Latest News

Dead-Eyed Drifter in Audio, Brief Update

For readers who prefer to listen to my books in audio, good news: the third Karen Pantelli book, Dead-Eyed Drifter is now available for download at both Audible and iTunes.

A big thanks to Cathy Crosman, who did an excellent job narrating this book. While it’s never ideal changing narrators in the middle of a series, Cathy made the switch as seamless as possible (while bringing her own wonderful rendition life).

Just a quick update, since it’s been a few months. The ninth Garrison Gage book is currently with the copy editor, slated to be published in June. Be looking for an email from me (assuming you’ve signed up for my New Release Newsletter, which I hope you have!) By the way, my copy editor is the excellent Michael J. Totten, who is not only a prize-winning writer in his own right, but one of the very best editors at all levels one can get. I can’t recommend him enough. He’s getting in such high demand, however, that it might be difficult to hire him before too long!

I’ve been in a productive grove lately. Some of this stems from staying off-line until the evening most days, but a lot of it is just being more focused and efficient, channeling my energy into what yields me the best returns. I like to split my productive time 70/30 between the writing and cartooning, with the writing getting the bulk of my efforts, and I’ve been edging closer to that ideal. The Run of the House cartoon strip is a completely different ball of wax from my fiction, especially my crime fiction, but doing it provides me with a nice change of pace. One of my fans described the strip as “frequently funny, often profound, and sometimes just plain weird,” which I thought was the best summation of my quirky sense of humor I’d ever heard! And a good tagline!

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A Cold and Shallow Shore Available in Audio

Good news for fans of my Garrison Gage series who prefer audio books: A Cold and Shallow Shore is now available for digital download on both Audible and iTunes.

This one took a little longer to get produced, and for sad reasons, I’m afraid. The excellent narrator for the first seven books, Steven Roy Grimsley, passed away, and I flailed around for a bit until I decided what to do. The good news is that the new narrator, Jarrod Taylor, is awesome! It’s different, of course. Instead of trying to get a voice that was as similar to Grimsley as I could get, I opted instead for someone who had a strong interpretation even if it was different. I’m quite pleased with the result.

Speaking of Gage, I’m working on the ninth book now. Don’t have a date yet. Hopefully it won’t be too long.

Why I Won’t Use A.I. to Write

Just in case any of my readers were wondering, no, I won’t be using artificial intelligence to write, create cartoons, or really, to do anything creative. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that, and I thought this post could serve as my general statement on the matter. I’ve done enough reading about how these LLM (large language model) tools work (pattern recognition on a massive, massive scale), as well playing around with ChatGPT, Bard, Dall-E, and some of the others to appreciate their possible uses, but for me … it’s a big fat nope.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t use them the way I occasionally use a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or the Chicago Manual of Style (and they’re a long ways away from being accurate or trustworthy enough to be useful even in that regard), but I won’t be using them to create. You see, it wouldn’t be me, and the point of fiction, cartoons, or any art or entertainment is to communicate a voice and a point of view. As Stephen King has said on more than one occasion, writing is a form of telepathy, a way of transmitting my thoughts and emotions to you.

What would be the point of using an A.I. to do that?

I think some people are fooled by these things just as there are people who are fooled by master illusionists. If anything, they’ve proven how far from A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence) we really are. They don’t know anything. It’s very doubtful they’ll ever develop a theory of mind. They’re just stochastic parrots, regurgitating patterns to please you. And while I don’t quite agree with Noam Chomsky that they essentially amount to high-tech plagiarism, I think you can definitely make a convincing argument that’s the case. Sure, humans copy and borrow all the time, and almost all art is derivative in some fashion, building on the works of others, but this is something different. I do agree with Chomsky and Gary Marcus that what these LLMs have done is prove just how remarkable the human mind really is.

Right now, most of what they create is just boring, which is no surprise considering how they work. It’s like taking all the ingredients of a delicious beef stew and putting them into a blender. Yes, all the same overall contents may be there, but I can assure you it’s not going to taste nearly as good.

Even if they could do it “better,” however you define “better,” it wouldn’t matter. It still wouldn’t be me. It wouldn’t be my voice, my point of view, and my decisions. What if it made my life easier? That’s another common rejoinder. And to that, I say this: I don’t write because it’s easy. I write because I enjoy it—even when it’s hard, maybe especially when it’s hard—because when it goes well there is a kind of magic that happens, a beautiful transmission from my mind to yours. It can happen across vast distances of time and space. You may be reading this post five minutes after I wrote it in a house just down the street from me me. Or you may be reading it five hundred years from now in your dome on a moon colony around Jupiter. Who knows.

It’s a beautiful thing, when it works. I’m always chasing that outcome. It’s worth the struggle to get better at it.

I suspect most people agree with me on this, which is why I’m not all that worried about losing all of my readers, but I thought it worth stating my opinion on the matter. If I put my name on something, I created it.  Simple as that.

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Run of the House, Now in Full Color

While I love the black and white version of Run of the House, I’ve been been debating about adding color to the strip for a while, and I finally decided to take the plunge. Since I do much of the finishing work with Adobe Photoshop anyway (after scanning in a hand drawn comic), it wasn’t that big of a leap to add color. The above strip is one that was sent out to subscribers a few weeks ago.

Why the change? While I fell in love with black and white comics in the newspapers (you remember what those things are, kids?), those limitations were mostly due to printing cost, and I don’t have those issues for a comic that’s published digitally. Yes, using color will increase my printing costs too down the road, if and when the comic is collected in book form, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I like all the options that using color gives me.

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