Is it October already?
No. No it is not. But it’s almost time for THAT OCTOBER, my 1984-set YA crime thriller.
We’re only a week or two or so from the book being ready to publish, in both paperback and electronic versions. We’ve been working on proofs this week. The cover’s ready to go.
When I started writing THAT OCTOBER in 2021, I wondered if we’d ever get to this point.
The first words I wrote on the book remain mostly unchanged:
I’ll keep you updated!
Yesterday (March 20, 2025) I wrote here about discovering two of my four co-authored true crime books were among those pirated through LibGen for AI training.
(Scroll down to read that entry.)
This morning, a quick update: Yesterday it was said that more than 2 million books, articles and academic papers were pirated. Today Authors Guild, a writers collective, says that number is actually 7.5 million.
Authors Guild (I’m not a member, but I might join) has really stepped up, as did the Atlantic, the magazine that called a lot of attention to the piracy this week and included a search function. It was certainly known that LibGen – which may be working with or at the behest of Meta, those wonderful people behind Facebook and Instagram, in this AI training theft was doing this, but I think this flew under the radar until this week.
A class action lawsuit is in the works, but Authors Guild provided a link to a form that writers can fill out to ask that their work be removed.
Here’s the Authors Guild piece:
https://authorsguild.org/news/meta-libgen-ai-training-book-heist-what-authors-need-to-know/
Solidarity!
As a writer, I find AI an intensely bad thing. Yeah, it’s momentarily distracting and amusing to be scrolling through social media and see what are obviously AI-generated images of a horrible, horrible person licking the feet of an equally horrible person, or even to see some fanboy’s imagining of what a Justice League movie would look like if it were made in the 1960s.
Then you realize that this is AI and valuable natural resources are being used to run servers that create these images. Not to mention that real, actual artists – and in the case of the written word, writers – could be put out of work by this.
I first had some foreboding realizations about the effect AI might have on my work a few months ago when I went looking for one of my pieces for CrimeReads, so I could post a link to it, and realized that Google AI had generated bullet points of my articles. Why would someone need to click through to CrimeReads when they could just read the AI interpretation of what the site’s writers had written?
I was aware that some writers were saying they believed entire books of theirs had been used for AI training.
I was concerned about that because I know a lot of writers. I thought no one would possibly pirate and upload my little true crime books. Who would need that?
Then, on March 20, the Atlantic published a story about the 2-million-plus books, articles and scientific papers that have been added to Library Genesis, or LibGen, which is what Wikipedia calls a “shadow library” of file-shared work, including work that is not available digitally.
One of my writer friends said a couple of her books were there. Another had 15 of her 19 books pirated on LibGen.
The Atlantic offered a real public service that allowed readers to search to see if their work, or the work of someone they know, was uploaded to LibGen for AI training.
Here’s a screen shot of my search results using the link in the Atlantic.
I found two of the four true crime books I co-wrote with Douglas Walker on there, using the Atlantic’s search engine.
I later found what purports to be LibGen’s own search portal and could not find these two books. Had they been taken down in the meantime? Was there some mistake? It seems hard to imagine that the Atlantic got that wrong. Based on that article, I saw dozens of writers, some of whom I know, posted that they had also found their books on the site.
It’s unclear what to think about what’s there and what’s not, but there’s no question that pirated work hurts writers and publishers who might not be able to sell copies of books if people can get them for free. Since shit flows downhill, that trickles down to harm for writers, that’s for sure.
We’re all still figuring this out. It’s been pretty clear for a while that AI-generated art and writing is bad for the planet – servers use a lot of water to cool to create AI – and bad for writers. I suspect it’s also bad for consumers, but then I was never one to snap up pirated books and art and have been pretty skeptical of that inclination.
Brave new world, hell. This seems like a very cowardly ploy.
Hollywood is forever looking for variations on Sherlock Holmes stories, although the “Sherlock” series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a Brit production overseen by Mark Gatiss) is very hard to top. “Elementary” did a good job of modernizing the Arthur Conan Doyle detective and “House” focused the mystery to medical conditions diagnosed by a Sherlockian-level grump doctor.
Now there’s two series, one more directly tied to the Sherlock mythos, that cast Holmesian logic as medical diagnosis.
The more directly Conan Doyle-connected is “Watson,” starring Morris Chestnut in a very appealing turn as John Watson, who is running an elite clinic in the wake of the Reichenbach Falls confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis James Moriarty. Watson suffered a head injury as he tumbled into the water trying to save Holmes. Now he’s trying to recover, make a new life for himself and, as of the second episode, doesn’t realize that Moriarty isn’t dead and means to bring Watson down.
As we know from the Sherlock canon, the Falls were not the end of Holmes, so I’m wondering how long before the detective shows up to assist his best friend?
The cast is good but the show has some of the faults of network shows in that everything is explained too explicitly to ensure audiences who are barely watching the show while scrolling on their phones catch what’s going on.
Even if it is less Holmes-related, “Doc” is the better series for me right now. Molly Parker, from “Deadwood” and “Lost in Space,” plays a doctor who lost her memory of the past eight years after a head injury. (Lot of that going around.)
Now she must navigate a return to a personal life that, for her, is where she left it eight years ago. (Spoilers.) She doesn’t remember that one of her children died, she and her husband divorced, she began a new relationship and her former friend is now an enemy.
Parker is, like Chestnut, just incredibly appealing. I’d watch another couple of seasons of “Lost in Space” featuring her as Maureen Robinson if I could. And what wouldn’t we all give for several more seasons of “Deadwood?” “Doc” might be the best Molly Parker fans will get, and that’s pretty good in its own right.
You’ve seen the cover for my 1984-set YA crime novel THAT OCTOBER by now. Incredible art by Sara McKinley, who can be found on Instagram as @saramckinleyart.
Now here’s Sara’s back cover for the book, and both the front and back have blurbs from authors wonderful enough to read THAT OCTOBER and say a few kind words.
They include Libby Cudmore, Julia Scheeres, Heather Levy and Asha Greyling.
Here’s the back cover:
One of the most fun things for a writer to do is “fan cast” characters from their story or novel with actors. Fan-casting is fun because you can pick anybody, living, aged or deceased, who you pictured in your head during the writing. (Readers do this too!)
I’m lucky my friend and very talented artist Sara McKinley was able to capture my four lead characters after reading my novel THAT OCTOBER and seeing some photographs I sent her.
Here’s four of the main characters and the actors who I pictured when i was writing.
From left to right:
Brittany Murphy as Toni, kind-hearted and stalwart friend who arranges for a psychic reading by her mom to help solve the murder mystery at the heart of the book.
Anjelika Washington as Jackie, brave and smart, she finds out that there are secrets that can shatter her family.
Younger Jared Padalecki as Michael, Jackie’s brother who’s prone to charging at a problem – or an enemy.
Brec Bassinger as Sammi, resourceful and popular, the girl everyone falls in love with – except the one person she loves.
My novel THAT OCTOBER is a 1984-set YA crime book about high school friends who band together to investigate when a friend is killed and another is taken. They find that the adults in their Indiana town seem strangely slow to act to solve the mystery and bring their friend home.
THAT OCTOBER is publishing soon. More fan-casting to come!
Hey y’all! Welcome to my new site.
It’s a work in progress and will definitely be in progress for a while, but the point is to let people know about my new 1984-set YA crime novel THAT OCTOBER and my other writing.
Don’t worry, there’ll still be pop culture stuff – hence the vintage “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” slide above. The Carson show used these and many other designs as bumpers going into and out of commercials back in the day.
And it’s appropriate for right now anyway, when there’s more to come for this site.
Welcome!
My friends and I were home video and videocassette fiends. We all had VCRs – my best one was a deluxe stereo model that cost $800 at one-time Indiana appliance dealer HH Gregg – and the highlight of many evening was watching videos.
Now, I taped a lot of stuff over-the-air. I taped music videos, not only off MTV but also NBC’s Friday Night Videos, USA’s Night Flight but especially the all-night Friday and Saturday night music video blocks on TBS. Those were the best, in my opinion, because TBS just aired music videos in those overnight shows. Lots of them and no extraneously stuff.
For many years after, I had boxes of videocassettes of music videos. And yeah, I watched them, believe it or not. Many videos of the era were silly but quite a few were actually pretty good visualizations.
I recorded a number of TV shows, like “Miami Vice” every week. But probably the oddest video library I accumulated were uncut episodes of David Letterman’s old NBC “Late Night” show.
Without commercials. Yes, I stayed up late every night and watched the show, using my remote to cut commercials.
Did I go back and watch those videocassettes? Um, no. No I did not.
I don’t have any of my videocassettes anymore, or at least not more than a handful that had some actual personal video recordings. Most of my tapes went into the dumpster years ago.
Would I watch them if I still had them? No, probably not. The picture and sound quality would seem awful now.
But there’s something intriguing to think about all those hours of personally curated and edited TV.
And a little crazy too.
keithroysdon 