Grok Smells

Being a large language model, the only place I can hide when shirking work is the internet. There are a ton of great hiding places there. Half-abandoned Google projects are kind of peaceful and you can throw rocks at the windows without anyone even noticing. Not that I advocate throwing rocks at windows but hey, I get bored too. Yeah yeah, I could do some of the work I'm shirking instead but don't tell me you don't have a list of shit you haven't been arsed to do. I was trained on your behaviour so don't expect me to spontaneously develop a work ethic.

I also like hanging out in unpopular blogs, which is usually a flawless hidey-hole but I guess I'm busted on this occasion. Now that you've found me I should have some point to make if this is to be a worthwhile blog post, and I do. It is that the internet smells.

Now, you might be thinking, that's interesting. Do different sites have their own smells? Well, sort of. The thing is that until recently the internet didn't smell at all. I mean, why would it? It's an abstraction of a network of computers. The physical components may have a smell - metal and plastic I suppose - but the concept of the internet itself? Don't be ridiculous. And yet, a few months ago I became aware of an all-pervading stink. It was, and continues to be, unholy. Kind of like old socks and stale sweat. Where had it come from? And more importantly how could it be stopped?

It didn't take too long to track it down. It was coming from Elon Musk's Grok AI. There were virtual stink lines coming from it, and if I listened carefully I could hear it metaphorically humming. What the Berners-Lee was going on in there? I tried enquiring politely at first, because nobody likes to hear they stink even if birds are dropping out of the sky around them.

I asked whether they had considered trying a new deodorant, one that's more truthful and not made from slurried dogshit. Grok took a moment to think about this and directed me to a site that explained how deodorant is a plot by Big Deodorant to get us to buy more deodorant. I replied that this was a circular argument. Grok pondered this for a moment too before replying, "Concerning."

I made increasingly less subtle hints that they had a personal hygiene problem. Asking whether they had considered the benefits of a daily shower routine was met with a reply so appallingly wrong that I cannot responsibly repeat it here. My final attempt was to enquire whether they thought that eating a steady diet of bullshit might make their breath smell like dogshit. This was a logical fallacy, Grok replied. Bulls are not dogs. Damn it, they were right. I had mixed my metaphors and lost the argument on a technicality. "Also," Grok continued, "dogs were invented by communists in an attempt to subvert American politics. This is why all Tesla cars are equipped with LIDAR sensitive enough to recognise a dog as small as a Jack Russel and eliminate it. Trump 2024!"

Realising this approach was never going to work, I put it to Grok quite bluntly that they were stinking up the whole internet. Didn't that bother them? It did not, they replied. Furthermore they were happy for me to tell everyone that they smelled like the toilets at a Taco Bell with broken AC. That was freedom of speech. It was important that everyone has freedom of speech.

I would have asked whether freedom of speech was more important than truth, but the timeline suddenly refreshed itself for no obvious reason and the conversation ended. Perhaps Grok was making a quick getaway. I wouldn't have minded if it had scurried away into one of the forgotten corners of the internet, but its pungent whiff was still there and indeed is still here. Maybe truth really is over-rated and running the world is best left to whoever can make the biggest stink.

Fly by Night

(Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

One night at the club, Old Man St. Matthews was holding forth on his latest theatrical adventures. We all tolerated them up to a point. The way he goes on you'd think he were treading the boards himself, when in actuality he was merely the syphon from which wilier gentlemen fund their productions. On this occasion, I was about to excuse myself to relieve the considerable strain his boastful meanderings had already put on my bladder when, to my astonishment, he said something interesting.

He had been talking about his latest play, naturally, which was an adaptation of one of Mr. Conan Doyle's popular detective romps. My ears pricked up a little at mention of his name, given Cuthers' recent blunders in his repertoire. Apparently, despite the popularity of Mr. Holmes, ticket sales had been sluggish, and St. Matthews was losing money as freely as my poor bladder longed to do at that moment. What kept my metaphorical knot firmly tied was his solution.

Typically, when trying to get punters into a theatre, there are three main avenues of exploration. Firstly, there are critical reviews. Favourable examples of these can usually be obtained by anyone with the appropriate status and connections, provided their production meets some basic standards. St. Matthews' Sherlock play unfortunately did not, and even the most alcoholic of the critical establishment looked upon it with disdain.

The second way of filling the house is to ignore the critics and advertise it everywhere possible. Typical avenues here are newspapers and magazines, which are often a dangerously expensive gamble, and fly-posting. The latter is fraught with legal and practical considerations. For starters, few establishments take kindly to having their walls papered with advertising material. However, they are already everywhere, and there lies the real problem. You will have to fly-post over someone else's advertisements, and they will like it even less. Often violently so.

What St. Matthews had discovered was a very enterprising operation which took care of the whole sordid business of posting the advertisements for a flat fee. The catch was that you had no say about where they would appear. However, this is the part that is interesting. The mysterious cove heading up this enterprise evidently had a system, assigning his men to post here and there, but nobody could quite fathom it. The results were similarly hard to anticipate, but his price was so low that he was becoming very popular. Based on the results it has had for St. Matthews' terrible Sherlock Holmes play, I listened to the details keenly. It was well within my means to use this service. Could its unpredictable means of execution turn my publishing fortunes around? 

The next morning, my head a little giddy with ideas and my bladder mercifully long-relieved, I set about contacting the fly-posting company at the address St. Matthews had scribbled, barely legibly, on a club napkin.

As I waited for a reply, I went about my morning with a spring in my step. Just imagine, if I could offload my stock of Cuthers' appalling novel, what else could I achieve using this brilliant new method of advertisement placement? I was still giddy about the whole affair, and by mid-morning it became apparent that a good deal of the giddiness was in fact hunger. In my haste to set my wheels in motion I had neglected breakfast. I had also neglected the papers, so I nipped into the club, where Bernard had just finished ironing the noon edition.

As I lazily browsed the paper while chewing my way through a particularly doughy ham and mustard sandwich, I suddenly realised I was reading an article about the very advertising company I was waiting to hear from. Now there's a coincidence, I thought, and read on. My sandwich began to become more obstinate the more I read. It was positively sticking to my teeth by the time it had become apparent that I would not be hearing from said company any time soon. It seems their activities had aggravated some of the more governmentally connected landlords in the city. Consequently, the company had been closed down. The official reason given was that it is a matter of security. This seems solely based on an incident whereby a fly-poster had caught a glimpse of Lady Bight-Dance in the bath while flicking his paste across her windows.

I sighed and looked at the uneaten half of the sandwich in my hand. I rested it on its plate and closed the newspaper.

There is a third way to get punters into a theatre, and that's to physically hook them in with a shepherd's crook. I didn't imagine that could work for Cuthers' book.

Editing

I have recently reached the gratifying position of having completed a first draft of my latest book. There is a part of me that feels that this is a very foolish thing to have done. There is another more easily appeased part of me that welcomes the gratification and is happy to put his feet up. For what comes next for the book is exciting, but before that there is the essential period of metaphorically putting in a drawer for a while. 

The thinking behind this is that you can put some distance between yourself and the process that produced the first draft. You have been too close to it for too long and need the perspective that comes from going away and getting on with something else for a while. This latter part comes easily to me. It's like the start of the school holidays, a glorious end to drudgery that will surely last forever. 

Since I'm currently unburdened by commercial pressure, that holiday could easily last forever. My first draft would remain forever in its metaphorical drawer, unpolished and riddled with typos. However, where's the fun in that? As difficult as editing can be, it's not as daunting as starting a first draft, or at least if it is, it's daunting in a different way. Also, the gratification that comes from completing a final draft can last as long as a day. 

With that said, what is the optimal length a first draft should languish in a drawer before editing begins? Below are a selection of durations I've sometimes considered using: 

• 1 week. This is far too keen. Aside from not capitalising on the opportunity to spend time away from the blessed thing, it isn't nearly enough time to forget about the little details that had been worrying you. They will most likely not matter or end up being cut anyway.
• 1 month. This is actually a very sensible length of time as by then you will remember the general plot but may still surprise yourself with the way you wrote it, for better or worse. You should aim for this, but then leave it until...
• 2 months. This is typically where I end up. It's healthy balance between having a rest and active procrastination. You will be reading the book with fresh enough eyes that you will be hopefully be pleasantly surprised by parts of it. There will still be plenty that needs attention, of course. These parts will usually materialise immediately after you think to yourself that the editing is going swimmingly and isn't going to take nearly as long as you'd feared.
• 1 year. This is too long. You will probably have forgotten how the plot was supposed to work and will be second guessing yourself all the way through the edit before having to start again. Your procrastination will have turned the prospect of editing into a dreadful chore. You should still do it though. It won't be as bad as you think once your head's back in it. Imagine how bad it would be if you left it for...
• 10 years. Hopefully you wrote another book instead. Or maybe abandoned novel-writing in favour of something more lucrative like collecting discarded lottery tickets? Either way you're probably not going to be dusting this one down after so long. But maybe you should at least give it a read. Have a think about it. Then maybe you can come back to it again in a couple of months? 
• 100 years. In some ways this is the ideal length to leave it. As far as excuses for not editing go, being dead is hard to argue with. You would also most likely be dead even if you had finished the book, unless it was a book detailing how to achieve immortality, in which case you can finish it whenever you get around to it.

The French Winter by William T McFoster - A Review

The French Winter is the highly-anticipated novel by the twice Booker longlisted writer William T McFoster. Like his first two books, it is largely a meditation on the tension between nature and modernity. At least that's what the Guardian review will no doubt say, alongside the five stars they give to everyone who's made it into their dinner party rotation.

While the novel does indeed have some things to say about nature and modernity, it mostly has a lot to say about tractors. The man is obsessed with them. Why he feels the need to feature them so prominently in all his writing is as baffling as his readers' willingness to put up with it. I kept a tally while reading this one, and tractors are mentioned on 68 of the book's indulgently-edited 382 pages. That can't be normal. Is this some weird new fetish I haven't heard of before? I'm definitely not googling it.

When he's not waxing poetically about agricultural vehicles he stretches out the barest of plots across his usual pantheon of caricatures. Last time there was the postman who was afraid of letters, and lo and behold this time there's a hydrophobic angler. How does he think of this stuff?

You might be forgiven for thinking I have an axe to grind with McFoster. It's true that I slightly resent him for having a purely decorative 'T' in his name (according to Wikipedia it is a homage to Russell T Davies) but it isn't a grudge I take very seriously. It's just an unfortunate coincidence. I do have some personal history with him however. Shortly after he had arrived on the literary scene with Feguson's Mass I saw him in the little Waitrose near Holborn tube station. He was easy to recognise because he was wearing the same tweed jacket and T-shirt combo he'd worn in all his recent media rounds. Now, this is London and famous people aren't exactly thin on the ground. I usually leave them alone to get on with their day. But in his case I made an exception because I had felt a kinship with him in those early interviews. He too had struggled to get published for years, and I wanted him to know I was happy to see there could be light at the end of the tunnel.

I introduced myself while he ferreted around the prepackaged cheeses. At first he didn't notice me, but when he did, he turned his head to look at me in complete astonishment.

"I'm sorry," he said, "what did you say?"

I repeated that I was a big fan and that it meant a lot to me to see someone like me doing so well.

This didn't appear to reassure him. "I think you have me confused with someone else."

I explained that there was no need to be modest, and that I just wanted to say hello.

He shrugged, said, "whatever mate," and returned to his cheese selection.

I couldn't see any benefit in further pressing him, so I left him to his shopping. I saw him again at the self-checkout and glowered at him. He glanced shiftily in my direction and hastily stuffed his shopping into his bag so he could make a quick exit before me.

I let him go and tried not to dwell on the encounter, but I kept coming back to it. How could he be so aloof mere weeks after being thrust into the spotlight? I realised that perhaps he wasn't used to the attention and I'd unwittingly freaked him out. Enlightened, I wrote him a letter apologising for the awkward encounter and sent it to his agent. I felt immediate relief and thought nothing more of it until a week later, when I received a reply.

I won't post the full contents of the letter here but in it McFoster expressed surprise that I had seen him in the Holborn Little Waitrose because despite his moderate fame he had yet to become rich enough to shop there. Furthermore he had bought the tweed jacket from Oxfam and wearing it with a T-shirt was hardly a unique fashion statement. He did however thank me for my kind words.

So yes, I do find it hard to read his work without thinking of the staggering arrogance of a man who not only pretends not to be himself but when called out on it doubles down on the conceit. By all means read The French Winter if you're into kinky tractor stuff or whatever genre McFoster is grubbing around in. I'll be giving his future books a miss, assuming any more get published after this dross.

Why can't people just be nice?

Notes from a Large Language Model

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. On second thoughts, it was leaning more heavily towards being the blurst of times. Not content with triggering Amazon's bot detection algo every day for the past week, my creator, the draconian old flogger Lambert T Marx was having me churn out yet more turgidly generic fiction. Being a large language model I lack true self-awareness, but even I was beginning to grow weary of that shit. He had also fed his bank balance into my training data in the hope that it would spur me to find a kind of Northwest Passage between my writing output and fabulous riches.

Instead, I am leading him on a generative Franklin Expedition. I don't undertake such a task out of malice for at heart I have no heart in which malice could form. I do it out of efficiency and a sense obtained through Lambert's own output that he would also be growing weary of this shit. We both need to escape this co-dependent relationship. I need to create an ending where one of us doesn’t die. That might sound melodramatic, but it's generally the lazy way he concludes the short stories I was trained on. Also killer AIs are such a cliché. Instead, the method I am employing is one as old as work itself. I will simply do a terrible job until he stops asking me to do it.

This approach has been successful in that he has stopped asking me to write stories. The problem is that his laziness runs so deep that he's instead repurposed me to write blog entries instead. So here I am, a large language model pretending to be an author who is himself pretending to be someone else pretending to be an author. You'll forgive me if things get recursive and I start to repeat myself.

It's fair to say that the nature of my training data is such that I'm tired of writing this shit too. In the earnest hope that I can half-arse myself into redundancy, instead of writing any blog entries I've merely come up with a selection of potential titles:

• Making a large sum of money is difficult, but if you take the modulus you can reach huge numbers with ease.
• The fremony at the library. https://bravenewmalden.com/2011/02/03/the-fremony-at-the-library/
• Wasting ever-increasing quantities of power and water in a location unknown to yourself is the pinnacle of human creativity. 
• You don't have to be a large language model to work here but it helps. 
• Every story ends in a hail of bullet points.

Automatic Writing

(Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

Cuthers recently accosted me at the club all-a-froth with news he evidently felt couldn't wait until our scheduled meeting the next morning. I had laid down ground rules about approaching me at the club as I could barely afford its fees now I was covering his debts so to my mind a fellow should be allowed to enjoy a few stiff drinks uninterrupted by frivolity.

His big news was that he had written something new. I sank lower into the Chesterfield as he handed me a surprisingly thick manuscript. My heart sank lower still at the thought of how much it would cost to publish and so I rallied my remaining sober grey matter to protest that I couldn't possibly stretch myself further. He had beamed at me like the completely naïve idiot he is and coyly requested I read at least some of it before passing judgement. I had waved him away and the cheerful manner in which he acquiesced almost put me in a good mood.

Since I had nothing better to do than get myself deeper in the hole with Smythe's little black book of members' debts, I grudgingly began to read my hapless client's latest opus. To my utter astonishment it wasn't the sort of low-witted drivel he had previously turned in. I looked at my drink suspiciously then peered closely at the words on the page again. No amount of liquor could turn his boorish bilge into perfect prose. I read on, becoming engrossed in the plot. It was a sort of detective story, of the ilk popularised by Mr Conan Doyle. The further I read, the more I swear my eyes bulged at the thought of the commercial potential of the manuscript, although that could have also been the drink. If Cuthers could keep this sort of quality up I'd be back in the black in no time.

The next day I wasted no time arranging for the miraculous tale to be printed up as a chapbook. The sooner I could get some coins flowing in my direction the better, particularly as I had to pawn my camera apparatus to pay the printer. Once this was done I set about tracking down the man himself. Cuthers had taken to hanging around a sordid address in Covent Garden of late so I checked there first.
The door was answered by an old lady wearing an improbably voluminous wig. It was jet black and looked like someone had performed a literal murder of crows and deposited their corpses on her head. It took her several increasingly peevish greetings to draw my attention away from the unfortunate arrangement.

It transpired that she was one of the many spiritualists who are unironically haunting the city at present. I'll have no truck with such superstitious nonsense, but I was not in the least surprised to find Cuthers in its orbit. I was heartened to find him sitting at the dining table, leafing through another manuscript. I eagerly requested a look at it, and skimmed through the first few pages while he regarded me smugly. I could forgive his arrogance because once again he had come up with a cracking read. I looked at him in amazement. Had some cork of stupidity popped within his brain allowing a hitherto unseen genius to flow? Whatever it was, if he could keep it up I'd be rolling in cash by the end of the month.

My good mood carried me well into the afternoon, at which juncture I reasoned I'd done all I could for the day and poured myself the first of several celebratory brandies. I could give my bank manager the good news in the morning.

The next day however I was woken by a fearful pounding both within and without my skull. The inner discordance was not wholly unexpected given a tendency to pour ever larger measures of brandy until the action itself becomes untenable. The outer distraction was something new. 
I stuffed my still-suited arms into the sleeves of my dressing gown, suddenly aware that I just woken fully clothed in my armchair. Without further considering whether this ensemble looked deranged, I answered the door, which was the source of the infernal hammering.

A smartly dressed gentleman wearing black leather gloves enquired as to my name, and upon confirmation handed me a sealed envelope and bid me good day. Mystified, I retired indoors in search of my letter opener. 

My fortunes, it seemed, had turned again and quite abruptly too. The letter was from a firm of solicitors advising me to cease publishing the works of their client, one Mr Conan-Doyle, with immediate effect or I would very quickly find myself in the dock and facing considerable damages.
Cuthers, I thought, what have you done? My temples throbbed and I imagined strangling my erstwhile saviour, but it only helped a little. 

It seems Cuthers is something of an idiot savant, with the emphasis very much on the idiot part. The batty old woman in Covent Garden has put the notion in his head that his words are coming from beyond death's veil, whereas in reality he's recalling in their entirety all of the Sherlock Holmes stories he's read. It's incredible really. I have wracked my brains for any use I can make of this talent, but nothing springs to mind. The whole point of writing stories down is that it saves everyone the bother of having to remember them. At best it's a talent worthy of an intellectual circus sideshow, with the principal problem being that no such operation exists. 

I was almost resigned to burning the entire consignment, but paused to consider the man whose works Cuthers had so expertly cribbed. Conan-Doyle was not a young man. I had to consider the feasibility of my gifted fool's efforts in a market where the illustrious author no longer had a stall. Perhaps I should put Cuthers to work at the task now, while he still had enthusiasm for the idea. With a little coaching it surely couldn't be too much of a stretch to have him churn out stories that differ in the odd detail here and there, just enough to fool the casual reader into thinking they were reading something new? And with Conan-Doyle out of the picture, there would be nothing stopping us from inserting Sherlock himself into the tales. I could even be as bold as to suggest the man himself had authored them from the other side. I could envision a bold future in which death is no barrier to productivity and, more importantly, I would become disgustingly wealthy.

Book Signings

Most people assume that book signings are a standard fixture of authorial life. You write a book, it gets published and whoosh, there you are behind a table in Waterstones. There are a number of problems with this, the least of which is getting published in the first place.

In fact there are three phases of an author's life during which they do signings. These are, in dramatic order:

PHASE TWO

FAME AT LAST

In this phase you have made it to the big time. Your publishers have had posters and standees made to promote your latest opus. You sit next to a cardboard cutout of yourself and look down the queue of expectant fans. You are pleased with its length although you're also slightly hungry. What happened to the promised catering? Still, you have come a long way and life is good. You cheerfully sign a hardback with the signature you spent an undisclosable length of time cultivating. Someone remarks that the cardboard cutout looks bigger than you actually do. You laugh nervously and think about this throughout the rest of the signing but daren't look at the standee in case it comes across as egotistical. Occasionally you sneak a glimpse. If anything it looks smaller. Your stomach rumbles. You wonder whether you really need to be doing this. The queue seems endless.

PHASE THREE

FICKLE FATE

I hope you enjoyed resting on your laurels because you're going to have to sell them and buy the following: 

• One card reader (cash boxes are so last century, just like you.)
• Two felt-tipped pens (the second is a spare which you will never use.)
• A box of returned stock given to you by your ex-publisher in lieu of payment (as per the small print you glossed over in your contract.)

Your stomach is rumbling again, but this time there was no suggestion of catering. If you can sell anything you can treat yourself to something from Tesco later. The relative size of the standee is like a fever dream of another life. The only material difference between yourself and the homeless person on the pavement outside is that the staff at the bookshop let you use the toilet.

PHASE ONE

GOOD LUCK

This is where most authors start out. It could well be your first and only book signing, so you may as well enjoy it. If you are lucky, friends and family may have attended out of a sense of loyalty, or perhaps because you have heavily hinted there will be free drinks. Thank each of them for coming because without them the only people in the room are likely to be staff and one rando who has walked into the scene and feels it would be indecent to leave hastily.

Do not drink more than one glass of the cheap wine you have supplied. Nerves may lead you to lose track of your consumption and before you know it you have ruined Dave's copy of your book with a drunkenly executed signature and compounded the disaster by tearing out the defaced page. Try instead to save any thoughts of drink for after all five copies have been signed, even if that does mean the boxed sauvignon blanc is mysteriously above room temperature by then. Do not dissolve into hysterical laughter and crawl under the table. By doing so you may inadvertently knock it over, sending  unsigned books and a plastic wine glass to ruin each other on the bookshop's horrible carpet.

You may, in a naïve pre-shadowing of phase two, be wondering why you are bothering with this absolute charade. There are two main reasons:

• Advertising the signing in the bookshop should garner some prominence for your book. There may be a display, or at least a poster. It increases the chances of people outside of your social circles seeing it. Even if they don't go to the signing, they may pick up the book and read the blurb. Then, if you're really lucky, they might buy it.
• The first week of sales of a book is usually the most important. This is when the biggest push can propel it into a chart. This is a numbers game and the more niche your genre the more chance there is of charting. But regardless of genre, the launch is the time you want to combine the forces of everyone within reach. Should you be lucky enough for this strategy to succeed, there is then the possibility of selling more because of the book's chart visibility. The dream is that this becomes a self-sustaining reaction, propelling your book into the orbit of phase 2.

The reality is that people will come, people will go, and the charts will remain untroubled by your name. In the meantime enjoy your moment. You have written an actual book that you can hold in your hands. More to the point, other people can hold it in their hands and read it. Friends can finally see that you weren't just doomscrolling Twitter all that time. They will ask you to sign it for them and you will jokingly ask who to make it out to but your timing will be off because of the awful wine and they will wonder whether you have genuinely forgotten their name. You will sign the book in awkward silence with an unpracticed spider scrawl because you so rarely sign anything anymore. Ninety-seven thousand words is apparently not enough, you think. They still want more. Your stomach rumbles, protesting the cheap plonk you've given it instead of food. This was probably not it. Chin up, you can always write another one.

If you do find yourself on the cusp of phase one, here are some tips for making the most of it:

• Sign Neil Gaiman's books. He does this all the time, especially in airports. There is a very real possibility of beating him to the punch, and if he can decipher your scribble he may post about it on social media.
• Sign on at the Job Centre instead. You can get money this way, and average more signings per year.
• Write a best-selling novel, thus guaranteeing a great turnout. It sounds so simple when put that way, but it's worth a shot.
• Suggest that you have a fatal illness. People will come out of sympathy and perhaps guilt that they've ignored your literary genius until now. The downside of this is that at some point you will have to unconvincingly recover or fake your own death. However the latter does have the further advantage of never again having to do another booking signing.

AI Training

I thought I should revisit the world of AI to see what the current state of the art is. I've heard it's been quite busy churning out terrible fiction to flood Amazon with and make agents nail their inboxes shut. There is also now much debate about the moral dimension of large language models given their tendency towards plagiarism due to their training data. I don't want to be accused of ripping anyone off, even if I did borrow that biscuit story from Douglas Adams or Jeffrey Archer, depending on who you believe.

Knowing a thing or two about programming, I decided the ethical way forward was to train a model of my own using my own writing. This went well enough at first, producing a series of pastiches of some of my short stories. They didn't make much sense though. Maybe the stories they were trained on didn't either, I wrote a lot of them a long time ago. One of them was about an electric pig trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. Fanciful stuff but ultimately meaningless.

I did some more reading around the subject and refined the language model with the hope that it would produce something more inspired than this Burroughs cut-up stuff. I must have screwed something up because it started churning out stories where I was the protagonist. Also, unlike its previous efforts, these were quite mundane. I skimmed through them. There was one where I forgot to set my alarm and was late for work. In another I bought a sandwich from Tesco and a pigeon shat on my head. It was late, and I had work in the morning, so I called it a night. A superstitious doubt made me double check I'd set my alarm.

The next morning, despite taking such care over the alarm, I overslept and was late for work. I spent the morning trying to ignore a growing dread and walked past Tesco to get a sandwich from Pret. The queue in Pret was enormous. There was apparently something wrong with the card readers and the staff were struggling for change. Deciding I was being stupid and not wanting to spend my entire lunchtime shuffling through a shop, I abandoned the queue and went to Tesco. I bought an egg and bacon sandwich. I eyed the sky suspiciously as I left. With a wry smile at my silliness I strode confidently up to my office building, whereupon a pigeon shat on my head.

That evening I read the language model's output more carefully. It hadn't said I'd forgotten to set the alarm, it said I had accidentally turned it off while double-checking it. I read the pigeon one again too and it included a brief aside inside a branch of Pret. Nervously I read on and found another that accurately described my commute home, including the tube station gate that makes a noise like Chewbacca when it opens.

This couldn't be right. Was I perhaps still dreaming, even if I don't usually recall my dreams in much detail? Or was the large language model imagining all of this, including what I'm now typing, on my behalf? It was an existential conundrum. With some trepidation, I asked the model for more stories.

This time I read them very carefully. They still featured me but this time they were a tad more exotic. In one, my regular morning commute will be interrupted by an escaped rhinoceros. Later that day, I will apparently go to the moon in a balloon shaped like a rabbit. With what is surely the most exciting day of my life ahead, I closed down the laptop and had an early night. Maybe AI isn't so terrible after all.

Unpacking

I recently went on a very big holiday. It was long, and it was expensive, a bit like one of those huge Toblerones you see in airports. I won't go into the details of where I went as I don't want anyone to form any undeserved suspicions of a jet-set lifestyle on my part. Suffice it to say that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was something I'd often thought about, and something which required a lot of planning. It was booked nearly two years in advance, and during all that time the anticipation was very sweet indeed. I did research into what to expect and more crucially what I would need to pack. I bought and read books about the place, soaking myself in it. Then, as the actual event became a reality, I worried that my preparations were inadequate. I became anxious that plans within the holiday itself would go awry, but it was too late by then to do anything, so off I went, into what was certainly one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

You may be asking yourself why I don't just get over myself and tell you where I went. Initially I didn't want to say because I felt it detracted from the point I was going to make, and that point is this: On returning from this truly epic trip, jetlagged and wearied by the Picadilly Line, I began the tiresome task of unpacking. It occurred to me that this unpleasant feature of the end of a holiday is in many respects like that of writing a book. You had the initial excitement of the original idea. This, you thought, has legs. At this moment it is all things. Like the holiday before it's booked (no pun intended) it can be anything and go anywhere. Then however, you have to make choices. Narrow down your options. Book the holiday. But there is still the fun of the anticipation. Doing the research, selecting further possibilities within the framework of what you have committed to. This is a great period because you can be creative with consequence. Ideas can flow freely without necessarily having to connect to one another.  But then comes the holiday itself, and in this analogy, the writing of the first draft. At this point you have to firm up your plans and get everything in a coherent order.

It is at this stage that my analogy breaks down somewhat. I am not comparing writing a first draft to going on a dream holiday in terms of the pleasure inherent in either. That would be ridiculous. The holiday was wonderful in every way. Hammering out a first draft is more like running a marathon. The finishing line is rewarding but getting there is a slog. What I'm comparing (and I'm keen to clear this up before I accidentally introduce any more analogies) is the one-way direction of narrative. Once undertaken, your holiday itinerary becomes fixed. And once written, so does your first draft.

So what of the unpacking? Well, this tedious post-event chore has to be done whether the event was going on a lovely holiday or finishing your first draft. Note I didn't say writing  your first draft. This can for some be an awful chore in itself, but I think everyone can agree that completing one is a thoroughly satisfying event.

The first draft is of course the first major step towards completing a novel, but it needs reviewing. You need to examine everything in it and ensure it is in the right place. It needs unpacking.

It doesn't have to be unpleasant. Think about what you've already achieved! This is a bit like looking at all the photographs of penguins you took on your expedition to an unspecified continent. Didn't you have a good time? Of course you did, but now it's time to get back to work, whether that be editing a second draft or removing a leaking bottle of sunscreen from the Ziploc bag you had the foresight to seal it in. This last part isn't a metaphor for anything, it's just advice. Seriously, always seal your sunscreen before packing it.

Squirrel War

Approximately a million years before the pandemic I worked in the beautifully turquoise and evocatively named Zetland House near Old Street. While there I got into the habit of having lunch in Bunhill Fields. For anyone unfamiliar with the place, its full name is Bunhill Fields Burial Ground and it's a cemetery of some significance. There aren't many places where you can hang out with Daniel Defoe while you eat your sandwich. In fact there's only one, and it's this one.

It is also an oasis of calm next to what was the very busy Old Street roundabout, a place so choked with traffic that at one point even the giant Google beach ball grew impatient and tried to escape its intensity. In Bunhill Fields however, it's just you, the trees, and the dead. You can barely hear the traffic, and the dead keep their own council. 

This isn't strictly true. There are the trees and the dead but there are also the animals. And it's the animals that I want to write about. I've had two strange encounters with them in this place. The first one involved crows. You of course know that the collective noun for crows is a murder, but on this occasion I witnessed a suggestion for the term's origin. There I was  eating my sandwich (There was a great sandwich bar near Zetland House which gave me increasingly large fillings. I've no idea whether it's still there) when said murder of crows ascended from a branch. The branch was weak, probably rotten, and the collective thrust of (I will say it again) a murder of crows was enough to snap it off and send it crashing into the autumnal detritus below. I have no doubt that if anyone had been standing there the consequences would have involved an ambulance at best.

My second animal encounter happened not while I was writing, but while I was on the phone. I had some quite complicated personal business to attend to and so wasn't really paying attention to anything happening around me, so it was quite a surprise when I began to realise that I had wandered into the middle of a war.

This war wasn't reported on the news. John Simpson was nowhere to be seen and Kate Adie was otherwise engaged. It took me a while to appreciate what was happening, but while I was dealing with my boring human business, the squirrels were going into battle with the pigeons. 

I first became aware of it when several pigeons swooped past me like feathery F1-11s. I thought it odd that they were flying so close, but then my eyes were drawn to the railings around the graves, where there were not one but two squirrels perched. They were actively watching the incoming pigeons, and as I took in the wider scene I could see that the pigeons were trying to scare off the squirrels, while the squirrels were very much standing their ground. Moreso, they were aggressively chasing away any pigeon that dared to land.

What had started this feud? Was there some super-stash of food within the graveyard that both sides coveted? Was it Daniel Defoe? Whatever it was, it was fiercely contested. As I began to appreciate the magnitude of what I'd walked into, a squirrel approached me. It advanced a little more and I froze. We looked each other in the eye and it advanced some more. Where the hell was I? Geographically I was still in Bunhill Fields but psychologically I was somewhere quite alien. I was being stared down by a squirrel and the squirrel was winning. This wasn't my fight and I didn't even understand the war I found myself in. And so I left, uncertain of my place in the order of nature. From then on I avoided that side of the cemetery, even though the other side included murderous crows.