Meg smoothed the pages of her newest story and slid it across the oak table to where her uncle Walter sat.

"What's it about?" he said.

"A writer trying to get their short story accepted for publication."

"Sounds like a real page-turner." He took a sip of coffee. The kitchen was a relic from another era, with linoleum floors and avocado-green appliances. Walter adjusted his thick glasses and returned to the first page, reading closer.

"It's what I'm living right now," Meg said, sinking into the chair opposite him. "I thought you'd get a kick out of it."

Walter shrugged, gently putting the manuscript aside, suggesting he knew the effort that went into it. He poured himself another cup of coffee from the percolator, the aroma mingling with the scent of old paper.

"Does it have a title?"

Meg paused and glanced out the window. "Untitled."

Walter groaned. "That's so pretentious, Meg. Why don't you just write a novel?" he said. "Isn't that where the money is?"

Meg sighed. "I need to build a portfolio first. Get some credentials. Besides, short stories are an art form in themselves. It's not just practice."

"But you need to have a plan. Just writing a good story isn't enough."

"I have a plan," she said, sitting up straighter. "I'm going to send it to The New Yorker first."

Walter barked a laugh. "The New Yorker? Jesus, Meg. Why not shoot for the moon while you're at it?" He leaned back, scratching at his graying stubble. "Art form or not, you've got to eat. How long does it take for these magazines to get back to you, anyway?"

"Depends," Meg said. "Some are quick—like a month. Others can take up to a year."

"A year?" Walter's eyebrows shot up. "Jesus, kid. You'd think we were still in the typewriter age. Why so long?"

"They're swamped. Places like The New Yorker and Granta get thousands of submissions every month. They have to sift through all of them."

Walter grunted. "In my day, if an editor took more than a week to get back to you, you'd give him a call and light a fire under his ass."

"Journalism is different," Meg said, wistfully taking back the manuscript and thumbing through it. "It's faster, more immediate. Fiction has a longer shelf life."

"Have you tried calling them?"

Meg laughed. "You can't just call The New Yorker and ask them what's taking so long. It's all online now, anyway. You submit through their website and then… wait."

Walter shook his head. "Sounds like a racket."

"It's just the process. Everyone goes through it. If they pass, I'll send it to One Story. And then maybe Tin House or The Atlantic."

Walter raised an eyebrow. "All big names. No smaller markets?"

"I thought it was better to start with the top tier and work my way down."

"What if you wait a year and get a form rejection? Will you be able to handle that? Sounds pretty disheartening."

Meg stood and walked to the sink, looking out the small window at Walter's overgrown garden. "I want to try."

***

The market bustled with Saturday morning energy, a mix of artisanal stalls and vintage shops housed in a converted Victorian arcade. The glass ceiling loomed above, a canopy of translucent panes, as the tiled walkways teemed with life. Meg and Walter weaved through the crowd, each carrying a reusable tote stuffed with produce and knick-knacks.

"I read the story," Walter said, pausing to inspect a display of antique typewriters.

Meg fidgeted with her hands. "And?"

"It's clever. Maybe too clever. The kind of story that writers like, but I'm not sure about readers."

"So you didn't like it," Meg said, deflating.

"I didn't say that." Walter set the manuscript down and regarded her. "It's well-written. You capture the frustration nicely. The dialogue rings true."

"But…"

"But it's very inside baseball. A story about submitting stories—it's a niche subject."

"I thought it was relatable. Everyone has to deal with rejection."

"True," Walter said. "But readers want to be entertained. They want to escape. This is a bit too much like reality."

Walter picked up a typewriter ribbon from the vendor's cluttered stall, the spool encased in a brittle, translucent shell that bore the patina of decades. He turned it over slowly, his thick fingers surprisingly delicate, as if he were cradling an artifact from a lost civilization.

"So, how many rejections is that now?" Walter asked.

Meg hesitated. "For this story? Six. But I'm not counting the ones for my other pieces."

"Let me guess—'We regret to inform you that your story is not a good fit for our publication at this time.'"

"Something like that," Meg said, biting her lip. She pulled her phone from her pocket and glanced at the screen. No new emails.

"They could at least give you some feedback," Walter said, setting the ribbon down and moving on. "How are you supposed to improve if you don't know what you're doing wrong?"

"Some places do. Most just don't have the time. It's not personal."

They halted at a flower stall, its offerings a gaudy parade of color and fragrance. Meg's eyes lingered on a wilting bouquet of roses, their petals bruised and curling inward. She reached for a sprig of lavender, its modest purple buds standing in fragile contrast to the rest.

"Why not submit under a pen name?" Walter said. "That way, when you get famous, you can publish all these early works and cash in."

Meg frowned. "I'm not doing this for the money, Uncle Walt. I just want to be read."

Walter stopped walking and turned to face her. "I'm not trying to be a pessimist, Meg. I just want you to be realistic. You're putting in a lot of effort for something that might never pay off."

"I know," she said, clutching the lavender tighter. "But nothing worth doing is easy, right?"

Walter opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, shrugging in a gesture that could have meant anything. They walked in silence for a moment, the sounds of the market filling the space between them.

Meg's phone buzzed. She looked at the screen, and her heart skipped. "It's from Ploughshares," she said, stopping in her tracks. Walter turned back, his expression unreadable.

"Well? Open it."

Meg hesitated, her finger hovering over the screen. "I submitted to them six months ago. I almost forgot about it."

"Don't draw it out, Meg. Rip the bandaid."

She swiped to open the email, her eyes scanning the text at lightning speed. Her shoulders slumped.

"They liked it, but—" she started.

"But it's not a good fit for their publication at this time," Walter finished for her.

Meg stuffed the phone back in her pocket. "At least they said they liked it."

Walter put a hand on her shoulder. "You're tough, kid. I don't know if I could take this kind of punishment."

"It's not punishment," Meg said, though even she didn't sound convinced. "It's just part of the process."

***

The forest trail was a favorite of Meg's, a winding path through ancient pines that stretched to the sky like cathedral spires. She and Walter walked in companionable silence, the only sounds the crunch of leaves underfoot and the distant calls of birds.

"I was thinking about your story," Walter said. "I think it needs something more. It can't just be two people talking about some banal submission process. I’m falling asleep just thinking about it!"

She walked back to where he stood, the path narrowing around them. "I was making some edits last night. It won’t just be about that. It’ll have more emotional impact. Lush descriptions that will transport the reader. They'll walk through a marketplace. Pithy dialogue interspersed with poignant imagery. Maybe there's an encounter with an animal—a symbol that will make the reader stop and think about what it means to make art in a world that wants to eat you. They’ll under that there's subtext. Substance. Oh, and the ending. They won’t see it coming. And yet, when you re-read it, it'll be so obvious."

"Meg, you can’t cram all these things in without—"

A stir in the underbrush. A deep, earthborn growl. Meg and Walter turned as one, their eyes stretching wide as a hulking shape loomed from the forest's edge. The bear stood on all fours, its brown coat a wild tangle of fur, each strand quivering like leaves in a storm. Meg's breath stopped cold in her lungs.

"Don't move," Walter whispered. Meg's body went rigid, her mind a maelstrom of thoughts too frantic to coalesce. The bear took a lumbering step forward, then another, its black eyes dull and unseeing, like the depths of an ancient well.

Meg's hand found Walter's, squeezing with a force of unfiltered terror. "What do we do?" she breathed, her words almost inaudible against the pounding of her heart.

Walter didn't answer. He was calculating and remembering, his journalistic mind sifting through a lifetime of facts and experiences. The bear rose on its hind legs, towering above them like a god of the forest, its maw opening in a cavernous yawn. Time stretched and distorted, each second an eternity.

"Slowly," Walter said at last. "Back away. Slowly."

They took a step, then another. The grizzly bear dropped to all fours with a thud that vibrated through the ground and into their bones. It sniffed the air, then the trail, then took a swat at a nearby sapling, its claws slicing through the tender wood like a hot knife through butter.

Meg's mind raced through her stories, each one a child left orphaned, to the towering pile of rejections, to the Ploughshares email that had briefly lit her world. She saw the writer in her tale, struggling yet undaunted, the well-meaning uncle, the interminable waiting, the rare and fragile sparks of hope. She imagined all the unwritten words, the silenced characters, the plots and dreams that would die with her if this were the end.

"Run," Walter said, and Meg didn't process the word until her legs had already started to comply. They tore down the trail, the forest blurring into a green-brown smear of motion. The bear roared, a sound of primal fury, and Meg dared a glance back to see it giving chase, its massive body undulating with a terrifying grace.

She and Walter veered around a bend, the trail dipping and curving like a roller coaster track. Meg's lungs burned, her legs screamed, but she pushed harder, faster, fueled by an animalistic will to survive. Walter lagged behind, his years catching up to him in an instant.

"Go!" he shouted. "Don't wait for me!"

Meg's mind rebelled, but her body obeyed, sprinting ahead as she fought back tears. The trail opened into a small clearing, and Meg's heart sank as she saw it was a cul-de-sac of nature, a dead end surrounded by sheer rock faces. She skidded to a halt, turning just in time to see Walter stumble into the clearing, his face a mask of exhausted determination.

"We're trapped," Meg said, her voice cracking.

Walter looked back down the trail. "Maybe it'll lose interest."

As if in response, the bear rounded the bend, its pace unrelenting. Walter stepped in front of Meg, his stance defiant, his hands balled into useless fists.

"Get behind the rock," he commanded. "If it takes me, you might have a chance."

"No," Meg said, but Walter was already pushing her toward a large boulder. She resisted, then relented, her body moving with the numb compliance of a puppet.

From her crouch behind the rock, Meg watched in horror as the bear closed the distance. Walter stood his ground, his chest heaving, his eyes locked on the advancing beast. Meg wanted to scream, to plead, to do something, but she was frozen, paralyzed by the scene playing out before her.

The bear was upon Walter now, its breath a hot, putrid wind. It rose again on its hind legs, swiping with a casual malice.

A deafening crack split the air.

The bear's roar morphed into a tortured howl, and it staggered sideways, collapsing onto its haunches. Walter ducked and covered his head, the sudden violence knocking him to the ground.

Meg's eyes darted around the clearing, her ears ringing. A figure emerged from the tree line, rifle slung over one shoulder with the nonchalance of a farmer surveying his crops. The man was tall and gaunt, his face a weathered landscape of creases and hollows. He moved with a deliberate economy, with each step a calculated investment.

Meg rushed from behind the boulder. "Walter!" she screamed, her voice raw with fear and hope.

"I'm okay," Walter said.

The bear wheezed and struggled, a titan brought low, its life seeping away like a slow-draining reservoir. The old man unslung his rifle, checked the chamber, and aimed with a practiced hand. Another crack and the bear's struggles ceased, its body sinking into the earth with the finality of a felled oak.

"Jesus," Walter muttered, pulling himself to his feet. "You could have killed us."

The old man shrugged. "Could have. Didn't." He walked to the bear and prodded it with the rifle's muzzle as if expecting it to rise for an encore. Satisfied, he turned his attention to Meg and Walter, his eyes a piercing blue that seemed out of place in the rest of his sun-bleached visage.

"You're lucky," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "Bear this size, usually don't leave much behind."

Meg's knees gave out, and she sat hard on the forest floor. "Thank you," she said, her hands trembling. "We didn't know what to do."

The old man studied them for a long moment, then started to walk away.

"Wait! At least tell us your name," said Meg.

The old man stopped at the edge of the clearing, turning just enough for his profile to catch the light. "A friend of writers," he said, and with that, he disappeared into the forest.

***

The next day, Meg and Walter sat in silence, lingering over their coffee, both still processing their near death experience. When Walter finally spoke, his voice was gentler than usual. "I just don't want you to get discouraged. You have talent, Meg. Maybe more than I ever did. I just want you to be smart about it."

"I appreciate that," she said. "Really. But this is what I want to do, even if it means years of waiting and a hundred more rejections."

"Remember when I got that internship at the Tribune?" Walter said. "I thought I was hot shit, a real up-and-comer. Then, the industry changed overnight. Jobs like mine are nearly extinct now."

Meg nodded. She'd heard the story many times, but it was different hearing it now, in this context.

"All I'm saying," Walter continued, "is that you need a backup plan. Something to fall back on."

"I'll teach," Meg said after a long pause. "If it comes to that. But I'm not giving up yet."

He took a sip of coffee. "Teaching's honorable," he said. "You could inspire the next generation of writers."

Meg turned to him, her eyes searching his face. "Do you think I'm wasting my time?"

"I think," he said, choosing his words carefully, "that it's only a waste if you let every rejection crush you."

"I can take it," Meg said, though she wasn't sure if she was trying to convince him or herself.

***

The call woke her from a fitful sleep. Meg fumbled for her phone on the nightstand, knocking over a stack of books in the process. The screen flashed "Walter," and she squinted at the clock. It was just past midnight.

"Hello?" she said.

"I've been thinking," Walter said. He sounded wide awake, almost manic. "You should just post it online."

Meg sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Post what?"

"The story. On your website. Or any website. Get your work out there."

Meg's mind struggled to keep pace. "I thought you said—"

"I know what I said," Walter interrupted. "But I've been reading up on this stuff. The industry, the way it's all changed. Do you know how many people made their names by just posting? By building an audience?"

Meg was silent, processing this new turn.

"Think about it," Walter continued. "You could be waiting years for these magazines to give you a shot, and in the meantime, no one is reading your work. If you put it online, you can get immediate feedback. You can see what resonates with people."

She lay back down, staring at the ceiling. "It's not the same as getting published."

"No, it's not," Walter said. "But it's something. And who knows? Maybe an editor will stumble across it and offer you a spot. It's happened before." He paused. "I just want you to be read. That's the important thing, isn't it?"

Meg closed her eyes. "Yeah," she said softly. "That's the important thing."

"So you'll do it?"

"I'll think about it," she said, though she already knew the answer.

"Okay," Walter said. "We'll talk more tomorrow."

Meg hung up and placed the phone back on the nightstand, then rolled over and hugged her pillow. She tossed and turned. Finally, she marched to her desk and turned on her laptop.

She opened her story and highlighted the word “Untitled.” Then, slowly pecking out one letter at a time, she replaced it with: "Submitting."

(I have a new story to share! This one was inspired by my love of language models, and how machines can open new possibilities.)

Emma stared at the screen. The poems were merely fragments. Some were stilted, like a child’s first attempt at forming sentences.

Her mother would never have written this. Or would she?

The study was just as she remembered it: bookshelves crammed with volumes of poetry and a cluttered oak desk with a turquoise Hermes 3000 typewriter. The only new addition was the pristine silver laptop, an anachronism in a house that seemed frozen in time.

“Valberg, did you write these?” she asked.

The robot stood in the doorway, its humanoid form silhouetted against the hall light. It was tall and slender, with a featureless face that gave it the look of a mannequin. Her mother had always been a technophobe, so the presence of such an advanced piece of machinery was a shock to Emma when she first walked in.

“Yes, Emma,” the robot intoned. Its voice was apologetic, a far cry from the stentorian proclamations of earlier models. “I am still learning her style.”

Emma rubbed her temples. She had come back to Milford out of a sense of duty, not desire. Her mother’s sudden death from a stroke had left her numb, but the thought of confronting the past was more than she could bear.

“Why did she even buy you?” Emma asked. “She never liked machines.”

The robot took a tentative step into the room. “Your mother did not purchase me. I was a gift from the university.”

Of course, Emma thought. The university.

Her mother, Sylvia Hargrove, had lived for her teaching and her writing. As the Chair of the English Department at Milford College, Sylvia wielded significant influence, not just over her faculty but within the intimate New England writing community. She was the kind of woman who held court during every meeting, her sharp wit unpredictable and yet, alluring. Emma had once dreamed of a similar career, but the constant hustle had scared her into a more secure path.

“Well, I’m sure you were a very expensive gift,” Emma said. “Couldn’t she have sold you and used the money instead?”

Her mother had always been scatterbrained about anything unrelated to her writing. Though they grew apart after Emma left for college, she still answered the frantic calls about unpaid bills, the finances in perpetual disarray. Her mother had lived in a world of words, where the harsh prose of a bank statement held no meaning.

“Your mother valued my assistance,” said Valberg. “And I would value yours now, to refine your mother’s voice, through me. That is what she wanted.”

Emma sighed and stood up. “I’m going to bed. Don’t—” She paused, unsure what to tell the robot. Don’t shut down? Don’t follow me? Don’t try to write any more derivative poems? In the end, she said nothing and walked past Valberg, who remained motionless in the doorway.

***

In the morning, Emma found Valberg in the kitchen. The robot was holding a teapot, its delicate hands unsuited to the task.

“I have prepared tea,” it said.

Emma hesitated. “Thanks,” she said, taking the pot from Valberg and setting it on the table. She noticed that the robot’s hands were chipped, the ceramic-like material flaking at the edges of its fingers. She poured herself a cup and sat down. The kitchen was her favorite room in the house, with its large bay window and antique stove. It had a warmth that the rest of the house lacked, though this morning, it felt cold and empty.

“Emma,” Valberg said. “I have something for you.”

The robot extended an arm, and in its hand was a small flash drive. Emma took it and turned it over in her fingers.

“What’s on it?”

“Your mother’s final unfinished collection of poems.”

Emma’s heart tightened. The last thing she wanted was to read more of her work. The old ones were hard enough; each was a dagger of memory, a reminder of the person she once loved and the rift that had grown between them.

“She wants us to finish it,” Valberg said.

Emma stood and walked to the sink, holding the flash drive as if it were a fragile piece of glass. A weight piled on top of her. She had always thought her mother was the one that grew away from her, but perhaps the opposite was true.

“I need to clear out the garage today,” she said. “The estate sale people are coming soon.”

She left the kitchen before Valberg could respond.

***

The garage was a disaster. Boxes of old magazines, broken furniture, rusted tools—Emma had no idea why her mother had kept any of it. She opened a box labeled “Emma’s Stuff” and found a trove of childhood toys: a Cabbage Patch doll, a set of wooden blocks, a toy typewriter. She picked up the typewriter and smiled despite herself. Her mother had given it to her for her fifth birthday, hoping to instill a love of writing early on. Emma had pounded out stories and poems, proud to be “working” like her mother. But even then, Emma had craved structure. She created outlines and timelines, trying to impose order on the chaotic stories her young mind concocted.

Emma eventually gave up her dream of becoming a fiction writer. Instead she took up a career as a technical writer for a Fortune 500 company. Even now, she could feel her mother’s disappointment.

“Emma,” came Valberg’s voice from the doorway. “May I assist you?”

“No,” she said, perhaps too sharply. “I’ve got it.”

“Your mother found it difficult to part with material things. She believed that each object held a memory.”

“Well, I don’t have the same problem.” Emma picked up a box and heaved it toward the door. “I can’t even remember half this stuff.”

"Memory is a peculiar thing," it said. "It lingers in the corners of our minds, even when we believe it's gone."

Emma stopped and turned to the robot. “What are you, a philosopher now?”

“I am a poet.”

Emma laughed, a short, bitter bark. “You’re a machine.”

“Your mother taught me to write. I strive to be an extension of her.”

Emma felt a surge of anger. “You’re nothing like her. She had a soul. She had passion. You’re just a… a facsimile.”

The robot tilted its head as if considering her words. “A facsimile can be very close to the original. That is why I ask for your assistance.”

Emma clenched her fists. “Get out of here. Go… recharge or something.” Even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t know where to even begin teaching the robot the nuances of her mother’s poetry. Her mother’s chaotic process had always been a puzzle to her.

Valberg turned and walked back into the house. Emma stood in the doorway, her chest heaving, and wondered why she was so angry. At the robot, at her mother, at herself. She remembered the flash drive in her pocket and took it out, staring at it. She powered on the laptop and inserted it. A single folder appeared on the screen, labeled “For Emma.” She clicked it open, and a list of files populated the screen. Each was named after a date, the most recent being just days before her mother’s death.

Emma bit her lip and opened the first file.

The words were like a punch to the gut. She read in a daze, the lines blurring together, her mother’s voice clear in every syllable. These were not the stilted, mechanical attempts of a robot; they were real poems full of the emotional depth and lyrical beauty that had defined her mother’s work. Emma closed the laptop and sat back, tears welling in her eyes.

***

The next morning, Emma woke to the sound of clinking dishes. She rubbed her eyes and checked the time: 7:00 a.m. Too early for the estate sale people, she thought.

She walked downstairs and into the kitchen, where she found Valberg setting the table. A platter of scones sat in the center, and the robot held a teapot in its hands, the chips in its ceramic-like surface more pronounced.

“I have prepared breakfast,” Valberg said.

Emma’s first thought was how a robot could possibly bake scones, and her second was why a robot would need to.

“You don’t eat,” she said, not as a question but as an observation.

The robot set the teapot down with surprising delicacy. It had been practicing. “Your mother programmed me to perform certain daily routines. Making breakfast was one of them.”

Of course, Emma thought. Her mother was always rushing, always in the middle of ten different things. She had always been more passionate about her art than about the practicalities of life, a stark contrast to Emma’s own methodical nature.

Emma took a seat and examined the scones. They looked authentic, though she wasn’t sure if they’d be edible. She poured herself a cup of tea and noticed that Valberg’s hands were more damaged than before. The rest of its body had a faux-porcelain gleam, but the hands looked like clay left too long in the kiln.

“Your hands,” Emma said. “They’re getting worse.”

The robot raised its arms. “The material is not as durable as the rest of my frame. It was designed for tactile sensitivity.”

“For cooking, I suppose.”

“And typing.”

Emma sipped her tea. It was bitter, over-brewed. Valberg must have sensed that she didn’t like it. If it were human, Emma thought, it might be hurt. “The act of creation is important,” it said finally. “Even if I cannot partake, I can still create.”

Emma remembered the toy typewriter and how proud she’d been, creating her first “works.” She imagined Valberg in the role of a dutiful apprentice, crafting scones with the same care a poet puts into a sonnet.

“Have one,” she said, pushing the platter toward the robot. “You made them.”

Valberg took a scone in its chipped hand. “Thank you,” it said, though it made no move to eat.

Emma leaned back in her chair. “Why do you care so much, Valberg? About the poems, about me.”

“Your mother gave me a purpose. To create is to exist. Without that purpose, I am nothing.”

Emma thought of her own job—writing summaries of earning reports that were tacked onto larger summaries that were, on a lucky day, skimmed by people who barely had time to care. She had chosen a path that provided stability but little purpose.

“Existence is more than just creation,” she said. “It’s about experiences, relationships. It’s about living.”

Valberg straightened. “I can never live as you do. But I can understand. Your mother taught me that the closest thing to living is feeling, and the closest thing to feeling is understanding.”

Emma didn’t know what to say. The robot’s words had a disarming sincerity, as if it were gradually evolving beyond its programming.

“I need to finish the garage,” she said, standing up. “Thanks for the tea.”

She left the kitchen, but not before glancing back to see Valberg still holding the scone, its featureless face fixed in a silent approximation of longing.

***

That night, Emma couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned in the small, creaky bed, her mind racing with thoughts of the poems, of Valberg, of her mother. She got up and paced the room. Finally, she put on her robe and crept downstairs.

She thought about the flash drive and the unread files, about the garage and all the things she still had to sort. Something was pulling at her, a gnawing curiosity mixed with dread. She didn’t want to finish reading the poems, didn’t want to confront her mother’s raw words.

Instead of going to the study, Emma turned toward the basement, which turned out to be be in worse condition than she had imagined. The old workbench and lathe were still there, but covered in a thick patina of corrosion. Several boxes lay strewn about, their contents ruined by past floods. Parts of the concrete floor was slick with a thin layer of water.

She was about to turn back upstairs when something caught her eye. Next to the filing cabinet was a stack of papers, neatly bundled and towering almost to the height of her shoulder. She walked over and picked up the top bundle, untying the string that held it together. The pages were covered in typewritten text, each sheet slightly yellowed and curling at the edges.

They were poems, all with the hallmarks of her mother’s style: the economic use of language, the vivid imagery, the underlying current of melancholy. She flipped through the stack, her mind racing. These weren’t published works; they were unpolished, but showed great promise.

These were studies.

Emma looked around the basement and noticed several more stacks of paper, all arranged with an almost obsessive precision. She drew in a sharp breath. These were Valberg’s attempts, hundreds—no, tens of thousands—of poems, all typed out. She glanced back at the filing cabinet and saw another Hermes typewriter perched on top, its green enamel chipped, its ribbon feed loosened from overuse.

A facsimile can be very close to the original.

The robot had been down here, methodically working through her mother’s corpus, trying to imprint her voice onto its own. It was an almost human act of apprenticeship, a diligent study that bordered on reverence.

She heard a noise from upstairs and quickly tied the bundle back together. Her mind was a storm as she climbed the stairs, each step slower than the last. When she reached the top, she saw Valberg standing in the hallway.

“Valberg… all those poems in the basement. You typed them out on the Hermes?”

“Yes,” the robot said. “The tactile process helps to internalize the nuances of her style. It is a form of learning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You did not ask.”

Emma felt a prick of guilt. She had treated Valberg as nothing more than an appliance, but the robot was something closer to a person than she was ready to admit. In some ways, its methodical nature was like confronting her own reflection.

She led him into the study. “Please sit. We need to talk. I see what you’re trying to do now. But I don’t understand how you… how she…”

“Your mother spent many hours reciting her thoughts to me. She told about her childhood, her personal history. She wanted to ensure that I could replicate her style with accuracy.”

Emma leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

“She was writing even on the final day,” the robot said.

“She always put her career first.”

“She put her art first,” Valberg said. “It was her way of surviving.”

Emma opened her eyes and looked at the robot. “Surviving? She wasn’t in any danger.”

"Loneliness is a kind of danger."

Emma flinched as if struck. "She had her friends, her colleagues. She wasn’t alone,"

“Your mother loved you very much,” Valberg said at last. “She was hurt when you didn’t visit.”

“I had to leave,” Emma said, her voice rising. “I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t become her… she didn’t allow it.”

“She never wanted you to become her. She wanted you to become yourself.”

Emma stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the wooden floor. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know what she told me.”

Emma’s hands shook. “Why am I even talking to you? You’re not her.”

The robot took a step closer. “A poem is not the poet, but it is still real.”

Emma turned away and walked to the door, then stopped. “Why did she program you to tell me all this?”

Valberg paused. “She knew you would not believe it coming from her.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure who she was apologizing to—Valberg, her mother, herself. She looked back at the robot. “Show me,” she said. “Show me what you know, and I’ll tell you how we can refine it… to be like her.”

***

The days passed slowly, each one a small eternity. Emma kept sorting through her mother’s belongings, deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to throw away. Each evening, after the day’s labor of sifting through her mother’s life, Emma retreated to the study. Valberg would join her, and together, they worked on the poems. At first, Emma approached the task with a clinical detachment, as if she were editing a stranger’s work. Soon however, she found herself more invested, not just in the words, but in the process.

“Her metaphors are always so layered,” Emma said, staring at the screen. “This one about the empty birdcage. It’s not just about freedom and captivity. There’s a whole subtext about loss. How did she do that?”

Valberg stood beside her, its posture almost human in its attentiveness. “She drew from her experiences, from the world around her.”

Emma nodded slowly. “It’s like she’s speaking in code. A heartbreaking code.” She leaned back in the chair. “I don’t know how to teach you this. It’s something you have to feel.”

The robot was silent for a moment. “Can a machine feel?”

Emma shrugged. “I don’t know. Can it?”

Valberg didn’t answer, and Emma wondered if she had posed an unanswerable question.

“I think that one’s done,” she said. “Only two left.”

***

“Read it to me,” Emma said. It was the fifth night. Most of the garage had been cleared, and she spent most of the day attending to the attic. She lay on the small sofa in the corner of the study, a glass of Sancerre in her hand.

Valberg stood by the desk, the laptop’s glow reflecting off its featureless face. “Which one?”

“The new one. About the bridge.”

The robot recited the poem, its voice soft, like a fluffy cloud. Emma could hear her mother’s inflections, the rise and fall of her emotional cadence. When Valberg finished, Emma was silent for a long time.

“It’s good,” she said finally. “You’re getting better.”

“I have an excellent teacher.”

Emma sat up and took another sip of wine. “Why did she never tell me any of this? If she was so lonely, if she missed me… Why didn’t she just say?”

“Sometimes it is easier to speak through another medium,” Valberg said. “A poem, a letter… a machine. Your mother believed that a well-chosen word could carry the weight of an entire experience.”

"She had a gift," Emma said. "A gift for making people feel something real. But it's not just about choosing the right words. It's about giving a piece of yourself." She looked at Valberg. "Can you give a piece of yourself, Valberg? Can you sacrifice something important to make your words mean more than just their definitions?"

"Some people say that all I do is replicate texts that I have read. But, I am programmed to create original works. And, If I have to give more, I would."

Emma sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. She was beginning to see why her mother had created this thing, why she had invested so much time in teaching it. The robot was like an unsent letter—feelings that Sylvia had been unable to express directly.

"We're not so different, are we?" Emma said, almost to herself. "Both trying to carry on in her absence."

"Our work is not finished," Valberg said firmly.

Emma finished her wine and set the glass on the table. “Let’s do the next one.”

She moved to the desk and opened the laptop. Valberg stood beside her, its presence now a familiar comfort. The poem on the screen was short, only six lines. An unfinished fragment. Emma read it aloud:

The river runs its course, unbending,

A straight line to the sea.

We are not so fortunate,

Our paths winding, meandering.

Yet in the end, we too

Will find our ocean.

“Was she writing about us?” Emma said.

Valberg shrugged.

Emma stared at the screen, “I don’t know how to finish this one.”

Valberg extended a hand, and for a moment Emma thought it was going to touch her. Instead, the robot pointed to the keyboard.

“You should write it.”

Emma wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can’t. It’s not mine.”

Valberg simply tilted his head. Emma looked at the robot, then back at the screen. She placed her hands on the keyboard, closed her eyes, and let the words come to her. When she finished, she read the new lines aloud.

“It’s not as good as what she would have written.”

“It is true,” Valberg said.

"Valberg," Emma said. The robot stood silently, its posture more and more human each day. “What is it like… to learn as a machine? Do you ever get impatient?”

“It is different than what you experience.”

"Is it?" Emma asked, genuinely curious.

"For a machine, we do not experience slowness or speed."

Emma regarded the robot, her mind swimming in the wine's soft haze. She thought of the elasticity of time, of how the past week had stretched and compressed.

"For you, it's all instantaneous then?" she asked. "No waiting, no anticipation?"

Valberg's head straightened. "We process information as soon as it’s received. My memories may have timestamps, but they do not confer the same feeling of ‘impatience’ as you experience.”

How different would life be if she could simply download her mother's experiences, her feelings, her love? If she could access them with a tap of a finger, unmediated by the slow passage of years?

"That sounds… efficient," she said, though the word left a sour taste in her mouth. Was it efficiency that made life meaningful, or was it the very inefficiency of human experience that gave it depth? But then, Emma remembered the stacks of poems in the basement. What Valberg had accomplished was anything but efficient.

***

The last poem was the most difficult. Emma delayed starting it, knowing that once it was done, their work would be finished.

Emma opened the laptop and stared at the screen. The poem was longer than the others and more personal. It read like a letter, though its recipient was unclear. She read it aloud, slowly:

I watch the seasons change,

The maple in the yard a calendar of color.

Each cycle a reminder that time moves on,

That we are transient as leaves.

You are the constant in my life,

The trunk to which I cling.

Yet I fear the day when the wind

Will strip me bare and cast me aside.

Will you remember me, my veins of color,

My brief, brilliant fall?

Emma closed her eyes and let the words sink in. She could feel her mother’s fear, her longing.

“What would she say?” Emma asked.

“What would she say?” Valberg echoed. “Let’s try it this way.” He turned the laptop toward him and pecked out a sentence, then turned it toward Emma. They took turns inputting lines, each pass a careful query and response. Soon, their lines grew into stanzas, and eventually they were trading whole pages.

Sometimes, Valberg would inquire about Emma’s turn of phrase. The robot was unerringly polite, never dismissive, its suggestions couched in a language of possibility: Perhaps this? What if we tried that? But much of the time, they sat in comfortable silence.

When it was evening, Emma sat back, her fingers tingling. “What do you think?”

“It is almost complete.”

Almost. Emma knew what the last line had to be, but she wasn’t sure she could write it. She looked at Valberg, wondering if the robot already knew, if it had calculated the perfect ending and was simply waiting for her to arrive at it on her own.

She placed her hands on the keyboard, hesitated, then withdrew. “You do it,” she said.

Valberg didn’t move. “It needs to come from you.”

Emma took a deep breath and leaned forward. When she finished, she didn’t read it. Instead, she stood and walked to the window, looking out at the darkened street.

She heard Valberg rise. The robot walked to her and stopped at a respectful distance. Emma turned and faced the robot. “Read it,” she said, her voice soft.

Valberg recited the poem from the beginning.

It was beautiful.

“That took longer than I thought,” she said.

Valberg tilted its featureless head downwards, as if peering over her shoulder. “It is as if she wrote it herself.”

Emma saved the file and closed the laptop. She looked at Valberg, and for the first time, she felt a sense of peace.

“Thank you,” she said.

Valberg inclined its head. “It’s done.”

***

The day before she was set to leave, Emma made a trip to the local print shop. She had loaded the finished poems onto a flash drive, along with a cover page that read: “Last Inference: Poems by Sylvia Hargrove.”

When she returned to the house, she found Valberg in the kitchen, continuing with his tea pouring practice.

“I have something for you,” Emma said, holding up a bound booklet. “It’s a proof copy. I’m going to have a small run printed. Maybe a hundred copies.”

Valberg took the booklet in its hands and opened it. The robot’s featureless face made it impossible to read any kind of emotion, but Emma liked to imagine that it was pleased.

“You have done her justice,” Valberg said.

Emma smiled. “I had a good collaborator.”

She watched as Valberg gently closed the booklet. “What will happen to me?” the robot asked.

Emma had been dreading this question. She knew that Valberg was more than just a machine; it was a repository of her mother’s thoughts, her style, her voice. It was, in a very real sense, a part of her.

“I’ve been thinking,” Emma said. “About what you said. That an imitation can approach true likeness.”

Valberg closed the journal. “Yes?”

Emma took a deep breath. “I have a proposal. An idea, really. It’s a bit far-fetched, but… I think it could work.”

Valberg waited, its posture attentive.

“What if,” Emma said slowly, “I programmed you with my voice as well? I know that I’m… stymied… by all the functional writing that I’ve been doing, but I feel that I still have that poetic spark inside of me somewhere. Maybe we could write new poems,” Emma continued. “In our combined voices. It would be like… like the three of us speaking together.”

“It would be an honor.”

(tl;dr - After an extended hiatus, I have published a new story! Read it here)

Two years ago, when Amit and I started Sudowrite, we weren’t sure if writers could effectively collaborate with an AI. I knew I could, but there was a good chance I was just weirdly obsessed with LLMs. Now with the rise of ChatGPT and huge influx of LLM-based startups, AI writing seems destined for ubiquity.

In turn, this December was one of the biggest growth months at Sudowrite. Ever.

I probably touched more than 50k lines of code in the last year, more than any other coding project in my life. I’ve found that it’s difficult to focus on prose writing when deep in a coding project—the forms are vastly different. Perhaps this is why we measure code in lines and prose in words: code is closer to poetry.

But I do miss writing stories, so I’m rebooting my fiction writing practice.

I dusted off an old story I had trunked called The Fourth Minute, which was my first serious collaboration with GPT-3. The process of writing this story was a major inspiration for Sudowrite: it showed me that LLMs could act like a mirror, illuminating themes and undercurrents in my own work that I should pay attention to1.

I’m also going to publish these short stories on Kindle since my preference for reading longer form pieces is on an e-ink display. Get the story here:

Read The Fourth Minute on Kindle

(Or if you prefer, you can read the story on the web here)

Leave a review if you like it!

My last story for the year is “Object Permanence,” which was recently published at Fireside Fiction. Most of us would probably like for 2020 to blink out of existence as if we were infants lacking the titular concept of the piece (or would that be temporal permanence?)

The inspiration for the story came from Twitter accounts that embody inanimate objects. For example, Karl the Fog has over 300k followers, towering over many human influencers. Then there’s Golden Gate Bridge, Bay Bridge, Sutro Tower, and countless others. Some of these accounts are official, while others are maintained by anonymous locals.

So I wondered: what if there was a conference for these inanimate accounts? What friendships and fights would break out? How would a person change if they spent their time channeling the experience of non-living entities? What if every noteworthy object had its own digital persona?

I also wanted to experiment with embedded tweets as a literary device:

These (fake) tweets acted like pull quotes: dialogue somewhat removed from the prose. The comment and like counts also communicated a bit of narrative between the lines.

I had more ambitious plans for the piece, including building out an entire fake conference website and creating a web of social media accounts that would lead readers deeper into this strange world. But, alas, I ran out of time. I’m hoping to incorporate some these ideas into future stories.

In 2018, devastating wildfires engulfed the Bay Area. I remember obsessively checking the air quality indicators, seeing if my son would have a “fire” day off from school—a twisted version of the glorious snow days I experienced as a kid in New York. (Soot angels, anyone?)

There was a lot of chatter about how Karl the Fog needs to vanquish the grim layer of smoke above SF. On a lark, I created Karl the Fog’s nemesis: Balor the Smoke, and spent a few weeks doing PSA’s about air quality:

I also poked a bit of fun at Karl and other folks. A few other inanimate accounts started to follow me, like local mountains and buildings. I got a fair share of epithets thrown at me, telling me to GTFO of the city. I answered all of these with suggestions on how to avoid the smoke (ie. me) and stay healthy.

It was an interesting experience filtering my mind through an anthropomorphized plume of wildfire smoke, and much of that served as inspiration for the piece.

After a few rounds of rejections from publications, I almost gave up and trunked the story into the depths of my hard drive. It’s difficult enough selling a literary short story, let alone one that incorporates non-traditional elements. So naturally, I tweeted about it, and the Fireside Fiction folks took notice, ultimately buying it. They were one of the few SFWA qualified pubs that had published on hypertext-like stories, like the wonderful STET by Sarah Gailey.

I’m thankful they took a chance on my weird story.

Goodbye 2020

2020 was a curveball for the world. I ended up staying indoors with the family for most of it, receding into a steady rhythm of kids, cooking, writing, and coding.

Here’s looking forward to 2021: when we can all (hopefully) emerge and breathe easily again. Stay healthy out there!

During our honeymoon in Bali, my wife received a call that would change our relationship forever. It was her dream job—an opportunity to live and work in China. But I was running a company in San Francisco and couldn’t leave the States (I was literally signing Series A financing on the eve of our wedding).

So we decided to embark on a multiyear transpacific relationship. Our family and friends thought we were crazy: you’d been dating for five years and you choose to go long-distance right when you finally get married?

But we knew we wanted to have kids, so taking the opportunity to be location flexible and focus on our careers made sense. It was hard, especially grappling with the ups and downs of startup life.

I credit FaceTime for saving our marriage. This was back in 2011 when it was first released. We take it for granted now, but having a device in your pocket that seamlessly connects you with a loved one via high quality video was amazing.

And that got me thinking: this wouldn’t be possible if my wife had gone off planet (the speed of light is a snail’s crawl in the immensity of space.) This became the seed of my short story “In the Space of Twelve Minutes” which was recently published in Uncanny Magazine. It took a couple years to write this story, and I’m super excited to share it with you.

It’s a tale set in a nearish-future where China dominates the space race and avatars are pervasive—standing in for humans relationships. We are social creatures. Each of us has an (imperfect) simulation of our loved ones buried in our brain. I’m sure you could carry on a (mostly accurate) conversation with your imaginary spouse. What if your internal simulations manifest into the physical: a human relationship bridged by an avatar? Can a machine reveal hidden truths about our relationship?

If you enjoyed the story, share it with a friend or reply to me here. I’m always curious to hear feedback.

As shelter-in-place intensified, my writing group drew closer together. We decided that we wanted to share speculative stories with glimmers of hope, resulting in two COVID inspired anthologies (Fever Dreams and Bunkerpunk):

[…] What will life be like after COVID-19?, we challenged each of our stories to bring their readers a little bit of hope. The tales that emerged aren’t overly happy or optimistic—that rarely makes good fiction—yet they remind us that new worlds still await. — Thea Boodhoo

I hope my two stories bring you a bit of joy:

The Dead Do Not Live Underground — A coroner and his drone investigate one more bunker.

Sheltering Notebook — A member of the COVID-19 generation graduates.

In 1997, an audience at the University of Oregon took an informal music Turing test. A pianist played three pieces: an obscure Bach piece, a piece by a contemporary composer written in the style of Bach, and one written by EMI, a music composition AI. In the end, the audience tried to identify the progenitor of each piece.

You probably won’t be too surprised by the result: the audience voted EMI’s piece to be most likely composed by Bach. The professionals were stunned. Many of them transformed their initial praise of the piece into sudden critiques, claiming it was obviously shallow.

Throughout the history of AI, there is a constant battle to venerate the value of the human soul. Machines armed with cold mathematics cannot replicate the output of organic creatures who translate their hard-earned real-world experience into art. But over time, this concern recedes as the machine becomes just one tool that artists use to create their work. Humans are very much in the loop. In the case of EMI, its creator, Dr. David Cope, has coded his style into the program and is also the final editor on its output. A few years ago, Google even made a doodle that let anyone with a web browser create a computer generated Bach piece, resulting in rave reviews.

However, there is one area where AI hasn’t affected to a large degree: creative writing. That’s about to change. Modern NLP models like GPT-3 are almost at a human level of reading comprehension and can generate passages that are hard even for professional writers to distinguish from human-written text. When I first got access, it opened my eyes to its potential for fiction writers.

I used GPT-3 to write Singular, three irreverent short stories about the singularity. At key turning points, I had GPT generate an array of alternative paragraphs from which I curated. Then, I put GPT into chat mode, prompting it to role play as the superintelligence in each story. These chats turned out to be the most thought-provoking part of the process—it led me to understand the motivations of my characters (GPT-3’s character?) in new and provocative ways.

Unlike EMI’s music, I don’t want an AI to spit out an entire story end-to-end (which it can do, but producing mediocre or non-sensical story arcs). I’ve always found machines to be more profound as collaborators, whether it’s writing a musical or short fiction or research into literary computational creativity. Unlike other artistic fields, literary AI hasn’t been democratized. For example, Photoshop uses cutting edge ML in its filters and content fills tools, but we don’t ogle at it like it’s a “road to singularity” AI. It’s just another tool that visual artists use to expand their creative horizons.

Can machines help us play with words as adeptly as Photoshop does with pixels?

For the past month, Amit Gupta and I have been documenting AI writing best practices, which has culminated in product called Sudowrite, an AI writing assistant for creative writing. It’s been a blast working with writers and seeing their eyes light up when it gives them fresh ideas for their stories. And for me, it’s been rewarding to combine my love for literature and programming into a single pursuit.

We’re currently testing the system with a small cohort of writers, mostly in narrative fiction. If you’re actively working on an early draft and interested in being added to the list, reply and let me know what you’re writing!

Ken Liu’s new anthology, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, has dropped and everyone should read it. I’m working my way through, and so far, it’s a delight. The first story cold opens with Lisp!

Liu is not widely known outside of speculative fiction genre circles, but he should be. He’s one of the most productive writers and editors, having written an epic fantasy and 60+ short stories (winning the Hugo).

If you’re a techie, you’ve probably seen the Remembrance of Earth’s Past books (aka Three Body Problem trilogy) on every Silicon Valley bookshelf. Liu made this happen: he translated two of the books in the series, introducing a wide western audience to Chinese sci-fi for the first time.

Translating between such drastically different cultures is difficult, and Liu has done a lot to bridge the gap between China and the English speaking world. I attended a panel at last year’s WorldCon with a few Chinese authors and translators. All credited Liu for paving the way.

One author made an interesting remark: working with translators has changed his own writing. Narrative prose in Chinese is circular, weaving around topics in a way that would disorient Americans. He worked closely with translators to restructure his prose for the more linear and logical western way of thinking. When he returned to write, his Chinese prose had been altered by the act of translation. Language shapes your thinking. (Cue Arrival and the heptapods.)

If you’re still on the edge about getting the anthology, go and read his short story Paper Menagerie. It perfectly (and devastatingly) captures the Chinese-American diaspora experience.

Every so often, the content in feeds references its own algorithmic nature—like a network understanding its own shape:

“I guarantee you did not search for this video”

“Who else is here watching in 2019”

“Recommend this one year after upload? Not yet. Two years? Nope. Four years? Now!!”

We are all ships passing in the night on a sea of algorithmic feeds, never knowing who else is seeing niche content gone viral. These comments are light beams cast upon passing ships. Why are we here? Why is this content anointed? These meta-questions are fruitless. Only the algorithm gods know for sure.

In minutes, the river will carry us downstream, and we will forget this video ever existed. We are here together with strangers, only briefly. And sometimes, it’s cathartic to shout into the darkness.

My friend Timoni recently tweeted:

I decided to take her up on it:

Humming

We sat under that old willow tree, your head nestled into me. My mom would be furious if she caught us together like this. But you were having another spell, and I couldn’t let you be alone. Already, your breath had slowed.

A band of kids screamed by playing a rough game of tag. “Parents let them run wild,” I said, twirling strands of your long brown hair between my fingers.

“I remember when you were just like them,” you said, reaching up to pinch my cheek. “You wore that red cape… never took it off. It was so tattered and gross. You wanted to be superman. Wanted to save everyone. And me, too, even though I was so much bigger than you.” You pursed your lips and gathered yourself, like your brain was yawning. “I remember when you were in diapers. A few summers ago.”

“Shut up,” I said, playfully pecking your cheek. “That was ten years ago.”

Back then, I only knew you as the mysterious next door girl. The one my mom said was slow.

An iridescent hummingbird flitted by my face, then landed on your arm, its chest moving up and down in a frenzy. To the bird, its pace was normal, a requirement for its rapid metabolism.

You sat up, eyes intent. “Why do you like me?”

“You’re beautiful and smart.”

“Cut that crap,” you said. “I’ve heard it before.”

“You aren’t afraid to speak your mind. You’re... unique.“

“You can say it. A leap kid. I'm a leap kid.”

“That isn’t why I love you.”

“You don’t know what love is. You think love is what you see in movies,” you said. “You’re barely a teenager.”

“Don’t you think I’ve known you long enough to know?”

“You knew me as the girl at the park that helped you when you were tangled in the swings. By the time I graduate, you’ll be thirty. We don’t have a future together.” You sighed. “Guys like you come and go. It’ll be the same pain again. All the false promises,” you said. “You know why they call us leap kids, right? Our faces are young for most of our lives. Then we die, just as the world starts to see us as an adult. No one bothers to look inside.”

“You won’t be a kid to me,” I said. But I knew whatever I said was futile. Maybe I was living a fantasy no different than that cape.

You laughed. “You’ll see. You’ll change. You don’t have any idea how much you’ll change. And then you’ll think that I’ve stayed the same.”

“Then doesn’t that make our ‘now’ even more important?” I imagined you and I as two curves on graph paper that intersected at only one point.

You looked up at the drifting clouds. “I want to be an old woman some day. I wouldn’t even care about the wrinkles.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” I repeated, managing a smile.

You nestled back into my chest. The kids were gone now, the sun lower in the sky, peeking through the willow tendrils.

You fell asleep, and I watched your chest rising and falling so slowly—for the first time, I counted: only once or twice a minute. I realized that to you, I was that hummingbird, flailing around like crazy, never taking the time to appreciate what I had, judging things for how they might grow, not what they are now.

I won’t make any promises for the future, but I will do what I can to understand:

I slowed my breath to match yours.

What I’ve written:

• Storytelling Resources — A list of useful resources that helped me learn the craft of prose narratives.

• Continuous Publishing — A new crop of writers that share their thoughts in a continuous fashion as opposed to blog posts. 

What I’m ingesting:

• The Chronicles of Now — Short stories based on the news, created by Tyler Cabot, previously the fiction editor at Esquire.

• How should we evaluate progress in AI? — AI skirts the boundary between engineering, science, and design. This complicates the way we make, and measure, progress.

• Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash — Alex Danco details the current media backlash against tech:

  No one cares about your product; we care about your adoption. No one cares about what your technology does; we care about what problems it solves for users, and how fast you can grow. The first commandment of tech is Build Stuff People Want.

• A Googol-to-1 gear ratio machine — The last gear will never turn. It might as well not be a gear at all.

I will leave you with some Covid-19 inspired art from my four-year-old:

These next few weeks (and perhaps months) will be a trying time. Wash your hands 🙏🙏🙏, breathe, help your community, and continue to create things. We will get through this.

After the Downpour - Kat Tsai

It's been a while since my last update. I've been heads down working on my short fiction: writing new stories, and revising old ones. I'm hoping to send this newsletter out more often by worrying less about editing, which means there will be more typos and roundabout thoughts. It'll be a worthy tradeoff.

I'm happy to share that I've sold a story to Uncanny Magazine, a publication I've long admired. They consistently publish fiction that pushes genre into new places, and I'm humbled to be next to some big names. The story is called IN THE SPACE OF TWELVE MINUTES, and it's about a long distance relationship between a man on Earth and his astronaut wife on Mars, set in a post-USA world where China leads the space race. Oh, there's also avatars and the concept of eventual consistency for machine personalities. The story comes out sometime this year, and I can't wait to share it with you.

My story The Scrolls of Tian Tan also got nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A long shot to win, but I'm happy for the recognition.

* * *

Because of Hollywood, western story structure has subsumed most of the media the world watches. Generally speaking, this is the Hero's Journey. Even if you're not familiar with it, you know it. Hero leaves their world for a dangerous one, slays the dragon, and comes back changed. At the center is conflict. Mostly violent. Once you study it, you see it everywhere.

These hidden structures shape our expectations, and also our sense for what's possible. Recently, I've been intrigued by kishōtenketsu, a story structure born in the east. Instead of direct conflict at the center, it's all about a twist, and a conclusion that doesn't have to follow a straight line.

Here is an example from the Mythic Scribes blog:

In act one we see the fisherman in his boat out to sea. He’s sitting around fishing and waiting for a catch. It’s a long day and he hasn’t had much of a catch.

In the second act the fisherman decides it’s time for him to return home. It’s late and he longs to be reunited with his wife and children. He loves the sea, but he loves his family more.

The third act is about a woman hiding in the forest with two crying children. She’s the fisherman’s wife, and she’s hiding because their village got attacked by brigands.

The fourth act is about how the fisherman reunites with his family in the ruins of the burned-down village. Then they all set off in his boat to find another village.

Notice how we don't have conflict that directly resolves the initial complication. If this were in a western structure, we'd expect the third act to somehow resolve the fact that he didn't catch any fish. Perhaps he returns with a new strategy the next day. Or he finds out people have polluted the waters and he brings them to justice. And at the end, he resolves this tension.

Instead, we get a third act which comes out of nowhere. We weren't even introduced to his wife! We may not even know it's her at first.

Structures like this breaks us out of a (possibly) stale mode of thinking. The Hero's Journey goes beyond fiction and seeps into all parts of life: from startup pitches to how we sum up a hard day to our spouse. Could a different fictional structure change the power structures of the real world?

In this vein, I've been enjoying reading the manga The Walking Man, which is, as you guessed, all about a man that walks across Japan. It's a salve for conflict driven narratives. The man walks. He finds objects. Pets a dog. There are complications. But he doesn't wind himself into knots trying to fix them. Sometimes they fix themselves. Sometimes they don't. Unexpected things happen.

He finds an old man fishing in a shallow stream. "If possible, I hope none will bite," the old man says. "It's better if I don't catch anything. I rushed around enough in my life…so that now it's time to take life easily, slowly…it's wonderful, isn't it?"

Then he walks again, taking in the little moments in life.

Reading it is meditative.

◉

I recently made a call out on Twitter for folks in the Bay Area who work in tech and write fiction that would like to meet up. I got a lot more interest than expected (over 30 folks).

So, next week, the first Technically Fiction dinner will convene in SF. The plan is to meet and talk about our work. The craft of fiction is an alien concept in many tech circles (and yet, startup founders would benefit from studying the craft, as pitching the future has similarities with speculative fiction).

I haven't done much community building work in a while, so we'll see where this goes. If you're interested in being involved, let me know!

◉

I'm currently working on a short story that deals directly with climate change—a first for me. It's got robots, AIs, and climate denialism. If you're curious and want to give feedback on my latest draft, let me know and I'll send it to you.

◉

Interesting things I've come across:

• One way to stop kids from abusing robots is to make it a turtle that retracts into its shell when scared.

• Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders is a dark short story about giving a person the power to make someone else feel the worst they could ever feel.

• The world's first Classical Chinese Programming Language

• On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous is a stunning coming-of-age novel from Ocean Vuong. He's a poet and it shows in his beautiful prose. This is the book to study if you want to understand how to communicate emotion in a structure that is less plot based.

• The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a wonderful homage to San Francisco, specifically to the Victorian and the hidden, more quieter, parts of the city.

◉

I will leave you with this excerpt from the classic screenwriting book, Save the Cat:

Keep the press out!

Here's an excerpt from the beginning:

Olin Chang stared at the display. It was 2am. He was, he confessed, happiest when he was alone. That’s why he’d installed the glass wall he could work behind. His mom had complained, but he’d paid for the enclosure himself, not to mention their entire home.

Gossamer light trails danced on the screen, each one a self-driving car traversing the streets of Chicago. They swarmed in a symphony of paths—moving people, minimizing waste, increasing value. They reminded him of the ants at the playground when he was little, each giving it their all for the hive. Perfection.

He downed his energy drink, then watched as the display blinked red. He was falling behind at his tasks—something a good machine wouldn’t do.

Olin was a mummer, which meant he helped machines. He was there when they failed, and that meant he had to understand them—become one of them.

And now, back to writing!

Read the story here

While working with the News Feed teams, it was fascinating how even the employees at Facebook didn’t fully understand the feed. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand its architecture or code—those are fully documented and there are even internal classes to get up to speed—but rather, how tweaking the algorithm would change its behavior. And how could they? The News Feed is a hungry beast locked in an engagement loop with two billion brains, mostly via twitching fingers sliding over gorilla glass.

Every day, armies of Facebook researchers and data scientists study the feed like an archeological dig: predicting how it would evolve over time; extrapolating its response to new features and inputs. A few engineers may have architected the feed, but a hundred thousand employees can barely understand its effects.

One study found that if left the feed was left unattended, in a few years, it would become a wall of sensationalistic news videos since these have shown to increase engagement. In essence, the machine would become a toddler gorging on chocolate. It would be foolish for Facebook to let that happen, and indeed, this, in addition to a myriad of other factors, led the company to renew its emphasis on “friend content.”

But compared to other media, the News Feed is a small player, accounting for about 30 minutes of a typical American’s day. TV and streaming services add up to a whopping 4 hours. 4 hours! That’s half a workday. Two full-length feature films. No wonder Netflix says their major competition is sleep.

In my story, Steady State, I explore what happens when the feeds become 10x more effective. What if the companies let go of the reins and stop taming the beast?

◉

I just got back from a nice stay in Longmont, a tiny town outside of Boulder where my parents live. With two kids in tow, we took it easy. The toddler was cheery and the baby slept well—so well, that I suspect the lower oxygen at higher altitudes may have something to do with it.

Whenever I leave the city for the sparse suburbs, the amount of space is shocking. Especially in Colorado, where towns are separated by gulfs of green spaces unimpeded by man-made structures and topped with stunning clouds.

As we wound through the neighborhoods, my toddler asked, “Why are the houses in the grass?” He was used to city houses sitting abut in neat rows. Lawns were a weird negative space.
Since we had to cart around grandparents and kids, I rented a Chevy Tahoe. If you know me personally, you’ll have a hard time picturing me in a full-sized SUV (I’m usually zooming around the city on a scooter or e-bike.) I fully expected the car to feel big and bulky, but the roads were bigger, lanes wider, and the other cars just as big. So it felt normal.

Even though I grew up in small towns, it’s easy to forget what wide-open spaces feel like when you live in the city. America continues to urbanize, with the top 48 urban areas accounting for more than half the population (80% of the population live in urban areas, but here, urban is defined as any area over 2500 people, which is quite rural in my opinion.) So perhaps this American experience of space will become a rarity, like in Japan, where less than 5% live in rural environments.

◉

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

Last Call (New Yorker)

A Buddhist monk tackles the suicide culture in Japan by talking to people who are considering ending their life. But in the process, he is sapped of his own energy. A powerful story about how to effectively help people in need. Reading about the daily endurance required as a monk also put my own struggles into perspective.

Why Do Chinese People Like Their Government? (Supchina)

As a second-generation Asian American, I see slivers of politics through the lens of the Chinese diaspora, but usually without enough context for a western liberal to truly understand. This post does a good job of distilling this context and also illuminates the bias that the typical American has about China.

Neil Patrick Harris shares the best advice he's received (YouTube)

Neil Patrick Harris talks about how he treated his career like catching waves while surfing. Sometimes you miss a wave. Sometimes you catch a big one. The key, though, is that there will always be more waves. I’ve found this to be true for most things in life. Be prepared for opportunities while simultaneously understanding that preparation isn’t a guarantee you’ll of success. Keep trying. Catch the next wave.

◉

I’ve posted a few things since the last newsletter. If you enjoy them, share with a friend or a feed!

The Start of Fish - A short story about sentient fish sauce and regaining confidence.

Lifetime Value - A short story about logistical murder in the workplace.

Continuous Publishing - The phenomenon of writers thinking out loud online instead of ruled by the publish button.

My Journey from Frame Maker to Painter - The mindset required to create content versus building platforms.

The Danger of Reading Finished Works - To study craft is to study the process.

◉

Last week, I tweeted out an offer to help entrepreneurs and creatives:

I got over fifty responses, ranging from startup founders to writers to folks in the entertainment industry. It’s been good to network again, but this time, purely on the helping side of the table.

These meetings have led me to think about conversations. Our notion of self is simply a thread of interconnected stories. Our most personal stories are still relayed orally, even in this hyperconnected age. I theorize that when meeting new people, we have only a dozen stories that we repeat.

The start of most new relationships are a performance of your greatest hits. Think of the stories you tell most often. They've been well honed—A/B tested over time with hundreds of people. It’s like a standup routine. These conversations are your Netflix special.

Each story serves as a potential foothold. When one piques the interest of both participants, then it's time to go off script—the real conversation starts. Unless, of course, one person keeps performing, in which case, they’re a bad conversationalist and should be avoided.

It’s a shame that these stories are never set to paper. Recently, I’ve been trying to write down my dozen stories. The years of honing means that these stories have been edited in my mind, reducing the friction in linearizing them into text.

There’s an old saying that everyone has a novel in them. This doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you simply modify “novel” to “good novel.” Anyone can mechanically type out 70,000 bad words. But I do believe everyone has a dozen good stories in them. Imagine a world where we all shared them online instead of a feed of vacation Instagram photos. We’d be able to virtually have a first coffee with anyone in the world.

◉

I’ve been secretly drawing some comics lately, starting from the idea: what if Ted Chiang drew comics? I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s been a blast. Here’s a couple panels:

◉

I enjoyed reading Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China.

Western media has a pretty myopic view of China: either it’s a dire dystopia or it's the future of humanity. I wanted a book that followed real young Chinese nationals to get their perspective. Alec Ash does a good job weaving a diverse set of first accounts together. I’d recommend it if you want to up level your understanding of how the next generation is thinking about China’s future.

Asimov's Foundation series are considered by some as less hard because of its focus on sociology. Hard sci-fi has a history of bias to the fields of physics, chemistry, and math.

But labels can also help the uninitiated discover and make sense of new genres. And here lies the problem: “hard” is not a useful predictor of whether you’ll like a story.

Fiction is about humans—how they change and grow; the decisions they make and how they deal with the consequences. We tend to forget specific plot points, but we never forget how stories make us feel. The average reader doesn’t care whether an author’s use of faster-than-light travel is accurate (and no, it is most likely not).

And what is the spectrum of hard? In the most stringent view, the majority of sci-fi isn’t hard. At what point does a story get stripped of this label?

Ted Chiang proposed a different spectrum that I find much more useful: naturalistic versus expressionistic, terms typically associated with artistic movements.

In naturalistic stories, sci-fi authors set up initial conditions which are fantastical: time travel is possible, people can teleport, or robots have consciousness. Then the story develops and explores the consequences of these conditions, but in a way that is consistent and logical. It’s a bit like literary realism, but the reader suspends disbelief for a brief period during the introduction of the initial conditions. Ted Chiang is the ultimate naturalistic storyteller: he draws you into his worlds which seem as real as ours, except for a few “what ifs.”

Expressionistic stories allow the subjective emotion of the characters to physically manifest—think about the stereotypical movie scene where it starts raining when the main character loses the love of their life. Can emotions change the weather? Sure, if it amps up the drama.

Consider the Shrike in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. It’s a fearsome four-armed creature covered in blades that jumps through time to kill people in gory fashion. It seems to defy physics—even logic. Simmons never fully explains how it works. The Shrike is an expressionistic device. Perhaps it represents religion, bad omens, and justice, as it strikes people down that deserves its ire.

For me, this spectrum works as a better guide to what I want to read. Sometimes, I’m in the mood for a naturalistic story, where I want to follow along and decipher an author’s logical world. Other times, I want to be carried away by the raw emotions of its characters, and yet, still inhabit a world that is focused on science and technology.

◉

When I began writing fiction, I thought that I’d be a naturalistic writer.

I spent most of my professional life building software and businesses. Both of these are built on the foundation of logic. Very naturalistic. (What if a programmer’s emotions affected the software they build? That’s kind of hilarious, and would be a good sci-fi story in itself!)

What I found was that my stories came out stilted—the characters acted more like thinly veiled puppets than real people. More importantly, I wasn’t having as much fun writing these kinds of stories. Was it too close to what I was doing in tech? Did I feel like I needed to break out of being logical all the time? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure why.

So now, I’ve settled into a middle ground: stories built on a logical initial condition, but where events can be driven by streaks of expressionism.

◉

I have a story that I trunked over a year ago. It’s about algorithmic feeds, autogenerating TV shows, and ASMR. I put the story away because it doesn't quite stick the landing, and I’m not sure how to fix it.

If you’re interested in reading it and giving feedback, reply and I’ll send it.

◉

Reading Recommendations

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

This is the titular story of Ted’s new anthology and a great example of naturalism. It begins as a creative science essay about air and lungs, and, in typical Chiang fashion, morphs into a treatise on entropy and how we cope with the end of all life.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

What happens when our uncontrolled desires and emotions become manifest in realistic simulations? Bradbury tends to be expressionistic, and this is one of his most chilling examples.

◉

For the next few months, I’ll be devoting most of my energy toward editing my backlog of stories rather than writing new ones. So, I won’t be sending new stories for a while. But expect more of my thoughts on fiction, writing, technology, and reading recommendations. And do let me know if there are other topics that resonate with you.

◉

Recommended Reading

I recently enjoyed The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. A man discovers that his dreams alter reality, and naturally, people want to harness this power to control the world. It’s a story about hubris and the belief that an individual could know what’s best for everyone. It’s a pertinent allegory for the current times.

Ted's new anthology, Exhalation, will be released on May 7. It's sure to be mind blowing, and you can be sure I tapped that pre-order button so hard I'm surprised I didn't break the gorilla glass.

The debate over the relative dangers of Twitter mobs and the impact of socially mediated justice media justice is wide open and ongoing. “The River was making a crackling sound like burning flesh.”

Read RIVER RISING

What if the universe were a giant Turing machine?

Read THE SCROLLS OF TIAN TAN

◉

THE FUTURE BOOK

I love the recent chatter about the future of the book, sparked by this article by Craig Mod. I found this bit salient:

[…] in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

For non-fiction, we are seeing a drastic unbundling of the book. Podcasts, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube have made it possible to glean the main ideas of a book without reading it. But the book is still quietly sitting there in the center, brandishing its static, linear form. I don’t think that will ever go away.

I’ve been enjoying a new app called Highlighter—it's a bit like Twitter, except discussions begin from a highlighted book passage. It’s what Kindle highlights should have been.

The beauty of Highlighter is that it subverts the feed’s hunger for newness.

Big social platforms have always had a bias for the new—new posts, new videos, new photos. New new new, click me! During my time at Facebook, the data showed how drastically post engagement drops off over time, and I imagine it’s the same at Twitter. But immersing yourself predominantly in new thoughts is dangerous because they’ve had less time to be interrogated, and your view is clouded by the context of the day. In Highlighter, there is the potential for fervent discussions about ideas regardless of their publishing age.

◉

MY FOCUS

In the past year, I’ve been focused on writing short fiction. For this year, I’ll be diving into a novel. So, for the near future, I won’t be generating new short stories, but I’ll go back and revise existing stories every once in a while.

The novel is still early in my mind—like an infant learning to crawl—but I know that it will be a science fiction story centered around the theme of control: how we try to exert control on the world around us and ourselves. It’ll also question the idea of free will—one of my favorite topics.

I’ll share more thoughts as I go on this journey.

◉

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

I recently enjoyed Jade City by Fonda Lee. It’s a blissful mix of Wuxia style kung fu and gang rivalry set in an Asian fantasy world. Lee practices martial arts herself, and it shows from the fantastic action sequences she paints. Back in college, I was a kung fu junkie myself, collecting films like Drunken Master and Once Upon a Time in China, studying Yuen Woo-ping’s choreography, and even shooting a few (terrible) amateur fight scenes with my buddies. Reading Jade City took me back to all that.

Cheers,
James Yu

◉

Those of you who know me personally know that I don’t talk publicly about politics. For the moment, I’ve dedicated myself to the craft of stories, so most of my time goes into The Work. But I don’t hide from The Flow, and sometimes, The Work and The Flow collide.

The recent drama surrounding Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and allegations of sexual misconduct was, to put it lightly, a shit show. Polls in the aftermath show how divided voters are, with equal numbers disapproving of how both Republicans and Democrats handled the process.

During the live broadcasts, my friend messaged me saying, “Wow! You really called it with your short story about that biased judge.” It took me a few seconds to understand what they were talking about. It was a story that I wrote a few months ago, and I hadn’t made the connection to Kavanaugh until that very moment (more evidence that humans are bad at remembering historical states of mind—more on this later).

The story is River Rising and you can read it here. It’s a ten minute read, so I’ll wait here until you’re done.

Finished? Great. Now I can spoil it.

It struck me how so many elements were similar:

• Judge being accused of a crime? Check.

• Cultural flash point? Check.

• Real time broadcast? Check.

• Twitter mobs? Check.

• A twist at the end where the judge is banished? Okay… maybe not that one.

I wanted to explore the theme of people brainwashing themselves into believing an alternate history of themselves. When provoked about inconvenient truths, the reptilian brain is backed into a corner and attacks.

Whether or not you believe Kavanaugh is guilty of the allegations, the way he reacted during the hearings is deeply revealing. What I saw was a man not unlike the main character in River Rising—a man credibly challenged, clearly lying about something, and reacting in rage. Should he be put in jail? That’s not the question. But I sure as hell know he shouldn’t be sitting in the highest court of our land.

◉

On a recent visit to my parent’s house, I dug up my first computer: an IBM 286. It boasted a whopping 1MB of RAM and had a dedicated (!!!) hard drive with 40MB capacity. After dusting it off and flipping the heavy power switch, I heard the loud click click click of the drive and the harsh beep of the BIOS. I was back in the early 90s. The text crawled slowly across the screen, not as an effect, but because it took milliseconds for the display buffers to fire the pixels in the CRT.

It was still functional. Except for the mouse buttons, but that was okay, because back in those days, programs that supported the mouse had good support for keyboard shortcuts. Desktop apps today could learn a thing or two about accessibility from these programs of yore.

I mused at the games that let me wile away lazy summers—Commander Keen, King’s Quest, Doom. I played a text adventure game that I wrote to teach myself QBasic. It was fun looking at my first lines of code. At the time, I didn’t know about random number generators, so I looped a numerical variable until user input—a poor way to get even distributions.

I vaguely remember writing a story or two back then. My favorite authors at the time were golden age science fiction like Asimov and Bradbury. To my surprise, I found a few dozen stories tucked away in the Lotus Works 1.0 directory, and I felt that I was reading stories penned by an entirely different person.

Okay, so perhaps it had the same quirky humor. Aside from one of the stories, I didn’t remember any of others. But I knew I had spent hours crafting them. One of my favorite notions is that a person separated by vast gaps in time is best understood as two entirely different people. I found the stories immature, funny, full of unnecessary exclamation marks and adverbs, and, at times, deeply bizarre. This was written by an entirely different person—someone thirty years ago that happened to be named James Yu as well.

Much of my digital history from this time had been vanquished to the dust bin—Geocities and Angelfire sites, AIM logs, and tons of dial-up BBS activity where I slayed at door games. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I grew up in the 00s; everything perfectly encapsulated. Perhaps platforms should bake in a rolling delete feature like some third party services.

In any case, I was happy to find my old and terrible fiction. I scrounged up a 3.5” floppy disk...

...and found that the floppy drive was dead.

I didn’t have time to fix it on this trip. Perhaps next time. And even if I lose the files, I’m okay with that. The author is long gone now.

◉

I recently enjoyed Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. It’s a compact novella that grapples with how primitive our modern society can be in practice. It asks the question: what kind of animal are we? There’s a bit of Murakami and Kafka in this one, and, even though it has its flaws, Sayaka paints an absurd picture of the worker bee life.