#WritersCoffeeClub (Sep) 1: Intro: Shameless Self Promotion.

[kagan@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub day 12: What kinds of love appear in your writing?

Quite a few! I'm tempted say "all of them"...

* Romantic love
* Parental love for children
* Blood-sibling love
* Companionate/BFF/found-family love in a siblingly manner between people who aren't related by blood
* People's love for their City
* The City's love for its people
* Love of abstract ideals, like freedom, equality, or doing the right thing

Some plain, carnal lust may also make an appearance; we'll see.

[kagan@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub day 14: Why do you write in the form you do? Why not in another format? (poem, short story, novel, etc)

"Why don't I write in a shorter format?" thought the aspiring novelist whose draft currently stands at over 85,000 words when it's roughly a fifth of the way done. "Yeah, I'll get right on that. 🙄"

[kagan@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub day 15: How do your immediate surroundings influence your work?

I try pretty hard to keep them from doing so; I don't want to do what the Turkey City Lexicon calls "Dischism". (https://www.critters.org/turkeycity.html, roughly 40% of the way down the page — I have no idea why that list isn't alphabetically sorted.)

[kagan@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub day 16: What was the hardest writerly lesson for you to learn? Or unlearn?

I think the hardest lesson for me to learn will turn out to be "how not to overwrite", and I sure as hell haven't learned it yet.

[kagan@wandering.shop]

#WritersCoffeeClub day 17: Should modern writers worry about proving their work is not generated by an LLM?

I think they should only worry about it to the extent that they'd previously have worried about proving that their work wasn't plagiarized. Like, if seriously challenged (usually by one's publisher, not by some rando), it's good to be able to produce prior drafts or other artifacts of creation.

But that's about all. 1/6

[kagan@wandering.shop]

I definitely *DON'T* think writers should try to avoid using em dashes, or the "not X, but Y" structure, or lists of three things, or anything else that some idiots are trying to push as "signs of LLM writing". For one, it's constricting your own style. For two, it's doing so specifically in a way that caters to some of the judgiest, most hyper-critical readers. You might as well also look up some lists of "writing do's and don't's" and… 2/6

#WritersCoffeeClub

[kagan@wandering.shop]

…try to follow every item on them, without fail. Like "never use the word 'like'", or "never use adverbs, at all". Or go into r/writing and/or r/writingadvice, ask, "What are some tropes you don't like?", and then make sure to avoid *every single one* that anyone lists. (Spoiler: you won't be able to.) 3/6

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[kagan@wandering.shop]

And in the third place, it's a moving target! "Signs of LLM writing" are likely to change by next spring, but your writing will hopefully last for longer than that. So if you distort your style to mollify this year's crop of AI-accusers, people coming to your work fresh in a few years will just say, "Hey, I think this must be AI, because it uses tag questions in dialogue", or hyphenated compound adjectives, or whatever. You'll have scarred your writing for no purpose. 4/6

#WritersCoffeeClub

[kagan@wandering.shop]

It's a losing battle, and it's one that isn't worth fighting in the first place, because the only people you're trying to convince are ones who *can't even recognize decent writing when they see it*. They're people who can say, with a straight face, that *lists of three* are signs of AI‽ As if they haven't heard every Tom, Dick, and Harry talk about "baseball, motherhood and apple pie" or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" before? 5/6

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