Tonight’s supermoon rises above the Manzanos while sandhill cranes seek their night’s rest.
I haven’t posted here since the middle of October. Instead I’ve been, well, knocking down a series of piñatas that have come floating up one after another. Slow-moving targets, but each requiring a fair amount of energy to knock down
In the last few weeks, I have:
Finished drafting HEAVEN IN FLAMES. (Will probably require rewrites, however.)
Celebrated a birthday. (yay)
Scheduled the first of three joint replacement surgeries. (yay?)
Completed a proposal for the next two Praxis novels.
Finally organized my 2024 taxes into a coherent package that my accountant may actually understand.
Started a piece of short fiction that is unconnected to any other project, to any deadline or expectation. I’ve been busy writing novels for ten or twelve years now, and working on a shorter piece feels like quite the liberation. I don’t owe this story to anyone but me!
And while this has been going on, I’ve been dealing with the fact that our building no longer has a working elevator. We’re on the top (third) floor, and now I have to painfully hobble up and down stairs with my cane. It’s much worse, of course, if we do something unwise like buy groceries, because we then have to drag our purchases up the stairs somehow.
This has been going on for three weeks now, and seems to be entirely the fault of the Otis Elevator company, which has taken its damn sweet time to find and ship the necessary replacement part. But at any rate, I’ve disposed of the various tasks that have been a drag on my life for most of this year. I have laid my burdens down. I have enough leisure to enjoy myself without having the feeling that I really ought to be doing something else.
Maybe I’ll hook up the PlayStation I bought back in April. I haven’t even taken it out of its box.
Or maybe I’ll just kick back and enjoy the holiday season. And let someone else carry the groceries.
So today I filed the paperwork— actually an online form— claiming my share of the Anthropic settlement.
Anthropic is an company which has trained its AI, called Claude, on vast numbers of books, song lyrics, and other stolen copyrighted matter, and which has now offered its victims $1.5 billion in compensation— the largest copyright case in history. Each individual violation of copyright will earn the creator $3000 plus interest.
There is a page where you can find out whether your work has been scraped by Criminal Claude, and if it has, will lead you to another page where you can file your claim.
According to the page no less than 27 of my works were victimized. There’s one work that has nothing to do with me, (the author has a similar name), and one of my books was entered twice, but that still left me with 25 books and stories.
So this afternoon I diligently sat down to type all this information into an online form. Title, author, publisher, ISBN, copyright registration number, whether I hold the rights solely or with others, and whether it’s an educational publication.
It’s a slog, and I found out that once I began I couldn’t save the page and continue later. I had to add all 25 entries, and only then would the page allow itself to be saved. I found this out when I was trying to click to another tab— probably to find the ISBN of the novel I was working on— I accidentally clicked on the X of the tab I was on. The page vanished, and there was no way to get it back. I’d halfway finished the job, and now i had to re-enter all that information.
It took all afternoon, and by the end my body was a mass of cramp and pain.
But hey! There will be compensation, right? $1.5 billion is pocket change compared to the profits Anthropic expects Claude to earn them, but at least it’ll buy me a few nice toys.
And more settlements on the horizon! All the large-language models learned their writerly chops from real writers, and without compensation. With Anthropic having settled, that’s more pressure for others to fall in line.
Personally I would like to see the AI companies all burst into flame and tumble screaming into the void, but if that doesn’t happen I can console myself with my token payments.
If you’re a victim, you have till the end of the month to file the paperwork. Get busy!
I visited my physical therapist this afternoon. We were born in the same town (Duluth), and went to the same junior high school (Ordean). He was a year behind me and we didn’t know each other. My family left town, and he went on to become a ski jumping champion and twice a member of the U.S. Olympic ski jumping team. So far, so awesome.
We were talking about those faraway times, and he said, “There’s one thing that nobody ever believes, which is that the boys were naked in swim class.”
Which is true. The girls got to wear swimsuits, but the boys were starkers, as if we were all at the old swimming hole, or something.
I was not particularly interested in the sight of thirty naked boys all shivering and blue-lipped in the cold water, but as it turns out they were interested in me, because it was soon evident that I was the only one among them who wasn’t circumcised.
They asked me about it, and I told them.
“Noooo! You’re just making that up!”
“No, I’m not. That really happened to you.”
“NO WAY! MY PARENTS WOULDN’T CUT OFF THE END OF MY DICK! YOU’RE LYING!”
“Well they didn’t actually cut it off themselves, they paid the doctor extra to do it for them.”
“NOOOO! YOU’RE A FREAK! GET AWAY FROM ME, FREAK-OH!”
This was far from the last time that I was shunned for speaking the absolute truth.
My novella “Elegy for Angels and Dogs” is reviewed on Black Gate by Steven H. Silver. Also reviewed is my story’s precursor, Roger Zelazny’s “the Graveyard Heart.”
“Elegy” was the longest story ever published in Asimov’s, and may still be.
