Great writers, thinkers, and researchers see patterns that others cannot. They then tell you about what they see and what you can do about it. Of course, of the things AI is best at is recognizing patterns. Does this mean writers, thinkers, and researchers are going to become obsolete? Not quite. First off, people see…
I’m happy we had the time to sit down and talk. What’s on your mind? I’m in college now and I want to be a writer. Wow, that’s great. What kind of writer? Well, I like writing both fiction and nonfiction, and I want to make a living writing books. Awesome. I’ll be honest, it’s…
People share nearly anything online these days — including things that no one would ever have considered sharing publicly years ago. People post about their problems with lovers, their medical problems, their political attitudes, their struggles and triumphs with religion, and their fights with merchants. The express opinions on the mental acuity of presidential candidates,…
Newsletter 37: Why sharing and not hoarding is the only path to happiness, translators vs. AI, 500-billion word training set, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Why nobody owns anything We spend much of our lives striving to own things. We want to own a house, a car, a smartphone, a…
Authors have often debuted their book content as a speech. So why not use those PowerPoint (or Keynote) slides from the speech as graphics in the book? After all, they’re perfectly aligned with the content and they’re instantly available. If you’re using Microsoft Word for text, why not use Microsoft’s PowerPoint for graphics? It’s a…
People have so much trouble with the flaws in AI tools because they are so different from everything else we do with our computing devices. Consider any productivity application you use: a spreadsheet, a programming language, an app, anything, doesn’t matter. All of these applications have two qualities: AI chatbots violate both of those rules….
A typical editing checklist includes things that editors should identify, like failures of parallelism, mixed metaphors, sentence fragments, and factual errors. But this is your motivational editing checklist. Follow this to make sure that the person you’re editing will understand, appreciate, accept, and address the problems you point out. Why bother? It’s a lot easier…
Book publishing nearly always requires a team of people: editors, copy editors, designers, publishers, publicists, researchers, and so on. But when I’m hired as a developmental editor, a coach, or a ghostwriter, I have only only one rule: I work for the author. Life is just simpler if you serve only one master. What does…
Newsletter 37: Ignorance amid abundant knowledge, traumatic writer’s block, burgeoning book bans, plus three people to follow and three books to read. The problem with ignorance Ignorance bugs the hell out of me. The urge to eliminate ignorance is the driving force in my career and much of my life. This is a good thing….