Writing
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Post-OU Annual Report
I left the OU a year ago, so have been reflecting on how that year has gone. Because I’ve been missing writing all those monthly, annual, random, reports, here is my Annual Report to be submitted to the funding council (ie me). With tongue a bit in cheek, I’ve adapted the format from an annual report that I used to prepare for a research funder for Post-OU Martin Inc. Key Metrics Outcome Indicator Target Progress to Target Comments Novel Words writtenNovels published 70,000 words1 novel published 70K writtenPublished by end Sept Instagram account FollowersPosts 1000 followers200 posts 1491 followers238 posts Developed aesthetic and style Running RacesDistance 1 half marathon 3…
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May 25 Round-up
This month I finished my first novel, a psychological horror, which came in around 70,000 words. I’ve sent it off to a few agents, but I expect it’ll be a case of self-publishing in Kindle. I’ll talk more about that in later posts, but it’s been a very enjoyable process. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it is there – the first step in writing a good novel is to write a novel. I was struck by the phrase Alison Light used to refer to the Golden Age of detective fiction as the “literature of convalescence“. She was arguing that after the horrors of the First World War,…
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Creativity, AI and awkward questions
Some of you will have seen how at least one author has been caught accidentally leaving AI prompts within the finished text of their book, and also how a suggested summer reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times contained AI hallucinations for books that don’t exist. There was, rightly, an outcry against this laziness, and a sense of being cheated (also, does no-one do any editing anymore?). But beyond these obvious, egregious examples, I find the question of artistic integrity (and related, academic integrity) interesting in general, and how the use of AI makes us ask difficult questions. There is a lot of puritanism around the use of AI in any…
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April 25 Round-Up
(Teilo and Posey have been enjoying wild garlic season) Bit late this month, I’ve been writing goddammit! I’ve blogged a few times about my post-OU reinvention, and this month I’ve been trying on the “I’m a writer” hat. By which I mean I’ve been approaching fiction writing more as a job, writing every day, as opposed to one thing I’m trying amongst a few others. I’ve appreciated the structure and the reduction in cognitive effort where I have to decide “what am I doing today?” every morning. Books I’ve been digging into music biographies quite a bit this month. David Byrne’s How Music Works, which is sometimes fascinating as Byrne…
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AI in creative writing
I’m generally against using AI to creative ends, as I’ve mentioned several times, for me it kind of defeats the point. The creativity you are engaging in is the thing. However, I’ve been writing a psychological horror novel over the past few months though, and I though I’d experiment with it. I was at around 60,000 words, so there was a big chunk of content to play with. I like writing so the intention here was more to understand uses of AI than to ease any writing. My conclusions are therefore more about general lessons we can learn about AI than writing. I tried Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with various…
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Monthly round-up March 25
(Teilo was my writing buddy this month) I’ll say this for Trump and Musk – when they make things go to shit, they make things go to shit fast. It seems strange to think of the world order back in January, that seems like the 1970s now. Like many people I’ve been divesting myself of support for American billionaires. On a regular basis we already have a network of independent local providers for a lot of products and services. But I’m a lazy consumer often, I admit, and Amazon had become the default for miscellaneous products. Now that I’m eschewing it, I’m reminded of when the web was still relatively…
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Writing and reinvention
(Image shows a Scare Devil from the Nicobar Islands – courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/7142224553) As you might guess from my last post, I’m going through something of an introspective phase at the moment. This was to be expected after leaving my place of employment for 30 years, but I think is also exacerbated by a) my field of ed tech becoming essentially only about AI, which doesn’t excite me much and b) the whole Trumpian dismantling of existing global norms within which I thought I would be operating. This means I’ve been going through something of a reinvention dialogue with myself (and Maren, and the poor dogs). I expect I am…
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Feb 25 round up
(With Maren Deepwell and Tom Farrelly at the Education After the Algorithm seminar at DCU) As I mentioned in a couple of posts, I gave a keynote in Dublin this month. I was also the examiner on an excellent PhD about the impact of the VLE on mental wellbeing. So, I’ve been keeping my academic hand in. It’s an odd time to be an academic. Mind you, it’s an odd time to be anyone. Part of what you do as an academic is attempt to find the truth. I’m aware that often there is not one single truth, and conclusions can vary depending on context, but in general, research, writing,…
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January 25 Round-up
After 3 long years, January has finally ended. On the personal front it’s been going well. Now that I don’t have as many meetings, I decided to shift the ‘vibe’ of my room from ‘home office’ to ‘vinyl lounge’. This involved the inevitable trip to Ikea, and purchase of the favourite of vinyl collectors, the Kallax unit. It’s interesting to note the manner in which the change in the physical set-up alters your behaviour. We used to have our records split across three rooms, but now they are all gathered in The Vinyl Lounge (please say this in an appropriately sonorous tone), I find myself playing a lot of different…
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December 24 round-up
We went to the coast for a week over Christmas, and had an unexpectedly sunny day on Boxing Day, the drinks in the picture above were outside a pub in Tresaith. The end of an eventful year, during which I left the Open University, became semi-retired, got engaged and had to do a lot of emergency care for elderly parents. It seems odd now to think I was still working at the OU 12 months ago, the human ability to adapt to a new context and take it as the new norm is always a surprise. And speaking of new norms, 2025 looks set to be a shitfest right, so…
