thewritingace

[thewritingace]

Begging people to stop reblogging this AI trash from “The Phantom Painter” on Instagram (instagram.com/phantom.painting). I’ve been seeing it on my dash more and more often from people who are otherwise anti-AI and either can’t tell it’s AI or don’t care because it looks cool.

This is the kind of shit that is VERY CLEARLY trained on the works of existing talented artists’ with distinct styles and this asshole is selling prints and making a profit off of stealing other people’s hard work.

Don’t give people like this money or attention and they will go away.

Please, if you’re going to buy art prints, buy them from an actual artist.

[thewritingace]

i think it is unrealistic for fans to expect sequels to be published a year after the first one and also want the book at its highest quality. it's okay to expect a few years in between and i think it weird how much pressure authors face to publish their next book immediately. that's a lot of stress on authors and i think it often leads to books being put out before they are ready.

[thewritingace]

Well. I have a feeling I'm about to have a million new followers. (March 31st, 2025; not an April Fool's joke, unless Nanowrimo has very poor taste and timing)

Here's a link that explains in long video format the whole entire thing in detail:

and to sum it up:

This blog was made as an Anti-Generative AI to Nanowrimo, as well as a way to actually build a friendly, low-pressure, helpful community of aspiring writers, without the hard-fast-do-it-or-die pressure brought on by nanowrimo.

There is no official "contest" -- only a community coming together to inspire each other to write, help out with motivation by setting community goals, keeping participation motivation via Trackbear.app, etc!

The most popular writing challenge is still November for most people, but I myself have also started to keep a year-round, daily writing goal of 444 via the website 4thewords, which has been an extreme help in getting me to write a little at a time.

This year has been very hectic for everyone what with the election results so I haven't been very active on tumblr (I think everyone can understand that) but I was originally planning on also having each month of the year being a different themed writing / art challenge but got a bit distracted real life.

So, what is the Novella November Challenge?

It's a fun challenge where writers come together to write 30,000 (or your own personal writing goal!) words in 30 days, sharing tips, writing advice, plot ideas, accessibility aids, and committing to having fun while explicitly fighting back against Generative AI by using our own words and disavowing the use of scraping and generating to take away the livelyhoods of artists of all spectrums, and proving everyone who insists "generative AI is an accessibility tool" wrong by committing to our creative visions and making it easier for everyone to find the tools they need to succeed by sharing tips, free programs, and finding a like-minded community to support you! 💙

There is no official website, there is no required place to show your participation, this is a community initiative that will never be monetized by predatory sponsors or dangerous moderators abusing their power.

This blog is here to inspire everyone, regardless of experience level, to write and create the story they want to tell, in their own words, while striving to remain a fun, low-pressure challenge that doesn't turn into a stressful spiral, like often happened with Nano.

Want to start writing but not sure how? Don't have money to spend on expensive writing programs? Have no fear!

LibreOffice: An always free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Word (and Microsoft's other office suits)

4Thewords: A website (both desktop and mobile web browser) that syncs your writing cross platform to the cloud, with built-in daily word goals, streak tracking, and you can fight monsters with your word count to game-ify writing!

Trackbear: A website dedicated to tracking your writing, setting custom goals, and creating leaderboards for community participation; you can join the year-long community leaderboard with the Join Code "f043cc66-6d5d-45b2-acf1-204626a727ba" and a November-limited one will release on November 1st as well.

Want to use Text to Speech to dictate your novel?

Most modern phones have a built-in option available on your keyboard settings which can be used on any writing program on your phone, and most modern PCs that allow a microphone (including headphone) connection has some kind of native dictation function, which you can find by opening your start panel and searching your computer for "Speech to text" or "voice to text".

Want to write while on the go, but don't want to / can't use the small phone keyboard to type, or speech to text?

You can, for as cheap as $40, buy a bluetooth keyboard that you can pair with your smart phone or tablet and use to write in any and all writing applications on your phone -- this allows you to write on the goal (especially using cross-platform websites or services, like 4thewords or google docs) , and the small screen can also help minimize distractions by muting notifications in your writing time.

[thewritingace]

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[thewritingace]

May your prose be gut-wrenching to readers and unintelligible to AI

[thewritingace]

Ink & essence.

--

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[thewritingace]

One of the best and most helpful things anyone ever said to me was: Don’t advertise your mistakes.

You will often notice when you’ve made an error, or when there’s something you could have done better, or etc, and sometimes other people will notice too. But often, they won’t. So don’t point it out.

It’s really a sign of a lack of self confidence – you think that if you point out the error first, it will save someone else from having to point it out for you. That by being self-depreciating, no one else will feel obliged to point out your flaws.

But here’s the thing. People don’t notice jack shit, most of the time. Sure, yeah, sometimes you’ll fuck up and people will notice and mention it, and thats fine, but 95% of your errors will go unnoticed. Unless you choose to point them out, in which case, you ensure that 100% of your errors get noticed.

The above sentence was said to me during a dance rehearsal. I’m not a pro dancer by any stretch of the imagination – this was a fun little between-friends dance that we were going to perform at a medium sized function full of people we knew. Half the people in the group did have dance experience, which made me - a non-dancer - feel self concious. So every time I messed up the steps, I would laugh at myself or made an “agh” sound or be verbally frustrated with myself that I was struggling to get that move, or whatever. Which drew peoples attention to the fact that I’d made an error.

There were like 10 of us doing this dance; me missing one step went largely unnoticed in the scheme of things, because with ten of us, anyone watching the dance had so much to look at that the likelihood of them seeing me misstep was extremely low. Unless I made a big deal about it, which would draw their attention to me, and ensure that they were made aware.

I used to point out my mistakes all the time. Not just with the dance, but across the board in general life, too. “Agh, whoops,” or handing over a completed project like “I know I could have done [thing] better, but hopefully the rest is ok,” or whatever. People were often frustrated with me, and I feel, in hindsight, that they were frustrated with me because in their eyes, with me constantly highlighting my own errors, they knew I could do better but instead here I was, giving them a shoddy, half-assed, error-filled effort. By me pointing out my every mistake, they were aware of how many I was making, and they were frustrated by my seemingly endless errors.

Then I got told to “stop advertising your mistakes,” and it was a bit of a revelation moment for me. I made a concious effort that day to minimise my reaction to my own mistakes – for the rest of the rehearsal and into the final performance – and you know what happened??

After the performance, countless people said some iteration of the phrase, “I didn’t know you could dance!!”

They thought I was a dancer. That I’d been dancing for years. They hadn’t noticed any of my missteps.

I messed up multiple times during the final performance. If I watch the recording and focus on me, I can see my missed steps, the time I span clockwise on the spot instead of anticlockwise, the time I was slightly out of alignment with the other dancers, etc. But if I watch the dance as a whole, watching all 10 dancers instead of just me….. I dont notice the mistakes I made. They blend in. Theres too much other stuff going on for anyone to notice the one dancer who spun on the spot in the opposite direction to everyone else.

And everyone thought i was brilliant. All I noticed, while dancing, were my mistakes, but no one else saw them, and everyone who saw the dance was super impressed with it and with me. That would not have been the case had I reacted to every one of my errors as I’d made them.

So I took that concept and applied it to the rest of my life. And you know what???? People were less frustrated with me. Because they weren’t noticing my minor errors, and I wasn’t pointing them out any more, so from their perspective, it looked like my output had improved. It looked like I was making “less errors.” I wasn’t, its just that before, I was pointing every one of them out, and now, I was letting people notice them on their own. And they didnt notice them.

You are always going to be hyperaware of yourself and your own mistakes, but other people are way too distracted by their own crap and have too much other stuff drawing their attention to notice your every misstep. So stop pointing your mistakes out. Stop being your own worst critic. Everyone fucks up now and then, its fine. You fix the error if you can, and you move on. You dont have to pre-empt someone else pointing out your mistakes, because its extremely likely that they wont notice your errors. Unless you point them out.

So stop advertising your mistakes, people.

[thewritingace]

Boots #1

[thewritingace]

Some truths about the publishing industry because I certainly got blindsided when going in. Now I'm so broken by this industry I struggle to encourage aspiring writers lmao

[thewritingace]

my OCs are sooo cool you guys don't know what you're missing. if you could see the show i'm watching in my head rn you'd go so crazy i'm telling u

[thewritingace]

Did I just unsubscribe from a writer I've been following for years because they advocated for using AI? You fucking bet.

They suggest it's use as a tool, citing writers who hesitated to jump on the internet being left behind and I think that displays a rather big misunderstanding of the nature of problem.

Their point was gen AI can "help us think" but there's growing studies show us that it does anything but. Here's one paper on skill atrophy from AI use. There's more than a few of them plus some articles like this one from Forbes. Essentially using AI for a particular skill shows degradation in thelat skill.

Fact is brainstorming, research, analysis. Planning, outlining, writing, editing are ALL skills writers need to develop and practise. Not offload to a machine and surrender critical thought.

These skills are vital and transferrable to other aspects of our lives. My ability to critically examine a body of text to parse meaning works in enjoying fiction and digging through mixed messages in news and on social media. My ability to research and develop ideas from multiple sources also helps me fact check misinformation online.

These skills are so important, too important to cast aside for convenience.

I'd rather use my brain and do the work. Maybe ai will shift and better tools will arise, but I have put too much work into developing my skills to be content with the half assed result of the plagiarism machine.

Fuck that.

[thewritingace]

... no. he looks like a teen twink but he has super strength he isn't aware of. He might set me on fire on accident.

Also the vampires who kidnapped him would try to kill me.

If you got into a fist fight with your main character... would you win?

[thewritingace]

Vampire WIP protagonist with the two vampires who kidnapped him.

sorry another bald tshirt post that came to me last night

[thewritingace]

By the way. If yall want to do a small and energy-saving act of resistance...start keeping a journal. No I mean seriously. Document everything about your daily life. Not so much the headlines, but I mean how things are for YOU, personally, every day. Your joys, pains, struggles, lights in the dark. Document it, because there are gonna be a lot of lies and gaslighting down the road in the future, and yes, historians read these and they're important to keep an account of everything happening.

Don't let them erase you from history. Don't let them make up lies to feed the future. We don't inherit the world from our parents, we borrow it from our children. Make sure they have a means to know the truth.

[thewritingace]

Two vampire kidnap a child because he looks like their dead boss/crush.

Writers! Badly describe the plot of your book in a single sentence. I'll go first

Local Teen creates mechanical dragon and sets it loose on the town to avoid confessing her feelings.

[thewritingace]

I have no idea why this needs to be said, but you can hate generative AI, love the Public Domain, love media preservation, hate the overbearing US Copyright system, and... still believe that Copyright Laws exist in the first place for a reason, (even if, thanks to Big Corporation Monopolies, it's been twisted into its current behemoth monstrosity.)

You can hate Large Language Models and still believe in Copyright Reform over Copyright Abolishment.

You can believe in Media Preservation and still believe that Plagiarism is wrong.

You can hate the current restrictive Copyright Laws without wanting to abolish them entirely.

You can love the Public Domain and still loath predatory corporations stealing everything they can get their hands on, to literally *feed the machine.*

These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think that

"you can't hate AI if you hate the current copyright laws"

or that

"Hating on Generative AI will only give us more restrictive copyright and IP laws, therefore you need to normalize and accept generative AI stealing all of your creations and every single thing you've ever said on the internet!"

I just genuinely don't understand how you can say this kind of crap if you've ever interacted with any creative person in your life.

I'm a wanna-be-author.

I want as many people to be able to afford my written works as possible without restrictions, and I fully plan on having free ebooks of my works available for those who can't afford to buy them.

*That does *not* mean I, in any way shape or form, would ever consent to people stealing my work and uploading it into a Large Language Model and telling it to spit out fifty unauthorized sequels that are then sold for cash profit!*

You cannot support generative AI and turn around and try to claim you're actually just defending small time artists, and *also* you think no one should have any legal protections at all protecting their work from plagiarism at all.

Supporting unethical generative AI (which is literally all of them currently), protecting artists, and *completely abolishing* copyright and intellectual property laws instead of reforming them *are* mutually exclusive concepts.

You *cannot* worship the plagiarism machine, claim to care about small artists, and then say that those same small artists should have absolutely *zero* legal protections to stop their work being plagiarized.

The only way AI could even begin to approach being ethical would be if using it to begin with wasn't a huge hazard to the enviornment, and if it was trained *exclusively * on Public Domain works that had to be checked and confirmed by multiple real human beings before it was put into the training data.

And oh, would you look at that?

Every single AI model is currently just sucking up the entire fucking goddamn internet and everything ever posted on it and everything ever downloaded from it with no way to really truly opt out of it or even just to know if your work has been fed to the machine until an entire page of text from your book pops out when it generates text from someone's writing prompt.

And no, it's not just "privileged Western authors" who are being exploited by AI.

For an updating list of global legal cases again AI tech giants, see this link here to stay up to date as cases develop:

[thewritingace]

*struggles while writing* i suck and writing is hard

*remembers some ppl use ai* i am a creative force. i am uncorrupted by theft and indolence. i am on a journey to excellence. it is my duty to keep taking joy in creating.