Write Your World (and a few ways to break the rules)

I’m excited to be leading a discussion about my very favourite topic World Building with Words. I presented V1 of this discussion two years ago to a packed out Don Bank Museum. This version of the forum will dig deeper, explore further, and discuss even more ways to immerse readers into your unique universe. Keep reading for more details and link to reserve your seat (for free!)

Writer and filmmaker Margaret M. MacDonald invites writers of all genres to discuss inspirations, ideas, methods, and more for penning unique worlds, whether realistic or fantastic. From the words you choose to their placement on the page, every decision is another tool for immersing readers into your story.

Participants will be invited to workshop, discuss, and compare multiple genres of writing, from novels and screenplays, to the magnum opus versus the meme. Bring a pen and a desire to dive into another world.

Thursday, April 16th 6pm
Stanton Library - 2nd floor event space - 234 Miller Street, North Sydney

Book Your Seat at: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/write-your-world-tickets-1983327345480

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It's not a warning, it's not a prediction, it's a response

I have been thinking about this one for quite a while and finally managed to put it into a few too many, slightly rambled, words. Hopefully they make sense to others who might have been pondering upon similarly dystopian topics.

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Not All Spams Are Created Equal

What began as a P.S.A. for my fellow authors became a bit of a rant against the lazy, lying and manipulative nature of A.I. marketing. Someone asked what difference it made if “it’s all spams,” but by that logic so are all my query letters. Yet without my human generated queries I wouldn’t have a published book for the A.I. slop slingers to target their marketing at. We cannot start classing real human to human communication (even in its e-sales form) in the same category as this L.L.M. nonsense. That’s how the robots win.

Stick through the whole video to see what the very human and humours way I’ve chose to respond and take on the challenge I’ve presented if you can. A book bearing my own human I have always held my pen wrong signature is on offer.

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Three more questions I've been (fairly) good at answering

These are the three most often asked questions I’ve gotten about The Phoenix Effect book series. Here is a compilation of my best attempts at (fairly) eloquent answers.

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Inspired by the Spooky Season

I’m working on something new. I rarely talk about works in progress, feels like inviting in a curse, but something about the spooky season inspired me to share this image and snippet from my new venture into horror…

🩸 EAT 🩸
“What if you woke up to discover you had just eaten your neighbour?”

EAT explores mortality, brutality, compulsion and addiction through a gripping narrative in an honest, even if a bit sarcastic, first person voice.

I hope you all enjoy this human generated image featuring my own human generated gob 👄 Bonus points to anyone who can guess what grocery items I used to make the FX blood 🤔 Click play to hear the snippet but proceed with caution and a strong stomach ⚠️

Three questions I've (attempted) to answer a lot now

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One way (of the many) in which I'm weird

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It's the actual words that matter

Dear Everyone,

Please stop using the em dash as your litmus test by which to decide a piece of writing is A.I. generated. An em dash is a perfectly normal part of writing and has been for a very long time. My publisher’s style guide utilizes em dashes. I have had to learn how to use them correctly and—hopefully—effectively. *

If you want to know if something has been written by a Large Language Model (for that is what they really are) and the author has not been kind enough to copy and paste a prompt along with their bot text, just consider a few simple tells.

Does an Instagram post use the word “highlighting”, “emphasizing”, or “contrasting” after a very banal description of the image or video, and proceeding a very didactic description of the zeitgeist of the post? It was written by an L.L.M.

Does the text appear to have a generous helping of thesaurus sprinkled on top of it? Every grade school teacher I had knew that too many “fancy” words was a dead giveaway that their student spent more time reading the thesaurus than the actual book they were writing about. You don’t have to have read a thousand theme papers to spot the difference. Is the text too perspicacious, effervescent, obsequious or even audacious? It was written by an L.L.M.

Does the text look like a word salad that bears a striking similarity to a literary meal you’ve consumed before? I have been solicited by a number of people offering promotional services for authors. Their lengthy—praise riddled—emails are peppered with words that have been used across the internet to describe my books, my writing style, and me. Even if I hadn’t carefully selected most of those words myself, the generic nature of each sentence, the hollow way in which my own words have been used, tells me that there is no genuine thought or consideration behind them. Does the text look like some kind of autotuned remix of a familiar classic? It was written by an L.L.M.

Look at the words. Consider what meaning they carry, in and of themselves, and in the way they’ve been presented to you. The human mind behind them, or lack thereof, isn’t hard to spot.

* I fully embrace the irony if I haven’t used those em dashes correctly. My blog doesn’t have a line editor.

Perfection is Suspicious

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Time and Irony

I’ve been thinking about time. The inevitability of it. The invisibility of it. How much of it passes during which we feel as if we are in a state of In-between one thing and another, when in fact we are simply forgetting to acknowledge that every given moment is, in and of itself, a state of completion. This microfilm is part of a larger project I’ve been working on about these liminal states in which time passes by. I have yet to complete the full film as time has gotten away from me. Ironic isn’t it?

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🩸 EAT 🩸 “What if you woke up to discover you had just eaten your neighbour?”

🩸 EAT 🩸
“What if you woke up to discover you had just eaten your neighbour?”