Dear Subscriber,
I wonder when the digital insignias are going to begin coming out with: “Made and 100% created by an actual human’s mind!”?
As many of you already know, I’m crafting a book about ChatGPT and how writers can use it (both fiction and non-fiction) to enhance their brains. Key word is “enhance” and not “replace,” which is what many marketers around the world are attempting to get you to buy into. For one small example, the current TV Writer’s strike ( I used to write TV news, so I know somewhat what this is about) has an underlying motive: “Don’t you dare try to replace us with A.I.!”
Speaking of dark stories and satire, I’ve crafted a story about a Native American shaman called Kokopelli is Damned. Those of you with Google Docs can read it for free. My great-great grandmother was 100% Mi’kmaq from New Brunswick who moved with her white husband to my home town of Fall River, Massachusetts in the Nineteenth Century. So, I am very close to Native American culture and its authors. In fact, author Sherman Alexie is one of my fave First Nation writers of all time. He enjoys writing “Indian” satire the way I do. My story, by the way, will also appear in an anthology, which you can purchase when it comes out. I’ll keep you posted.
Auschwitz Dancer Dances for Her Life
My ongoing serial Auschwitz Dancer is into its seventh episode this month. Although not technically a horror story, per se, the series does have as a setting a most despicable place, which is flash-frozen in October (Halloween anybody?) 1943. My series is also a literary adventure, as the research and the characters are taken from real life, and the purpose I had was to shine a very bright light into the mind of the reader so he/she/they can experience totalitarianism up-close and personal, as many are doing these days in different countries that aren’t particularly Nazi endowed, but for which the Anti-Defamation League would certainly want you to be aware. The reason is that when any small group or culture is singled out for persecution (hello, Indigenous People, everywhere) then it becomes humanity’s burden and not just the Jews, Arabs, or other cultures’ problem.
The first iteration can be read for free, as it was kindly published online at MetaStellar. If you’re an insightful reader, you’ll begin to realize that Auschwitz Concentration Camp soon becomes a symbol for any prison, anywhere in the world, including the prison of your own mind. This is perhaps the most horrific experience, especially for me, the author. I understand the Existentialist’s dilemma of having a compassionate mind that constantly sees what Sartre and Camus called “the ultimate responsibility for being alive.”
So, I suggest, as the author who spends hours crafting and researching these episodes each month (there will be a total of 10 in the complete novel) that you keep in mind the symbolic meaning for today that I’m attempting to plant in your conscious or subconscious brain as you read.
There is no excessive gore or graphic torture in my content. It is mostly action and love that motivates my characters, as you’ll see. In episode 7, however, I’m bringing in a guy named Dr. Josef Mengele, who was perhaps one of the most horrific real-life characters in my true-to-life story.
However, if one is astute, one can compare him with present day characters like the Sackler Family and Purdue, producers of opioids that killed hundreds of thousands of victims, and they got a slap on the wrist, whereas Mengele and others escaped, or became U.S.A. rocket scientists. The “horror” was that Mengele died of a stroke while peacefully swimming in Brazil.
Also, what about the Chinese distributors of fentanyl, which are today being packed into “regular drugs” that street buyers are using, and they’re being distributed to users through international drug cartels? Certainly these folks equate to Mengele and are perhaps even more evil, in that Mengele was doing research and was supported directly by the then legitimate German government in 1943.
Therefore, as you read my little adventure tale, please consider the symbolic meaning of the characters in my novel, especially Frankie Mannheim and Herr Ubermensch, her villainous enemy, and think about today’s folks about whom you can compare.
Please be well, enjoy your little rushes of adrenaline, and stay existentially and politically aware. As my PoliSci college instructor once told me, “Every human act is political in nature if you investigate it deeply enough.”
Kind Regards,
*James Musgrave
EMRE Publishing, San Diego, CA
*Made and created by a 100% human brain!
