estellamiraiauthor

[estellamiraiauthor]

Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

[estellamiraiauthor]

Fuck personality tests. Who comes to your mind when I say “Michael”

[estellamiraiauthor]

My absolute least favorite trope in sci-fi is the planetary monoculture.

Vulcans come from Vulcan, Thanagarians from Thanagar, Martians from Mars. Kryptonians speak Kryptonian and are science people while Klingons speak Klingon and love to fight. The entire population of Cybertron either picked sides or left.

Meanwhile, we are Humans from Earth with thousands of languages, religions, cultures, ethnicities...

I hate it in fantasy, too. You mean there are no dipshit elves that walk with a limp because they tripped on a rock? If all fairies are tricksters, who's doing the accounting? Jreph the daytime troll who wears sunscreen.

[estellamiraiauthor]

Story idea: Some kind of situation where there’s kind of a chosen one, but the chosen one isn’t chosen because of who their parents are or the alignment of the stars when they’re born, it’s more like a “whoever finds the Magical Item next is the next… IDK, Slayer or whatever” situation.

The young woman who CURRENTLY has the magical item is pregnant and knows it’s time to pass the torch. She tries to find a place where it will be found by a young, healthy person capable of taking it on… but instead it’s found by a 60- or 70-something woman who’s been a housewife her whole life and doesn’t consider herself to have ANY special skills much less saving the world.

But once she’s got the Magical Object, that’s it. It’s her. So she’s got to learn to fight the bad guys, and her only mentor is working off two hours of sleep and has to give all her lessons with a baby on her boob, and they somehow both kick ass at it and become best friends in the process?

IDK. Just an idea and like, a vague outline of a couple of characters. Not sure if I’ll write it or not, but there it is.

[estellamiraiauthor]

I feel like I’ve been given a challenge here as well! ❤️

This is totally at odds with the story idea that’s been percolating my head (which wouldn’t involve romance at all), but I’m tempted.

The problem with commercial F/M romance is that it's written by the most heterosexual women alive and reading it you feel yourself slowly suffocating from the Gender of it all like a fish in a eutrophying lake. And what we actually need as a culture is F/M written by insane bisexuals violently allergic to heteronormativity

[estellamiraiauthor]

This reminds me of a book I read once where one of the main characters was a wheelchair user but the author didn’t mention that until like, 60% of the way through the book.

And I 1000% appreciate what I assume they were trying to do there. I don’t think it was lazy writing, I think they were intentionally trying to make the reader aware of the human tendency to just ASSUME the dude doesn’t have any disabilities unless they are explicitly pointed out. It’s a valid lesson, and I think they did it REALLY well if that was the intent.

But it was also really jarring because if I remember correctly, we had a REALLY GOOD physical image of what the characters looked like otherwise? I think it was like a mixed-race blended family, and because all of that was done really vividly, I thought I had a good image of them in my head? This wasn’t one of those situations where the author just doesn’t describe the character at all and the reader can just fill in whatever.

My personal preference just as a reader would’ve been to have the information up front so I could imagine the character correctly. But if the author was, in fact, trying to make a statement, they clearly did it very well because I no longer remember the title of the book, the character’s name, or the plot, but I’m still talking about that little reveal that really wasn’t a reveal at all?

[estellamiraiauthor]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[estellamiraiauthor]

The emotional connection between a writer/artist and a really obscure song that they associate with their characters is immensely powerful and cannot be explained

[estellamiraiauthor]

Some truths about the publishing industry because I certainly got blindsided when going in. Now I'm so broken by this industry I struggle to encourage aspiring writers lmao

[estellamiraiauthor]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[estellamiraiauthor]

I keep thinking about what would happen if Pamela (MC of Blood On A Yellow Rose) and Rei met. They have a surprising amount in common lol, case in point:

1.) Both are washed-up former musicians who are extremely bitter about the loss of their careers

2.) They’re technically around the same age, but Pamela hasn’t aged since she was bitten, and she’s stuck at age 25 for the rest of eternity

3.) Both are trying to leverage their way back into the music industry via the newbies they’ve taken a liking to (Pamela with Zinnia, and Rei with Teru)

Well, without having “met” Pamela yet, I can’t say for sure, but I think Rei’s gut instinct would probably be to see anyone in a remotely similar situation as a rival at best or even a kind of snooty “don’t equate me with THEM” situation at first.

But then, I think if circumstances forced him to spend more time either said person and they really did have POSITIVE things in common in addition to the bitterness… I think he might eventually have to admit it’s nice to have someone to talk to who has some shared experiences.

He might always be a little jealous of the whole eternal youth thing though. 😜

[estellamiraiauthor]

I started writing my book in 2005, finished the first full draft in 2015, finally published in 2018.

No, I wasn’t writing constantly during that time. For about 7-8 year the file was just gathering dust but I was THINKING about it. And sometimes that’s writing too, just letting an idea or a character percolate while you gain the live experience and the technical experience you need to make it RIGHT.

PSA: Writing a book can take a looooong time. If you've been working on your project for a year, two years, five years... you're not doing anything wrong. If you've written three drafts and thrown them all away, if you can only write a hundred words a day, if you put your book down for six months and pick it up again only to be baffled by what you've written... Congratulations. You're not inefficient or slow. You're just a writer. Welcome to the writing life.

[estellamiraiauthor]

from the bottom of my heart: just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed to exist

[estellamiraiauthor]

Fun fact: I have never read Susan Kay’s Phantom, and at this point I probably never will.

Why did I not read it originally? Because it was either self-published or with a really small publisher or something and therefore out of print, hard to find, and expensive at the time I was originally into All the Phantom Things. (EBooks were not really a thing.)

Why did I not read it once ebooks became a thing? Because I already had the idea for my own Phantom retelling and didn’t want that vision to change, I deliberately refrained from reading any new-to-me versions for a few years.

So why not read it now? Uh… because meh? I feel like I’ve got the general gist of what it’s about from All The Fucking Fanfics That Treat It Like Leroux Canon. (You can write Kay Fic if you want, that’s cool, but there was not a cat named Ayesha in Leroux thankyouverymuch.) And honestly, I think it would just remind me of that specific 2005 brand of fic that I was trying to Not Do.

Basically I think I probably won’t like it all that much, there won’t be any plot points fanfic hasn’t already made clear, and there are things I’d rather spend my reading time on?

[estellamiraiauthor]

So writers joke a lot about "drinking the tears of our readers", but I want to be so honest with you when I tell you that making you cry isn't our real goal. Making you feel is.

Kicking your feet? Giggling? Can't stop smiling? And yes, crying? Feeling anything, everything. That's our goal. That means we did The Job.

[estellamiraiauthor]