Emerging from the shadows…

Yes, it has been a while since I posted.

Hello! You may have noticed my absence from this newsletter! Or you just forgot it existed, or thought it was going into your spam folder and decided “Good riddance!”

Anyway, I am back, briefly, because I have, shockingly, accomplished things? Which you may be interested in?

First, an essay on Typebar Magazine is now out from behind the paywall! Behold: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and ChatGPT: How Snobbery Can Save Us From the Literary Robot Apocalypse

It’s easy to say that there’s good writing and bad writing, and that AI writing is on the bad side, but it’s worse than that. Merely bad human writing still comes from recognizable human experience, it’s still a connection between reader and writer. It might be so awful you’ll want to fling the book across the room, but that’s a human reaction to a human creation.

The goal of LLM-extruded books is to eliminate these moments of human connection. Their target are readers – and they probably do exist – who mistake the signifiers of a book for the real thing. Readers who see their preferred tropes and plot beats strung together for three hundred pages, and find that sufficient.

It’s more of me rambling about SFF and writing and snobbery, but with actual editing and some brevity.

Second, I have a story out!

Terminal City Dogs is in the July/August issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, my third appearance in that magazine.

Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, I was picked up by the police three times, each time trying to scramble over a fence, my worn-smooth Vans betraying me by slipping out of the chain link. I’d go before a judge and hang my head, my dad sitting stone-faced while the public defender entered my guilty plea, and then I’d pick up trash along the highway for a few months. Eventually I’d start eying the spray paint cans down at the Canadian Tire again.

I mostly painted coyotes. Wile E. and his Roadrunner at first, but also realistic ones.

Wolves and foxes, too, sometimes. Did them in black and white from stencils with a few freehand color highlights.

There were plenty of coyotes in our neighborhood. They denned in the parks and vacant lots and roamed the alleys at night, hunting rats and stray cats, digging into garbage. I liked the way they looked straight at you when you saw them. Weighing you. It felt honest, and honesty wasn’t something I got a lot of at home.

It was also my first mystery. What were they thinking, behind those eyes glowing pale green in the reflected streetlight?

It’s about a graffiti-artist-turned-cop tasked with investigating a series of seemingly impossible rogue artworks appearing on city streets. If you subscribe or you can pick up a copy, digitally or in print, you can check it out!

And finally, a couple of housekeeping notes. I have been meaning for some time to transfer this newsletter to a new provider, preferably one that pays less money to transphobic bigots. That was not too pressing while I wasn’t posting, but I hope to get back to that soon. Expect one more message from this account letting people know about the change before I make the jump.

The reasons I’ve been writing less have included the normal stuff – day job, minor family crises, the sort of stuff that whittles away just enough of your free time that sitting down to think up some kind of theoretically entertaining post seems exhausting.

More significantly, I have been writing a fair bit of fiction. I have 90,000 words of something like a novel, with about 10,000 to go, plus a novelette and a short story that both need edits. Hopefully at least one of the short stories will see the light of day soon, i.e. sometime in the next two years. Ah, SFF publishing, you’ve got to love it!

Obligatory self-promotion

Feel like I already did that, so all that’s left to say is that I’m on Bluesky, with the other Twitter-abandoning nerds. The handle is just matthewclaxton.bsky.social. Follow me if you’re over there and you feel like hearing even MORE of my ramblings. Also, I repost a lot of dinosaur art, so that’s nice!

Remember, following newsletters has been linked to other dangerous and self-destructive activities, like chewing up old lead batteries, urinating on electric fences, and raising sporulating black molds inside your mattress!