A Side of Mac, "Anatto" and Sodium Tripolyphosphate, by Catriona

How do you see AI changing the landscape for better or worse for authors?

Oof. I might not answer the question, actually. It's been answered better than I could do already this week (scroll down).

spoiler from my latest author's note.

Instead, I'll take a swing at why the environmental cost, uninvited daily intrusions, wholesale theft, sneaky lying, cheating, whining about getting caught lying and cheating, and all the rest of it are such a brain-frying, heart-sinking source of despair. I mean, it's not like we're short of those coming at us from elsewhere.

It's because it's junk. Worthless, dispiriting, empty junk. It's a lot of money and water and lawsuits for something with no value. 

I get a bit stumped when asked to back that up, mind you. It's one of those situations where if you ask the question, you might not be equipped to understand the answer. The best example I've ever heard of that kind of conundrum was years back when a student nurse asked why she had to sit with a dying patient who wasn't conscious and wouldn't know whether there was anyone there or not. The boss nurse checked - "You're asking what the problem is with someone dying alone in a room on this ward instead of with someone at her bedside?"

See? 

If you ask that question you might not be equipped to understand the answer. (Or be a nurse.)

But I'll try again anyway. Ahem. Stuff being fake matters.

There was a landmark bit of sociological research published years back that encapsulated it perfectly.

Basically, there was an investigation of levels of pilfering by staff of two different supermarkets. One lot had pockets in their uniforms and one lot didn't. Guess which cohort of workers was discreetly easing cash out of the till and products off the shelves. Yep - the ones who had to go to all the trouble of stuffing pies down their tights because they had no pockets.

So the supermarket with the theft problem decided to redesign their uniforms. But they couldn't bring themselves to actually give the sticky-fingered workers real pockets to fill with swag, so they faked them. Plackets a-go-go but no pouch. 

The theft got worse.

Stuff being fake matters.

It would be an appalling end to this long tradition of human creativity if "unregulated" market forces caused art, music and literature to be replaced by cheaper, quicker fakes because people who don't get it don't get it and they're rich. It would be like Timothee Chalomet somehow managing to shut down the Vienna Opera House and the Royal Ballet, with a Beavis-and-Butthead-style snigger of proud, affectless ignorance.  

And make no mistake. They are fakes. Every unit of extruded novel-length language-substitute, every twelve-fingered grandma illustrating a heart-microwaving tale on Facebook, every response to a Google search where you forget to type -AI into the box . . . fake.

Those AI summaries don't contain information. ChatGPT doesn't answer questions. Those pixels don't add up to a granny. What you're being served is a simulation of what information, answers, and grannies look like. 

You can check this for yourself, if you're quick. I got the chance very recently. Small Prophets, MacKenzie Crook's follow-up to Detectorists was broadcast on British telly to rave reviews. The next day, I googled "Where can I watch Small Prophets in the US". For a minute I thought I had got the answer: "Small Prophets is available in the US on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu."

Wow. Crook sold it four times into the same market? That's . . . surprising. 

Silly me. I had forgotten to type -AI and I'd got a fake version of what the answer to that question would look like, using terms that turn up in real anwers to that general kind of question. Before enough people asked that specific question, about that specific weird little British sitcom, this was the best the poor AI could do. 

It's learning. Now it's reporting Amazon Prime Video and Netflix only. Utter tosh, of course. It's not available anywhere in the US, but Netflix and Amazon are just too frequent a pair of answers and it's such a niche little show . . . the slop's going to win this one every time. 

Right, I'm off to make macaroni and cheese with five ingredients - pasta, butter, flour, milk, cheese - or three if I can call pasta and flour "wheat" and milk, cheese and butter "milk". And, if the blue box people get to call what they recover from waste anatto by-product via indstrial solvent extraction processes "anatto", I think I probably can.

Cx

Greggs go-cup to prove I'm not *that* snooty

Is it real? by Eric Beetner

 How do you see AI changing the landscape for better or worse for authors?

This is THE hot topic for discussion any time a group of writers gets together these days.

The short answer, in my opinion, is that it will make things worse.

Not only is there already a division within the writing community among writers who abhor all things AI and the (luckily) few who are embracing it, but what constitutes  some use of AI before it is deemed “Cheating” is a vague and undefined line.

We’d all be lost without spell check, which has been an early form of artificial intelligence we all embraced decades ago. There are small ways in which assistance from the electronic brains on our desks or in our laps helps us every day. The obvious line in the sand is asking a computer to write a full draft of something. There is just no world in which that is considered writing. Same with an outline or writing prompt, if only for the fact that these systems have all learned by devouring the work of others and regurgitating it.

The argument, of course, is that we all do the same by taking in influences and inspiration from other authors all the time, but there is something quite different from being influenced by great art and then reinterpreting it through your creative process versus asking a computer to simply spit out a paint-by-numbers version of the same thing.

Recently we’ve seen the looming AI flood begin to recede a bit. Companies aren’t  thriving the way they wanted to and the public is rejecting the force-feeding of AI into every aspect of our lives. This is a good thing and I hope it continues. AI technology has so many amazing capabilities to improve our lives. The fact is, nobody asked for it to take over creative endeavors. We want improvements in medicine, automation of drudgery tasks and a million invisible uses we’ll never know about. We want our art to continue to be human and for the AI technology to open more time and creative space for that to happen.

One of the most insidious evils of AI in our lives, and one thing that is already out of the box no matter how much AI begins to shrink into the background, is the doubt it casts over what is real and what is not.

From deepfake photos, Instagram videos that are fabricated, news articles and, yes, full novels, we have doubt now about what has been computer generated and what is still being made by humans. Once that doubt creeps in, it is hard to ever trust again.

Accusations fly and when that happens, false accusations are inevitable. We’ve seen contracts cancelled already due to AI being exposed during the writing process. We’ve seen people claim that use of the em dash is a signifier of AI usage, when those of us who use em dashes sit here, innocent, but caught in the crossfire.

I have found it easy to simply avoid any use of AI tools entirely. I don’t even entertain the thought of using them. That doesn’t save me from the skeptics who start to see all writing as assisted writing. The simple fact that it exists out there makes what we do suspect and that is an awful feeling.

I don’t think I know any writers, personally, who are using AI for their work. I do know writers who are using it for cover art, promotional videos, graphic work. I steer clear of all of it both for not wanting to support an industry intent on making human effort in the arts obsolete, the environmental impacts of AI, and the soul-sucking dullness of not taking the time and effort to create something. 

Whenever I’ve heard these tech bros speak about the uses of AI in the arts – writing, music, film – it is always painfully obvious they lack the skills to do any of it and they simply don’t understand the creative process. I saw an interview with some tech guy who claimed nobody liked making music any more. He said you had to get good at an instrument, which took years of practice and effort, you had to learn production tools and music theory. Any musician knows that YES! THAT’S THE FUN PART!

Same, too, with writing. Is it easier to plug in “write my a mystery in the style of Agatha Christie” and be done? Yes. Is it satisfying? Not in the least. Certainly not as satisfying as devising a plot, creating misleads and red herrings, devising an ingenious solution, tying it all together and making it live with full-blooded characters from your own imagination. A computer could never replace that.

AI is here to stay in one form or another. How much we let it through the door of our creative arts is up to us. I say stay out, full stop. Don’t give it an inch. Don’t be tempted by the ease of it. Or if you do, don’t dare call yourself a writer.

Machines Can Lie, Writers Do Lie… Stories Tell the Truth

   

The first time I asked an AI to summarize a crime novel, it did so in about three seconds.

It took me three months to write mine.

As a crime writer, I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about human psychology. Motive is the engine of the genre. A body on the floor is the starting point; the real story begins with How and Why it’s there.

In my own case, the novel has false starts, rewrites, and long stretches spent staring at a paragraph that refuses to behave.

That small experiment captures the current argument about artificial intelligence. Depending on whom you ask, AI will either usher in a golden age of creativity or reduce writers to gig workers polishing prose generated by a machine that has never experienced heartbreak, homicide, or a missed deadline.

Both predictions are probably wrong. Historically, they almost always are.

New technologies tend to arrive with two publicists: one predicting paradise, the other predicting catastrophe. For more than a century we have been promised that machines would free us for higher pursuits. Washing machines spared us from scrubbing clothes by hand. Email replaced letters. Television was once expected to become the great educator of the masses, bringing Shakespeare, science, and world affairs into every living room.

The promise is always the same: remove the drudgery and humans will devote themselves to more meaningful work.

Sometimes the promise even holds.

Writers once worked on typewriters, producing pages that looked like minor crime scenes—crossed-out lines, correction fluid, and coffee rings as editorial commentary. When word processors arrived, they quietly eliminated one of the great mechanical burdens of writing: retyping entire pages just to fix a paragraph.

Spell-check followed. Then autocorrect, which introduced its own genre of accidental comedy.

And yet many of us, liberated from the tyranny of the typewriter, still struggle to produce a compelling sentence.

Artificial intelligence continues that same technological trajectory. It can summarize research, organize information, propose outlines, and imitate the statistical patterns of language with impressive speed.

But stories—especially crime stories—depend on something less mechanical.

Crime fiction is rarely about the crime itself. It is about human nature under pressure: the moment someone crosses a line they once swore they never would.

Greed. Fear. Loyalty. Betrayal.

These are the emotional forces that drive the story.

A machine can describe a murder. Understanding why someone commits one is another matter.

None of this means artificial intelligence is trivial. It may reshape publishing, accelerate research, and flood the world with more text than anyone can reasonably read. Writers will adapt, just as they adapted to typewriters, word processors, the internet, social media, and the curious modern expectation that authors should also function as marketers, podcasters, and amateur meteorologists of the publishing industry.

Storytelling has survived every technological shift thrown at it so far.

That is because the appetite for stories is older than any machine. Humans want to know what happened, why it happened, and whether justice—however imperfect—will prevail.

Crime fiction, especially, thrives on that ancient curiosity.

Which brings me back to the three-second summary.

Artificial intelligence can reduce a novel to a neat paragraph. It can identify the characters, the plot, and even the twist.

What it cannot easily summarize is the thing crime writers spend years trying to understand:

why someone crossed the line in the first place.

And as long as that question remains difficult, messy, and stubbornly human, there will still be work for crime writers.

Yes, I would like a slice of that lemon pound cake!

 

 

 

How do you see AI changing the landscape for better or worse for authors? 

Let me be transparent from the start. I am firmly in the No-AI-in-the-arts camp. Even so, I had my doubts about the ability to stuff this pervasive genie back into the bottle. AI has infiltrated virtually every facet of our lives without our even noticing. Now that we are noticing, it’s too late to stop it. From the time Alexa wakes me up in the morning until my smart lights plunge me into darkness at night, AI is there, helping me cook, checking my health, directing my driving, and my steps. So then, how could I expect it wouldn’t worm its way into the arts, specifically storytelling.

Enter Afroman. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, congratulations! Somehow, you’ve managed to shield yourself from the invasive tentacles of the internet, and possibly all forms of modern communication of the 21^st century.

Afroman, a rapper, singer, poet, of a sort, was erroneously (on purpose) targeted by his local police as a possible drug-dealing kidnapper. They invaded his home, destroyed his property, and terrified his family. The result, the most brilliant series of revenge albums ever made.

You may have never heard of Afroman, may never have, or ever will, listen to an Afroman song in your life. That’s fine. But if you’re an artist, especially an artist that uses words as your medium, his story is relevant to you. Because, his ability to take a real-life situation and reshape it into creative gold can never be duplicated by AI. I just don’t believe that’s possible. Why not? Emotion. Creativity is all about emotion, in my mind. Afroman, along with every artist who’s ever sat down and created something out of nothing was inspired by an emotion. Our characters act out of emotion. Our readers react to our emotion.

AI may can write about emotion, but it can’t fake the feelings that lead to a whole song written about a rogue sheriff and his lust for lemon pound cake. Look it up and thank me later.  And we should all feel better about that.

 

                                                               

 

Do you know what month it is? | Working Other Genres into Crime Fiction by Faye Snowden

For the past several years I’ve waited with anticipation for April, and because this *age redacted* Grandma is twelve at heart, I go around asking everyone I encounter, ‘Do you know what month it is?’ in a riff off the old Geico commercial, the one with the camel talking about hump day. My husband groans. My sons pat me on the head and say, ‘That’s wonderful, Mom’ while furiously completing an application to Shady Pines. I’m quite sure those two are conspiring to put me in some version of a Shady Pines old folk home when I reach my dotage. (Yikes, maybe that’s now.)

Photo by Yana Yuzvenko on Unsplash

Let me see if I can explain my excitement every time April rolls around.

I’ll start with James Dickey’s poem, The Hospital Window. When I was first getting together with my husband, I recited this line on dates, or dinner at home, even in the movies (especially the soapy romcoms he made me watch): I have just come down from my father. My poor soon-to-be husband didn’t love it. He wasn’t the only victim. My sister-in-law got it, too. That line was just so damn good, the lilt of it. Okay, don’t like Dickey? How about the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table. You read it and know this poem is about to take a serious turn.

Let’s not forget Ai (no, not AI. Come on, focus). I’m talking about Ai, the poet known for her stark and bloody monologues. Take a look at The Kid. When the poem opens, a young boy is smacking the flat tires of an old pickup with a tire iron. The monologue continues with him murdering his family. It ends:

In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit

and his patent leather shoes.

I pack my mother’s satin nightgown

and my sister’s doll in the suitcase.

Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.

I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere.   

I can break your heart.

 

There are more, of course, Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Bean Eaters, Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Mornings, Kim Addonizio’s What Do Women Want (hint: not a man), poems with images so sharp you’re bound to get cut. 

As for the question we’re answering this week: do I work other genres into my crime fiction? Absolutely, positively, most definitely yes. I love poetry so much that my main character Raven Burns can’t help but love it. Her serial killer father doesn’t love poetry, per se, but he does have a fondness for doggerel including The Owl and the Pussycat. And he is quite fond of quoting nursery rhymes. 

Coming, April 14, 2026

I’ve used poems as clues and in character development. I’ve turned to poetry to help me craft a mood or perfect an image or when my drafts start to sprawl and I need to be concise. Looking to explain something important in the story, but only have one or two lines to get it done? Read some poems. Having trouble showing and not telling? I head over to The Poetry Foundation at poetryfoundation.org where all of the poems I’ve discussed in this blog are hosted. I’ve downloaded the app and regularly use the spin feature to find poems on disappointments and celebrations, doubt and science, humor and aging. 

Have you guessed why I’m so excited about April? April is National Poetry Month! Every year, I delight in posting a poem a day on social media to celebrate.  So, I ask again, Do you know what month it is? If you do, join me. Read some unforgettable poems to improve your writing, and so you, too, can annoy your friends and family.  

Aliens in Love: Bending the Rules from James W. Ziskin

Do you work other genres into your crime fiction? Do you bend the “so-called” rules?

 

I had a killer idea for a time-traveling-interstellar-alien-romance-mystery-cum-bildungsroman/comedy of manners/roman à clef. But—would you believe it?—

 

SOMEBODY BEAT ME TO IT!

Other than my alien romance, I haven’t tried to write outside the overarching umbrella of crime fiction. But I have mixed elements from other genres into my books. As for bending the so-called rules, aside from playing fair with the reader, I don’t subscribe to any. That includes (excludes?) most, but not all, of the prohibitions laid out by S. S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox back in the 1920s. Only one secret room permitted in a story??? Who can write a mystery with only one secret room? No way. In fact, I have broken—not bent—several of their rules in my books, as have many writers more accomplished than I.

 

Now, have I borrowed elements from other genres and used them shamelessly in my mysteries and crime fiction? Yes, I have. And since I don’t intend to give them back, I suppose you could say I stole them. That said, my Ellie Stone novels (seven to date) fall squarely into the mystery genre. Ellie is a small town newspaper reporter in the early 1960s. Her beat is local and human interest stories until the occasional murder pops up. These books are traditional procedurals and do not stray into other sandboxes. Okay, once she nearly fell in love (Heart of Stone), but that’s about as close to romance as she’s ever come. And no sci-fi, fantasy, western, or erotica DNA to be found.

 

On the other hand, many readers of my historical thriller, Bombay Monsoon, have suggested that it’s a romantic thriller. I’m fine with that description, even if that wasn’t exactly my intention when I wrote it. Yes, my main character, Danny Jacobs, falls for a mysterious, desirable woman, and his obsession for her fuels the plot and the suspense of the book. The object of his desires is unavailable, is the lover of Danny’snewfound friend, and appears to be all wrong for him. I won’t give away the ending other than to say that while Bombay Monsoon is a love story of sorts, it’s not a bodice-ripper and it is definitely a historical thriller.

 

That brings me to my next book, THE PRANK, which comes out in July 2026 (Level Best Books). I struggle to put a tag on this story. Is it a mystery? No, definitely not. Is it a romance? Well, the main characters spend time together and one is definitely interested in the other. But, no. It’s not a love story. And it’s not science fiction or fantasy either—no robots or elves or faeries. And, no, it’s not exactly historical, even if it does take place at Christmas 1968. It’s not a comic novel, there’s no time travel, and I wouldn’t call it literary despite the fine writing.

 

(Blushes as accolades pour in.)

 

(Blushes even more as eyes roll in reaction to ill-concealed attempt to pat self on back.)

 

No, THE PRANK is not a literary novel. Finally, I’m confident it’s not picaresque, paranormal, steampunk, dystopian, or alternate history.

So what is it, exactly? 

 

Could it be a thriller? Yes, I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. But what kind of thriller? I don’t think it’s a domestic thriller, in that it’s not about a married couple or a family. Is it medical? Legal? No. It’s certainly not geo-political, military, or techno either. No spies in the story either. No, THE PRANK is none of those.

 

So, back to my previous question: what the hell is it?

 

Well, there’s a crime of sorts. And somebody dies. And we wonder what will happen next. But there’s never any doubt about who did what. No mystery. It’s more a cautionary tale about good intentions and bad decisions. The characters drive the story because they both want something. And they want it a lot. Enough to risk serious societal repercussions. 

 

I like stories like that, even if they don’t fall into neat categories, which makes them harder to sell. Kind of like that novel I wanted to write: a laugh-riot bildungsroman about alien detectives falling in love as they tumble through eons and galaxies.

 

 

 *****************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

 

THE PRANK. A picture clipped from Playboy magazine, a missing Swiss Army Knife, and a prank gone terribly wrong conspire to make Christmas 1968 a deadly holiday to remember.

 

“The Holdovers meets The Bad Seed,” THE PRANK features a charming but volatile thirteen-year-old named Jimmy Steuben. He befriends his seventh-grade English teacher, Patti Finch, just days after her boyfriend is killed in an electrocution accident while hanging Christmas lights on his roof. Patti desperately needs respite from her grief, and a chance encounter with Jimmy provides just that. Ignoring the dangers of a potential scandal, the mismatched pair begins spending time together over Christmas break. Patti finds solace in Jimmy’s company; Jimmy discovers desire and infatuation. But what Patti doesn’t know is that it was Jimmy who caused the tragic accident that killed her lover.

From two-time Edgar Award finalist, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winner James W. Ziskin, THE PRANK releases July 2026.

PLACEHOLDER—NOT THE OFFICIAL COVER

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Never a Straight Line

Do you work other genres into your crime fiction? Do you bend the “so-called” rules?

by Dietrich

In crime fiction, the path from crime to consequence rarely runs straight. Twists, detours and sharp turns keep readers hooked, and the same goes for how I approach writing it. Over the years, I’ve never been one to stick rigidly to a single lane. My novels are crime novels at their core—gritty, character-driven stories full of flawed people making bad choices—but I like to weave in other elements that bend the so-called rules of the genre.

My earlier books set in modern Vancouver — Ride the Lightning, The Deadbeat Club, Triggerfish — are straight-up urban crime tales: drug deals gone sideways, small-time crooks clashing with bigger fish, dark humor amid the chaos. But even there, I pull from noir traditions— dialogue driven and fast paced with a focus on the underbelly—while letting the city’s real vibe seep in. I don’t force a whodunit structure or insist on a tidy resolution. Sometimes the bad guys get away with it, or the hero isn’t all that heroic, and justice doesn’t always prevail.

Some stories border on thriller territory with high-stakes chases, or even a touch of Western grit. 

Then there’s the historical side of my work, where things get even less straight. I love drawing from real events and figures to ground the crime in history, blending factual details with fictional drama. Under an Outlaw Moon is based on the true story of Bennie and Stella Dickson, a Depression-era couple who turned to bank robbing and were forced to live on the run. Call Down the Thunder dives into Dust Bowl desperation and criminal choices amid economic ruin. House of Blazes sets high-stakes crime and revenge against the chaos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The disaster itself becoming a force that drives the characters’ actions. Crooked brings to life Alvin Karpis and the Barker Gang—Ma Barker and her boys—in their Chicago bootlegging and kidnapping era, turning historical outlaws into vivid, unpredictable characters driven by greed, loyalty and desperation. Dirty Little War keeps the 1920s–1930s vibe, exploring gangland conflicts and moral gray areas in that turbulent time.

I don’t set out to write historical fiction, but crime novels rooted in history. I love to blend in period atmosphere, slang, and social tensions, but the heart remains the crime: heists, shootouts and betrayals. It’s crime fiction with a historical twist, or historical fiction with a criminal pulse. Either way, it defies a neat box.

My latest, Rust and Bone (coming March 31, 2026), takes things further afield. Set at the tail end of World War II in Ukraine and Germany, it’s part coming-of-age story and part family drama set against a backdrop of war’s devastation—escape from captivity, survival in ruined landscapes, and the search for refuge while the entire world’s gone mad. It leans more literary in its exploration of human resilience and loss, but crime elements still simmer beneath. Survival often means breaking laws, making ruthless choices and crossing lines in a world without any rules. It’s another bend in the line, showing how crime and moral ambiguity persist even in historical extremes.

I also like to blend dark comedy into many of my stories—the absurd schemes in The Get and the punk-rock edge of Zero Avenue. 

And I like to read outside crime—literary fiction, history, whatever catches my eye—and it all filters in. A straight crime plot can feel predictable if it follows every convention. I prefer letting characters lead, even if they veer off the expected path. Rules like “the protagonist must be likable” or “tie up every loose end” often get bent or broken when it serves the story.

Ultimately, crime fiction thrives on tension, moral gray zones, and the tangled mess of being human. Clinging too tightly to a predictable formula risks diluting all of that. My aim is to engage readers by weaving in whatever feels authentic and keeping things unpredictable.