AIn’t Necessarily So

It’s no secret AI can operate as a powerful research tool, especially when requiring ‘fuzzy’ searches. ‘Fuzzy logic’ is a computer term referring to imprecise inputs or output. Digital computers like exactitude. In practice, ‘approximately’, ‘about’, ‘almost’, and ‘nearly’ are anathema to traditional programming.

Until now.

“Oh please, ChatGPT / Copilot / Gemini / Grok / LLaMA / Claude / Deep Seek, please help me identify a summer television series with a mystery theme broadcast on ABC, CBS, or NBC in the late 1970s or maybe 1980s…”

Google and Bing won’t help much but a well-phrased AI query can give your research a fighting chance. It can process your conservational request, understand what you’re looking for, and relieve you of the burden of searching by year and perhaps by network.

In recent decades, programmers cracked the hard nut of pattern matching, essential for AI in many ways. The front end of many AIs use an LLM, large language model, which not only parses spoken (and written) word, but can now understand it.

Our friend ABA (Hi Cate!), once under contract to the South African government, hired a small bevy of assistants to sort through historical photographs, identifying and labeling their content, e.g, ‘Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Background: Tabletop Mountain, 10 June 1994’.

At present, an automatic document loader and AI processor can accomplish the same job in moments. AI can understand the contents of a picture. Unfortunately, that sort of thing could put a coterie of girls out of a job.

And yet…

AI can make mistakes, sometimes huge ones. We’ve learned particular AIs can be politically manipulated. An old computing rule states that results can be no more accurate than incoming data– Garbage in, Garbage out. And it’s early days… We’re barely in the Model T stage.

An early bugbear that should be fixed by now came from a simple question: How many Rs are in the word strawberry? A programming quirk would return an answer of 2. Does your AI get it right?

I’ve listened to a number of AI generated stories. Some are ‘okay’ but most fall prey to one problem or another, especially word repetition, i.e, ’smirked’. The phrase a ‘smile didn’t quite reach her eyes’ is a dead giveaway. And plot holes. Lordy, lordy, the plot holes, not to mention failed opportunities to wring drama out of confrontations.

That said, I wish posters would explicitly tag AI generated works. AI dreck shouldn’t drag down the arts.

On the other hand, AI can make a halfway decent editor if you’re having difficulty with a scene that might be overwritten or too flowery with overflowing modifiers. It might stimulate your thinking in a different direction. Be aware, major public-facing AIs have bowdlerizing limitations regarding adult topics, limits ranging in the GP to PG category.

Note: Generally speaking, works created largely or wholly by AIs cannot be copyrighted.

What about…

We’ve heard more than once AIs can write better computer code than professional programmers. For the moment setting aside massive matrix programs, I ordered applications in various procedural and object-oriented languages. The first two attempts suffered bugs even in the simplest code. Once fixed, program efficiency was merely so-so.

Experiments suggests AI might write scripts and program code at an average programmer level, but can’t presently compete with top-tier ‘super-programmers’ (a term coined in the 1970s).

Where AIs can excel are in massive table driven or matrix based programming, where, thanks to incredible processor speed and memory, they can populate many millions of array cells when a human cannot hope to compete.

Armed and Dangerous

Requesting pictures gave me fits, beginning with over-saturated color, and botched eyes and mouths. A photorealistic mother had two and a half arms, a dancer had three legs. Once I thought I’d finally received a perfect rendering with no extra limbs or major body parts. My friend said, “Oh yeah? Count the fingers.”

Examples have been too creepy to keep, but I slipped one example into an article. Turns out my audience was too polite to mention the armed conflict.

The toughest challenge I never did resolve. My query went, “Create a pencil sketch  of a father carrying his young teen daughter upstairs.” Once or twice, I suggested a point of view: “From floor level, angle the camera from the side of the stairway.”

Results were a mess. Often, the AI positioned the camera from above rather than below. Sometimes it had a little girl carrying the father. The most bizarre attached the father’s left arm to his right shoulder socket and right arm to his left side, and carrying the girl like a monstrous backpack.

Holy Heavens, Hannah

Recently, I asked an AI a research question: “Kindly give me a list of words where the first letter is a silent H.” Here you see the results.

A couple of years into public release, AIs remain subject to errors and restrictions. Yet with informed practice, they can offer considerable research assistance.

Note: Be impressed how au fait my colleagues are with AI, both good and bad aspects.

Game On … or faster versus smarter?

Leigh’s game of senet

Where'd THAT Ending Come From?

One of the things that sometimes bug me, as both a booklover and a movie addict, is watching an adaptation of a novel that I've read and then finding that it has a different ending. Actually, that's not true: It bugs me if the ending is worse. It doesn't bother me at all if the movie ending turns out to be better. 

The difference I seem to remember the most--spoiler alert!--happened when I watched the movie The Mist years ago, after reading the Stephen King novella. In the written version, after the survivors of the monster attack at the supermarket escape and manage to also avoid the other creatures in the area, they drive away toward a possible safe zone, still together and alive and hopeful. But in the movie, their getaway car runs out of gas with creatures lurking everywhere, the leader of the survivors kills the four others in the group, including his son, in order to spare them a gruesome death, and--now out of ammunition– he exits the car to be killed himself … when a military team appears out of nowhere and tells him rescuers are on the way. A real downer of an ending, and I've found that many others agree. But in retrospect, it was probably the perfect ending because it created such emotion on the part of the viewer. It was certainly memorable.

Anyhow– you see my line of thinking, here– I have dutifully come up with twenty well-known novels and movie adaptations, all of which I have read and watched, where the endings were changed. There are of course many, many more, but these came to mind.

Here's my list (I'm hoping I've remembered the details correctly)--and, for what it's worth, I've placed an asterisk beside the versions I preferred. Be aware, more spoilers are here, in abundance:

1. The Natural — Book version: Baseball star Roy Hobbs strikes out in a crucial game and is disgraced. Movie version*: Hobbs hits a home run that wins the pennant, and is hailed as a hero.
2. Cujo — Book: The little boy in the car, Tad Trenton, dies. Movie*: He survives.
3. Jaws — Book: Hooper (the young oceanographer) dies. Movie*: Both Chief Brody and Hooper are alive, and swim together to shore.
4. The Firm — Book*: Mitch McDeere scams the firm out of millions and escapes to the Caribbean with his family and the money. Movie: Mitch makes a deal with the mafia and with the FBI, destroys the firm, and remains a lawyer, in a different city.
5. The Shining — Book*: Jack Torrance blows up the hotel and dies in the explosion, and Dick Hallorann survives. Movie: Jack kills Hallorann and then freezes to death in the maze.
6. Double Indemnity — Book: Neff and Phyllis escape together and commit suicide on their way to Mexico. Movie*: Neff and Phyllis shoot each other, and Neff confesses to his boss before dying.
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's — Book: The two lovers don't wind up together. Movie*: They do. 
8. Hannibal — Book: Lecter and Clarice run off together. Movie*: Lecter escapes and leaves Clarice behind. 
9. The Shawshank Redemption — Book: Red is searching for Andy following their prison break. Movie*: Red finds and joins Andy in Mexico. 
10. Strangers on a Train — Book: Guy kills Bruno's father and goes to prison. Movie*: Bruno dies at the amusement park and Guy is cleared of his wife's murder.
11. Forrest Gump — Book: Jenny marries someone else, and Forrest moves to New Orleans with Lt. Dan. Movie*: Forrest and Jenny get married, she dies, and Forrest raises their son.
12. Rebecca — Book*: Manderley burns down and Mrs. Danvers's fate is uncertain. Movie: She dies in the fire.
13. Black Sunday — Book*: The blimp carrying the bomb is diverted from the stadium, but the hero dies. Movie: The hero survives.
14. The Grapes of Wrath — Book: Sad ending, with the Joad family still suffering. Movie*: Hopeful ending, with the Joads safe for the moment, and pressing on.
15. Jurassic Park — Book: The island is destroyed by bombing, and Hammond dies. Movie*: The T-Rex saves everyone from raptors at the welcome center, and Hammond survives.
16. The Notebook — Book: The couple reunites and lives. Movie*: The couple reunites and dies peacefully.
17. LA Confidential — Book: The villain (Capt. Smith) survives and gets away with his crimes. Movie*: Exley kills Smith in a shootout at the Victory Motel.
18. And Then There Were None — Book*: All the guests, and the judge, die. Movie: Vera and Lombard solve the mystery and survive.
19. First Blood — Book: John Rambo dies. Movie*: Rambo lives (thus enabling four sequels).
20. Planet of the Apes — Book: Hero and his companion escape the planet and go back to Earth. Movie*: Hero discovers that he's been on Earth all along.

I discovered, when I checked the placement of my asterisks, that I seem to prefer either twist endings or happy, neatly-wrapped endings (but not always). My question for you is, do you agree with any of my preferences? What are some novel vs. movie endings that you remember, and which versions did you like, or hate? As I said, I've left out a lot of them.

Okay, back to my books and videos. See you in two weeks.

Road Tripping: Go Bag for Writers

I can’t believe it’s only a few weeks until Christmas. I’ve been traveling a lot. Between writing retreats, conferences, and vacations with family, my life has been less ho, ho, ho and more go, go, go. On the road, I still try to write whenever I can. So, I created a go bag with the tools I need. 

Here is a look at what’s inside:

Laptop

I love a keyboard. I need it to write. I have tried smaller devices to reduce weight and optimize space. I’ve even tried traveling without my MacBook and always regret it.

Lap Desk

At the Austin Film Festival, I heard a writer and busy mother say that she writes between the seams in her schedule. I feel like my life is the same way. I found a budget-friendly lap desk and write during long drives from the passenger seat, in the carpool line waiting to pick up kids, in coffee shops, and in dinky hotel rooms. 

Refillable Journal

I found this Voyager Refillable Journal in Books to Be Red, an independent bookstore, on Ocracoke Island. It holds three notebooks: lined, dot grid, and blank pages. It is great for research notes, sketching diagrams, and jotting down ideas. The notebooks are small and refillable. Until I found this gem, my note-taking system on the road was random scraps of paper and sending emails to myself which was problematic at best.

Travel Power Strip

I hate playing Twister behind furniture searching for outlets. This USB desktop power strip has been a game changer for me.  I love the outlets are easy to access, and I can charge multiple devices at one time. 

Portable Charger

I’m notorious for forgetting to charge my phone. I often use it as a hotspot when I write. This portable charger has saved me countless times. It is also small and easy to carry.

Snack Pouch

There have been days (I wish more) when the writing has been going well and suddenly, I’m hungry. If I stop to find food, the magic disappears. I keep bags of almonds, dark chocolate, and protein bars with me in a pinch. 

[NOTE: All links provided above are solely for your convenience; I have no financial relationship with the brands or retailers.]

Do you have a go bag for writing? Do you have advice on the best way to write on the road? What tools work for you? 

Please share your ideas in the comments.

***

I am delighted to be a recent guest on Elaine's Literary Salon Podcast. I had the best time chatting with Jeffrey James Higgins, about craft, community, and anthologies. You can listen to the podcast here. I hope you stop by.

Alexander the Great: Bastard as Exemplar for an Age (356–323 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

*    *    *

Alexander ordered all but those who had fled to the temples to be put to death and the buildings to be set on fire… 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.

— Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni 

Alexander the Great

Held up throughout the ages as a shining example of both the great conqueror and the philosopher-king, Alexander III of Macedonia was considered by many to be the greatest monarch of the ancient world. 

He was also a homicidal megalomaniac who developed a god complex to go along with a drinking problem, likely had a hand in killing his own father, murdered one of his own generals in a drunken rage, conquered the Persian Empire, and unleashed the Macedonian war machine on an unprepared world, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of people.

Born to parents who could barely stand the sight of each other by the time he came along, Alexander was in his teens and already trained as a cavalry officer and a leader of men when his father, Macedonian king and bastard Philip II, took a new, young wife, whom he immediately got pregnant. When the girl delivered a boy whom Philip promptly designated his heir, Alexander and his crazy snake-cult-priestess mother Olympias fled Macedonia for her native country of Epirus (modern Albania), where they cooled their heels until Philip was assassinated later that same year. Alexander and his mother probably had a little something to do with that. Within weeks, Philip’s new wife, her opportunistic nobleman father, and her infant son had all been quietly put to death. 

The destruction of Thebes

On news of Philip's death the tribes to the north rebelled, and Alexander was forced to take time out to resubjugate them. A rumor that he had perished while doing so sparked a revolt by the Greek city-states Philip had conquered two years previously. Alexander marched south at the head of the army his father had built, and attacked Thebes, one of the cities leading the rebellion, and also where Philip had learned phalanx battle strategy in his youth.

Destroying Thebes' army, Alexander went about making an example of the city so as not to need to worry about further Greek rebellions once he was off in Asia. Six thousand Thebans died in the fighting, and Alexander had a further thirty-thousand sold into slavery.The Greeks never rose against him again.

After this Alexander was finally on to Asia, leading an army that Philip had built, conquering territories left and right. He lived another thirteen years and never again set foot back in Greece.

When Alexander and his army entered Egypt, the priests of Amun there hailed him as a god himself and the son of one of their gods (a syncretic figure that combined aspects of the Greek god Zeus with the of the Egyptian god Amun), a connection that played to both his vanity and his political need to lend legitimacy to his conquests (after all, who can argue with the reasons of a god-on-earth for anything he does?). 

Alexander kills Cleitus

The further he got from Macedonia, the more binge drinking he and his senior officers did, and the worse Alexander’s god complex became. One evening, he got into a drunken brawl with one of his generals, a veteran named Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life in battle at the Granicus River years before. What's more, Cleitus's sister Laodice had been Alexander's wetnurse when he was a baby. 

The argument began when Cleitus confronted Alexander over comments he was making about his dead father. Cleitus, who had served as a junior officer in Philip's army, objected to Alexander disparaging the dead king, both men were very drunk, and it was all downhill from there. After a heated back and forth, Cleitus opened his tunic, offering his chest as a target, should his king wish to take his life. In the heat of the moment, Alexander snatched a spear from one of his bodyguards and threw it at Cleitus, killing him on the spot. 

Overcome with remorse once he sobered up, Alexander contemplated suicide but was talked out of it by his entourage, who convinced him that Cleitus was disloyal and since Alexander was a god, he was therefore infallible. 

When he finally died in Babylon of a combination of malaria and exhaustion at the age of thirty-three, Alexander left a changed world behind him. Whether or not it was for the better is up for debate.

Dear Abi, or the Ultimate Unreliable Narrator

 "As for myself, I belong to that delicious subgenre, the self-confessed unreliable narrator." - Matt Coward

Back in 2021 I wrote here about Stuart Turton's remarkable first novel, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.  (Leigh also wrote about it later.)  Turton is a master of mash-ups or genre-blendings, so let's call that book a fantasy novel braided together with a golden-age-style mystery.

I also enjoyed, but never wrote about his second book, The Devil and the Dark Water, which is sort of a seafaring historical mystery with horror overtones.

I just finished his third novel, and it's an amazing tale.  The Last Murder at the End of the World is a science fiction mystery.  It is set hundreds of years in the future (I had to keep reminding myself of that when futuristic technology is used) when all animal life on earth has been wiped out except on an island in the Mediterranean where a village of a few hundred people remain. 

 

When one of the residents  is murdered solving it could literally mean life or death for  the whole planet.  And since their memories of the past night have been wiped - futuristic technology - even the killer doesn't know whodunit.  Fortunately one of the villagers is uniquely qualified to do the detective work.  There is a breathtaking scene in which Emory, the sleuth, looks at a scene of utter chaos and immediately deduces what happened.  Nice piece of writing.

But what fascinated me most about the book is the narration style.  Most of the book is in third person, the classic omniscient narrator who can tell us all the actions and thoughts of the characters.  But every once in a while, well, take a look:

She remembers being out there when she was a girl, hearing this same lesson from the same teacher. She cried the entire way and nearly jumped out to swim for home when they dropped anchor.

"The children are safe with Niema," I say reassuringly.

Say what? Who is this first person narrator suddenly intruding, one who can tell us what the characters are thinking?

Her name, it turns out, is Abi (and I think I was halfway through the book before her gender was mentioned). She can see through the eyes of the villagers, talk with them through their thoughts and, to some extent, control them.

So, who or what is Abi? Obviously that is one of the puzzle boxes that the reader hopes will  be opened before the end of the book.  

But now we're getting to my main point.  Abi sometimes tells us that she is lying to the villagers.  But does she tell us every time she does? Can we  trust anything she is telling us?  

This is a terrific book but not without flaws.  The last quarter is so convoluted you practically need a flowchart and map to track Who is Where When.  And there is something which is described as a major clue which feels to me like an error an editor should have caught.

But it is a stunning read. 

Mining the Files

Some of the many publications containing my stories, including those that were mined from the files.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, as I have, you likely have a file drawer (or a file folder on your computer) filled with unsold stories.

Likely, some of them are unpublishable under any circumstances. Some, however, are publishable as is or with minor tweaking. Because you were unable to find suitable markets at the time, you disappeared the stories into your files. If enough time has passed, you may have even forgotten writing them.

This is a mistake. Every so often, you should reread your unsold stories and spend time seeking information about markets that have changed or that did not exist when you wrote the stories. You might be sitting on a gold mine (figuratively; you do know how well short stories pay, don’t you?).

This has been one of those years. Though there’re still thirty-one days left (as I write this) and I could receive additional acceptances that will impact the numbers I’m about to share, this has been a good year for mining my unsold stories file.

So, far, I’ve placed eight of those stories. I wrote the oldest—a bit of crime fiction—in 2013; the other seven are short romances I wrote in 2016. I placed them with three different publications, none of which existed at the time I wrote the stories.

Other than correcting typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors I hadn’t caught at the time, I only found it necessary to revise one story. I found a submission call for a winter-themed romance anthology, so I added a few sentences to one story to make it clear the story took place during winter.

UNFINISHED STORIES

I have another, larger, file of unfinished stories, and I frequently mine it as well. I’ve written about this before, but whenever I am not writing to deadline and have no specific project top of mind, I read my unfinished stories until one captures my attention.

Sometimes, I have a burst of inspiration and finish the story. Other times, I add a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire scene. Sometimes I create a rough outline for the balance of the story. If nothing compels me to finish, I move on to other unfinished stories.

Both “Blind Pig” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) and “The Girl in the Shop” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) were stories I had started and which lay dormant for four years (“Blind Pig”) or three years (“The Girl in the Shop”) between the time I started them and the time I finished them.

So, whether you’re mining your files for finished stories and seeking new markets for them or you’re mining for unfinished stories in hopes of inspirational sparks that will propel you through to the end of finished manuscripts, mining your files can prove quite beneficial.

I know it does for me.

* * *

“Forever Family” was published in Micromance Magazine, November 22, 2025.

“Writing is thinking.”

             My wife made this observation many years ago, and it has not only lingered in my mind, but grown in significance as I’ve experienced the effects. 

Here’s the premise:  When you’re just thinking something, it’s an undifferentiated ball of feelings, memories, randomly firing synapses, unstructured language, side tangents and fleeting images.  A swirl of disorganized, unmediated mush.  When you have to express all that via the written word, you have to “think it through”.  In other words, your mind imposes order and continuity to the original jumble, recording feelings and vague impressions in a way they can be conveyed to another person, essentially “completing the thought.”  Writing it down makes it real and tangible, and adds a fair amount of useful cognition along the way.

Fiction writers often mention those strange, and unfortunately fleeting, moments when something seems to be writing itself.  It’s suddenly effortless, the words flowing on the page as if directed by divine inspiration.  What could be happening, miraculous though not quite as romantic, is your brain, as your write, quickly sorts out all the inchoate reasoning that’s been going on in the background, and letting you reveal what you’d been thinking all along. 

It's also possible that the language you’re putting on the page is triggering other thoughts, which then express themselves as words, sentences and paragraphs, which then fuels further thinking, and concomitant writing, and so forth in a virtuous circle.

Brain scientists describe a process whereby raw emotions express themselves, spontaneously and involuntarily, as words in the heat of a stress-filled moment.  This is when your amygdala (once referred to as your “lizard brain”) gets so riled up that it sends a message right to your mouth, or in extreme cases your fists, bypassing all that other refining and moderating circuitry.   We usually apologize after one of these episodes by saying, “Sorry, I lost my temper.”  Or “Really sorry.  I guess I lost my mind.”   The latter is technically more accurate.  You have, in fact, lost portions of your mind when they’ve been sidelined, or hijacked (an actual clinical description) by the primitive bits from our evolutionary past.

I bring all this up to illustrate that it’s not unreasonable to assert that thoughts originating in one part of the brain can find themselves transformed for the better as they pass through the other parts.  Why the purely emotional sensations you might feel witnessing the dawn of a beautiful spring day can splash across a piece of paper in the form of a sonnet, and you have no idea how it got there.

 It would be fair to say that speaking serves the same purpose.  It also organizes the cacophony of impulses and feelings that constitute thought into discernible meaning you can communicate to other people.  That’s true, though written language operates at a different level.  It is more structured, intricate and reliant on basic logic.  You are more likely to be working your way to a conclusion, a summation that faces greater rigor than merely thinking out loud. 

            My wife would maintain that the act of writing itself not only harnesses thought, it is a type of thought itself that arrives at a destination unreachable by any other means.  It’s possible that some fiction writers compose their work fully in their heads before delivering it to the page.  But most are like me.  I have some idea of what’s going to happen in the next chapter, but I really won’t know for certain until I get there.  Often, my assumptions are misplaced, and the narrative goes merrily off in another direction entirely. 

You could argue that writing is merely a tool that facilitates thought, and by extension, creativity.  Feel free, but in my experience, no good ever comes from arguing with my wife.