Writers are a funny breed.
Virtually every other art form has a million approaches, and no one seems to question this.
Perhaps it's because writing requires some degree of education, and holding a reader's attention for possibly many hours to read an entire book involves creating more fascination than a 45-second TikTok video of a hot young chick swallowing whipped cream.
Whatever it is, writers seem to always want to be right about what writing well requires (note my audacious use of an adverb there).
Check back regularly as I reveal how I not only do not have "imposter syndrome," but consider myself to be a bit of an unrecognized genius.
Thank god I am writing the last two chapters of my five-years-in-the making geopolitical thriller/historical fiction novel.
Because the kind of information one could find with a little ingenuity before is now going the way of the Dodo bird, thanks to the AI community and its "let's sell shit to everyone, all the time" mentality.
In a recent search of "paraja"--a horrific garment, even worse than the burquah, that women in Central Asia and the steppes of the old USSR once had to wear, I got literally 10 sites trying to sell me Muslim garb.
Um, no. Fuck off.
In fact, the only site that came up--and it was way down the list--was Wiki's.
All this has been gathering steam since the introduction of Google's horrific "experimental" AI search function. The hundreds of Agency and other intel agency memoes (declassified) that I uncovered (and thankfully printed or screenshotted) over the past five years will now be almost impossible to uncover.
We are headed towards a world that makes 1984 look rosey.
I happened to look at a terrible AI-audio video of Nazi atrocities the other day, in which everything but the Nazis was blurred out. Way to negate the horrors that were visited on Jews and others, God forbid we upset whatever psych code and meds now control your tepid mind.
Will I write another historical fiction novel after this one? I had planned to, but now I am wondering. Fortunately, I did print out a fair amount of information along the way for that one, but having to wade through shitty Chinese slave labor clothing sites to find real information is going to make me stabby.
What began thirty years ago as a great alternative to having to shlep to libraries or Washington is now basically a really tacky shopping mall, barraged at you like an AK.
An example: I just had a brain fart for the word "swap meet," and it took about five searches to find it.
We are doomed.
When I was a news editor, I used to tell my writers to ignore Word's editing suggestions, and this was before AI burst upon the scene like an unwelcome intruder.
"Word would have told William Shakespeare his words were too big," I said back then, and sadly, it's all too true.
Working on my geopolitical thriller just now, the word "slick" was highlighted--sometimes I click through more out of curiousity than anything else. It assumed I meant "sick"--why?
"These words sound alike," it wrote, and shit like this makes me want to reach into the laptop and tear the robotic head off whatever algorithm determined this.
More often, I don't even bother to see what advice it is offering, because it's so retarded.
I am sad that future generations of writers will rely on this nonsense. Probably most news writers under 35 already do. I don't need to tell anyone who reads news now how abysmal the grammar and typos are. No one seems to care.
I'm not sure how you confuse "slick" with "sick," given that their meanings aren't even slightly similar. Why not ask if I meant "slack" then?
I am pushing through the last chapters on this five-year saga now, and expect to be at final edits by the fall, and to formatting by end of this year. March 2025 still looks like a realistic publish target, God willin' and the crick don't rise.
Word AI would tell me that's poor grammar, because Word AI has no ability to contextualize anything.
Word AI can go fuck itself. (Then you get a warning you may offend some readers. Oh well).
Halfway through my fifth (and last) year of working on a historical fiction epic geopolitical thriller based on my parents' time in Cold War Europe in the 1950s, I have marathon fatigue.
I'm almost there (and by "there," I mean to final edits/formatting and getting this novel out to you at last), and I'm also getting the bends.
Some of it is real life. Between the unfolding of America's shocking issues with overt antisemitism following Oct. 7th and having to put my beloved pittie down last week, I feel like I am running on fumes.
Right now, I'm doing some finessed research on the Berlin Tunnel for the last four chapters I'm writing, and I think I'm both tired and terrified of finishing this story.
I truly don't know what comes next. Yes, I have a sequel planned and even partially written, but it's hard to know where the one now almost complete will take me.
It's definitely movie material. Who knows, I might even overcome all odds and have a bestseller on my hands. I truly think it's a different kind of story about espionage and war, because so many personal family stories are woven into the complex historical plot.
But also (see my column on Aging Dis-Gracefully), I'm realizing I could easily be in my last decade of existence, or even less. That changes one's vision of time.
Anyway, I'm almost there. I'm very proud of this story, and have done everything to make sure it's both historically accurate and also, I hope, entirely engaging.
Turning your own parents and grands into characters in a novel is interesting, but then again, my family has always been larger than life.
And this is my legacy novel. With no kids, it's my footprint left on the planet.
Hopefully, in two hundred years, people are still reading this story.
As I near the formatting stage of my upcoming geopolitical thriller, how it will be printed is becoming a pressing matter (see what I did there).
We all know that serious, traditional fiction has always been published as a hardcover with a linen, foil-stamped-on-the spine wrap, and artwork on the dust jacket. And for many years, "doing it the way the trad guys do it" has been the standard.
But everything must change, and I am guessing the case for case laminate is about to blow up.
I just received my first-ever case laminate hardcover, not even knowing that's what I ordered. This is an interesting issue unto itself: do book purchasers have the right to know if they're getting a traditional dust jacket? Apparently not.
However, after hearing endless horror stories about case laminate books--from dinged edges to poor color quality--I am amazed at how good the book I ordered looks.
Naturally, the first thing I did was to try to find out who printed it. Because there are two things involved with any printed book: the formatting and cover design, along with paper color and weight selection, and the actual printing process. One thing I am 99% certain of is that the former impacts the latter.
I tried calling the small publishing house listed, but it's a division of a larger publishing house, and when you call that number, you get a "no one is available" response, which seemed odd early on a Monday morning during business hours, but that's America 2024.
So now I have contacted the author, although I realize she may not know, in the hopes she can find out from her little publisher. My guess--because I see the publishing house is also connected to IngramSpark--is that IS did the printing. I've repeatedly heard their printing is great.
Unfortunately, I've also heard their customer service is not.
And they now offer a new "case laminate with dust cover" option, which I have to say seems a bit weird to me. The argument for would be, books apparently lose value without a dust cover if all that's left is the linen wrap. To me, it's just another case for case laminate, and leave it there.
Yes, you lose the inside flaps for nice author bios and blurbs proclaiming the brilliance of said author, but I don't think the redundancy makes sense. You can put those blurbs on the back cover or inside pages before the book starts.
I've really been hoping not to use IS based on their bad service, and I have a great formatting company I used on my last novel, so not worried about that aspect. But it's hard to argue with a print job that looks fantastic in the flesh.
I also think I've been converted from matte to gloss on the cover. I read everywhere that fingerprints mar the matte covers, and frankly, the gloss makes colors pop and everything look shiny and eye-catching.
My takeway advise for all authors is, at least look at some case laminate covers before you decide how to go. Printing is always a changing art, and the age of the dust cover may be on its way to becoming obsolete.
It's funny how things change in a year. I was originally encouraged to go the whole trad publishing route, which would mean writing query letters to agents, hoping to land one, and then hoping said agent lands me a traditional publishing deal.
But now, no one is pushing that. The advances are slim, the marketing on your behalf is nil, and you've turned over your copyright and entrusted your cover and formatting and proofing to people who really don't know anything about your story. And probably care even less.
I am an unashamed control freak, so self-publishing feels much more natural to me. I had my cover art for the upcoming geopolitical thriller (which should hit Amazon in March 2025) locked up three years ago (it's been a five-year writing/researching/editing project, as it's historical fiction/WWII/Cold War). You can read more about it here: https://miranda-armstadt.com/in-the-works
To be honest, I'm not writing and publishing this with even the slightest expectation of making a profit. I'm writing it so that in 200 years--when my ashes are long melded with the Earth--someone will understand a world that no longer exists.
Like a time capsule, if you will.
It occurred to me recently that mine is the last generation to bear witness to Holocaust survivors before they hit old age. I remember a roast chicken store on Broadway when I was a kid, and very tall guy who was probably in his thirties who had the Nazi-embedded number tattoo on his inside forearm. I never mentioned it, I just recall the chill that came over me seeing it.
He must have been a teenager during the war. God only knows what he endured. If he is still alive now, he would be in his late nineties.
Survival is the best revenge.
Miranda Armstadt
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