Before I switched positions and location at my offline job, I was pretty heavily into writing this book. I’m not sure why I’ve been on a cooling-off period for a couple of months in regard to writing it, but that’s how it’s been my whole life. Took me three years to finish the full manuscript of my first book, and looking back at it ten years later after publishing, I don’t even really feel like I would have published it now, had it taken me this long to finish (my tastes and ideas have radically changed since then).
But I have, and had, a rough idea for a massive space-horror. A story of loneliness, and isolation. The death of the universe, an outcome of human technological advancement in the face of profit-driven, no-safety-checks expansion. Think of the guy who took a mini-sub into the ocean while ignoring safety standards (safety is for losers, not billionaires). A mission that killed four people and left the whole world watching when the craft virtually disappeared into the dark of the waters.
The rich among us absolutely would push technology to the point of total universe destruction, if it meant a few extra bucks in the here and now.
And so I wrote, and tacked away at my keyboard.
Then, sometime in the midst of writing barely even the fourth chapter, “AI” started to gain a lot of traction. Maybe this is why I haven’t written much. Basically, anything you write on most popular websites, or publish, or post, whether it be the written word, or a piece of your own art–it is likely being scraped by groups of untalented tech-hacks who want to use what you do, with your spare time, with your blood, sweat, and tears, without consent, for free, and for profit. For profit, in their generative, hallucination-making garbage.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t written anything in a while.
It’s not that I post all of what I’ve been writing for Dissolution Protocol online, either. Hell, barely anyone has even seen pieces of the rough draft … because, if I post one snippet, one synopsis, you can bet it’s going to end up in some greasy chatbot for the lazy to use in the training of the AI server farms. Only to end up recombobulated into some soulless ham fisted spam-novel, via Amazon.
So let’s say I finish Dissolution Protocol, and I will, eventually, but let’s just pretend we’re there. Then what? I self-publish it through means I’ve been using for two decades, and it ends up alongside auto-generated trash, also self-published, indistinguishable to the average person?
Things are grim.
Self-publishing is taking another hit, this time at the hands of creatively-dead losers, rather than just uppity big-six authors.
What’s the answer? What’s the solution? Am I to finish the manuscript, and wait five years as it sifts through the hands of agents and publishers and maybe doesn’t end up going anywhere? Or do I self-publish, like I always have, and pray that five people find it amidst no-effort junk that exists only to make a dollar?
Who the hell knows. But, welcome to the future, I guess?
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