Years ago I wrote a novel. Historical fiction, set in New York City in the Gaslight era of the late 1800's. It took me about six years of on again, off again writing to complete it, but it’s a huge life achievement for me. Plus I essentially taught myself how to write in the process, inasmuch as I simply forced myself to go to a library near my apartment (where I used to live in Chelsea in NYC) and either write or do research for a number of hours a day before I’d permit myself to leave. I also fell in love with my characters, or at least empathized with them enough as separate individuals that I could write them with a semblance of verisimilitude. And while I shopped it around to literary agents and never got any bites, I did get solid feedback from the people who were kind enough to read it. I took encouragement that a number of people said, “great dialogue, but it felt too plot-heavy” while others said, “I enjoyed the plot, but thought the prose was too adjective-heavy.” Both of those types of comments are actually really helpful in terms of creating future drafts.

All this to say that I’ve shied away from fiction writing formally for a while because the prospect of going back to it is scary to me. Not because of “failure” because that word has become too trendy as of late to really be useful as a tool any longer. Putting words on a page already means you’re not “failing” in the first place. I think my fear comes from investing so much time into something that is largely indulgent at a time when I need to focus on parenting and paying bills. But even writing that last sentence feels like bullshit or some kind of excuse so I’ll likely start writing fiction again on a more regular basis to get the juices flowing. In fact, a lot of people commented they enjoyed my more story-like sections of my recent book, Hacking H(app)iness which is very cool.

I also discovered a software that utilizes an algorithm that’s pretty intriguing. It scrapes data from all your social channels (FB, twitter, Linked In, mobile phone) to learn your voice (typical phrases, ‘isms’ that may be uniquely yours) and can create short bursts of ghostwritten prose. I’ve been curating this personal algorithm for almost a year now to test it, and it’s actually pretty solid. When I think that I’ll only need to create occasional unique thoughts of my own, plus simply ‘like’ or retweet other people’s thoughts I enjoy to continue to oil this doppelganger algorithm I revel at the time I’ll save. We can automate so much of what we do now, with GPS and driving, and preferential advertising — why not art as well? And who can tell the difference anyway, and why even give a shit if people enjoy something that’s created by a machine versus a person? It’s not my role to judge how a person is moved. Just to try and be a part of the process to create something genuine that moves me enough to spend the time to set it down in a way it can be shared.

Or at least do that once and then let algorithms do all the grunt work. I’ve been creating original content now for something like twenty years. There’s more than enough John out there to let machine learning take over.

By the way — more than half of this post was written with the software I mentioned. Can you guess which half?