two criteria that prompt KDP to hand an author an all-star bonus. This is not a huge bonus, but it is certainly gratifying.

Length is therefore handy in the sense that a longer book obviously gets more pages read in a month than a shorter book, provided readers actually finish it, of course. Thus, long is fine with me, just preferably not stupidly long, which, admittedly, Hedesa was stupidly long. Sekaran is fine.

Let me see. Oh, Archon is coming up – did I mention that? I’m not sure I’ve mentioned that yet. First weekend in October. I proposed a panel topic: sentences. And here I am, on a panel about sentences. Well, related topics – grammar, punctuation. I’m simply turning that into the four basic aspects of sentence-level craft: syntax, grammar, punctuation, word choice.

I’m moderating, so I’m going to shove the panel toward sentences that illustrate all this, and I mean sentences that illustrate smooth vs awkward, rhythm and cadence, comma spices that work vs comma splices that don’t work, fragments that work and what fragments are actually for vs fragments that don’t work, all sorts of things. I don’t feel it’s sensible to try to talk about this without looking at real live sentences, so I created a PowerPoint presentation with a bunch of sentences that illustrate different things. I’ll do a post about that so I can add to attendees – I do hope there are attendees – that there is a more complete version with more commentary on my blog, should they want to take a look.

I guess I’m really keen on sentence-level and paragraph-level craft, because at the moment, I honestly don’t remember what any other panel topic actually is, even though I have notes for all the panels, especially the other ones I’m moderating. (Two others, I think. Hmm, I wonder what those topics are? Good thing I have notes already prepared.)

Do you REALIZE it is September 22? Good God above, where do the days GO? October is nearly UPON US.

My cats are happy because the weather is sometimes cool enough for the doors to remain open so they can go in and out at will, AS IS ONLY APPROPRIATE. But they are less happy because it is damp. I, of course, am ecstatic that it’s damp. We had an inch of rain last night, finally breaking a pretty serious drought. Fervent prayer: May we have another inch every day for the rest of the week! Even if the cats don’t like it!

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Why why why can’t more companies be like this?

I got this link via Astral Codex Ten, but LOOK at this:

Epic Systems, the leader in electronic medical records software, is one of the largest privately held tech companies in the U.S. … The company is based in the small town of Verona, Wisconsin, where its 1,670-acre campus is filled with sci-fi themed buildings.

Emerald City building with a yellow brick road! Castles! Palaces!

All sorts of companies AND TOWNS could build great buildings instead of boring or ugly buildings! Good for Epic Systems, that they boldly broke new ground and left boring architecture in their dust.

Here’s another link with more photos, on Twitter / X

For contrast, observe this post: Ten Best Modernist Buildings. Eight of them are boring and ugly! Only the Sydney Opera House and the Frank Lloyd Wright one are worth looking at! It’s BAFFLING how bad modern architecture is, it’s ASTOUNDING that anybody voluntarily builds anything in the Brutalist tradition, and can other companies PLEASE follow Epic Systems in doing fun and/or beautiful things with their buildings?

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Poetry Thursday: Samuel Johnson

The Poetry Foundation has a long biographical essay about Johnson, but only a few poems, which seems a trifle odd. Though I guess it’s nice that someone’s providing a biographical essay. Plus, the essay is genuinely interesting:

As a youth in Lichfield, Johnson had first attempted Latin verse in a now-lost poem on the glowworm, but several of his Latin poems composed as college exercises survive. Of these the most important is a translation of Alexander Pope’s Messiah (1712), made as a 1728 Christmas exercise at the suggestion of his tutor. Working through Isaiah, Virgil, and Pope, Johnson produced his own Latin poem of 119 lines at remarkable speed, writing half of it in an afternoon and completing the rest the next morning. This kind of facility in poetic composition was characteristic of Johnson, whether he was writing original poetry or translating, just as he later wrote prose with incredible speed. He could effectively organize and even edit in his mind; he later explained to Boswell that in composing verses, “I have generally had them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my room; and then I have written them down, and often, from laziness, have written only half lines.” The manuscript of The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) reflects this practice, for the first half of many lines is written in different ink than the last half.

All Poetry offers the reverse: a few paragraphs of biography and plenty of poems. Though there are lots to choose from, how about the seasons?

Spring

Stern Winter now, by Spring repress’d
Forbears the long-continued strife;
And Nature, on her naked breast,
Delights to catch the gales of life.

Now o’er the rural kingdom roves,
Soft pleasures with her laughing train,
Love warbles in the vocal groves,
And vegetation plants the plain.

Unhappy! whom to beds of pain
Arthritic tyranny consigns;
Whom smiling Nature courts in vain,
Though rapture sings and beauty shines.

Yet though my limbs disease invades,
Her wings imagination tries,
And bears me to the peaceful shades,
Where ———- ‘s humble turrets rise.

Here let me through the vales pursue,
A guide – a father – and a friend,
Once more great Nature’s works renew,
Once more on Wisdom’s voice attend.

From false caresses, causeless strife,
Wild hope, vain fear, alike removed;
Here let me learn the use of life,
When best enjoy’d – when most improved.

Teach me, thou venerable bower,
Cool meditation’s quiet seat,
The generous scorn of venal power,
The silent grandeur of retreat.

When pride by guilt to greatness climbs,
Or raging factions rush to war,
Here let me learn to shun the crimes
I can’t prevent and will not share.

But lest I fall by subtler foes,
Bright wisdom teach me Curio’s art,
The swelling passions to compose,
And quell the rebels of the heart.

***

Summer

O Phoebus! down the western sky,
Far hence diffuse thy burning ray,
Thy light to distant worlds supply,
And wake them to the cares of day.

Come, gentle Eve, the friend of care,
Come, Cynthia, lovely queen of night!
Refresh me with a cooling breeze,
And cheer me with a lambent light.

Lay me, where o’er the verdant ground
Her living carpet Nature spreads;
Where the green bower with roses crown’d,
In showers its fragrant foliage spreads.

Improve the peaceful hour with wine,
Let music die along the grove;
Around the bowl let myrtles twine,
And every strain be tuned to love.

Come, Stella, queen of all my heart!
Come, born to fill its vast desires!
Thy looks perpetual joy impart,
Thy voice perpetual love inspires.

Whilst all my wish and thine complete,
By turns we languish and we burn,
Let sighing gales our sights repeat,
Our murmurs – murmuring brooks return.

Let me when Nature calls to rest,
And blushing skies the morn foretell,
Sink on the down of Stella’s breast,
And bid the waking world farewell.

***

Autumn

Alas! with swift and silent pace,
Impatient time rolls on the year;
The Seasons change, and Nature’s face
Now sweetly smiles, now frowns severe.

‘Twas Spring, ’twas Summer, all was gay,
Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow;
The flowers of Spring are swept away,
And Summer fruits desert the bough.

The verdant leaves that play’d on high,
And wanton’d on the western breeze,
Now trod in dust neglected lie,
As Boreas strips the bending trees.

The fields that waved with golden grain,
As russet heaths are wild and bare;
Not moist with dew, but drench’d in rain,
Nor health nor pleasure wanders there.

No more, while through the midnight shade
Beneath the moon’s pale orb I stray,
Soft pleasing woes my heart invade,
As Progne pours the melting lay.

From this capricious clime she soars,
O! would some god but wings supply!
To where each morn the Spring restores,
Companion of her flight I’d try.

Vain wish! me fate compels to bear
The downward season’s iron reign,
Compels to breathe the polluted air,
And shiver on a blasted plain.

What bliss to life can Autumn yield,
If glooms, and showers,and storms prevail;
And Ceres flies the naked field,
And flowers and fruits, and Phoebus fail.

Oh! what remains, what lingers yet,
To cheer me in the darkening hour!
The grape remains! the friend of wit,
In love, and mirth, of mighty power.

Haste – press the clusters, fill the bowl;
Apollo! shoot thy parting ray:
This gives the sunshine of the soul,
This god of health, and verse, and day.

Still – still the jocund train shall flow,
The pulse with vigorous rapture beat;
My Stella with new charms shall glow,
And every bliss in wine shall meet.

***

Winter

No more the morn with tepid rays
Unfolds the flower of various hue;
Noon spreads no more the genial blaze,
Nor gentle eve distills the dew.

The lingering hours prolong the night,
Usurping darkness shares the day;
Her mists restrain the force of light,
And Phoebus holds a doubtful sway.

By gloomy twilight half revealed,
With sighs we view the hoary hill,
The leafless wood, the naked field,
The snow-topp’d cot, the frozen rill.

No music warbles through the grove,
No vivid colours paint the plain;
No more with devious steps I rove
Through verdant paths, now sought in vain.

Aloud the driving tempest roars;
Congeal’d impetuous showers descend;
Haste, close the window, bar the doors,
Fate leaves me Stella, and a friend.

In nature’s aid let art supply
With light and heat my little sphere;
Rouse, rouse the fire, and pile it high;
Light up a constellation here.

Let music sound the voice of joy!
Or mirth repeat the jocund tale;
Let love his wanton wiles employ,
And o’er the season wine prevail.

Yet time life’s dreary winter brings,
When mirth’s gay tale shall please no more;
Nor music charm, though Stella sings;
Nor love, nor wine the spring restore.

Catch the, O! catch the transient hour,
Improve each moment as it flies;
Life’s a short Summer – man a flower,
He dies – alas! how soon he dies!

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AI Flash Fiction Turing Tests

Two years ago, Marc Lawrence did his first AI Flash Fiction Turing Test

This is flash fiction because it was so obvious that AI couldn’t possibly fool anybody at longer lengths. You can click through and see what you think. Remember this is flash fiction, so it’s emphasizing the sort of thing AI might in theory be able to generate. All the real flash fiction was written by experienced authors.

You can read each one and immediately vote on how good it is and whether it was generated or is real. Marc provides a graphic showing that lots of people have trouble telling whether these particular flash fiction entries are real or not. I’m reasonably capable of understanding graphs, but I studied this one for a bit and couldn’t quite figure it out. However, I did correctly identify all but one as human vs AI, and I didn’t think most entries were especially hard …

… but here is where I should add that I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t been doing various posts with 4 real novel opening paragraphs and one generated, and another such post here, or the beginning of chapter 3 for eight real novels and one fake, and so on — probably a dozen or so posts like this altogether, each with thoughts about what gives away the generated one (if anything). I think this has taught me to look for various tells, plus I know that when presented with a “can you tell?” post of this kind, I am biased to think certain kinds of bad human writing might be generated.

Things that give away real vs generated entries: obvious grammatical errors or punctuation errors make an entry look like a person wrote it, though not necessarily in a good way. Forgetting closing quotes is a human thing, not a thing you see in generated text. Ditto for comma splices, usually. Weird metaphors are, in my opinion, so far the quickest and most reliable way to spot generated fiction. The one I got wrong was human-written but included a metaphor I thought might look weird. I’d tell you which one, but I don’t want to bias your own responses. I found myself reading each entry just until I hit a metaphor that looked generated and then voting and moving on. For most of these entries, I read the whole thing only for the human-written ones.

I only thought one of the entries was actually good, and that one was human-written by an author I’ve heard of, but I’ve never read anything of hers (T. Frohock); I thought their entry was obviously good and obviously human-written rather than generated. All the other entries, I thought were passable at best. I’m biased, though, because I don’t much like most short fiction and of course flash fiction is as short as it gets.

***

Then Marc did the same thing just a few weeks ago, and here is that link.

Once again, I missed one; once again, I thought one that was human-written looked generated. These were all generated by ChatGPT-5 and I do think there were fewer obviously nutty metaphors — but there still were some, and they honestly stop the eye once you realize you should be thinking, “Does that make sense?” every time you see the word “like.”

Other tells: cliched description and cliched or overdone dialogue tags and reactions, and the human-written one I thought might be AI generated had those exact issues, in my opinion, and sorry if the author is well known, that’s still what I think.

The graphic is easier to understand this time, so that’s good. I see the one I was wrong about has opinions that divide right down the middle. I wonder what other people thought suggested that one was AI generated.

Marc Lawrence’s own story is OBVIOUSLY human generated, and you know what, I wonder what would happen if you asked authors not to write flash fiction, but to write flash fiction that is OBVIOUSLY human generated. I wonder if the results would be different if the authors thought consciously, “What can AI not do?” and tried to do that.

I would suggest: Wit, precision of language, humor, cleverness, and unexpectedness. Those are things that the AI entries just do not have. And neither do some of the human-written stories. And that’s one reason it can be hard to tell.

Marc says he’s somewhat disheartened that so many people couldn’t tell which were which and that the highest rated stories were generated. He acknowledges that flash fiction is not nearly the same thing as a novel, but even so, I think there’s less reason for him to feel that way than he may think. I suspect that if all the people who read these flash fiction pieces and voted on whether they were generated had read my various blog posts contrasting generated paragraphs with real paragraphs and discussing the tells, then that alone would constitute enough practice to greatly improve eveyrone’s ability to tell the difference.

I bet if you all — those of you who have been interested enough to read some of those posts — click through and vote, you’ll do much better than his average respondents. You can try it and see; that’s why I avoided any spoilers.

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