I’m writing a novella. Fiction. I’m sure you can guess the genre. And I’m leaning heavily on LLMs. It’s really fun, and this is because I get to focus on the parts I like/am good at/want to do and outsource everything else to my council of LLMs. This is a new type of writing. Like having “just-in-time ghostwriters”. So what is it I am doing? I think taste. I have an idea of: ...
I was thinking about the movie “The Blair Witch Project”. Specifically, about the progression from “kids recording a project” to “horror” across 3 acts. Firstly, let’s get a handle on the plot (via DS): The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a found-footage horror film that follows three student filmmakers—Heather, Josh, and Mike—who venture into the Black Hills Forest in Maryland to document the legend of the Blair Witch. The witch is said to haunt the woods, and the students aim to uncover the truth behind the myth. ...
I was thinking about “The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas”. I don’t recall when I first read it, only a few years ago I think. (checks goodreads…) July 2023. So not that long ago. The story is good, but the multimodal nature of the story telling is really fun. Lots of footnotes. Letters. Other documents. It’s great. We have to piece the story together across the styles/tones/documents/etc. Truly “Ergodic Literature”. ...
I first read “House of Leaves” about a decade ago and loved it immediately. Specifically: Narrative at multiple levels. Found-document style Multimodal writing (letters, footnotes, mess) I also liked the core mystery: what was that house all about. My favorite parts were descriptions of measuring the house, exploring the stair case, etc. When Zampano is summarizing the parts of the Navidson record that focus on Navidson + family + friends trying to understand the house. ...
Normally, I’m a “systems over goals” kind of guy. Nevertheless, sometimes having a goal kicks ass. It cuts through everything with questions like: Will reading this get me closer? Will doing this get me closer? What’s one thing I can do to get closer? I’m not saying “goals over systems”. I’m still a systems guy. I’ll system my way all the way up and over the goal. Just sometimes, we need a sharp knife to cut away the cruft and a crisp goal can be that knife. ...
I was talking with LLMs about fiction that I might like to write. I think we may have settled on “metafiction”, defined via gemini: Metafiction is a form of fiction that self-consciously addresses the nature of fiction itself, often by blurring the lines between reality and fiction or by exposing the mechanisms of storytelling. My favorite stories are those where the plot is vague (so I can guess and think), the narrator/s are unreliable, there is a blurring of fiction/non-fiction, and often a mixture of formats/form factors (footnotes, letters, diaries, editor notes, etc.). ...
I am reading “Slouching Towards Utopia”. Good so far. It opens with a discussion on effort required for certain output, e.g. enough calories to live on, and how that looks at different points in time. The thesis of the book is probably something like: tech driving this dramatic drop in effort for calories, yet why don’t we experience paradise? But I might be getting that wrong. According to claude: …despite achieving material abundance for the first time in human history, DeLong contends that we have “slouched” rather than strode towards utopia. This is because our social, political, and economic institutions haven’t adequately evolved to distribute this unprecedented wealth or provide people with meaningful work and purpose in an age of plenty. The book suggests that while we solved the problem of production, we haven’t solved the problems of distribution and meaning. ...
This is another reminder to self: Book + Movie > Book | Movie I finished reading “Anything You Can Imagine” on the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Great book. Great movies, seen them many times. I’ve stared re-watching them now after having read a deep dive into how hard they were to make. The movies are so much better. Also, it’s probably been a decade since my last watch. ...
I finished “Hitler’s Monsters” yesterday. Meh. Anyway, the book uses a term I’d not heard: “border science”. I took it to mean pseudoscience, or occultism broadly conceived. Maybe. Wikipedia says Pseudoscience is stuff that is not science because it’s not testable, e.g. falsifiable. Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Fringe Science Wikipedia has something called “Fringe Science” which seems different again, e.g. fake science. ...
I was just re-reading “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” by H.P. Lovecraft. In his essay, he gives three structured frameworks: A 5-part procedure of writing weird stories. The 4 types of stories you can write. How to handle the 5 types of horror elements of a story. I thought it might be interesting to extract them and clean them up a little. I fed the essay into DeepSeek R1 and asked it to extract frameworks for modern writers, here’s what I got: ...