TOP OF MIND I teach a class for USC, in the Architecture Department, and I’ve learned one thing these past few years. If I don’t keep up reviewing student assignments, I will be buried. For example, this past Monday, after USC’s spring break, I had 40 assignments to review and … read more

There are a lot of fun community plugins to play around with in Obisdian. (bad)

There are a lot of fun community plugins to play around with in Obisdian. (good)

Back in 2009, when I joined Twitter and Facebook, started a blog, and signed on to The Huffington Post as an unpaid contributor, the online world was much happier. Total strangers commented on my blog, often thoughtfully. Blog comments now are mostly for scammy marketers or angry trolls, or bots, … read more

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

[Francis Bacon](https://submittedforyourperusal.com/2008/10/30/sometimes-its-ok-to-skim/)

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway. (James Baldwin) read more

From Sounds Profitable/The Download Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted a short video demonstrating an upcoming feature for Spotify: artificial voice translation. According to Ek, the tech translates podcast episodes into alternate languages using AI to imitate the podcaster’s original voice. No further … read more

Is A.I. a kind off fairy tale genie that will unlock all of our dreams? Or is A.I. a tool of maximum efficiency that will be used by our bosses to trim the herd of unnecessary workers? An essay by Ted Chiang, titled Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?, makes this compelling argument: A.I. sure will … read more

Hello, I wanted to send out a final reminder that my newsletter, The Waveform, is folding up shop and ascending to newsletter heaven, or wherever newsletters go when they aren’t published any longer. This is the last edition you’ll receive from me. It’s the end, but if you look at it another way, … read more

Did you know I wrote a book about what can happen in the near future? The themes and topics in my novel are AI, corporate surveillance, and the climate crisis. A lot of what I wrote in the book is coming true faster than I thought possible. This is #1 in a series of posts about how my future … read more

Reupping this because it still works. It’s a post from 23 June 2019. Take a look at this. It’s by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago when I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line like “he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning … read more

No word count today, but instead working on continuity. Making a mind map of where the characters are and when they leave the story, by death or desertion.

Entropy reduction today 165 #WordCount. Passed 100,000 overall word count today. 110,000 is the goal and I’m about a month ahead of schedule.

Entropy reduction has been … reduced this week. Forces of chaos are gaining.

15APR 560 #WordCount
17APR 864
18APR 1290
19APR 0

But today is not over, and I will have a word count to post later.

“Climate change fiction” is a thing, even though many readers might not know it yet. It’s a category! Readers may discover books like The New Wilderness by Diane Cook, or The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, or books you’ve written, and not realize they are part of the same category … read more

I was a guest on the Care More Be Better podcast to talk about eco-anxiety and my book Surrender. The host Corinna Bellizzi and I spoke about facing the consequences of our love of tech, evaluating the real value of futurist projects, the problems with “tech bro” companies, and what we can all do to … read more

I did an interview for the Care More Be Better Podcast about my book, Surrender. We talked about eco-anxiety, what progress has turned out to be, and how I wrap those themes in the story of the book. ==> Surrender Your Eco-Anxiety With Lee Schneider, Author, Podcaster, Producer And Director

The book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is my next nonfiction read. It seems relevant now that conversations with chatbots have taken over the imaginations of some of our best and brightest. Folks like Ben Thompson and Kevin Roose, in their conversations with the Bing chatbot, have … read more

Hello! My new science fiction novel Surrender is available everywhere now, listed by Bookshop.org, Book Depository, and Amazon. Wow. I will do an audiobook also, but not for a few months. I’ve hired a publicist, who is going to be working on pitching to influencers, working the big Amazon machine, … read more

Anyone who creates public work today is in a race for human attention. You may not have asked to be in the race, or even know that you’re running in it; but you are. Technology has become the nervous system for everything. When you’re building attention for what you do, you have to use tech. … read more

This, for me, is where Scrivener really shines. If you want to nerd out on the structure of your novel, know when scenes are happening in the timeline, know who’s in them, and color code everything, it is absolutely the way to go. I may throw out 30% of these scenes, and will rewrite all of … read more