Category: Essays

Cat Links Essays

Coming Soon: Fearless Worlds

Posted on kelzone

At this point I’m just waiting on the cover art and then I’ll be birthing my latest baby into the bookiverse. It’s been an interesting two years. That’s when I started the book, and the working title was All About AI. I wrote the first draft of it during the last NaNoWriMo event. At the time I was polishing (and trying to find a publisher for) Something About AI. Once that novel launched, I went back to its sequel and began the first round of editing. Cutting chapters, adding chapters, tweaking and reading bits and pieces to my critique group for their input, and then I had it where I felt I could live with it. Not that it was something that made me really proud, but that now wasn’t the time to pursue perfection. I’ll be honest, I’m no perfectionist. And I’m kind of lazy. And I know the novel, like the first one, has loads of dialog. But here’s the thing about dialog, people don’t skip it. I talked to a lot of power readers. I even attempted a survey on Substack to ask strangers, and every one of them said that they skip descriptions but not dialog. My writing will continue to get better and that means including more description in my stories and not skippable descriptions either, but right now, I needed to get my novel out. My dear friend (and a beta reader – the only one this time) wrote this to me: “Dude you have to publish. Because you wrote it before it started happening!!! You’re the first! Get it out there! With this new development on Reddit, you have to prove you were ahead of the Singularity!” Haha – of course I wasn’t the first, but we both knew what he meant. My

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Cat Links Essays, Short Stories

Shelter

Posted on kelzone

I’ve finished my AI Sequel novel and it’s going through editing but now I’m excited to start a new project  —  a compilation novel. This is the first chapter. From wikipedia: A compilation novel, often referred to as a short story cycle or composite novel, is a collection of short stories that are arranged to create a cohesive experience, where the stories can stand alone but also interrelate to form a larger narrative. This format allows for various themes or characters to connect across the stories, enhancing the overall reading experience. The order to shelter in place had been given five days ago. The new governor said that there were no essential workers; everyone had to stay inside. She said it was a perfect storm (the fourth this year) that seemed like God himself was telling everyone to stay inside and safe. True enough, this one was worse than the last three. This one was deadlier. My daughter, Beatriz, had called twice already today. She was worried about food. Despite all my advice and attempts to teach her, she never learned how to manage food or how to cook. She said it was old-fashioned and today everyone ate out or did Instacart or DoorDash — some such nonsense. She had just turned 23 and didn’t have a job but had her own apartment. Her father and I divorced five years ago. She was Daddy’s girl, and he supported her. Last year, when she graduated college, he helped her with an apartment and did all he could to help her find a job, too, but still nothing. I’d told her that a degree in psychology wouldn’t be enough, but he’d encouraged her. As a tech writer, I’d known it was all heading toward robotics and AI skills, but even I had to admit

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Cat Links Essays, Short Stories

Fall 2025 Winners – WritersWeekly 24-hr Short Story Contest.

Posted on kelzone

Well, I was hoping for a better position but being an Honorable Mention / Special Recognition winner of the Writers Weekly Fall 24-hour short story contest is okay. I’ll take it!! I did a search to see how many, on average, submit to the Writers Weekly contests and AI told me they have a limit of about 500. I was hoping it was more. ha! Anyway, I love the 24hr format and will try again in the Winter contest. For your entertainment, here’s my entry. The Blood Moon Two brothers, Lloyd and Wyatt Bernard, sat in decrepit folding chairs on a sagging porch. The boys were tired after a day of fixing the family still. They took turns swigging from an old crockery jug. This part of Kentucky had once been a moonshining capital and a business legacy for the Bernard family going back generations. Now, business was slow. The rotting porch faced a well-used dirt road, and beyond lay a field of rotting pumpkins. Behind, to the west, stood a ten-acre wood of pin oak and felled trees mostly covered with overgrown kudzu. Posted signs every ten feet read: No Trespasin, and we mean it! The thicket made access to the shack housing the ancient still nearly impossible. Lloyd pointed to the sky. “Oh shit, Wyatt, look at that.” Wyatt nodded. “Yeah, we better get inside soon; the moon is turning.” He handed the jug to Lloyd, who slung it up for a swig in a single smooth motion. He sat the jug on the bleached, splintering floorboards between them. Lloyd agreed. “Oh yeah. That bigass blood moon is gonna be turning orange soon.” Wyatt’s eyes squinted as he tried to adjust his eyesight. “The hell is that?” Lloyd strained to see, then echoed, “The hell…?” A young girl

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Cat Links Essays

Thoughts on the Dr. Roman Yampolskiy Interview

Posted on kelzone

Roman V. Yampolskiy (Russian: Роман Владимирович Ямпольский) is a computer scientist at the University of Louisville, mostly known for his work on AI safety and cybersecurity. He is the founder and as of 2012 director of Cyber Security Lab, in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering of the University of Louisville. Source: wiki Steven Bartlett interviews Dr. Roman Yampolskiy on his The Diary of a CEO podcast which Spotify Wrapped ranked fifth in its list of the top five most popular podcasts in 2024. The interviews are always long, giving the listener (or viewer if you watch on YouTube) a good sense of the person being interviewed but this video is only about 20 minutes. As I’m collecting my thoughts, character arcs, conflicts, and other pieces of my Something About AI sequel (not yet named, I just call it Book 2) I’ve been watching a few interviews like this. It’s a way for an outsider like me to keep up with what’s happening in the AI space. These are some of my thoughts about this particular interview. Yampolskiy uses a term I haven’t heard before but now I won’t forget it: Uncontrolled Super Intelligence 1:07 Here we’re inventing a replacement for human mind. We are inventing a replacement for human mind. I’m intrigued by the idea that never before have humans invented something that can invent things. You rarely see AI referred to in this way. It’s easy to see how, in this context, AI can take over all the major aspects of human civilization. 1:58 “We as humans have this built-in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent.” This is something I’ve marveled about with regard to climate destabilization. In this case it’s not just

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Cat Links Essays

Save Yourself Some Heartache

Posted on kelzone

I was about nine years old when I wrote my first story, “Sawdust Tears”. It was my expression of grief over the leveling of our neighborhood woods. A place where all us kids played pretend, had a rigged up clubhouse, bike paths, and daily imagined our fantasies. It got leveled for a gas station. I let my father, my favorite parent, read the story and he laughed. I learned right then to not trust family and friends when it came to understanding or even appreciating my writings. This has been a lesson that has served me well through my life. It is a lesson in expectations. If you are a writer you will find that you, hopefully, have a handful of friends and family members who support you. Perhaps they’ve never even read what you’ve written but they are proud of you for your accomplishment. And, again, hopefully there will be a few who do and they’ll provide helpful constructive criticism and motivational support. Those people are treasures. I hope you have a few, like I do. That said, the vast majority will not. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve asked someone to read something or they’ve asked to read something and then the whole matter simply disappears never to be discussed again. Even if I’ve sent said masterpiece (ha!) to them. It is very important you not hold a grudge against these folks and here’s why. If you’re a reader you know that there are books you love, page turners you can’t put down, books you want to love but just cannot get going (I had to start Iain M. Banks’ Against A Dark Background four times!), books you try to read but just can’t understand (for me olde English kind of stuff), and stuff you just

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Cat Links Essays

What About Copyright?

Posted on kelzone

A year or two ago I bought licenses for using Publisher Rocket and also Atticus so I am on Dave Chesson’s email distribution list. Mr Chesson is the CEO of Aegis Investments, and the founder of Publisher Rocket, Atticus and more. In an email received today, subject: Why copyright registration just became non-negotiable, Dave had this to say: “Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, scraped hundreds of thousands of books from pirate sites. When the case went to court, the judge ruled that using pirated books isn’t fair use. The result? About 465,000 books were identified as part of the case, and the rights holders of those books are now eligible for payments of around $3k per title. But here’s what most people missed: Not every impacted author gets a check. Only those with registered copyrights are eligible.” So, is it true? Is this something else indy authors need to do? I had checked this out previously and from the copyright.gov/engage/writers page they state the following: If you want to dive into this deeper, on the Copyright.gov site, specifically the registration of literary works page, there are a bunch of resources for your learning experience that are as follows. Rather watch than read? The U.S. Copyright Office also has a YouTube channel. So, I thought, what the hell. I’ll do it. Some notes from the process are as follows. Here is where you create an Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) account: https://eservice.eco.loc.gov/siebel/app/eservice/enu?SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=VBC+User+Registration+Initial+Form+View&SWERF=1&SWEHo=&SWEBU=1&SWEApplet0=VBC+User+Registration+Initial+Form+Applet&SWERowId0=VRId-0 Once I logged in I used the One Work by One Author I went through the eCO process and here are some of the decisions I made. After I finished I realized I’d probably made a mistake. I have two ISBNs assigned for my novel. One for the hardcopy paperback, the other for the eBook. I decided

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