Dear Subscriber,
It’s always nice for an author to offer the first novel in a series for free. Both of my first novels in the Portia of the Pacific and the Pat O’Malley series are free. That’s pretty nice of authors to do that. The big authors usually don’t do that, as their “names” are in the household already, so why would they give you a free first novel?
Speaking of “name authors,” how about the Writers’ Strike in Hollyweird? Most authors and actors, for that matter, don’t make enough money at their job to live full-time as humans. Their salaries average around what starting kindergarten teachers make: $25,000 a year, if they’re lucky. That’s what I make in retirement, and I lose money in my book sales. I just read an article that families in the U.S. who make over $100,000 per year are not making ends meet! Boy, I have not kept up with inflation! I’m still giving away free first novels.
But I’m a veteran and a retired teacher, so I get a pension. Not much, but many folks in the U.S.A. don’t receive that! The Republicans are at war with unions, and the U.S.A. has one of the poorest countries in the world when it comes to socialized support for anything.
My students at Caltech always hated to be fooled, as did most college students I taught in my Advanced Research and Argument classes.This Artificial Intelligence gambit is a big worry for writers and artists in the world. Think about it as a Caltech student or professor would think about it. Computers store information in a database. They’re great at doing that! So, when business folks online use information collected from the biggest databases in the world, they’re using recycled information that’s already out there. Nothing original. Just brain garbage.
Some techies would argue that the human brain doesn’t produce anything original, so they’re nothing but computers. Nope. The science says differently. The human mind is the most powerful computer for original thinking there is. Why? Just read the many articles by real computer scientists! (I’ll wait while you Google it.) This is why reading articles, stories, novels, screenplays, or anything else that’s been recycled, so as not to pay a flesh-and-blood human, is not a way to do business for the reader. The reader not only reads recycled garbage, but they’re being fooled! My Caltech students would be really pissed!
My friends at Caltech will freak out, but here’s what MIT says about the human mind’s capabilities and the computer machine’s capabilities. The folks who work with computers every day understand the difference. Do you?
Take care, and don’t take any wooden nickels or bullshit recycled information.
James Musgrave
San Diego, CA
