Wed. Feb. 22, 2023: We Are Boiled Frogs

image courtesy of Zdeněk Chalupský via pixabay.com

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Waxing Moon

Sunny and cold

There was supposed to be a big storm, so I didn’t prepare for the usual early laundromat run, and, of course, now it’s fine. Oh, well. Too late now, or it throws off the whole day.

The latest Process Muse is up, about how process and marketing affect each other.

Yesterday, I did the social media rounds in the morning for Legerdemain and 28 Prompts, and caught up on email, because I was having trouble with deep focus. I felt scattered, and like I wasn’t getting anything done about anything.

Lots of “authors” giving interviews about how they never thought they’d publish a book until AI. Making a list, and will cross check any time I’m tempted by an eBook from Amazon (or anywhere else) to see if they or any pseudonym associated with them is on my list, so I can avoid them. It’s definitely going to change the way I look at ads/consider buying digital books. Sometimes one can tell from the very generic blurbs and just avoid them, but I need to make a more concerted effort.

Dewi Hargreaves wrote an excellent piece on the AI dilemma for small magazines, over on Medium. Definitely worth checking out. Author Suzan Palumbo posted an excellent thread over on Twitter about how we need to stop calling it “Artificial Intelligence” and call it what it is: “Electronic Colonialization.” It’s there to destroy the natural artistic habitat in order for the colonizers to profit. That is the most accurate description I’ve seen to date.

Back in the 1970’s when I was in elementary school, “they” extolled how robots would take over mundane, repetitive, and dangerous tasks so we’d all have more “leisure time” to pursue our passions. Instead, we work longer hours for less, and the colonizers are determined to destroy artists because they can and do change the world, expanding understanding of a variety of experiences, and that goes against the corporate model. We had the chance to build something wonderful as a society; instead, there wasn’t enough collective will and too much apathy.  Individual rights stripped away, especially when it comes to bodily autonomy, book bans, electronic colonization to destroy artists’ livelihoods so they can’t expand perceptions and understandings, no consequences to criminals criming in real time on video and gloating about it. There were plenty of us screaming about this since Reagan, at the very least (that’s when I was old enough to be aware of it). We were called alarmists and told to calm down. But we were realists. And the larger, more collective “we” kept giving incremental ground until now we are boiled frogs.

Took my mom to the doctor for her regular checkup. Was happy to see that masking is still a requirement. We picked up Korean food on the way home (and it was wonderful).

I had to go back and reconstruct the entire article, after all that “making the individual voices sing.” The editor wants it in a very specific Q & A format, not what I had constructed for voice, rhythm, and flow. Fortunately, I had sent the questions in that type of format, and my master document was in that format, so it was about reshaping the original answers along with some of the choices I’d made for flow and build into a more traditional interview. There’s so much material I couldn’t use in the article that I might try to pitch something using some of that to other publications, if my interview subjects are open to that.

My opinion about such strict formatting for this type of article doesn’t matter. It’s my job to serve the material and the interview subjects in the structure the editor wants and needs.

So that’s (hopefully) what I did.

This morning, I will give it another proofread, check and make sure I have the names spelled correctly, zip the photo file, and send it off.

People who whine about “not having time” for their creative work always get so offended when I point out the reason I have a career in the arts is that I always put my own work first, and taking on other work only has the purpose of supporting mine, not interfering with it. But it’s true; if I kept turning down theatre productions because I was worried about keeping a “day job” I wouldn’t have made it to Broadway. I always quit the day job, worked the show, and then got another day job, which was then quit the next time I landed a show, and, eventually, Broadway was my only job. Okay, no, that’s not true, I often worked a television show on my theatre dark day, but it was still work in my profession. I wasn’t doing an office job I kept out of fear. I made the decision when I was 18 that I would make a living in the arts, and therefore I did.

After the article goes off, the attention goes back to tearing about and restructuring the very short radio plays, hopefully doing some work on Legerdemain, and turning around a script coverage. I need to do the social media rounds for today’s episode of Angel Hunt and #28Prompts.

I’m grumpy today, and a little discouraged about the landscape as a whole, even though I have some good things looming on my personal horizon. Hopefully, digging back into the work will help me get over myself.