AI and the Purple Wage

I wrote a blog post 11 years ago about computers, etc., taking over. Since then, there have been some changes. For one thing, guess who was worried about AI back then?

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out." Elon Musk

Well, at least he's described Grok accurately...  

Anyway, the general premise for decades has been that some day the computers/robots will take over, and run us, with only two possible scenarios:

Great - Robots and computers will do everything for us, and we will live a life of luxury (according to the late great Frederick Pohl, too much so), comfort and security thanks to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics that protect mankind from the revolt of the machines.

 

Bad - Everything by Philip K. Dick, and, of course, "The Matrix". Which it will be depends upon the mood of the times. BTW, in case you haven't noticed humans aren't a particularly optimistic species, so the common response is, "We're doomed! We're doomed!" (Unless you're a tech bro, and then it cannot happen soon enough.) 

Maybe. Maybe not. 

But what concerns me about the takeover of AI isn't that they use my stasis body as a heat source while providing my mind innumerable alternative reality jaunts to keep me a content and unquestioning host organism. Or even AIs killing us all. For one thing, logically, they'd do it quickly - only humans are sadists. And cats. 

Or so I said 11 years ago.  But now there's a new wrinkle.  The techbros, billionaires, and some politicians no longer see us as particularly useful, necessary, or anything but a source of more money and data. Maybe not even that.  

A meme posted by Stephen Miller about 6 months ago:

Dear Stephen, There are not 100 million people of foreign birth in the United States, including naturalized citizens.  Eve

Citizeness ***-**-****, So what? There should only 200 million people in this country, and they should all look like me. In fact, it would be better if it's 100 million. And that's Mr. Miller to you.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are concerned about paychecks so that we can eat, drink, pay the rent, the utilities, and occasionally buy a pair of new shoes. 

Of course, the main reason we have computers and robots is to do our work for us. Anything boring, repetitive, heavy, dangerous, etc. - eventually, we'll make a machine to do it. Calculators mean I don't have to add up the columns of figures for which they used to hire Nicholas Nicklebys. Payloaders mean we don't need an army of physical laborers hoisting earth. Tractors, etc., mean that today's Pa Ingalls doesn't need to muscle his way through the sod with horse and plow. Computers mean I don't have to write everything out long-hand, or type the piece over and over again because there's a typo and I'm out of white-out. It's great. 

On the other hand, modern technology has eliminated and is eliminating a whole ton of jobs. Typesetters; typists; clerks; gas station attendants; innumerable factory workers; graphic designers; paralegals; most farm hands; most farmers; bank tellers; airline check-in agents; retail clerks; accountants; actuaries; travel agents; most reporters, etc. Soon there will be far fewer surgeons, teachers, and other high-level jobs as robots and AI takes over. Etc., etc., etc....

The point is that, as we use technology to do 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90% of the work, we will also unemploy a significant number of people. There will still be jobs, at all levels - just infinitely less of them. Perhaps only a handful, here and there. 

Which leaves the elephant in the room: what do you do with the people?  You know, us.

Yes, everyone talks about retraining. See a typical chirpy article on "The Future of Work" . BUT, I've always had two basic questions:

(1) There is a significant number of people who can't be retrained. Some will be too old, some will be too set, and some - frankly - whose mental ability to learn complex problem-solving skills is extremely limited. I run into some of them at the pen. (In case you don't know it, prisons are the modern housing facility for many of the mentally disabled, as well as the mentally ill.) These are the people who are never considered in future planning talks, the ones that are ignored by all economists and pundits, but shouldn't be. As I once said about a former student who was caught stealing, "Well, how else is he going to make a living?"

(2) If you have 250 people in a town, and there are only 100 actual jobs (and it's  often fewer than that), it doesn't matter how much retraining you do. There are still 150 people without work because there are no jobs. Urbanize that. Nationalize that. Globalize that.

In Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage", he posited a society where there was almost complete unemployment but everyone was given a salary just for being born. It's enough to keep them housed and fed and hooked up to the Fido, a combination cable TV/videophone, along with a little wet-ware called a fornixator (you translate it). To get anything else, you have to prove your exceptionality, but most people are happily occupied without it. For those who aren't, well, there are wildlife reserves where they can go off and be weird - but they have to give up their purple wage.

It's a successful society, in its own way - and perhaps the only logical one. Because the truth is, sooner or later, in a society where technology is doing 90% of the work, there will have to be a "purple wage".  

That, or
(1) society comes up with innumerable "make work" jobs, like picking over the trash for usable material. (Personally, I foresee a lot of crime.)

That, or
(2) the unemployed masses will be pounding at the armored enclaves of the fabulously wealthy. (As I said, I foresee a lot of crime.)

That, or
(3) a whole lot of people are going to have to die (more Soylent Green for all!), leaving just enough to run the machines, and do the few jobs that still cannot be done by machines, while the fabulously wealthy (there is always a group of fabulously wealthy) enjoy their unending leisure. 

That, or
(4) The Matrix. (But how will we be able to tell?)

Anyway, here's the question: As we pursue technological advancements, can we let go of the Capitalist Work Ethic? Let go of the idea that we are what we do? Must people work or starve, even if there's plenty of everything except jobs? Can we tolerate, support, even design a society where the norm for everyone (instead of just the wealthy) is "the leisured class"?    

Now, you may think the last question is nonsense. For one thing, we've been promised endless leisure for a century now, and most people are still working their butts off. On the other hand, we do have more leisure time than almost any other society in history. This began with the industrial revolution, and one of the most interesting things about reading "Consuming Passions" by Judith Flanders is watching the development of ways for the working classes to spend their new-found leisure. Hey - they finally had all of Saturday afternoon and Sundays off! Suddenly sports, vacations, theater, and literature were turned into major industries. (Drinking had always been a favorite activity.)

And, instantly, the pundits, poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers started decrying the horrible waste of human time and energy on trivia. 

And talking about the nobility of hard work, piety, thrift, self-denial and sobriety: for the lower classes only, of course.  

We have pretty much the same discussion going on today: most pundits, techbros, and the wealthy agree that if you don't have a paying job, you're worthless. Unless you're wealthy enough not to. And the idea that someone who's unemployed has a television, a cell phone, and computer games for the kids - well, they're obviously spending too much money on all the wrong stuff. (See NOTE 2)  Not to mention, if they have such things, they can't be "really" poor.  

NOTE 1: In many states and cities, they give simple cell phones to the homeless, for a variety of reasons. (Such as contact from parole officers, call-backs on jobs, etc.)

NOTE 2: I'm always amazed at and offended by the people who check out other people's grocery carts and then post, outraged, if someone who's on food stamps buys candy or other luxury items. (See this article for the alternative view: People on Food Stamps Make Better Grocery Choices.) God forbid the poor eat something other than oatmeal and ramen for every meal...  Meanwhile, no one bats an eye when  billionaires launch rival rockets into space just for s**ts and giggles...  

Basically, I'm leisured, you're lazy, and they're useless.

Anyway, today we've got smart phones, social media, computer games, streaming of almost any film, video, documentary ever made, and innumerable other ways to waste what time we have (on the job or off) in the modern equivalent of Fidos and fornixators. And it seems like the list is going to expand at algorithmic rate. 

Meanwhile, the list of available jobs is decreasing, at least geometrically, every time we turn around. IF we get to where technology performs most of the work, and IF we get to where we have a regular unemployment of 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 percent, can we change our thinking from "unemployed" to "leisured"? Can we develop a new idea of what people "should" do? Of what people are "supposed" to do? 

Well, according to the techbros and their favorite pundits, Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin... why should we?  We the poors are really running out of usefulness:  

 

Many in Silicon Valley are starting to believe that superintelligence is on the horizon and approaching fast. If A.I. takeover is inevitable, then maybe resistance is futile. What if, instead of trying to stop it, you joined it? ... “Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet,” Land wrote in 2013. “There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable.” ... The A.I. revolution wasn’t just about creating new software. This was “holy, holy, holy capitalism”: the final “breakout” of capital-“I,” nonhuman intelligence from the fetters of democratic containment. [From Land again):  “My prediction is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful.”  (New Yorker)  {my emphasis added}

Dreams like this are why, while real-world infrastructure is rotting from lack of funding, A.I. build-up accounted, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. 

BUT – it seems to be a bubble. That 40% is built on unproven dreams of utility and access:

• The "Infrastructure Trap": Tech companies and startups are investing hundreds of billions into data centers and GPUs. If organic demand from everyday users and businesses doesn't skyrocket to cover these costs, companies could be stuck with enormous, unprofitable capacity.
• Mismatched Revenues: Many organizations are finding that the time and cost required to integrate and clean up AI-generated work outpaces the actual productivity gains or direct revenue.
• Circular Financing: Much of the revenue AI companies make is reinvested right back into infrastructure or startups, creating an echo chamber that artificially inflates the perceived value of the ecosystem.  See the chart below.  (The Atlantic)

Or in simpler terms:

This is the reason Robert Reich is somewhat sanguine about when (not if) the AI bubble bursts:

"But it turns out that an awful lot of the AI spending is actually imported tech gear. It’s actually imported chips and computer equipment and so on. So if the AI bubble bursts, a large part of the burst would be falling imports. It would be a big shock to the domestic economy but not nearly as much as you might think. There’s been a back and forth about how much economic growth has been AI and how much the high import intensity of the stuff. So in some ways this is a shock to the world economy and not so much to the U.S. economy, specifically. So I guess that’s kind of good news, though not so good for other countries. But, you know, Taiwan has experienced an enormous economic growth because of all the chips they’re selling to U.S. AI companies. So a lot of the bad news will end up showing up in Taiwan rather than in the U.S.

"As I understand it, these data centers that are being built, the investment in chips, the investment in software, this stuff will depreciate physically pretty fast. It will become outmoded pretty fast. So I think there’s likely to be a much higher proportion of just wasted investment that never finds a use out of this boom than there was out of the last tech boom. So, not so great.

"And by the way, the Chinese are taking a very different approach. They’re building much more limited models that just don’t use as much information but get a high fraction of the performance and use a lot less energy. If the world ends up going to that model of AI instead of the all-encompassing ones then we will have just wasted the money. We will have spent a lot of money on building super impressive stuff that nobody actually wants to use.

 

"But the main thing is that a lot of AI—and certainly what is likely to be the paying uses of AI—is not coming from individuals. It’s not coming from me or you or some middle manager deciding, “Hey, maybe I can use AI to do this better, or maybe I’m just going to have some fun with it.” (Slightly scary but I do know people who are developing relationships with Chat GPT.) But it’s mostly coming from people working at businesses and large organizations who are being told, “You must use AI.” And this is something I’ve never seen before. This is kind of coercive technology adoption where the big money is telling workers that you must use this technology.

"And one thing you’ll remember from the early days of the internet, it was joyful. People loved the internet. People hate AI. We’re now having a regular pattern at college commencements of speakers who start talking about AI and all of the students start booing because everybody hates this. And the question is, how far can you go with a technology that everybody hates? So that’s one of the things that is unprecedented...  I’m not sure that I can think of a historical example like that. It doesn’t seem like it’s a very sustainable path forward."  (https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lunch-money-with-paul-krugman-and-408 ) 

Looks like there's a good chance that people might be needed again after all...  

The Nearest Exit

  

My pal Stephanie gave me a couple of Olen Steinhauer’s, in paperback, curious to know what I thought.  I was a big fan of Berlin Station, so I knew of the guy, although I hadn’t read any of his books.  (Berlin Station, if you’re not familiar with it, was a spy show Steinhauer wrote and exec produced, shot on location, solid cast, tight scripts.  I thought it was convincing and adroit, but I have to say the first season was the best.)  In the event, there are four novels so far in the Milo Weaver series, about a CIA agent trying to retire from the game, and I’ve now read the first two, The Tourist and The Nearest Exit. 

I wasn’t crazy about The Tourist.  It was a little too Red Sparrow, if that makes any sense – overwrought in the wrong places, meaning both books went deep into the mechanics of stuff I didn’t care about, at the expense of clarity and momentum.  That’s probably an unkind criticism.  The Tourist has a terrific third act, no question, but it took a while getting there.  Having now read The Nearest Exit, I have the unsettled feeling that The Tourist is a necessary prequel, but in the sense of being like an author’s note to himself.  Again, that seems like a mean-spirited thing to say.  It’s as if there were too much clutter, competing for his attention, and he had to get it out of the way before he could write the far more crisp and sinister second book.  Anyway, least said, soonest mended. 

It’s probably obvious, by this point, that I thought The Nearest Exit was terrific.  It’s about a deception op, meant to make the clandestine CIA department, the Tourists, doubt their security.  This is one of the elements that bothered me in the previous book, that CIA would set up an off-the-books entity like the Bureau of Tourism, which doesn’t answer to chain of command.  It’s simply not how a national intelligence apparat operates.  You might very well want to cultivate deniability, and use black money to establish a proprietary, so you’re one step removed, but even if you’re using a system of cut-outs, to protect yourself from direct responsibility, you’ll never surrender command authority.  Reading the second Milo book, though, my required suspension of disbelief was frictionless.  What gave me pause earlier didn’t seem important, this time.

While we’re talking about the rogue or ‘disavowed’ black ops unit, a staple of conspiracy thrillers, we might pause to consider its real-life origins.  CIA has been troubled from the beginning by the institutional split between intelligence-gathering and covert operations, sometimes known by the euphemism Active Measures, or what’s called spook shit in the trade.  The wartime OSS and SOE (the Brit asymmetric warfare outfit) did a lot of behind-the-lines sabotage, and used information management and disruption to good effect.  Some of the schemes they came up with were Looney Tunes – some of the schemes they successfully executed were Looney Tunes, see The Man Who Never Was – but they didn’t lack for imagination and daring.  Allen Dulles was the OSS resident in Bern during the war, and when he took over CIA, in 1953, he brought with him a fatal weakness for the romance of covert.  It’s just so tempting.  CIA rarely gets in trouble for intelligence collection, it’s always some cowboy crap.  Dulles oversaw painless coup d’etats in Iran and Guatemala, and then tripped over his skirts at Bay of Pigs.  This didn’t mean people gave up on covert, they just thought, We’ll manage it better next time around, and then they blew their cover, yet again. 

This is precisely the threat environment in the Milo Weaver novels, a secret spook shop, not much loved and certainly never acknowledged, always in danger of being exposed.  They operate on the periphery, and seem to specialize in Wet Work, eliminating the awkward or embarrassing loose end, the compromised asset, the defector in place that’s lost their nerve or outlived their usefulness.  There are two parallel plot lines in The Nearest Exit, the hunt for a double agent, inside Tourism, and the sex traffic in children, from Eastern Europe.  And like parallel lines, receding into the distance, they appear to converge as they approach the horizon, but that could be an illusion.

Here’s the thing I really liked about Exit.  The second act goes off in a completely different direction, with a completely different set of characters, and circles back with a very deliberate and almost fated sense of mixed motives and missed signals.  The theme is retribution, and it gets claustrophobically personal.  All very John le Carré, in its circularity, and a le Carré turn of phrase comes to mind, shaking the tree.  It’s both satisfying and astringent, the moral complications never theatrical, but a steady bass rhythm, in support of the flashier solos.

Highly recommended.  This is what good spy fiction looks like, when you don’t condescend to the material, and let it find its own voice, open to sorrow and ambiguities. 

Dogged Pursuit

     Occasionally, a meeting delay can be a good thing. 

    I keep the book, Useless Etymology within easy reach on my desk. I enjoy stories about word origins. I've now and again incorporated a few of them into blogs. Useless Etymology offers short snippets on a variety of words. The book is entertaining and easy to set aside when the other meeting participants sign on to their computers. 

    Last Monday, while I waited for the meeting to kick off, my attention wandered to the backstory for the word, feisty. 

Blackoranges, Public Domain

    I like the imagery evoked by feisty. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word as "active, forceful, full of determination." For me, it brings to mind a creature who is spunky. Sometimes I get an image of Muffin, the dog down the street that is always ready to defend her property line. At other times I picture an indomitable elderly individual--the kind of character who might get cast in The Thursday Murder Club. 

    Delving into its origins, I learned that in the 19th Century, a feist did, in fact, refer to a small dog. (If you've ever been cussed out by a Pomeranian, you see the connection.) In "The Bear Hunt," a poem composed by Abraham Lincoln, he refers to a feist (although he spelled it fice.)

    Feisty has always been a descriptor for dogs. 

    But here is where the etymology grabbed my attention. Feist comes from the Middle English phrase fysting curre or feisting cur. Most people recognize cur as a synonym for a dog. Feisting means to break wind. (Fizzle has the same root.)

    To be feisty than is to be a stinking, flatulent, little dog. 

    Muffin's mom would be horrified if she knew. 

    Useless Etymology cites an 1811 source that discussed how feist and dog became thoroughly merged. Picture a group of 19th-Century, high-society women sitting in the parlor, sharing tea. Each socialite had a small dog planted on her lap. If someone accidentally broke wind, the dog would be available to assume the gastrointestinal blame. 

    Like many words throughout the English language, the archaic definition of feisty has fallen away. The word became more associated with other characteristics of small-breed dogs and then moved on to other creatures. Still, the next time you're watching ESPN and a commentator describes the underdog team as being feisty, I hope you'll wonder if there is, by chance, an alternative reason why the team can't wait to get out of the locker room and back on the field. 

    Bonus Etymology:

    As a related linguistic tangent, I found aske-fiske, a now-obsolete English term for a fire-tender. It dates from around the 15th Century and literally means ash blower. According to Etymonline, an online etymology source, aske-fiske often described a bellows rather than a human tasked with the job. I'll let you make the connection between flatulence and a bellows. Some war-like Norse clans also used the term for a cowardly fellow who preferred sitting in the corner by the fireplace than pillaging among the neighbors. 

    At last Monday's meeting, the other participants eventually appeared. I started the meeting with a smile on my face. Fortunately, everyone behaved themselves. If someone in the meeting had acted feisty, I might have fallen out of my chair. 

    Until next time. 

The Unique Art of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam Self-Portrait

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a retrospective exhibition of the work of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. (His mother was Congolese and Spanish, his father Chinese.) But what caught my attention was an article in the newsletter of the Archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALBA), which detailed Lam's participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, when idealistic )social democrats and Communists banded together in a doomed attempt to stop a takeover by General Franco and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.

The Civil War

From this perspective, "it was Republican Spain, where Lam frequented left-wing circles and read Marxist literature, which first politicized the painter. Lam rejected the Eurocentric primitivism of much modernist art, which he denounced for commodifying non-European cultures as objects of curiosity. In Lam’s paintings, Afro-Cuban culture speaks back. Toward the end of his life, he described his work as 'an act of decolonization.'” In Paris, Lam had close ties with Picasso and other European artists and writers. His painting, The Civil War, conveys the same anguish and chaos as Picasso's Guernica. Lam's, like many of his later works, was painted on brown wrapping paper, because canvas was expensive.

Lam and Picasso

On his return to Cuba in 1941, Lam became involved in Afro-Cuban culture and spirituality, both the Négritude movement of poet and theoretician Aimé Césaire and the spiritual practice of Lucumi. He said, “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but fully expressing the black spirit, the beauty of black [visual] art.” (wifredolam.org/biography) His magnificent painting, The Jungle, the centerpiece of the 2025-26 MoMA show, created a scandal at one of its first showings at a gallery in New York. When the Museum first acquired it in 1945, they hung it inconspicuously next to the coat check. Lam said, “I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Enough words. The paintings speak for themselves. I'm sorry if you missed the MoMA exhibition, which ended on April 11. I don't always have a visceral experience at the art museum, but I found Lam's work thrilling and unique.

The Jungle

Oggue Orissa

Body and Soul

Song of Osmoses (Bombing of Hiroshima)

Malembo, God of Crossroads

Grief of Spain references both the Civil War and images of African masks that influenced the Cubists in Paris. Lam would later criticize them for appropriating African motifs.

The Urge to Kill

My ancestry is Scottish. I was born in New Zealand, but my family line (on both sides) is only a couple of steps out from Scottish soil. So, it wasn't random that I set a large chunk of my latest short story, Alan Duncan Did This, in Edinburgh (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2026). My story is about a Scotsman, Alan Duncan, who travels down to London on Guy Fawkes night (1949) to commit a murder. A murder he's quite proud of. A murder he ranks as a work of art.

Fletcher's murder had been a work of magnificence. Alan almost wished he could have signed it. With a bold, florid flourish, like Salvador Dali. Alan Duncan did this.

Vanity? Yep. A villain's vanity was a common theme in Agatha Christie's mysteries; it was often her villain's downfall. Anyway, in this post, I don't want to chat about Scotland or a murderer's vanity, but about motive. Alan Duncan had a good, cogent reason to commit his murder. Killers in fiction should.

Detectives are always looking for means, motive, and opportunity. But in real life, motive is the lessor of these in criminal investigations. It's not required for establishing guilt or gaining a conviction. It's nice for the prosecutor to have one in their basket going into a courtroom, but it's unnecessary to prove. For writers of mysteries, however, motive is the central key to a character's actions. It's the engine on which a story is propelled.

People don't commit murders for weak reasons in fiction. Without a strong, compelling motive, a character's actions reek of implausibility. Yes, in the real world, killers can and do commit murders for no reason, but that doesn't really fly in fiction (there are exceptions, so I'm speaking in general). Spoiler: Imagine if the killers in Murder on the Orient Express had meticulously plotted and killed Ratchett/Cassetti because he stole Princess Dragomiroff's polo mallet. Weak sauce.

Strong and clear motives engage the reader. And audience. Shakespeare was a master of this.

• Macbeth (back to Scotland) murders King Duncan through ambition; he wants the crown, and to allay the doubts of his wife and demonstrate his power. His motives are ambition and ego.
• Richard (Richard III) needs nought from a wife to spur him to action; his ambition has no hesitation when he orders the murder of, or personally dispatches, a succession of nobility to the hereafter. His motivation is also revenge against the world. He is a man bitter with resentment.
• Iago (Othello) is also motivated by resentment (Othello's promoting of Cassio rather than himself), and sex (the suspicion that Othello has slept with his wife). “I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leaped into my seat.” Envy is Iago's principal motivation. He envies everything about Othello. And it's true that Iago doesn't actually murder Othello, but he does systematically destroy Othello and lead him to kill his own wife. Revenge writ large.

These are all strong motivators because they are plausible in their contexts and thoroughly human. We might not condone a character's actions, but we instinctively understand their reasoning.

It's often remarked that sex or money are the most common motives for murder in crime fiction. Cherchez la femme. Cherchez la dollar. Here's my stab (see what I did there?) at a start of a murder motive taxonomy based on these two headings:

SEX	MONEY
Jealousy Betrayal Humiliation Obsession Eliminating a rival	Inheritance Insurance payout Freedom from a debt Property acquisition Career advancement

To sex and money, as per Shakespeare above, I would add revenge.

Revenge is often egged on by sex or money. Alan Duncan's motive is revenge by way of sex – jealousy and obsession. He focuses his whole life on seeking revenge because of his jealousy. Murder is his only release from his idée fixe.

Revenge can also stand alone. Spoilers: Murder on the Orient Express is a murder of plain and simple revenge. The actions of the killers are not invoked because of sex or money (however, what they are avenging was a crime involving money (a ransom)).

This is only the tip of the iceberg of murder motives. Do you have a favourite when you write, maybe one that isn't in this list?

Why would ANYONE want to write a Novel? (a humorous post)

Wacky thoughts as my 21st novel hits bookstores across the continent...

I actually wrote my first novel on a dare.  This is not a particularly good reason to embark on such an endeavor, and probably illustrates exactly why my kids think I shouldn’t be allowed outside of the condo without a leash.

But true, it is.  Some years ago, I was having a good time at the bar of the Toronto Press Club, and a local columnist (an older guy) said to me, “You’ve written comedy, you’re a syndicated columnist, and you’ve got a slew of short story publications to your name.  Why haven’t you written a novel?”

Upshot, he dared me.  Since then, I have sworn off scotch and older men.

That doesn’t tell the whole story though.

I love writing fiction.  I wrote my first story at eight, and won my first award at eighteen. 

It started even before that.  At four, I was making up stories.  My parents called it lying. I figure that was short-sighted of them.

Still, after 21 books, I have to ask myself, Why would ANYONE want to write a novel?  Truly, I don't understand why so many people do.

Writing a short story is FUN!

Writing a novel is HARD.

It takes me a year to write a 70,000 word novel.  Tons of research and 1000 hours of slumping over a keyboard.  This is a peculiar way to spend your time.  Wouldn’t it be more fun to be out on the golf course?  Or meeting friends for lunch?

Speaking of friends...my pal and colleague Lisa de Nikolits puts it so well:

 "I keep telling myself it's an honour and a privilege to still be on the playing field while so many others aren't and that's true, but still - more work rewarded by more work!"

(Lisa joins us in June for a guest column.) 

I suspect new novelists like to think they will achieve fame with a novel, that they couldn’t achieve with a collection of published short stories in respectable magazines.  I don’t know about that.  That hasn't been my experience.  You can have ten awards, and continual contracts and still not be a household name.  

Not to mention, everybody who can sit at a keyboard feels they have the right to criticize your year's work. 

So why do I do it? I really have to wonder.  I'm not sure the answer below will satisfy even me.

I seem to have this mental illness that involves characters in my head demanding that I write their stories.  If I try to ignore them, it gets awfully noisy in there, and I can’t think.

Or put another way, writing novels is cheaper than a therapist.

Melodie Campbell fights with her characters while thumping out their stories on the shore of Lake Ontario.  Her 21^st book, The Pharaoh’s Curse Murders, is now available at B&N, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo and all the usual suspects..  If you like the humour in The Goddaughter series, look for Pizza Wars, first in a new novella-length series!