Some Notes on Some Stories
I've been working on a post that will be about 20k words. I suppose I could call it a novella if I was feeling fancy. I'm unsure of its quality, but I'm too far into it to not finish. If it is a sunk cost I've never been a particularly good rationalist, despite reading the blogs. I feel the need to publish something. It's been a year since I started taking writing seriously. So I thought I would make a brief comment about a few of my stories.
This is the first story I wrote since high school, with the exception of short Twitter-length stuff and one very lazy story about modal realism. I wrote it for an SBF funded short story competition, but I never got it in on time. There are some good lines and a hidden story only one person has caught. But The Elect explores similar themes and I think it's much stronger.
I wrote an AI girlfriend story years ago called The Liar and the Scold.
(Interesting note about Liar: I invented the concept of heavenbanning while writing it. I made a fake NYT article about it, which I didn't end up using in the story, so I gave it to Near - who posted it in his famous tweet which popularized the term.)
I was always dissatisfied with The Liar and the Scold, and wanted to write an AI boyfriend story. I made several attempts, including a metafictional piece about a narrator who dates an AI based on a character in a fictional soap opera modelled on The O.C. This approach was maybe interesting to me and the three other people who remember that show fondly, so I scrapped it.
I put the idea on the back burner and moved on to The Company Man. Sonnet 3.7 was released shortly after, and it was the first model capable of producing short stories that were coherent. This was very upsetting to me, given I just had some success with my amateur fiction. I was extremely pissy about it for a few hours, but then I got the idea of the Lit Olympiad and distilling LLMs into human minds. Often, I find the concept while writing, but this time I knew the title beforehand, the central gimmick, and the narrator would be a young woman. After a few paragraphs, I found a place for an AI boyfriend. For some reason, it amused me to make him DFW.
Other things that influenced me as I wrote it: I had a friend who was playing an otome game called Love and Deep Space (Sylus was her poison) and was very fond of villainess manhwa. Tokyo Jupiter is a reference to RahXephon. Most of the authors and books the narrator mentions are favourites of mine. And I have similar opinions to the narrator regarding Amis, whose work I loved for a time but have mixed feelings about now. I also owe Amis a debt for persuading me to read Austen with his essay Jane's World.
I've been informed by Gwern that this is terrible. I still kinda like it, though I modified its ending to be less opaque a couple weeks after publishing. I've always found musician's dystonia terrifying. Whatever this story's vices, I think the concept is strong. I like the aesthetics of classical music, especially the image of the virtuoso pianist, but I don't listen to it much. It was fun to listen to a bunch for research, and particularly fun to write my impressions of the pieces mentioned while doing so. I worked pretty hard on the pseudo-neuroscience, so hopefully that was appreciated by someone.
Customer Satisfaction Opportunities
After Inkhaven, I didn't publish for three months. I started dozens of stories but nothing stuck besides this and The Elect. At my wit's end, I started brainstorming stupid narrator ideas; and a security camera came to mind. I don't remember much else about writing it, except that it did not come easily. In some sense, it's spiritually related to That Mad Olympiad, as they both poke lovingly at certain tropes in romantic fiction and its fandom.
I started writing this with one idea in mind. This being: something vaguely like Sandman's The Endless. It ended up being almost like a rewrite of Maker of MIND, another story of mine that owes some debt to The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I wanted to hide a lot of mechanism, but hopefully have it be coherent. Some readers thought it was, some didn't. I referenced Kwan’s Rouge, because I was watching it the night before I wrote the section in which the narrator describes her appearance. I think it's a good image. The Lucifer/Avery thing is also a nod to Gaiman and Mike Carey's Lucifer.
I wrote this after reading Borges for the first time. At Inkhaven 1, there were feedback circles. I thought the point of feedback circles was to bring in stuff that wasn't working. The real point is to bring in your strongest pieces to try to get everyone to pat you on the back. Boy did I feel like an idiot. Almost everyone there said Lobsang was unsalvageable. I was about to give up on it, and then I figured out the frame story. I'm pretty happy with the voice and how it turned out. It remains one of my least popular stories.