I was writing a video script, and a warning popped up. I first noticed this warning a couple days ago, but I didn’t think anything of it.
‘Strong resemblance to AI text.’
I am creating some videos to promote my latest book. I realise that it is academically dense, so I want to break down some of the subject matter.
As usual, my writing is on language and its insufficiencies.
But why was I being warned that my writing resembled AI? What does that even mean?
I reread the sentence:
What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?
I was looking for a hook to open the short clip. I altered it slightly:
What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things, of objects?
This appeased the AI detector. I had to dilute the message by adding ‘of objects‘. As I write this, it reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and the naming of the women as property of their masters – OfFred, and so on. Of objects.
The AI police are annoying to say the least. Profiling: Minority Project. A 1984 thought crime.
I’m hopping down off the soapbox, down off my high horse, but I’m miffed by bollocks.
How does AI summarise it? Find out here:
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
EDIT: Does it get worse?
When I checked into LinkedIn to share this post, I was distracted by another thread chatting about Emotivism. I’ll spare you the entire thread, but now Grammarly wants me to write in German. Was ist los?
I’ve commenced a new series in support of my new book. First, I’m building a glossary.
Video: Bry – Architecture of Encounter
On the docket in this segment are affordance, salience, and valence as they relate to the book. I selected these terms from the glossary in the appendix.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to produce videos on other terms and additional videos explaining key concepts. This one is straightforward and academic. Others will be less formal, hoping to accommodate different learning styles.
Does anyone subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? I may take time to create Kindle and eBook versions.
My fiction books had some formatting issues with Kindle, but these titles are more standard – no fancy layouts or fonts, and not too many images.
The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.
Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.
In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.
In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.
At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. I prompted NotebookLM to illustrate a 4-layered model that shows how removed language is from encounter, attention, conception, and representation of what we normally consider to be reality. This view is supported by both MEOW and LIH.
Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.
This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.
Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.
We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.
In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.
What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.
In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.
Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.
The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.
We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.
It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.
Lucy V. Hay posted this on LinkedIn… and then stopped allowing comments, so I figured I’d recycle it here for comment.
Unpopular opinion (that shouldn’t be unpopular):
The term “Mary Sue” is inherently s3xist 🎯
The phrase comes from a 1973 parody story by Paula Smith called A Trekkie’s Tale. It mocked the self-insert characters appearing in Star Trek fanfiction.
Those writers? Mostly teenage girls 😡
That matters, because culturally we have a long history of treating teenage girls – and the things they create – with contempt. Their fandoms, their stories, their passions are routinely framed as embarrassing, shallow or ridiculous.
Sometimes that ridicule even comes from older women punching down.
And no, the fact Smith was a woman doesn’t magically make the term neutral. Internalised misogyny exists.
Here’s what happened next …
For the last 50+ years, the label “Mary Sue” has been used against practically every female protagonist who shows competence, power or narrative importance.
Meanwhile, male characters with identical arcs are celebrated.
An inexperienced boy who turns out to be the chosen one? Hero.
A woman who discovers she has unusual power or talent? “Mary Sue.”
Same narrative structure … Different reaction 😡
Also, it’s worth noticing something interesting: I hadn’t seen the term “Mary Sue” on my timeline for yeeeeeeaars. Now, every time I post something about female characters, there it is again. In 2026 🤮
Given the current climate around women’s rights and the growing attacks on women and girls globally, that resurgence doesn’t feel accidental. Language shapes culture. Storytelling shapes culture.
And here’s another truth many people don’t realise:
The professional writing industry does not use the term “Mary Sue.”
Not in publishing. Not in development notes. Not in writers’ rooms.
If you’re using it as critique, you’re not signalling professional insight. You’re signalling that you learned storytelling discourse from internet flame wars.
If we want better conversations about character, we need better vocabulary than a 1970s insult aimed at teenage girls writing fanfic.
If you want to explore how bias shapes the way we write and judge characters, that’s exactly what I unpack in my book Writing Diverse Characters For Fiction, TV Or Film (Creative Essentials) 👇 👇 👇
Nah, mate. Even the provided definition is incorrect. Yes, Mary Sue is a gendered term. (Duh.) But the male equivalent would be a male character who had so much plot armour as to have no vulnerabilities, and his capabilities would require no training or friction, not just a ‘female protagonist who shows competence, power or narrative importance’. Pretty much no one wants to watch a character in God mode – female, male, pet, alien, or robot. What would possibly be the character arc or development? Asking for a friend.
BTW, none of the women depicted in the cover images are generally portrayed as Mary Sues. She-Hulk in the comics is not a Mary Sue. The one that streamed for a season was. Huge difference.
Her response was flippant and contained no useful information. I can only imagine she’s trolling.
Obviously, I understand that language is an imperfect vehicle, but it doesn’t have to be this abused. And, obviously, she provided her definition, but it doesn’t comport with any definitions I’m aware of.
As far as the Mary Sue argument goes, ‘no one’ in that space berates all female roles, not even past heroes like Wonderwoman, Spiderwoman, Batwoman, or Ripley from Alien, Terminator’s Sarah Connor, and so on. No one (except Lucy) categorises them as Mary Sue.
This is convenient for an argument, but it’s really tilting at windmills. I understand she’s likely trying to drum up publicity for her book. Good on her. She’ll attract people sympathetic to her message. As for me, I don’t trust a disingenuous source.
An Architecture of Encounter will be available in the next few days. I’ll make an announcement when it is, but I want to talk about pricing.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Firstly, books cost money to print. This much is obvious. Hardcovers cost more than paperbacks. The ones with dust jackets cost more still. From a financial/economics perspective, one needs to charge more for hardcovers to compensate for the costs.
Secondly, distributors take a cut. They aren’t in business without a profit interest.
Of course, one might offer directly to the customer to cut out the distribution cost and maybe pocket all or some of the difference, which might be 40-odd per cent of the sale price – 8 from a book priced at 20, where the printer already takes, say, 8. This leaves 4 for the author.
If I were to cut out the middleman to take all of the 8 in this example, I’d likely lose most of it in shipping and handling. (I know because I’ve done this before). Of course, I could pass this expense to the buyer, but this jacks up the price from 20 to 28.
Some sellers offer free shipping, whether by exceeding some minimum order amount or through a programme such as Amazon Prime.
If I am going to eat the 8, I might as well give it to Amazon and let them handle the logistics. Business 101. Barnes and Noble has an even less favourable model as far as publishing is concerned, but they provide different offerings, so I still use them via IngramSpark.
For the record, I’ve used and considered other printers and distribution methods, but they are all more expensive to me from a total cost perspective. Part of this is simply the incremental pricing facility. I don’t want to purchase and manage inventory for 1,000 books at a time. In this case, I’d be out 8K up front. Perhaps I could get a deal and print the books at 6K for committing to a print run, but I’d still have to manage the inventory and logistics, which then takes away from my writing time. I’ve outsourced this before, but I had to pay for warehousing and a handling fee to someone to package the book – and pay for shipping (pass-through or otherwise). Amazon (KDP) is just easier, so it’s my go-to.
As for pricing, I’ve decided that my default prices will be 20 USD for paperback and 30 for hardcover. This is in contrast to a x.99 pricing scheme. I usually set my ex-US prices lower, but honestly, it depends. I try to set prices in each market with no fractional units. If the price had been £14.97, I’ll up it to £15, Sorry. In most cases, it will drop from £15.23 to an even £15. In most markets, I’ll lose margin to provide a clean-looking sales price.
As an economist, I could see that one might arbitrage (in a manner of speaking) and order from Belgium instead of France or vice versa, but I don’t expect the shekels saved would be worth the added effort.
As for bookstores, they can still purchase my titles wholesale from whatever distributor (even Amazon), so you can still support your local bookstore if that’s your ethos.
Anyway, I know I’m just wittering on, but I felt that transparency into the process might be appreciated.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. (Ignore the pie chart. lol)
Kindle and other eBook formats
One might think that offering a digital version would be simple, but it’s not as easy as uploading a PDF. A lot of formatting is required to fit the format. An ordinary EPUB is easier than Kindle, which relies on old technology to support its legacy devices. It doesn’t always handle images, charts, and tables nicely, and doesn’t support all fonts, so that creates more work.
Because of this, ebooks are a low priority for me, though I admit they do sell well. It’s up in the air as to whether the increased sales justify the cannibalisation of the physical media.
Audiobooks
I’ve made available a few audiobook versions. I’ve heard that these are a decent portion of many independent authors’ revenue sources, but I haven’t found this to be true. Because of this, offering them is a low priority for me. I’m not anti-digital so much as anti-negative-cost-benefit.
I mentioned recently that I create audio versions for me to review, but these are not necessarily ready for the public. Additional time must be invested in correcting pronunciation, prosody, and odd digital glitches.
A thought experiment by Derek Parfit, here’s the setup: ostensibly, a human is cloned, but they aren’t so much cloned as teleported to Mars, à la Star Trek – there, not here, particle by particle.
The question and seeming paradox is whether the reconstructed person and the original are the same, identical.
In deference to my upcoming book, The Architecture of Encounter, I want to revisit this problem and show how there is no paradox. Let’s take a look.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Parfit’s Teletransporter Is Not a Paradox. It Is a Hangover.
Derek Parfit’s teletransporter thought experiment has become one of philosophy’s favourite parlour tricks. A person steps into a machine on Earth. The machine records their physical structure in total detail, destroys the original body, and reconstructs an exact counterpart on Mars from local matter. The person on Mars wakes with the same memories, the same character, the same projects, and the same unearned confidence that philosophers are asking sensible questions. Parfit uses such cases to press the thought that personal identity may not be what matters; psychological continuity may matter more.
The supposed paradox is familiar enough: is the person on Mars the same person, or has the original died and been replaced by a copy?
My answer is that there is no paradox here, unless one insists on dragging in precisely the assumptions that ought to be under suspicion.
This is where my forthcoming book, The Architecture of Encounter, becomes relevant. The teletransporter puzzle only looks deep if one begins with a poor ontology and a clumsy model of selfhood. Once those are withdrawn, the mystery evaporates.
The first mistake: substance nostalgia
The teletransporter story is framed as though a human being were fundamentally a thing made of parts, a self-identical object that might either persist through rearrangement or fail to do so. We are invited to imagine a body atomised here and recomposed there, then asked whether the ‘same person’ has survived. But this framing already cheats.
If substance ontology is not basic, then there is no hidden metaphysical pellet of selfhood waiting to be shepherded from Earth to Mars. On a relational picture, what is fundamental is not a stockpile of little self-identical things but organised relation, structured energetic differentiation, constraint, response, and persistence-pattern. The old metaphysics of enduring stuff survives mostly because grammar flatters it.
So the first reason the teletransporter is not paradoxical is that it begins by treating persons as though they were furniture.
The second mistake: reifying the self
The second assumption is just as dubious. The problem presumes that there must be a deep self, some enduring owner of experience, whose fate the machine must settle. I don’t grant that either.
I am much closer here to Galen Strawson’s episodic flavour than to the pious diachronic picture in which one’s life forms a single, extended inner possession. Strawson’s distinction is useful because it reminds us that not everyone experiences themselves as a long, narratively unified entity stretching robustly across time. An episodic self need not deny practical continuity, memory, or biography; it simply refuses to inflate them into a metaphysical core.
That is also how I think identity should be understood more generally: as a scale-dependent heuristic.
The self is not nothing. But neither is it an ontological pearl. It is a compression. A convenience. A useful index over continuities that matter for some purposes and not others. At one grain, sameness appears stable enough. At another, it dissolves into drift, revision, replacement, and selective narrative smoothing.
The “I” is not a tiny monarch enthroned behind the eyes. It is an indexical function within organised experience.
The third mistake: treating mind and world as pre-fabricated blocks
The teletransporter story also inherits a bad picture of mind and world. It imagines a ready-made mind confronting a ready-made external world, then asks whether one of those ready-made minds has been shifted from one location in the world to another. I reject that framing, too.
Mind and world, on my view, are post hoc constructions of mediated interface. Encounter comes first. Organisation comes first. Constraint comes first. Only later do we abstract “mind” on one side and “world” on the other as though these were primordial blocks of reality instead of conceptual products of a deeper relation.
Once one starts there, the question changes. We are no longer asking whether some occult owner-substance has been preserved. We are asking what kind of continuity, if any, is being tracked across interruption, re-instantiation, and resumed encounter. That is a very different matter.
Under episodic time, the paradox collapses immediately
Image: Notice that if we reject the diachronic self in favour of an episodic self, when the ‘self’ migrates from Earth to Mars, it just carries on indexing, so the paradox vaporates.
If one takes the episodic view seriously, Parfit’s machine is mostly theatre.
Why? Because strict numerical sameness was never available between temporal intervals in the first place. The self at one interval and the self at the next are not joined by a metaphysical thread hidden beneath change. They are linked, where linked, by organised continuity, practical function, memory inheritance, bodily persistence, and narrative convenience.
The teletransporter does not introduce some unprecedented rupture into an otherwise pristine metaphysical order. It merely exaggerates what was true all along: selfhood is not an invariant core but a heuristic over organised succession.
That means the Mars person is not paradoxical. They are simply a case in which our ordinary identity-compression is being stress-tested.
Call them the same person if your explanatory threshold is coarse enough. Refuse the label if your threshold is stricter. There is no further hidden fact trembling in the wings.
Even under diachronic time, the issue is still heuristic
Suppose, however, that one relaxes the episodic commitment and grants a diachronic self. Even then, the machine does not resurrect a deep identity problem. It only relocates the issue to threshold-setting.
How much continuity is enough?
Enough for legal identity? Enough for moral responsibility? Enough for marriage? Enough for debt? Enough for grief? Enough for survival?
These are not one question. They never were one question. Philosophy often gets itself into trouble by pretending that practical, phenomenological, ethical, and metaphysical criteria must all cash out in the same currency. They do not.
Parfit himself is famous precisely for pressing the thought that what matters may be psychological continuity and connectedness rather than some further fact of identity. My complaint is that one can go further still. Once identity is treated as a heuristic rather than a metaphysical absolute, the need for a single all-purpose answer begins to look like a bad demand rather than an unsolved mystery.
Why the duplicate case makes the illusion obvious
The variant with duplication makes the point even more brutally. If one person enters on Earth and two successors emerge elsewhere, both inheriting the same memories and both insisting “I am the original,” then the problem is no longer whether identity has become spooky. The problem is that our ordinary identity-talk has finally been pushed beyond its comfort zone.
Once there are two successors, the inherited continuity-profile has branched. That does not produce metaphysical magic. It produces two loci of encounter with the same initial macro-organisation.
At time-nought, perhaps we may stipulate identical configuration for the sake of the thought experiment. Fine. Humans adore their stipulations. At the first non-zero interval thereafter, they are already different. Different position, different sensory input, different salience, different bodily relation, different thermal and spatial microconditions, different affordances. Their trajectories begin to separate immediately. So even there, no paradox. Only the collapse of a coarse heuristic under finer scrutiny.
The real lesson
Parfit’s teletransporter is often presented as though it reveals some terrible instability in personal identity. I think it reveals something duller and more devastating. It reveals that our language of identity was never as deep as we pretended.
We say “same person” because it is useful. We use it to stabilise law, memory, blame, love, property, and biography. Fair enough. But utility should not be mistaken for metaphysical revelation. The thought experiment merely embarrasses that confusion.
So when asked whether the reconstructed person on Mars is really the same person, my answer is:
Under an episodic model, strict sameness was never on offer across temporal intervals anyway. Under a diachronic model, sameness is still a heuristic judgement about acceptable continuity. In neither case is there a paradox. There is only an old habit of substance-thinking refusing to die.
The shorter version
The teletransporter does not expose a contradiction in selfhood. It exposes the poverty of the ontology brought to the problem.
If selves are indexical, scale-dependent heuristics arising from organised encounter, then the machine does not pose a metaphysical puzzle about whether some hidden essence made it to Mars. It only asks how much continuity we are willing to treat as enough.
That is not a paradox. That is a policy decision disguised as metaphysics.
I’m not ashamed to say that AI is a significant part of my publishing workflow. In my latest project, The Architecture of Encounter, I’ve added indexing to the roles it serves. Other roles were prepping the index and footnotes, as I shared recently.
I expect the book to be available by next week. Time will tell.
I’ve included the full index below for reference. I’ve also included the title and copyright pages and other back matter.
What will a visitor do with a bookless index? I don’t know, but sharing is caring in my book. For the interested, you can get a sense of the contents. I’ll be sharing more details over the coming weeks – and beyond, I’m sure.
Earlier, I shared that Claude had offered index candidates. I started executing on that list by indexing the first few terms. It took me about an hour to do these, searching for each term and documenting the page number and context – around 250 pages. The book itself is 292 – 6″ x 9″ pages, but more than 50 of these are appendices, and others are front matter. Still.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic. (Another one that misses some points but make others. Fair enough.)
Then it dawned on me to ask Claude to help me with the index. Claude interpreted ‘help’ by spitting out the entire index, formatted and organised. If the book were formatted in 8½” x 11″ Letter size, I could have appended it as-is, but I still had to pour the output into the InDesign template I was composing through and make it look like it was part of the same manuscript, but that took minutes, not days of hours. Appendix E.
Given that I also rely heavily on novel concepts and specifically-defined terms – language insufficiency notwithstanding – I felt that a glossary would be useful. I tasked Claude with this, too. Again, it output a fully-formed list.
I noticed that a couple of terms I wanted defined were absent, so I fed the list into ChatGPT and asked it to consider these and let me know, given the manuscript, what other terms might be absent. It agreed with the two I wanted and suggested three more. It also pointed out an error Claude had made in counting. It also provided the definitions for the glossary entries, so I poured Claude’s output into InDesign. Appendix D.
AI is also a helper. For example, I wanted my index to flow into 2 columns. I’ve done this before. In the old days, I’d have scanned the menus (Adobe products are infamous for convoluted, nested menus), read the manual, and/or Googled for the answer – perhaps queried YouTube, a great resource for such things. Now, I ask AI. In this case, I asked ChatGPT. To be honest, it’s a little verbose, where ‘it’s option X under Y menu’ would suffice, but I ignore the banter.
If you need to know…
If the index is already placed in a text frame
Select the text frame containing the index.
Go to Object → Text Frame Options.
Set the Number of Columns you want, usually 2 for a 6×9 book, sometimes 3 if the type is small and the entries are short.
Adjust the Gutter spacing between columns.
Click OK.
Criticise AI all you want, but having access to in-built assistance 24/7 is a huge time-saving benefit.
Do I still use Google and YouTube? Yes, often.
Speaking of Google, I was searching for a cover image, and I discovered something I need for the fiction title I paused in September to focus on nonfiction. Sidenotes. Perhaps I’ll employ a similar mechanism.
The nonfiction book I am writing is somewhat epistolary, and I want to place internal dialogue as marginalia, employing a scripted font face. I am even considering a ‘deluxe’ version that renders this content in colour, but that’s an extra expense, first for the colour, then the full-page bleed, and perhaps thicker paper stock. Likely hardbound, reserving the paperback for a lower price point.
So, what’s next?
I finished both paperback and hardcover designs today.
I still need to review the index for hallucinated errors. This will still take less time than manually constructing it.
On the copyright page, there are a few classifiers. There are ISBNs for each format and a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). These are done, as you can see, but the ISBN system in the United States is antiquated. It looks like it’s a museum piece from the mid-1990s. In fact, I believe I first accessed it around 2000 or 2001, when I published my first book – before AI, before print on demand (POD).
A bit of nostalgia. The WWW, the internet as most people know it, was made public around 1994. Google hit it in 1998. Web 1.0. Facebook blighted the world around 2004, though less invasively at the start. I digress. Technology is a mixed bag.
Returning to ISBNs… These are managed in a system built circa 1997. It seems it is still managed with a host of cron jobs, so not much is processed in real time unless it’s a trivial record entry.
Each ISBN references a title and a format, as well as other odds and ends. In my case, I also use an imprint to separate my fiction from nonfiction. I started Microglyphics – tiny writing– in the mid-90s. When I published other authors, I used this name. I also used it for some of my fiction writing. I decided to create a Philosophics Press imprint for my philosophy and adjacent work.
It turns out that the printer needs to ensure that a book’s title and ISBN match the imprint. The system default is the company name, but I changed it to my imprint. This causes a workflow event on their end. Until it propagates, it doesn’t match, and the printer won’t allow the print run.
I’m writing this blog entry as I wait. I’m not sure if it’s automated – I’d like to assume it is – or if a human has to do something. AI might help. Just saying.
EDIT: The imprint has now been updated to Philosophics Press, but it still doesn’t work at the printer. Evidently, it can take up to 5 days for the data to propagate. I’m not sure who owns the fail on this one? Is the printer waiting for a data push? Can’t they pull the data? They seem to be live from my perspective. Is there an API, or is it truly old-school?
Whilst I’m here wittering on, WordPress have deprecated the little widget below – the one with my (old) thumbnail picture and ‘written by’ tag. I adopted it last year, but it’s been killed off. I’ve been copying the object from old posts, but I’ll probably switch to whatever they’ve replaced it with. I wasn’t keen on the options I’ve seen so far. First-world problems, I suppose.
As a writer, I have a kind of workflow in mind. It differs for fiction and nonfiction, though there are similarities. The main differences are indexes, references, and footnotes. I thought I was nearly finished with my latest book.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I rendered the first couple of chapters in ElevenLabs so I could listen to the text. It helps me assess pacing, continuity, and the like. It also gives me one more thing to fix, since the digital voices occasionally pronounce things differently from the way I’d prefer. Usually, choosing a voice that sounds roughly like Standard Southern British English helps, though not always. In any case, I survive.
While listening and following along in the manuscript, I discovered that I still haven’t fully footnoted the book.
When I write, I tend to jot down sources and references as I go, but I leave the footnoting until the final revision. There is little point in spending time drafting footnotes for material that may not survive the cut. So here I am, drafting footnotes.
I am of two minds about footnotes and citations, especially in academic work. On the one hand, they can feel performative, a way of signalling that one has incorporated so-and-so, a kind of name-dropping appeal to authority. As a heterodox writer, this is risky anyway, because I am liable to cite one of the approved villains. God forbid a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, or a Foucault. Analytic philosophers, in my experience, can be remarkably thin-skinned.
On the other hand, I do want to acknowledge those whose ideas I have borrowed. Even that, of course, is also a signal. Perhaps it all comes down to intent. As I mean it, I want to leave breadcrumbs for anyone who feels inclined to follow them back to the source.
I’ll let you decide where I’ve landed.
I’ve procrastinated long enough. Time to get back into the word mine.
Philosophics 