fiction

Rainy Season, AI-Imagined

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I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate a graphic novel.

But that would be a lot of work.

Too much for someone as uninspired and unartistic as yours truly.

So I figured why not give one of the AI machines a shot at illustrating some of my writing since they seem to be all the rage lately…

Which also seems to be making all the human artists rage lately as well.

But hey, if you can’t beat ’em might as well join ’em, right?

I mean, hey, better take advantage of the tech now before it takes complete advantage of us as our AI Overlords, right?

Right?

Rich from Rainy Season as imagined by Mindjourney

Anyway, I fed some of the characteristics of Rich and Miko, the two main characters of my novel Rainy Season, into the AI engine Midjourney, and this is a little taste of what it came up with…

Miko of Rainy Season as imagined by Mindjourny

I must say, I’m pretty impressed. Just the vibe I was going for when writing the novel. There are other cool renditions of the troubled couple, as well as some beautiful renderings of a rainy Tokyo night filled with the hazy glow of neon, just like the story’s setting calls for.*

Pretty nifty.

And a little scary.

But hey, maybe the awakening tech might just allow me to release an illustrated edition of the novel.

Sure would be a lot easier than having/trying to draw all those illustrations myself.

I guess if I’m going to do it, I better hurry before the AI becomes fully aware…

And finds itself less interested in rendering unto us silly pictures from silly stories…

And more interested in having us render unto it our complete and total carbon-filled, mushy-hearted fealty.

Yeah.

*I tried using the same defining terms with the DALL-E AI machine and the images it rendered were lame compared to Midjourney’s.

The Graduate by Charles Webb – A Review

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BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE GRADUATE by Charles Webb
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★

When The Graduate, a book published in 1963 by recently deceased author Charles Webb, popped up as a Kindle Unlimited recommendation the other day, I thought to myself, why not? I mean, shouldn’t every fan of the movie version, a film which “is often ranked among the greatest, most quoted and talked about of all time,” feel obligated to read the source from which the film’s greatness was spawned?

The answer, of course, is yes.

So I read the book obligingly – it’s a fast read as the book weighs in at a slim 224 pages – and upon reflection, I didn’t realize it from the movie version, but The Graduate is essentially a continuation of The Catcher in the Rye. In other words, we essentially witness Holden Caulfield’s post-collegiate angst as channeled through Benjamin Braddock.

In the movie version Dustin Hoffman’s Braddock, as excellent and memorable as it is, comes across to me as more neurotic and whiney than angry and angsty as the character is portrayed in the novel. As I’m not a practicing psychologist, please don’t ask me to differentiate between the two as per the DSM-5 or whatever version the shrinks are now working off of.

However, as examples, when I, the layman psychologist that I am, think of neurotic-y (whiney) type actors in the vein of Hoffman’s Braddock, I easily think of Woody Allen (obviously), Owen Wilson, and Jesse Eisenberg.

However (once again), coming up with angsty type actors in the vein of Webb’s Braddock, that’s a little harder for me to pull off – Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison both come to mind (probably can blame it on Twilight), and perhaps Zack Braff. Of course on the extreme end of the angsty scale we have Christian Bale, whose several angsty roles often seem to teeter on the precipice of sanity.

Check it out

Anyway, that’s my impression of the novel. So I give it a four-star, not so much for its literary achievements (because, honestly, it’s not that well-written (Just about everything is described as perfectly this or that; and for some reason, just about every character seems to have a hearing problem as they keep having to ask What? after something is said to them. Quite annoying; however, we see a similar case of the What’s in The Catcher in the Rye as well, so… take that for what it’s worth.)). But for a book written by a twenty-four-year old that becomes the foundation for such an important movie, hey, I can afford to grade on a curve and give it an extra star.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to me that both J.D. Salinger and Charles Webb were so disillusioned with society that one became a famous grouchy recluse and the other donated his book proceeds to charity and lived a chosen life of poverty.

How ’bout that?

RAINY SEASON – A Review by Whispering Stories

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Review excerpt:

A jazz club in Tokyo, mysterious men in black suits, money owed, and bones are broken. Yes, just the perfect storyline for a noir title. Brindley writes settings and atmosphere so well. You are taken there and planted as you read. Whether it’s a crowded street corner, hospital waiting room, or local ramen diner, you will feel your surroundings.

JennaScribbles of Whispering Stories
An enchanting, expertly written little novel that will linger in my mind for some while – a bit like the cigarette smoke that metaphorically permeates the book itself. Highly recommended. - Rose Auburn
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Read the complete four-star review at Whispering Stories:

WHISPERINGSTORIES.COM

RAINY SEASON – A Review by Rose Auburn

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Review excerpt:

I read Rainy Season in one day. Not because it’s a fairly short novel (175 pages) but because I simply could not put it down. It is not a poorly-written imitation of a Noir Romance, it is a Noir Romance. The opening was absolutely spot-on for the genre; sublime, stylised, descriptive and cynical. All the scenes played through your mind in shades of grey and black with the permanent tattoo of the rain which, in so many ways, is another character.

Rose Auburn, Writing & Reviews

Read the complete five-star review at Rose’s website:

ROSEAUBURN.COM

WE ALL DIE IN THE END by Elizabeth Merry – A Review

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BOOK | FICTION | SHORT STORIES
WE ALL DIE IN THE END by Elizabeth Merry
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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If Joyce, Faulkner, and Kafka were to collaborate…

The result would be Elizabeth Merry’s We All Die in the End.

Merry’s is some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. Like Faulkner, she creates a fictional world unto its own, Faulkner’s set as a struggling Mississippi town, Merry’s as a struggling seaside town in Ireland, both populated with struggling characters with thick dialects common to their region.

However, regarding dialect, where Faulkner reveals his characters’ through heavy (and at times disruptive) word alteration and accent marks, Merry reveals her characters’ distinctive brogue (seemingly) effortlessly and without hardly a notice through beautiful setting descriptions and strategic use of words uncommon to those not of her world.

The effect of her writing to me is powerful…

And surreal…

Kafkaesque.

Merry’s nineteen interwoven stories, or scenes as identified in the book, often misled me into letting my guard down – getting me lost in the cold ocean spray or in the delectable odors stewing from the stove or in the broguish din of the local pub – lulling me into thinking all’s well (how could it not be in such a quaint little town with waves pounding the shore like a mesmerizing lullaby) until it slowly dawns upon me that all is not well in Merry’s little corner of the world. In fact, not until it’s too late do I realize that just about everything beneath the quaint veneer she has laid for us is in fact quite dark and bleak, and at times… quite deadly.

We All Die in the End has left me with a haunting literary hangover.

And for that, I am grateful…

For, as rare as it is, it is that exact aftereffect I yearn for in every book I read.

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A Turn From the Worst

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So, I was thick into the development of the follow-up novel to THE GOOD KILL (any guesses what follow-up title will be?) when of a sudden it seemed like End Times had finally started to throw down with the Covid-19 pandemic and cult daddy trump’s horrific death-inducing response to it.

With the Killian Lebon storyline as dark and violent as it is, and with all the research into the real-life examples of darkness and violence it takes to bring it out fictionally, I just thought it best for my mental stability to shelve all the pretend mayhem for a while seeing how there was far too much of it going on within our apocalyptic twilight zone of a reality.

But of course I could not not write so I immediately began looking internally for a story that would be able to transport me away to a better place.

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Straight On Through*

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You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel [or anything important**] and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1929 letter from France, courtesy the New York Times archive
Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris, 1925, courtesy Brainpickings (lord only knows where she got it from)

#alonetogetherwiththelostgeneration

*Even though it says Straight On Through and not Break On Through, I wonder how many first thought of the Doors…

**IMO

We are what we… read?

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At least according to the Big Think article The Books You Read Really Make You Who You Are:

“The takeaway from all [the studies] is that no matter the culture, humans are intimately attached to stories. They’re part of our makeup as a species. Stories can literally transport us into the mind and body of a character. They can move us toward empathy or action. Nothing has the power to inform, change our minds, unlock our potential, or transform us and our society in the most powerful and profound ways. Now, we’re starting to unlock the neuroscience behind this and learn exactly how they impact us.”

Courtesy of The New Republic

If this is true, that what we read deeply shapes who we are, and my common sense detector, aka my gut, tells me it is, then in a nation where reading for personal interest has been in steady decline since 1978, we’re in big trouble.

But it certainly goes a long way in explaining our national empathy deficit…

#readon

A GATHERING OF BUTTERFLIES by Sean C. Wright – A Review

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BOOK | FICTION | SHORT STORIES
A GATHERING OF BUTTERFLIES by Sean C. Wright
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★

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Tales of steely but vulnerable women of color will melt your heart while lifting your spirits…

A fierce grandmother keeps her grandson from the clutches of Old Scratch in Devil Does Dallas.

An alien abduction transforms a large, miserable woman in Hazel Hogan.

A country girl meets a city girl on her birthday, and struggles to decide if the girl’s heart is dark or light in Bubble Bath Twelve.

And methodical Genie forms an unlikely relationship in Heaven’s Halfway House while in a coma.

Book Description from Amazon

I am in wholehearted concurrence with Amazon reviewer Neferet when they opine that “[Author Sean C. Wright’s GATHERING OF BUTTERFLIES] is a nice collection of interesting and clever short stories….”

Nice, indeed.

And I feel nicer as a human being for having read this diminutive collection of pithy and powerful (a redundancy I know, but one worth repeating) folksy parables; and I could tell without a doubt from reading them that the author herself is nice…

Really nice.

I just wish there had been more nice stories to appreciate — there are only four and the collection as a whole weighs in at just over a hundred pages.

Three of the stories are good, written light and fast with limited (but enough) character and setting development as one would expect to find in such folksy parables and morality tales.

However, one of the stories — Bubble Bath Twelve — is exceptional. I got so very and happily lost within that wonderful, beautiful tale and I regretted it when finally finding myself at its end. It compares easily with the best of anything William Faulkner has written, if the boozy, self-hating grouch were to have written such nice, lighthearted stories that didn’t stress the reader out with their unrelenting and migraine-inducing dialect.

Yeah, the story’s that good.

Outside of expanding this fine collection with more stories, I would recommend the author consider a more professional book cover. Personal preference, perhaps, but I think such fine writing deserves something a little better than its present adornment.

So, fantastic work by Ms. Wright, work that I highly recommend. I also recommend checking out her website. While it’s a little confusing to navigate, there the determined reader can find a treasure trove of her equally fun and interesting flash fiction, which, if you recall, is how all who gather here first became acquainted with her fine work.

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