AI – Where is the intelligence? – by Vijaya Schartz

 

This award-winning novel deals with an AI character.
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I recently noticed a slew of posts in my Facebook feed that are obviously AI-generated. Although I am not opposed to giving life to old portraits of historical figures, I draw the line at computer generated images of the Sphynx and other famous archeological treasures, that are inaccurate at best, if not completely made up and wrong. Other times, the picture has no connection whatsoever with the title, the text, or the information in the post. Why not use a real photograph relevant to the post?

As for the monotonous AI voice, completely devoid of emotion, I have come to hate it. How can anyone relate to information delivered in such a boring manner? I remember the passion in the voice of my teachers when I was in school. They were the ones who communicated to me their love for literature, history, science. All because they cared, and it showed in their voice, their body language, and on their faces. I could feel the energy coming from them and touching me deeply. They made me want to learn more.

AI-generated royalty-free image

Nowadays, we are witnessing the takeover of the machines. Not only the voice is devoid of emotion, but it also misreads the words because it doesn’t understand the meaning of the sentence, only the structure. It pauses in the wrong places, sometimes expressing the opposite of the intended meaning. In a recent post, the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet became a “segment” in the narrative. Worse, AI is also turning the voice into text for subtitles, and the subtitles also said “segment.”

And I don't need an AI detector to spot AI generated comments. Probably an attempt to start a debate, they are all similar in structure. Coming from different accounts, they start with an introduction, three bullet points, and a conclusion, as if directly copied from an online textbook. Who on Facebook comments like that? Who is AI trying to fool?

Now that AI will become the center of learning for many students, I shudder at the idea that future generations of intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, writers, explorers, and rulers will be groomed by non-emotional entities in the cold, detached style of what we call AI.

Royalty-free AI generated image

Isn’t intelligence supposed to be self-aware, with the ability to comprehend and relate emotionally? To me this new invasion is not AI, but dumb computers relying on search engines and limited logic. As we used to say in my days, “Erring is human, but to really mess things up, it takes a computer.”

So, here we are. We didn’t react when autocorrect changed the meaning of our texts, laughing because it was “cute.” And now we are letting the same computers take over control of our lives, influencing our ideas, thwarting our knowledge, trying to replace free thinking and real intelligence.

As a science-fiction author, I am appalled. There is no AI intervention whatsoever in my novels. They are pure passion, pure imagination and human intelligence, and I hope you’ll enjoy them.

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Vijaya Schartz, award-winning author

Strong Heroines, Brave Heroes, cats

https://www.vijayaschartz.com

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Paying Dues by Bruce McKern

McKern, Kevin and Bruce - BWL Publishing Inc.

Like most things, the term 'paying dues' has certain connotations, dependent on one's life experiences.  To some, it means a chunk of their paycheck goes to an organization that, ideally, would advocate for them in case of a labor dispute.  For others, it's the price of admission to place that offers brotherhood and cheap booze.  But to a lunk-headed, free-lance small market musician, it has very little to do with money.  It's all the experiences, from the goofy to the sublime, that made me the musician I ultimately became.

It could be said that education and dues are separate entities, but not by me. I started guitar lessons at age seven. Every Saturday morning Dad would take me and my brother to the music store. Our teacher was an old-school musician's musician. He had emigrated from Germany, had an amazing accent, and was proficient in just about every instrument imaginable. He gave us a theoretical as well as technical background in music.

We also got some practical experience when he had me and my brother play some real-life gigs with him.  It was so cool to be out past my bedtime, playing music for people, and actually getting some money for it.  I also got the chance to see how a pro handles different situations whilst keeping the music flowing.

For most of my school days, I was in orchestra and band.  And my last three years of high school, Kevin and I played in the pit for the spring musical.  My sophomore year, it was a last minute, emergency situation with very little rehearsal.  It was just me, Kevin, and the music-director/pianist.  We all worked from condensed scores, so it was great fun making up our own parts (and for a string bass player, I got pretty adept at reading ledger lines!).  But the biggest take away was learning the fine art of accompanying.  With singers and actors, but especially with teenagers trying to be both at the same time, it's a balancing act of being firm, supportive, and above all, flexible.  It's a skill-set that served me well not only doing musical theatre, but with just about every kind of gig.  Most of the time, music is conversational in nature, and listening is key to good conversation.

Probably my very first gig was at a tavern with my cousin and my brother.  I think my age was in the single digits, I played the tambourine, and I requested my pay be in the form of a stack of dollar bills.  Starting in my tweens and running right up to present day, I've been in various iterations of rock bands with my brother.  We did the club scene pretty heavy while I was still in high school.  This was in the days of five sets a night.  Usually, the places were deserted for the first and last sets, so it was challenging to keep the energy up and put on a show.  We had a lot of fun, but it was also when the bars were full of cigarette smoke.  Hair, clothes, and gear were absolutely toxic by the end of the night.

During my college years, while playing in the symphony and rock bands, we were also doing the odd society gig.  Usually at the country club, it was an exercise in humility and definitely a character builder.  In my late twenties, I played in a little-big band (swing-era music scored down for an octet).  This was a particularly interesting sociological experience due to the fact that the other members of the group were retirees from all different walks of life.  They were also mostly from the greatest generation, so they had first-hand knowledge of swing when it was new and popular.  Also, that band had a dedicated arranger who would create absolutely stunning, original charts that were equally challenging and accessible.  

On most of the casual dates I played, I was the baby on the bandstand.  It was a very informal type of apprenticeship that I greatly appreciate.  I'm not sure young people now have the same opportunities.  I hope they do, and I hope they have as much fun as I did!

Vikings in North America by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

  

The Vikings in North America

 

It has been long thought that the first European to step on the soil of North America was Christopher Columbus. But excavations done at a site in northwest Newfoundland, called L’Anse aux Meadows, in the 1960’s recovered artifacts like jewellery, a stone oil lamp, a bone knitting needle, and tools that were compared to ones used at Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland around the year 1000. They have been carbon dated to between the years 990 and 1050, proof that the Vikings were in North America long before Columbus.

       Vikings were people from Scandinavia, present day Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, who were merchants as well as warriors. During the late eighth to eleventh century they raided, pillage, and conquered settlements in Scotland and throughout Europe. They also had settlements in Iceland and Greenland.

       Surnames ending in "-son" or "-sen" are considered to have Viking ancestry. My great-grandparents emigrated from Scotland. Plus, the little finger on my right hand does not lay flat when I set my palm down. My sister has the same condition but worse. Her little finger had a permanent bend to it. She went to her doctor and received a botox shot to relax it. When she went for physio she was told that a bent finger like that was a sign of being a Viking. I also have a friend of Norwegian ancestry with the same little finger.

       But, that bent little finger comes from my mother’s side who also had one. Her maiden name was Relf, which I learned was first found in the 1000s in Nairnit, a town in northern Scotland. So, with this ancestry on both sides I consider myself a Viking. In 2017, I visited L’Anse aux Meadows in northwest Newfloundland.

       From the parking lot I walked to the interpretive centre where I looked at the displays of what the settlement would have looked like during its occupation. There are replicas of the longships that the Vikings sailed in, artifacts unearthed during the excavations, write-ups about the Vikings, tools that were found, and maps showing the route the Vikings used to get to Newfoundland or Vinland, as they are thought to have named it. The Scandinavians of the medieval period were known as Norse and they were farmers and traders. When they began raiding other countries they became known as Vikings, the Norse word for raiders.

       There has been a lot of interest in the Vikings recently with televisions shows and documentaries about them and their raiding which began in the 790s and lasted until around 1050. With their longboats and advanced sailing and navigational skills the Viking men and women travelled from Scandinavia south through Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and west to North America.

       I left the centre and followed a long, wooden boardwalk through grass and small bushes to the actual site. There I found a post fence around a yard with large mounds covered in grass. When the Vikings landed here there were forests from which they were able to get material for their boat and house building. The remains of eight buildings were found in the 1960s and they are believed to have been made of a wooden frame and covered with sod.

       The structures have been identified are a long house, an iron smithy, a carpentry shop, and smaller buildings that may have been for lower-status crewmembers or even slaves or for storage. There are three replicas of those sod buildings with their thick walls on the site. One is a long house which is equipped with clothes, beds and bedding, household utensils, tools, a fire pit and has a couple dressed in period clothing cooking a meal. The Vikings hunted caribou, bear, and smaller animals plus whale, walrus, and birds for food as well as fished.

       I wandered through the rooms divided by hand carved wooden plank walls. Light came from the fire and holes in the ceiling which are partially covered with upside down wooden boxes to keep the rain out.

       One of the other buildings is the smithy complete with anvil, forge, bellows, and various tools. I wandered the rest of the site and saw the outlines of other buildings that have not been reconstructed. It is estimated that between 30 and 160 people lived there over the years.

       The Vikings arrived in Newfoundland from Iceland via Greenland. According to historical records the site was inhabited by the brothers and sister of Leif Ericson plus a series of explorers. It is believed the settlement was there for seven or eight years before being abandoned. This is the only confirmed Viking site in North America and is the farthest west that Europeans sailed before Columbus.

       After viewing the buildings I followed a trail along the rocky shoreline and then turned inland to walk on a boardwalk over a bog back to the parking lot.

       One of the best things is that not only does the interpretive centre have the history of the Vikings, but there is also extensive displays showing the history of the aboriginal people who inhabited the area over thousands of years before any European arrived.

       In 2018, I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. In the museum is a permanent exhibition of parts of five original Viking ships excavated nearby in 1962. A thousand years ago these ships were deliberately scuttled (filled with rocks and sunk) in a river to stop the enemy from invading the city by water. Over the decades since they were found, the pieces have been preserved and put together on a metal frame to show how the ships would have looked. Also at the site are replicas of the Viking ships and I became a Viking for an hour. A group of us sat on the seats and rowed the ship out of the harbour using the long oars. Once on the open water we hoisted the mast and set sail. After sailing for a while we headed back to the harbour. As we neared it I had the honour of pulling on the rope that lowered the mast and sail and we glided back to our dock.

       It would be fun, someday, to write a novel about my ancestors.

       

 

Where to Set Your Story by Victoria Chatham

 

TO BE RELEASED SEPTEMBER 2025

All stories have a setting. Some are instantly recognisable, others are not. One of my favourite authors is Rosamund Pilcher, who set many of her stories in Cornwall, the English county that dips its toe into the Atlantic Ocean. The first line of her book, Coming Home, tells you this, but in a charming way:

'The Porthkerris Council School stood halfway up the steep hill which climbed from the heart of the little town to the empty moors which lay beyond.'

Lee Child, another of my favourite authors, leaves you in no doubt of his setting in the opening of Oneshot:

'Friday. Five o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or maybe the easiest. Because at five o'clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.'

The setting anchors the story in time and space, providing a sense of reality for the reader. The author is responsible for further solidifying that setting by engaging the senses. If it is an indoor setting, such as a house or a building, where is the character located? What furniture might they have to move around? What can they see, hear, and feel? I often close my eyes and visualise it, typically typing as I move from hallway to stairs, from scullery to dining room. The devil is in the details, so all the details I ‘see’ are typed. What time of day is it, and what part of the year? Where does the light fall, and what shadows does it create? How does that affect the colour palette of the décor? Being specific usually holds a reader’s attention, especially if it appeals to the senses.

Shakespeare wrote, ‘Let me count the ways.’ OK, he was writing Sonnet #43, but that phrase could just as easily refer to creating settings as to declaring love. In As You Like It, he also wrote, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.’

While the Bard waxes poetic, authors are not so different in creating the stage or setting and moving characters around in that landscape. As much as I love creating characters, I also enjoy creating their settings. For my Regency romances, my characters have followed the social round from someone’s country seat to London, then on to the spa towns of Brighton, Bath, Cheltenham, Buxton, and Harrogate. While there were others, these are the most easily recognised, particularly Bath, for those who enjoy Regency romance. Being such popular cities, many of which have changed little since their inception, street plans are readily available online with some digging into each city’s archives.  

Typical town plan

I have been torn between using real-life locations for my contemporary stories and creating a town because I’m writing fiction. This is where I combine fact and fiction. I take a location I know and fictionalise it. That way, I can still write with a measure of conviction that might otherwise be lacking. Readers invariably sense a weakness, and I do my best to make my fictional settings as real as possible. I mix up English village names if my setting is in England, and I’m sure there are many more fictional ranches in Southern Alberta than in reality.

Fall colours in Southern Alberta

Another aspect of setting is designing the houses in which my characters live. I need to understand how they move through these spaces and what keeps the upstairs household members separate from those below stairs. Even with my ranch houses, I approach the same considerations. After designing one ranch house, I knew almost every log and stone in its construction, but I could not picture the roofline. I phoned a local architect’s office, explained my dilemma to the receptionist, and asked if any of the architects there would be willing to assist. The following day, I received a call from a gentleman intrigued by the process of building a house in a novel. We scheduled an appointment, and when he examined my floor plan, it didn't take him long to add a roof to it. Job done, but our conversation about the intricacies of writing a book continued well beyond the one-hour slot he had allocated me.

My current work in progress is set in a place I know well, but I have fictionalized it out of respect for the residents. Whether they recognise it or not remains to be seen when A Murder in the Meadow debuts this coming September.

Victoria Chatham

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Lighting the creative fire and keeping it burning

At a recent writer's workshop, one of my students asked, "How do you stay motivated to work on a book that may take years to complete?" My first thought was to pass on the old adage, "Don't be overwhelmed by the elephant laying before you. Eat it one bite at a time." I sensed the student needed something more immediate. 

I said each book has a series of milestones. While it's immensely satisfying to see your name on the cover of your first book, that's only a single milestone along a long path of writing. I sensed he needed something immediate, so I passed on advice I'd received from Nevada Barr, the author of the Anna Pigeon series. She writes three pages a day. Every day. If she's inspired, she writes very small. If uninspired, she writes large and double spaced. That discipline yields a book every year. 

I could see my student glaze over as he considered the prospect of a year of daily writing. I said, "the milestone was three pages, not the whole book. Write three pages and step back. Say, 'I've succeeded today. I've written three pages!" 

Still not sensing any enthusiasm, I reassured him. "Do you have an opening sentence? If you do, you've passed a milestone. Is there an opening paragraph? Great, another milestone is behind you. A first page. Another success." I could see him starting to feel better about his accomplishments. 

"Next, tell your wife or call you best friend when you've finished the first chapter. They'll be impressed and their enthusiasm will drive you on. You'll have the energy to write the second chapter."

As he mulled that advice, he smiled. "I can write three pages a day. Thank you."

A second student told me she'd stalled. Halfway through a book, she'd hit the wall. She was a "pantser', writing by the seat of her pants, whatever thoughts came to her mind that day. I suggested she step back to create an outline of the plot she's completed. When I do that, I perceive the "trajectory" of the book I'm writing, which helps me envision what comes next.

As the students left, a smiling middle-aged woman approached and shook my hand. I asked if I'd provided the tools she needed to move ahead with her book. Her reply was priceless. "No, Dean, what you've done is convince me I don't want to write a book. You've pointed out the things I enjoy in a book, and I'm motivated to dive into my "to be read" pile. I'll look at the plots and characters more critically. Thank you."

I heard later that she was working her way through my Pine County mystery series. That's a milestone for me; a reader who enjoyed the first Dean Hovey book she read, and is now moving on to the others.

If you're an inspired reader, check out "Skidded and Skunked". It's the latest book in the Pine County series. This is the first book for my co-author, D.L. Dixen, She's just hit that incredibly exciting milestone of touching the first book with her name printed on the cover. 

Better yet, if you search for D.L. Dixen on Amazon or my publisher's website, you'll see "Skidded and Skunked." Not only did she make the book better, she hit that BIG milestone of her name on the book's cover. 

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=D.L.+Dixen&crid=2GBIPB966OLU5

Dixen, D.L. - BWL Publishing Inc.