Season’s Greetings!

Welcome to the beginning of 2024! Hurray! I’m still alive! And if you are reading this, then you are still alive too!

I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some of my milestones and accomplishments of last year.

I’m not a full-time writer, so the writing I do is mostly woven in and out of my other responsibilities. But I have identified as a writer and storyteller since I was 9 years old, and I have been working steadily towards that passion ever since then.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse…coming January 30, 2024!

I drew illustrations for my forthcoming short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse. You can read about my artistic process and view some of the drawings in this blog post here.  I loved the process of illustrating my short stories, and I think that I definitely plan on continuing to incorporate art into my future works somehow.

My manuscript for What We Talk About is finally finished!

Here is a photo of me holding a sample copy, which arrived just in time for Christmas. I have a few little proofreading edits to make, but the book will live and be ready for sale on Amazon, January 30, 2024. 

It’s very exciting to finally have a publication date! This collection has been a labor of love, encompassing the last 17 years of my work, and it’s so exciting to have all my stories from a particular era of my life collected in one spot. 

One of the short stories from that collection, “Prove It” was published online at Club Chixculub. You can read or listen to me reading the story here, on their website, along with many other wonderful short stories. I have to say, I love the spooky music the editors have behind the audio-recordings of the short stories.

Experiments with ChatGPT

I was interviewed for “The Imaginary Possible” podcast about my experiences with ChatGPT. You can read my blog post about it and find a link to listen to the interview. 

I have to say, the more I play around with ChatGPT, the more excited I get about its potential. I have been experimenting with integrating it more into my workflow, in various different aspects of my writing. (Although this blog post was written completely by me.) 

As part of my son’s 4th grade schoolwork, he and I co-wrote a middle grade fantasy chapter book with ChatGPT4. This is part of the California Common Core requirements to take a piece of writing from concept to publication — but it was also a wonderful opportunity for us to learn how to blend our human skills with this new technology.

This project was really interesting, because I have never co-written a book with anyone before. (My only co-writing experiences are from school, where I ended up doing all the work and the bums I was partnered with took half the credit.) It was interesting to co-write with my own child and with an AI. It was delightful!

The majority of the credit for this project belongs to my son. He was the director, the creative engineer, the final decision-maker. It was his story idea, his vision. My role was basically to act as a typist, and as a facilitator, guiding my son through asking ChatGPT the right questions.

We told Chat our concept and asked it to create an outline for us. We edited the outline until we liked the story. Then, we drafted the book, one scene at a time, by adding our ideas to our day’s scene, and then asking Chat to fill in the rest.

The results were surprisingly good! Definitely on par with some of the Scholastic chapter books my son has checked out from the library.

After the first draft was done, we took the book through several editing passes, and multiple Beta readers to get their feedback. We are considering adding illustrations to the book and hoping to publish it in 2024.

I can absolutely see what a major disruptive technology Large Language Models like ChatGPT are going to be for creativity and education. For certain types of work, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between what was written by a human and what was written by a computer.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a book I read a few years ago called The Most Human Human: What Talking to Computers Teaches Us About What It Means To Be Alive, by Brian Christian. I read this book many years ago, but it feels incredibly prescient. In this non-fiction book, the author talks about the Turing test and how it is inevitable that computers would pass it (which AI has) and that his personal challenge in taking the test in 2009 was to come across as more human than the computers.

We humans liked to separate ourselves from other animals by saying that we could “reason” better than they could. Where do we fit now that we have created machines that can reason better than us?

I’m definitely thinking about revisiting this book.

In the past few months of playing with ChatGPT, it’s definitely clear that it’s going to replace some jobs — probably a lot of jobs. And that’s scary.

I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m hoping that AI will help create more new opportunities than it will destroy.

I think I’d be more freaked out if wasn’t so darn helpful.

For example, I’m really excited about ChatGPT’s illustration function that it can do. I’m a passable artist, but I can definitely see myself using illustrations in places where I wouldn’t have used illustrations before. I’ve asked ChatGPT to help me with my fiction writing by helping me outline a new series I’m noodling on. I’ve asked it to help edit my scenes. I’ve asked it for help in generating marketing material. It’s just so useful. The more I play with it, the better I get asking it the right questions so that I get the result I want.

I have found some inspiration and guidance in listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast episodes, “The AI-Assisted Artisan Author” and about her “15 Year Creative Pivot” to focus more on fiction books than on non-fiction.

I have been planning my own “career pivot” with my fiction writing.

My 17-Year Creative Pivot

For years, I’ve been struggling to define myself as a writer and to make a specific decision about my audience and my voice. I waffled between literary, contemporary, fantasy, horror, and romance. 

During the past two years of working on my short story collection, I have been doing some soul-searching on what my personal “Id list” is. The term “Id list” is based on Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s lecture to the romance Writers Association about finding what sparks joy for you and writing that. (Fans of Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up will also be familiar with the “sparks joy” concept.)

Going through my bookshelves in 2021, I found out that a lot of the books I read did not spark joy. Most of them felt like homework. So I donated them all, and started only reading books that excite me.

And you know what? I read so many more books once I started picking books that gave me pleasure rather than books I felt like I was supposed to read in order to seem smart and writerly. In 2022 I read more than 140 books, and in 2023, I read more than 120 books. That’s more than double than what I previously read each year!

I also created a master list of all my story ideas — more than 500 of them! I held each idea, and started asking myself if I actually wanted to write this, or if it was just a fleeting thought that appealed to me intellectually, but which had no passion connected with it. 

The more I interrogated my own ideas — particularly by trying out some concepts in the form of outlining, or scenes, or as short stories  — the better I got at determining which ideas really thrilled me, and which ideas I was ready to let go of. 

I had been holding on to some of those project ideas for a long time. Years.

And I’ll be honest: it felt really liberating to quit some of them.

The fastest way to finish a project is to quit it.

I know some people feel tremendous sadness at the thought of quitting a project—especially if it’s one they’ve nurtured for a long time. But for me, quitting most of these ideas felt like a huge relief. I was no longer shackled to the brain-children of my twenty-year-old self. I am a vastly different woman now than I was then. At last, I’m free to pursue the things that excite me now, today.

I think part of my easy-come, easy-go attitude comes from the fact that I have so many ideas. There’s more where that came from. Ideas are limitless. It’s time that is limited.

I still wanted to pay honor my past. And that is where my collection What We Talk About comes in. This book is an homage to past experiences and anxieties. This is the best of what 20-37-year-old me could come up with. These are the finest gems. The darkest, most haunting tales. And I’m so proud of that project.

But I’m also looking forward to what I will be doing next.

During NaNoWriMo, I started writing a new collection of short stories, tentatively titled Beads of Amber. These stories are Polish-inspired fairy tales, historical fantasy, and speculative fantasy stories inspired by some of the bedtime stories I remember being told by my mother and grandmother. 

I’m reluctant to give it a publication deadline, but this is definitely the direction I see myself going in the future.

I’ve also started brainstorming a fairy tale romance series set in this Central European fantasy world, specifically having to do with the local legends of certain cities. The Dragon of Krakow. The Mermaid of Warsaw. That type of thing.

To keep you readers in the loop of my changing focus, I’ve been doing my best to blog a little more regularly. I’ve been blogging almost weekly since October, and this is a habit I hope to continue.

I hope to provide more book reviews of books that have a similar focus to what I’m working on, so that while you wait for me to write my next book, you can find a sampling of other works that I find inspiring, and which have a similar focus to the projects I’m working on.

I’m also toying around with doing a sort of “Monster Guide” blog series of all the fantastic Slavic fairy creatures I’m learning about. I’m tentatively planning on titling it Slavic Spirits, and it’s a project I hope to launch in 2024.

If you are interested in following along on my journey, please consider signing up for my Reader’s Club newsletter. As a Thank You, I’ll send you a free copy of one of the short stories that will be included in my Beads of Amber collection. 

I hope your new year holds many wonderful things for you.

Best wishes to you all!