I do not use generative AI to write.

I also don’t use it to edit, brainstorm, summarize, or for any other purpose related to writing.

The amount of AI involvement in anything you see on this blog, or in any of my published writing, is, and always will be, zero.

I write because I love writing. I’ve loved it since I was a kid, and I will always love it.

I’m not in this for the money. Even if I were, I still wouldn’t use AI, because why should someone pay money to read something I couldn’t be bothered to write?

There are, of course, many reasons not to use generative AI. It was trained on stolen intellectual property (including my own work and that of many other writers). It’s bad for the environment (data centers use water that we need elsewhere and ruin quality of life for their neighbors). It’s untrustworthy, prioritizing task completion over accuracy.

But most importantly, generative AI is exactly as its name states: artificial. Writing, and all forms of art, are most impactful when they communicate real human emotion and experience. A robot can’t do that. It can only fake it. I only have so many years on this earth, and I’m going to live them authentically.

Recently I’ve had two microfiction stories published with 100-Word Fiction. Both are free to read, and both have accompanying audio recordings if you prefer to listen.

The Vine That Strangled the South is the story that won me third place in last year’s NYC Midnight 100-Word Microfiction competition.

The Warlock’s Tome is about an ancient book with a mind of its own — and a hunger to expand its reach to modern readers.

It’s always a fun challenge to pack a big story into a small word count, and these are two of my personal favorites.

Sometimes, a year after you write a horror story about two-headed eels in the Chicago River, a fisherman catches an eel in that same river:

Several local news outlets reported on the catch, because it’s kind of a big deal. It means good things about the health of Chicago’s once-polluted waterways. American eels are born in the North Atlantic ocean, and those suckers travel for years and years, miles upon miles, through the Great Lakes and other waterways, to reach their ultimate fresh-water destinations. According to Friends of the Chicago River, the Great Lakes population of American eels had declined more than 90% over the last 50 years due to habitat loss, dams, and overfishing. Now it might be coming back.

While writing “The River’s Revenge,” which appeared in Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories, I searched for the perfect critter to get caught in an underwater trap and scare the bejesus out of the people who found it. I quickly settled on eels, but my fictional eels’ two-headedness came later, when a song randomly led me into a store that sold me this ring:

That’s how creativity flows sometimes. You take inspiration from what you find around you.

Anyway, fisherman Ben Gorahschenko’s eel had only one head. But he threw it back to swim another day. So the next time you’re kayaking, pontoon-boating, or taking an architecture tour, keep an eye out. You might see one of these wiggly creatures yourself, and if you feed it some neon-green relish from your Chicago-style hot dog, who knows what could happen.

I adore it when publishers wax creative about their utter disdain for people trying to pass off AI-generated writing as real creative work. Exhibit A: Ghoulish Tales declaring that gen-AI “writers” will be hunted down for sport.

Here are three more for the hall of fame.

Tangled Wilderness rightfully points out that generative AI material cannot be copyrighted, so you shouldn’t get mad if they blast your “writing” all over the internet:

Story Unlikely goes so far as to charge penalties for the use of generative AI:

And Sometimes Hilarious Horror (RIP) invited the clankers to F off and establish their own publishing space:

Well, it finally happened. After writing and publishing fiction for 7 years, I’ve evidently become “big” enough to be the recipient of one of the infamous author scams! I don’t know whether to gag or be flattered. I’ll settle for a giant eye roll with a side of giggles.

This is the one where they congratulate you on your recent book (while never mentioning it by name), invite you to have your book in their nonexistent book club (easily verifiable by an internet search), then presumably try to get money out of you for some sort of join fee (I’m not about to click through to find out).

Even if I wasn’t a regular reader of Anne Allen’s blog and Writer Beware, this would look fishy to me:

But even if I’d been tempted to believe the above email was legit, that fantasy would likely have evaporated when I received an almost identical email 45 minutes later:

I can only assume these scammers also target creatives in other fields (art, music). The solicitations are all alike: written in such a generic way that they’re likely AI, heavy on flattery, and light on specifics.

Please don’t fall for these. They’re like any other spam email, aiming to take your money and run. The only difference is that these particular scams are tailored to take advantage of writers’ egos. I like to think I’m humble and lack an ego, but that would be a lie.

Joke’s on you, “Dr. Mira Sterling” and “Dr. Noah,” because I don’t even have a book (yet). Ha!

Shout out to Yahoo Mail. It might be the dinosaur of email providers (second only to AOL), but it’s got a spam filter acute enough to correctly flag these bogus emails.

It should surprise nobody that creative writers, and most publishers, aren’t fond of the use of generative AI to create fiction. We got into this because we love writing, not because we wanted to outsource it to robots. We tend to be vocal in our distaste, sometimes strident, often colorful, because we are artists, not purveyors of sad beige prose.

In that vein, I present to you Ghoulish Tales’ submission guidelines:

Amen, brothers and sisters. Amen.

Now that’s a way to start the new year off right! Thank you, NYC Midnight judges, for ranking me first in my group in the Scary Story Challenge. I’m glad my bug story creeped you out. And I’m certain that’s not a beetle that you feel crawling up your leg. Just a stray hair, surely.

This result is from Round 1 of a 3-round contest. If you’re looking for writing competitions with good prompts to get your started, I highly recommend NYC Midnight, which also runs contests for screenplays, short stories, rhyming stories, and microfiction.

Many writers, myself included, have mixed feelings about the demise of the National Novel Writing Month website, nanowrimo.org. (To read about why it went kaput, visit nanoscandal.com.)

NaNoWriMo motivated thousands of us to challenge ourselves and write 50,000 words or more in a single month. It was NaNoWriMo (and the writers who encouraged me to go for it – shout out to J.D. Blackrose) that made me realize I had it in me to write a novel-length work at all, when I’d previously written only blogs and short stories.

One of my favorite things about NaNoWriMo was that you could use its website to chart your progress, and it would create a pretty graph for you. Perhaps I am a simple creature, but seeing that line trending upward was super motivating to me.

The good news: other sites have sprung up to fill the gap NaNoWriMo left behind. My favorite is TrackBear, which I’ve been using since September to track my latest novel-in-progress.

Pretty, isn’t it?

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of appearing on my friend Sue Edelman’s radio show, “Something About the Women,” the longest-running women’s music radio show in the United States, on WMFO (91.5 FM, Medford, Massachusetts).

We chatted about my recently published story “The River’s Revenge” (RED LINE: Chicago Horror Stories, From Beyond Press, 2025) and I picked out a spooky set of tunes to accompany our chat. It was a lot of fun. Thanks Sue and WMFO for the opportunity to haunt your airwaves.

The archived show is available until November 8. You can view a track list or listen to the full show.