I don’t often blog on Wednesdays, keeping those mornings for other things instead. But this week is a little different. My health is not good, we are literally iced in, and I have been thinking about a few things.
One of them is my Word of the Year. Resolutions bear mixed results at best, not least for the self-punishment our culture encourages if a new habit isn’t easily and flawlessly acquired. So, somewhere around the internets, I saw someone had simply picked a few words to focus on for the year instead, and that seemed a grand idea.
January 1, I decided I would focus on one word, and I would keep it simple.
The word was REAL.
We are assailed by “AI” plagiarism pap–visual, audio, and textual–as well as disinformation and propaganda, to a degree unusual in my life experience. Of course disinformation and propaganda have been with us from the beginning, especially as humanity developed mass-communication tools. However, I feel like it’s currently heaped up, doused with jet fuel, and set ablaze, with lots of people merrily shoveling more highly volatile fuel onto the blaze just to see what happens.
Not only that, but I work in publishing. It’s not quite Hollywood, where one is well advised not to believe even the simplest assertion until the cheque clears (not deposited, clears) but it’s still an industry largely built on the exploitation of creative people, and that exploitation requires broken promises, implicit deceit, outright lies, and shameless number-juggling to a degree that astonishes many folks, even those in other lines of work where such things are rampant.
I cannot fix this. And I know there are a lot of people out there claiming to be writers when in fact they are marketers and view the actual writing as a chore best farmed out to ghostwriters, who are forced to scour Upwork and Fiverr for a pittance in order to barely pay ever-escalating rent. There are a lot of people claiming to be writers when in fact they are grifters attempting to score big with LLM plagiarism, running away with the cash before they can be brought to account. There are a lot of people claiming to be “publishing gurus” or “coaches” when in fact they are also grifters looking to profit off the desperation of those who think they could be a Big-Name Novelist if they could just find the Magic Handshake. There’s a whole host of people claiming to be artists in when in fact they are plagiarizing, thieving pieces of shit who think a Midjourney prompt is something that should put them on Rembrandt’s level.
These people are fakes. I prefer to be real.
I have been considered a bit temperamental because I want my books a certain way. I want my books to be as good and as honest as I can make them, and while I allow feedback from trusted sources the final decision is always mine. I have sometimes insisted on that to the point of open conflict, and I know I have passed up and lost certain opportunities as a result.
The few times I have allowed myself to be overridden by the well-meaning (or the vengeful), I have always regretted it.
I think readers respond to both hard work in and the reality of books. I don’t think readers only want plagiarised pap or bland, anodyne inoffensive mealymouthing. I think even if a book or an author is flawed, if they are honest about their experience, refuse to bullshit, and put in the work, readers will respond. I think human beings are capable of discerning the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of tiny signals in a work of human art that say, “I made this with my whole being, and I give it to you.” Even if people dislike the piece of art in question, the emotional response is still there.
I’m betting that people still want complex, nuanced, juicy books that take significant effort to write. Regardless of whether I win or lose the bet, I do not regret placing it and will never stop believing it’s the right call.
Concurrently, I am done with being shamed when I am “difficult” because a book has a complex plot or words that may require a dictionary trip, “unlikeable” characters or a non-happy ending. I will not betray the work. I will not, in any way, betray the Real.
That’s what I’m focusing on this year. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen such a word after years of pandemic and escalating fakeness. I know the power of words–how on earth could I not? And the first challenge in my Year of the Real has been a doozy, possibly permanently damaging my health and driving me past patience.
But I’ve taken up the gauntlet. I have often said, especially since 2016, that I dislike hope because it just leads to getting kicked in the face again. Yet Hope is not a shrinking violet. She has been knocked to the ground, spat out a few teeth, blinked away the blood, reached for her shattered sword, and the bitch just keeps getting back up. Hope is the sister of the Real, and so long as I am faithful to them–so long as I do not truckle–they will return the favor.
Let’s see what the year throws at me next.