A woman has been working on her book, a young adult fantasy novel, for hours. At some point, she gets the familiar itch to check her email: She can’t think of what to write next. She stares at the screen. She’s lost her words. She could bang her head against the wall, or maybe turn to a favorite book for inspiration, or lose her momentum to distraction. But instead she turns to an AI writing tool, which takes in her chapter so far and spits out some potential next paragraphs. These paragraphs are never quite what she wants, though they sometimes contain beautiful sentences or fascinating directions. (Once it suggested a character sings a song, and also generated the lyrics of the song.) Even when these paragraphs fail, they make her interested in the story again. She’s curious about this computer-generated text, and it reignites her interest in her own writing.
With the advent of high quality computer-generated text, writers suddenly have a half-decent writing buddy who at least wants to do what they ask (even if it doesn’t always succeed) and has no desire to take any credit. Never before could writers get paragraphs of fluent text on a topic of their choice, except from another writer. (Ghostwriting may be an appropriate analogy for these writerly use cases of AI.) This is posing questions to writers everywhere: Which parts of writing are so tedious you’d be happy to see them go? Which parts bring you the inexplicable joy of creating something from nothing? And what is it about writing you hold most dear?
As long as people have been buying gifts for the holidays, they have been buying books. Books offer infinite variety, are easily wrapped, can be personalized for the recipient and displayed as a signifier of one’s own identity. They are, in many respects, the quintessential Christmas — or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or other December celebration — gift.
This has held true since the very beginning of Christmas as we know it today — a domestic holiday typically celebrated indoors, with family, that prominently features the exchange of presents. “They come in greater numbers every day,” The New York Times reported of the increasingly crowded shops in 1895. “The people who are buying books, the people who are thinking of buying books, and the people who are wondering if there is anything more satisfactory in the world of Christmas delights.”
Around 73 million years ago, when the sediment was laid down, the world was warmer than it is now, but the region would have been even further north. While today this part of Alaska gets a few hours of twilight each day during the winter, back then it was plunged into total darkness for four months of the year, from October to February. It regularly dipped below -10C (14F), with occasional dustings of snow.
And yet, hidden within this silty seam are the last remains of a bizarre epoch in history – tiny bones and teeth, mere millimetres across, that belonged to the offspring of giants. This is where thousands of dinosaurs made their nests, and the unhatched foetuses that didn't make it are still there to this day.
"It's probably the most interesting layer of dinosaur bones in the entire state of Alaska," says Druckenmiller. "They were practically living at the North Pole."
But Wilson is more interested in how art and imagination operate on his characters—and by extension, himself. Above all, he’s alert to their liberating potential. Like the offbeat figures he writes about, he is caught up in a repetitive cycle of processing difficult events on the page: His fiction is like a set of nesting dolls, the themes and preoccupations of one story feeding into the next, alike in their contours but wonderfully unique in their particulars. If that sounds like a writer in a rut, go read Wilson’s books. You’ll discover one-of-a-kind worlds opening up.
Only a mystery writer of great stylistic range and moral depth could handle the demands of such a shifting — and potentially sensitive — story as this one. Fortunately, as she proves once again, Penny is all that and more.
Great to see you, man. Can you believe Kevin is finally getting married? That’s awesome that you’re a groomsman. How have you been, by the way? Wow. Your mindfulness company employs twenty full-time coaches now? Insane. You’ll be a millionaire by forty. So cool.
Me? Nothing new. Still living the dream. Same job as before. Yeah, marketing stuff. And I’m still writing. Well, trying to. Uh, and I grew a mustache and shaved it off. Too much grooming. Look, I’ll level with you—absolutely nothing is going on with me, and I couldn’t be happier.