storytelling | M Thomas Apple Author Page

September to April

August 28, 2023
MThomas

September

I want to do a creative graduate thesis, he said.

In that case, you should keep a diary, his advisor suggested. Write every day.

OK, he said.

And bring me a story or two to look at.

OK.

October

These aren’t stories, his advisor informed. These are more like diary entries.

How should I write a story, then? he asked.

Write what you know. Base your stories on people and things around you.

OK.

And bring me another story or two.

OK.

November

The narration isn’t believable, his advisor imparted.

Why? he asked.

It’s too difficult for the reader to identify with the characters. Nobody has a family with nine children.

What should I do?

Go read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

OK.

And bring me a couple more stories.

OK.

December

I don’t get any sense of through-story, his advisor complained.

What do you mean? he asked.

The stories aren’t connected. They’re all different.

Well, what should I do?

Try an internal perspective. Go read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

OK.

And bring me another story.

OK.

January

This is too abstract, his advisor mused.

What do you mean? he asked.

This isn’t a true plot. The symbolism is too obscure.

It’s a translation of something I wrote for a German class.

You don’t want to be Kafka.

I don’t?

You need real life stories, with real people and real problems.

What should I do?

Go read Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.”

OK.

And…

Bring you another story?

Two.

February

I think I see the problem, his advisor intuited.

What is it? he asked.

I think you need to experience more life before you can be an effective writer.

What do you mean?

You need to go out into the world and work different jobs, meet different people, move around a bit.

My thesis is due in two months.

So it is. Make sure you give your draft to me next month.

OK.

And…

Another story?

No. Just read my comments and rewrite what you have.

OK.

March

I don’t see the point of adding poetry between the stories, his advisor grumped.

Why? he pondered.

The poems interfere with the prose.

I thought you didn’t like the prose.

I would say you need to add a poetic sense to your prose.

How do I do that?

Try writing poetry. For practice.

…

And finish the rewrite of the draft by next week.

OK.

And print three copies on a laser printer. And buy three of those thesis black cover binders.

OK.

April

Well, the three of us have examined your thesis, and we decided on a grade of B+, his advisor beamed.

…

I know it’s not as high as you wanted, but I argued that the interplay of letters, poetry, and stories woven together formed an interesting kind of metadiscourse narrative depth to the thesis structure.

…

Congratulations.

Thanks.

If you like this, you might enjoy Notes from the Nineties, a book with short stories and poems (the above is the first one, and may or may not be partially based on personal experiences my senior year in college).

Dear Diary – Posts from the Past

August 25, 2023
MThomas

I’ve kept a journal (OK, a diary) for many, many years now. It first started in September 1984 as a junior high school 1st year (7th grade) English assignment — each day, we would be given a writing prompt and at the end of the 10-week term (quarterly system back then), the English teacher would look it over and write feedback.

At least, that was the idea. In mid-October my family moved to a county and school system about 60 miles away (it’s more complicated — we couldn’t move in to the new house at first and so my siblings and I were looked after by various relatives, so we didn’t go to school for about nine to ten days). The new school didn’t use journals at all. English class was boring. Grammar and sentence diagramming.

So I kept writing at home, almost on a daily basis in the beginning.

But I’ve been fairly inconsistent over the years. I filled several notebooks, all different sizes and shapes. I stopped writing in one notebook at some point in 1999 when I moved to Japan and started another one. Then some time in 2004 I decided it was a waste of paper not to finish the 1999 one. Then I filled it up and started typing in a Word file. Then I went to Montreal four years ago and started writing in paper notebooks again.

It’s, quite frankly, a great big mess.

But there are some good ideas in these notebooks, and lots and lots of bizarre poems that I swear I do not remember writing. (Also at least half a dozen attempts at “automatic writing.” If you don’t know what that is, look it up.)

So from time to time, I’ll post some bits and pieces here. Just for safe-keeping.

Who knows? I may wind up publishing some of it at some point. Or at least drop some of it into the mouths of future SciFi characters.

AI “loses its mind” when fed AI-created drivel

August 19, 2023
MThomas

Source: https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/1677439914886176768 (@tomgoldsteincs)

In other words, without “fresh real data” — translation: original human work, as opposed to stuff spit out by AI — to feed the beast, we can expect its outputs to suffer drastically. When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model’s training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it’ll soon start to crumble into itself.
https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

So, as more and more lazy people ask AI to “write” for them, the programs get less and less accurate…

Or, as the authors of the study conclude, “…without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease.”

I.e., the use of AI-generated content to train AI doesn’t work, and since there is already way too much AI-generated garbage all over the internet, it’s almost impossible to sort out which is which when the AI-creators “scrape” data from the web.

So…

See, machines can’t replace us entirely — their brains will melt!

But then again, that might not be so hopeful after all. When AI takes over the world, maybe it won’t kill humans; perhaps it’ll just corral us into content farms…

At least we won’t wind up as batteries.

Yet.

PS. I find it both hysterically amusing and disturbing that my blog program offers an “experimental AI assistant.” Granted, the program does let you know that AI-generated content accuracy is not guaranteed, but wth would I want to use AI for a personal blog? The whole purpose of a blog is to WRITE. AI-generated text is not writing. It is intellectual property theft.

Everybody I know needs it!

August 15, 2023
MThomas

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

OK, OK, in all seriousness, I would probably open a jazz café / restaurant. But only on the weekends.

We live at the foot of a mountain trail, and it’s really popular with retired folks and young families.

My wife and I have already begun thinking about our “second life” after retirement, and I’ve been frankly bored with the whole EFL teaching thing for a while now.

But pizza and the Duke? Yeah. That’d work.

10 things I know to be absolutely certain

July 17, 2023
MThomas

List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

1. I know it to be certain that the wording of this prompt is a bit odd. Is this meant to mean “know to be true”?

2. I know it to be absolutely certain that there are many things about which I am far from certain.

3. I also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things I know to be certain will annoy at least one person who reads this.

4. I also also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things to know to be certain will amuse at least one person.

5. One of these things I know to be absolutely certain may even irritate and amuse the same person (👈 maybe even this one right here).

6. I even know it to be absolutely certain that writing a list of ten things that are absolutely certain takes a considerably longer time than I had initially anticipated.

7. Just to be sure I irritate someone, it is absolutely certain that the world is a warmer place than it was when I was a kid 40 years ago.

8. The fact that June 2023 was the hottest month on record is absolutely certain.

9. I know it to be absolutely certain, however, that we have only been keeping records on temperatures worldwide since the late 1880s, and records were measured using different instruments

10. But the most important thing to be absolutely certain that I know is that Sony says they have the technology to make humanoid robots but can’t figure out what to use them for. I have an idea or two about that…

ChatGPT: Is this really the “death of the essay”?

December 17, 2022
MThomas

I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)

The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.

By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.

*Somehow, I doubt that people in the US said “livin’ the dream” in the ’50s…*

As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.

So far, I have asked the program to:

Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick

OK, and the verdict is:

Smashwords End of the Year Sale from 12/15 to 1/1!

December 15, 2022
MThomas

“Find my ebooks and a wide collection of great indie titles as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! Check out https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos before the end of the month and follow @smashwords for more promos like this! #SmashwordsEOYSale #ebook #sale #books2read #indiebooks”

(I swiped this from the Smashwords promo site as a “generic blurb.” But what else, really, do I need to write?

All my ebooks on Smashwords are “50%” off! That means the books that are listed as $0.99 are actually free, since they don’t do $0.49.

And don’t forget that all proceeds from Destiny in the Future are donated to fight cancer.

Gift an ebook to friends and family!

Onward and upward, Excelsior!

September 19, 2022
MThomas

Just passed 200 followers on WordPress. Thank you, everyone!

I know I should be posting a whole lot more often than I have. There are LOADS of new science articles and events happening recently, so I’ll see if I can get caught up over the next couple of weeks.

Plus a new chapter of Bringer of Light by the end of the week! I promise!

(And it would be VERY helpful if WordPress didn’t “refresh” while I was adding tags and categories to posts, and then hiding those tags and categories afterward so that I couldn’t update them…Sigh…what was wrong with the older version that worked just fine?)

Quantum Leap pilot episode confirmed (but Bakula is only a “maybe”)

January 14, 2022
MThomas

“Considering how many different possibilities there are for a series like Quantum Leap in today’s world, it’s more than a little surprising that it’s taken this long for the series to attempt a return. Bakula had previously stated how relevant a series reboot would be, and the idea of creating a sequel series in which a new team searches for him is perhaps the perfect way to reignite the intrigue that the original program offered.”
https://screenrant.com/quantum-leap-sequel-pilot-scott-bakula-return-update

My family used to watch this each week in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Near the end it did get a little weird (the main character Sam Beckett jumped into the body of a space race NASA chimpanzee, and animal rights activists went totally ballastic).

Still, it ended on a very unsatisfying note (basically, “He never returned home. The End.”) and almost any kind of sequel would be great. Since Sam is a “missing person,” there is likely more to this than meets the eye (see https://www.thewrap.com/quantum-leap-reboot-nbc-plot-details/).

Tales of a 6th-Grade Nothing (Apologies to Judy Blume)

November 26, 2021
MThomas

I started writing stories when I was in 5th grade. Our teacher gave us a list of vocabulary each week — about 10 to 12 words, I think — and said we had two choices: 1) write down all their definitions along with a sample sentence, or 2) work them into a short story to show that we understood the meaning of the words.

I chose the 2nd option. In fact, I was the only one who did out of a class of about 25.

The thing is, the teacher wanted us to read them at the front of the room.

Man, that was not something I was looking forward to. But somehow I managed.

I wrote nothing but detective stories, all in the first person. At some point, I borrowed my mother’s old manual typewriter (originally my grandfather’s, from the 1950s) and typed them all out. I still have most of them.

But my peak as an elementary school age creative writer came part-way 6th grade, when I attempted to write my first horror story.

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