What's this?

A journal of progress (or lack of it) on getting the sci-fi book self-published and "one last edit"ed prior to that. ("The Old Script" was its working title, taken from the final lines of this Peter Boyle poem).

Skip to the end for the latest; it's a working doc.

Top bits

Title ideas (more of em)

Sarracenia. (Bit beat over head with metaphor?)

Your blood is our blood. (Anything with 'blood' in, hmmph.)

Getting-it-into-the-world journal

First bits of telling people about the self-publish plan [23.10.25]

I have a post about the plan. Err. Who to tell? Let's start somewhere / keep a record.

• Facebook - starting with Sheffield sci-fi and fantasy group (not meeting at the mo but FB still going). Draft:

  • Hi folks, hope you don't mind me posting here - I'm a Sheffield first-time sci-fi author just embarking on a self-publishing mission. I've written a post about the plan on my blog ("I wrote a sci-fi book about AI before chatGPT came out. Now what?") If you fancy followng along with the ups and downs (I'm aiming for 6 -9 months, let's see if that becomes years!) go to the blog and stick your email in the subscribe box (via the about page or top right). Any thoughts and prayers welcome!

• On the reddit self-publish weekly self-promotion thread. I can stick later posts on there too (I think). It's up, but probably need to put that there when week renews. Here.

Getting help! [24.10.25]

Writing community and help has been fckin vital in getting this thing done up to now. I need to cultivate more and pester people for advice along the way. So some ideas on what I'm doing next to keep that going / grow it.

• Gary Gibson, found via Jericho, but he'll get the full cut if going by his own site presumably. Worth just having an hour's chat to get things going. https://www.garygibson.net/#editing

• Chatting to Sheffield writers workshop peeps again (help get the slack lively again).

If I try to chat to Gary though, I could do with being clear on what I want. Do I know that? It keeps on changing a little. From "Just get closure so I can stop thinking out it" to "Actually, I believe in the book and want to maximise my chances of people reading it, and I'm willing to take the time to try and get it right, including horrible amounts of self promotion."

Redraft journal

Random thoughts

• Wall in John's rooms should probably already be holographic. We go on to show it's a thing in the auction. Should be here too, right? Or give reasons why not. John can choose/ask to dial it back. But then segues into something else happening that means he knows it's getting in his brain. What would that be?
• Show what happens with parents. The final split, which is going to be after Hill gets into school - happens when she's young, remember, and may involve having to go to different place, be with dad. It could be drifting apart at the point. The red toy exchange happens after that - is hill too small there?
• Just reading hexaflex again. Am reminded - part of what makes John's thread work is being carried along with what John's going through, seeing this from this POV. That's compelling in itself, some internal justification for its existence. The difficult is the psychological realism. How could someone possibly react in a situation like that? How can that be written about?

Figuring out changes #1 [28.10.25]

First post on this. SInce the last time I printed off a draft, I've:

1. Gone through that, scribbled, made some notes on things that might change.
2. Been adding any random thoughts to an oldscript note in SImplenotes
3. Also got a bsquillion oldscript-tagged bookmarks / evernote notes (that I'd like to pull out and then get rid of that app; little actual use to me).

What I need now is an actual sense of direction, maybe something resembling a plan. Otherwise this will go on forever and I'll never have a beer again.

A key question: just how much work do I think is possible/realistic? Also, what's sensible? At a certain point we get firmly into flogging-dead-cheval territory. Yes, there are ways to make it better. But there are opportunity costs for other things I might want to write/do.

Oooon the other hand... I do want to honour the book as much as I can. I do actually want to see if I can get it out there in some form that people might actually read.

On point #1, I thought I'd already noted those down. Apparently not. So let's maybe start with that. I probably also need to just read through again and remind myself of anything in the structure that might have faded in my mind.

What I think is a good idea vs bad idea:

• Trying to artificially graft story on.

• Versus finding organic ways to enhance plot that go with the grain of what the book's doing.

Obv, that artificial difference may not apply, but that's a useful way to think about it.

Notes from last read-through [1.11.25]

From the blue/red stripey notebook. Shit, I have to try and read my hand writing.

• Last note first, after returning months later: the opening is opaque and baffling. "How to do the same thing, or not at all? How to do in way that actually draws reader in? It's in there, just needs knocking about. Cf. p.130 "how important the story is". Nice idea for beginning too."

• Need better Ipai intro in first Hill section (think I've got plan for that, tying into making Tru better too).

• "Someone owns every concept and every story." ("Explain why seems dystopian but isn't," it says here!)

• More Tru: have him explain more about how exactly he got into debt. (Ties again to bigger aims for that char, the bet..) Who hard-sold him?

• Lab destruction - motivation is still tepid/opaque/out of the blue/out of place. Is it? All of that might need some rethinking, in combo with Tru. What actually are the stakes, is it possible to gain early understanding of why Hill might do that? (Or was it a pantsing too far?)

  • What would be compelling? What's whole hill structure/arc?

• p.84: Hill - "Work was destroyed". Can I think through a better thing to convey the hole she's in? What kind of hole is she actually in anyway? This is classic Princess falls on hard times type thing isn't it?

  • How to get the reader into Hill's head on this? Plus, does it actually make sense? (Did something else pre-date it, how does it fit with fam history?)
  • Actually does get good post-lab-destroy: Just gotta get there. "Proposal" is great, lab destroy does work as instigating wotsit. But...

• p.93: "Petulance so powerful": piece Hill's story together. [Huh? Make it make sense with everything else?]

• Really need to show how much losing IP access fucks things. That's the job of the Tru thread, no? Do I actually know how it fucks things?

• 129: "needs sunlight of attention". Is there any way to get nature of IP thing right at beginning? Again, every Hill section should be doing that at the start. Go through and be clear on what each is achieving in rel2 that. Write that down. That's in "the plan" - can def get some of it into e.g. the Axiom Hack and the exhibition. And how it differs still from the street, its relative safety and playfulness?

• Says here: hmm - street convo in 'seed planting' could do half the job of the axiom hack seminar, maybe. Most of it. Could be right near start, properly show off the voice system.

  • How though? What would happen near the start? Does Tru actually come along, bring someone else? That might work, esp if he's coming to egg on, push Hill into making mistakes. He might bring someone who doesn't have so many restrictions. Leveraging connections. (Can he pass paper notes, or is that not allowed for some reason? Could make that entertaining - Hill can call him out, he can shrug, his accomplice can say, "There's nothing to stop me saying what I want. What I want just happens to be what's written on this piece of paper." But then, what is Tru trying to achieve? Win a bet? Maybe. Maybe he's not so nice after all.

• This is nice to read: "Am reading A-B and remembering why I wrote this, how much it does exactly what I wanted."

• "Can I up the AI gen aspects of Terry Saucer?" Yeah there's a lot there to think through too.

• 179: How to sell IP - where Tru tells Hill a lot of stuff it might be good to show. [Let's see - full check on Tru's thread, may well be possible to do this as we go.] Instead, this scene could be picking apart what's happening.

• "Street" is confusing term, possibly? Better?

• More of an arc for Remzi: how to connect that to the levels? What's his relation with street level? Am I clear in my own mind all the diff social rels there, layers in the school, where everyone fits and what their function is in the story? Esp given I want Tru to have a larger role there.

• Says here: "Consider all points Tru making p.178." What are those? Just I think about his and Hill's differences.

• I could do with doing something to make the school more tangible, weirder, more baroque. A large dark academia rabbit hole awaits.

• Some of the street people Hill connects to - tie to what Rem/Hill do, then maybe have it show up with cx2 what John's layer becomes.

• Better word than "context"? Clique?

• p.183 = good (IP / getting laid). Something like that nearer to the beginning? Lay out intro to how the whole system works?

• Predator prey: give them a touch more life? [Do they really need it? Dunno. Connect to John's memories? (The shark memory, introduce the ocean book earlier, so it's not so suddenly introduced. And can be John applying memory at different levels.) Shadow of sharks, all teeth and knife-sharp focus? Add noise, hiding in dark of trees.

• Says here: "brief chat with I + B at start." (Of predator prey. Why / what for?)

• Cauliflower: path of discovery could do with being smoothed out and clarified. Reader needs to be clear why we're now talking about DNA. Depict actual DNA strands and RNA reading. Take time. [And think about what this is trying to achieve - might be that dropping the romanesque is sensible. Who the hell is going to know what I'm talking about there? But what else would do the job? Something else that turns up again later.]

  • Hexaflex: "You saw how vital geog is for protein function." Depict that in cauli plz, in some way.

• One millimetre: it's only a page, but how the new IP thing is communicated is still overly flowery. Would prefer something else. See note P.391. [OK, what does that say? "Can this be massively cut down? It's confusing and self-indulgent." Well that doesn't sound good!] One suggestion I have here: have Hill/John translate Ipai's pompous twattery into pisstaking English.

  • Ooo note: same page, some def franken overtones here on how the skin's assembled from different people. I can say something about trying to find all commonalities, use some statistics language.

• Says here p.423, "looking skin" got dropped. But it totally didn't, appears also on p.391. I do need to consider what I think the frankenskin thing is, how best to convey it (to myself included).

Other thoughts as they occur:

• The other animal people - they appear to make a single point but can't they do more? Be more of a part of what they all get combined to become? That does happen as John blends with them, but what does that mean for the connectome?

  • Ah yes, this turns up in previous notes: "J's false memories just make me think there's a better book where those connections have more plot meaning." Yes.

Things from simplenotes

Where I've been storing random thoughts as they've occurred.

..

Looking for ways to improve point of John peel. A thought: make John / Hill comms more explicit early on. John trying to help Hill find him, track him down, work out what's happening. That would allow Hill and Remzi to try to figure out more clues, and provide some basis for John to poke at things that might help reveal. Ipai still gets to know comms have been happening? That needs mulling too.

..

Richard Whittle: https://theconversation.com/what-could-burst-the-ai-bubble-267136

A thought off the back of that - can I trace a line of tech dev from this, through all the IP stuff, to the IPAI and voice system? [That part's a bit odd and extreme, but that's the fun thought experiment part.] p.s. I need to check Black Mirror hasn't yet done it!

..

John: wall is holographic. It's just him, easy nuff for 3D. Not until much later (house memories) that he's open that he knows it's his dad. I might want to get their mum into this story somehow better too.

That means changing what happens when it becomes apparent it's not just holographic, it's interacting with it. That has lots of possibilities including what ipai is pursuing. What are options here?

..

"This film suffers from what I call "mystery box syndrome" - it thinks that withholding information automatically makes a story compelling, regardless of whether the actual answers are worth the wait." https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1mnmshm/weapons_2025_am_i_missing_something_this_movie/

This is a good point. Mull. "Oh, they're brother and sister. Yeah that's a thing that could happen." That's less interesting, isn't it, than what we can get story-wise from that relationship, or how they try to find each other. Also letting the reader know early on (opening) means that's got some tension to it. But what to give away, what not to?

..

"Musk is selling science fiction. Hence the cyber truck design, the Murderbot androids, and HAL the computer AGI. It will be med beds next." https://www.ft.com/content/21ec5a5f-0e9a-49b9-b64d-9ebc88e70aa7?commentID=13b1fcbf-e51f-4890-9e56-0616390d1f75

As in: robot pods that cure you. Prob need a bit more background on that in my head for the book! Cf. Alysium [only thing holding back curing poor is not allowing it / artificial scarcity of healthcare.]

..

More on their mum and dad: maybe dad's lens / hologram tech was a key breakthrough for AI learning? Prob not cos we don't want that to be so recent... could that many changes happen that quickly. Would be good to involve / flesh out ma side too.

.. Back story - lean more into "AI was used to create structure that "solved" polarisation and emergent fascism" (subtly!) .. Second (?) John scene where he brings up his grandma's talkbox, mulls thinking Medic's a person - it's clumsy (and only there to link to later). I need to much more carefully think through what he says here and why / how it ties to the person idea I'm bringing up elsewhere (with mucho LLM overlap of course).

But how to do light-touch personhood thing? Maybe make it flippant. "I can anthropomorphise anything. I got guilt about taking my old washing machine to be scrapped. School trained us on this but I can't help it. I'm more like my grandma...." But the point? ..

For the Judy mulling. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4626276#paper-citations-widget See e.g. <file:///home/dano/Downloads/ssrn-5098708.pdf> - "Judge AI: Assessing Large Language Models in Judicial Decision-Making" (Will AI judges replace humans? Nope.)

.

It will need a better theory of provenance guarantees. Polly and Judy have that built in. (Just thinking about Dunt's concern here: "I got an image of the person compiling a series of Chat GPT inquiries. 'Please provide a list of the kind of people it would be suitable to approach about this topic, along with a short description of their professional work." " https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1833442&post_id=171638661&utm_source=post-email-title

In the book, that's not happening - which suggests something occurred to draw lines around what AI was and wasn't allowed to do, while AI manages it [sidepoint: someone has to point out - other places have vastly different approaches; that should be in the auction maybe... oh I say that below too]. I then need reasons why anyone would trust just voices over a phone. How does Judy/Polly monitor that, or say they do? If it's as strong as physics, how has Ipai got round it?

One idea then: used Bernard as a proxy, got far enough into the brain stuff to be able to use him. That gives him another small role. How can I make that as weird as possible? It also means he could even be in the room with Hill - the buzzer is the door. And that makes their meeting at the end more interesting.

The polly/judy conditions for the law may be watertight, so that Bernard work would have to fit - the speech would on some level need to be his. Also makes Medic saying "we did some hacky stuff", can hint at, is more fun. And then law updated after of course.

Or hint at that, but then it could just be an earpiece! Old fashioned way. Except that should be illegal right? Something in Judy that says: words "must originate from a human mind". These are the limits of agent use, just to protect ownership. How this changes the writers' room, I am not sure.

Yeah, no, make a really weird elaborate way around the physics-like legal restrictions. Judy/Polly not omniscient, and some protection in uni grounds still.

Oh yes of course - Dunt points out: "The Voight-Kampff test - basically the Turing test - is established to distinguish replicants from humans based on their emotional responses." So that needs a little thought about what we're saying here... [also, it's not basically the turing test!]

Other parts of the world can have very different mixes of this. Can lay out all the range of pol types - full dystopia, places with "free agents" etc. Can have some hint about how this particular settlement arose.

..

Writers room: they ban AI use (except that's ridiculous cos ipai manages it and entai makes it... entai!)

"But they're NOT their own thoughts." "They think they are tho."

So react when it appears Hill is cheating. "Are you using an earpiece? You fucker, that gets us banned!" "Wait though, we're winning." But then get over it when they see how much they're winning.

Update thought on that: it's a contrast to what's happened elsewhere, where entai is basically the monopolist, feeding off inputs from everywhere and churning out anything that's required. Think that through some more, and what relationship "creators" might want to have to that.

So they believe they're being authentic in this situation, despite it being a managed network (how do the talking heads for the shows work? Maybe it's shifted... if there ended up being a law meaning that "meaning" had to originate in human thought, for example.)

Which is maybe what several of the situations are about - checking for human input, but the blend of that with machines blah. Is there something interesting to do there?

The Writers' room should really bounce off this kind of thing: "I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax? "But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover — as Netscape was for me — but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html

..

Intro: make clear it's obvious things aren't going to turn out well for the protagonist, that it's obviously not face value. Link to reader somehow.

Via this linus vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGIpdiQrFDU 10'10'' - "AI is so wrongly used, when AI actually arrives, going to have to give it a different name" Interesting. So actually IPAI etc might have different name. What would it be? What are the options?

It's also interesting discussion of marketers "knowing what people will think when they hear AI", that they're doing it on purpose.

..

"The internet died not because people can be fooled by manipulated media - that's always been true. It died because synthetic media, like that created by Sora, ChatGPT, midjourney and others - can emulate human creativity at a scope and scale that is impossible for humans to engage with or sift through." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaVjQFMg7L0 Book: infopocalypse. Cites example of Russian tactic of flooding with any information just to drown signal with noise. "Generative A.l Is the nuclear bomb of the information age."

Some extra plot based on identity theft e.g Crispin Glover and others

..

Replace lecture scene with: same room, but new students. First class? Wowing them? Open day? IP rep has to be there to make clear how all that works for uni. Noah is... monitoring? (It's an exhibition, which is close to open day...)

Or actually viva: testing them openly. Think through how that mixes with where tech went re. How they use it. [Yes, like this. Public viva? Oh yes, again, see below!]

Gives chance for playing out some tired IPs e.g. Hill is playing the "rebel who refuses to tow the line" cliches etc etc (better versions of that!)

Maybe a mix of prospective students and IP reps. Mull.

AND: something like a Viva. Papers are absolutely besides the point now - maybe have a paper spat out / think about what knoweldge system would be there, but the point is -- Viva because have to guarantee human input into that knowledge creation. The entire exhibition is like this, as is auction of course. Think through a bit. Retrofit.

Use all this to better build up to Hill trashing lab. Why is uni now so headfucking that it'll get her to that point? Try and make severity of what's happened much more clear, so the lab itself is the effect of the inciting incident, not the thing itself.

Note: if it's Remzi's viva, the lab destruction sets them against each other, puts him in quite a different situation. What would it be / how would that play out? "They put my promotion on hold." "No!" Hmm not sure I want to lean further into academia nonsense TBH!

..

Band names tru bet: tie it to start with to something in next class, so there's stakes there. Then tie to things unravelling for hill, and tru's response.

Tru can also be a bit of gambler, partly why it went wrong for him. (Compare to Nate Silver / River thing?)

Across line, tru can make names up, other two refuse or become quiet. "Go on try." See a bit what happens. Explain context a bit.

Actually, expand this. Tie to point below about hierarchy in school itself. Tru illustrates point by making them play Band Names either side of the line. One addition: either an extra person, or probably Remzi doesn't have same privileges as Hill [no he doesn't before Viva!] - so actually it costs him on that side of the line. They don't know it's there. Remzi does.

That's not a bad idea - viva can be Remzi getting extra privileges. Or Hill. Gonna have to piece that together.

(Remzi makes sense as it'll give more opps for building in tensions between them, things to work from, rather than adding fourth person.)

And it makes more sense why they always go outside line.

And! Maybe tru needs girlf who's outside line cos of moral choice / authents (authentic humans only zero other input but then do they do work randomising? Do we see that?)

..

Difficulty of researching poisons given IPAI system...? (Or not actually - make the point that it's NOT about surveillance.)

..

Add in some people with a mildly fanatical devotion to making sure their creative endeavours are untouched by machine. [See above, Tru's girlfriend / boyfriend]

..

Animals stories and how they end up involving John: I think maybe nope. They have to have more reason, more actual plot reason, to exist, rather than just making a point about memory? Do they? But what? [Point about relative intelligence and personhood nonsense!]

..

Famous father thing should come up again for Hill, maybe in first class. But why? What consequences? Some already built in.

...

A class of people in the school (support, estate, cleaning) with no library privileges who can't speak quite so easily. Turn up after lab trashed, other points? More on the metabolism of the building. Is one of them... Bernie? Some reason for being there? [Ooo! Like!]

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_academia "One writer compared it to the contemporary cottagecore lifestyle aesthetic, saying that while cottagecore requires a home in the country and leisure time for crafting, dark academia's "simple act of putting on a blazer and reading Dostoevsky is far more doable."

Mulling, in relation to how the uni goes / Hill's rel to it, how she has to consiously shape herself and her view of herself given IPAI, and how that gets warped and twisted by Noah and others.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSecretHistory/comments/1akn5pf/the_secret_history_is_very_disappointing_but/ "the secret history doesn’t deconstruct dark academia, it is dark academia. it’s the popularity of the secret history (alongside the 2014 film kill your darlings) on tumblr during the early to mid 2010s that gave rise to the term “dark academia.” you can see both stories are very much about seemingly sophisticated and cultured university students going off the rails and committing brutal acts, hence the “dark” bit."

"But "dark academia" as the fashion/social trend isn't inevitably murderous. It's a cool aesthetic that people fetishise." Yeah - can imagine some people on the Street doing this, right? What's the uni's position to that? What am I doing with that?

..

"Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, the actor Julianne Moore, the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among 10,500 signatories of a statement from the creative industries warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a “major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods." https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/22/thom-yorke-and-julianne-moore-join-thousands-of-creatives-in-ai-warning

PERFECT. Then we get dev of AI driven systems to "make sure everyone gets to own their IP" and away we go. [So much more, what with other lawsuits, pirated books etc.]

..

Bernie: dupes Hill into "checking" that he's the person she's working with, not Ipai. Common protocols to check identity and she fails. Otherwise - why would she trust the other person as not AI? What's the crack here?

..

Use ZRAIN protein chat as opening? [What??]

LINKS! * https://www.careful.industries/blog/2025-4-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-ai * The language in this abstract is kind of exactly the nonsense that could happen at the auction plus in IPAI-academia. Just awful! How did we get there? Fitting into epistemes oh no I'm doing it! http://www.richard-hall.org/2024/02/15/generative-ai-and-re-weaving-a-pedagogical-horizon-of-social-possibility/

..

AI and IPAI: if LLMs don't "understand" language and meaning... what innovations led later AI to have symbolic understanding? How did it demonstrate it? (Issue of how to know, that overlaps with what IPAI is trying to do with John, and why digging deeper into the language side does actually overlap this overall story.) (And why Symbolic species is so key; and why I got tricked into thinking LLMs did have symbolic understanding.)

..

There's increasingly absolutely no way to separate AI output from human speech even if verbal? Entirely mixed. Same as diff betw those old shoe makers and newer tech; so the writers' room is a facet of that (tho an entirely weird and false one). See e.g. https://archive.ph/eMUYW

The written word - did it die? Is that why writers' room so weird? It's why vivas happening.

[How does that tie into John reading the book / writing there?]

..

Bouncing off this: the "going into your mind to achieve some story goal" cliche. https://youtu.be/4-pnloXSNrI?t=1787 How to do something with that that's actually interesting and useful and that does something good with the animal people? Hmmmm.

Broad headings of things to consider for final changes [3.11.25]

Including some thought on what's actually realistic and when to leave alone. Most of these I think can be keyhole surgery rather than butchery, but let's see. Some nabbed from above, some thought of since.

• John's thread:

  • Consider the whole thing, look for ways to develop more narrative drive. Difficult given its nature, but not impossible - there's a lot to tie to in the rest of the book. Various options including beginning the connection with Hill earlier, turning that more into a discovery process, figuring out the clues. It may not need that much.

• Provenance:

  • This needs more thought than I've given it. Hill wouldn't take a voice at face value. The simplenotes above cover a lot of this, but it might be an idea to make it foundational. E.g. the whole system is ostensibly built on protecting human IP, creation, provenance. And there's meant to be an impregnable line between that and automated systems. But... what have we got?

  • E.g. bouncing off "used Bernard as a proxy, got far enough into the brain stuff to be able to use him": the skin, Ipai can argue, is exactly a way to deepen provenance, make sure any IP captures the true source's creativity in a way that protects them. Hill: you're the one that breached the entire system and you're trying to sell us the cure? [That's a trope to IP too isn't it? I'll sell you the disease and the cure.]

• The bet:

  • What is this going to be? How does it thread through the story? It starts with the outside line setup, and the band names but...