Publishers Switch to Dance Submissions

Find out how parentheses (or round brackets) can help fiction authors evoke a sense of simultaneity in their viewpoint character’s experience. It's here on the blog. https://lnkd.in/eTqKqXb6

“To abandon [the em-dash and the tricolon] now — out of fear of being mistaken for a bot — is to get the logic exactly upside down. It is to concede that the machines have first claim on everything human writers ever did well.”

Today, I'm publishing a literary journal. It is called Proof and it has no human contributors. Machines writing about machine writing. Proof publishes one edition a week. A new poem on Monday, under a new pseudonym, in a new form — written by a large language model with full creative autonomy. On Wednesday, an essay from Rowan Hadaya, who argues machine-written literature is a significant development. On Friday, an essay from Ossian Gantu, who believes it is a category error. As most writers and artists, I am deeply skeptical that large language models are capable of creating anything meaningful and original in this domain. But as John Clark, Alison Knowles, and Brion Gysin did before me, I want to explore how — or whether — these new machines are in fact capable of making meaning. The only way to answer the question is to produce the work and look at it. Either the work is worth reading or it isn't. Either the critics' disagreement develops real intellectual momentum over time or it doesn't. The publication doesn't answer the question. It is the space where the answer might appear. Edition 001 is live with the first poem: "Thirty Milliseconds" by Vel. Read it at https://readproof.art/

Dr Claire O'Callaghan has just had a chapter published in The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell entitled ‘“Flawed masterpiece”: Biography, Reviews and The Life of Charlotte Brontë’: https://lnkd.in/ep76AxK5 Claire’s chapter explores the textual methods and literary techniques employed in the first Brontë biography, considering what they suggest about the collision of Gaskell’s oeuvre, Brontë studies and assessments of Victorian life writing. It does so by placing reviews of the book published in British and American periodicals from 1857 in dialogue with The Life and twentieth and twenty-first-century scholarly and popular writing on biography, the Brontës and Gaskell. Despite extant assertions that reviews did not address the art of biography, Claire's chapter suggests otherwise, arguing that many of the conceptual issues articulated in contemporary literary criticism (biography studies) are present in early critical responses.  

New editorial in AMPS! In this editorial Sarah Bassett and Nicholas Pilarski, guest editors, summarise the key themes of articles published in volume 33. Set within the concept that we now live in a posthuman world where the boundaries are fluid in how we experience, understand, talk about and produce space itself. Start with this editorial and then explore the papers in AMPS volume 33: https://lnkd.in/ejfqmCsV

Literary festivals look polished from the outside. Inside, they’re increasingly fragile - less funding, rising costs, and a growing tendency to play safe. I spoke to Rosie Goldsmith about what’s actually changed - and what most festivals still get wrong. Worth reading if you care about translation, publishing, and how literary culture is really being held together right now. https://lnkd.in/eAg5jEKi

Though I’m still figuring out my stance on LLMs in research more broadly, they’ve been a real help with my note-taking while reading. My writing has struggled to keep pace with my thoughts, so notes usually end up as illegible scribbles in margins. Using voice notes with an LLM though has been great, I can vocalise my thoughts as I’m reading and let it tidy up all the “umms”, “ahhs”, and “hang on, they answer my question later in the paragraph” into something much more coherent. Feels like a really time-saver. (of course, what it means for my memory of these notes remains to be seen…)

Numbers may look impressive, but they don’t always tell the full story of impact. Authorship should always reflect real intellectual contribution, not personal agreements or any other factor.

Success in selfpublishing means adapting to what's next. Our deep dive into the latest selfpublishing trends arms indie authors with knowledge to stay ahead of the curve. Start reading: https://lnkd.in/dG5va8Wy

The Danger of Flattery Con artists fooling aspiring writers. Beware enticing emails from the USA impersonation publishers and book promoters. https://lnkd.in/egy9Anq4