@libby
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A reminder for anyone who, like me, forget this month’s competition deadline is tonight: the October monthly comp deadline is midnight tonight! You might have a suitable WIP hiding away somewhere…
Thanks, Ath. Yes, I was thinking that writers might collect some AI produced fiction and do something with its tropes, sort of like Pop Art did. I’m vague about this. Am looking for reasons for optimism!
Hi Sandra, I saw your comment about self-pub authors but it has disappeared from the thread. As you say, it’s harder to see how authors could guarantee their own writing. I expect someone will think of something to address this, or try to address it.
I also think some readers will seek out AI novels because AI writing will be reliable. It will tick various boxes, just like real-life authors can do.
And then there will be the writers who’ll use and adapt AI to do something interesting, and be upfront about it.
Some great stories have already come in. We’re half way through the month – plenty of time for more entries.
A reminder of the details:
It’s October and I’m going for the obvious: Halloween. Or All Saints’ Eve or Hallowmas Eve or whatever you prefer. It doesn’t have to be ghostly, though if you can give us all the shivers that would be fun.
Max 400 words, connected to 31st October in some way.
Deadline midnight 31st October.
Thank you, Jill! That was a lovely surprise when I switched on this morning. Such brilliant writing from Knicks and Ath, everything so vivid and pleasurable to read.
This month I’ve gone for an essay, or at any rate not a story.
338 words
Outside my window there’s the small garden and then a field, where a tractor drags a harrow. The harrow’s arms are open and horizontal. Metal discs hang below them, making contact with the ground, and I hear the discs rattling along the soil and bouncing over flints. They leave shallow grooves and break up clumps. In the stubble left from the earlier harvest they’re making a seedbed for the next sowing. This preparation is minimum-tillage: organic matter left at the surface improves the soil while, in darkness below, the undisturbed mycelium recycles carbon and nutrients.
For the first time since spring the morning sun is low enough to shine through the window and on the computer. I close the venetian blind and the room dims. The screen’s content is mundane – a traffic report or an email about a subscription – but life funnelled through the PC becomes more salient now the summer is over. The switch to autumn is a turn towards words. As more time is spent indoors, the days shift to a compensating balance with more reading, and possibly writing too. September, I think, has the feel of a new term even if structured learning isn’t ahead. In lower natural light and the comfort of artificial lighting, any new project can have the sense that a mindful burrowing has begun.
There’s something about autumn’s lack of instant visibility. In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, cerebral letters are consonants sounded by arching the tongue backwards and putting its tip to the palate. These sounds don’t depend on teeth and lips, parts of us obvious from the outside, but are expressions from further back, coming from the mouth’s darkness and shadow.
I could be stretching the analogy here. This isn’t about the mechanisms of any language, and I don’t think occultism of any kind necessarily brings forth ideas of value or useful re-conception. Instead it’s the old human experience of meeting the turning of the year and, subconsciously or not, preparing for spring, and the chance to do better.
Apologies in advance, Sandra. I won’t be doing a story this month. I do enjoy these poetry prompts but a combination of holidays and life admin is swallowing the time.
A great prompt, Sea – I just haven’t had time to write a story this month. Very enjoyable entries from everyone.
I’m sorry to hear about the cardiologist.
That’s such a fabulous story, Seagreen.
I enjoyed everyone else’s entries too. Thank you Ath for the prompt and all your comments.
Moving On
The elderly man picked up a landline receiver. On his desk lay an open, glossy page of Country Life. The man underlined a phone number and dialled.
“Hello, my name’s John Tucker,” he said. “I’d like to sell my house. Could you send a valuer?”
He gave his address. A distant phone voice burbled.
“Two valuers?” said John. “This afternoon. Excellent. My number is my landline. Yes. I prefer it to a mobile for significant matters.”
The receiver back on its cradle, John picked up a file named ‘Benedict’ which was also on his desk. He rose slowly from a wooden antique swivel chair. The chair had a continuous slatted back and sides like a horseshoe, and the cushions to make it comfortable were frayed with age. John put the file in a metal filing cabinet.
He shuffled across a marble-tiled hall and went into a long drawing room whose oil paintings hung in two rows on every wall, scenes of moors or fields or horses. He settled in a chintz-covered armchair next to the fireplace and, in silence, gazed through floor-to-ceiling windows across a terrace.
Later a young man and an older one arrived at the double-leaved front door. Their smiles were alert, the sort meant to look interested but not ingratiating.
When they’d spent an hour and a half in the house and gardens the older man announced a figure.
“Ballpark,” he added. “We have to make it negotiable.”
“Of course,” said John. “Sounds a decent amount to me.”
“Our marketing department will make an appointment to talk through the selling process.”
“Excellent,” said John.
**
A woman arrived at the front door. She smiled.
“Mr Tucker?”
“John Tucker, yes. Come in. We’ll go into the drawing room.”
They walked across the hall, the woman’s heels tapping the tiles.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking up the wide staircase to the balcony running round the hall.
“Indeed.”
John was limping as if in pain. In the drawing room he said, “The paintings won’t be auctioned until the house is sold. It would look dreary to have the marks of where they’d been.”
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
The woman looked across the terrace. “Two hectares of gardens. How do you keep them so well?”
“Contractors tend the gardens. And agency cleaners do indoors. I can recommend all these people.”
The woman, smiling, studied the drawing room. “We’ll get some lovely photos. Have you no family who are interested in the house, Mr Tucker?”
“My son has decided it’s too much for him.”
The woman smiled sadly. “I’m sure you’ll miss this house.”
**
When she’d gone John went back to his office and lifted the ‘Benedict’ file from the cabinet. Opening it he laid out letters concerning his son’s trial and gaol term for embezzlement.
“Always trouble,” said John. “I was endlessly bailing you out. Your inheritance will be sold and in my new apartment I shan’t have the things in this house. No more reminders of you.”
496 words exc title and asterisks
Congratulations, Ath. I love your story. Very well deserved win.
Thank you Janette for setting the competition and for everyone’s entries. They are a very enjoyable selection of stories.
Somewhere to Bloom
The cottage on the lane had a garden of pink, blue and mauve flowers on plants she couldn’t name. They faced her in clumps and drifts. On the lane she considered the pretty cottages, each one wearing its garden like a skirt, patterned, pastel – standardised, or something. And, even more annoying, they coped with the early May sun, rain and breezes: changeable conditions.
She and her partner had agreed to marry. Unexpectedly – to her – that meant moving home. They’d come down from London to look around and he was standing with her, silent.
“We can’t afford it,” he said, eventually, as if he’d been testing his patience for at least a minute.
“I wouldn’t want it.”
“We have to leave the flat.”
Without looking at him she knew his shoulders were tight.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Yes, yet. Now.”
She’d thought him good looking and sexy and it was odd seeing him another way. They’d been together two years and the second anniversary, a celebration meal which he’d cooked, had become a discussion. Or rather, a blunt talk. He’d announced they must move, they’d need more space.
On the lane he said, “There are cheaper places than this one. We must move while we can.”
“We could buy a larger flat.”
“You know we can’t.”
She did know. Too expensive. Since the anniversary they’d spent evenings looking online and doing sums.
They turned from the cottage and walked a few hundred metres to a row of terraced houses, each house little wider than the arrangement of its front door and ground-floor window. The gardens were the size of a large double bed; some had a clipped shrub or two, others grew straggly grass.
“They have potential,” she said, thinking at least they were better than those cottages. They had the suggestion of real life in their city-like density.
“There’ll be bigger gardens at the back,” he said.
This was it, the nutshell: children. She’d agreed to the pull of life that had them creating children, who didn’t yet exist, who’d play in a garden, and it wouldn’t just be the young ones growing up. Parenthood itself would be a time of blooming.
In London she always noticed the trees greening, especially the tallest and widest, under which she walked with an earthy sense that everyone else enjoyed them too. But these terraced houses with a back garden, children running over tatty grass, a private space for them, no park or busy street in sight: they’d have safety in a small area, cramped but, all around, the countryside that was hardly open to the public.
In the car going back to London she saw unfolding leaves on the country trees and hedges, the newness that was a repeat of oldness, nature’s determination, its project. Her fiancé – for the first time she gave him this old-fashioned title – he had a project that suited himself.
She dreaded their next discussion. She hoped for what may lie beyond it.
Sandra, this is an atmospheric depiction of the personalities within a family, all so economically written. I’d never heard of furanocoumarins. What an interesting thing to discover! You built tension with all the possible problems resulting from letting children loose in the kitchen, then there was a fine twist at the end. Very enjoyable.
Seagreen, I really liked how you wove past and present together by using the recipe to show what the narrator was engaged in, and introduced the mystery of them disliking parsnips. Then there was the intrigue of the sibling, who was ill or debilitated in some way, and a satisfying conclusion. There’s a lovely rhythm and balance to the story.
Janette, I laughed out loud at this comedy! Village life, competitive neighbours and delightful revenge. You portray them all so effectively in a story full of incident and Cynthia’s ghastliness and strident voice come across well.
Janette – over to you for making me laugh as well as telling a good tale.
Ten days left to enter the monthly competition for April!
Details here
Thank you, @sandradavies I really didn’t expect that. The other entries were so good.
I’ll be back later with a comp for April.
They’d Chosen Me for Being Good at Isolation
Those harbour houses had slope-ceilinged attics with dormer windows. I’d been instructed to stay in one garret, squint out between curtains, send situation reports every two hours. A reconnaissance man, a civilian thought to be steady, I watched the quay below, admired the yachts and motorboats moored side-on, monitored the bridge at the harbour’s inland end.
Under the bridge a river flowed into the harbour’s newly oily water. Beyond it rose a hill, the other half of the town. I watched deserted lanes, pretty cottages, white, pink and butter yellow, doors and windows shut. The town had endured firebombs and riots, but above it the gulls still called and wheeled.
Me, spying for the military. They’d questioned my politics and found them uninteresting; I was genuinely content with government authority. A quiet life. As men and women pushed cars into the harbour, and oil and petrol floated to the surface, I was sent to the garret. But when no soldiers came to detain the vandals everyone dispersed and I settled down to watching, wondering why people saw authority as an enemy.
But the town’s quietness began to oppress. The family who lived below my garret had left. On day four I jumped at footsteps on the stairs then realised they echoed from the homes either side. On day five real voices, chanting, came from streets behind the house. I could still hear the gulls, cawing is if my situation was amusing. I reassured myself I was safe, the rebels didn’t know anyone was here.
Outside, shouts rose, glass shattered. I looked down on civilians surging onto the quay, police following. An officer truncheoned a young woman, she fell, the riot bloomed. Fire leaped from the house next door and I, dry-mouthed, imagined burning to death. Or I could join the crowd which would grab me even though I’d nothing to do with their troubles. I trembled and dithered. When a message demanded extra sitreps, I wasn’t sure if they wanted reports on what I saw or how I was. I didn’t answer.
Beyond the garret door a girl screamed. Another police truncheon? If so, the police would look after me. But the landing was empty. I’d no choice now. I ran down the stairs, merged with the crowd, the fresh air making my bravery bracing. Soldiers would rescue me.
Military trucks flowed towards the riot like lava. Overhead, gulls laughed.
(400)
Congratulations, Sandra! I love your story.
Thank you, @Seagreen for the comp. I enjoyed doing my pastiche of The Big Sleep. I find that kind of thing a useful exercise. Recently my own sentence structures and vocabulary have seemed stuck in a rut. Studying someone else’s gives a necessary jolt.
It’s a fun thing to do if other Denizens want to give it a go. Two hundred words was about my limit, Chandler’s style being so individual. But there are loads of books and short stories on https://www.gutenberg.org
They’re out of copyright though as far as I can tell that applies in the US. I don’t know if beyond the US things may be more complicated.
Before this competition was set I’d been thinking about the opening from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, specifically how it builds humour and tension in the first paragraph. I decided to use Chandler’s first two paras as a template for the story comp, possibly a daft and murderous thing to do but a bit of fun.
***
The Blush
It was the second lesson of the morning, mid-January, with the sun not shining and a hard coldness seeping through the clearness of the windows. I was thirteen, wearing my white school blouse and grey school jumper, while under the lip of my desk I held a book, pale light aslant on it. I was eyes down, rapt and tense, and caring that the teacher wouldn’t see it. I was curious, everything a schoolgirl ought to be. I was calling on something rich.
The English mistress at my school was tall and thin. From up there in her mind, which could have let in a library of books, there’d been hints that stories might rescue girls who, tied to convention, didn’t have any choices but only long and inconvenient wishes.
The teacher dipped her hand to my book to be inquisitive, and was sizing up the cover, the private eye in fedora and trench coat, my alternative self, and she didn’t ask me any questions as she walked to her desk and dropped the book in the bin. I sat there, my blush like a bruise heated high enough to bake hard the thought that I would, sooner or later, read more than she – and I might even help her solve her own life. She didn’t seem to be really trying.
221 words
***
If you want to see how terribly I’ve mangled Chandler’s original, here is is
https://gutenbergcanada.ca/ebooks/chandlerr-bigsleep/chandlerr-bigsleep-00-h.html
impromptu
you’ll come to a bad end, said my dad in our hallway, in his pyjamas, hands at his sides, knuckles curled, though – as far as I know – he never raised his fists, and what’s more he was too clever for cliché most of the time, but that evening when I came home from the gig with a scent of sweat and beer, I was grinning, shifting from foot to foot, nerves bouncing, still mentally seated at the kit, playing a storm, and could have told him there’s quiet beauty in the light reflecting off a high-hat, an image which might impress him, but after his remark I held my silence about the gig though every synapse still fired because, for the first time, I’d really made the beat swing (hours and hours of practising) but Dad who’d never sat at a kit was holding forth, pompous as an old sod, blinded by his generation, me on my toes, foot to foot, while he was a pillar of stillness in our hall, a man who finished cryptic crosswords and loved my mum, Mum who’d created the problem though I couldn’t and never did say this: how her piano playing in our living room had started it, her practising of scales on the new upright Dad had paid for, the beat on the first note of each four in an octave, up and down, down and up, regular, loud – systematic: that was what caught me, in an unintellectual way, the young teenager in me hearing a structure and the sometimes flexing of it, which I tried to work out by watching Mum’s hands, wrists bending, relaxing, as if taking a breath when she lifted them from the notes for a moment, and all this she was doing because she was in awe of the Schubert Impromptus she learned from sheet music and from Alfred Brendel, Brendel who played them through our record player and Mum repeating them on the piano: da-da-da-dah-dah, said Mum, speaking the rhythm ’til it came right, improving, better, best, just a hobby she’d say and then, as if an apology, Brendel, she’d say, has such lightness and elegance; so when I started playing the drums seriously Dad said why not play a proper instrument, a piano, like your mother – the piano from his salary at the food laboratory where he tested for bacteria, keeping the public safe, a good job well done, and now here I was that evening, still messing about on drums, crashing around, and it’s true that later I never did earn much money but good, I got good, better than Mum who never could play swing though she tried, she tried for me, swing, my favourite then and still is, light and elegant, I can hear it but can’t play it, not properly, joints sticky with arthritis, an end in sight, not to life, but to a kind of religion
(486)
I asked it for a 200-word synopsis for my 2,200-word Den Challenge story (which I haven’t posted on the Den yet). The result was mostly a true reflection of the story – about 90% right I’d say. It had the minor character’s motivations wrong; they went in the opposite direction to what I’d written, unless of course I haven’t described them clearly enough. The story’s ending was correct in a general way: factually recognisable but lacking the emotional connections which I hope a real reader would make. But successful short story endings are often subtle and potentially open, and my ending may not be up to scratch, in which case I can’t blame ChatGPT for not picking up my draft’s wayward clues.
This is very interesting, Ath. Have you tried giving it a word count, e.g. to produce a 300-word synopsis?
Thank you for posting this, Ath. Christmas has been so busy I’ve only just read it. It’s a touching story.
This links to a short piece in The Bookseller:
The main message is:
“The SoA is asking publishers, celebrities, booksellers, festival organisers, agents and all involved in the industry to recognise and reward all collaborators on celebrity books.”
This doesn’t answer all the questions about celebrity books in the Den discussion but it looks like an encouraging start.
You were – are – part of the zeitgeist @janette
At least, I hope it’s a zeitgeist.
Yes, it’s the old vanity approach of taking advantage of unaware writers’ naivety. There’s a common belief that editing more or less equals proofreading without so much as a beta read along the way. I imagine all vanity publishers will be using AI in the same fashion.
I think what’s notable about Spines is the number of books they plan to produce: 8,000 in the first year. It’s also a short step to using generative AI to generate stories, from plot to sentence level. The Guardian article doesn’t suggest that will happen but it seems inevitable.
I’m hardly knowledgeable enough to comment but the distinction between assistive AI and generative AI seems to be disappearing. Even if all you want is a spellcheck, it will be done by gen AI. I imagine it doesn’t make sense from the tech point of view to have two different systems when one can do everything incorporate machine learning to boot.
On a day-to-day level my concern is environmental – the vast amount of electricity and water involved in powering gen AI.
Hi @janette
I agree it could bring self-pub into disrepute though the large number of self-pub books on Amazon that seem not to have had human editing, regardless of the availability of AI, is already doing that.
The publishing industry can seem very off-putting. I’ve never tried to be published by it so I haven’t been through that particular mill. There are small indie publishers that inspire hope such as Galley Beggar, CB Editions, Influx Press. Stinging Fly.
If you haven’t seen it before this report from April 2022 on paid-for publishing is interesting and depressing. I can’t remember if it mentions AI. A questionnaire was sent to authors who’d paid for an all-in editorial and publishing package. These weren’t indie authors paying for their own editors, cover designers etc and doing the hard work of self-publishing.
Summary:
94% of respondents lost money, typically in the thousands.
• The average loss was £1,861 with some writers reporting losses as high as £9,900.
• The median cost of publication was £2,000.
• A median of only 67 books were sold per deal, resulting in royalties of only £68.
• 59% of writers said their book was not available to buy in retail outlets.