This one is my introspection, not my characters.
The great and powerful YouTube algorithm presented LughDJ to me. I’m not a huge fan of club music, but it’s high energy. I like having the fake shirtless men dancing on the side of my screen when I look away from the text I’m writing. This is not, in my opinion, AI slop. It’s definitely AI, but it’s well done. He’s getting an acknowledgement, somewhere.
Watching those put a bunch of other stuff the Play Next list. In the pile is Strongheart Workout Music. There’s no video. Just two hours of what I’d call 70s rock. It all sounds the same. It makes great background music for werewolf fights. The lyrics make no sense at all. Musical people might find the music equally nonsensical. I am not a music person. It sounds fine to me. It is AI slop. And I’m listening to it anyway.
I have attention focus disorder (I have no idea if that’s a real thing or not). When I’m focused on something, everything else fades into the background. I don’t really hear the music that’s playing. I hear, feel?, the energy or lack thereof, but it just washes over me without any cognitive processing on my part.
AI slop is fine as background music that I don’t hear, anyway. Would I buy six hours of it? No. But I have pressed the replay button twice. The same two hours again is fine because I don’t recognize it, not having listened to it the first time.
I can understand why this angers musicians. But, from my perspective, why should I pay someone to compose a beautiful story in rhythm and lyrics that I’m not going to hear?
See where this is going?
A lot of the HFY stuff is AI – both generated and narrated by it. There are mountains of AI slop. For me, I think it was a fad. I liked it and enjoyed many of the stories. Now I’m over it. The quality is too low. This is a temporary situation. AI may plateau before we achieve general AI (human smart), but we’re not anywhere close to that plateau, yet. It’s going to get a lot better.
Digression: Audiobooks also drive me crazy because they’re so slow. I read much, much faster than anyone can talk. If the HFY stories were published for Kindle, would I read them? Maybe. I would certainly give it a try. I think the quality would get them walled, though.
Why am I writing? Because I like to read, mostly. I want to write something that I’d be excited find in a “Recommended for You” list. I don’t care too much if anyone else is excited by it, but I admit that I’d be thrilled if they were.
Why am I writing You Asked For It, now?
I’ve tried to write before. Space Opera. Isaac Arthur ruined space opera for me. It’s so horribly not how things will work out. I can’t suspend disbelief any longer. For anything “realistic” to happen in space, the timelines are gargantuanly long. So much that is not part of the story will change that the background is impossible to write. Say it’s only a century until we start colonizing Jupiter’s moons. What’s medical care like? What’s AI like? How is the moon-as-factory project working out? What’s going on with governments on Earth? Too many variables over that much time. I scoped space opera back to solar system opera then gave up when I wrote out the timeline. It’s certainly possible to write this. The Expanse is a good example. It’s right enough. I didn’t want to write it, myself.
That explains the genre choice: LitRPG has very few sanity constraints.
I figured I’d give writing a serious try when I retired and just jotted down ideas for someday. Then my company was sold/purchased. I’m not worried for the short-term. I know too much important stuff. However, long-term is another story. Will I integrate with the teams doing the new shiny stuff or will I be the COBOL programmer in the basement that fixes bugs no one else can even find? Or will they sensibly scrap the COBOL system? And retirement is not as far away as it once was.
If I’m going to look at writing as a second career, it’s kind of important to know if I can actually write. It doesn’t matter whether it’s lucrative or not, if I can’t do it in the first place.
I suddenly have the feeling that I’m an apprentice buggy whip maker, unaware that Henry Ford is raising capital for his first factory. Except I am aware, now.
Shrug.
I still want to know if I can do it. I’m still curious if anyone will read it; if anyone will like it. If nothing else, I want to be able to point to the framed cover and say, “but it was a damn fine buggy whip.”
P.S. Chapter 18 is a nightmare. It’s hard to explain the magic system via experimentation without boring myself, let alone readers, to death or just info-dumping to get it over with. Chapter 21 is much more fun – and it has paw-print intra-chapter breaks.
Marked Up 