Michael Chorost

Fellow authors, check out Eva Langston's terrific new podcast, "The Long Road to Publishing," in which she interviews longtime novelists about their careers.

I highly recommend the debut interview with the novelist Courtney Maum, and the next one with Julia Bartz:
shows.acast.com/.../epis.../...

Yes, I really enjoyed that one too.

SecDef is NOT a position where it's okay to be learning basic security practices on the job.

WaPo is dead to me.

Jeff Bezos probably thinks he doesn't have to care about the lost 250,000 subscribers, but I doubt that alienating your hometown readers is a long-term success strategy.

Finally. I’ve been waiting for this.

Actually, you did vote for it. You just thought it would hurt other people instead of you.

Oops.

The Mystery of the Locked-in Cat In which my mother becomes entropy's best friend.

Taking care of Mom has become like getting too near a black hole: the equations blow up, causality breaks down, time and space switch roles, nothing makes sense.

open.substack.com/pub/michaelc...

On Jan. 5th, 2020, Daniel Rodriguez texted his friends, "There will be blood." On Jan 6th, at the Capitol, he shocked a cop repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury found him guilty. Sentenced to 12 years. Trump just let Rodriguez go free. (Hat tip: @davidlitt)

Donald Trump just pardoned them. This is a clear signal that he views the rule of law with contempt and plans to pardon future acts of violence on his behalf.

We D.C. residents remember January 6th all too well. Remember this day. And remember the convicted felon who let the perpetrators go. (3/3)

The damage cost $2.7 million to repair. For months afterward, the Capitol was surrounded by fences topped with razor wire.

The ringleaders were tried in a court of law, found guilty by a jury, and given sentences in the neighborhood of 20 years. That's how serious their crimes were. (2/3)

Capitol police officers looking through a shattered window.

Republican thugs fighting with Capitol police to breach the barriers.

Let's just revisit the truth of January 6th, shall we?

This was not a peaceful political protest. This was a planned, coordinated, violent onslaught by Republican thugs.

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards testified afterward, "I was slipping in people's blood." (1/3)

The point is that if the Authors Guild succeeds in litigating and/or making a deal with AI, you can then refuse to have your work used in future AI models, or opt for compensation.

Your other options are to (a) just keep complaining on the Internet or (b) sue the corporations yourself.

I strongly disagree. When a client of mine wouldn't pay, the Authors Guild stepped in and successfully pressured him. They've reviewed my contracts and made good suggestions. Their Model Trade Contract is a superb resource. They've consistently litigated to protect authors' rights.

You can affirm that, too. The site spells it all out.

The AI Rights licensing platform for creators - Created by Humans Take control of your works' AI Rights and get compensated for their use by AI companies.

PSA for my author friends.

Check out CreatedByHumans.ai, a project to get AI companies to pay authors when LLMs ingest their books as training data.

They've partnered with the Authors Guild, which gives them a ton of credibility in my eyes. The AG exists to protect the rights of writers.

In lieu of flowers, send pizzas to his funeral. #pizzagate

On a scale of 1 to 10, how corrupt does this sound?

"Alito spoke with Trump not long before Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to delay his sentencing following his conviction in New York in a case arising from hush money payments."

🚨🚨🚨🚨HOMEWORK🚨🚨🚨🚨
I think the Jack Smith draft report is finished. Write to Merrick Garland and ask him to release the Jack Smith report. You can do it here. Select “Messages to the Attorney General” from the drop down menu www.justice.gov/doj/webform/...

I’m really looking forward to the big snowstorm in D.C. Supposed to be 6-12 inches. I love the quiet and the white, and the feeling of staying in while the world takes a pause.

Hi there RFK. I was born 5 years before the rubella vaccine in 1969. Cost: $10 per dose in 2024 dollars.

Cost of 2 cochlear implants: $100,000.

Plus 50 years of hearing aids + batteries, cochlear implant spare parts, and audiologist visits.

Not getting a vaccine can be pretty damn expensive.

Artists do need to protect their creative time. But for me, much of the satisfaction of writing is its entree into a community of ideas. Part of my "true purpose" is being in conversation with readers and writers, and that means juries, book tours, speaking gigs--all of which I love doing.

Looking to interview creative writers--poets, novelists, etc.--who use ChatGPT or other LLMs to aid their creative process. Not for text production (they're terrible at that) but for brainstorming, idea generation, and other high-level uses. Hit me up.

I was born in 1964, just before the rubella vaccine became available. My mother got rubella while she was pregnant with me, so I was born deaf. I've done very well with hearing aids and then cochlear implants, but it has not been easy. One short illness = lifelong consequences.

But gradually, through persistence and grit, everyone, including the aliens, learns to understand each other. It's an optimistic story of communication against all odds.

Now that it’s done, I’m about to look for a fiction agent. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck! (6/end)

The whole plot turns on misunderstandings. The team misunderstands the alien language in ways that nearly kill them. The team leader falls in love with the linguist--and they misunderstand each other too. (5/x)

As a deaf person I'm keenly interested in communication and (just as importantly) failures of communication. Misunderstandings are a big part of the plot. I wanted to represent the protagonist's experience as a cochlear implant user realistically on the page--including his misunderstandings. (4/x)

The worldbuilding was tough: how does an intelligent social insect colony pick up a hammer?

I've been a nonfiction writer all my life, so I also had to tackle an even tougher challenge: how to build a plot and write plausible characters—including a sapient social insect colony. (3/x)

The team consists of an entomologist, a linguist, a physicist, and a neuroscientist. Eventually the neuroscientist becomes convinced that humanity will never accept coexistence with sapient insect colonies. He begins sabotaging the team’s work. (2/x)

At last, the finished manuscript of my novel!

It’s about a deaf grad student in entomology who asks how to stop a rogue ant colony that is ravaging Earth. The answer is, “Ask it to stop.”

He recruits 3 other grad students and they travel to a high-gravity planet to learn an alien language. (1/x)