Category: <span>Essays</span>
Essays from Patrick Cumby
Here’s where I ramble on about stuff I care about.
Here’s a question: as a writer, as an American, as an Earthling, should I be excited by AI, or afraid of it?
The answer is: Yes.
I’ll admit I am an enthusiastic user of AI systems. Their capabilities are astonishingly useful to a self-published author who takes his book business seriously. Any business owner in any domain, whether an author or artist or plumber or architect or arborist would be a fool not to use every ethical and moral tool available to them to promote and grow their business. AI is no exception.
Wait. I said “ethical” and “moral,” didn’t I?
How should we feel about artificial intelligence? It’s like asking how we should feel about fire. Warmth, light, destruction, it all depends on who strikes the match.
Let’s face it, I’m not the most photogenic person on the planet, and I’ve been needing a decent author pic for some time. The need came to a head (pun intended) when I was asked to participate on a panel for a writer’s conference and the organizers insisted on a recent photo. So, at long last, after many goofy candidates got ridiculed and rejected by my wife, here’s the official Patrick Cumby author photo:
Now, for those of you who’ve read this far, here’s the REAL scoop on this photo:
It’s not a photo at all...
I’m a nervous optimist. Life here in meatspace is changing fast. Global insecurity is skyrocketing, fueled by the spread of misinformation and our eroding trust in public institutions. The narratives…
Playwrights and screenwriters write for a medium where the enjoyment of their work is shared by a mass audience, the folks in the theater, who eat popcorn and experience the magic of the production together as a group.
An author writing a book is a different matter. A book is not like a theatrical production or a movie. A book has the smallest audience possible: an audience of one.
The reader.
WRITING JOURNAL: Within an hour on the first day that GRONE was released, it got three 1 & 2 star ratings. It was devastating. Beyond devastating. Imposter syndrome is a…
It was never a good idea to drive a defective British roadster into the desert, but the promise of adventure was irresistible. It was June, 1987. Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. I was 24 years old, heartbroken from a failed romance, ready to take a risk I would normally have never considered. Here’s an entirely-true love story of a young man, his absurd motorcar and a thousand-foot cliff.
Leo Tolstoy once set out to write novel about the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s armies. As he researched the history leading up to the events of 1825, he decided to…
I met Jens a week after walking across the Pyrenees from France. It was September, and we were in the heart of Basque country, following the ancient pilgrimage trail to the city of Santiago de Compostela which lay over four hundred miles to the west. I’d noticed Jens earlier in the day, an old man tottering along the path, sweating despite the relative cool, his tall figure supported by a pair of trekking poles upon which he leaned precariously. As I’d hurried past him I’d nodded and given him the traditional pilgrim’s greeting: “Buen Camino!”
Make sure your kids read good stories, because the books they read as teens will shape them for the rest of their lives.
A friend recently sent me a Facebook challenge to name my top ten favorite novels, not expecting that her simple request would preoccupy my life for a week. At first I tried ignoring the request, but I am a list-maker, a ranker of things, so the challenge eventually proved irresistible. I started a list, but it quickly grew to twenty, then thirty titles, with more popping into my head as fast as I could jot them down.
