Writing News Update - February 2023
It's time for my quarterly update, which is not so much quarterly as more whenever I have time to sit down and write a update. I meant to write a January newsletter commenting on the new year, but time got away from me. Sooo, better late than never?
The biggest news I have is that in November 2022, Ann Leckie, who had been the publisher for GigaNotosaurus magazine, stepped down and turned the running of the magazine over to me, so now I'm both GNS’s editor and publisher. Like I mention in the linked post, I’m both scared and thrilled, as now I and my slushing team can do things we have previously dreamed about. For instance, we increased our acceptance rate to $200 per story. We’re also going to bring on more slushreaders — we’re particularly interested in queer, BIPOC, and trans readers, so if you fit in that category, please email us at editor@giganotosaurus.org and we’ll get a questionnaire out to you in the next couple of weeks.
Finally, we have enough money to run stories for 2023, but if we are to continue beyond that, we will need to either crowdfund or adopt a Patreon/subscription model going forward. If you’re interested in donating, click here to be taken to our Paypal. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our webpage’s feed for further updates.
But wait! There’s More Big News!
If you ever followed my book reviews when I wrote for Lightspeed Magazine, then you know I absolutely gushed over N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. A couple of years ago, Green Ronin Publishing invited me to work on a new RPG that would be based on the trilogy. Last month, the Fifth Season Roleplaying Game was released on Backerkit and funded within six hours! When the campaign ended yesterday, it raised over $175K!
I’m pretty excited about this. I’ve worked on tabletop games before, but that was more to provide short fiction to help bolster the games. This was the first time I worked on a RPG corebook (for those who ordered the corebook, I provided content about use-castes and general information about the Seasons in chapters 2 and 3). I had a lot of fun doing so, and I hope what I provided will enhance the gameplay for those who play it. If you’re curious, I provided an interview during the campaign that goes a little deeper into my writing process on the project.(I also may have agreed to play this as part of Green Ronin Publishing gaming livestream? Because I really really really want to play this so bad…)
In other news, my Meow Wolf project is well into its production phase. It plans to open in Summer 2023. I get to visit it in March to see how things are going.
Work on the AfroFae Novel is coming along slowly. I only got as far as 23K in November, so I didn’t win NanoWriMo, but to be honest, I never planned to push for 50k during these things. I didn’t push my wordcount because back in October, my grandmother passed away at the age of 92. We had a beautiful memorial service at a private school in Beverly, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It was a great way to celebrate her life and her love of learning, but it was still hard to say goodbye to her.
Finally, Notion, the note-taking productivity website I use, recently integrated GPT into its pages. AI-generated works have become a huge topic, particularly in the artist and writing worlds. Recently, Clarkesworld had to temporarily pause submissions because they received a ridiculous upsurge in chatbot-generated stories. GigaNotoSaurus has been closed to submissions since November, but we've gotten similar submissions before we closed. Not the deluge like the other magazines, but I suspect that will change when we reopen. I’ve been playing with Notion AI to see what type of content it produces. This post actually started off with me throwing a bunch of my thoughts and then asking the AI to put it in a blog format.
What came up from my disjointed thoughts was this:
It's been a while since I wrote, so here's a brief update on what I've been up to.
In October, my grandmother passed away. We had a beautiful memorial service at a private school in Beverly, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It was a great way to celebrate her life and her love of learning.
In November, Ann Leckie, who had been the publisher for GigaNotosaurus magazine, stepped down. I'm now the publisher and editor of GigaNotoSaurus Magazine. One of the first things we did was increase acceptance payment to $200. I will need to think about funding for the magazine if we are to continue beyond 2023.
My Meow Wolf project is well into its production phase. It plans to open in the Summer 2023. I get to visit it in March to see how things are going.
Work on the AfroFae Novel is coming along. So far I've written [word count] words.
Finally, I'm trying something new in writing Newsletters with AI. If this works, maybe you'll see more posts from me.
As you can see, this is way, way shorter than what I ultimately came up with. Probably the only part that stayed the same was the Meow Wolf project, and that’s because I don’t have any real updates—also, the AI just took the fragments ‘Meow Wolf is in production phase’ ‘will be opening in Summer 2023’ ‘March visit to see how things are going’ and put them in sentence form. Everything else has been embellished/revised/added by me, not by using AI, but just good old-fashioned writing. Not much different from when I write posts anyway, but it helped me to put together a draft quicker than if I sat and wrote it out.
I’m still putting together my thoughts on using AI to write as a whole. I’ll probably actually get around to writing a blog post (gasp, an actual blog post) about it in the next couple of weeks. I can see both pros and cons, but I want to think about it some more. I’ll post a link to it on Twitter and Facebook when it goes up, so be sure to follow me at those places to get updates quicker from me.
Aight. Peace.