Reflections of Life, Part 2 by Karen S. Wiesner

Reflections of Life, Part 2

by Karen S. Wiesner

In looking back over the course of my life as an author who's looking forward to becoming an artist in retirement, I've learned to slow down and reflect on the past, savor the present, and look forward to the future. Interspersed through these ruminations, I'll include some of my own most apropos sketches.

In Part 1 of this article, I talked about feeling directed to find a better balance in my life. One of the first things required in order to bring about very necessary changes in my crash and burn lifestyle was the crushing of my ego. I've spoken before in my writings of the worst experience I've ever had with editing a project. Specifically, when I completed my Arrow of Time Chronicles (a massive science fiction saga) over the course of two intense years, I truly felt that I'd written my pièce de résistance. I believed it was the best thing I'd ever written up to that point. I was on top of the world. I couldn't wait to have my masterpiece published and in the hands of my readers. The editing process took place over the course of several months as all four books were released back to back.

As a little background to ensure full understanding before I continue, in the span of my writing career, I've written for at least 25 different publishers big and small, at first because it was the only way to get my horde of books out to the world as quickly as possible, considering how fast I wrote. Following a few years of the worst luck possible with some of my publishers who, frankly, "did me wrong", I decided to place all my books with a single publisher, the only one at that time I actually trusted, and still do. One after the other and sometimes in huge batches, I pulled my books from my other publishers, revised and reformatted each of them, and gave them to this one publisher, who, initially, reissued the majority of them very quickly, all while also publishing my brand new works.

From my very first book published in June 1997 to the one just before Arrow of Time Chronicles, the revisions handed down to me from any of my numerous editors had been mild up to this point, amounting to a few typos needing correction or sentences that required reworking for clarity with each book. With my first two writing reference books, editors wanted me to add certain sections, which meant drafting new material to coincide with a feature they wanted to see displayed in the manuals. All told, none of this was serious. Structurally, from the start of my career, all my books were solid and polished even before I submitted them. I possessed the editorial skills to make them so.

To this day, I'm not a hundred percent sure why this particular project caused such a rift between me and my publisher (who was also my editor for all my submissions). Even after the arduous, soul-tearing editing was completed, I still believed the four books in Arrow of Time Chronicles were some of my best to date. The agony I suffered through four excruciating times with each of the books in that series decimated me in ways I couldn't have previously imagined, given my editing history. I left the process limping and bleeding each time, my spirit ground to ash. My confidence took such a violent blow, I never wanted to write again because it meant inviting further attacks that would surely come during editing. While I couldn't and wouldn't do anything as drastic as quitting writing, all the spinoff books I'd planned to write in the Arrow of Time universe, once the four-book set was published, were summarily canceled. I couldn't take the risk that this series had been the cause of the damage that wreaked havoc between me and my publisher.

Karen Wiesner Sketch: Agony

As I said, I didn't quit writing altogether, but I did know I needed and wanted to make changes. In the span of my career, I've started 16 series, varying in length from three to twenty-three books in each. At that time, all but four of the series had been finished previous to this crisis. There was no way I could abandon those final four series without providing satisfactory resolutions. 

Over the next two years, I worked hard rebuilding my relationship with my editor, who was my only publisher now. While I can't take full blame for the problems between us, I know I did my share of harm. Chief among my issues was that my ego and (what seems like now) certainty that my every word was golden needed to be checked with humility and the willingness to compromise. These two lessons were hard fought battles for me, both internally and externally. In the process of learning them, I also undertook the heart-rending job of culling my list of upcoming projects.

Next week I'll talk about what brought about the strong sense that I needed to slow down.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Telepaths and Language

One panel I attended at this year's RavenCon was about communicating with aliens. I brought up the question of whether a telepathic species would have a spoken language or the concept of words at all, which was then discussed at some length.

Touch telepaths such as Vulcans don't count. A society could hardly exist if people had be touching each other to share feelings or thoughts, so Vulcans naturally have a language. I'm thinking of a species whose members would communicate by short-range thought transmission, needing to be in each other's physical presence or at most within line-of-sight. In my opinion, they would have no evolutionary reason to develop language. They wouldn't need words, let alone speech, because they would form mental images of whatever they're "talking" about. Somebody on the panel raised the issue of what kind of environment would cause them to evolve telepathy as their chief mode of communication. It would have to be a world where both hearing and vision would be unreliable for that purpose.

Stipulating such an unusual environment, why would they develop words? People wouldn't even have names; they would identify each other by mental images of the person they're "speaking" to or about. If they eventually encountered interstellar travelers from Earth, the telepaths would probably consider our mind-blindness a pitiable handicap.

In order to develop science and technology, however, this species would have to invent language sooner or later, if only a written one. A society beyond the hunter-gatherer level requires keeping records, communicating at a distance, and transmitting information to future generations. One panelist suggested a universal mental "cloud" all members of the species could tap into, like a worldwide telepathic mainframe. Such a phenomenon, though, would go far beyond the short-range, person-to-person telepathy I'm considering. A species such as the latter couldn't create what we'd think of as civilization without writing or the equivalent. That step would be harder than simply inventing the alphabet would have been in our world. In a society without spoken language or even the concept of speech and words, the invention of written or electronic communication might require a genius on the level of the creator of algebra or calculus in Earth history.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Falsity

I came upon "falsity" within a copyright-related Law Review article about the protected speech, and I was intrigued.

Is "falsity" a lesser known synonym for "falsehood"?  Apparently, not quite. Intriguingly, one of the major meanings of "falsity" is"incorrectness". Another is "insincerity".

An interesting explanation is offered here:  https://grammarist.com/usage/falsehood-falsity-falseness/

I infer that Galileo Galilei was the unfortunate recipient of the attentions of the Inquisition for falsity, because what he stated about the relationship between the Sun and our planet was contrary to correct thinking (received wisdom) at the time. Of course, the Inquisition was interested in stamping out heresy, and Galileo was obliged to recant. There is also an interesting story about how he claimed that his tormentors "doctored" evidence against him.

As the French have said for centuries,  "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

A contemporary techo-fib equivalent could be, "my blog was hacked".

Also, and still with reference to Galileo, he claimed that the sun did not orbit the Earth. One might call that a negative proposition, and one can never prove a negative. That is a link about black swans and unicorns.

With regard to unicorns in the fossil record (completely off topic), wouldn't the premise rely on the supposition that unicorn horns are made of a substance that can be petrified? Rhino horns are made of keratin (like hair and finger nails), and does not fossilize well.

Similarly, one probably cannot prove that one medical precaution --that almost everyone takes-- prevents a certain outcome (death) because there is a dearth of identical subjects who abstained from that precaution.

plus ça change.... and all related to "falsity" or "falsehoods".

High time I got to the copyright-related legal blog on the Law Review by Benjamin E. Marks for Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP which is a masterful analysis of free speech and false speech, and if, when, and whether there is a difference.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6507e780-1a6e-4cb7-9788-a314ea6d2697

It is about free speech and media freedom, which was of great interest to certain authors' associations a few years ago, but much less so since 2021, and discusses what are--and are not--protected forms of speech, such as the apocryphal ejaculation of "Fire!" (verbal sense) in a crowded theater, newsgathering, FOIA, protection of witnesses or news sources, suing news publications, and more.

Angela Hoy of WritersWeekly has some fascinating news on media freedom, which you can check out here: https://writersweekly.com/in-the-news/042923?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=writersweekly-com-112119_67

And, did you know that it is possible that your blog has been used without your permission or knowledge to develop AI?  Scott Rosenberg of Axios elaborates:

https://www.axios.com/2023/04/24/ai-chatgpt-blogs-web-writing-training-data

Yes indeed. If someone were to ask chatwhateveritis to write a love scene in the matter of Rowena Cherry, where would the bot have got the vocabulary and candence? Not that love scenes are my forte. I would not recommend copying them.

Legal blogger Richard L. Hathaway of the tongue-twister legal firm Kane Russsell Coleman Logan PC explains the perils of using AI (as previously suggested) and then trying to copyright your enhanced work.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=52e40b3c-ad2f-4375-a451-6ffb8d6421f6

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™  

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

Reflections of Life, Part 1 by Karen S. Wiesner

Reflections of Life, Part 1

by Karen S. Wiesner

In looking back over the course of my life as an author who's looking forward to becoming an artist in retirement, I've learned to slow down and reflect on the past, savor the present, and look forward to the future. Interspersed through these ruminations, I'll include some of my own most apropos sketches.

For the last several years, I've felt directed toward finding a better balance in my life. There's no denying I've spent most of my time on this earth cultivating a crash and burn lifestyle--in my work and "play" activities. Those who know me would agree that I can only be described as a person who gets things done (emphasis and attitude in that phrase, please). In all honestly, I took great pride in my accomplishments at many points in my life before I was laid low. You will see that--and even some smugness--reflected in these reminiscences. I apologize and ask for you to indulge me just this once, as this is something of a capsulation of my entire life, and I have little more to show for myself than these brief achievements. I'm forever reminded of the countless, plentiful desert periods in my life when I was absolutely certain I was a fraud without a speck of talent, natural or otherwise. Those by far supersede any glimpse of self-worth.

In any case, during my "leisure", I've been known to read in excess of 400 books in a single year. Yes, you read that right, and, yes, I know there are only 365 days in a year. In my work, which has been writing (professionally for the last 26 years) I've actually been compared to a computer. Only that accurately describes how quickly I process and perform my tasks. Whereas most writers can finish a novel or two a year and rare ones can produce one or two more than that, I've spent the majority of my career completing at least five full-length novels (ranging from 60,000 to 100,000 words plus) and five novellas (nearly all close to 40,000 words long) every single year.

If I had to be honest, I'd admit that I barely broke a sweat most of the time I was accomplishing these feats. In fact, reading and writing books was only part of what I was doing at any given time. Along with writing books, every year I made promotion of my published works a full-time job, along with leading a few writers' groups in which I coordinated numerous endeavors. I also wrote countless freelance assignments for many magazines, cranked out weekly or monthly columns for various publications, wrote blurbs, and critiqued and edited the material of other authors, as well as designed covers for my books and those of fellow authors.

Karen Wiesner Sketch: Still Life with Books

My secret: Early in my writing, I formulated an approach to writing that I've documented step by step in my reference titles. This technique allowed me to "work in stages" and accomplish so much more than I would have if I'd written each book from start to finish, back to back, one at a time. Essentially, I was always writing multiple books at a time, each in distinct stages of the writing process. For the most part, that technique ensured that I avoided burnout altogether. More accurately, I was able to sidestep it, provided I gave myself at least three vacations a year, each lasting 2-3 weeks long and forcing me to curtail all writing activities during them.

As long as I took those vacations as prescribed, I could indefinitely juggle the heavy workloads I assigned myself the rest of the year. Most often, I indulged in my favorite pastimes during my recuperation times: Reading and playing videogames. Here, too, I hit it hard. As befitting a crash and burn personality like mine, I would spend most of my waking hours, staying up late, playing a game or series of games or plowing through a shocking amount of books from my To Be Read mountain. This was the only way I was able to cope with the stress of just how much I was accomplishing in a year's time. Mind you, if I took my vacations when I needed to, for as much time as I needed to, I barely felt the weight of my work at all other times. In these 26 years, my running tally is 146 books published, 152 books written, and, incidentally, nearly 130 awards nominated for or won. This is the testament to my dedication in accomplishing all my writing goals.

As anyone can imagine, breaking this lifelong habit of crash and burn was nearly impossible. As I said at the start of this essay, I've felt myself being directed and redirected, gently, sometimes almost imperceptibly, for years. It wasn't a lesson I learned all at once, but it is one I had to relearn countless times it really stuck.  Many sentiments fit how it felt to be taught something I assumed I'd mastered only to fall back into the same bad habits that are seemingly my own unique factory resets: Embarrassment, amusement, frustration, bewilderment, even shock at my own ignorance and blindness as to what's happened to bring me back to square one.

It's unfortunate that, to get me to the point where I even agreed to submission in the first place, I had to be broken and re-broken. Strangely, I've come to enjoy (in some ways, at least) the slow-down--I, who once considered herself with no small amount of pride, the Mighty One with Super Powers.

Next week I'll talk about what it took to bring about change in the crash and burn lifestyle that dominated most of my adult life.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

RavenCon

You can read about the 2023 RavenCon, held in the Richmond, VA, area this past weekend, here:

RavenCon

The guest of honor was Esther Friesner. I watched her "Ask Auntie Esther" presentation (consisting mostly of funny anecdotes about life in writing, publishing, and fandom) and part of an interview. She's as entertaining in person as her stories and anthologies are (e.g., the CHICKS IN CHAINMAIL series she edited). Another special guest, horror host "Count Gore De Vol," of course costumed in vampire regalia, acted as MC for the masquerade contest. Although I didn't recognize the sources of most of the costumes, I enjoyed seeing them anyway. The only child entrant played a role I did know, Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series. The most unusual costume, I thought, was "Jor-El in the Fortress of Solitude." The contestant wore a cardboard diorama of the interior of the ice fortress on his head. His actual face, in white makeup, emerged through an opening in the back, with a tiny figure of Superman looking up at him. The intermission featured entertainment by a filk music group called Dimensional Riffs, whom I liked. (For one thing, most of the lyrics were clearly understandable, often not the case with instruments drowning out vocals in some groups' performances.) They sang Star Wars and "Firefly" material.

My husband and I appeared in a session on creating memorable character names, which I thought went well. Recommendations of resources for finding or generating names, plus lots of discussion about what not to do.

Some panel highlights: "Raising Children in Space," including both generation ships and extraterrestrial or extrasolar planets. "Should We Be Genetically Altering Humans?", ranging from correction of genes that cause severely disabling or life-threatening conditions to radical redesign of human embryos. Both of these had actual scientists on the panel with solid information and substantive issues discussed. Same with "Writing Believable Aliens." The panel on how not to think about women characters, focusing more on reader response than on strategies for writers, was interesting but not quite what I expected. The "Mary Sue" concept, since it figured prominently in the printed schedule's panel description, took up a lot of time, and in my opinion the panelists sometimes applied it too broadly and not quite accurately. Some interesting discussion anyway. An archaeologist gave a presentation on medicinal and magical plants found in "spell bags" (usually, in fact, pots rather than bags, which don't last very well) in burials of shamans. She showed slides of plants and the burial sites, with skeletal remains. The lecture explored two different sites, one in England and one Native American burial from the eastern U.S. She barely managed to fit all her material into the allotted time; I wish the talk could have gone on longer.

Same hotel as last year, spread over three different buildings on a beautiful, green campus. Buffets were available for breakfasts and dinners, fortunately. We heard from those who ate lunch in the "tavern" that service was painfully slow. Typical of a convention hotel, sigh. Luckily, there is also a "grab and go" food counter, although their selection is limited. The location is within less than half a day's drive from us. We had nice weather for the most part; the predicted Saturday rain didn't turn out to be much. On the whole, a satisfactory weekend at a not-too-big con.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

OWN IT

The "natural right" to own property is one of the acid tests of whether a society is a free market democracy or not.

Simply from the grammatical perspective, one might call an acid test a "hallmark", or a "typical characteristic", and some would mistakenly call it an "earmark". An earmark is not a synonym for a hallmark... but it may become one, as is so often the case when a term is misused repeatedly and authoritatively.

My theme for today's copyright-related article is "Ownership".

First of all, a warning from WIRED for those who own a car with a keyless fob, especially a BMW, a Lexus, or a Toyota. For those who like factoids, Lexus is a luxury division of Toyota.

https://www.wired.com/story/car-hacker-theft-can-security-roundup/

 

Next up, legal blogger William J. Hurles for the large, general practice business law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC explains how a basic understanding of Intellectual Property law is essential to managing an Amazon store, and he explains what you need to know to "own it" on Amazon as he covers Amazon's baffling (my adjective) IP enforcement tools, Patents, Trademarks (and the mistakes sellers make by infringing other peoples trademarks), Copyrights, and more.

A Seller's Guide to Navigating Intellectual Property Law on Amazon.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=672955c5-54d0-41b4-be11-64c76d771aaa

Do you own that lovely photograph of yourself? Maybe you don't. 

In an article partly titled, "Next Time, Take a Selfie..." legal blog editor Margaret A. Esquenet for global IP law firm Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett and Dunner LLP and law clerk Maxime Jarquin discuss the copyright problems that arise when an aspirant to fame and fortune asks a bystander at a glitzy event to take a photograph of  himself or herself or themself posing with a celebrity. There is more to the story, but it is interesting and worth reading.

The bottom line (for me) is that the person who takes the photograph, even at the direction of another and using the equipment of another, is the person who owns the copyright unless there is a contract or a waiver.

https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/blogs/incontestable/next-time-take-a-selfie-case-dismissed-for-lack-of-copyright-ownership.html#page=1

Some people might just want to keep a photo of themselves with royalty or a movie star in a prominent place in their own home, but nowadays, they might want to post that picture on a social media site. Then, what one puts up on one social media site can be scraped by person-finding type businesses, and the photo may be considered fair game by the news media in perpetuity.

What, though --and that is not the case in this story--  the one-time celebrity turns out to be a pariah, and any association with that person is the kiss of death to social climbing aspirations? If one does not own the copyright to the now-unfortunate photograph, one cannot have it taken down.

 

Comprehensive privacy laws may be coming, everso gradually, State by State. 

 

A comprehensive round-up of global developments in privacy law is shared by an ensemble cast of legal bloggers Molly S. DiRago, Robyn Lin, Kim Phan, Matthew R. Cali, Alexandria Pritchett, April Garbuz, Jessica Ring, Natasha E. Halloran, Ronald I. Raether Jr. and James Koenig who get into the weeds of privacy regulations for the legal influencer law firm Troutman Pepper.

https://www.troutman.com/insights/more-privacy-please-april-2023.html

Maybe I exaggerated for the sake of a pun. The compendium is more of a fascinating series of short, prose vignettes touching on consumers, government use (or not) of commercial spyware, cyber attacks and doxxing, the abuse of health data, spying on journalists, and much more.

It's surprising how little of ones own data one owns!

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

 

Details of Life by Karen S. Wiesner

Details of Life

by Karen S. Wiesner

In this article, I talk about changing your perspective from the negative to the positive when writing an obituary for yourself or for a loved one who's still alive.

Last summer, after we'd all finally come through the COVID crisis worse for wear but still kicking, my family went through a heartrending trauma that (thankfully) was resolved over the course of just a couple days. Even still, once it was finally concluded, none of us could easily go back to our normal lives without feeling haunted for months afterward by it. If a situation that harrowing could actually lead to anything good, if nothing else, it did spur us to get our future financial, medical, legal, and end-of-life "ducks in a row". Those in my family who'd played a role in the event realized that the absolute worst time to focus on these crucial things was literally at the end of our lives.

Over the course of the next several months, my husband and I and our other close relatives filled out all kinds of forms that we'd never taken the time to realize, let alone understand, could be necessary sooner rather than later. These things were filed with the appropriate agencies and copies were given to everyone relevant. More than once we wondered, if we'd done these things sooner, would we have had to go through what we did at all? There is no good answer to such a question.

At the beginning of this year, our local library gave a program called "What To Do Before You Die". While we were fairly confident we'd adequately prepared for the future, we figured it couldn't hurt to make sure. We signed up and convinced some friends to join us. For this program, the library director had gathered an interesting pool of local resources: the County Register of Deeds, a local funeral director, a flag pole and monument business, the local cemetery caretaker, an estate planning lawyer, and the County Veteran Service officer.

Although we'd planned and prepared well, we discovered over the course of the several hours this seminar took place that there were a few considerations we'd missed, allowing us to become even more organized for the future. To cap the highly useful agenda, there were several knowledgeable souls on hand to talk about obituary writing. Those leading the discussion advised writing your own "death details" in advance to make the process much easier for those this task would otherwise fall to once you were gone. I was actually the one who raised my hand during this and suggested not only doing this for yourself but for elderly relatives who were still with you. I'd wanted to write this information down for my parents since I was very sure at that point I would need to ask them numerous questions in order to find the answers needed to complete the forms.

This was something I've had on my checklist to do since the traumatizing incident last summer and the library program earlier this year but hadn't gotten around to yet because 1) given its ties to genealogy, it could end up being a tremendous amount of work, and 2) there's something very uncomfortable, morbid even, about writing an obituary for yourself let alone one for a loved one who's still alive.

Merely looking up the definition of obituary in the dictionary gave me pause:

1. a notice of a death, especially in a newspaper, typically including a brief biography of the deceased person.

Similar words to "obituary" in the dictionary are eulogy (a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, typically someone who has just died), necrology (an obituary notice, a list of deaths), death notice, and necrologue (a published announcement of a death, usually with a short biography of the dead person).

Alas, I kept this unpleasant task on my to-do list, regardless of how disconcerting the idea of undertaking it was to me. When it finally came up in my rotation, I did an internet search with the words "obituary form". I looked at a few and eventually found something that had most of what I wanted. After some brainstorming with relatives, we were able to cull the form contents to what we thought were the best things to include. Once completed, the blank form was hardly more than a single page long.

Still, I was having trouble getting started for the same reasons as before. Filling out an obituary form for myself and family members still living was the height of "not fun". Additionally, I would have to broach the subject with my parents, and that seemed disturbing as well. "Look what I have here, Mom and Dad! Your death notices, all ready to publish!" No, that was even worse than simply doing it on my own and tactfully asking them questions I needed answers to in order to complete the form. While I was hemming and hawing about setting a date to do this work, it occurred to me that maybe I was going about the process all wrong.

The day came for me to sit down and fill out the form. Instead of labeling each individual's form an "Obituary" or "Death Details", I called it a "Details of Life" form. My perspective immediately changed with the revision that made all the difference. Yes, there was a whole lot of genealogy stuff that did bog me down, though I'd done a lot of work in that regard in years past. None of it was particularly organized, so locating and locking down specifics with accurate information was a bit of a trek. But even that was kind of fun as I learned and re-learned new things about the family.

Additionally, I found reminiscing about the past a lot of fun. I spent most of two days getting the new, compelling "Details of Life" filled in section by section for myself, my husband, and both of my parents. When I talked to my parents, it wasn't concerning the unpalatable things like "surviving family members or those who preceded in death" (those things, including a death date can be added later, when they're needed). We covered specific details about their lives that I'd either been told in the past and forgotten because I hadn't written them down before or that I'd unfathomably just never known about them.

Everything on this form, once completed, was something I would need to know to fill out a formal death notice and announcement eventually. In the meantime, it was a concise summary of the details of a life that I cherished and was profoundly grateful to know and share.

I've included a copy of my Details of Life form below, or you can find a PDF of it here:  

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/5/5/23554234/details_of_life_form.pdf

Celebrate life today while it's still today.

Details of Life

Name (full, including maiden and married names, and any nicknames):

All cities/states lived:

Location:
Approximate ages/years lived there:
Other details:

Date of birth:

Interesting stories of birth:

Place of birth and details:

Father (name, birth/death, cause of death, burial place, vocation, details):

Mother (include maiden name, birth/death, cause of death, burial place, vocation, details):

How did your parents meet?

Name of spouse (include maiden name):

How the person of focus on this form met his or her spouse:

Marriage date:

Your age:

How long you knew each other prior to marriage:

Place of marriage (city/state):

Ceremony information (church, city hall, etc.):

Wedding details

Wore:

Reception location

Witnesses/Maid of Honor/Best Man:

Honeymoon date/location:

Names of children (could include birth/death, vocation):

Education (name/location of school, year graduated, focus of study, degree received):

Employment history: (business/locations, position title and description)

Military service (branch, boot camp location, years of service, places stationed, type(s) of work done):

Hobbies/interests:

Memory(ies) growing up and/or memorable one(s) of your life: 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

Do Plants Think?

A relatively recent (2021) article on plant intelligence, which includes an interview with Monica Gagliano, a professor in Evolutionary Ecology at Southern Cross University in Australia:

Plant Intelligence

It's known that plants can communicate with each other to "warn" their neighbors about potential attacks. Some plants also use animals to defend against pests, such as by releasing chemicals to attract wasps that prey on caterpillars. Researchers have discovered evidence that plants may have "memory" of a sort. In the interview, Gagliano defines intelligence as decision-making in reaction to one's environment. She insists that "you do not need a nervous system or a brain to embody this kind of behaviour and decisions." She goes so far as to declare, "Of course plants are intelligent, as much as bacteria and amoebas, and fish and birds and humans."

Bacteria? That wide-ranging application of the concept may come as a shock to many people's mental categories, as it does to mine. We typically think of intelligence as requiring brains and involving sapience or at least consciousness. I'm reminded of a vintage horror story that begins with a conversation about the nature of mind, in which one character rhetorically asks, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" The other character scoffs, while the first maintains that intelligence exists everywhere in many shapes. When or if we eventually travel to extrasolar planets, we might plausibly discover plants or a vegetative group mind possessing a capacity for thought we'd recognize as similar to our own. However, mutual communication might be hard because organisms the size of trees or larger might think on a slower time scale than we do—like Tolkien's Ents, only much more so.

Another article on plant intelligence I came across queried whether, if plants can think in some sense, we would be obligated to stop eating them. If so, we'd be stuck with rather narrow diets, composed entirely of foods we could harvest without killing any complex organism (dairy products, unfertilized eggs, fruits, nuts, honey, the leaves of green vegetables that regenerate throughout the growing season—that's about it). Fortunately, the writer of that essay reassured us we wouldn't, since animals regularly consume plants as part of the cycle of life. Besides, many plants have parts (e.g., fruit) especially meant to be eaten by animals for the purpose of spreading seeds.

Remember the Shmoos in the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip, delicious animals that rejoiced in sacrificing themselves as food?

Shmoo

Maybe on a world shared by intelligent plants and humanoids, some vegetative life forms would partake in a symbiotic partnership whereby they produced renewable offshoots to feed sapient animals in exchange for helpful services such as fertilizing and pest control.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Don't Sleep In The Subway

Don't Sleep In The Subway, Darling.

There are probably several messages there. For me, one is that this song by Petula Clark did enormous and lasting damage to the English language because she sang "the whys or the wherefores" ... as if there were a difference.

Just to be clear, there is no difference. Why and wherefore mean the same. When Juliet asks rhetorically (thinking herself alone on the balcony with no stalker below), "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" she means, "Why do you have to be the son and heir of my father's greatest enemy?"  

Possibly due to Pet's success and abuse of the English language, too many folks think that wherefore is a fancy British way of saying Where.  It isn't.

Another message  might be the advice of an urban prepper or survivalist who was interviewed by a controversial TV host who rejoices in a name that is Australian slang for food.

The host can't help it. His parents probably liked a very innovative car that was too good to be allowed to succeed.

The prepper suggested that everyone should be prepared with 3 ways of making fire, and more than a couple of ways of getting drinking water, because one cannot trust The Man and his windmills to be there in a catastrophe.

https://tastecooking.com/preppers-dont-survive-thrive/

For Greens, survivalists, or Science Fiction authors, a most inspiring piece, for real life terraforming Is the low tech project that has been going on in the Sahel of Africa to combat Saharan desertification.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220301007

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/africa-great-green-wall-trees-sahel-climate-change

California could learn a thing or two from the African farmers of the Sahel and their humble crescent shaped pits dug in the hard, dry soil, and surrounded on the down-weather curved side with a line of rocks

https://www.goodnet.org/articles/traditional-farming-techniques-are-stopping-desertification

Zai pits, supplemented with compost, hold water long enough for seeds to sprout and grow, and as plants and trees grow, they create a virtuous cycle of darker vegetation that pulls in heat, that generates condensation, that recycles evaporation, and creates shade, and allows more plants to grown, and that cools the area, increases rainfall, and so on. 

Carbon Dioxide is not bad, it is plant food. Oxygen is excreted by plants. We let the trees respire, they let us breathe and eat. 

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

How Will AI Transform Childhood?

According to columnist Tyler Cowen, "In the future, middle-class kids will learn from, play with and grow attached to their own personalized AI chatbots."

I read this essay in our local newspaper a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the article on a site that didn't require registering for an account to read it. The essence of its claim is that "personalized AI chatbots" will someday, at a not too far distant time, become as ubiquitous as pets, with the advantage that they won't bite. Parents will be able to control access to content (until the kid learns to "break" the constraints or simply borrows a friend's less restricted device) and switch off the tablet-like handheld computers remotely. Children, Cowen predicts, will love these; they'll play the role of an ever-present imaginary friend that one can really interact with and get a response.

He envisions their being used for game play, virtual companionship, and private AI tutoring (e.g., learning foreign languages much cheaper than from classes or individual tutors) among other applications. I'm sure our own kids would have loved a device like this, if it had been available in their childhood. I probably would have, too, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and similar inventions were the wild-eyed, futuristic dreams of science fiction. If "parents are okay with it" (as he concedes at one point), the customized AI companion could be a great boon—with appropriate boundaries and precautions. For instance, what about the risks of hacking?

One thing that worries me, however, isn't even mentioned in the article (if I remember correctly from the paper copy I neglected to keep): The casual reference to "middle-class kids." The "digital divide" has already become a thing. Imagine the hardships imposed on students from low-income families, who couldn't afford home computers, by the remote learning requirements of the peak pandemic year. What will happen when an unexamined assumption develops that every child will have a personal chatbot device, just as many people and organizations, especially businesses and government offices, now seem to assume everybody has a computer and/or a smart phone? (It exasperates me when websites want to confirm my existence by sending me texts; I don't own a smart phone, don't text, and don't plan to start.) Not everybody does, including some who could easily afford them, such as my aunt, who's in her nineties. Those assumptions create a disadvantaged underclass, which could only become more marginalized and excluded in the case of children who don't belong to the cohort of "middle-class kids" apparently regarded as the norm. Will school districts provide free chatbot tablets for pupils whose families fall below a specified income level? With a guarantee of free replacement if the thing gets broken, lost, or stolen?

In other AI news, a Maryland author has self-published a horror book for children, SHADOWMAN, with assistance from the Midjourney image-generating software to create the illustrations:

Shadowman

In an interview quoted in a front-page article of the April 12,2023, Baltimore Sun, she explains that she used the program to produce art inspired by and in the style of Edward Gorey. As she puts it, "I created the illustrations, but I did not hand draw them." She's perfectly transparent about the way the images were created, and the pictures don't imitate any actual drawings by Gorey. The content of each illustration came from her. "One thing that's incredible about AI art," she says, "is that if you have a vision for what you're wanting to make it can go from your mind to being." And, as far as I know, imitating someone else's visual or verbal style isn't illegal or unethical; it's one way novice creators learn their craft. And yet. . . might this sort of thing, using software "trained" on the output of one particular creator, skate closer to plagiarism than some other uses of AI-generated prose and art?

Another AI story in recent news: Digidog, a robot police K-9 informally known as Spot, is being returned to active duty by the NYPD. The robot dog was introduced previously but shelved because some people considered it "creepy":

Robot Dog

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Voice Over

One of the lesser-discussed intellectual property rights is the right of publicity, and until recently, the right to use --or more importantly to stop other people using--ones voice was not much of a problem.

Have you ever telephoned a bank, or brokerage house, or utility company and been bullied by a bot into giving your consent to let them set you up to use your voice to identify yourself as a security short-cut for future "convenience"?

Personally, I have never given any kind of consent to a recording as a means of identifying me. I have always been suspicious of that, and after reading legal blogger Belinda Scrimenti's article for Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP's Broadcast Law Blog about the violation of celebrity voices, I think I was right to be wary.

For any author who reads an excerpt of her book in public or on social media, records her own audio book, does an interview on a podcast or radio, maybe you should think twice about giving any business permission to recognize you by your voice.

If you are not a celebrity, your voice might not be used to endorse a product, point of view, or a political candidate that you would never recommend without extreme duress, but it could be used to steal your identity, or your money, or both.

The Broadcast Law Blog discusses the misuse of living and deceased celebrities' voices that is now possible owing to AI with some interesting examples. Apparently, a bot only needs to hear sixty seconds worth of someone's voice to be able to make them seem to say almost anything.

They don't say it, but I will, this could be seriously misused in political smear campaigns.

https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2023/04/articles/using-ai-to-replicate-the-voice-of-a-celebrity-watch-out-for-legal-issues-including-violating-the-right-of-publicity/#page=1

Belinda Scrimenti explains the right of publicity thus:

"The right of publicity is a right that is based on state laws. Elvis Presley’s estate was one of the forerunners in advancing legislation to protect publicity rights in Tennessee, but laws now exist in most states that protect the use of living individuals’ name, image, likenesses, and other identifying features, which includes the voice."

Another interesting source is Seth Resler on "How To Use AI To Impersonate Celebrity Voices (And Why You Probably Shouldn't)."

Since I mentioned banking, I am reminded of the old proverb that I suspect is not taught to children in school these days: All that glitters is not gold. (My search engine associates the proverb with SpongeBob.) It is a shame, because the Trojan Horse of Homer's Iliad was very much something that appeared to be desirable, and was not. 

There are whispers of a convenient and trendy move by brilliant minds in high office to create a digital currency that might work very fast indeed, and that will be centrally managed, rendering banks obsolete. 

In dystopian novels, such a wonderful system would mean that individuals would be unable to purchase socially undesirable products such as cigarettes, briquettes, fortified beverages, drinking straws, flammable liquids made by nature from jurassic plankton, or even toilet paper. As an added convenience, it would be impossible to do anything without carrying around a portable tracking system.

All the best, 

Rowena Cherry

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing