Heroes are something we all need and when they are absent, we are somehow less for it. Reading Robert E. Howard’s Chronicles of Conan the Barbarian, I may have been unjust to a certain resident of the Shire in Middle Earth in dismissing him as a whining little turd. For that thought, Conan the Cimmerian is to be thanked.

While we all like heroes for the most part, there are wildly divergent ideas on what a hero is, exactly. For some, they think of the Marvel and DC universes, peopled with widely varying characters from Superman to The Punisher. For others, sporting people may be heroes. For still more, even business tycoons like Elon Musk could be heroes. This illustrates the need for clarity on what exactly we are thinking of as a “hero” in this article. To start with, the Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘hero’ as “a person who is admired for having done something very brave or having achieved something great.” Christopher Reeve, the first actor to portray Superman back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, once said a hero was an ordinary person who did extraordinary things. Clearly, he was not thinking about Superman when he said that. For the sake of this article, I think both definitions are workable and precise enough.

Is Conan the Cimmerian a hero? Conan is certainly brave and performs great deeds. He is well gifted in the arts of combat and womanising, to be sure. He is also fearless against incredibly bad odds, though he tends to be a little more nervous around spiritual entities and those able to work great magic. Conan is a barbarian through and through, and a barbarian who appears very comfortable in his skin. Conan is also a very independent individual and his bravery does not depend on the presence of others. This accords very well to Western, especially United States, ideas of the ruggedly independent male hero.

Conan has also achieved great things. He has wielded power as a king of Aquilonia and even done very well in that position. The Aquilonians seemed to have actually liked him as their king, even though some of the nobles were a little less loyal when the road got rough. Conan has also defeated great enemies and, in doing so, benefited those who have not been able to help themselves. The elephant headed Yag-kosha is a case in point. This pre-Cataclysm being was held prisoner and suffered untold horrors at the hands of the evil Yara. Conan broke into the Tower of the Elephant with less than saintly motives, but was soon to moved to help the captive Yag-kosha and successfully did so. While Conan may not always have the purest of reasons to do something, he usually chooses the path of good when confronted with injustice. According to the Cambridge definition, Conan seems to qualify as a hero.

Bilbo Baggins appears less certain when it comes to being a hero. He has never wielded any sort of power except for one time when he gained possession of the titular ring. Yet, it could be argued the ring held the real power as it continued to subvert Bilbo’s sense of identity and free will. Bilbo also was not very heroic without people around him. He needed his friend from the Shire and a host of others willing to pitch in and help him on his quest to destroy the ring. In fact, using the Cambridge definition, it is Bilbo’s friends who seem more heroic than Bilbo.

When we consider the definition offered by Reeve, things get a little more complicated. Conan is never operating from the position of an ordinary person. From the viewpoint of his physicality, Conan is imposing. He’s muscled to a ridiculous level, moves like a tiger, and is blindingly quick in his reactions. Even as a mercenary or roving adventurer, it is clear Conan is nothing ordinary. The responses of ordinary people in his world serve to illustrate his extraordinary nature. By Reeve’s definition, Bilbo Baggins seems the more heroic type. He is physically a fraction of the person Conan is, and has nothing of Conan’s bravery or personal confidence. I would imagine Bilbo Baggins would sooner die than walk about naked except for a loin cloth and some leather sandals. Yet, Baggins still agrees to step well beyond his own limitations and embark on a quest into the unknown. He not only makes a choice to risk his own person, but he also goes against the very racial tendencies he has grown up with. That is, hobbits are homebodies. Unlike Conan, Bilbo is more than content being home and has absolutely no desire or need for adventure. Despite these factors of size, tendency and fear, Bilbo the Boringly Ordinary steps beyond himself into the vast gulf of his fears in a way that Conan can never match.

And this makes the hobbit all the more relatable. You might be different, but when I look in the mirror, I see nothing like Conan the Barbarian. I move more like a wallowing walrus than a lion, and I have the reflexes of a doped up sloth. Conan is very much the extraordinary person and for that, he is not as relatable as Bilbo Baggins. This is not a criticism, as Conan’s specialness makes him all the more appealing to readers. We can revel in his skill and skip ahead to catch a glimpse of his prowess and skills. It is exciting stuff to read of the Cimmerian’s exploits and victories, with the deities of his universe pulling him into their schemes and plans.

Yet, if there was ever a character who embodied Western comfort and joy of just being in your home, (recall the phrase a man’s home is his castle) , Bilbo Baggins is it. Homebound to the point of xenophobia, completely uninterested in anything outside the Shire and utterly fearful of the unknown, Baggins is truly the posterchild of the modern Western age. While Tolkien possibly based the hobbits on the English, I would suggest the resemblance runs wider than that. These are qualities share by many Western cultures and people in our time. Many people are fearful and insecure, much as Baggins was when Gandalf suggested he needed to travel. Most people do not wish to be bothered by events that make them uncomfortable, as Baggins did not. Bilbo Baggins is the utter embodiment of the absolutely ordinary. This is no hairy Martin Luther King Jr. This is no small version of Sir Edmund Hillary. And Bilbo is certainly no Muhammed Ali. And it is Bilbo’s very averageness, his deep mediocrity, that makes him the hero for the Everyman and Everywoman. It is for this reason, I suggest Bilbo Baggins is even braver than Conan of Cimmeria.

This is not to say Howard was any less of a writer than Tolkien. The contrasts between their heroes is more a contrast of type and purpose. Conan is the Escapist’s Hero. He is the hero in whom we can live vicariously and imagine ourselves performing great feats and swaggering around towns with women swooning and men fearful. Conan takes us outside of our reality and gives us a moment of pure dream-like fantasy in which we get the girl and vanquish the villainous wizard. Bilbo Baggins is the Realist’s Hero. Like us, when confronted by a huge snake in a pitch dark space, Bilbo would probably fill his pants. An rightly so. In Bilbo, anyone who is not the independent, ripped, sword-carrying whirlwind of might and power can find themselves mirrored. Bilbo shares our fears. Conan does not. Bilbo shares our weaknesses. Conan does not. Bilbo shares our inherent failings. Conan does not. For the average Jane and Joe, Bilbo is the hero of the suburbs. He does not offer escape in the sense which Conan does, but rather says we can do great things while being the ordinary, frail people we really are.

For all that, Bilbo Baggins just seems a little better of a hero than Conan for our time when heroes are sadly lacking in any real sense. Current fantasy novels and those of even recent history seem to lack the earthy hero of Baggins’ ilk. They lack this in a couple of ways. First, in the The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist, we have the protagonist Pug, who starts life as a nobody on the fringe of his society. Yet, as the adventure continues and develops, he becomes a magician of great power. Thereafter, though he is not without challenges, Pug acts from a position of power and confidence. He moves from a Hobbit typology to a Cimmerian template, but one without the ripped six-pack and muscles. Second, in The Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin, characters seem to have very little in the way of heroic tendency. Eddard Stark is probably the closest GoT has to a hero and, yet, the message is clear. Being a hero embodying any sense of honesty and loyalty is stupid. Eddard got himself killed because he would not compromise his values. Both Conan and Baggins would have faired the same as people of strong values. Even those who were like Stark in early life are shown to have compromised themselves in order to survive. Robert Baratheon is a case in point. A one-time friend and comrade of Stark, he soon became a corrupt, perverted and non-heroic type simply to survive in the capital. In Martin’s books, being a hero is not only dangerous, but it is also futile. Power is in the hands of the evil, and it is better to keep your head down and keep it attached.

In this sense, heroes in modern fantasy fail readers in an important way. Bilbo Baggins and Conan provide a guideline of what people should do when faced with evil and tyranny. Conan, for all his faults, is someone who still cares about justice, fairness, and people’s rights to live as they choose and be free. Baggins is a bit different, as I do not think he much cares about the freedom of the dwarves in the same way as Conan would. However, Baggins is concerned enough to do the right thing and make sure he takes responsibility for his choices. He is loyal to his friends, as Conan is, and he has strong values which may override his culturally imbued concerns and fears. “Heroes,” and I use that term very loosely here, in The Game of Thrones never go beyond themselves or seek to uphold any strong sense of value beyond what is beneficial for them. Apart from the Starks (possibly), most people in the GoT world are basically cockwombles who cannot get over themselves long enough to actually do anything worthwhile. They provide us with no model of being part of something greater than ourselves and upholding the value of doing good just because it is the right thing to do. Bilbo Baggins is a far greater person than John Snow.

To wrap up, we need more heroes of the type of Bilbo Baggins, as well as those in the vein of Conan the Barbarian. We need heroes who step outside themselves and expand their visions of who they are and what their world is as they pursue their goals based on clear value systems worthy of our respect and emulation. We need the ordinary people who perform extraordinary deeds.

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I am reading three books at the moment. The first is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, by Carl R. Trueman. For those of us who have no idea how Western culture cut its roots from it’s own value systems and made it hard for even medical professionals to define what a woman was, this book is a delight of insight. Trueman traces current identity politics quite a way back in history, and shows there is nothing new under the sun. He deals with thinkers like Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Freud, and a whole tonne more. So far, it has really introduced a lot of ideas and connections I had not seen before. Following this on from Melvin Tinker’s That Hideous Strength, Trueman’s book is definitely far wider in scope.

N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God is the second reading project I am dealing with. After extensive discourses on the nature of reading, and the terms used and a whole lot more, I got to the “good stuff” at about page 140. That said, all that foundational work was and is valuable. It really helps put Wright’s historical discussions into a wider context. I have had this book, and two others, for more than 5 years, just collecting dust on my shelf. This is one of those really solid reads you cannot rush. I bounce between this and Trueman’s book.

You might wonder at the thematic consistency of my reading. Simply put, there is none. Dinniman’s book is full of profanity at a level I have not read in a long time. Yet, it has already, at merely page 4, sucked me into the plot. Like Trueman’s book, I had long heard wonderful things about Matt Dinniman, and many people I follow on social like the guy’s books. When a local bookstore had the whole series, I started buying them one by one. I have 3. No doubt, I will soon have volume 4 in my grasp.

Drop a comment one what you are reading at the moment!

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Analytics are really cool and pretty. Call me a sucker for a colour-loaded graph or two. My favourite are the maps, which are really nice to look back on. They give some usual data like which time zone I should be posting the stories for. Maps also simply appeal to the D&D player and wargamer in me. Who does not like a good map? I can’t see the colours too well, so I may be modifying the colours here because of that. You see how much I love maps?

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I have had a rat in my kitchen for a month. As soon as I found it was there, I set some traps. Within a night, one of the traps trigger and I found the trap moved. I found the trap had been dragged across the kitchen by the rat, which had a front leg trapped inside the jaws. I lifted it up to get rid of it, and the rat slipped out of the trap. I tried to catch it, but the cunning thing had scarpered into the kitchen again.

I have reset the traps a few times now, and have not enticed the rat to try them again. So, in a feat of thought, I have changed the trap type. The new trap is a live catch cage set up, and I have a bit of a dilemma with this one. That is, if the rat goes inside.

My cat has been utterly relentless in his efforts to get the rat, with his efforts being the only way I have known roughly where the pest is hiding. It is this effort which has cause me some pause for thought. What should I do with the rat if it falls into my hands alive?

My first thought was to bash it with a hammer, but then I thought about Nut (the cat above) and his efforts to catch the rat. I did also play with the idea of just releasing the rat for about three and a half seconds. I thought, given Nut’s efforts here, maybe I should take him outside and release the rat in front of him. I mean, it would only be nature taking its course and I would be no more than facilitating a natural process.

Nut would greatly enjoy some fresh meat he has caught, along with the idea Nut and I would be doing the neighbourhood a small service in removing a pest from within it. Yet, the idea I am inflicting unjustified cruelty on the rat does not escape me.

This is where you come in. What is your opinion on this? Should I hand the rat over to Nut and let him have a fresh meal? Should a Christian do this? This is a deep rabbit hole and some thoughts from others would be helpful.

Also, I am just curious. What would you do?

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I have done it about four times in the last couple of years. Maybe even more. I really don’t remember, but then, that is what it’s like. I just get my head in a good space, and it all goes smooth for a bit, and then they’re back like a weird aunt who has a distinct scent of formaldehyde and a breath even worse.

It seems I have voices in my head which tell me I need to delete everything and walk away. They are loud and persistent in their message. I have a colleague who is pretty good with a megaphone, and even better without it. I don’t know why she bothers with the thing, actually. The voice of disdain, a whispering sibilance in the recesses of my mind, is equally good at what it does, if a lot quieter in doing it.

It is times like now I really need to take a good, hard look at why I do what I do here. I do, at times, focus on the numbers I see spotted about. And when I do, and when the voices are there, the fun of being on any social media instantly gets sucked out it, like when the big bug on Starship Troopers sucks the brains out of the hapless soldier it manages to get its proboscis into.

I guess, like for anyone writing stuff and putting it out there, the question of whether we are wasting our time comes up. It sure does for me. Today, listening to some music that probably is not setting the right mood, I have started asking that very question. And today, on an emotional and self-indulgent level, I want to answer, “Yeah, I’m probably wasting my time.”

But a whole tonne of authors who have said anything about writing itself said writing is the marathon through the deepest circle of hell and beyond. I had little idea just how right they were. They all warned me, and, like the jester the proverbial village misplaced, I had the delusion tucked away that it would not be that hard.

What an idiot.

All I can do is laugh about my own folly and hubris. This stuff keeps you humble. So, to ask the burning question: why the hell do I write stuff at all here or anywhere? It is because I actually enjoy writing. And now that I am thinking about that reason, those voices are actually retreating into the shadows again. I mean, in a physical sense, I can feel their weight lift from my chest and stomach. If you’re freaked out, I sympathise. I would be a bit freaked, too, if I were reading someone else’s post with all this in it.

I also have no fixed theme to my Substack presence or that on X. I just write what I like and what I want. At times, I wonder if I need a more focused theme to what I write. But I write for fun and the enjoyment of it. So, if I am writing for fun and enjoyment, what do I need to care about a “focused theme” or…what is it influencers call it?…a “brand” for?

Remembering why you write is a key to mental health in the writing game, whether new and under the radar, and (I suspect) when you hit the big time. I am sure Matt Dinniman still has moments where he’s wondering what the hell he has let himself in for.

It is time to say screw it all and dance through the spaces in my head wearing nothing by a terry towelling dressing gown dancing to Men Without Hats’ The Safety Dance and just being whatever idiot I am and revelling in it.

I am too old to give a crap about what I “should” be doing. I need to learn to start acting like it.

If you’ve made it this far through my outburst, I really do appreciate it. Thanks for hanging with me this long!

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In the #vss365 community, I have been a long-time dabbler. I am not that reliable on the hashtag, but I enjoy some of the challenges connected with getting an idea into such a short space. In recent posts, I have tried to get a bit deeper on occasions. My usual fare is somewhat flippant and idiotic, but in one post, for which the image above was used, I wanted to challenge some ideas that have gained currency out there.

The challenge here is to the tendency of many to revise history to suit their modern agendas and hijack an historical figure to whatever cause they might have under their bonnet at the time. And this is where the gun-wielding bushranger comes in.

Edward “Ned” Kelly (c. 1854 - 1880) was a bushranger active in the north of Victoria, Australia. While he had been an active criminal from his youth, it was not until Ned Kelly gunned down three police officers at Stringybark Creek that he gained true notoriety on a national and, eventually, international scale. On the run, the Kelly Gang (Ned Kelly, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne, and Steve Hart) robbed a couple of banks, burned mortgage papers, and came to be seen as a risk to the very stability of the colony. The last stand at Glenrowan, an attempt by the Gang to lure the Victorian Police into a trap with the aim of killing as many officers as possible, ended in tragedy. Only Ned Kelly survived, and at that he was heavily wounded, to face trial. He was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November, 1880.

Ned Kelly, over the years, has been reinterpreted in any number of different ways by books and in film. He has been painted as a quintessential Aussie larrikin, and also given the veneer of a freedom fighter for Irish equality in the colony. In a recent film, Kelly was portrayed as being homosexual, along with some of the other members of the Kelly Gang. Given Kelly’s limited writing skills and the equally sparse writings he left behind (the Jerilderee letter is the only one, as far as I know), there is not much to work from to get at Kelly’s inner thinking. The fact remains Kelly is one of the most divisive figures in Australian history. And yet, he is still shanghaied to just about any cause you can imagine. Some theories about him are more plausible than others, and some are outright farcical.

The juxtaposition of Ned Kelly holding a Colt revolver in the middle of a disco dance floor with a t-shirt with “Make love not war” on it is meant to jolt the viewer and reader out of the comfortable categories we assign to Ned Kelly. Kelly was known to like dancing, but there was no way he would have been seen among disco-going peace lovers. Ned Kelly famously beat the living crap out of Isaiah “Wild” Wright in a bare-knuckle boxing match. Wright was a man famed for his vile temper and vicious fists. Kelly was a capable and skilled fighter, and no man of peace. Violence was something Kelly was very well versed with.

And this segues into the quote at the bottom of the image. Part of the revisions Kelly has had foisted on him have ignored much of his upbringing. To present Kelly in certain guises, one has to ignore much in the historical record. Kelly and his family were devout and very strict Catholics, by all accounts, despite the criminal activities they were involved in. To suggest, for example, that Kelly was gay, ignores the deep religious values he adhered to, as well as the complete lack of evidence to that effect. Sadly for the three police officers, Kelly’s religious ethics did not cover murdering police officers.

Progressive Christians, in order to maintain many of their beliefs, must get rid of nearly two thousand years of Christian belief. For example, one of my favourite beliefs of progressive Christianity is the idea the Bible has errors in it and is not inspired by God. By making this claim, progressives are able to ignore whatever the Bible might say against their preconceived ideas. Yet, it is clear, even in the New Testament, that Christians believed the scriptures, (and they include Paul’s writings and the Gospels in this), were inspired by God through human writers. Therefore, to be able to support LGBTQ+ morality and other things, progressive Christians need the Bible to have errors in it and not be inspired by God. Yet, by holding to this, they must convince themselves that two thousand years of Christians were completely wrong.

By using the question, I am suggesting the idea Ned Kelly was a model of Christian virtue and Jesus would agree with him murdering cops is an utter load of rubbish. Yet it is not any more insipid and evil than progressive Christians using the Bible to justify whatever immorality and sin our current culture wishes to endorse.

Mistakes, as ever, remain my own.

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Around two years. I could be considered an overly impatient braggart, but I think two years sitting on a manuscript is a fairly long time. And this is the problem with traditional pathways to publication for the unknown and, possibly, shitty author. Is the wait time worth it?

The back story - I wrote a story called The Recast back when I cannot remember, but it is a science fiction story set in a far future version of Australia. The manuscript, written with my favourite software Scrivener, was submitted to a US-based publisher. They emailed me a year later (that was a sign!) with an interesting comment. Someone had pulled it from their mass of unsolicited manuscripts and put it to their people for more attention. The email was a sure boost to the ego, and that is the truth. I was pumped!

What I was unprepared for, as a new and emerging author, was the timeframe. This is not a complaint about the publisher. I get it. Everyone who thinks they can write a novel is sending the poor staff of any publisher who takes unsolicited works their drivel, me included. That translates into a massive workload for a staff who are already exceptionally busy people. I get it, and I have every degree of sympathy for their plight. When real life intrudes on the fantasy I entertain of me being a real author, my job as a teacher gives me some idea of what the staff of a publishing company must endure. I would not want their job, and I am teaching in a secondary school!

But the reality is publishers and their staff, like the rest of humanity, have only twenty-four hours in a day. That time is often taken up with a plethora of conflicting and competing obligations, which means only one thing. The manuscript into which you have poured your soul will often find itself on the back-burner of priorities. As far as trad publishing is concerned, this is the reality and the nature of the beast, through utterly no fault of the staff who work for publishing companies.

Traditional publishing, no matter what crap people level at it, takes time. Pure and simple. If you’re as impatient as some, maybe the indie route is more your juice.

Do I regret submitting a manuscript? Hell, no! For the purely egoistical endorsement that someone who has no idea who I am said my story was worth more than the delete button is something I am happy to live on for years! Last time I emailed the publisher, they said my novel was about 33 in line. Hell, they can take all the time they need. They have endorsed me as a writer with potential. Their decision alone means I am not entirely wasting my time in this caper.

However, all that said, I am also keen to put other stories out there as in indie author. I am planning to use Substack partly for that reason. For the first chapter of any serialised novel, expect that to be for free. After that, my paid subscribers get everything, including the full eBook at the end, if I have published it as such a thing.

In my vast experience, all of six months, I would suggest a mix of traditional publishing for the stories you are in no hurry at all, and indie publishing for those stories you are keen to get to your readers. In the end, keep it real.

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It’s been awhile now since Bandcamp announced they would be removing all AI-generated music from the platform in their post Keeping Bandcamp Human. Since then, has Bandcamp imploded into obscurity for the lack of AI music available? I would say a resounding “no” in response.

It seems a huge number of music fans are in agreement with me on this one. According to Futurism, fans have “exploded,” though the term it hyperbolic - the article only quotes a couple of people and makes a vague statement about widespread frustration. The fact that some people have the same feelings as myself entirely validates my own strong opinions on this matter, as far as I am concerned. Bandcamp appears to have made the right move, which the Herald Scotland calls a “much-needed decision” in fighting against “the rot of AI-generated music.” Opinions, at least in the cases of those that matter, have come out in support of the ban.

From a personal viewpoint, my own purchasing from Bandcamp has gone up since deceptive, unlabelled, AI music has been taken out of the equation. Just from an emotional viewpoint, the loss of AI music has been an absolute God-send. While I am a fanboy of a few musicians on Ampwall, getting my hands on ambient music from Bandcamp has now seen my collection grow somewhat. I am going to need much bigger mobile storage.

Of course, there have been some voices raised in protest. In an spam-pop-up-ridden article (yeah, there is no point to that adjective other than to paint the source in a negative light, - I am biased, so kill me), Undetectr lauded Bandcamp’s lack of AI detection purely because unscrupulous users could flood the platform with AI urine and not get picked up on it. The authors at Undetectr encourage AI users to distribute their tracks through streaming services like Distrokid and direct sales platforms. The main praise is the lack of AI policy or lack of detection on these platforms.

The response of Undetectr is understandably negative to Bandcamp’s decision, as their own business depends on people getting sucked into the narrative that using SUNO is no different than Mark Knopfler picking his guitar and kicking out “Brothers in Arms.” The question is rather simple: when are streaming platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and others going to make a stand for human musicians and get rid of AI-generated excrement?

Bandcamp’s decision is part of a much wider, though still nascent, resistance to AI-generated art. Some book publishers have written new policies which not only ban AI-generated books from being submitted, but also ban the users who are dumb enough to use AI to write from ever submitting to those publishing companies again. Like with a lot of new technology, the honeymoon period seemed a bit crazy, like mad sex on a beach at sunset with a new bride and her groom, but the honeymoon seems to be coming to an end. The bride has realised that her man has kind of let himself go, and he has realised he has commitment issues after all. Like a lot of people, AI promised a lot, but has under-delivered in just about everything except negative impact on the arts.

Bandcamp has not imploded in a collapsing black hole, nor has the ban been a cause for rioting and boycotts in our boycott-something-to-signal-our-virtues world. From all indications, Bandcamp can actually look forward to a time of relative prosperity with customers feeling much safer in the knowledge they are buying real music from real humans.

As a last note, Bandcamp does encourage snitching on bands who are using AI on the platform. It is an important thing to do, as by reporting suspected AI-generated sewage, you are doing every fan a massive favour.

Now, leave me alone. I have some music shopping to do.

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Over the last few months, I have had to war with difference voices around me and my tendency to accept what people say at face value in good faith. This has come to something of a head as I have discovered podcasts. These are my thoughts on filtering the voices you listen to, including those from within.

The first podcast I have every really listened to extensively is Live Free put out by Lakepointe Church in Texas, USA. When I started looking for social media places where I could follow either the church or the lead pastor, Josh Howerton, I was confronted with a fair amount of criticism of the man. The criticism of Howerton was not limited to left dominated platforms like Bluesky, but also some on the cesspit X and even Facebook had a few negative things to say about the guy. In my own mind, these voices were louder than those people who actually like Howerton and what he has to say. It was this incident that brought me finally to the place where I stopped listening to people who appear to be mindless trolls.

On the Live Free podcast, I have yet to hear anything major with which I disagree. Howerton and his partners on the podcast present well-supported points, even if they take a good long time to get around to the topic of the podcast itself. Howerton might use some harsh phraseology, but that is something of a positive for me. I don’t think Gen X get too ruffled about a few hard words. The point is, Howerton’s theology and ethics, so far, have matched my own fairly broadly, and I see nothing in the Bible, again so far, that has contradicted the podcast.

This same issue was brought up to me previously when I mentioned I had the book Systematic Theology by theologian Wayne Grudem. I am not a reformed Christian by any stretch, but I do find Grudem’s presentation on things theological fairly solid. A brother in Christ told me Grudem was a pretty crappy theologian, and that was a comment I took on board, as I trusted the one who had made it. That same brother in Christ also recommended as irrefutable David Bentley-Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved. I did read Hart’s book and found it far from irrefutable. In fact, it highlighted a vast gulf between myself and so-called progressive Christians who water down the Bible to suit their social agendas. Of course, a universalist would argue that Grudem is a crappy theologian because Grudem upholds the inerrancy of the Bible.

I have come to the point where if something does not align with clear Biblical teaching, such as “Hell is temporary,” it is not acceptable.

More broadly speaking, and this is where I myself am still evolving, when it comes to your writing, be very careful whose voices you listen to. I have found some to be excellent fonts of deep wisdom about the craft of wordsmithing, but others have been somewhat lacking. Choose those you trust carefully, as many have agendas which remain invisible and hidden from you. For clarity, I am not here referring to the clear scammers who pop up in our messages every now and then about Nigerian women’s cyberpunk book clubs.

Another voice to beware of is your own. I really love Ray Bradbury’s dictum.

I am the quintessential dreamer and wastrel, so Bradbury’s advice really lands home. However, I think he is actually correct. Creativity should be a flowing stream without thought beyond what you want to put out there. The refinement can come later. The main point of creativity is to create. I hate to be so obvious, but I think it needs saying. Creating does not get helped by second guessing, or wondering what people will think. Creativity is its own reason.

Related to the problem of thinking too much is that of choosing what you want to write. I am not yet a globally famous author, but I have some thoughts on this. Write what you want to write. If it is something you have an itch for, scratch the itch. Let no one’s dismissal put you off. One of reasons I have muliple sections on my Substack is I feel restricted when I limit myself to just fiction; more so when that limit is to just one or two genres. I am sure others feel the same. I like to write a lot of different things and I just go with the urge. I wonder if others limit themselves with questions about who will read it or even like it. This takes us back to Bradbury - don’t think.

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I make use of Buffer to schedule posts that I can plan ahead, like articles coming out and so on. Like so many services these days, Buffer offers an AI to help generate ideas, draft them, improve them, and even write them for you. Is there a space in the writing journey for people to use AI? I would say there might be a very limited space. As in, microscopically miniscule. Possibly.

I did a little experiment a long while ago with Buffer’s AI, and asked it to plan a bunch of posts across two social networks based on a group of topics which I usually post about. What I ended up with was enough posts to make at least a post a day for over a year. That meant I could schedule the posts with minimal correction and not have to really think about social media for a year.

For genuine interaction with your readers, this plan is less than optimal. If we are just here to pump out verbal diarrhoea, then such a scheme would work. But for a unique voice, the human needs to be there in what we post. Absolutely, for meaningful interaction with readers, which makes total sense for indie authors, you need to write, make, and deliver your own content with no AI writing it.

I have encountered an opinion which holds that, as long as the writing is all human, using AI for things like prompts to get that writing started is fine. I have already given my opinions about the post-draft process, so I will not dive into that here. While I think prompt generation might be the one area where using AI might be acceptable to me, I still have some serious questions about.

The first is if AI is developing your prompts, and therefore, your ideas from a massive data set of previous language it has been trained on, how unique can those prompts be? This presents critical creative issues for me as an author. Of course, I have thought of ideas, one of which I thought was a unique and novel world, only to find Drew Wagar’s Emanation series had already used the idea and done so with far more skill than I could have brought to it. Using AI for prompts and ideas plunges us even more into the derivative with, I think, fewer opportunities to take even existing inspiration into new directions. While we will come up with ideas that have been done before, this does not excuse us from trying without turning to AI.

The second question is even more cutting, I think. If, as an author, I need AI to supply me with ideas, should I even be an author? I would lean to the negative on that question. If I cannot pump out ideas that are my own, no matter how dumb they are, I have a very real problem and need to ask some deep questions about my choice of artistic output. I would even go so far as to say I probably should have stuck to drawing stick figures, as they would have been a more genuine expression of my artistic side than AI-generated prompts.

When I started planning Temporary Citizen, I honestly thought it was a really stupid idea. I initially planned it as a single-part short story, but as I got into the writing, I asked the question, “why not run with the idiocy of the story?” What resulted was a fun, light-hearted, horror-esque story which is completely ridiculous.

Temporary Citizen might be ridiculous and stupid, but it is my ridiculousness and stupidity. I would like to think AI would never have come up with anything like it. I am pretty sure AI has never come up with something this original.

Over the months since my last post about AI, I am still convinced my stated position is still fairly correct. AI is not merely a tool. It is a technology that allows us to be creatively lazy through by-passing a number of the steps needed to create a story, long or short, that has a unique and individual voice rooted in human experience and the human spirit.

In short, to ask the question some have put out there, does being pro-AI make you anti-human? In the arts, I think it does. By using AI, we surrender at least part of the artistic process to a machine. The struggle of that process is vital to genuine expression, and it is that struggle as experienced by an embodied, emotional, conscious, and sentient being which makes art so very relatable and relevent. Artistic expression and thought are part of what makes us uniquely human. To short cut this is to make your writing, at best, irrelevant from the very first step of creation.

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