No. No it is not!

Ok, so first, yes, I did send Bound in Smoke to my editor. I asked for  a developmental edit and got enough feedback to understand that the story still fell short of where I want it to be and then everything just stopped and I have not gotten any response after sending a requested outline. It’s a strange situation, but there we are, just one of many things I cannot deal with right now.

Despite appearances to the contrary, I have been working away on the book. I have also been watching and reading a shit-ton of material to remind me how to write, and I have made some significant updates and progress. At the moment, my chapters go like this: Some prologue-y stuff, Chapters 1-8, 8.1. 8.2, 9, 10, etc to the end. Total word count is about 89K. We’ll see where I land once I pull my changes the rest of the way through the story.

I will not release the book until it’s what I want it to be. I am writing/brainstorming every day and I really am making progress!

Why, Carolyn, is This Taking so Long?

I have theories. The major one is an existential despair and dismay about the current political situation. Normally, I keep politics out of the blog and my writing life but this is a personal crisis for me that matters to my writing. I recently joined the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America)  in case you’re wondering where I now place myself on the political spectrum. For anyone upset by that, well, I am not the writer for you anyway. Go away and learn to care about other people more than you care about punishment and an imaginary world where White people are the real victims. I have always been politically liberal, by the way.

I find it really difficult to write when I read about Nazi-era full on racist and hateful policies coming out of Washington. So that’s one reason.

Another is that in the last year, two of my circle of three close and dear friends died. I used to talk to them all the time and all three kept me grounded in the creativity and mental health needed to function as a writer. I miss them. I miss talking to them, I miss hearing what they have to say about what’s going on in their lives and the world. And yes, I miss their support of me and my writing.

Then there’s the fact that I am my elderly father’s primary caregiver, as I was for my mother before she passed. I am now running my own life and his. I manage his medical care, I rearranged my entire schedule to accommodate his needs, I pay the bills, I manage his meds, I monitor his condition and contact his doctors. I am the housekeeper, the groundskeeper, the scheduler, the bookkeeper, and the cook. I am grateful that his TAVR procedure last year improved his condition and am intensely aware that it could be worse, because with my mother, it was worse.

Climate change is real and endangering and degrading lives and killing people right this minute. It’s a global crisis and a bunch of rich White men do not give a shit about whether the world is going to be habitable for our children and grandchildren. Our politicians will not take the necessary actions because they don’t want the billionaires to stop the cash flow. The best the Dems could come up with is tax credits that still require people to come up with thousands of their own dollars to try to get off the fossil fuels that are killing us now. Take money away from the military and put it toward stopping the coming climate disaster. They can give it back afterward.

And now Amazon is going around shutting down writer’s accounts for opaque reasons. Meanwhile I have done essentially zero marketing of any of my books. I haven’t send out a newsletter in years. (When I do, I expect a huge number of unsubscribes because everyone’s forgotten who I am and why I would email them.)

I still have a full time job and sometimes at the end of the work day I am mentally exhausted.

So, that’s why this is taking so long.

And Yet, Right Now, I’m Doing Relatively OK

It’s just that I’m trying not to fall into the dangerous Damn the Torpedos mindset that mostly just leads to full on burn out. I am taking care of myself as best I can.

Now that you know, I have to go write some more.

You guys take care of yourselves, too. It’s important.

Over the last couple of months I keep hearing about Amazon shutting down authors’ KDP accounts without recourse. (KDP: Kindle Direct Publishing, the Amazon service authors use to load the books they want to sell on Amazon). Not scam or ill-informed authors, but authors who have been writing for years. The stories are all similar. They got a KDP email about a problem with a book or upload accompanied by a threat to shut down the account if proof of innocence is not provided. The authors reply with the requested proof or explanation and they are then trapped in an AI loop that will not accept the proof. Within a few days of this circle of hell, the account is shut down. Attempts to contact “Customer Service” are met with the exact same AI loop. I know of one author who reached a person only to be told “The AI agent cannot be challenged.” And that was that. Her account of 14 years was shut down.

You should not be surprised that in these cases, Amazon does not disburse ANY money due for any sales.

From everything I’m hearing, Amazon considers its AI process to be infallible and does not allow tier one support employees to intervene in an adverse decision. The problems are often phantom and/or erroneous and its agents will not accept proof or explanation.

FYI: Amazon recently updated its Terms of Service (TOS). You give up the right to a class action. You have to pre-arbitrate and then accept arbitration.

Close Shave?

I encountered a flavor of this issue when I updated the covers to the My Immortal Series books a while back. Mind you, the only change was a new cover. Most of the updates went through just fine, but one of the print books did not. The ebook version went through. I was told the print book was previously published. Well, yes. I updated the cover for an existing book. This was before AI was its current horror and I did not realize at first that I was not interacting with a person. Pointing out that the ebook update was accepted made no difference. The book was a reverted title. I have sent Amazon the reversion no fewer than 3 previous times. I sent the reversion yet again and that cleared the issue.

It was a terrible, terrible stress-inducing experience and I wonder if I would be able to successfully address the same issue today. I had a reversion for this book. But what if the book was not a reverted title? The US Copyright office can take MONTHS if not longer, to send the copyright registration. Unless authors don’t publish until they have that, there will not be proof they have the necessary publishing rights. And how on earth do authors prove that their brand new freshly finished book has not been previously published if Amazon won’t tell you why they think it has been?

Speculation

I think it’s at least plausible that the previously published issue can happen when an author uses an AI connected process to edit, copyedit, proofread, or text-to-speech a book. Any of those things would require uploading the entire text to a 3rd party (likely an AI agent). Amazon has finally admitted that it exchanges account information with Facebook which they use to determine if reviews were being bought or were from friends or family. (I TOLD you so. You know who you are.) I would not be at all surprised if Amazon has a deal with AI companies to see if a newly uploaded book can be found in LLM training data. AI companies keep prompt history and that prompt history might be parts of or all of an unpublished book. Boom. False positive.

The (very) recent disclosures about AI “watermarking” are another potential means of getting a false positive. While the watermarking is not recent, the revelation is. I have not read and thought enough about this to have an informed opinion yet. More on that later, I guess. In order to comply with EU rules, AI companies are “watermarking” AI generated text. But (in the main) it’s not really a watermark. It’s more like a fingerprint.

Apparently, they weight all the words in the dictionary, dividing them into two camps and then use an algorithm that uses more words from one camp than the other such that the output can be (they say) identified as having been created with an AI tool. Apparently, the watermarking has been going on for a while. Authors who used AI (especially Claude) for tasks that are NOT asking AI to write the book for them would still get watermarked. So, again, I would not be surprised if Amazon is looking at this as well.

Keep in mind that this weighting system means that AI output is NO LONGER THE BEST COMPUTED EFFORT. It’s a crippled effort that discards training that would comport with the truth that the words a writer chooses matter. Silicon Valley does not value or understand creativity. They think it’s easy–English majors can do it!  It does not occur to them that words matter.

So, I suppose, hahahahah to people asking AI to write a book for them. They’re getting an even shittier result. If they have to go through the result to try to edit enough to unweight the “watermarking” effect, it ain’t gonna work for people who have no respect for English (or any language) majors. It’s pretty fucking ironic.

What should Authors Do?

Even though the use of AI for copyediting, proofreading etc is supposed be OK for  EU rules compliance, such output text is STILL watermarked. I promise you, regardless of rule compliance for the EU, others will use this system to do ill-informed and stupid things that will have disastrous impacts on innocent authors. As I often say in my database life:

Data collected is data abused.

AI companies are collecting your data. The safer thing to do is limit exposure to the data collection AKA an AI prompt. Make sure your human proofreaders, copyeditors, etc are not using AI in their work for you. You could be flagged for someone else’s laziness or lack of awareness of how watermarking will necessarily produce a less nuanced, impactful experience for readers.

Right now, everything is in flux and no one knows for sure how this will shake out. At least go in with your eyes open. Do not forget that Amazon does not have an author’s best interests at heart.

More Clouds on the Horizon

I have some minor updates to make for my books; an updated bio, and better descriptions, and I am now worried these changes will trigger the AI system. And, believe it or not, I will soon have the first book in a new series to publish. Will KDP have a problem with a new title? Being an established and long-standing author does not seem to matter anymore.

Authors who have not gone wide will be in a world of hurt if they lose their accounts. I’m not entirely sure that going through an aggregator is a way for cancelled authors to get back on Amazon, but if it is, it’s still a method that means income is reduced by the aggregator’s take or fee. There are aggregators that charge a flat fee rather than a percentage of the royalties, so authors will have to do the math to confirm which route is better in terms of author income, assuming an aggregator will get you back on Amazon.

It’s anxiety provoking. If your favorite authors start disappearing off Amazon, this is why.

Legislation

Ultimately, I think legislation is required. Companies simply cannot offer AI-only customer service. They also cannot allow a real person to send customers back to an AI-driven solution. Customers have to be able to reach a real person empowered to reverse or enforce a prior decision. At this point, I think most of us have been trapped in such loops and have just given up. At some point driving away customers becomes bad for the business, but that pain is still coming for businesses. Sadly, national legislation seems vanishing unlikely. Corporations will simply buy their way to inaction and we are all screwed.

Alas Poor Readers

Readers have made huge investments in their Kindles and the books they’ve bought. Readers should be able to read on the device of their choice without worrying those books will become inaccessible to them. This should be a painful reminder to people with older Kindles or who used to download their purchases. Sorry to trigger you. Personally, I stopped using my Kindle and I no longer read on the Kindle app unless I previously purchased the book on Kindle, have sufficient desire,  and no choice. It’s enraging. This situation isn’t good for anyone who isn’t a billionaire.

Progress Report

I am still working on edits for Bound in Smoke while attempting to manage my stress is these crazy, awful, stressful time. It takes a toll on the creative well. At the moment, I am mostly solidifying the new chapters I wrote. I need those solid before I move on to later chapters, since those events will inform later events. I feel guilty for being so slow, but if I don’t manage stress the writing suffers.

About Email and AI

At this point, my writing email is inundated by AI bullshit to the point where I have proactively blocked all emails from gmail, outlook, and hotmail. I’m sad to report that email is probably no longer an effective way to reach me. If there is something urgent or you are a real person who would like to ask me to participate in something, your best bet is to contact me on Bluesky or Mastodon. I’m pretty sure I deleted my instagram account, but if I didn’t and it’s still there, well, I have not been to the site in years. I’m also not on TikTok sorry not sorry at the point. I am on Facebook once a week but you should be able to contact me via my Author page only. I do not accept writing-life related requests on my personal profile.

I know this sounds restrictive, but the scale of the AI crap combined with the appalling privacy and data scraping by Facebook and the new owners of TikTok make this necessary. In addition, social media companies are inherently evil. They have politically aligned with fascists and racists and some of them have actively participated in the current administration’s appalling efforts to turn a democracy into a fascist theocracy run by and for the benefit of rich men. It’s no accident that women and people of color are/were laid off from tech and governments jobs in greater numbers than white men.

Today I finished up an important new chapter for Bound in Smoke. so I’m pleased about that. Next, I’ll start pulling the new threads through the other chapters. I’ll also discuss these changes with my editor shortly.

Broken Leg

My broken leg is improving, thank goodness. I’ve been cleared to walk more which is a relief because the inactivity has been driving me nuts. My next follow-up is later this month. I’ll have a repeat x-ray and see the podiatrist and hopefully get the OK to not have the walking boot. I’m doing the PT now.

Freddy The Macaw

Some of you may already know that this week we had to say goodbye to our macaw, Freddy. He’s been a part of the family for decades and it’s been gutting for all of us. The house is so quiet without him. I feel like I’ve lost a good buddy because, well, I did. I will always miss him.

Now that I can sit for more normal periods of time, I have been steadily working on Bound in Smoke. I have my opening revisions almost done. After that, I need to carry those changes and threads through the rest. Tuesday I have a follow up appt with my doc who I hope will say I need the boot for only a little longer instead of longer.

How’s everyone else doing?

Indeed  I am revising Bound In Smoke. However, on January 1, I broke my fibula in a fall (the non-weight-bearing bone in the calf) I suppose if you’re going to break a bone, that’s the one to break since the fibula tends to heal quickly and not need surgery. I have a walking boot for the next 4-6 weeks. So, I have had a bit of a break (hah!) from revising because 1. I have been in pain, 2) calling doctors and getting xrays. I am not supposed to walk unless necessary and it hurts a lot.

However! I expect to be back at the keyboard shortly. I have also had several ideas pop into my head while I am getting through distracting part of recovery. Acute pain has a way of messing with your train of thought. Also, my standing desk is stuck in the standing position. The new one arrived but needs to be assembled, which I cannot safely do at this point. I’ll have someone here shortly to do the assembly and removal of the old one.

I do have a new chapter to write that will address some issues and I’m excited to get to that.

1. An actual fan email is usually pretty brief.
2. Hate-your-book emails are usually quite long because the writer has a serious hate and needs to tell me EVERYTHING I did wrong.

The best defense against the AI book spam is to block the gmail.com domain. I can review from my spam filter and delete them from there. That way they never land in my actual inbox.

Anyway, real people who want to contact me, be assured that I do scan everything, but there’s always a chance that I’ll make a mistake, so if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sorry. Blame AI. If you are emailing any author, be aware that they too are being inundated by this crap.