Friday Done List February 13

 What's happened these last two weeks?

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor    

• I made three submissions.
• I received one rejection.
• I had three pieces published. (One of these had been submitted before this period.)
• Had just about decided to try Substack but immediately decided not to. The thinking behind that may become a blog post.
• I worked on two humor pieces, one of which had been rejected a couple of times.
• Readership has plummeted on Medium, which is encouraging me to work harder on submitting elsewhere.
• Last weekend's Weekend Writer post has made me think I need to do a study of short story writing. I've done this in the past, but my success rate with publishing short stories suggests I need to do more. Just in case the whole world isn't wrong, and I'm right. 

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Have done five blog posts.
• Promoted the three pieces published on Medium.
• Continue to work on building community on BlueSky and Medium.
• Have been reading for Black History Month and published blog post on first book read. 
• Promoted my Black History reading post.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• Received rejection on last submission

The Heritage Month Project: Colored Television by Danzy Senna

My very first read for my Heritage Month Project, and Black History Month, was a good one, Colored Television by Danzy Senna. This novel was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick (there's some good stuff at that link) so it has had plenty of attention. I, however, didn't hear of it until I saw it on a list of humorous novels. As is often the case for me, while I liked the book very much, I had mixed feelings about how funny it was.

Jane, our biracial main character, is going through a desperate period. She teaches writing at a so-so college where she is at a crucial point. She has been on leave for a year where she is supposed to be finishing...and selling...her novel about mulattoes that she has been working on for ten years. If she can't sell it, she won't get tenure and will be stuck with the heavy workload that the untenured have to shoulder there. Additionally, her funny (yeah, he is funny) artist husband is talented, but his work doesn't sell. The family is constantly moving from one less than desirable living situation to another. One of their two children appears to be in the early stages of being diagnosed with a neurodivergent issue. (Seriously, that can take what seems like forever.) Jane's hopes for a black bohemian bourgeois life for herself and her family are all pinned on that book. That desire is intensified after having housesat for a year in her wealthy TV writer friend's home and experiencing the good life. 

I may not have found this book particularly funny because this white/failed middle grade writer/homemaker identified a lot with its mixed race/failed literary writer/academic. I mean a lot. I, too, am a woman writer who can no longer sell a book and is flailing around with other kinds of writing and has a little boy like Flinn in my family.  I found myself shouting to Jane in my head. "Come on, Jane! You wrote and published one book. You know another book isn't going to fix everything." "Jane! Jane! Don't drink all Brett's expensive wine!"

Jane leaves novel writing after it becomes clear her second book is dead before it even gets in the water. She finds it a relief. I have left novel writing, too, and Jane is right. It is a relief. Except all the little writing projects I come up with for myself can be overwhelming. And, wouldn't you know it, Jane comes up with smaller writing projects that are overwhelming her. Her's involve pitching a comedy show about mulattoes to a Hollywood wheeler and dealer named Hampton Ford.

Now Hampton Ford is also desperate. He complains that the ideas Jane pitches him aren’t mulatto enough, that they’re about random things and the characters she's talking about don’t have to be mulatto. They could be anybody.  I wonder, is that why this book grabs me and evidently a lot of other readers? Is this a book about a mixed-race woman living a desperate life, writing a book about mulattoes, pitching ideas about mulattoes, but she could be anybody?

She could be so any of us?

The Story Behind the Story Times 3

After what seemed to me like quite a bit of rejection the past couple of months, including two last Friday, I had three pieces published in three different Medium publications this past week. 

Kitchen Culture?

The story behind The Big Advantages of Small-Batch Baking was published in Tastyble on the fifth. This is one of my essays about eating/cooking. I have to come up with a name for this category, because as I've probably said before, I'm not interested in traditional food writing. Food writers need to know something. I'm interested in what I think of as nonprestige food. And I'm interested in life around eating. I just thought of "kitchen culture," right this minute. Perhaps I'll use those words somehow. 

Anyway, the backstory to this story is pretty much there in the story. The only interesting bit is that the weekend before it was accepted, I found myself with some extra time, because we were expecting snow the day I was supposed to visit with some relatives and help with the little people there. I spent this time making three small-batch recipes while my husband made one, so I could take pictures for this submission. One of my recipes didn't get into the pictures, because it was not photo ready when it came out of the oven. But that's how the photos in the article came about.

Interesting point: Tastyble has editors who do edit. Many publications on Medium don't. Editors can be helpful. The Tastyble editor I worked with made an excellent point about my original title. It was arty, but told nothing.

The snow didn't develop, I could have gone to my family's house instead of baking and taking pictures for work, but probably wouldn't have because it ended up that two people therre were sick. I worked instead of doing the mother thing. 

Bookish Stuff

I have published a few book-related things in various places on Medium. Last week I revised last Tuesday's blog post about using heritage months as temporal landmarks for planning reading. I'm interested in reworking blog material for publication elsewhere, though Medium would allow me to publish my blog posts there just as they are. 

Nonetheless, I did a big revision and expansion and published This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading in Books Are Our Superpower. The piece was accepted for Medium's boosted program, which means it will get more promotion.

Reworking material for publication in different venues is a traditional free-lance writer thing, and I'm interested in doing more of it. 

I worked on this intently last Friday and Saturday when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to that same family member's house and then going there. However, they had more sickness there and cancelled. I worked on that photo I used for the illustration in addition to revising and revising and revising instead of bursting into that sick house and making everyone well, which, of course, I could have done with my magic. Working mother guilt lasts for generations.

A Writer on Writing

Erdal Erdal on Pexels

Yesterday The Writing Cooperative, a very big Medium publication that had rejected something I submitted there a few years ago (I can't remember what it was about) published my piece A Hermit Crab
Walks into a Bar. This was something I wrote at least a year and a half ago, so we're talking about submitting something from the files.

I didn't abandon any sick children or refuse to go out into a storm to work on this one, so that's good.

It's gratifying to have had so much published in such a short period. However, Medium has been experiencing a crisis related to payments going down for those writers accustomed to making regular money there and readership going down for writers like me who think they're doing well if they make a few dollars per story. We will have to see whether this recent work (and child abandonment) broadens my readership, which is my major reason for publishing on this platform.

More to follow?

The Weekend Writer: Story and Short Stories

Two articles turned up recently on Medium regarding story, both of which started out good but then drifted off. They reminded me, though, that I think defining story is significant. And, it turns out, difficult.

In years past when I was trying to do it, I found confusing info. For instance, some people use plot and  story interchangeably. Plot is an element of story, so it cannot also be story.

My favorite definition of story comes from L. Rust Hills in his book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. He says that in a story, something happens to somebody and the somebody is changed as a result. I like to think of it as "something happens to somebody and so what."   

Relating to short stories, which I am more interested in writing than I used to be, Edgar Allan Poe had some significant things to say. They are summarized in How to Write a Short Story According to Edgar Allan Poe at Dark Media. One incident, Gail. One central event.

Hmm. With that in mind, maybe one of my short stories is really a tiny novel. 

Some Annotated Reading February 6

Books

I recently read the follow-up to a YA book I liked very much a few years back. I am not mentioning any titles, because the second book was a major, major disappointment. It became what I call a "skimmer." I had to start skimming to finish the thing. It was YA, but there was no indication that the YA character was YA (his backstory was in the first book). There was a lot of what might be considered thought-provoking sort of spiritual stuff that didn't really work. Some point-of-view switches that didn't make sense. Some dragging that seemed like filler. Oh, my gosh. This was the second in what was supposed to be a trilogy. The third book seems to have been dropped. The author may have never had much of an on-line presence and now seems to have disappeared. I am always sorry to see this kind of situation. 

Short-form Writing

Did a Best-selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer's Story? by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker I am a great one for missing the point when I'm reading, especially nonfiction like this. The part of this that really struck me was the description of how the best-selling novelist worked with her editor on this particular project. It was intense, more so than I experienced when working with book editors. I read things like this, and I think that maybe I'm fine with not publishing another book. I don't know that I want to go through something like that. Thank goodness for that agent rejection I just got, yeah?

Transgender soldiers date back to the Civil War  by Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. When I was a tween and teen reader, I loved reading about women who disguised themselves as soldiers so they could fight in the Civil War. I knew nothing about transgender issues. Didn't know they existed.

Why Simon & Schuster’s Flagship Imprint Won’t Require Blurbs Anymore by Sean Manning at Publishers Weekly. I hate book blurbs. As I've said here many times.

What Fruit We Bear by Megan Baxter in Sequestrum. This is so good it makes me feel, Yes, I must read short stories.

The Many Ways YA Books & The Community Isolates Teens at Vicky Who Reads: A YA Book Blog.  I don't know how I stumbled upon this five-year-old post, but I 100 percent agree.

How Midlife Became a Crisis by Matthew Redmon in Wise & Well. This is a wow. I will never think about middle age as that boring old cliche again.

Humor

Three-Year-Old Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs  by Angus Duffin in Slackjaw. Because I love Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

I’m Your Young Adult Child and I Have Twenty Acceptable Reasons for Not Putting My Stuff in the Dishwasher  by Stacey Curran in Frazzled.  I love teen voice lists. 

How I, A Stay-at-Home Mom, Actually Wind Down in the Evening When My Husband Comes Home by Alexis Tai in Frazzled. Notice the line about asking the father to babysit. It's not babysitting if it's your own freaking kid!

A Series of Announcements From the Robertson Elementary PTA Spring Gala Committee Encouraging You to Please Support the Students Despite the Ongoing Apocalypse by Saba Khonsari in Frazzled. As a general rule, I don't care for apocalyptic books and movies, but I love apocalyptic humor.

God Attempts To Write A Novel In Seven Days by Rachel Reys in Slackjaw. You probably don't have to be a writer to get this.  

Time Management Tuesday: Heritage Months as Temporal Landmarks for Reading

Heritage months (also sometimes called history months) are designated periods of time during which various ethnic groups, often ones that have traditionally been viewed as outsiders or other, are recognized. They are like temporal landmarks, calendar events that create opportunities. I love temporal landmarks.

Various organizations recognize and support different heritage months. Northwestern University does a good job of recognizing more than one group per month. 

Right now, the U.S. Department of State recognizes nine heritage months, which I am listing here, just for the record. 

• Black History Month
• Women's History Month
• Arab American Heritage Month
• Jewish American Heritage Month
• Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
• Military Appreciation and National Veterans and Military Families Appreciation Months
• Caribbean-American Heritage Month
• Immigrant Heritage Month & World Refugee Day
• Hispanic Heritage Month 

My plan this year is to observe the months as the U.S. Department of State has listed them, because when I was planning this last fall, this was the most official looking list I found. I will stick with it to the extent that I can.

Now why would I want to plan a year of reading around heritage months?

So Many Books

Over the last 20 years or so, there have been surges of interest in just how many books are published each year in, let's say, the United States, since that's Original Content's home country. Here's one source that says 4 million books were published here in 2022. The same source says that 2.1 million books were self-published the year before, to try to give us an idea of what's going on with that. Quite honestly, though, I thought I saw a figure recently that said only 500,000 books are traditionally published in this country each year and another 1 and a half million are self-published, which would bring us to 2 million books, not 4.

Because 2 million books is so much more manageable a number than 4 million.

I am nitpicking in order to make the point that a lot of books are published each year. And then all those books are out there, and more books are published the next year and the next, plus there are all the books kicking around from years gone by.

So many books. I can't read them all. Neither can you.

So Hard to Find Numbers

Though there has been a great interest in increasing diversity in publishing since 2020, I can't find a lot of numbers to tell me what's happening with that. How many of those 2 or 4 million books are written by black writers or Asian writers or Arab American writers? If you scroll down here, you'll see that these people say that at whatever point this was published over 75 percent of writers in the U.S. were white, 7.6% were Hispanic, 5.9% Black, 4.9% Asian, and 0.4% American Indian/Alaska native. (These are their terms.)

The point I'm making now is that when a writing group is a small percentage of the whole writing group, they're going to produce a small percentage of the total number of books published. They can just physically only write so many books. Those books can easily get lost in the millions of books published. Even white readers who consider themselves color blind in their reading interests are not going to have a lot of books from nonwhite writers showing up in their personal book radar.

Where Heritage Months as Temporal Landmarks Come In

Writers can use temporal landmarks to help focus on particular things--using weekends for specific writing projects, assigning the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day for revision, using periods organized by groups, like National Poetry Month, to be their new draft time. This writer is going to use this year's heritage months as temporal landmarks to organize reading.

Why not just read these writers all year long? I do. But, like the people I described above, I only read what happens to pop up in front of me. Observing heritage months gives me an opportunity to do a little seeking out.

Additionally, as I said last year when I announced that I was going to do this, "when times are...strange, shall we say...publicizing the work of groups whose work didn't always get much attention in the past is something positive we can do. It doesn't involve name calling or ranting, which I've never seen doing anything for anybody."

Also, I love temporal landmarks. Focusing on one thing is just so freaking exciting. I am so up for this. I am actually reading two books now for Black History month. Sadly, I often peter out toward the end of a temporal landmark project, so I am worried the heritage months at the end of the year will be getting less attention from me. But I will just have to plan more carefully to avoid that, won't I?

My Real, and Very Shallow, Reason for Observing Heritage Months with My Reading

Lulu Blog has a lovely post on The Importance of Reading Black Literature. But it doesn't mention what I get from reading literature written by anyone from a group I don't belong to.

If you are a reader who has been around a while and has read a great deal...has read so much...a lot of what you read isn't what we might call new. There is a lot of sameness. There is a lot of old wine in a new flask kind of thing going on in books by your favorite writers or books in your favorite genres. Reading books by people in groups you're not as familiar with opens up opportunities to read about new characters and experiences. To read something different.

That's not a very virtuous reason for doing this. But maybe that's the best reason of all for reading the work of writers you're not familiar with. 

You should be hearing about my heritage month reading throughout the year.

 

Friday Done List

 Well, I haven't been blogging this week. Have I done anything at all?  

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I worked on some of the pieces I started during December.
• I made two submissions.
• Received a rejection.
• Resubmitted the rejected piece.
• It was rejected within a couple of hours. If you have been following things here, yes, it has been a rough few months.
• I worked on revising my last annotated reading post, since I've published a couple of those at Medium, directly myself, not to a publication.
• Instead of publishing the most recent Random Reader article to Medium on Monday (I've read that's a good day to publish), I queried a publication to see if it would be interested in that type of work. I received a reply that the editor had added me to the pub's writer list, meaning I could submit.
• I did some more work on revising it, making it appropriate for a publication and submitted it. A few hours later, I received a response telling me it wasn't appropriate for the publication. I would have thought he would have said that when I queried him, saving us both some effort. I'm guessing he doesn't read queries, adds everyone who contacts him, or has some kind of automated response set up that, again, accepts everyone as a writer. Doesn't that mean inappropriate stuff is submitted that he then has to read and not use? We're about managing time here, folks! That doesn't seem like a good use of it.   
• I have also been wading through essays and short stories that I've bookmarked.
• God help me, I was thinking of starting a Substack project. The little bit of research I've done suggests that that place is far more complex than Medium, and I found the learning curve there a little steep.
• To end this on a positive note, I have an objective this year of making 2 submissions a month. I've made 7 this month, with one resulting in publication. Not an acceptance to submission ratio I'm crazy about, but it's there, nonetheless.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Followed a few new people on BlueSky and Medium and got a few new followers in each place, as well. Not necessarily the same people I followed.
• Got the side bar of this blog updated with BlueSky link. And, what's more, I believe I can do that myself now, and I have some things I want to do there.
• Got started on some reading for Black History Month and did some research on other books I want to read this year to support heritage months.
• Got started on an updating the website with work I've had published the last few months.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• Took part in my first BlueSky pitch. While no agents or editors noticed (I don't know if many are there), I did get more shares than I used to get on X. So that is both gratifying and helps build connections with people on BlueSky.
• Submitted 143 Canterbury Road to an agent.

Goal 4. Play With 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Name Now, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• Did a little outlining. Named a couple of secondary characters. Continue to read a history book dealing with my setting and characters. Think maybe religion should become involved, because everyone likes to read about that.

Does It Seem To You As If It's Been A Long Time Since I've Published Something? Because It Seems That Way To Me. A Story Behind The Story.

Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels

 Today my first humor piece of the year, Trad Parents: Learn How to Go Back to a Simpler, Happier Time  with This Sample of Titles From my Blog was published at Frazzled. 

As I mentioned just yesterday, I am freaked out by trad wives. Being old as mud, I recall the total woman period. So, I believe trad wives will go the same way total women did. We shall see. 

I don't recall the total woman thing being as rooted in nostalgia as trad wives are believed to be. I have a great distrust for nostalgia, perhaps because of my interest in history. Nostalgia became my jump off point for this humor piece.

If trad wives could be nostalgic, why couldn't other groups? The first one I thought of was trad parents. What would turning to, and embracing the past, mean for them? Giving up birth control, maybe? This parody raises the question of what the trad parents here are really nostalgic for...a past they never knew or a past with birth control?

Notice that I mention birth control three times in Trad Parents. That's the rule of three. It's used in many kinds of writing, humor writing being just one of them. 

Some Annotated Reading January 23

This annotated reading thing...it's becoming a reading journal. Only I am now reading so much short-form writing I can't possibly write it all up here.

Books

I am just full of thoughts about The Guest List by Lucy Foley. First off, I must say that as a reader I am not a fan of alternating points of view, especially when there are several of them and every point of view sounds like the others. In fact, I recognized the first couple of chapters of The Guest List, because I'd started to read it before and gave up on it. Probably because of the p.o.v. switches. This time I stuck with it and ended up staying up until 2:15 AM a few nights later to finish reading it. Didn't have to fight sleep for even a minute. This thing has a number of surprises that are of the best kind...surprises that you realize make all the sense in the world because they are so intricately set up. Additionally, I had nearly finished the book when I realized it has a structure that I have been thinking of using if I end up writing another novel. And, finally, rich kids are freaking sociopaths, aren't they? And they're only marginally better when they grow up.

Short-Form Writing

And She Had Been So Reasonable by Rachel Bolton in Apex Magazine. This story definitely grabbed me, I think because the narrator is speaking directly to readers and there is a feeling of reality until the end.

Small Rebellions: Prose Poems by Bruce Holland Rogers in Flash Fiction Online. I have written exactly one prose poem, which is why I was drawn to this essay about prose poems.

I liked Do You Speak Indian? by RealStories in Ellemeno very much. It's the kind of story that opens a person's mind to other cultures.

I don't recall how I came upon Benjamin Woodard's writing, but what I've read of it is terrific. I haven't been able to read everything but some things I've enjoyed:

• Intimacy at Gooseberry Lit Magazine.
• Everyday Miracles in Bull. 
• Bump in the Night in The ASP Bulletin

I'm trying to read more traditional length short stories this year, and Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM by Rebecca Roanhouse at Apex Magazine is a stand-out.

Yes, trad wives do freak me out. Trad Wives Are Thriving in the Post-Dobbs Era by Morgan Jerkins in Mother Jones. Personally, I take a "this, too, shall pass" attitude toward them, but, yeah, I may be wrong.

I did some reading at Bending Genres, because I'd submitted a piece of creative nonfiction there. Bending Genres published me in the past, though it has had no interest since then. My most recent submission came to nothing, too, though I didn't know that when I read the following:

• A Fallibility of Hoopoes by Patricia Newberry
• Snakeskin Road by Douglas Cole
• Deciding by Marie Hoy-Kenny

Humor

Conditions That Must Be Met Before I Can Do My To-Do List by Viktoria Shulevich in Slackjaw. I know this feeling.

Don't Have Time For Small Talk--Why Do You Hate Your Mom by Kelly Matheis in Frazzled. Fortunately, I don’t get out much, because I’ll never be able to hear questions like she’s talking about without bursting out laughing. Matheis also has a fun piece on how much she hates Connecticut. Don’t hate it here, but the place is full of itself. For no good reason. 

Looks as if I went on a little Emily Kling reading binge:

• The Wedding Vows of Someone Marrying Their "Best Friend" by Emily Kling in McSweeney's. I love this. Both the concept and the structure.
• A Member Of The Donner Party Responds To It Being Called A "Party" by Emily Kling in Slackjaw. Incongruity humor, folks.
• What I Said To My Boyfriend On Saturday During A Fight Vs. What I Said One Hour Before His Weekly Therapy Session On Friday by Emily Kling in Slackjaw. Notice the build-up in this one.

How Gail Came to Leave X. Because Everyone Wants to Know That, Right?

We're finally putting up my BlueSky info both on my website (done) and here at the blog (not sure when that will be happening) this week, so it seems like a good time to officially tell people I left X two months ago. And, yes, I'm on BlueSky.

For A Long Time, I Didn't Have a Big Problem with X

X goes up in flames. Pixabay at Pexels

I often heard people talk of ugly stuff going on on X, some of those complaints coming from people
who had never been near it. I didn't see a lot of attacks on others in most of my time there. I had to go look for that kind of thing, it didn't usually turn up on my feed. For example, I only know who catturd is because he(?) was trending once, and, of course, I'm going to go see why someone who calls themselves catturd is trending. (Can't recall now.) But just on my feed, I didn't see a lot of unpleasantness.

That was probably because of the way I'd curated my experience there. By the time I left, I was following around 1,500 people and had about 1,200 people following me. They were primarily children's writers, other types of writers, history people, litbloggers, librarians, literary agents, book people. Most of them were there, like myself, to promote their work. Evidently, they were not the type of people who engaged in name calling on social media. What I saw from them were announcements of new publications or reviews or that an agent or a journal was opening for submissions. I saw newsy type things about problems in publishing companies and literary agencies. This, for me, was legit water cooler stuff.

Additionally, over the last year or two, no other viable alternative to X was presenting itself. I'd see people talking on Facebook about joining this platform or that platform to get away from X, but they came to nothing and soon people were moving on to something else. I just couldn't spend time going from place to place. 

So I stayed at X where I could get info and promote my short-form writing.

A Big Change Came the Morning After the Election

The morning of November 6 an enormous change came to my X feed. It was like watching an on-line street riot. People were incensed, crazed over the outcome of the election. The two standouts for me were:

1. A woman who filmed herself shouting into a camera as if she were railing at Trump supporters, telling them what was going to happen to them because they voted for Trump. She wasn't threatening them. She was yelling that they had doomed themselves. Then she posted her rant on X. No, I don't know what she thought she was going to gain with that. The Trump people had won. What could they possibly care about what a random naysayer had to naysay?
2. A guy who announced that he'd just called his Trump-loving mother and told her that when her Social Security was cut because Trump was president, he was not going to lift a finger to help her. Maybe he got a lot of support for that. I don't know. I didn't stick around to look.

Was this politics? I wondered. What is politics, anyway? I looked the word up. It's either the workings of government or other institutions or discussion of ideology related to same. I guess telling the world that you've just bitched out your mother because of whom she voted for might fall into one of those categories, but, if so, it certainly lowers the level of political discourse.

Things calmed down some after 48 hours, but the place was not the same. I was seeing less professional discussion and more the-sky-is-falling kinds of things that were not necessarily well informed or offering any thoughts on how to move forward. I wasn't the only one who saw the change. I kept seeing tweets saying things like "Where are all the writers?" "Where are the writers?" "Did everyone leave?" "Is anyone left?" 

Writers, the people I wanted to see, were abandoning the place. I held on, though, because I wanted my publishing news and, in the past at least, my work had received some attention there.

AI Raises Its Ugly Head

Towards the end of the election period, we started hearing that X was going to allow AI to train on anything posted there. That sounded a little bit like urban legend to me. I'm big on looking things up and found that, no, it was not urban legend. I do take issue with companies helping themselves to the creative output of others in order to train a computer system to pump out its own bland and pretty much unnecessary "work." I have, for instance, stopped submitting to a Medium publication that uses an AI editor. (In addition to being AI, it's a pain in the ass to work with.).

Then, while taking a writing workshop, I learned that artificial intelligence uses tremendous amounts of energy, which I had totally missed. That was the straw that broke the X camel's back for me. I am not a major environmentalist. We're talking here someone who has a three-section compost bin and a pollinator garden, not someone who lives off the grid. But I don't see how artificial intelligence is doing anything at this point to justify that kind of environmental impact.

Maybe someday AI will be responsible for doing something in the area of science that will enhance human life. But for now, it is primarily generating mind-numbing music for YouTube to broadcast with those creepy fake pictures and allowing search engines to steal info from websites in order to form shallow answers to user questions. It allows poor writers to quickly generate more poor writing and flood the Internet with it. 

In Conclusion

Between my personal X echo chamber being shattered and X becoming part of the AI invasion, I just couldn't justify staying there or, yes, spending valuable time there. Also, leaving was easier, because what appeared to be a workable alternative had finally turned up. BlueSky.

So, I'm over there now, and at some point, I hope to do a post here about my experience skeeting.