Tag: traditional publishing

Trauma Tropes and the Lies They Tell: Part 2 Hurt People Hurt People

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Author’s Note: This is the Part 2 I mentioned in my last post. The doozy of all doozies when it comes to trauma and dealing with it sensitively. I’ve spent A LOT of time thinking on this topic. It is, after all, one of the main themes of the darkest book of my heart. It’s also a theme of my life. But it’s not an easy subject to tackle because it involves unpacking truths and myths about people just like me. Maybe about me, too. Necessary work is never easy.

As always, I remind my readers what follows is my opinion only, subject to bias and change, wrongness and flaws. I write (and read) through the western lens of American traditional book publishing. While I have C-PTSD, AuDHD, and touch aversion, I’m not a monolith and cannot speak to experiences besides my own. I don’t intend this to be definitive advice or an opinion representing the whole of any group, nor to be extrapolated beyond the groups described.

CW/TW: Discussion of trauma, mass murder, serial killing, etc. no graphic on page description; discussion of some of these themes and issues in history, literature, and film. Some violent imagery in photo form.

Hurt people hurt people.

Source unknown; earliest recorded source, Charles Eads, 1959, Amarillo-Globe Times.

The History of Hurt People Hurt people

In my last post on trauma tropes in narrative fiction, I discussed the definition of tropes. I won’t recreate that wheel here where you can read it there. Instead, I want to talk about the history of this curious, clever, corrupting little phrase. Hurt people hurt people.

As mentioned above, the source of the phrase is really unknown. The earliest recorded instance of it being used is by a man named Charles Eads in 1959 in a review in the Amarillo-Globe Times but there’s evidence to suggest he heard it from someone else, who maybe heard it from someone else, and back and back it goes.

The phrase itself became part of the American mainstream in the early 1990s when several self-help writers picked it back up, including a Christian family therapist named Sandra D. Wilson, who wrote a book with the same title in 1993.

However, the concept of the phrase didn’t have the sebatical the phrase did. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the US was rocked by wave after wave of notorious serial killers. Men like Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer), Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Sam Little, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam) stole life after life with little explanation.

The country wanted answers. They wanted assurances. In all the instability, people wanted to know why these men went beyond murder. The police could answer who, how, what, where, and when. Those things weren’t what people wanted, though. Not when it was over and the bad guy was behind bars. Then, when they felt safe again, people wanted to know one more thing. Why. Psychiatry rose to the occasion, ready with its answer.

Hurt people hurt people.

Black and white photo of a white man, back to the camera, holding a knife to his spine. © Reza Hasannia, Unsplash

Before sitting down to write this post, I spent some time learning about the history behind this phrase. During that research, I learned about a psychiatrist named Dorothy Otnow Lewis whose research “with” (or on) violent juveniles led her to testifying on behalf of some of the most infamous serial killers.

Not guilty by reason of insanity.

Lewis’ research (which can be summarized by her in her own words in HBO’s documentary Crazy, Not Insane), indicated that most serial killers shared two things in common: (1) Childhood trauma (being abused or witnessing abuse); and (2) a neurological “issue*” (dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, autism, etc.).

*What is really being said here is someone who is neurodiverse but that word is not always adopted by modern psychiatry and certainly wasn’t when Lewis was doing her work. For this post, I will use neurodiverse but mention this so you can see the hurt even in the definition described. “Issue” I have an issue with.

Why do serial killers do the psychotic things they do? Because hurt (neurodiverse) people hurt people, that’s why.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me from watching the documentary whether Ms. Lewis believes dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple-personality disorder), could in fact be a symptom of trauma. It wasn’t clear to me what she thought might be caused by trauma (besides killing people, I suppose). Could all the types of neurodiversity she discussed be a syptom of trauma? A side effect of the brain being broken so young? Schizophrenia. Bipolar. Autism. What can be made by trauma? The film left me wondering if any or even all the things rattling against a broken brain could trace back to the same source: childhood trauma. I’m not sure anyone knows the answer to that at present. If they do, I’d sure like to find out for myself.

Those whys didn’t matter to the public, though, nor do they for most of you, dear readers. They might not have mattered or even been pondered upon by Ms. Lewis. They matter greatly to me, but that’s a different unpacking not meant for here. What’s important is this hypothesis that hurt people hurt people (regardless of how the hurt manifests) never stopped snaking its way through society.

Which is how it found its way to literature, film, and me.

A black and white photo of a white woman with her hair in a bun, head pressed into her knees. © Zohre Namati on Unsplash.

How ‘Hurt People Hurts People’ Hurts People

It’s probably not hard to figure out why we shouldn’t assume every neurodiverse person with childhood trauma will become a serial killer. Anyone who has seen Minority Report or read a dystopian novel about robots stopping crime before it starts can spot where that story goes wrong. The more difficult topics to address are the more subtle takes on this tale.

Should we suspect a hurt person will hurt us? Might it be safer for everyone to approach with caution someone who might, at any moment, become a mirror of their own monster? These questions roll around in my head day in and day out. Because when you’re a survivor of childhood abuse, you’re often someone who was hurt by someone else who was also hurt. Your abuser is frequently also a victim. In some ways, you can’t be the innocent, unsuspecting victim of a monster. Not when you can empathize so completely with the monster. When you have walked a day in their shoes. Not when their rage runs through your blood as well, an ever present whisper against your skull.

Not like them. Not like them. Not like them.

In modern day media, it’s not serial killers who take the front page, but mass murderers. But today we aren’t focused as much on the why these people (usually young, white, straight men just like serial killers) did it. We’re busying defending why the guns didn’t. “I think that mental health is your problem here,” Donald Trump said after a man killed 26 churchgoers in 2017. Mental health. Many hundreds of diagnoses in the voluminous DSM swept into a soundbite.

And maybe mental health plays a role. But what exactly about mental health? Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia, maintains a database that shows 1 out of 5 mass murderers are psychotic or delusional (versus the national population where this is only about 1%). Reserachers at the DOJ have found that almost half have ADHD.

It’s easy to study people in cages, though. Or people who can no longer speak for themselves. It’s harder to study those of us living in the real world. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to get statistics on so many of us because women are so often underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed, and men are so often afraid to seek help at all.

Simple answers, then. That will keep the normal people safe. Not gun control for the whole country. Not less stigma on mental health so more people seek treatment. Not healthcare reform that actually gives people real outlets to real therpaists and psychiatrists. Take the guns out of the hands of the crazies, not ours. That will fix it. Anyone who has been hospitalized for a psychiatric condition should be on the government’s list. Watch them. Group them together and strip them of rights given to other citizens. Surveil them.

When do they start caging us? I wonder every time a new tragedy unfolds on the TV screen and the debate turns once again to mental health instead of weapons of war being available to everyone with an ID and access to a Wal-mart. Every time I read a dystopian novel and have to put it down because it looks a little bit too much like home. Every time I read a fantasy where the heroes walk away from horrendous battles with physical scars but no mental ones yet the villains monologue about their terrible childhoods as a way to humanize not them but the person about to stick a blade through their chest. Of course they became this. It’s a mercy to put them down, really. What a hero.

Don’t give them a choice at controlling their own redemption.

It’s no surprise I’ve always related more to well-written villains than heroes, I suppose.

And I wonder… what does it do to someone to relate more often with villains than heroes? What are we saying to those who have that whisper against their ear and rage in their blood that no matter what we do we will fail? That we are just as we were made to be? Without choice or voice. A foil to those better and more deserving than us. Someone to prop them up.

Not like them. Not like them. Not like them.

Oh, these stories tell us, but you are. You have no choice but to be. And what a wonder it is, to be relieved of that thing ripped from you so long ago. What a burden choice is. How easy it is to surrender it. Even now…

Photo of a brown-skinned woman with long black hair holding a butcher's knife over one eye, covered in blood. © Sierra Koder, Unsplash

How to Not Hurt People Who are Hurt

This part is tricky, because avoiding the representation erases us, but trauma has a generational component. Hurt people don’t get hurt on their own. Not usually. And the people who hurt them, well, it’s true they were most usually victims once.

I’ve struggled with this my whole life. How to make it real but not messy.

You can’t.

The truth is, trauma is nothing if not messy. Hurt people do sometimes hurt people. Maybe more often than not. It’s hard to say when the statistics focus on the fantastic, and people in cages easily studied and not people in the real world, simply living. People who are often afraid to seek help because they know what the world thinks of them. That said, it’s not entirely wrong to be without caution. Trauma has taught me many things, but that most of all. Vigilance.

But for every serial killer and mass murderer out there, there are many dozens more hurt people breaking the generational rules. One thing I’ve always loved about animal rescue is that it’s a place where you’ll find people like this. Almost without fail. People who once needed rescuing now doing the rescuing. You’ll find them working jobs as teachers, therapists, mental health counselors, nurses, doctors, and yes, psychiatrists. People rewriting their own stories, reclaiming their own voices. Hurt people becoming heroes. Who channel their hurt into helping.

They deserve their stories told, too. Kids who have only ever seen the monsters society makes us deserve to see not the terror in choice, but the beauty. Not in bright, shiny glory earned by people they will never relate to, but in monsters like them. They deserve to see how anger can be molded into a force for good, not evil. How power can be seized, then wielded with empathy. They deserve to see stories where the hero is sometimes the villain and the villain can sometimes be redeemed. They deserve to see stories where the hero isn’t perfect. Where they are hurt. Just like them.

So my advice if you’re going to depict this: Leave the messy versions to those of us living in those skins, asking the deep and tangled whys every day. Living in vigilance and monstrous skin. Let us fight our battles and show them on page. However messy they may be.

For you, don’t erase us, but stop making us your monsters, your villains, your people to shy away from, your morality tales. Instead, consider giving us new narratives. The one we need to seep into society to overtake the old.

Hurt people help people.

Photo of a girl with short brown hair wearing a white dress with white and red wings. © Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash.

Trauma Tropes and the Lies They Tell: Part 1 Traumatized Person Cured by Love, and Curing Cursed Touch Aversion

Published on by aimeedavisauthor3 Comments

Author’s Note: I have been mulling over this one for a while, and there might be a second part to it to talk about another trauma issue, but I wanted to start here. With the dark book of my heart glitzed by 1920s glamor finally finalized, and sent to my agent, trauma thoughts loom. Bringing me here before the next unpacking.

As always, I remind my readers what follows is my opinion only, subject to bias and change, wrongness and flaws. I write (and read) through the western lens of American traditional book publishing. While I have C-PTSD, AuDHD, and touch aversion, I’m not a monolith and cannot speak to experiences besides my own. I don’t intend this to be definitive advice or an opinion representing the whole of any group, nor to be extrapolated beyond the groups described.

CW/TW: Discussion of C-PTSD, assault, abuse, etc. no graphic on page description; discussion of some of these themes and issues in fairytales and YA and Adult Fantasy (with plot overview of the works); minor description of effects of triggering media.

First, Definitions…

Before we begin, I want to address one of my personal pet peeves: the rampant overuse of the word trope. Which is kind of hilarious if you consider what a trope is.

Literary Trope: Traditionally, a literary trope is basically using a figure of speech for artistic effect. This is NOT what people mean when they say “only one bed” or ask what tropes you’ve included in your latest work in progress.

Narrative Trope: Narrative tropes are seen most commonly in genre fiction and can be character foils, plot devices, themes, motifs, storylines, or the like. Some are genre-specific (for example “only one bed” in romance is a plot device trope while “femme fatale” in crime is a character foil trope). These are what I mean when I say the word “trope” is overused. They’re also what I (and most of the rest of the commercial genre fiction world) are referring to when they use the word “trope.”

How does a Trope become Trope-y?

A trope becomes a trope when it’s used frequently enough for people to recognize it. Which is… pretty generic and probably why the word is easily overused.

Which leads me to the two ways I see it overused most commonly:

  1. Used too Broadly: The “trope” is defined as large chunks of something in the relevant genre. Example: One time, I saw someone say they were tired of the “royalty” trope in fantasy. This is… not a trope. “Royalty” isn’t really a character foil (“evil stepmother” is) or a plot device (“palace intrigue” meets that trope requirement). Royalty is just a swooping category of people commonly found in SFF books.
  2. Used Too Narrowly: The “trope” is too specific to be used enough to become a trope. Example: I recently saw someone complain they hated the “get kicked out of the hero’s party to discover you have an ability then do whatever you want” trope. While mildly hilarious, and probably this person is a fan of TJ Klune (same), I do remember looking around and asking, “Is that a trope? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that?” Dear reader, if takes you more than three to five words to say it, it probably isn’t a trope. Also, it does have to be understood to be a trope by the vast majority of the consumers of that genre. Otherwise, it might just be a few books where that weirdly specific thing happened, and it irked you, which, while valid for you, does not make it a discourse.
Black and white photo of a dragon perched atop a second story balcony, mouth open in a scream. © Sean Thomas on Unsplash.
Dragons = too broad; Dragons the size of dogs who talk and are related to humans = too specific; Dragons attacking the castle = JUST RIGHT. YOU FOUND A FANTASY TROPE.

Why Do I (or should anyone else) Care?

Well… because in addition to tropes being handy for marketing purposes, they’re also handy for other groupings. Like addressing problematic issues and systemic discrimination in our work. Think: “Kill the gays;” “Black character dies first;” “Hurt people hurt people,” “Fat person is lazy” etc. etc. It’s important that genre writers know what tropes exist in their genre, and when those tropes can be problematic, so the author can choose to avoid (or subvert).

It’s also important we know what is too large or not large enough to facilitate this discussion. Losing sight of this can mean creating blow-ups that result in hurting those who are writing good and needed representation.

I saw this sort of happen with the “sexual assault” trope discourse awhile back. There was very little discussion of nuance. A majority of what I saw was, “No more. It’s cancelled.” Nevermind the statement was too broad to properly be a trope, the missing crucial pieces of this potential harmful plot device being things like: “pointless and gratuitous” sexual assault or sexual assult “to prop up a male character’s development.” Nevermind that many of the narratives out there were written by men, and cancelling this narrative meant silencing women, including women like me: survivors of sexual assault. POC talk about this frequently as well even within the context of non-harmful tropes like “vampires” and “elemental magic” being declared dead before they get a bite of the apple.

Photo of a brown girl with long black hair in a black gown sporting black wings standing in front of a dragon statue, hands pressed to chest, looking into the distance. © Andre Sebastian, Unsplash
Listen, I never really cared for the angel/demon story (another dead for now trope in fantasy), but I would sign up to read this woman’s fall from grace.

I say this all because I want to be clear my intent with the following is not to set off a red alarm leading to “no more.” More is wanted. Needed. Desperately. However, I want the more that comes to be thoughtful, because from what I’ve seen, these… issues, let’s call them, have not always or arguably often been handled with care. I want discussion on ways to change that without ending anything.

For that reason (and because I’m not sure these things even are tropes), I will not call anything in this blog a “trope.” (Despite my clickbait title; sorry, I’m a sucker for alliteration.)

Get to the Point!

Right, so. The general concept is: fantasy books that feature love as a cure for trauma. Second to that is a magic or curse that creates touch aversion and how that is either cured or worked around by the love interest.

Once Upon a Time, I called this entire construct the “Broken Girl Cured by Love” trope, but I have learned that is (a) too gendered; (b) not the kindest categorization of very serious mental health issues (including my own); and (c) as I mentioned, maybe not a trope (or at least not the touch aversion part).

Part A: Traumatized Person Cured by Love

In general, I define the traumatized person cured by love issue to be one where a character (usually female but not always) suffers a serious trauma(s), is rescued by The One, and is instantly cured of all the issues that come with trauma. No more nightmares. No more anxiety. No more agoraphobia. No more hypervigilance. No more touch aversion. Just butterflies and rainbows, engagement and weddings and babies. Tada!

If you can’t think of a fantasy where this happens, you’re not thinking hard enough, or you’re not entirely familiar with trauma.

Fairytales, Trauma, and Damsels Cured by Kisses

There’s a reason I return to retelling fairytales time and time again. A reason they’re the core of my Adult work but not my YA. My relationship with them is as messy as the trauma we’re both steeped in. They’re comforting and damaging. Amidst my violent childhood, they were a safe space, but only because they normalized everything around me that was so unsafe. They, like me, need to grow up, reimagine themselves, and start anew.

I’m not even talking about the older, darker versions of the tales. I’m talking about what I grew up with, what I watched and read. Snow White, an orphan, is sentenced to death by her evil stepmother for being… pretty? The huntsman can’t bring himself to kill her, though, also because she’s… pretty? Then she goes to live with seven strange men in a shoddy hut to… clean for them? Despite being a princess. Then she’s poisoned and basically dies. Until TADA her Prince comes, kisses her without consent, wakes her up, and BOOM! Hello wedding bells, goodbye trauma.

Cinderella, a movie I watched so much as a child my first imaginary friends were named GusGus and Jaq (after the mice in the movie), has a similar plot. Orphan girl, evil stepmother, cleaning, torture, poverty, pain, emotional abuse until TADA! Her literal Prince Charming (that’s his whole name) saves the day. Nevermind he can’t tell what the woman he spent a whole night dancing with looks like without having a shoe fit her. Apparently.

And don’t get me started on Beauty and the Beast. All I remember about that movie is crouching behind the couch, whimpering during the scene when the Beast screams at Belle over his damn rose. Because the noise of a man screaming at a woman was already too much for my five-year-old ears. I hated that movie. To this day, I can’t watch it, nor will I ever be able to relate with the bookworms who answer with, “Belle, duh!” to every survey question or Twitter poll about what Disney princess would you be. Not when all I can think of is five-year-old me behind that couch my mom won on a radio giveaway, clutching my hands to my ears, eyes shut, waiting for it to be over.

Fantasy: From Damsels to Warriors (Who Still Need Sex as Saving)

This issue followed me from my love of fairytales to my love of fantasy. Women who are sexually abused and emotionally manipulated? No worries, their handsome, roguish man of the dark comes to rescue them and BAM! The nightmares are over. Safe in his arms for the first time she can remember. Warrior squires who vomit after their first kill, sword trembling in their hands as they charge into battle? No big deal, their handsome knight and lord will take them into their tent later and soothe their fears… with sex.

Love conquers all, right?

Yeah, right.

Photo of a white woman with white hair in a black and red gown and black cape, laying on a forest floor near a large stump, a sword hilt pressed to her cheek. © Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash
Most likely to seduce you, then carve out and consume your heart. That’s the woman I write now.

Part B: Curing Cursed Touch Aversion

This one is a sort of subset of the first, but perhaps too specific to actually be a “trope.” However, I’m starting to see more of it, and as someone who has real life touch aversion caused by trauma, who also has a real live book going on submission that tackles these issues, it’s time for me to dip my toes into the trauma trope do-not do pond.

In fantasy, magic systems are built on the backs of all kinds of wild and whacky things. That’s one of my favorite things about fantasy. Some of these systems are great, some of them aren’t. Some of them can be done right in the hands of some and abused in the hands of other. Not unlike well, any weapon in the hands of those more powerful. And never doubt words can be weapons. But they can also be balms.

Characters who have some kind of magic or curse that prevents them touching and/or being touched is definitely a “proceed with caution” magic system. Because there’s really no way to do it without invoking in real life touch aversion. A thing people (like me) struggle with on a daily basis.

There was a time I used to read every book I saw that had some kind of touch-based magic in it, desperate to read a character like me. Now, I almost never read these kinds of books. I find it’s rare to have good representation of touch aversion, and worse, these magic systems and curses almost always have either a cure or an “exception” for love.

What I mean by that is any character who has a curse or magic that causes them to be unable to be touched or be afraid of touch but OH WAIT, the love interest turns up, and oh, isn’t that strange, THEY’RE TOUCHABLE. Or oh wait, the love interest has the perfect counterbalance magic or curse to the one preventing touch, and TADA! No more touch aversion (because apparently the ability to touch one whole human rids you of something preventing you from touching everyone else). Which leads to the oh-so-often addition of, “It’s so sexy I’m the only one who can touch you,” the strong male love interests says in a growl. Just what we wanted, some manic pixie dream girl action.

If you couldn’t tell, this is… not the the representation I’ve been waiting for. If the love interest cures the curse or “saves” the character from their magic, it’s possibly worse.

Photo of a white girl with blond hair in a blue robe, curled in on herself, submerged in water amongst jellyfish. © Alice Alinari on Unsplash
MC: My jellyfish are the only ones who understand me, but it’s so lonely in the deep, what with my skin that paralyzes anyone who touches me. LI: DID I MENTION I HAVE MAGICAL VINEGAR SKIN TO COUNTERACT YOUR VENOM?! (Despite that being absolutely pointless and serving zero other plot purpose.) Damn, you’re so hot, you sad, lonely, desperate for touch orphan princess. I definitely won’t manipulate you or take advantage of the fact you have zero other choices. (It’s fine to have no agency when it involves A Soulmate, after all, just not when it involves our author’s first 5-10 sample pages). Trust me.

Part C: How These Things Cause(d Me) Harm

The reason I created a separate section for the harm portion of this program is because I can’t really talk about one of these issues without talking about the other. Not when it comes to my lived experience. Which is the only lived experience I can talk about, but I suspect I can’t be alone.

I have C-PTSD and AuDHD so it’s difficult to say where exactly the touch aversion came from. Would it have existed without the early childhood trauma? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the terrible beast it is today. But if you learn anything in trauma therapy, you learn it’s not really worth it to linger on the endless spiral of maybe. I’m touch averse and traumatized. And still alive.

I have a complicated relationship with my touch aversion. The complication is why I think it’s important to have real representation out there. It’s possibly why bad representation has caused me harm. Some folks don’t mind being touch averse. I am not them. I hate it. If I could rid myself of it, I would.

Enter my childhood media whispering a promise of a cure. If only I could find The One.

It might seem ridiculous to think of an adult (even a young adult) dreaming of a whirlwind romance that would cure her of mental illness, but long-term pain makes us desperate. Don’t believe me? Check out some chronic back pain forums to see the shit people try for any small relief. Honestly, look no further than the current opiod epidemic in America.

When I was young, a piece of the child I was or could have been fractured inside me. There she still lives, hidden and sheltered behind massive walls I’ve spent years building and tearing down only to rebuild and tear down again and again. Sometimes, in between demolition and construction, I see her. Not often. More often, I feel her. My own Rapunzel, trapped in her tower, waiting for someone to save her. Now, I know that someone must be me. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I thought it had to be a man. (Yes, always a man, despite my own sexuality, another blog for another day).

Photo of a girl in a white dress, not facing camera, with long dark hair, looking out through a castle's stone opening into bright light. © Sean Pierce on Unsplash
What a beautiful fairytale… about a girl in a cage.

Because part of me was emotionally delayed (thanks, trauma), and I live by a rule-based system (AuDHD), I was easily convinced into believing there was a step-by-step process to curing myself of my touch aversion, my night terrors, my agoraphobia, my misery.

Go out. Endure. Find The One. Let him seduce you. Smile when you’re sad. Live Happily Ever After.

But how would I know when I’d found The One? The books I’d cherished gave me a rule for that too: He wouldn’t trigger my touch aversion. He’d be the person I could finally sleep soundly with, encircled in his arms. With him, there would be no nightmares. Only dreams. Obviously.

Right.

I don’t think I have to, nor do I want to, spell out how that formula led me to some seriously fucked up situations. Places I wasn’t safe. People who abused me, manipulated me, beat me. Worse. Then the behaviors to numb it all, so I could hunt again. Only to be abused again. On and on. For years.

Trauma is a hell of a drug. But so, as it turns out, are fairytales.

Photo of a white girl (me) with blond hair in a biking top and white skirt sitting on a bench in a forest.
Actual photo of me during this period of my life. The second comment on my Facebook to this day is from a guy who used and humiliated one of my best friends and warns me to “look out for the r*pist behind [me]!” Real Prince Charming.

Part D: Getting It Right (According to Me)

When it comes to trauma and touch aversion, I’m not someone who believes you must have a diagnosis to write characters with trauma or touch aversion. All I ask is authors write with sensitivity and ask for help from people with lived experience before they put anything into the world. To me, representation isn’t about the author, it’s about the character and the reader. If the character reads right to the readers who need the representation, that’s a win.

I would love to go back to the days when I eagerly grabbed books off the shelf and threw them into my buy basket for simply referencing touch or trauma. Of course I would love for my own book featuring a traumatized, touch averse character to be published, but if it isn’t, I want someone’s book to be. Because we need more. A lot more. There’s too few books tackling these topics. Touch aversion especially. Even fewer that do it well.

Who Already Does it Right:

Kaz Brekker in Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows gets touch aversion and trauma right. I believe, despite some controversy, that Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series did right by trauma. Marissa Meyer’s Heartless will always be one of my favorite trauma depictions of all time. Melissa Bashardoust’s Girl, Serpent, Thorn gets cursed skin right. Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient (adult romance) gets touch aversion from ASD right.

Of course there are more, especially where trauma is baked in but not the focal point. I think of books like Crown of Feathers by Nicki Pau Preto where the main character wields her kindness and compassion as a weapon against her abuser, and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone where love persists despite abuse, growing stronger, healing the world if not the lovers, and Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle where love and trauma are both thrumming beats of the narrative without love overwhelming trauma to become a magical deus ex machina cure to wrap the characters in their very own happily ever after bows

There are not many I can think of beyond those mentioned that do touch aversion well. Or not that I’ve read. To be fair, this might be because I’ve read enough deeply disturbing narratives where touch aversion is some kind of “madness in the blood,” or “evil,” or the character is treated as damaged goods, or seen as a manic pixie kink because he (sorry, it’s usually a he) is the only one who can touch her (and yes, it’s usually a her) without her getting sick/maimed/killed. Where it’s a sign of “claiming” or dominance. And she loves it.

Photo of a white man with his head bowed and a bun and a white cloak, wearing armor but only from waist down, one hand on shield, other on sword. © Gioele Fazzeri on Unsplash
You know the guy I’m talking about. This guy (or some immortal derivative thereof).

My relationship with this latter point is messy. Once upon a time, I loved books like that. Loved them so much I thought I could wish myself into them. I remember twelve-year-old me lying on my front lawn, a quiver of arrows at my hip, my bow and arrow strung around my back, ignoring the pain of the wood in my spine as I pressed a book to my chest and squeezed by eyes shut, whispering into the sky, begging God or whoever was listening to take me away. To whisk me into my book. Into my own adventures where I could finally find love. A cure. Someone to tell me what to do.

Books like this gave me hope. They were wish fulfillment. In my darkest days, they made me believe in something. Books like this are dangerous. They fulfilled the wrong kind of wish. Pushed me to rely on everyone except myself. Made me look to external sources of validation and guidance. Stripped me of barely-born agency I was all too eager to give away because that’s what trauma does. Made it all too easy to believe in the easy thing, not the right thing. What I needed was a bit more real and a lot less sexy.

I needed someone to write me a story of the traumatized person healed by self love.

Some might not want or need healing. They might see their touch aversion as a strength, even. But me? While I see now there isn’t a cure, I’m happy to take healing.

Yet, if I had magic, I would magic this away. If true love’s kiss would do the trick, I’d kiss a bushel of frogs to find my The One True Prince and a night full of dreams instead of nightmares. So it’s hard to begrudge authors this narrative. It’s hard to say “stop” writing those stories that once gave me something to cling to.

Instead, I’ll say, please think. Ask. Learn. Be interested. The traumatized are not your kinks. Or plot devices. No one, but especially not women, need to be hurt to teach their male counterparts a moral lesson about “gee, wowie, women are whole humans, too!” How hot we are isn’t what gives us value any more than our ability to keep a clean house. We aren’t here to be saved so the handsome love interest can get a handy in gratitude. In fact, we don’t need to be saved by a love interest at all. We need healed, and the only ones who can do that is… us. We need that to be just as sexy.

Traumatized person healed by self love. Prince(ss) Charmings optional.

Copyright 101: FAQ For Authors

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Legal Disclaimer: I am not an attorney so nothing in this blog should be construed as legal advice. It is not comprehensive and as you’re about to see, this is a nuanced subject that is very fact intensive. If you think your copyright or other intellectual property right has been infringed upon, please consult legal counsel well versed in intellectual property right matters.

As I sit here, preparing my next book to go on submission, reading other books to compare it to in the submission packet, the Twitter discourse of the day rages in the background. Fears of idea theft, copyright infringement, whether authors should participate in pitch events because someone might “steal” something from them.

I’ve written about copyright on this blog before, but that was primarily with regard to the AI and copyright infringement debate and the deeply nuanced concept of Fair Use. What I’m now coming to realize is that many writers need a 101 guide to copyright. No shame in that. Copyright is complicated and there’s a lot of bullshit on the internet.

None of what I’m about to go through will necessarily alleviate the fear of “idea theft.” Just because something isn’t expressly illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t or can’t happen, or that people have no reason to be afraid of it. So, I’ll preface with this: Ideas have been done and redone a thousand times over. Your story is uniquely yours not because of the idea but because of the bits of you left within it. Sometimes you hit with that story, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s the right moment. Sometimes it isn’t. That doesn’t mean that someone who was inspired by your idea and wrote something similar or compared their story to yours (as I am now doing at this exact moment), did it better or worse. It was simply different. It’s been said a thousand times by a thousand people wiser and pithier than me, but if you want to survive in this industry, comparing yourself to others is a thing you must do your best every day to battle. Fears of idea theft are a good place to start.

Now, onward!

Photo of a book, Revelle by Lyssa Mia Smith, surrounded by pink, purple and blue flowers, and pink and purple butterlifes. © Aimee Davis @writingwaimee on Instagram (or will be when I post it).
One of the books I’m looking at comping for my YA about to go on sub. Also by a fellow Pitch Wars alum (and mentor during my year). 1920s vibe is not copyrightable as you’re about to learn, and I had no idea this book existed before Pitch Wars.

Copyright FAQs (For Authors)

The following FAQ is based on federal, United States copyright law, primarily the United States Copyright Act of 1976, as amended, 17 U.S.C. §, 101, et seq. While US copyright law is generally reciprocated internationally, if the US is not your home jurisdiction, this is going to be less helpful. There are also some state laws around copyright that may up the ante on the federal law that I will not be getting into here. Again, not a lawyer and even if I was, here are just some of the reasons why it’s important to discuss your specific facts with counsel in your jurisdiction.

What does copyright mean?

In general, copyright is one of several forms of intellectual property (IP) protections available to creators and inventors. Other IP protections include things like patent, trademark, and trade secret. Each IP protection covers specific things and has specific laws that cover it (including in the case of patent law, a separate bar that must be passed by practicing attorneys). Copyright is indicated using ©. This mark can be used whether the work is actually registered with the US Copyright Office or not (unlike trademark where there are separate symbols for registered and unregistered marks).

What does copyright protect?

Copyright protects original works of authorship in the following categories:

  • Literary works
  • Musical works (including lyrics)
  • Dramatic works (including music/score)
  • Pantomimes and choreographic works
  • Pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works
  • Motion pictures and other audiovisual works
  • Sound recordings
  • Architectural works

While works may fall into more than one category, for the rest of this FAQ, I will be focusing on copyright protection in general and as it relates to literary works.

What doesn’t copyright protect?

Specifically exlcuded from copyright protection are the following:

  • Ideas
  • Processes
  • Systems
  • Methods of operation
  • Concepts
  • Principles
  • Discoveries, even if they are described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in an otherwise protectable work (this means your great sci-fi tech or computer algorithm is not patentable or copyrightable because you put it in a copyrighted book)

What is a literary work?

Literary works are broadly defined as works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects. This includes things like:

  • Books
  • Periodicals
  • Manuscripts
  • Phonorecords
  • Film
  • Tapes
  • Disks
  • Cards
  • Software code (see Apple Comput., Inc. v. Franklin Comput. Corp., 714 F.2d 1240, 1249 (3d Cir. 1983)).

Pertinent to literary works, the US Copyright Act also provides copyright protection to compilations, collective, and derivative works. A compilation is a new arrangement of works (whether they are copyrightable in their own right or not) that is unique and original. A collective work is a specific type of compilation consisting of preexisting copyrightable works including things like encyclopedias, periodicals, and anthologies. A derivative is a transformation or adaptation of one or more preexisting works into something new. These include things like fictionalized versions of factual accounts, movies based on books, abridgements, condensed versions, and my personal favorite, retellings.

The copyright owner of a compilation, collection, or derivative does not inherit the copyright of the original work, only gains copyright ownership over the new work. In simpler terms, this means I don’t get copyright over every Beauty & the Beast story because I’m writing a retelling. I only get protection over my retelling.

When does a work become protected by copyright?

Your work is automatically protected by law as soon as you create it as long as it is something covered under the Copyright Act and is both original (meaning it is independently created by the author and is minimally creative) and fixed (meaning it’s been written or typed somewhere). More on this original bit in a second. There are some weird situations for work produced between 1978 and 1989, but I’m going to assume most of y’all are not interested in copyright for things produced before I was born.

Reminder that a work produced solely by AI is not copyrightable. This was recently upheld by the US District Court of Columbia in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2023 WL 5333236 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023) (refusal to register a work created entirely by an AI computer system without any human involvement).

What does “original” really mean?

Under the law? Not much. Basically, for a work to be original, you have to have not copied large swaths of it word for word from something else. A work doesn’t have to new or unique to receive protection. It can be damn near identical to something else, even, so long as you did not copy it. Remember, this is COPYright we’re talking about here. Not IDEAright. And honestly, thank goodness? The amount of times I see an idea that has my heart in my throat because how did we think of the same thing and will that get to market before me and… yeah. If that could all be copyrighted a majority of us would never write again.

The work doesn’t even have to be hugely creative. “Minimal” creativity is the standard. Artistic value or merit doesn’t matter (which again, thank goodness). These are judges, after all, not art critics. The amount of effort spent is also irrelevant. If this stings to read, I know it, but let it burn and hopefully soothe because sometimes the cool slap of logic is what we all need.

Essentially, you can copyright just about anything that you wrote on your own with a minimal level of creative thought or assembly. What you cannot copyright is anything made by a robot, stolen word-for-word from another copyrighted work, and things like:

  • Short phrases and single words
  • Book titles
  • Headlines
  • Slogans
  • Typefaces

Some of these may be trademarkable, though. I’d advise (not as a lawyer but as an author who has been around awhile) not trademarking popular words or phrases in your genre and just letting other people have the same title as you. It happens. Both the same title thing and the trademarking phrases thing.

Photo of a book, The Whispering Dark, by Kelly Andrew, surrounded by purple flowers and purple butterflies. © Aimee Davis @writingwaimee on Instagram when I post it.
Photos, like this one, are also copyrightable. The ideas contained in the book depicted are not.

How long does a copyright last?

In general, copyrights for written works last for 70 years after an author’s death.

Do I keep the copyright after I get published?

It depends. If you’re self-publishing, yes. That’s one of the advantages. If you’re publishing traditionally, not usually. While there might be some indie/small presses out there that allow you to retain copyrights or joint-copyrights of some sort, the entire point of having a copyright is to give the owner of the copyright the ability to produce and distribute the copyrighted material. For ease, most traditional publishers require you to transfer your copyrights to whatever they’re publishing to them, that’s essentially what they’re buying. Your agent can help you navigate what rights you’re selling versus keeping and if you don’t have one, there are agents who will still help you negotiate a small press contract if you have questions.

If there’s an issue with you and your press before the book is published, there are often ways to get your copyrights back built into the contract or a way to negotiate for them, but after the book has been published and distributed, that’s usually the end of the road, at least for a good long while, because again, the point of copyright ownership is the distribution and sale. That is what the press bought.

I think someone stole my book, what do I do?

First ask yourself, did they really, or do they have some similar ideas or concepts as you? Even if they stole the idea, it’s not copyright infringement. Even if they have the first twenty pages of your book and a synopsis and tweaked them and wrote their own book, it’s not copyright infringement. It might be professionally yikes when it comes to ethics in my opinion, but it’s not infringement. My advice here? Not as a lawyer but as an author who has been putting her shit out there for a looooong time? Fuck ’em. Learn from this that they’re shady and move along. Only you can write the true book of your heart anyway. Your idea won’t sing to them the way it does to you. If you’re discouraged, put it away and write another thing.

Don’t be afraid to put your work out there, though. The reality is that eventually, you have to. Whether it’s self-publishing or querying or pitching or publishing with a small press or a Big Five, eventually you’re going to put it out there. That’s why you wrote it. If you didn’t, well kudos to you honestly you’re better and more humble than I will ever be. Feel free to lock it down and never put it out there again. For the rest of folks, putting things out there is a great confidence boost on some days and a real lesson on thickening your skin in others. You will need both in this brutal industry.

Now, if they word for word stole your book and you have evidence? I would say call a Real Lawyer™. (Fun fact, the ™ stands for a trademark that is not yet registered with the US Patent Office while the ® stands for a trademark that has been registered).

Happy writing! And sharing!

Photo of a book, Nightbirds, by Kate J. Armstrong, surrounded by blue flowers and blue butterflies. © Aimee Davis @writingwaimee on Instagram whenever I post there again.
Meanwhile, I’m going back to reading these lovely comps. Which definitely will not make me feel insecure about my own book’s chances. Not at all.

Breaking up with Romantasy

Published on by aimeedavisauthor2 Comments

Author’s Note: This post is not intended to pass judgment on the books currently being marketed as romantasy or their readers. I support the incorporation of sex positive books into the fantasy market and have always been a huge proponent of this. It is, however, a reflection on the continued narrow mindset that we use to view and sell books and how that mindset continues to hurt marginalized communities.

This is simply my opinion and is not intended to represent the view of any individual or group besides myself. For ease of understanding, I write both YA and Adult Fantasy in the traditional publishing space and am agented but unpublished (as of yet). The following post is a reflection primarily on the Adult Fantasy space but does discuss how YA and Adult intertwine.

Once upon a time, I would have said to you my adult fantasy books were “romantasy.” I would have said that because I believed it to be true. They were a blending of the fantasy and romance genres that still belonged primarily under the fantasy arm. I would also have said this because romantasy was, and continues to be, extremely popular.

Now, you’re more likely to find me calling my books fairytale retellings for grownups.

I’ve broken up with romantasy.

Photo of an ornately framed mirror being shattered on a black background. Image by creatifrankenstein from Pixabay.

To be honest, I was always a little nervous about calling my books romantasy to begin with. When my agent and I first set this label to my fairytale retelling about a godmother who hated her job, the romantasy moniker was relatively new to the traditional publishing scene. It wasn’t well defined. It still isn’t well defined.

Is it a fantasy that has a strong romantic element or a romance that has a strong fantasy element? Does it require open door, on the page sex? How much? What heat level must it be to be considered romantasy? Is there a real difference between romantasy and fantasy romance? Or romantic fantasy? Where are the lines? What shelf does it go on?

As a neurodiverse individual who spends her days elbow-deep in contracts “not well defined” is not a thing I love.

However, somewhat arrogantly, I thought perhaps I could be one of the trailblazers to define this space.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I also have no track record to have ever thought that would be a real ambition. Still, I believed, as so many people do, that romantasy must mean what I wanted it to mean, and it made sense to throw my book into the ring even if it maybe didn’t belong there.

What I wanted romantasy to be was a fantasy-first story with a strong romantic subplot. A book with a pretty hardcover that sat next to Gaiman and Martin and Tolkien. A grown-up version of much of the young adult fantasy you see on the shelves today. Something dealing with grown-up problems (like hating your job and dastardly exes) in grown-up ways (rage quitting and revenge sex) while still maintaining the fantastic elements, fast pace, character-driven plots, and light worldbuiding of YA fantasy.

Like so many, I’d grown out of YA. Insta love and pining wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Nor were love interests who were minors. The days of messy childhood dramas were past. My friends are my allies, my foundation, not my competition. I’m a busy, Millennial woman working in software, usually between 60-80 hours a week. I have a mortgage, a family, responsibilities and appointments to run in and out of. The days of locking myself in my room for a week during spring break to read, only emerging for popcorn and soda, were gone. Now, my fingers ofen find the smallest book on my TBR, not the largest.

YA fantasy no longer offered what I wanted. But neither did adult fantasy, where the books were too long, too dark, too political, too sprawling. I hated maps, and countries, and a million languages and thirteen POVs I couldn’t remember, and flipping back and forth to try to remind myself who was who.

So I set out to write what I wanted. A grown up YA-esque fantasy fit for the adult fantasy shelf and the (now) adult fantasy reader craving something different.

Image of the torso of a girl in a blue ruffled gown reading a piece of parchment. Photo by SAMANTA SANTY on Unsplash

Here’s where I guess I went sideways. Because I didn’t set out to write a romantasy as it existed. I set out to write a thing I personally wanted to read. Romantasy as it existed was a much sexier fantasy than I’ll likely ever write. It became even sexier as the subgenre evolved (and my book moved through submission).

I wasn’t writing for a genre, I was writing for something I thought was missing in the genre. A fantasy with sex in it, sure. A fantasy with a romantic subplot, but a fantasy first. I thought this would fit into the romantasy category, but what I received on submission was a lot of “this is great but it doesn’t fit… anywhere.”

My books aren’t about six pack abs and heat level. I don’t know how spicy they are. I’m touch averse. The fact they contain sex is a miracle in and of itself. The reason they do is a statement. Sex in my books is about reclaiming my power, about seizing female agency and saying, “This goes here, too. We go here, too.” It’s about showing things through a lens I never got to view sex. One that is not as fantastical as my favorite books once had me believe.

But at the end of the day, my books are more about friendship. And power. They’re about breaking down walls and rewriting problematic faves.

I write them because I believe fantasy deserves to have more than grim dark and sword and sworcery and urban darkness. I believe it deserves to have more lightness and simplicity in world building. But I believe romantasy now deserves more, too. Love deserves more. It deserves to be represented in more ways than heat level, and an endless run of tropes, and how many times you can have open door sex in 90,000 words. It deserves to be seen in friendships, and undiscovered sexuality, and self-love, and asexuality, and found family, and redemption, and parents trying and failing, and sex being a place of healing but never healed.

Romantasy deserves a definition. And a place on the FANTASY shelf that is as wide as the genre it’s named after.

Until then, though, I’m breaking up with it.

Until then, I write fairytales for grownups (and the occassional YA).

Mood board with rose and wine glass, woman with black hair in a forest, man with a bare chest and hoodie with blood over his eye, trees with hands, and a book on fire with words that read "This beast isn't looking for redemption. She's looking for revenge."
Current WIP

AI: A Primer from an Insider

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Author’s Note: Aimee, you’re writing about AI AGAIN?! Yes. Yes, I am. Sorry, but Twitter is just such a terrible place for nuance and I work in software and it is making me wild over here seeing all the confusion with the tech. That said, this blog really doesn’t encompass even a small fraction of the data ethics issues at play currently, even in publishing. It also doesn’t address many of the AI Models out there, again, only the ones relevant to the exact conversation which is Generative AI and LLM data scraping practices and the harm that’s causing in publishing (artists and authors).

Work Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and are not intended to represent the views or opinions of my employer.

AI, oh my! It’s all over everything everywhere. And everyone has an opinion about it. Usually love it or hate it. Not often anywhere in between.

Shocking no one, I’m the someone in between.

As a VP of Compliance at a software company who spends my days in the trenches of the AI debate, I get it. Some people want to poke at it with a fifty-foot pole while squinting. Some people can’t gobble the tech up fast enough before demanding more.

Almost no one wants to take time to understand the nuance of the intersecting fields of AI. Definitely no one wants to hear about the people behind them.

You know I’m not going to let that slide, right?

Brief History of AI and AI Ethics

Brief AI Timeline Made using Canva
I didn’t get to include some of my favorites in the timeline, but I hope to find pictures of them somewhere. Anyone remember how scared people were of Furbies being spies for the Japanese government? AI scares have been a thing as far back as I can remember. I’m not saying the scares here aren’t justified, some of them are, but they shouldn’t be rooted in ignorance.

As we can see, AI has been around awhile. And while the federal government (in the United States, anyway) hasn’t been doing much, some states have (California most notably but also Colorado, Virginia, Utah, and Connecticut with more to come no doubt), as have other countries, the biggest note being the European Union’s GDPR.

Interestingly, writers have been debating AI and robotics ethics far longer than legislators. Isaac Asimov (yep, the science fiction writer), penned an ethical code for AI in 1942 in his short story Runaround. That ethical code is actually used as a real framework for some AI ethical concepts to this day. However, until the early 2000s, pretty much the only ones concerned about AI ethics or safety were uh… well, writers. While some scientists and engineers did discuss technological safety, and even published papers on it, until the new millennium, it was primarily still a speculative element portrayed in fiction and movies.

In 2000, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (now the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) was created with the purpose of identifying and managing potential risks from artifical intelligence. From there, the AI Ethics movement took off.

Over the next decade, more research institutes focused on AI ethics were founded. Some to prop up the tech companies sponsoring them. Some to do real work. Time sorted some of them out, others still have to be sorted. What the government failed to do, consumers began to take charge of.

In short, capitalism did what capitalism does best: rules by purse.

Now, larger tech corporations hire for positions like “Ethical AI Architects,” “AI Ethics Program Managers,” and “Chief AI Ethics Officers,” and develop responsible AI frameworks and ethical AI policies. Major universities like Northeastern, Berkeley, and Duke, offer post doctoral research programs for AI Ethicists and Ethical AI. Conferences are held across industries to discuss AI and what to do with it. Who can go a day without seeing an email about the latest in AI developments or scandals? All right, that might be just my job, but I’m pretty sure every industry is feeling and seeing the impacts of not only the AI boom but the Responsible AI Revolution.

Great. Tech is teching. Researchers are researching. Capitalists are capitalizing. Legislators are procrasting. But what the hell does it all mean?

Photo of a book, Thunder Head surrounded by a dagger, candles, white and blue fake flowers. Image (c) Aimee Davis from @writingwaimee on Instagram
Don’t mind me, I’m just over here waiting for my benevolent robot overlord.

All the Techbro Lingo (Definitions First, Stay with Me)

We use this sweeping phrase “AI” as in artificial intelligence to encompass a huge amount of technology, much of which we use every day and have been using our entire lives without ever caring about. Whether we should’ve cared about it is another question, but let’s set that aside for right now. Some definitions. I swear I’ll apply them right after this, I just want to be clear that AI isn’t AI isn’t AI. There’s loads of different kinds and honestly, some of it isn’t that fancy (some of the least fancy stuff I haven’t even included here).

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”): A field of study within computer science concerned with developing computer systems that perform specific functions or tasks that would normally require human intelligence. Remember, the first AI was literally a program that played checkers. Not fancy. I mean, it was to the computer developer who made it, but not to the average human who has a brain that intrinsically knows how to learn stuff like how to play checkers.

AI Model: The use or creation, training, and deployment of machine learning algorithms that emulate logical decision-making based on available data. The AI Model being used by any given system is what needs to be best understood. Not that it’s AI. Not all possible AI Models are listed here, just the ones relevant to what’s discussed in this blog.

Foundation Model: A large AI Model, Pre-Trained (often on many different data formats like text, images, video, speech, numbers, etc.) which can then be used as the basis for many different types of tasks and operations.

Generative AI: An AI Model that can be used to create new content reflective of the general characteristics of the training data without duplicating the training data.

Large Language Model (“LLM”): An AI Model which can analyze massive volumes of data resulting in the LLM learning to create sophisticated output. This is the modeling system used in Generative AI such as Chatbots like ChatGPT.

Pre-Trained: Also called Transfer Learning this machine learning method reuses a model previously used for one task to reduce cost and time and fine-tune tasks.

Web scraping: Also referred to as data scraping this is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website to be replicated elsewhere.

Turning this Nonsense into Useful Information: Examples

There are two things to keep in mind when we’re talking about AI: (1) What system(s) is/are being used; and (2) Following the training data.

Example: Generative AI Using Only Your Data

Generative AI is bad.

Well, not necessarily. If I’m an artist, or an author, and I build my own Generative AI system and keep it closed (e.g. the only data ever used is mine, there is nothing Pre-trained and no Foundation Model), then all it’s ever replicating is my work. If it spits out some derivitative based on my work, I edit it, tweak it, alter it further, make it just so, is that really bad, or is it a new way to do art? Is it any different than a computer speeding up the typing process or Photoshop (also a form of AI, by the way) helping a photographer touch up their photo, or a digital notepad for a graphic designer?

Note: This is not the same thing as training on a “closed system.” When you hear someone in software say they’re using a closed system, they mean the opposite of open source in that the specifications are being kept secret and unable to be modified or used by third parties. These still often use open source or purchased Foundation Models or Pre-Trained bases of some sort (which bases need data to create, remember). The company then inputs their data into those bases for specific customization.

Image of a yellow furbie with black hair in grass. Image sourced via Pixabay.
I told you it was coming. Behold! The Furbie! The AI toy that caused my mother to almost be trampled in a Black Friday stampede only for the nation to be then consumed by Furbie fear.

Example: Generative AI Use in the Same or Similar Industry

In my opinion, the clearest issue of do not do right now in publishing is the use of Generative AI in the same or similar industries. What does this mean?

Well, in the publishing industry right now, there are software products that use Generative AI trained on data scraped from artists’ and graphic designers’ websites and social media pages without their consent (and often knowledge) that produce cover art. Some of these artists do, could, or would make cover art given the opportunity. Using software that does it instead of using a real artist causes economic harm to the real artists. For authors to use this kind of art is an ethical issue in my opinion, because authors’ work can be similarly data scraped and used to train software to create books, so they should have the same concern and care to protect their fellows within the same industry.

Reminder: This can be complicated in traditional publishing because authors often don’t have much control over their covers.

Exception: Bria AI, an Israel-based AI image generator has partnered with Getty Images (to much applause from data ethicists) to create AI models, including Generative AI models, trained only from licensed content. In addition to only training AI on images licensed for that use, Bria AI is implementing technology which will compensate the original creators when the AI platform generates images based on their photos.

Image of a white baby clapping in a bathtub on a white background. Image sourced via Pixabay.
Everywhere, the youth rejoiced. Maybe they CAN be whatever they want to be when they grow up, not just a software engineer. No one tell them what the average publishing income is. Just kidding, do. Tell them not to major in writing.

Example: Generative AI in a Non-Adjacent Industry

Finally, we get to the squishiest ethical loop of them all. What do we do about… everything else?

We don’t know what is being data scraped or for what purpose, really. Assume everything. Then we have no idea to what extent data is being used to generate Foundation Models for all sorts of systems the original creators never intended their work to find its way into it. And because it’s being taken without the creators’ knowledge, aggregated with billions of other bits of data, then spit out in a new form in systems all over the world, the creator has zero control over their work.

This blog, for example, could be being data scraped. Bots might be taking this content and aggregating it as part of the dataset for an LLM. Let’s say they are. I don’t really care about that because this blog isn’t something I want to sell. Doesn’t matter what I care about though. Into the dataset it goes.

Let’s say instead, I have the first chapter of my copyrighted, published book posted on my website, which is something many self-published authors (and some traditionally published authors depending on contract) do to entice readers to buy their books. I definitely don’t want that going just anywhere. That’s my product. I’m actively trying to sell it. Still doesn’t matter. Into the dataset it goes.

Maybe that dataset is part of an LLM that’s then used to generate a book. I think you can probably see why an author might have an issue with that even if you want to argue it’s not illegal. That falls under the example I discussed above, really.

What if it’s used not to create a book, though, but to create a Foundation Model or a Pre-Trained base for something in a totally different industry? What if all the developer wants is to grab your writing to train its AI to sound human so a company in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, can then input its own drug data into it to have a chatbot educate doctors about its products? Have you ever read a pharmaceutical insert? Training a chatbot on that information alone wouldn’t make it very well… chatty. To have chatbots that can successfully interact with humans, companies need AI trained on something that’s read dialogue. Lots of it.

Now, this hypothetical pharmaceutical company will make money off the chatbot, have no doubt. It’s selling their product with decreased margins!

But what about the people who taught the bot to speak? The people like me who have expensive degrees in English and qualifications and literary agents and copyrighted or copyrightable material that’s been scraped without consent? Who have read thousands of books to learn how to do what they do? Who have written millions of words to get where they are? Who have labored over their craft for hours for no money? Should we get paid now? Does this “count” as someone making a profit off our labor? Our expertise? Our intellectual property? Were we inadvertent consultants to the bot? Should we be paid for our time? But how do you quanitfy that when it’s split into billions? What if some of it was work we intended to sell while some of it wasn’t?

Then what about the people not at all like me? The people who have none of those things but still created original content with zero intent to sell it? They still, arguably, had intellectual property data scraped without their consent then commercialized. What about the rapid fire tweeters who harbor dreams of going viral? Social media mom groups who would love to have sponsorship? Who doesn’t have a secret dream putting something random on the internet and getting rich somehow? And who gets to say whose work matters more, is worth more? When does it become “stealing?” When does it become “sellable?”

The honest answer for me is I’m not sure. I don’t know if the solution is to ban data scraping entirely or if we even can. I suspect it’s uncontrollable, though putting control back into the hands of creators is in fact probably the ideal solution. We focuson PII and PHI in all these laws but not all of our content. Getting control over anything and everything we don’t want fed to mystery machines is the utopian solution, in my opinion. Now, whether that’s feasible or practical and what impact that might have on slowing down what tech is doing positively in so many industries and if I have a moral issue with slowing that down if my work feeding a chatbot for pharma means they have more resources for cancer research… I have no idea. I suspect time will tell for us all.

And I didn’t even get to bias or black boxes or bad data or hallucinations or what happens if your scraped content when aggregated ends up generating something you are so morally opposed to it…

I guess it’s like our parents’ always said: Be careful what you put on the internet, kids.

Don’t Major in Writing

Published on by aimeedavisauthor1 Comment

Author’s Note: This blog should really come with a subtitle. Don’t Major in Writing: Some Curmudgeonly Advice from an Elder Millennial Who Deeply Regrets It. I don’t mean it as blanket advice, obviously. There are maybe some reasons to major in writing, though I can’t think of any practical ones right now. Also, you probably won’t listen. 18-year-old me definitely would not have listened.

Finally, I’m not entirely sure I’m an Elder Millennial. Pretty sure I fall smack dab in the middle, but at age 35, I’m feeling Elder and am a Millennial so there you have it. Anyway, this is partly some joking, tongue-in-cheek advice, partly some blowing off of steam on my part, and partly something you might be able to call practical. Don’t take it (or life) too seriously. But also don’t take it so unseriously that you end up majoring in writing.

Checking out of yet another blissful, fun-filled, fourteen-hour-day in software compliance where the phrase “leave it to the real lawyer” gets thrown in my face for about the 872nd time is delightful. Exactly how I thought I’d be spending my thirties, in fact. Who doesn’t dream of long hours, burning eyes, people yelling at you, endless existential crises, doomspiraling, feelings of inadequacy backed up by seething rage about a lack of a singular piece of paper, followed by eating shit you know you’ll regret later while you wonder if your jeans will ever fit again?

Oh, I can think of one person. Eighteen-year-old me.

Photo of a white girl (me) with long blond, crimped hair, wearing a blue tee-shirt, black sweater, and multiple necklaces and rings.
Hey, look, there she is. I bet she didn’t worry about her jeans. Just kidding, she totally did, because society is a monster.

Eighteen-year-old me had more dreams than she knew what to do with, truth be told, but the shiniest of them all was becoming A Famous Author. To that end, she, quite reasonably and without any reservations whatsoever, applied to one single college, intending to enter the writing program there.

Pro tip: If college is your track, don’t apply to only one. I mean I’m sure almost everyone applying to college knows this, but it’s a horrible idea. It worked out for past me, but I really had no idea how much fire I was playing with there. And don’t worry, the hubris caught up. Then lapped me a few times.

I got into The One Single College (UNC Chapel Hill) and immediately registered as an English major with a minor in creative writing, headed toward the honors writing track. Nevermind I couldn’t start the writing program until I was a sophomore. Single-minded, I headed forward, never once considering any other option or career path.

No thought when my professor on the first day of my first writing class suggested to the students if anyone could do anything else they should leave to pursue that. Some did. Shocking no one, I did not.

Pro tip: You absolutely CAN do something besides write. You will almost certainly have to if paying your bills is a thing you want to do. You can be successful at the something else, too. Even more successful if you have the appropriate degree, I expect. The notion that writers can only write and that’s why they write is outdated and ridiculous. Would writing full time be better for many? Sure. For me? Uh… yeah. Does that mean you can’t do anything else? No. You are so much more talented than tying your entire skillset to like… one thing.

Silhouette of a woman in business suit walking up skyscrapers set against a skyscape. Image sourced via Pixabay.
Admittedly, I think it’s ridiculous we expect 18 year olds or even 22 year olds to have any idea what they want to do for the next 45 years of their lives but considering many things is a better idea than one thing. Also, internships. Do them.

I didn’t second guess when my friends asked me what the hell I would do with a writing degree, “Teach?” Um, no, be a novelist, obviously. Apparently, I was the only one missing out on this joke.

Pro tip: You can’t actually teach writing with an undergrad degree in writing (or English, either) in a vast majority of public (and even private) schools. You have to have a teaching degree and a whole bunch of certifications to go with it. I learned this when I graduated, couldn’t find a job, thought back to that joke, and was like hmmmm… Nope. Not even private schools would hire me. My lack of teaching degree might have been overlooked if I had a masters or a PhD. But. Alas. I actually couldn’t even get a slot to teach a single writing workshop for free at a local university when my first self-published book was published, and the professor who wanted me to teach the workshop put in a good word in for me. No MFA, no entry. Nor could I get a gig doing a guest appearance at my own high school.

When my impending graduation loomed in the worst economy since The Great Depression, and I had no idea what my prospects were and everyone else I knew was headed to grad school to get a degree in something more uh… useful, I charged forward.

I was unconcerned. My success was on the horizon.

Spoiler. It wasn’t.

Not where writing is concerned, and actually not where my current career is concerned, either. My first job out of college was working at a horse farm on 10-12 hour shifts doing hard labor shoveling literal shit for $8 an hour. This was in 2010, you can adjust for inflation how you will, anyone who majored in anything useful like business or finance or accounting or…

A woman (me) with a green riding helmet rides a bay horse with a pink saddle pad in the snow.
Me circa 2010 on my horse Jules.

My second job was working as a clerk at a law firm answering phones, running (literally, we had a tough set of lawyers) errands, and making hundreds of copies on a single page copy machine. You know, the ones like you have at home where the feeder always breaks and you have to use the glass? Yeah. I made $10 an hour, had no benefits, no time off, and worked at a cramped desk in a fire exit in a basement.

I had no idea what a fax machine was, or how to answer a phone, and despite my impressive English literature degree and minor in creative writing, I’m pretty sure I spelled the word subpoena wrong on the spelling test I had to take to get the job. That’s right. A spelling test.

No one gave a shit about my transcripts, or that I knew how to interpret Milton’s Paradise Lost, or that I had a complicated relationship with Chekhov. In fact, the clerk who took the afternoon shift from me some days (because nope this wasn’t entirely full time) was a high school junior.

When I asked for a raise, I was told frankly, “We pay the position. Not the person.”

To be fair, I was a shit employee. I called out a lot, drank a lot, ditched a lot, and in general was very unpleasant to be around when I was around. At that point, I’d been in a riding accident that damaged nerves in my back permanently, and I was in constant pain. I’d sold my horse. Gained a ton of weight that made the pain worse. I’d quit writing. Hell, I’d quit dreaming. I ducked and covered, pulling into my trauma defenses. Survival was the name of the game. I hardened as I listened to the lectures. To my parents, my bosses, my boyfriends all call me lazy and useless and good for nothing, a waste of space and time and energy, while my degree and my dreams rotted inside this shell I’d become.

The reality is publishing is not really a full-time option for the vast majority of authors. It takes forever to get published, when you finally do the advances are split into unsustainable pieces, the royalties are small, you have to build up backlist which again, takes awhile. It’s a brutal, uncertain business with no health benefits, no steady paycheck, no guarantees. And before the self-publishing folks come in, I wrote a post on that. That’s no piece of cake, either.

Graphic with statistics of publishing facts. Made via Canva.
I really wish it wasn’t like this. It’s hard to see your dream made so impossible. But it’s harder to know you reached and burned your wings when you could have done literally anything else.

By the time I started looking for a better job, I didn’t actually think I was capable of working full time I’d been called lazy so many times.

Good news. I was totally capable. Full time and then some. Eventually, I found a place willing to take a real shot on me. Another law firm. The job I applied for was as a legal secretary, a term I think most firms don’t use anymore but would be the equivalent of an administrative assistant. I had to beg the managing partner to give me the job, because he thought my education made me overqualified. He was sure I would get bored and leave.

I stayed at that job for 11 years. Until the day came that uh… I got bored. But more than that, I felt the walls pressing in. They’d done well by me for a small firm. I’d become a paralegal, then a senior litigation paralegal managing a small staff, then a benefits specialist with a fancy certification from Wharton. But I would never be “lawyer.”

In the back of my mind, my ambition wouldn’t let that go.

Majoring in writing was a terrible mistake. Not continuing my education was a bigger one.

Here’s the thing about being a writer: you don’t need a piece of paper to be one. You write, you’re a writer.

Yes, yes, easy for me to say with a writing degree and a literary agent right? Sure. I hear you, mysterious internet voices. But let me tell you, I struggled to get that agent for a looooong time and a big part of how I did involved purging my writing of almost everything I learned during college. First of all, in my writing workshops, we read, wrote, and workshopped literary fiction and short stories in particular. Writing a novel is a totally different thing. A genre novel even different. Everything I learned about writing a novel came from critique partners, beta readers, practice, reading, and craft books I read post-college.

My college courses didn’t talk about beats or accepted word counts or tropes or genre conventions or age groups or anything you need to publish an actual book. We never wrote or discussed a query, a synopsis, an elevator pitch. It was all metaphor and line level and what’s the Deeper Meaning. Flowers with deep meanings, and men having existential mid-life crises, and women with small dogs that mean something, and the fall of the southern aristocracy. They encouraged a lot of things frowned upon in a lot of genre fiction (like writing outside your lane with… abandon.)

What you do need a piece of paper to be is many other things. Doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, veterinarian, actuary, accountant, human resources professional, the list goes on. And those things are the things that put food on the table and a roof over your head. Unless you’re very lucky.

Pro tip: Don’t ever count on being lucky.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret going to law school. Or vet school. Or business school. Or majoring in journalism instead of English. Have I done all right for myself? Absolutely. But it’s 10:00 p.m. on a Monday, and all I hear is, “Let the real lawyer…”

Somewhere in the multiverse, I hope the real lawyer version of me is happier.

You know what I could do without a writing degree? Write that story. You know what I can’t be without a law degree? That other version of me.

Do yourself a favor, cut out the multiverse. Don’t major in writing.

Image of a book, Craft in the Real World, surrounded by fake pink flowers and pink butterflies. Image (c) Aimee Davis on Instagram @writingwaimee
Want a great idea of how crap workshops can be? Read this.

A Submission Survival Guide

Published on by aimeedavisauthor1 Comment

Author’s Note: Being a Pitch Wars alum has offered me a unique perspective by allowing me access to aggregated information in the form of rapid succession stories about all the things that once hid behind the “After Agent” veil. Super successes. Quiet wins. Loud defeats. Agonizing almost-but-not-quites. Rewrites and redos. Some of this information (non specific, all anonymous) is gathered from that experience. Some is gleaned from reading too many articles about all the things I never thought to think about before I was agented. All the advice is my own. I compile it here not to discuss one specific event or series of events but some of the many multiple possibilities that could await you in your next chapter. It’s information I wish I had before and with Pitch Wars gone and so many other mentorships with it, my hope by putting it here is only to help someone else who may not have the same access I’ve enjoyed.

To those who have let me be part of their journeys, thank you. There’s no better crew than you.

Congratulations! You wrote a book! Edited the book! Had it critiqued! Survived those critiques! Probably edited the book again! Survived that without burning the book! You queried the book! Survived the rejections! Maybe you did that for years over the course of many books (don’t know anyone like that at all). Maybe you got that lucky book the first time. Doesn’t matter. Whatever the situation is…

YOU GOT AN AGENT!

Graphic of three fox-children jumping up with a black bubble image of the word success above them. Image sourced via Pixabay.
CELEBRATE! BASK! EAT CAKE! MAKE THE TWITTER ANNOUNCEMENT! CHANGE THE BIO! SLEEP FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS! I’ll wait, because the rest of this post is uh… not as exciting as all that.

Pause. Bad News™ incoming.

Turn around now if you haven’t appropriately partied your socks off. Publishing doesn’t give us enough opportunities to do that, so we sort of have to seize the moments we can and hang on tight. Bookmark this bad boy for later. Go party some more. Eat another piece of cake. Or the entire cake. I’ll be here.

Photo of a white woman (me) in a white sweater wearing rainbow gloves and a crown gesturing toward a contract and a blue cake with a Cinderella slipper on it. Copyright: Aimee Davis
Did I party my socks off when I got my agent? Abso-fucking-lutely. With a custom cake, cookies, princess crown, photoshoot and all. Nothing is too ridiculous. THIS IS YOUR MOMENT!

Last opportunity to turn back.

3

2

1

Bad News™: There’s still a long way to go before that sweet, sweet book deal

For most of you who have been around publishing awhile, this won’t come as a surprise. (Your family will still be surprised. I have a post on that if you’re interested.) What might come as a surprise, however, even to those who have been around a little, is how much further away the book deal feels once you get over the hurdle of getting the agent.

Moving goal posts is probably a big reason. Everything in publishing is a moving goal post. The achievement benchmarks are constantly growing. It’s a bit like Pacman. A wish for a single personalized rejection turns into a wish for a partial request turns into a wish for a full request turns into a wish for ten full requests, into an offer, into three offers, into a literary agent, into one editor being interested, then three, then six, then an auction, then a five figure advance, no six, no seven, hardcover, audiobook, book tour, no BOOKCON, Netflix deal and on and on and on.

Out there somewhere, your favorite author with all the success is moving their goalpost, I can almost guarantee it. If they weren’t, they’d have written a book on how to stop doing that and be even more famous. The fact is this is an industry where there’s always something else to strive toward, to want, and that makes the “end” seem… well, endless.

Yellow Pacman eats yellow balls. Sourced via Pixabay.com
Oh look, it’s me, just mindlessly eating all my goalposts without stopping for one second to celebrate any of my achievements. Don’t be a Pacman. Stop and savor your food. I mean, wins.

Practically speaking, however, if you’re someone who has queried for a bit, submission also might seem daunting because, well, you’re fucking tired. You’ve already taken a hell of a beating so to dive right into the enterprise of receiving more rejections but at arguably higher stakes is… a lot. And then there are the steps that you didn’t think about or you didn’t know about or seemed too far away when you were querying to worry about.

Well, they’re here now so let’s go ahead and talk about them.

Timeline: Ater you get your agent events. Sign with Agent; Edit Letter; Submission; Acquisitions; Offer to Buy Made using: Canva.com
Honestly if I made a timeline for the whole publishing process it might unroll halfway across the United States. No wonder our families don’t understand this.

Sign with Agent

If you haven’t done this yet, read your contract before you sign it! I wrote a blog about that, too. Look at me, I’m a whole wealth of information 😎 NEXT! (Look at me also trying to be brief(ish)).

Edit Letter

Woof. More Bad News™. You have to edit this thing. Again. If the book sells, this won’t be the last time, either. Buckle up, buttercup! Depending on your agent, what you both see for the book, the state of the market, the shape of the book, etc. your edits might be anything from line edits to developmental rewrites. This is definitely something you should have talked about on your call prior to your offer though, so it shouldn’t come as a huge shock. If your edit letter does come as a shock, don’t be afraid to reach out to your agent to talk to them about it! Also don’t be afraid to inquire after your edit letter if you were given a timeline and it’s unreasonably delayed.

Tip: If this is your first agent and first book, this is a weird time. It’s hard to go from querying (especially if you’ve been querying for awhile), where you spend a lot of time agonizing over everything you can do to win agents over, to seeing yourself as an equal business partner to one. Even the most supportive agents can’t fully make this dynamic different because it’s a partnership and it takes two (meaning you need to shift your mindset, too). I’ve seen it in my friends and felt it in myself, and my agent could not be more open, honest, communicative, or lovely. It’s simply a strange period of time while you try to transition from “terrified of writing the wrong salutation” or “providing 5.5 sample pages instead of 5” lest I piss off this person I desperately want to impress to “it’s totally fine to disagree with their artistic vision for my work.” But advocating for yourself is normal in any relationship, and if that can’t be normalized in your business relationship with your agent, you have an issue. I know it’s hard to hear and trite and probably no one will listen because it’s just one of those things you have to learn yourself but I’ve seen it enough now to know in my soul that a bad agent (or a bad for you agent, also a thing!) is worse than no agent. That said, be professional, as always.

So you have to edit the book again. At least once. Probably more. Super bummer. Add that to this list of reasons why the submission process can be a bit… well… soulsucking. If you’re going from querying to signing with an agent to submission for the first time, this is the first time you’ve made it this far and… it’s still the same book. In theory, this could be the book that lives with you the longest of any book in your career if it goes the whole way because once you have an agent, they’ll hopefully stay your agent and sell your next book so that book won’t go through the whole, you know, querying thing. Of course there are a myriad of publishing snags embedded in that statement, but let’s just say it’s good to be really in love with this book, just in case.

The act of writing a book is not about falling in love. It’s about staying in love.

Leigh Bardugo, MadCap Retreats, 2017
A photo of a white woman (me) wearing a white PitchWars shirt, with her hand on her chin in front of a computer with a red-lined document open. Copyright: Aimee Davis
Is this me editing my book for the 9th time during #PitchWars? Yes. The one I started in 2020? Yes. Was this in 2021? Yes. Was I still editing the EXACT SAME book a year and a half later with my agent in 2023? Also yes. Does a world exist where I might still be editing the EXACT SAME book potentially into like 2026? I think you know the answer. (It’s yes).

Submission

Submission does not go down the same with every agent. I’ve heard and seen lots of different strategies (which one is being employed for your book should also have been a topic of conversation during your call). In many respects, however, submission is like Querying 2.0, but where you at least don’t have to do the querying.

Who and Where

Your agent will prepare a list of editors at publishing houses to submit your pitch packet and book to. The who will depend on the strategy your agent (and you) have devised. Some author/agent teams want to submit only to Big Five publishing houses (or their imprints). Some author/agent teams are interested in independent presses but contingent on size. Some author/agent teams want to shoot all the shots. You and your agent should discuss the strategy that’s right for you both on your call and before submission (and hey, there’s always room to revise it along the way).

Note: Many publishing houses are “one and done” just like many literary agencies, meaning your agent can only submit to one editor at that imprint. Also, there are a lot less editors to submit to than agents (it seems impossible but yeah, less shots this round, folks). Selecting editors carefully is important. It’s also important to remember (IMO) that publishing is a business of connections and your agent has built them in a way that no amount of deep research on Publisher’s Marketplace will be able to replicate (likely). You have an agent for a reason, it’s not a terrible idea to listen carefully to their suggestions for submission. Or even cede this responsibility entirely.

What

After you have an editor list, your agent will prepare a pitch packet with an introductory email that is essentially a query but to an acquiring editor. Often, they’ll include personalization from the agent to the editor (remember that connections bit from above?) about why they’ve chosen the editor in question. They’ll also include a pitch of the book, and your bio. Some agents will then wait for the editor to request your full. Querying 2.0 strikes again, yes. Although there’s some difference here. Some agents will send the full book right away because (thanks to your agent’s connections) the editor has already expressed interest. Some agents will do a combo (especially with one and done imprints). Good news? You’re not the one waiting this time. Well, you are, but you’re not on the front lines of waiting. There’s someone between you and waiting. That distance matters.

When

Many (but not all) agents will do submission in “rounds” just like querying (or how querying used to work). The round sizes and length between each will vary based on the submission strategy and breadth.

Tip: Talk to your agent before you go on submission about what their thoughts are on public mentions about submission. Submission is being talked about more on social media but it’s still not always recommended to discuss submission (or certain aspects of submission) publicly.

Bad News™ Time (again)

Now you wait. For… well, it can be a while. Unless you’re a rockstar with an auction and movie right fights on the way of course. But honestly most everyone falls into the “probably not” category where that’s concerned so let’s talk about that.

What do you do while you’re waiting?

You know, the standard hurry up and wait writing fare. Obsess over your email. Talk to your writing pals about your lack of emails. Immediately thereafter get an email but with Bad News™. Eat ice cream. Try to figure out the corporate structure of Penguin Random House and all its bazillion imprints. Doom scroll.

Or you can always go with the old addage that continues to ring true and through: Write the wait.

Like I said, Querying 2.0.

Tip: If you’re an author who wrote a series (fantasy, sci fi, romance serial, mystery serial, whatever) do not spend this time working on the second book unless you can sell it as a standalone. There’s no guarantee the book on submission is going to sell. (I cannot tell you how sorry I am to report this.) Even if it does, there’s no guarantee you’ll land a multi-book deal. Not all you see on Twitter is reality. Make life easier on yourself and get to working on another book your agent can try to sell if this one doesn’t. (Also, many agents will help you with the next idea if you’re trying to figure out which one might be most marketable.)

Mood board with images of devil, woman with roots growing out of her sleeves, queen on a chess board, castle near the river, and a rose with text that reads "Once Upon a Time A man told her she would never amount to anything. Society told him he was a stone under its boot. Together, they will break their tales and their world." All images sources via Pixabay, Unsplash or Canva.
Not really a write the wait book but a chance to talk about my New Thing at least! Is it another adult fairytale retelling? Yep, sure is. Is it marketable? Who knows. But at least it doesn’t count as a sequel because it can be sold alone. SO THERE.

Acquisitions

CONGRATULATIONS! SOMEONE WANTS TO BUY YOUR BOOK! YOU HAVE ARRRR…

JUST KIDDING. (Maybe).

Acquisitions is the least talked about cruelty in all of publishing. You wrote the book. And probably another one (or ten). You wrote the query. And ten more versions after that. You queried everyone. And waited. Finally, you got the agent. You revised the book. Again. And maybe again. You worked on a submission strategy and a pitch packet and a revised bio and synopsis and fuck, you finally found real comp titles that work. You’ve written all the waits. Now, FINALLY, an acquiring editor says they want to acquire your book. Buy it. Make it a real live book.

You’re here.

Except there’s another step. The acquisitions meeting.

All publishing houses do this differently and there’s been much blog ink spilled over how, so if you’re interested, you can do a google and read up on it, but the gist is basically an acquisitions team consisting of loads of people who are involved in book production (from finance to marketing to other editors to distribution) all get together to listen to pitches from acquiring editors and decide what books they’re going to buy for how much.

Acquisitions is where many midlist and debut dreams go to die.

You don’t always get through. If you do get through, the offer isn’t always what you were hoping for. There’s a plethora of available emotions involved with this process that aren’t deliriously excited, and the honest truth is that sucks. It sucks to be anything less than deliriously excited over something you’ve been working toward for so long. It sucks to feel guilty because you’re not excited, you’re actually just fucking scared or worried or disappointed while you have friends still struggling in the querying trenches. Friends you believe in. Friends you know are just as talented as you. Friends you think might have books more sellable if they were here and you weren’t. I imagine that guilt is one of the things preventing us from talking about this part of the process.

But here’s the thing.

You made it this far.

When your agent tells you you’re going to acquisitions: Celebrate! Do not move that fucking goal post one inch before you’ve celebrated! Screamed! Squealed! Taken pictures! Yelled frantically! Eaten cake! Run around the house! Danced! Made an impulse purchase! Whatever it is you do to celebrate, do that thing. Don’t hold back.

Tip: Acquisitions can take awhile to get through depending on the meeting schedule and the press involved. Sometimes meetings can go over, your book might get bumped to the next meeting, it might get held up while the editor tries to convince people in the press to buy in (like Nancy Pelosi counting last minute votes). It may also take some time to get an official offer because proposals have to be drafted, signed, etc. But this is also an opportunity for your agent to nudge other editors so they can get in the game as well. Ever wonder how an auction or a preempt happens? This is how. And yep, agents nudge too. It’s a stressful time while you wait so celebrate before!

A piece of cheesecake on a white plate with light pink flowers around it, a glass slipper behind it, and a bookmark that reads You're Never Too Old for Fairytales. Copyright: Aimee Davis
CAKE! This was absolutely as delicious as it looks, yes.

Offer to Buy

YOU REALLY MADE IT THROUGH! In software, what happens after an acquisitions team signs off on a book is what we call a “business verbal.” It basically means the business side of the house has given the financial approval for the go ahead on the purchase. The general offer terms are conveyed to your agent in a brief written proposal. This is the dollars and cents things, timeline, royalties, what is being acquired (type of rights), and other pertinent terms.

All the nudging goes next. Your agent notifies editors who still have the book that there’s an offer to see if they might also be interested in making an offer (Querying 2.0, yes). If multiple editors express interest, you might be set up for an auction. If one editor is super interested and wants to sort of steal the deal, they can make a preempt offer (like the Buy Now link on eBay, beat out the auction price by paying potentially a little bit more right now). Regardless, you’re at the finish line (at least as it relates to your and your agent’s unpaid labor, because money comes next).

Because after that you have…

Contract Negotiations. My favorite part.

But first, don’t forget to eat more cake. You’re going to be a published author (probably 😉)*

*We’ll leave that Bad News™ for another day.

Fair Warning about Fair Use

Published on by aimeedavisauthor1 Comment

Legal Disclaimer: I am not an attorney so nothing in this blog should be construed as legal advice. It is not comprehensive and as you’re about to see, this is a nuanced subject that is very fact intensive. If you think your copyright or other intellectual property right has been infringed upon, please consult legal counsel well versed in intellectual property right matters.

Length Disclaimer: This post is long. I mean most of my posts are long but this one is really long. And it doesn’t encompass everything I wanted to talk about or could talk about. It’s just a sort of 101 guide tailored to address authors and AI and the use of books in LLM (and other tech).

The Statute

In general, the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended (the “Act”), governs the intellectual property right of copyright (there are other intellectual property rights such as trademark and patent but copyright is the primary source of conversation when we’re talking about intellectual property (“IP”) related to written works). In 1998, the Copyright Act was amended by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). Sometimes, the DMCA is referenced independently, but it is structurally part of the Copyright Act and will not be referred to separately here.

The Act grants to creators a swathe of exclusive rights related to their works, including the right to reproduce and distribute the works, create derivative works based on the work, to sell, lend, or lease copies of the work to the public, to perform the work publicly, and to display the work publicly. See, 17 USCA § 106.

Like almost all laws, however, the Act has exceptions. Many of the exceptions are narrow and extremely specific. For example, a library can reproduce one copy of a book without infringing on a copyright if the purpose is noncommercial, the library is open to the public or researchers not affiliated with the library, and the copy has a notice that it’s been copied under the Act’s exceptions. If they want to expand it to three copies, there are even stricter requirements. See, 17 USCA § 108.

17 USCA § 107 (“Section 107”) is different. This section, which outlines the doctrine of Fair Use, is a bit… murkier. Section 107 is quoted in full below.

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include–
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

17 U.S.C.A. § 107

The Fair Use Factors

The four factors listed in Section 107 (the ones with the numbers before them) are the ones courts evaluate to determine whether a use of a copyrighted work is “fair use” and thus, non-infringing (assuming it’s not an obvious case set forth in Section 107’s preamble such as a teacher making copies for a classroom).

So, which factor matters most?

It depends.

Cartoon image of a green cricket shrugging with a sly smile. Image sourced via Pixabay.
Could we have just made rules? I mean sure, but that’s hard and annoying. Plus, how would we keep our fellow lawyers gainfully employed? And give them a career path from partner to judge? <– Politicians.

Both federal appellate courts and the United States Supreme Court have repeatedly stated that fair use cases are fact specific, there are no bright line rules, and the factors should be weighed on a case-by-case basis. See, Am. Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 21 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), aff’d, 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994) (no one factor is dispositive in weighing); Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 1183, 1197 (2021) (some factors may be more important in some cases than in others);  Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 577 (1994) (there are no brightline rules and each case requires an independent case-by-case analysis).

Because of this, the US Copyright Office created a Fair Use Index, a searchable database compiling summaries of major fair use cases by category and type of use.

I’m going to again repeat that I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. It’s a compilation of generalities to give folks a better understanding of how complicated this can get and why, “It’s on the internet” does not necessarily equal fair use. It’s also to help people avoid pitfalls like “I thought I understood copyright and fair use because I did a Google then went and developed some AI.” Again, not legal advice but uh… I just don’t recommend that as a citizen of the world. For reasons I already touched on but also because you might get sued and honestly, getting sued sucks. 0/10 do not recommend.

Photo of a typewriter with a piece of paper with the words copyright claim. Image sourced via Unsplash.
You’ve been served. With a fair warning about fair use. Which is definitely not legal advice. Something I can’t give because I’m not a lawyer. I’m going to say that probably four more times this post. Just in case someone didn’t read the whole thing as people are prone to do with legal stuff (and every email I write).

Factor One: Purpose and Character of Use

When someone asks me to “bullet point” legal analysis, I laugh. It simply doesn’t work like that. So in typical “it doesn’t work like that” fashion, there are sub-factors to the factors to consider:

  1. Commercial v. Non-Commercial Use
  2. The so-called “Transformative Use” of the work

Commercial/Non-Commercial Use

Commercial versus non-commercial use is pretty simple. It’s what it sounds like. Is the person using the allegedly infringed upon work profiting off it? There are some interesting exceptions here because (!) we (!) can’t (!) go (!) one (!) paragraph (!) without (!) exceptions (!) Have you gotten the point yet?

But one of the exceptions I want to point out is that a use can be considered commercial if use of the material infringed upon induces someone to purchase something else. See, Compaq Computer Corp. v. Ergonome, Inc., 387 F.3d 403, 409 (5th Cir. 2004) (inclusion of allegedly infringed on book on ergonomic hand positioning included with computer sales induced purchase of computers and reduced potential liability of computer company making use commercial).

In general, a commercial use case will be more likely to be considered infringing than a non-commercial use case but because there are more factors (and sub-factors) which may be given more weight (it depends, after all), commercial use is not dispositive by any means.

Transformative Use

A photo of a monarch butterfly in its chrysalis. Photo sourced via Unsplash.
*Cracks knuckles* Okay, buckle up, y’all because this one is going to take some work. Actually by the time we get to the end this butterfly might have transformed from its chrysalis into a whole damn butterfly. But this is one of the most important parts for books and AI and all that so stick with me (and the butterfly).

A use is considered transformative if it adds something new to the work so that the new thing has a different function, purpose, or character from the original work. This analysis is about as squishy as it sounds. The case most frequently cited around this concept recently is the Supreme Court Case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 143 S.Ct. 1258 (May 18, 2023). That case goes into great depth about different types of what is and is not transformative. Andy Warhol painting a Campbell’s soup can is transformative. Why? Because despite it being basiaclly an exact replica, the purpose of the soup can label was commercial – to induce people to buy soup through branding. Warhol’s purpose of painting it was to critique consumerism, something totally different. He transformed the work so it had a different purpose and character. However, Warhol’s creation of orange silkscreens based on a photographer’s photo of Prince (the subject of the actual case) were found to not be transformative because the uses by both artist and photographer were commercial and so similar as to not make the derivative Warhol created transformative.

All that to say when two people in similar fields (artists, basically) are creating something for essentially the same reason (commercial or otherwise) and the one copies the other, turning the copy orange isn’t enough to convince a court that it’s been transformed enough to make it new. Green probably doesn’t count, either.

In tech, use of copyrighted works has been found by appellate courts in several circuits to be transformative (but not necessarily non-infringing because again, there are other factors to consider). See, A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms, LLC, 562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir. 2009) (Archival of student essays in an online database used for plagiarism review is transformative of the original works); Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir.2007) (Google’s use of thumbnail images in a searchable index is transformative despite not altering the images at all); Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014) (a digital library’s full-text searchable database of millions of books is transformative). TL;DR: Databases are transformative but again, that does not guarantee they’re not infringing this is only one sub-factor of many.

How these circuits determine whether a work is transformative also, shockingly, depends. The 9th Circuit has suggested the new work should not be in competition with the old one to be considered transformative. The 2nd Circuit has suggested the new work must be creative or perhaps comment on the old work itself (such as in a parody or in Warhol’s soup can). It has backtracked a bit on the comment uh… comment since then. However, all these cases talk about the “author” of the new work, and closely examining authorial intent when determinining a work’s transformative nature.

Fun fact. The current (but rapidly evolving position) of the US Copyright Office is that AI can’t be an author and that human authorship is a prerequisite to copyrights. However, surprising no one at this point, there are now some notable exceptions you can read about here. There is other tricky stuff about the repercussions around that, but I’m going to pass because we are still on factor one, everyone.

Graphic of a blue alien robot waving. Image sourced via Pixabay.
Who says this guy can’t be an author? The US Copyright Office, that’s who. And honestly probably for the best, this guy seems like he would write awful books.

Factor Two: Nature of the Copyrighted Work

Sub factors: (1) Creative or factual; (2) Published or unpublished

These are actually not complicated. The more creative a work, the more likely it is to be protected by the Act. Works of fiction are more protectable than nonfiction. Nonfiction is more protectable than say… lists of numbers (yes, that’s literally a thing that can be copyrighted in some cases please don’t ask me how I know I don’t want to talk about it).

Significantly, exploitation of creativity will weigh against the transformative nature of a work (e.g. if a transformative work transforms in a way that exploits the original creative work it’s not given as much “credit” toward fair use). I mean hypothetically that could mean maybe… I don’t know… if you created an AI program that stole a bunch of super cool creative books written by real people then used that to uh… create other books. Maybe you transformed the books into something totally new (data, an algorithm, a software model, hell a new book making a radical comment on the old). But you did it by uh… infringing then used the thing to compete against the orginal thing. I mean I’m not a lawyer but that just doesn’t seem super fair to me.

An unpublished work will also be more easy to protect than a published one, because a published work already got to have its day in the sun, essentially. It had its commercial debut and is now up for potential commentary and critique.

Factor Three: Amount and Sustainability of Portion Used

Sub-factors: (1) Qualitative; and (2) Quantitative

Qualitative

Using one line can be infringing if the one line is the heart of a work. Or it spoils the movie. See, Video Pipeline Inc. v. Buena Vista Home Entm’t, Inc., 342 F.3d 191, 201 (3d Cir. 2003). Using the whole thing can be appropriate if it’s for a purpose permitted under the other factors. It all really depends here. What is the heart of the work? And how does ripping it out damage the work, its reputation, and the author?

Cartoon of a yellow smiley face holding a white gloved hand to its lips in a shushing gesture. Image via Pixabay.
Spoiler alert! The Titanic sinks. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. That kid can see dead people. Jon Snow… too soon? Now THERE is a sub-factor. When does it cease being a spoiler? Someone tell my ADHD that it doesn’t need to go figure that out.

Quantitative

While a quantitative analysis is easier to understand: how much of the work was copied and used? It’s not applied in an easy-to-understand way. There’s no rule that says “You’re totally fine if you use less than 5% of the total thing.” Because of the other factors. And also because sometimes the quantity isn’t determined based on the total thing but on how much of the thing competes (Google, Inc., 804 F.3d at 223) and sometimes the quantity is determined based on how much of the thing is “relevant.” See, Am. Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 21 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), aff’d, 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994). You can use 1% and infringe if there’s heavy weight given to other factors or use 80% and not infringe if there’s heavy weight given to this factor. So, again, while I’m not handing out legal advice here because I’m not a lawyer it’s just… not hugely advisable to apply bright line rules where there are none. Even if it would be easier.

Listen, I didn’t make the rules. Because if I had, there would uh… be some.

Factor Four: Effect on the Market

Sub-factors: (1) Direct market harm caused by the alleged infringing work; and (2) Harms that may result from other similar infringements in the future

Direct Market Harm

This is basically exactly what it sounds like. It encompasses loss of sales, profits, revenue, royalties, and potential licensing deals. Basically any allegedly infringing use can be seen as having market harm by depriving the copyright owner of sales. See, Bill Graham Archives, 448 F.3d (2nd Cir. 2006). Also included is market harm for markets the work has not yet entered or fully exploited. To prove such harm, the owner of the copyright must prove that (1) such market exist for it to enter; and (2) the copyright owner is likely to or has plans to enter that market.

What cannot be considered as market harm are uses that criticize the work (even if such criticism results in loss of sales, revenue, licensing opportunity, etc.). This is because the Act does not supersede protected First Amendment Rights to free speech.

Future Harm

Courts also take potential future harm into consideration. The concept here is basically, if we allow this one through, we’re setting a precedent for others like it, and what kind of economic impact will that have on the copyright owner?

This one might be important to pay attention to in some of the upcoming LLM cases (e.g. Silverman, et al. v. OpenAI, et al., N.D.Ca. 3:23-cv-03416) because the stakes there on future harm are potentially quite high not only for the authors involved in the lawsuit but for creators everywhere.

Random Other Things

In typical court fashion, there are also some other random things that have been tacked on during the years that courts consider when making fair use determinations. I won’t belabor the nuance because if you’re not asleep already you’re pretty much a hero. The bulleted key points on some bigger more relevant ones are below:

  • The use is consistent with industry practices
  • The use provides a signficant benefit to the public
  • The infringment was knowing and in bad faith

Conclusion

TL;DR: Copyright infringement is bad. Fair use is complicated. And not always the fairest. There are rules but they sorta suck and can change with a light breeze. I’m not a lawyer. If you’re having an issue with your IP or you want to develop AI that uses IP that isn’t yours (including use an open source base that uses data you’re not sure where it came from, call your In Real Life Lawyer).

Most importantly, keep creating.

Image of pretend photo editor that shows text that says "I'm not a Lawyer Count" with a 6 tally. Image created using Pixabay.
Hope that was sufficient to cover me.

What’s the Deal with the Data?

Published on by aimeedavisauthor1 Comment

Legal Disclaimer: I’m not an attorney, so nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. If you believe your intellectual property rights have been infringed upon, please contact your agent, your publisher, and/or your (or their) legal counsel. The Author’s Guild is also available for many traditionally published (or agented but not yet published) authors.

Work Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and are not intended to represent the views or opinions of my employer.

Yes, I work in software compliance. Not in the arts, but in healthcare. Still, the ethical constructs remain the same. My job is to guard data with, to be frank, utter ferocity. I take this job extremely seriously. Because at the end of the day, data isn’t simply data.

It’s also my job to remind people of that.

Data is protected health information. Emphasis on protected. It’s that diagnosis you’ve been hiding from your family because you don’t want to worry them. It’s the abortion you had when you were young held between you and your doctor. It’s your birth sex that no one has a right to know except you and your OBGYN. It’s your weight. Your mental health history. Your struggles and triumphs. It’s precious. Sacred.

Data is personal information. It’s the social security number you fought to earn over a course of years as you worked toward citizenship. It’s the driver’s license you won back after you won your sobriety. It’s the credit score you battled to on your way out of poverty. It’s the zip code you’re hiding from your abusive ex.

Data is dreams. It’s decades of callused fingers holding a pick to strings. Frustration as you mixed and remixed colors trying to capture the exact shade of pink in that sunset over your grandmother’s funeral. It’s the cool grass beneath your head, a book in your hands, reading about a female knight for the first time, realizing you might be able to write stories like this too if you tried. It’s burning, bloodshot eyes staring at draft after draft after draft. It’s bitten down pens and pencils and charcoal stained hands. It’s college tuition money you’ll never see back in your lifetime, and arguments with parents that echo in your ears as you chase a dream so far out of reach but worth chasing all the same. It’s years of jobs you hate, trudging home exhausted, trying to find time for the only thing that quenches the ache in your soul. It’s a first commission. A demo tape slipped into the right hands at the right time. An advance split into four payments that dwindle to nearly nothing but not quite. The not quite is important because it’s something after years of nothing, nothing, nothing.

Image of three monitors behind which are binary code with a city skyline. Image sourced via Pixabay.

Yes. I take data seriously. Data ethics, too.

So imagine my surprise and dismay when I signed off my work computer after giving an hour and a half long presentation on ethical AI and secure coding to my compliance and data security teams only to find ethics had once again been breached in relation to my dream: publishing.

For those who don’t know, yesterday, a company incorporated in Oregon doing business under the name Shaxpir, went viral in the Twitter writing community after it was revealed a project called Prosecraft (operating under the Shaxpir name), had collected thousands of books to be fed into its algorithms without authors’ or publishers’ knowledge or consent. At this time, it’s unknown how many books or authors were affected but Prosecraft boasted of having a database of more than 25,000 books. Authors like Angie Thomas, Victoria Aveyard, and Kate Elliott addressed the issue head on, stating consent was not given for their books to be listed there (yet there they were). Dozens of other authors confirmed the same. Some of them friends. Debuts. People I know who have clawed their way through impossible odds to arrive to… this.

Shaxpir founder Benjamin Smith took the Prosecraft website down after public cries of outrage and issued an… apology looking thing, but made no mention of the data. Not where he got it, or if he was keeping it, or if it was indeed fueling Shaxpir, the software as a service business model billed at $7.99 a month. According to the Shaxpir site, though, the Prosecraft data is indeed part of the paid model.

Screenshot from https://shaxpir.com/pricing showing Prosecraft: Linguistics for Literature as a paid feature.
Note that Shaxpir also boasts a “Concept Art” feature. Just pointing that out.

Taking the website down but not deleting the data is a big deal. It means there are authors out there who don’t know if their books were part of this because they didn’t get a chance to search the website before it was shut down. I myself was in the middle of searching the website for friends’ books (and actually my own once upon a time self-published books) when it was taken down. I found one final friend’s book before it went dark. I never got to check on my own.

There’s a larger picture, here, however. It’s one I talk about frequently in my day job and one that hovers at the front of my mind almost constantly. It goes beyond one man running a two-person startup, and shit apologies, and the fury burning through my veins when I see my friends’ books blatantly stolen as robot food.

It’s a picture about the larger picture.

Technology isn’t inherently evil. We can very easily make it so, though. Because we make it in our image. And when we make technology without considering the global picture, we recreate ourselves, only worse. The decisions come faster, are often unexplainable and undetectable (even to their makers), and in being so, are often indefensible. This is sometimes called the “black box” problem. To avoid it, AI and algorithms (deep learning in particular, which to be clear, Shaxpir does not appear to have been using) have to be created with purpose, transparency, ethics, and a global framework in mind. They cannot be created simply because wow, wouldn’t that be cool?

Wouldn’t that be cool? The question that started a thousand dystopian novels. (That some techbro went and data scraped for their LLM lolz.)

Image of a figure in a suit with a respirator amidst a destroyed city on fire. Image via Pixabay
This was titled “AI This was titled “AI generated dystopia.” Whether that means it was generated by AI or the dystopia was generated by AI is unclear. Perhaps both. Both seems appropriate. I try to avoid AI generated art in these posts (where I can, I’m no artist and sometimes can’t tell) because many of them are using LLM to create their generative art which is stealing art the same way LLM text features are stealing books but the transparency with the title gave me enough pause to be equally transparent with the use case here. Because transparency is what I’m about to talk about.

The fact is AI isn’t going away. It’s been here awhile and it will continue to be. It’s doing amazing things in a lot of places. It’s also hurting people. Whole industries, actually. Like the people who act as its gods, it creates and destroys in their image. It can be biased and prejudiced and innovative and beautiful and ethical and transparent and honest. It can learn and develop and change and evolve. It can become worse. Or better. It depends on the guide.

Software developers are creators, too. We just speak a different sort of language. Are they all going to listen? I’d be naive if I thought so. But if enough of them do, we’ll be a hell of a lot better off.

So that’s my goal every day. To help people in tech understand these aren’t just points of data fed to a machine. To encourage them to slow down for five minutes so they might better understand the base of that LLM learned to speak human by STEALING from a human. From someone like you. Like me. From someone who had a dream.

A dream just like theirs, really.

Am I angry? Yes. Today more than other days. Honestly, I started this blog to be a seething commentary about Shakspir and AI and all the shit tech keeps stealing from us. But as I wrote, I realized I only feel sad. And tired. Maybe a little scared, too. I’ve fought so hard for my dream and I’m not ready to give it up.

From that springs hope. Hope for ethical, responsible AI. Hope that we can find common ground. Hope that we’ll be able to understand one another if tech can slow down and maybe we can all sit down and work this out together.

Before we destroy all the data. Or all the dreams it holds.

Image of two faces staring at one another behind a binary code of data. Image via Pixabay.

AI and Art

Published on by aimeedavisauthor2 Comments

Author’s Note: Full disclosure, my full time job is in software (healthcare sector). I’m the Vice President of Compliance, meaning I’m highly involved in data security and data sourcing. I live and breathe data issues not only in my publishing life but in my 8-8 (ha!) as well.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your jurisdiction should you require legal advice. These opinions are my own and are not intended to represent my employer.

The [Copyright] Act “reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts.”

Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151 (1975)

Right now, a bot is scraping this for my words to train a machine to sound like me. Well, not like me specifically, because I’m a nobody, but like a human who is well-read and well-studied. A human who happened to get an 800 on the English portion of the SAT. Who has a degree in English literature from a highly ranked university. Who has written sixteen or more books. Who has a literary agent. Who has spent seemingly endless waking moments since she was four chasing the dream of becoming a published author. Who has sacrificed other dreams, other lives, other paths in that pursuit. Who has cried, screamed, bled, sweat, studied, pulled all nighters, read millions of words, wrote millions of words, all pushing toward that singular goal.

Thirty-one years of language to eat. Steal. Regurgitate for a profit I’ll never see.

No big deal.

Bonus, it will also get a real legal citation it didn’t just make up. You’re welcome, ChatGPT.

It’s hard to figure out how to come at this topic, honestly. There’s a legal angle. What are the four factors that make a copyrighted work “fair use?” A technical angle. What is data scraping? A large language model (“LLM”)? An emotional angle. Why are writers and artists and actors so pissed? A philosophical angle. What does it even mean for something to be art?

I know them all. Each one pumps through my rapidly beating heart, coursing through my veins, itching to be freed through my fingers. Tabs fly open as I try to discern what angle I’ll take. On my right screen, tabs upon tabs upon tabs of Westlaw copyright cases. On my left screen, emails and articles about LLM and NLP (natural langauge processing) and the differences between the two. Techopedia ready to go, to explain. All the while, thoughts of that horror movie M3GAN flash through my mind.

Does AI write itself as the villain, I wonder?

Perhaps that’s how we know it truly is starting to come alive…

Something shudders through me. An echo. A whisper against the back of my neck. Somewhere, a ripple.

A droplet of water starts a ripple on top of a book. Image sourced via Pixabay.

My ADHD flies into overdrive. Speared on by the unknown. The unseen. Desperate. Trying to outpace a thing I know I cannot outrun.

On the right screen, I open the Author’s Guild’s open letter to generative AI leaders: Open AI; Alphabet; Meta; Stability AI; IBM; Microsoft—God there are so many already, since yesterday it seems—begging them to stop this madness, to pay writers their fair share. Another tab. The NPR article about median writers’ income for 2022 being $23,000. Poverty levels for the US for 2022. $13,590 for an individual. $18,310 for two. $23,030 for three. There it is. Poverty comes quickly. A single child and a spouse not working for whatever reason, there are so many reasons these days. A single parent and two kids. Options there, too. Nevermind I don’t know anyone who can live off $23,000 on their own in Philadelphia and publishing doesn’t pay for an author’s healthcare.

Our dreams. Our dinner. Our lives. Our livelihoods. Is there nothing they can’t have?

They’re the newage Ursula, stealing our voices and our princes and our happily ever afters. There’s probably a book there somewhere if the bots don’t scrape it first.

My neck aches. I press my fingers into the place where my skull meets my spine, molding my skin like clay. Skin. Clay. Sleep. My stomach growls, reminding me of my humanity. I ignore it. Move forward.

I’ve written this before. Literally and metaphorically. I’ve been drafting it in my mind. But a draft I spent hours on also disappeared. I thought about giving up. It doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t keep up. But it has to come out. I’m angry enough to write it again. And again. And again. Our dreams are being fed to the machine while we aren’t being paid enough to feed ourselves.

Virginia Woolf comes to mind. Money and a room of one’s own is needed to write fiction. Art is for the economically privileged. It always has been. Does it surprise us that art was the first to fall victim to Silicon Valley?

The fair use doctrine permits courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would stifle the very creativity which that law is designed to foster.

Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990)

So far, there are concrete answers. What is fair use. What is LLM and NLP. Why are authors and artists and actors mad.

What is literature, though. That has me frozen.

Except… maybe there aren’t concrete answers for everything.

I turn to the case the Author’s Guild has cited, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc v. Goldsmith, 143 S.Ct. 1258 (May 18, 2023). In it, the court cites to Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Can series.

Painting of Campbell's Black Bean Soup done by Andy Warhol.
From the case: Figure 7. A print based on the Campbell’s soup can, one of Warhol’s works that replicates a copyrighted advertising logo. Image from Westlaw. © Andy Warhol.

The court notes the purpose of the Campbell’s logo and label was commercial: to advertise soup. Warhol’s purpose in reproducing the image was the opposite: to comment on consumerism. Therefore, the use was fair.

Controversial statement but… I wonder if the designer of the label, someone who was presumably a real human who didn’t profit off the can label nearly as much as Warhol profited off the reproduction of the soup label, finds that particularly fair.

I wonder if that person cares they are unknown for their creation while Warhol is known for its reproduction.

I wonder if I am also afraid of AI replacing me into anonymity.

Art is my only potential legacy, after all.

Pertinent to this discussion, I googled “Who designed the Campbell’s soup logo” and Google highlighted Andy Warhol despite his name not making an appearance in my search because hi, bots. Also, people apparently ask if Andy Warhol designed it. Just saying. But for the record, Dr. John T. Dorrance created the logo in 1897. In 1898, Herberton L. Williams swapped the orange and blue (yikes) colors out for red and white because he saw Cornell’s colors at a football game and liked them better. Herberton later became the company’s treasurer, comptroller, and assistant general manager, so probably we don’t have to cry too hard for that guy.

Is it the intent of our art that makes it art, then?

Because as someone who has spent a lot of time in writing workshops listening to snobbery about the bastardization of literature due to genre fiction’s pandering to commercialization; who has also spent a lot of time listening to programmers talk about programming rules that sound a lot like intent, let me tell you about how that is a slippery slope.

The court goes on.

The Court of Appeals noted, correctly, that ‘whether a work is transformative cannot turn merely on the stated or perceived intent of the artist or the meaning or impression that a critic—or for that matter, a judge—draw from the work. [O]therwise, the law may well recogniz[e] any alteration as transformative.'”

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 143 S.Ct. 1258 (May 18, 2023) (Internal Citations Omitted)

Not intent then. Or at least not entirely.

Relief floods me.

Still, legality and literature have entangled in my mind. Day job and dream job comingling again.

What makes something art.

Life.

The answer is life.

It’s a falsity that you must suffer to create art. But you must live. My art requires suffering because that’s my lived experience. All that’s truly required, however, is a lived experience. Write what you know. You.

Art is about the individual life experience. The individual voice. The individual expression. Not a little of me and a little of you and a little of him and a little of her and a little of them strewn together to create one voice, one story, one experience. Art requires many singular voices and stories and experiences. Canon but more importantly, culture, then becomes that body of singular works. The thousand, single stories. Then a thousand more. Art isn’t a single story put together by a thousand voices. That’s what creates the danger Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns of in that TED talk. The danger of the monolith. AI puts together experiences that cannot be unified or reconciled. That’s exactly what marginalized voices have been fighting against except so much worse. It’s the stripping of language of all its nuance. All its individuality.

We have forgotten.

Words have power.

We have to pay people appropriately, so they can wield them well.

Maybe then we will remember.

And wake.