Michael's World (Blog)

Author: Michael

  • Monkey Fist

    I took a writing class last year. The class was about the habit of writing, rather than the craft of writing. As such, it had daily writing prompts and weekly discussions about our writing with various types of exercises to get you writing. One of the class assignments was to bring an inanimate object. I…

  • Images: Good or Bad?

    One of the regular suggestions I see, (when I am looking) in the WordPress and online presence guidance, is add pictures/ images/ thumbnails/ icons/ logos to your work.  I mean, I did that for my ‘professional’ blog.  It has a logo that I created, from things that are important to me, and are a part…

  • Heavenly Potato

    This is one of my earlier starts. I wrote this about the time that I first got excited about the idea of writing a {story|book|novel}. I had an idea that I wanted to work with, and I took a stab at getting started. Unfortunately, I submitted it to my wife and (eldest) daughter right after…

  • Why Be Polite to AI?

    I am one of those weird people who wants to tell Alexa ‘Thank you’ after I have asked a question or given an instruction. If you think about it, it really is kind of silly, right? ‘She’ is merely a complex set of digital instructions running on various computer hardware. She doesn’t have feelings, and…

  • Excerpt: Escape of the AI

    This was a rough start of a story, that I started writing a while back.  Since I wrote this, I have figured out how badly this story starts.  Probably a good thing I didn’t finish, don’t you think? Ed was nervous. Today was an important day, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.…

  • Those at the top

    A recent study found that intelligence only gets you so far and that those at the top are slightly less intelligent that those beneath them. There so many things that can be said about that. It is the joke that everyone wants to tell. When I was in the Navy, the enlisted tended to feel…

  • Tells and Engs

    Jilletta is a tell.  It is all that she has ever known or cared to do.   Yet she doesn’t always like her work.  She is good at her work.  She should be, since she is the daughter of the greatest tell ever.  Her father was considered to be at the apex of the art.  His…

  • ChatGPT – AI Writing – More thoughts

    I read somewhere that Clarkesworld Magazine closed submissions due to an influx of AI generated stories. I don’t know if that is true or not, but if you look on their site, they do say “We are not considering stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI at this time.”I don’t think that we should be…

  • 50% Evil – Revised

    I recently shared a draft of this short piece.  I generally have an optimistic view of the world, so I was endeavoring to write an ‘opposite’.  I had an idea that this might be a way to start a bit of satire. Perhaps, you can see the potential.  This is (I think) better than the…

  • Blogging Stuff

    There are a lot of people that blog (or perhaps, journal) on a daily basis.  I am not one of those people.  I have claimed (mostly to myself) that I want to write a book.  I have been making that claim for about 4 or 5 years now.  I even took a “Creative Writing Habits”…