Challenge,  Fun Stuff

First Day Superstars…

Even Though I Have Been Teaching for Two Days…

Yesterday was  what they call the craft day and today day one…

I think the Licensing Your IP talk I did went all right. Said a lot of stuff the newer writers had not thought about.

And learned a bunch about estate planning for writers from an attorney who was a specialist in it who did a talk and thenI was on a panel with him as well the next hour. Really fun.

Only got about four hours last night of sleep, so two short naps between stuff today keep me going. Great breakfast with Allyson and Mark, great talk later with Joanna Pen about different forms of AI.

And a fun dinner with a bunch of writers who are dictating and how they do it and so on.

My eye is getting slightly better and I can almost read menus. Good sign.

So now off to try to get a better nights sleep before I do a two plus hour talk on writing into the dark early tomorrow morning. Early meaning in the middle of my normal night’s sleep.

6 Comments

  • Harvey Stanbrouigh

    Glad you’re having fun up in Colorado, Dean. I saw Joanna’s post on using “generative AI” in a recent short story. When I first saw the excerpt of the post at TPV, I thought surely it must have been written by a guest author and not Joanna herself. Of course, when I clicked through I found I was wrong.

    I was a little disappointed. I thought JP wrote into the dark, and frankly I see no way to square using input from “generative AI” with WITD. In fact, I wrote a whole blog post titled “AI: Um, Why?” at https://hestanbrough.com/ai-um-why/.

    It will be fun in years to come to watch the legal battles arise especially over AI-generated art. Expecially younger writers seem always ready to pre-build settings and characters before they write and then to second-guess the characters after they write. First with their own conscious, critical mind and then with critique groups. That’s head-shaking enough, and now they’re doing the same thing with AI. Which, when you dust off the mystique, is only a collective of even more humans’ conscious, critical minds. Sigh.

    • dwsmith

      Lot more complex than anything going on on the surface. Not defending, just saying that this is the early days and the dust has not settled by a long ways. Just stay tuned and watch. And as things settle in certain AI areas, I will talk about it here.

    • Cheryl

      Respecting Dean’s prompt to hold off on judgement until more is apparent, but very much in agreement with Harvey’s comment (and linked post) as it does seem entirely antithetical to what I’m learning via WMG … well, and I guess, in full disclosure, as an irregular visual artist and spouse of a f/t artist, I do find it inherently abhorent.

  • SophieSchiller

    Hi Dean,
    I want to read more blog posts like those you wrote for “Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing.” They were super fun to read and very engaging and thought-provoking. Please keep it coming!
    Thanks,
    Sophie

    • dwsmith

      Going to do a series on Killing the Sacred Cows on Indie Publishing and delete those old ones that are out of date. Stay tuned.