In Which Hank Hijacks What We're Writing Week for a Very Good Reason

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I know it's What We're Writing Week, and I am writing like mad, and getting ready to launch MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER --lookit that cover! (And we are still tweaking the final.) And you know you will hear all about that when the time comes.

But today I am turning over my day to our dear backblogger Diana. Because her post is--as we say--time-sensitive, because today is the only day this could be posted!

If you remember, she had mentioned in the comments one day recently that Deaf Awareness Week was coming up starting May 4 (although we celebrate that every day at JRW) and that April is Deaf History Month, and she asked whether we'd be doing a blog about it. Such a good idea! And I asked her to email me. Which she did, and turns out, her post was perfectly perfect, and especially perfect for today. 

As a result, I am delighted to turn the floor over to the amazing Diana.  (Here's her photo, too! Such fun to see!)

DIANA: Tuesday 21 April marks the centenary of Queen Elizabeth II’s birth. Queen Elizabeth II was born on 21 April 1926 to the Duchess of York and the Duke of York in London, England. The late Queen has several connections to Deaf history. 

 Her father, Bertie’s grandmother Queen Alexandra was congenitally deaf. Another connection is Her Majesty’s mother in law.

Princess Alice of Battenberg was born in February 1885 at Windsor Castle in England. No one noticed that Alice was deaf at first. 

 Once her family learned that she was deaf, to quote a relative who was interviewed in a documentary, they decided that they would not treat her any differently, meaning they expected her to follow the royal protocol. 

 Her family worried more about Alice’s deafness than Alice herself. Her siblings would converse with her without concessions. Princess Alice learned how to dance and play the piano. Despite her deafness, Princess Alice learned to lipread in several languages, including English and German. She also learned how to read and write. Her mother worked with her to develop her lipreading skills. 

 A relative remarked that “you had to be very careful what you said” because her lipreading skills were very good.

Princess Alice met Prince Andrew of Greece at the coronation of King Edward VII. They fell in love and got married in 1903. Their only son, Prince Philip, was born in 1921. Many years before Prince Philip met Princess Elizabeth, the heiress to the British throne, his parents Princess Alice of Battenberg and Prince Andrew of Greece visited the Duchess and the Duke of York and the new baby, Elizabeth. Princess Alice was also known as Princess Andrew of Greece. 

 During the Second World War, she used her deafness to her advantage when she was sheltering a Jewish family from the Nazis. By the time her daughter in law became the Queen, she became a nun. At the 1953 coronation, she was wearing a grey nun’s habit. She spent the last few years of her life, living at Buckingham Palace. Princess Alice of Battenberg was a private person. 

 She is well known to the British Deaf community, who shared wonderful stories about her with me.

In addition to the late Queen’s birthday month, April is also Deaf History month. There is a book about the Princess written by Hugo Vickers, who also published a new book about the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece by Hugo Vickers can be ordered from bookshop.org, Apple Books online (ebooks) or your local booksellers.

Hank: SO fascinating! And Diana has two questions for you, Reds and Readers.  Answer as you will!

Question one: Reds and Readers, did you surprise yourself by doing something that you thought you were not able to do?


Or question two: Reds and Readers, do you enjoy reading about history? Fictional History, Romantic History or Scholarly History? Or do you have a favorite story about a favorite historical character?

More info:

Bookshop link:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/alice-princess-andrew-of-greece-hugo-vickers/fd712f8743251138?ean=9780312302399&next=t

Queen Elizabeth II. By Hugo Vickers can be ordered from Blackwell’s at this link:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Queen-Elizabeth-II-by-Hugo-Vickers/9781529355178

 

You can't make this stuff up...

HALLIE EPHRON: Kicking off What we're writing week...

When I read aspiring writers' stories, I often encounter the up-to-now plucky strong investigator who runs pell-mell into a burning building. Why? Because the author needs her to run into that building because a big fat CLUE (or victim) is waiting just inside.

Never mind that no one in their right mind runs into a burning building (certainly not a smart, plucky sleuth/protagonist). Sane people call 911. (Unless they know there's a mama dog nesting in one of the bedroom closets and giving birth to a brood of puppies (see my novel "There Was an Old Woman" in which two characters, decades apart run into two different burning buildings... and live to tell about it.))

I get a lot of wonderful ideas from the news. Stuff that would be hard to make up because people (in real life) do the most outrageous things that would never pass muster in a work of fiction.

Just this week, for instance, there's the story of the enterprising folks who staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars (think Rolls-Royce) in order to collect over $100K in insurance payouts.

The best part of this story is the HOW.

It involved a person getting into a bear suit (yes, bear suits are available on Amazon), climbing into a fancy car, and scraping away at the interior with sharp kitchen utensils leaving scratch marks. Then filing an insurance claim.

The mind boggles at that clever ways one could work this scenario in a mystery novel. (What do they find when they pop the trunk??) (What happens if the horn gets stuck blaring while the "bear" is at work) (What happens if (real) bears emerge from the surrounding wood...)

But, as my reviewers comments taught me, Reality is no excuse. For a plot point to work in a novel, it has to be credible. The characters' actions need to be believable.

Most authors know: Just because something really happened doesn't mean readers will swallow it.

Are there moments have you encountered in REAL LIFE that, if someone put it in a book, no one would believe?

AI and "The Struggle"

 And the winner of the Dude bookmark is... dianneke!!!!

Email me at jennmck at yahoo dot com with you mailing address and I'll send your Dude bookmark.

JENN McKINLAY: Okay, AI is all we seem to hear about these days (if we ignore the war of choice) and I've had my opinions about AI from day one. We've even discussed it here before, but I think the prevalence of AI has gotten even worse since our discussion of Hallie's Generative What? post last September. Sometimes, I loosen up about its use and other times, well, no. I am currently in a "Oh, Hell No" place where I've blocked embedded AI (located in settings and switched it off) from my devices and refuse to use it in any form now.

I'm going to put aside the fact that Anthropic helped itself to 35 of my books, taking them without approval or compensation, and fed them into their machine to "teach" it. Yeah, no. Theft is theft. The lawsuit currently underway is offering artists a fraction (that they have to split 50/50 with their publisher, FFS) of what Anthropic would have paid had they bought the rights properly. Because of course they never offered to legitimately buy the rights as one of the grifting execs said, "That would be entirely too expensive." Yeah, no duh. I guess I'll just go take that new car I want from the dealership because paying for it would be entirely too expensive. Same thing, y'all. Theft is theft.

I'm also going to table the horrors of what AI and its required cooling Data Centers are going to do to our planet's environment. Wells polluted with forever chemicals, water made undrinkable, farms drying up, light pollution, noise pollution, communities forced to pay for a behemoth non job producing monster that tanks their property values as the cherry on top of the poop sundae. 

Instead, what I'm going to pop off about is the actual creative process. I'm in what I call "proposal writing season." This means I've finished all of the books I had under contract and am now writing proposals for potential future books. This would seemingly be a grand place to use AI. I could open up one of their question boxes and say "outline a romcom with XY and Z tropes with an organic farm as the setting" and it would churn out exactly that using my prompts and the more input I fed it, the tighter it would be. I could even ask it to tailor the proposal to the voice of Jenn McKinlay (I know it has the capability because it stole so much of my work). 

In fact, I did use AI to write an outline for a non-fiction piece I was asked to write last year. Non-fiction is not my jam and the outline was super helpful but it was a two paragraph OUTLINE not the article. 

Fiction to me, however, is an organic thing. It lives and breathes in the heart and mind of the artist and it can't be replicated by a machine no matter how many books by the author the machine has been fed. My opinion about this cemented when I had an epiphany, sometimes they hit like lightning bolts and this one did.

I knew I needed another idea for a romcom. I enjoy writing them, but they are by far the hardest genre for me. All that sticky authentic emotional angst is excruciating when I just want to crack jokes and avoid feelings. Ha ha.

The well, as they say, was empty, almost like a Data Center had moved into my head and sucked it dry, ahem. But then, when I was putting my loaded dinner plate onto the table, an entire book appeared in my head and I audibly gasped. Hub immediately asked if I was all right, and I shouted yes as I ran from the room to write down the most awesome idea for a romcom ever. Now, here's the thing, this idea came from a conversation I'd had with a woman seventeen years ago that my brain suddenly trotted out and said, "Well, how about this?"

And here's where the struggle comes in. The spark had arrived but it took me another week of thinking, plotting, revising, rejecting, and scribbling on random pieces of paper when new ideas struck at an inconvenient times, to piece together how this story needed to be told. Could AI have offered a million suggestions on this part? Probably, yes. But the struggle is the important part. I needed ideas to fail so that stronger ideas would appear, a process that takes patience and tenacity.

And that's when I had my epiphany, not just about the book in my head, but the entire problem with AI. Creativity is magic. It comes from the human experience and takes all the bits and bobs of your life or the way you view the world, both of which are unique to you, and crafts them into art in whatever from you decide, whether it's a story or a painting or a performance, and no machine can ever, ever, ever produce anything other than derivative slop replicating that creative magic. Only a human can create something out of nothing. A machine can only produce a subpar imitation. I believe we should demand better of ourselves and the corporations trying to crush us by stealing our creativity and destroying our planet.

Reds and Readers, what are your thoughts on this?