Hey Reader,

I hope you are having a great August wherever you are! Here in the Pacific Northwest where I am, we are dealing with drought and smoky skies, which is nothing compared to the heatwaves and wildfires millions of people are experiencing around the world.

I am chugging away on my work in progress, but in the meantime, I wanted to try something different. Today's newsletter will be longer but also, I hope, more interesting.

A chance discovery

A few weeks ago, I went to the library (yes, a real library, with physical books!) to do some research for my WIP. While I was there, I stumbled upon a book containing some translated works of Jean-Henri Fabre, a 19th-century French entomologist aka insect scientist.

I'd never heard of Fabre, so I did a little research. He was a remarkable man--born into poverty, largely self-educated, a teacher who was at one point evicted by his landlady and denounced for the crime of educating young women. But he was most well-known for his research and popular books on entomology, which he wrote in an engaging, narrative style, rather than dry scientific writing. Per Fabre (translated):

"Others have reproached me with my style.... They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure."

Even translated, Fabre's writing is gorgeous. He writes about his childhood in rural France and his observations of the insects and other wildlife around him. I was obsessed.

On improving craft

A while back, I read some advice to copy out prose by hand. The thinking is the act of physically writing the words helps you learn the shape of the sentences and gives you a better sense of how to compose good prose.

I almost never do this--I read extremely fast and I tend to read while reclining or on the go--but I decided to sit down and try it with Fabre's book. And it definitely made me appreciate prose so much more. The visceral act of writing with pen and paper makes you think deeply about the words in a way that passively consuming them just can't. I found myself copying out whole paragraphs from the book, just because I found the prose so beautiful.

As a writer, my happy place is writing dialogue. I love banter and awkward meet-cutes and heartfelt declarations. But I've been trying to get better at description and interiority, and even after just doing this exercise once I can already appreciate the possibilities for deepening my work.

On efficiency, writing, and AI

When I was a kid, I wrote all my stories by hand. I no longer have the stamina to do that 😅Still, this exercise was 100% worth it, and I want to do it again with a fiction book or two.

Is it slow and inefficient? Absolutely! But since when is efficiency the point of this?

Recently, another writer had a book deal pulled due to suspected use of genAI. Lincoln Michel had a piece on his Substack on what this could mean for publishing. While very little credible information on this particular scandal has come out--and it is EXTREMELY suspicious that three of the highest-profile AI allegations in the book world have all been against Black authors--there are certainly plenty of "authors" using genAI to write their books. The NY Times even ran an article back in February profiling an author who claimed to have published 200 books last year using AI. The Kindle store is awash in AI-generated books.

Thankfully, the book community is largely vociferously against genAI in book spaces. Personally, though, I can't even bring myself to care about what these "authors" are doing. It's not that I'm not affected by their slop clogging up the stores, torpedoing visibility for the rest of us, and giving authors a bad name. I just don't care what they're doing, because I write for reasons that have nothing to do with them.

The act of writing is thinking, and that's what I love about it. I've solved some of my thorniest storytelling problems by writing a stream of consciousness until the most elegant solution presents itself. I've written myself into corners, then woke up the next day and realized there was no need for that scene to even exist. Writing helps me cope with events in my life and makes me a more empathetic, patient person. Even if AI-generated books made money (they don't, at least not that we know of), I cannot think of anything more pointless than handing something I love doing so much off to an LLM.

Fabre was talking about scientific inquiry when he wrote the following, but I think it applies equally to the arts as well:

"Alone among living creatures, man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things...If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life's only object in the eyes of most men, does it become us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts."

Recent Reads

I've read so many good books in the past month! Here are just three that I enjoyed:

A curmudgeonly academic goes on a mission to compile the first encyclopedia of faerie-kind. Unlike a lot of faeries featured in modern fantasy, these faeries are neither nice nor sexy. They are very much the kind featured in cautionary Celtic tales about not wandering around in the dark or making bargains with strangers. I've seen this book described as cozy-adjacent or cozy fantasy with high stakes, which is pretty accurate.

Another fantasy book featuring a nerdy female protagonist! This Regency era-inspired novel follows a young noblewoman obsessed with dragons in an era where rich women doing anything besides attending society events and getting married is earnestly frowned upon. I had few expectations going in and Regency-era is not normally my thing, but I was pleasantly surprised by this book. A must-read for fans of fantasy STEM heroines.

Lady knight! Gorgeous cover art! SO MUCH YEARNING! The Second Death of Locke was an impulse buy and I'm SO glad I bought it. This is one of the best fantasy romances I've read. There is so much blood and gore but also a swooningly romantic love story. Be prepared to spend a lot of time shouting "GIRL KISS HIM ALREADY".

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Until next time!

G