iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

As someone who has been on a boat on the Zambezi with grumpy and territorial hippos nearby, and a few days later in a raft that quickly flipped over in said Zambezi, I can confirm hippos are fucking terrifying. That thread was all I needed and more.

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I need more information about the hippos.

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Thank you, I wrote it myself without using AI 😁

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Hey, I did warn you about the typos. Of course this is where it happened. if*

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This is exactly how Alabaster chose us. He gave my husband daily hugs in his classroom until we gave in.

A gloriously fluffy orange and white cat sits in a box, looking over his shoulder like "get in, we're going shopping."

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So if you're a lexical deviant who wants to have their way with language and needs a bit of room to do it, and maybe a cleanup crew for when you're done, I might be the perfect editor for you. I said what I said and I'm not sorry. Thanks for making it all the way down here. Cat tax!

Alabaster's OnlyFans page is full of toe beans pics just like this one. Yes. Look at the toe beans. Lovely little toe beans. Alabaster is an orange and white cat who is curled up asleep on a fluffy towel. His toe beans are on full display. Showoff.

My role as editor is to catch the drips of paint and smudges that were unintentional or which obscure the meaning and emotional effect of the art from the reader. It's not my job to force you to use a stencil or make you color within the lines of that's not your intention.

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GenAI can only look backward and remix what's already been done. And anyone who's played with paint knows that if you keep mixing all the same colors together over and over again, it just ends up turning a murky, soulless, shitty brownish gray.

Human writers are constantly reaching for new colors to add to their palette so they can better paint the picture in the reader's mind. They're always looking forward (and sideways and under that mossy rock). They're looking within themselves and adding a bit of their soul into the mix.

The difference between human writers and GenAI is that humans take the pattern and then tweak it and add to it and innovate and experiment and go a bit wild, using trial and error to find what feels right and the audience response to know if they should carry on down that route of exploration.

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So I rolled with it. If the author has tried something new that enhances the reading experience, I'm all for it. And maybe it'll catch on and maybe everyone will be doing it a year from now, and it'll become the pattern that other writers use as a base for their own experiments.

But: This author had figured out a way to show them both at the same time, without zooming so far out into omniscient third that you have Julie Andrews doing a voiceover. It is always crystal clear who's thinking or feeling at that moment, but with the effect of a split-screen tandem POV. It works.

The pattern: Romance novels often have a dual first person or third limited POV, alternating by scene or chapter. This means you're usually only seeing one side of how the sex scene or fight feels at a time.

Gatekeeper editor might have rigorously rooted that out and "fixed" it. The author might have pushed back. Or felt stupid. Or gone along with it, with the weight of the publisher looming over them. That's not what I did. I took a closer look and tried to understand what the writer was trying to do.

Real life editing example: I received a manuscript where the dev editor had flagged that there was a lot of headhopping and that they believed the author had confused third person limited and omniscient third.

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Because deviation and innovation are practically synonyms. You don't get new without breaking away from old. You don't get impressionism without stepping away from photorealism. And without breaking away from the standard way of doing things, we'd never have Van Gogh.

As editors, and keepers of the gate, we need to use our judgment a little more carefully. When I'm editing a novel, I'm not only looking for where the author has deviated from style. It's not just about catching typos. I am analyzing the deviations and trying to see if they were intentional.

Sometimes these arguments about what's right or wrong make it into the general discussion, like singular they, which surely has been repeated enough to be standard after several hundred years of usage. It seems some people never came out of the caves, though. Aaaanyway...

Politico headline: he, she, they: the pronoun debate will likely land at the Supreme Court. And the trend doesn't look great for transgender kids.

This picture makes me sad. Trans rights are human rights and Trans kids deserve protection.

But if humans are always innovating and language is always changing, then who says what's correct? Is it only stuff we've repeated enough times for it to become normalized?

Some editors take that to mean they need to police the author and force them into adherence to style and convention. They'll flag every non-standard dialog tag. They prefer only to approve language use with precedent, usage they can verify is "correct."

As an editor in training, I was told that we are the gatekeepers of language. We uphold the standards. We serve not only the writers but also the readers. It's up to us to hold the writer back when they've gone too far and lost or injured the reader. Yadda yadda.

Romance novelists try multiple ways of saying the same thing and sometimes it sticks. It catches on. It works. So other writers pick it up, maybe not even realizing they have, and the new phrase spreads as quickly as a weird hand gesture related to a two digit number spreads through a middle school.

They hold their breath. They release a breath they didn't know they were holding. They let loose a feral breath they didn't realize they were holding. A breath escapes their traitorous mouth and they realize they've accidentally been asphyxiating.

It starts with the dialogue tags. Romance novelists are notorious for being allergic to good ol' "said." Everything must be murmured, whispered, muttered or groaned. But that starts feeling repetitive. So they innovate. Now it's growling, humming, and breathed. Oh no. Too much breathing.

But romance novelists aren't just innovating with the stories, tropes, and settings. They're at the forefront of linguistic innovation too. There are only so many ways to say "he put his peepee in her hooha" while making it sexy and without it feeling clichéd. And this is where editors come in.

But romance novelists are like, "Hold my prosecco" and the next thing you know, minotaurs aren't safe anymore. Suck it, Homer. Neither are doorknobs or cutlery or whatever the unhinged hell they think of next. I doubt genAI would come up with household object–based smut without explicit prompting.

Unhinged. An erotic door romance by Vera Valentine. The number on the door is, of course, 69.

Romance novelists have it rough. Ahem. Phrasing! I mean it's hard for them— Er... Calm down. Something that makes it difficult to be successful in the romance market is that readers are very particular about what they like, which can feel like a barrier to innovation.

Language shift isn't just in slang and accent. It's happening right under your noses in that romance novel you're reading. Wait, am I getting ahead of myself? What do romance novelists have to do with this?

Yeah yeah but what about writers? One of the easiest ways for us to try new things is in how we talk. That weird new young 'un slang that makes no sense to you? That's human innovation. By the way, read @gretchenmcculloch.com's Because Internet.

The thing that makes us human is our ability to innovate. We try new ways of doing things and see if it's better or at least more fun. Go back to the beginning: the stone age. They didn't just make good cutty things. They also made art.

Bison licking insect bite. Stone age art. A carved stone in the shape of a bison body. The head is carved in relief, in extraordinary detail, turned towards the rump as it licks itself.

Human writers might analyze market trends and tropes, sure, and many writers reuse or recycle stories that have engaged readers since Homer first cleared his throat to speak. But there's a key difference in how humans do it.

First, if you've been in a bunker, genAI works by analyzing patterns in a corpus of stolen work and then recreating those patterns based on what it thinks it's the most popular choice. That is the opposite of how human writers work.

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Bear with me, there will probably be typos galore on this long thread. I'm not getting paid to edit it and neither are you. Let's get on with the show.

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