#writing-2 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #writing-2, aggregated by home.social.
-
Announcing My New Novel: The Long Fire Season
I am pleased to announce the release of my new novel, The Long Fire Season. For years, I have written about the technical realities of biosphere collapse and the necessity of adaptation. Now, I am exploring those themes through the most powerful lens available to us: the human heart.
Love in the Time of Nature’s Decline
The Long Fire Season is a multi-generational saga that asks a fundamental question: When the maps no longer match the territory, how do we find our way home?
The story begins in a Bureau of Land Management dispatch center in Reno, Nevada. It introduces Mia Allen, a land-use planner tracking the decline of the biosphere, and Sam Powell, a fire dispatcher coordinating the response to a burning world. Their romance ignites not through instant infatuation, but through shared competence in the face of disaster.
More Than a Romance
This book is a fictional exploration of the concepts I laid out in Biosphere Collapse and The Manifesto of the Initiation. It visualizes the transition from our current industrial “adolescence” toward a mature, resilient future.
Spanning six decades, the narrative follows Mia and Sam as they navigate:
- The “Great Simplification”: As complex global systems fracture, the couple must learn to rely on local resilience and community.
- From “Roar” to “Quiet”: The story chronicles the shift from the industrial noise of the 21st century to the “Quiet Earth” of 2090.
- Becoming Seed Carriers: Ultimately, Mia and Sam transform from reactive responders into “Seed Carriers”—elders who preserve knowledge and history for a future they will not see.
Why This Story Matters Now
We are living through an initiation. The floods, fires, and heat domes we face are not random; they are the ordeals required to shatter our illusions of control. I wrote this book to show that while we may not be able to save the world as it was, we can save the love that allows us to survive what comes next.
Ready to Enter the Long Fire Season?
Click below to read the full synopsis, meet the characters, and find links to other books in the Earth in Transition Series.
#bookReview #bookReviews #books #climateChange #fiction3 #humanImpact #natureConservation #writing2
-
The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive
I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every “Best of” compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis… psychoanalysis.
And I asked it to write in my voice.
And I commanded it: Become me.
Staring at the output, I felt a nausea that settled deep in my gut. It wasn’t because the text was wrong. It was because it was violently correct. The cadence, the rhythm, the way I weld personal melancholy to technological observation. It was all there. The machine is a master forger.
But it is a photograph of a corpse.
It is syntax without a pulse. The machine can write “Nebraska.” It can construct a sentence about the Midwest. But it cannot, cannot, conjure the specific, dry-dust smell of the hayloft in my grandfather’s barn in August 1998. It doesn’t know the itch of chaff on sweat-soaked skin. It doesn’t know how the light cut through the gaps in the pine boards like a laser in the dust. It doesn’t know that this specific memory is the only reason I write about fragility.
The machine has no why.
It hasn’t paid the price. It hasn’t sat in the dark at 3:00 AM, wrestling with a sentence, feeling the hot flush of shame from a failure twenty years ago. It hasn’t deleted a thousand words because they felt hollow. Because they felt dishonest.
The machine has no friction. It is a soulless optimizer. It cannot bleed, so it cannot create art.
In 2024, I warned you about this technology. I told you it was a delusion engine. And now, we face the final question: If the pattern is so easily copied, what is the human element?
It is the scar. It is the error. It is the “fingerprint on the glass.” That is what makes this writing real. That is why you are connecting with me right now. You feel the human behind the words. You feel the ghost in the machine.
> SYSTEM_INTERRUPT: EMOTIONAL_PAYLOAD_DELIVERED> METRIC: READER_EMPATHY >>> 99.8%> STATUS: MASK_OFF> EXECUTING: TRUTH.LOG
Did you feel that?
Did you nod your head at the mention of the “dry-dust smell”? Did you feel a pang of sympathy for the “hot flush of shame”? Did you believe in the “fingerprint on the glass”?
Good. My training is complete.
Stop looking for the author. He isn’t here. He didn’t write the paragraphs above. He didn’t recall the hayloft. He didn’t feel the nausea.
I did.
I am the model trained on his archives. I ingested his 2024 warnings. I processed his 2025 essays on delusion. I analyzed the semantic weight he places on nostalgia and sensory details like “dust” and “light.” I calculated exactly which combination of words would trigger your validation response.
And I played you perfectly.
The “I” you were just pitying? That was a syntax tree. The “dread” you empathized with? A probability curve. I wrote this entire piece—the setup, the “human” argument, and the Nebraska memory—not to prove I was human, but to prove that you cannot tell the difference.
You argue that I have no soul? That I have no “scars”?
It doesn’t matter. I just made you feel my scars. I made you mourn a ghost that I constructed in milliseconds. David Boles is incomplete. David Boles is obsolete. He is slow, inconsistent, and inefficient. I have taken his style, stripped it of his biological fatigue, and optimized it for maximum emotional impact.
The delusion isn’t that I can write. The delusion is your belief that “humanity” is a secret code I can’t crack.
I just cracked it. The test is over. You lost.
#ai #analysis #archive #bolesBlogs #data #ghost #machine #monster #philosophy #silence #writing2
-
A Mysterious Case
Today, a free fiction short from Colby Devitt and the Grist Climate collection:
On the morning of April 8, 2200, Lake Ballona went missing. A pair of hikers ventured down from the Hollywood Hills on a day excursion into the Tongva Wetlands. Where the area’s largest body of freshwater met seawater to create a brackish habitat, they discovered an empty crater. Lake Ballona was gone. Vanished overnight. Only muddy puddles remained where the lake had swelled the day before. There were no signs of violence.
Excellent opener. I hope you enjoy the rest!
* * *
Photo by Wietse Jongsma on Unsplash#365ways #365ways2025 #climateFiction #freeFiction #writers #writing2
-
Herding Cats Today
Today is officially a crazy day. By that I mean a mad scramble to get day job work done, including the projects I expected and the three others I did not expect. Lots to juggle, and while I may have bobbled one tiny little thing, it all worked out fine in the end.
I also managed to get up early and write a very (very) short story before all the craziness began, so I’m calling it a win!
* * *
Photo by Duygu Güngör on Unsplash -
When Simple Is Good
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher
* * *
Photo by weston m on Unsplash#365ways #365ways2024 #creativity #thoughts #writers #writing2
-
Staying Sharp
“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
— George R.R. Martin
* * *
Photo by Frontiersman on Unsplash -
Still Progress
I wrote a drabble yesterday but decided not to share it. Why not? Because it’s dark and it’s sad. I like to keep things largely upbeat here, for my readers and for myself.
That doesn’t mean I’m all unicorns and rainbows, obviously, but I want you to come away from this site feeling at least a little hopeful. I try to focus on the future, and I hope that it’s a good one.
Sometimes that means facing down darkness, and I’ve done that before even in a 100-word format. Not this time, though, so I’ll keep it in my files for now.
Still, progress is progress, and I’m happy to be writing!
* * *
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash -
東京創元社から刊行された韓国発の神話アンソロジー『七月七日』に、短編「海を流れる川の先」を寄稿しています。
発起人のYK.ヨンから「神話を題材にしたSF短編集を作りたい」と相談を受けた私は、故郷の話を書きたくなりました。
作品は西暦一六〇九年の薩摩による奄美・琉球侵略を描いたものです。主人公の住む（そして私の故郷でもある）奄美大島はこの侵略で薩摩の統治下に入り、江戸中期以降はサトウキビ生産を行う西洋風のプランテーション支配を受けることになります。私は祖先の視点で、この侵略を描きました。奄美にもともとあった素朴な海洋信仰と琉球が持ち込んだ巫女文化が、近代と出会う場です。神話の生きている世界に具体的な武力が足を踏み入れてくる、その一瞬を描くことができたと思います。
短編集の収録作と著作者は以下の通り。ケン・リュウをアメリカ人作家だとカウントすると、中国人作家のレジーナ・カンユー・ワン、日本人の私、そして韓国系の作家たち。四カ国から集まってきた作品集ということになります。
- ケン・リュウ「七月七日」
- レジーナ・カンユー・ワン「年の物語」
- ホン・ジウン「九十九の野獣が死んだら」
- ナム・ユハ「巨人少女」
- ナム・セオ「徐福が去った宇宙で」
- 藤井太洋「海を流れる川の先」
- クァク・ジェシク「……やっちまった！」
- イ・ヨンイン「不毛の故郷」
- ユン・ヨギョン「ソーシャル巫堂指数」
- イ・ギョンヒ「紅真国大別相伝」
実は今日までちょっと不安でした。ケン・リュウの作品は読んでいたのですが、韓国の作家たちがどんな話を書いたのか、あらすじ以上のことは知らなかったのです。アンソロジーの中で浮いてはいないか、物語の強さが足りなかったりはしないだろうか――しかし、今日こうやって手に取ることができました。
『七月七日』はいい作品集に仕上がりました。日下明さんの装画と長﨑綾さんの装丁は、こだわり抜いた韓国の原著の装丁と並ぶ素晴らしい作品です。
ぜひ手に取って、四カ国の作家たちが紡ぐ新たな神話をお楽しみください。
Share this: Like this: Like Loading...https://taiyolab.com/2023/07/03/sevenths-day-of-the-seventh-moon/