GUEST POST: Lillian Csernica on Finding Happiness in Writing

I’m delighted to welcome author Lillian Csernica, who writes eloquently from the heart about her life. She says the following essay “embodies the main theme of my NaNoWriMo project, Keep Getting Up.”

 

HAPPINESS: A WELCOME STRANGER

By Lillian Csernica

 

If you ask me where I make room for my happiness, it will take me a minute or two to come up with a reply. Not because I don't know where I keep it, but because in a very real sense, I don't have any to keep. I live with Major Depressive Disorder. It's not like I get depressed every now and then. I'm depressed all the time. I have to fight my way out of it to a state of mind that approximates the kind of baseline cheerfulness that gets most people through their day. The specific name for the no-happiness part of my condition is anhedonia. That's the inability to experience pleasure from normal activities such as watching a funny movie or playing with a pet. If that sounds sad, it is. Some days it goes beyond sad all the way into tragic. I sit there and watch life go by. I can see the colors and hear the sounds, but I can't feel anything other than depression. The tastes, the smells, the textures are there but they don't connect to the pleasure center in my brain.

I've had to actively seek out qualified people who taught me the skills I need to change my perceptions and reframe my thinking. I might not be able to feel happiness, but I take great pleasure in other people's joy. Here are two examples:

• My son John just finished taking a class at the library on using a digital camera and laptop to make movies. He learned how to use some new software and do some interesting things with the storyboard pages he'd spent so much time drawing. John doesn't have a completed animation project yet, but he did master a new part of the process in just one hour. I put the experience in context for him, explaining how the animators he admires had to learn step-by-step methods as well. John is proud of himself.
• Michael, my older son, just brought home his latest award-winning art project. He and his aide had kept it in his classroom until summer school ended because it's a triptych with two of the panels created by two of Michael's classmates. It shows a street scene right off the beach in Capitola, done in multimedia that includes paint and crayon and some glitter. While Michael didn't make it into the Top Three for this year's school district art contest, he and his team received ribbons for Awards of Merit. All of us at home made much over Michael winning his fourth award for an art project.

 I think I'm the closest to real happiness that I can get these days when I write. When I get into the creative trance, all sense of time passing vanishes. I leave behind the sorrows of the real world and function within the world of my story. I am on that intuitive wavelength where I'm processing structure and characterization and setting and dialogue all the way down to the microwriting level of word choice and punctuation placement. I could be a gem cutter working with the magnifiers and the precision tools that allow me to cut a stone into a solitaire, a baguette, a marquise, whatever best suits the particular gem. I reach into the story itself for its reality, its shape, the right way to show off its color, cut, and clarity. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of finding the exact word and putting it in the ideal setting.

I have to work hard at making room for happiness in my mind and in my life. Every day I have to survive in an environment of ongoing tragedy, knowing that because of their disabilities, both of my sons will not enjoy everything life has to offer them. I've learned that I can't hold on to happiness. Life changes too quickly, and some of the changes are permanent. I've learned that I have to take medication to correct my brain chemistry so I can get out of bed in the morning and get through the demands of each day. I've learned that I can't let my mental and emotional room be taken up by negative feelings and old baggage. Most of all, I've learned that if I just keep still and be in this present moment, happiness will wave at me or throw me a smile. Once in a while, it will even come and sit beside me so we can share the moment.

 

Lillian Csernica writes fantasy, romance, and horror. Her short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Fantastic Stories, and Jewels of Darkover. Her Kyoto Steampunk short stories can be found in the Clockwork Alchemy anthologies Twelve Hours Later, Thirty Days Later, Some Time Later and Next Stop On The #13. SHIP OF DREAMS, an historical romance, is set in the Caribbean of 1725 during the Golden Age of piracy. A genuine California native born in San Diego, Lillian resides in the Santa Cruz mountains with her two sons and three cats. Visit her at lillian888.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Mothtown, A Brilliant Second Novel from Caroline Hardaker

 Mothtown, by Caroline Hardaker (Angry Robot)

Caroline Hardaker’s second novel, like the first, presents a challenging read. It asks the reader to keep critical faculties, human sympathy, and a healthy degree of scientific skepticism onboard as the story unfolds. It’s been described as a cross between horror and mainstream, but I don’t think it’s horror in the usual sense, any more than Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is. It might better be described as a psychological mystery. Whether the fantasy/science-fictional/surreal elements truly exist in Hardaker’s world or whether they are creations in the mind of the main character is, ultimately, a judgment call for the reader to make.

The story alternates between “After,” in which the adult protagonist races desperately through a sinister wilderness, and “Before,” looking back to his childhood. The “Before” section opens on an apparently dystopic world in which people go missing and floral tributes appear on all-too-many doorsteps and street corners. This is the first part of the mystery: What is going on? Are people really vanishing? If so, where are they going? If not, where are their bodies?

Although his parents try hard to protect him and his sister, ten-year-old David believes something more is going on. When his beloved grandfather--a Professor of Superstring Theory and Dark Matter Studies--disappears and his parents insist the old man is dead, David refuses to believe them. He becomes convinced that his grandfather has found a door into another world, a place he truly belongs. And David is determined to find such a world for himself.

David faces many difficulties in the ordinary world. He’s barely verbal, doesn’t pick up on social cues or interact with others, and seems oblivious to the feelings of others. His mother’s increasingly anxious about the “disappearances,” and despite this, David takes off on his own to visit the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. As a mother myself, I was furious at his lack of sensitivity. Fortunately, Hardaker’s skill kept me reading long enough to ask the question, “What is going on with this kid?”

David is more than an unreliable narrator, although he is that, too, and herein lies the second part of the mystery. What, indeed, is going on with him? Can we trust anything he says about himself, the world, other characters, his grandfather—anything?

Can we read between and behind the lines to discover the real story?

==SPOILER ALERT==

New Evidence on How the Dinosaurs Died

 Such a cool article from Universe Today, I think it merits a post all to itself!

Devastating Clouds of Dust Helped End the Reign of the Dinosaurs

When a giant meteor crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, the impact pulverized cubic kilometers of rock and blasted the dust and debris into the Earth’s atmosphere. It was previously believed that sulfur from the impact and soot from the global fires that followed drove a global “impact winter” that killed off 75% of species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

A new geology paper says that the die-off was additionally fueled by ultrafine dust created by the impact which filled the atmosphere and blocked sunlight for as long as 15 years. Plants were unable to photosynthesize and global temperatures were lowered by 15 degrees C (59 F).

Most scientists agree the disaster started with an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated.

The devastation created layer of ash sandwiched between layers of rock, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, formerly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary, which is found across the world in the geologic record. It includes a layer of iridium, an element common in asteroids but rare on Earth. It was this ‘iridium anomaly’ that first revealed the extinction event as an asteroid strike to geologists more than three decades ago.

What has been debated is what created conditions for the post-impact winter. The leading candidates were sulphur from the asteroid’s impact, or soot from global wildfires that ensued after the impact. Both would have blocked out sunlight and plunged the world into a long, dark winter, collapsing the food chain and creating a chain reaction of extinctions.  

Short Book Reviews: Louisa Morgan's Powerful Take on Ghosts, Abuse, and Friendship

Louisa Morgan is a writer of astonishing depth and power. Now she brings her superb talents to a modern tale of abuse, friendship, and hope.

Clinical psychologist Beatrice Bird has always had a touch of “second sight,” a benign and occasionally useful talent for lucky guesses. An impulsive experiment with psychedelics during the Haight-Ashbury era transforms her intuitive gift. Now she sees ghostly figures attached to living people, embodiments of abuse, terror, and guilt. As the years pass, these manifestations become increasingly difficult to endure. She flees to a remote island community, where her only social contacts are a few nuns and a pair of opinionated cows. Just as she settles in to a life of isolation, her life collides with that of another refugee. Timid Anne Iredale is clearly on the run, willing to go to any lengths to hide her identity as the wife of a powerful judge. Beatrice’s gift, however, reveals the most horrific phantoms yet: a mewling child clinging to Anne and a specter of unalloyed evil looming over them both. Soon the two are thrown together on a journey of courage, healing, and redemption.

Morgan tackles complex and difficult issues with compassion, intelligence, and page-turning drama. The story unfolds like a spiral, circling through two very different lives, past and present, peeling away layers of illusion and façade until they are woven together in a triumphant, deeply moving unity. Clear your schedule before opening this book, because once you start reading, you won’t want to put it down!

Planets and Nebulae and Stars, Oh My!

An embarrassment of riches of science articles:

Want to Find Life? Compare a Planet to its Neighbors

With thousands of known exoplanets and tens of thousands likely to be discovered in the coming decades, it could be only a matter of time before we discover a planet with life. The trick is proving it. So far the focus has been on observing the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, looking for molecular biosignatures that would indicate the presence of life. But this can be difficult since many of the molecules produced by life on Earth could also be produced by geologic processes. A new study argues that a better approach would be to compare the atmospheric composition of a potentially habitable world with those of other planets in the star system.

Since planets form within the debris disk of a young star, they will generally have similar compositions. Because of the migration of certain molecules such as water ice, the outer planets can have a slightly different composition than the inner planets, but overall their composition is similar. For this study, the team looked at the abundance of atmospheric carbon among worlds.

Carbon is not just a primary element for life on Earth, it also absorbs readily in water and can be bound geologically in rocks. So the idea is that if an exoplanet is in the potentially habitable zone of a star and has significantly less atmospheric carbon than similar worlds in its system, then that is a strong indicator of the presence of water and organic life. Take our solar system as an example. Earth, Venus, and Mars are all roughly in the habitable zone of the Sun, but both Venus and Mars have atmospheres comprised mostly of carbon dioxide. In contrast, Earth has an atmosphere of mostly nitrogen and oxygen, and only a fraction of a percent of carbon dioxide. Earth’s atmospheric carbon is so dramatically different from that of Venus and Mars that it stands out as a likely inhabited world.

The Crab Reveals Its Secrets To JWST

The Crab Nebula – otherwise known as the first object on Charles Messier’s list of non-cometary objects or M1 for short

It has been known that there is a pulsar at the core of the nebula, and it’s this pulsar that is the true remains of the progenitor star.  When it went ‘supernova,’ the core collapsed to form the ultra-dense rotating object that, if you happen to be in the right place in space (hey, that rhymes), then you will see a pulse of radiation as it rotates. The infrared images from JWST reveal synchrotron emissions, which are a direct result of the rapidly rotating pulsar.  As the pulsar rotates, the magnetic field accelerates particles in the nebula to astonishingly high speeds such that they emit synchrotron radiation. As a fabulously lucky quirk of nature, the radiation is particularly obvious in infrared, making it ideal for JWST. 

Uranus Has Infrared Auroras, Too

Auroras happen when charged particles in the solar wind and near-planet environment get trapped by a planet’s magnetic field. They funnel down to the atmosphere and collide with gas molecules. This happens on Earth and we see auroras over the north and south poles of our planet. They also happen at other planets. Astronomers detect them on the other giant planets, and a smaller version of them occurs on Mars. Venus probably doesn’t experience similar types of auroral displays, since it has no intrinsic magnetic field. However, it may experience something like them during particularly gusty solar wind events. At the outer planets, the gas mix is different in the atmospheres. That means their aurorae show up in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

Uranus has an interesting magnetic field. It does not originate from the exact center of the planet. It’s also offset by 59 degrees from the rotation axis. That’s tipped 90 degrees from the plane of the solar system. This arrangement means that the Uranian magnetosphere is asymmetric and its field strengths vary depending on location. It connects with the solar wind once every Uranian day (which is 17 hours long). The planet does show some auroral activity, particularly around the poles and Hubble Space Telescope detected some in 2011

Three Planets Around this Sunlike Star are Doomed. Doomed!

According to new research we can start writing the eulogy for four exoplanets around a Sun-like star about 57 light years away. But there’s no hurry; we have about one billion years before the star becomes a red giant and starts to destroy them.

The star is Rho Coronae Borealis, a yellow dwarf star like our Sun. It’s in the constellation Corona Borealis, and has almost the same mass, radius, and luminosity as the Sun. The difference is in their ages. The Sun is about five billion years old, but Rho CrB is twice that, which means its red giant phase is imminent, at least in astrophysical terms.

Post main sequence stellar evolution can result in dramatic, and occasionally traumatic, alterations to the planetary system architecture, such as tidal disruption of planets and engulfment by the host star,” Kane writes. Rho Coronae Borealis is both old and bright, making it “… a particularly interesting case of advanced main sequence evolution,” according to Kane. Not only because its similar to the Sun and easily observed, but also because it hosts four exoplanets.

White Dwarfs Could Support Life. So Where are All Their Planets?

Astronomers have found plenty of white dwarf stars surrounded by debris disks. Those disks are the remains of planets destroyed by the star as it evolved. But they’ve found one intact Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a white dwarf.

Are there more white dwarf planets? Can terrestrial, Earth-like planets exist around white dwarfs?

A white dwarf (WD) is the stellar remnant of a once much-larger main sequence star like our Sun. When a star in the same mass range as our Sun leaves the main sequence, it swells up and becomes a red giant. As the red giant ages and runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers as a planetary nebula, a shimmering veil of expanding ionized gas that everybody’s seen in Hubble images. After about 10,000 years, the planetary nebula dissipates, and all that’s left is a white dwarf, alone in the center of all that disappearing glory.

White dwarfs are extremely dense and massive, but only about as large as Earth. They’ve left their life of fusion behind, and emit only residual heat. But still, heat is heat, and white dwarfs can have habitable zones, though they’re very close.

Astronomers are pretty certain that most stars have planets. But those planets are in peril when they orbit a star that leaves the main sequence behind and becomes a red giant. That can wreak havoc on planets, consuming some of them and tearing others apart by tidal disruption. Some white dwarfs are surrounded by debris disks, and they can only be the remains of the star’s planets, ripped to pieces by the star during its red dwarf stage.

But in 2020 researchers announced the discovery of an intact planet among the debris disk in the habitable zone around the white dwarf WD1054-226. If there’s one, there are almost certainly others out there somewhere. Why haven’t we found them? And does the fact that the first one we’ve found is a Jupiter-mass planet mean the WD exoplanet population is dominated by them?

Old Data from Kepler Turns Up A System with Seven Planets

NASA’s Kepler mission ended in 2018 after more than nine years of fruitful planet-hunting. The space telescope discovered thousands of planets, many of which bear its name. But it also generated an enormous amount of data that exoplanet scientists are still analyzing.

Kepler 385 is similar to the Sun but a little larger and hotter. It’s 10% larger and about 5% hotter. It’s one of a very small number of stars with more than six planets or planet candidates orbiting it.

The two innermost planets are both slightly larger than Earth. According to the new catalogue, they’re both probably rocky. They may even have atmospheres, though if they do, they’re very thin. The remaining five planets have radii about twice as large as Earth’s and likely have thick atmospheres.

SFWA's Statement on Artificial Intelligence

 

On October 30, the SFWA Board and the SFWA Legal Affairs Committee sent the following letter to the US Copyright Office in response to their August 2023 Notice of Inquiry regarding copyright law and policy issues in artificial intelligence, which is part of their AI Initiative.

We are aware that there is a wide range of opinion on the subject within our community, but the issues of known damage to fiction marketplaces and threats to original IP copyrights that these new AI tools pose must be made known to bureaucrats and lawmakers recommending and making policy. By doing so, when consensus emerges about the proper use of generative AI in art, we can ensure that such AI is created and utilized in a way that respects the rights of creative workers.

In the near future, we’ll have the opportunity to read other letters submitted to this call for comments, and both SFWA and individuals will be able to review them and respond. We invite all our members, but especially those writers working in gaming and comics, to make known the effects you are seeing of artificial intelligence on your careers, for good or ill.

We will continue to study this issue and speak up where we feel we can do good. The more we learn from our membership, the more effective we will be.

The SFWA Board

 

 

TEXT OF LETTER

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), formerly Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is, in part, to support, defend, and advocate for writers of science fiction, fantasy and related genres. Formed in 1965, SFWA currently has over 2,500 commercially published writers in those genres across various types of media. Its membership includes writers of both stand-alone works and short fiction published in anthologies, magazines, and in other media. SFWA is not a subsidiary of any other entity. SFWA has no subsidiaries or other ownership interest in any other organization that may be affected by the Copyright Office’s policies on AI.

It is in that capacity that we write this letter in response to the Copyright Office’s call for comment on issues raised by artificial intelligence systems. As creative writers who have long had an eye on the future, we are no strangers to the concept of artificial intelligence; indeed, the work of our members is frequently mentioned by the people who over the years have made progress in that field. We have long anticipated these developments and have thought deeply over the years about its promise and pitfalls. With this in mind, it is with much regret that we cannot yet speak in favor of using AI technology in the business of creating art.

The current crop of artificial intelligence systems owes a great debt to the work of creative human beings. Vast amounts of copyrighted creative work, collected and processed without regard to the moral and legal rights of its creators, have been copied into and used by these systems that appear to produce new creative work. These systems would not exist without the work of creative people, and certainly would not be capable of some of their more startling successes. However, the researchers who have developed them have not paid due attention to this debt. Everyone else involved in the creation of these systems has been compensated for their contributions—the manufacturers of the hardware on which it runs, the utility companies that generate their electrical power, the owners of their data centers and offices, and of course the researchers themselves. Even where free and open source software is used, it is used according to the licenses under which the software is distributed as a reflection of the legal rights of the programmers. Creative workers alone are expected to provide the fruits of their labor for free, without even the courtesy of being asked for permission. Our rights are treated as a mere externality.

Perhaps, then, creative workers uniquely benefit from the existence of these artificial intelligence systems? Unfortunately, to date the opposite has been the case: SFWA has thus far seen mainly harm to the business of writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy as a result of the release of AI systems.

For example, short fiction in our genres has long been recognized as a wellspring of the ideas that drive our work as well as inspiring works in film, games, and television. Writers in our genres rely on a thriving and accessible landscape, which includes online and paper magazines. Part of the success of these publications depends on an open submission process, in which writers may submit their stories without a prior business relationship. This has frequently served as a critical opportunity for new and marginalized authors to have their voices heard.

Over the last year, these venues, particularly the ones that pay higher rates for stories, have been inundated with AI-written stories. The editors uniformly report that these submissions are poorly conceived and written, far from being publishable, but the sheer volume materially interferes with the running of these magazines. Once submission systems are flooded with such content, it takes longer to read and reject a submission than it took someone to have an AI produce it in the first place. Every submitted work must be opened and considered to verify that the writers for whom the system was originally designed are not missed or forgotten.

This amounts to a denial-of-service attack against a critical part of our community: at best, authors wait longer for the attention of a more-hurried editor; at worst, we fear that valued markets may be forced to close their doors to unsolicited submissions. As more and more users of AI hear about potential get-rich-quick submission schemes, this problem will only grow worse. Significantly, the harm to our marketplace will fall hardest on new and marginalized authors.

Likewise, novelists have reported to SFWA that their work has been increasingly crowded out in online marketplaces such as Amazon, where there is a well-known issue of large numbers of AI-generated book-length works for sale. In this case the market itself becomes clogged with AI-written books that are posted in the hopes of playing Amazon’s algorithms to lure readers into careless or adventurous spending, leaving those readers less able to find real writers’ work and less willing to take a future chance. Again it is new and marginalized authors without name recognition who will suffer most from the significant rise in noise in the marketplace, but even established authors are seeing AI-generated counterfeit works appear under their names.

In addition, we have received reports of AI systems trained on copyrighted material being induced to produce material that would be a violation of the original creators’ rights to license derivative works. The background and setting of science fiction and fantasy books are uniquely copyrightable and suited to derivative works that may not even copy the characters, but only the world in which the story takes place. It is common for science fiction and fantasy authors to license these worlds to other authors or publishers as derivative works. AIs have been documented being used without permission to produce putative prequels or sequels to copyrighted works using these derivative elements, for example, or to provide quotes from books.

AI does not uniquely enable such violations, of course; the potential harm is that what can be done on purpose can be done by accident. It seems entirely plausible for someone to generate text from an AI for use in their own creative work that violates the rights of another author. They would then publish the resulting work or seek copyright registration without ever understanding that their work infringes on the rights of others. Should this become common, the courts would likely become increasingly full of litigation to protect original intellectual property, at considerable cost and chilling effect.

Clearly, we are only experiencing the beginning of a potentially devastating process for both creators and consumers alike.

Even if at some point in the future as AI becomes more sophisticated, these ersatz books and stories become acceptable to human readers, that will be wholly because of the copyrighted material that these systems have copied and ingested. If they have any value at all, it will be due to the work of creators that has been taken without permission or compensation, and turned to a use that harms the ability of those creators to ply their trade. This state of affairs cannot stand.

The Copyright Office is rightly concerned with the details of the registration process and how AI generated writing should be treated by the law. We agree wholeheartedly that AI-generated works should be uncopyrightable and the Office should refuse to register such works. To promote the progress of science and the useful arts, that line must be held.

We are forced to conclude, however, in the light of the harms listed above, that existing policy is not sufficient. Lack of copyrightability has not prevented marketplaces from being flooded with counterfeit fiction. Treating AI-generated text as legally on par with public domain work ignores the possibility that it in fact inadvertently contains infringing elements placed there by a machine seeking only to respond to a prompt and not concerned with rights.

It must also be considered that AI systems may be trained in other countries with different laws regarding the ingestion of creators’ work. Care must be taken to craft regulations and laws that protect rightsholders in the US, no matter where the AI itself is trained. Training outside the US must not become a loophole allowing the violation of rights in the US.

Remedies will not be easy. However, we offer four suggestions that we consider necessary to protecting creators and preserving their future ability to create.

We recommend a disclosure requirement, to protect readers and potential business partners by explicitly identifying AI-created contributions representing at least a de minimis creative expression. Supporters of human authorship want to know what it is they’re buying, and markets have a right to not be fooled into publishing work which the putative authors have limited or no legal right to license.

The copyright registration of textual works that include a mix of AI-generated and human-authored expression should indicate how much of each there is. There is no easy way to distinguish whether a work is 95% human generated and 5% created by AI, or vice versa. The inclusion of purpose-created AI work thus differs from the otherwise-analogous inclusion of public domain work, which can in principle be researched and identified. We therefore ask that the CO include in registration a disclosure statement from the registrant estimating how much of the work is created by AI.

We recommend requiring proof of license or legal right to all training data before any AI-generated work based on that data can be incorporated into a copyright registration. Just as it is considered necessary for commercial software to track the licenses of all libraries used in its creation and verify the right to put those libraries to such use, it should be necessary as well for the training data of an artificial intelligence to be tracked such that it can be proved that all incorporated work is used under license by consent of the author. Work incorporating AI without that clear provenance should be treated as presumptively infringing on the copyright of unknown authors.

In the event that a collective license for AI textual works may be established, a number of factors need to be taken into account before accepting such a license, many of which are often overlooked. We believe that such a system should be voluntary, opt-in, and should cover any professional authors whose work has been ingested by the AI system. Collective licenses that do not receive explicit permissions from the authors of covered work should be treated as no license at all for these purposes, and AI-generated work based on them should be treated as infringing on the copyright of authors who did not voluntarily opt in.

As writers of science fiction and fantasy, we are confident that the boundless ingenuity of the researchers who brought these AI systems to the world will find ways to do their work that fully respect our rights.

SFWA looks forward to the opportunity to provide input on whatever additional subjects may arise during the course of this study.

November 03, 2023

Reprinted with permission.