The future is now

Years ago, maybe a little over twenty-two years ago, I was working as a university researcher in the field of interactive and multimedia systems. In particular, I worked for seven years on a project where we explored how to use technology in creative and constructive ways in K–12 education. It was what I called my Black Forest cake in my career; delicious and joyful.

I have been reflecting on the work we did, and adults are once again being asked to guide young people through a technology they are still learning to understand themselves. Looking back over the years I spent researching how internet technologies could be used constructively in schools, I have been struck by how many of the challenges we encountered then are reappearing today in a different form. The technologies have changed. Human nature has not.

During those years, we worked together with students and teachers, finding ways to enhance the students’ learning with the help of internet technologies and multimedia systems. I don’t really want to write about what we did, but rather about a few of the truths we discovered concerning who benefited from participating in our projects, and whether these findings might also be pertinent to the current situation of AI in schools.

I’d like to address three main learnings.

The first is that the students who benefited, meaning those who showed an increase in their engagement and confidence, were not necessarily those in the top percentile. Those students performed well and showed only a marginal increase in engagement compared with when they were having standard classes. Neither did the students in the bottom percentile show a significant increase in terms of performance. In both cases, the results were probably due to the novelty of using technology in creative ways to learn topics in their curriculum.

No, the students who benefited the most were those hovering slightly above and below the average. We researched why this was and came up with various theories. The one that struck me most had to do with the allocation of responsibility and the transparency of outputs.

When we started a project, the class would be separated into various teams. In each team, there were those who had to document the progress of the project, those who helped create the end results, and one or two who were responsible for the technology. The latter were also responsible for teaching the other students how to use the hardware and software properly.

I had a few university IT students who came with me into the classes, and we taught the “techies” and gave them clear guidelines about how to care for the devices. Then we saw to it that they were able to help their team members use the devices or software properly.

We would nearly always choose those students as our techies who were underperforming, had high absenteeism, or were somewhat introverted. Not the troublemakers, but those who were at risk of falling behind. We did not elevate them to the top of the castle; rather, we made them realise that the other students, and we in the research party, needed their support. They were the ones the other students called if they were stuck with a problem. They were also responsible for doing backups of data and collecting all the devices and handing them over to us after every work session.

In the months we worked with them, it was possible to see them grow, both outwardly and inwardly. The data we collected only confirmed what we saw happening before our eyes. In two cases, teachers told me how students who had been close to dropping out decided to finish school and go on to university because, as they put it, they didn’t know learning could be fun.

Looking back, I think this has implications for how we introduce AI into classrooms. When students were given meaningful responsibility within a team, particularly responsibility that other students depended upon, many who were quietly drifting through school began to flourish. Responsibility transformed identity in ways that grades alone rarely could. AI may become another opportunity to rethink not simply what students learn, but the roles they are invited to play while learning.

The second aspect I noticed was that students, of any age, were not particularly concerned when things went wrong with the technology, and they were patient in learning how to use a piece of software or hardware so that they got their desired results. In one Grade 6 project, where children were learning about metamorphosis (biology) by creating stop-motion animation films (art), they patiently took twenty shots for each second of their five-minute movie. There was one poor student who had to sit motionless against the trunk of a tree while he metamorphosed into a mound of dirt, moss, and twigs.

Throughout the span of those projects, over all those years, we sometimes heard, “This is hard,” but we never heard, “This is too hard.” Over and over again, I would observe some techie explain how some software worked, amazed at how the other students didn’t balk at the lengthy explanation and endless, “Click here. Then here. Then here. Then here...” Unfortunately, this could not be said of most of the teachers we worked with.

Children often approach unfamiliar technology with curiosity before judgement. They expect to experiment, make mistakes, and gradually improve. That doesn’t mean they should unquestioningly trust everything technology produces. Quite the opposite. It means they are usually willing to persist long enough to discover both its possibilities and its limitations. That willingness to explore without expecting immediate mastery may be one of the most valuable attitudes we can preserve as AI enters education.

Which brings me to the third thing I observed over those years of doing research. The greatest challenge, however, wasn’t technical. It was psychological.

In many instances, it was the teachers who struggled most with learning the technology, not the students. This was at a time when the use of internet technology in schools was only just beginning. When we collected data on the teachers, very few used internet technologies either privately or professionally.

When we approached the teachers about doing projects, they were often curious and open-minded. They were excited for their students. It took them a moment when we told them the students would be teaching each other how to use the technology rather than being taught by the teachers. We always had one-on-one sessions with the teachers as well, which often took much longer than it did for the students to learn.

In my experience, this had to do with two automatic responses that would trip them up. These were, “I’ll never be able to remember this,” when we were giving step-by-step instructions, and, “Why is it so complicated?” when outlining how the students would integrate the technology. This discomfort and internal resistance was prevalent among nearly all the teachers we worked with, regardless of age or the subjects they taught.

In essence, we were devising a situation where students, the ultimate learners, were having to teach each other how to use the technology. At the same time, we were putting teachers, masters at teaching, in the precarious position of being learners.

The shift from teacher to learner was disconcerting. Whereas the students dealt with software glitches or technical failures as part of the learning process, the teachers often felt they were doing something wrong or that the technology itself was inadequate whenever errors occurred.

Our job was often helping teachers see that fixing what goes wrong was part of learning. Instead of expecting everything to work all the time perfectly, we asked them whether they could see technical problems as opportunities for problem-solving. The moment they noticed how unperturbed their students were when things went wrong, and that the students didn’t expect their teacher to fix everything, the teachers themselves began learning how to learn in a way they had not anticipated.

This is not to say the students became the teachers. Rather, by observing their students, the teachers were able to turn inward and reflect upon their own ability—or inability—to deal with uncertainty. This often came with the realisation that much of their professional energy was focused on becoming better teachers, but far less on remaining active learners themselves.

I don’t believe the teachers struggled because they lacked ability. They struggled because they cared. They were accustomed to standing in front of a classroom feeling responsible for having answers. Suddenly they found themselves learning in public alongside their students. That is an uncomfortable position for anyone, regardless of experience.

Generative AI introduces questions our multimedia projects never faced: hallucinated answers, bias, authorship, privacy, and the temptation to substitute generated responses for genuine understanding. Those issues deserve careful attention. Yet they do not remove the central challenge we observed all those years ago. They reinforce it. Adults will once again have to model what it means to be thoughtful learners while guiding young people through unfamiliar territory.

This is a long detour to arrive at the point I want to make. When it comes to AI, leaders, teachers, and parents cannot wait until they feel completely confident before inviting young people to engage with it. Learning and teaching will have to happen simultaneously. We do not have the luxury of figuring everything out and fixing every glitch before students encounter the technology. What we can do is cultivate curiosity, critical thinking, and a willingness to experiment while remaining rigorous in evaluating what AI can and cannot do.

We know AI will change the landscape of learning in the future. What is discomforting to many is that the future is now.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Picking up the trash

Watermelon rind
Swan feathers shed in passing
Early morning walk.

Days before summer vacation

It's a hot summer day, and the train compartment is stuffed with a swarm of teenagers on their way to the Baltic Sea. A day trip away from their sad, stuffy schoolroom, their teachers sitting in another compartment, their backpacks filled to the brim with every conceivable snack. More glittering wrappers than substance.

They squeeze into the compartment, girls sitting on each other's laps. Boys, still small and scrawny, sit four side by side where usually only two would fit. The girls act up, shrill screams of laughter, seemingly unstoppable, fuelled by whispered secrets and stolen glances at the boys. One girl laughs so hard her head flies back and hits the window. More explosive laughter ensues.

The boys' heads are together, watching a video on one guy's phone. They watch it over and over again, groaning at the same missed goal. They talk earnestly about the finer points of the football game, as if they have personally been privileged to hear the trainer talking to the players.

Outwardly, they seem oblivious to the girls' chatter and laughter. Yet eventually, they succumb to the continual onslaught of provocations. One of the boys pulls out three large boxes of Mon Chéri chocolates. He hands one to the group of girls, another to the guys sitting across from him, and the last to his best buddy beside him.

One of the group members leaves the compartment to make sure the teachers are not coming. 

Quickly, they puncture each chocolate, drain the horrible alcohol from its filling, and toss the rest into the small rubbish bins next to their seats. The girls begin to talk louder. Their antics become more uncontrolled. The boys are drawn into the merriment. Someone turns on head-bouncing music. A party is born.

A little girl sits in the corner seat with her older brother and mother. She stares at the teenagers with wide eyes and an iron-rod-straight back. Mesmerised, she cannot stop watching the girls. When the music starts playing, she begins to cry and pleads with her mother to leave.
Her mother asks her son to look after the luggage and takes her daughter into the corridor. 

They wander along, looking for a compartment that is less loud, less scary. There is none to be found.

Talking to her daughter, she tries to reassure her that it won't be long before they reach their stop.

She asks her dearest daughter what is bothering her. The noise? The loud laughter? The music? Sobbing, the little girl bursts out that she doesn't want to be a teenager. She wants to stay a little girl forever. She doesn't want to have to behave like those in their compartment.

Her mother scoops her into a warm embrace, saying that not all teenagers behave like that. No matter what happens, she can behave any way she wants when she's a teenager.

Something about the way her mother says this soothes the girl's fears. She wipes away her tears. Together, holding hands, the two return to where her brother sits reading his comic book, oblivious to the drama swirling around him.

A sad history of houseplants

There was a time when everyone filled their apartments with houseplants. For most of us, buying a new houseplant was a downward slide, showing us how little green our thumbs were. Some were better and managed to keep them alive. Claudia was one of those. 

Her apartment was a jungle of hanging pots with plants draped over them, vines crawling up and over bookshelves, and beasts of unruly rubber plants crowding the corners of her living room. Plants were her companions. They were not necessarily pretty or decorative, more a jumbled, overgrown mass of green.

Whereas, any plants I bought quickly went from store-bought lush to shrivelling victims of neglect in a very short breath of time. Their decline made me feel very inadequate. Those needing water thirsted. Those that didn't need watering drowned. Then there was always the one plant that grew and grew, with a twisting stem and a pathetic, small amount of leaves.

Claudia always bought me plants for my birthday. I could never figure out if she did this with a touch of wickedness, knowing my dread of plants, or if it was a case of hope springs eternal. She never gave up. Whenever I got a new plant, I'd throw away the most miserable one. And for some weeks, or months, the new plant would stand there boldly amongst the scruff.

Yet in the end, they all succumbed and ended up atop a compost heap.

Sometime after Claudia died, I got rid of all our houseplants. They were both victims and witnesses to my grief. I treasured the books she brought into my life, reading them with joyful sadness and feeling her loss, but I could not bear seeing one more plant die before my eyes. It took me seven years to buy a new houseplant.

I put it in the living room by itself and made a pact. I told myself that if I could keep it alive for one year, I'd find it some friends. Now, nearly two years down the line, four plants are residing in our living room, looking happy and healthy. 

I just might buy one more, as if it were a gift from Claudia, on my next birthday.

+++++++++++

Photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash

Witnesses of silence

Books on my bookshelves
A collection of time spent
Not talking a word.

Looking out on cornfields

Prompt:

"The corn was head high, rustling its heavy, dusty leaves, and for a while anyway it had nothing to do with her."

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

She hides in the attic amongst discarded pieces of broken furniture. Too precious to burn. No longer deemed worthy of fixing. Instead, they gather dust on their wooden surfaces, the grim and rust in their joints leave stains on her shirt and shorts as she crawls to the round window open at the gable of the roof. A cool breeze dries the pearls of sweat on her forehead. 

Sinking into cushions, she forms a makeshift fort, grasping the softest one, its floral pattern faded by sunlight, and hugging it close to her chest. Pushing down, trying to stave off the waves of disappointment and hurt building up inside of her. Her mother's categorical no still echoes in her ears. Her one chance of escape shattered.

  
Now there is nothing to do but wait and watch each day pass by in repetition of nothingness. She swallows the bitterness, choking. Tears begin to fall. 

History

I used to go to Würzburg to the Benedictine monastery to learn Tai Chi.

A Chinese Catholic priest from Barcelona came to teach. He told us the story of escaping China with Catholic missionaries when their lives were threatened by the Red Army.

Thirty years later, he returned to visit his sister, his only living relative. He said that, instead of recounting the details of their struggles, they sat together in silence, knowing that their suffering was too deep to put into words. 

Still not there yet

What little I know about forgiveness has been milked from shrivelled memories. Some say it is possible to forgive, yet not forget. I'm not so sure of that. Forgiveness happens so slowly because it needs constant nourishment given from happiness and joyfulness. How is that going to happen if I cannot forget the hurtful deeds, the unkind criticisms, or wrongful decisions? Holding tight to those memories makes it impossible for anything other to surface.

I worry that I will pass on my suffering to my children and my life partner. There is so much child-like, childish hurt bottled up inside of me that I put on a shelf in my subconscious. Only on days like today do I take it out and polish the glass sides, checking whether the seal is still air-tight.

Deep inside, I hope the hurt will miraculously evaporate, leaving an ether of forgiveness that permeates the walls of my heart.

They are no longer here. Surely it is time to let the hurt die as well. For no one deserves to be measured only by their mistakes, inadequacies, or their worst deeds. I yearn to put those to rest. I want to love them again, as I did as a child, before the suffering began.

My AI writing coach

Last week, I sent the manuscript of the first twenty-two of twenty-seven chapters of my memoir to an editor. It is what I hope will prove to be a good first draft. The editor is someone I trust to do a thorough line edit as well as provide creative feedback.

What surprised me most was not that I had finished twenty-two chapters. It was that this was probably the strongest first draft I have written in all my years as a content developer. Granted, writing a memoir is another kettle of fish, and I still have to hear back from the editor; they might see it otherwise.

What I am anxious to find out is whether working with an AI writing coach has truly paid off in this initial phase, as far as the quality of output. What is indisputable is that the experience of using an agent changed how I approached my writing. I had more time to write and less time to brood.

After reading Dr. Philippa Hartman’s article, The “Cognitive Offloading” Paradox, I was fascinated to discover that many of the ways I had instinctively been working with AI closely matched what she describes as “committed, strategic offloading,” a predictor of positive, even transformative learning.

Hartman discusses six principles to follow.

Principle 1: Offload to AI substantially, or not at all.

When it comes to writing, up until now, I have used ChatGPT, together with Grammarly and Claude, to edit my spelling and grammar.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to give ChatGPT more complicated editing tasks to do, but found this dissatisfying. This is partially because the AI tools introduced certain language patterns I don’t like at all, such as em dashes, one-sentence paragraphs, and an overuse of adjectives. As well, at the Pro project level, ChatGPT only seemed able to process tasks involving documents up to ten pages long. If, for instance, I asked it to remove the time lines and clean up the text of a podcast transcript longer than fifteen pages, the results were suboptimal: missing sections, cut-off sentences, and hallucinations. Any discussion with ChatGPT about how to alter my prompts to achieve consistently reliable results failed.

Admittedly, the problem might have been on my side, but I didn’t want to spend more time trying to get the model to produce better outcomes. I also didn’t want to run the risk of my book reading as though AI had stomped all over it, leaving the language flat and the imagery matted. I found two friends with the required expertise to do the editing. Human writing for human readers.

Having dyslexia meant I still relied on Grammarly as a spell checker.

The one area I was excited to work with AI was as a writing coach. This is the first time I have written a book, and I needed guidance. After taking numerous online courses in creative nonfiction writing, I felt more confused than motivated. I needed a writing coach to help me with structure and form. Fortunately, a good friend worked with me and programmed an AI agent as a writing coach.

Principle 2: Frame AI as a partner, not a tool.

My writing coach was not so much a partner as an informed expert, possessing a skill set I needed. I’ve probably read dozens and dozens of memoirs in my life, some of them among my favourites, but I knew nothing about what makes a memoir engaging and appealing to today’s readers. For this, I needed feedback from someone or something that could review my work from a publisher’s perspective, and also had the ability to support my writing process without creative intrusion.

What I was seeking was a coach who would listen to my questions and answer them with specificity. I was also hoping the coach could help me distance myself from what I was writing, so that I could make changes out of conviction that they would add cohesiveness and clarity, rather than out of desperation or insecurity.

The final selling point was the ability to converse with this coach about anything that came to mind, and at times convenient for me. I didn’t need to feel beholden to this coach, nor was I concerned about testing the boundaries of the relationship. This freedom of when, where, and what of our so-called partnership was joyful.

Principle 3: Build verification into the workflow, not the preamble.

One of the core tasks I assigned the coach to do was to analyse each chapter for what was working, what needed improvement, and what was missing. The book has four parts with varying numbers of chapters, so I asked the agent to make sure each chapter supported the central theme of its respective part and that each part was identifiable from the others.

The coach would write an analysis of what worked and what didn’t in the version I submitted of each chapter. As I read through the response, I registered whether I “liked” what was being said or not. Everything I liked went into a “maybe true” bucket. I didn’t feel I could necessarily trust the positive comments as being true, but neither could I dismiss them. I gave myself permission to let them stand for the moment. It was reassuring to hear these comments and soothed my doubts, which enabled me to continue writing with momentum.

Then there was the feedback I didn’t like reading. This tended to fall into two other buckets. The first was the “whatever” bucket. These were nice-to-have suggestions, but not for this round of revisions. Advice about how I could build an even higher sandcastle. Things that would take too much time and not substantially improve the current version.

There were also comments so unhelpful that I questioned the feasibility of continuing to use the AI coach. I treated these as anomalies and discarded them almost immediately.

Then there were comments or ideas I didn’t like or were resistant to, but that provoked a response that made me want to explore them further. One suggestion was that I move an entire chapter to a different part of the book. My immediate reaction was, “Absolutely not.” Two days later, I realised the suggestion exposed a weakness in the structure, even though I ultimately solved the problem differently. Those were the conversations that taught me the most.

If a suggestion made me pause, I’d ask the agent to give me some examples and ask follow-up questions. What would be an alternative to what I’m doing now? Why is this suggestion useful? What will it improve? Then a conversation would ensue. Not between adversaries, but between two parties working toward a common outcome. I was well aware that the AI agent was not a committed partner, but the thread of discussion often felt as though it was.

Principle 4: Make the learner think first, AI second.

In the creative process of writing a book, I am the learner, so it is up to me to do the work, both the heavy lifting and the light touches. Using the coach reminds me of something my father used to say: “The best thing about buying your first car is paying for it.” As someone who has never owned a car, I do not have direct experience with this, yet I do know the satisfaction of taking a piece of advice from the agent, rewriting part of a chapter or expanding on an idea, and recognising that the piece is now better.

The coach could make suggestions endlessly, but until I wrestled with those suggestions myself, nothing had really been learned. The learning happened in the rewriting, not in reading the feedback. Every decision remained mine. Sometimes I accepted a suggestion wholeheartedly. Sometimes I rejected it immediately. More often, one suggestion led me to an entirely different solution that neither the coach nor I had imagined at the outset.

All learning begins with baby steps. Sometimes I felt very wobbly on my legs, the way babies learning to walk resemble drunken sailors. I would take a group of suggestions and begin revising, only to abandon the whole approach halfway through. Since I was using Scrivener as my writing platform, wobbling back to the starting line was no problem.

I never tracked changes. Instead, I rewrote the text, paused for a day or two, and then read the chapter again. I asked myself whether it now flowed smoothly and whether the ideas followed one another more naturally. If not, I returned to the previous version and tried another approach. If it felt right, I moved on to the next chapter and let the revised one rest for a while before returning to it once again with fresh eyes.

That ownership turned out to be essential. The coach could accelerate my thinking, but it could never replace it.

Principle 5: Use AI to identify errors, not fix them.

I love this use of the AI agent most of all. The best feedback I receive is when I ask, “What improvements or changes should I make? What is missing?” Especially the latter question exposed obvious oversights or prodded tender blind spots. Since the information came from a machine, nothing it said felt personal. I only had to ask myself whether what it said made sense or not. Nothing more.

There were two aspects of identifying errors where my AI coach fell short. One was that it had no concept of “good enough.” If I asked it whether the current version of a chapter was good enough as a first draft, whether it had reached a comparable level to the other chapters, the answer was always yes-and-no. There were always things that still needed fixing.

The other shortcoming was that no text was considered beyond saving. No matter how weak or incomprehensible a piece was, it apparently merited practical suggestions for how to improve it. Of course, the coach never said it was a mess.

It happened twice that I worked and worked on a chapter, allowing the AI agent to lead me down the garden path, only to realise that all my efforts were useless. I had to throw the chapters away and start again. Somehow, I wasn’t willing to give up as long as the agent kept making suggestions. This was a valuable lesson to learn. Like the Monty Python sketch about the Black Plague, my text was piled onto the wagon headed for a mass burial, and the agent was singing, “Not dead yet!”

Principle 6: Assess without the scaffolding.

This is where I am now, waiting for my editor’s verdict. If the feedback is largely positive, I will send the manuscript to the second editor. I fully expect many changes, but I also hope they will confirm that the heart of the book is there.

If that happens, I will decide whether to continue using the model in the next round or whether it has already served its purpose.

If the feedback reveals more fundamental problems, I will have to examine not only the manuscript but also the way I used AI throughout the process. That may bruise my ego, but learning something new often does.

In the end, Hartman’s article may prove to be right. The real question was never whether AI could write my book. It couldn’t. The question was whether it could help me become a better writer. That is something only another human being, my editor, can now help me answer.

Baby brother

Tina sits in her bedroom, hiding under her mommy's winter coat, which she dragged from the front corridor. Her eyes are squinted shut. She's covering her ears and singing lalala, trying to unhear the noises in the next room.

Her baby brother is crying again. He's always crying. He never stops. Every time she tries to hold him, he screams and cries, and then her mommy quickly takes him away, with a look.

She hates that look. It makes her feel like a bad girl. She runs back to her room and hides because she doesn't want her mommy to see what she's thinking.

She wishes her baby brother would stop crying. Disappear. Or go away for a long time so her mommy would stop pushing her away from hugging her.

Definition of lush

Work slop, AI slop
What a divine way to call
Something so useless.

#booksIlove: Titus Groan

Title: Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
First time I read the book: when I was dancing full-time at Les Grand Ballet after returning from Cannes, France

I recently decided to download this book as an audiobook, and I am delighting in this book again. I remember being enthralled by the strangeness of the world he presents and how relatable his characters were. They were not nice people, nor were they intrinsically bad. They were, rather, just flawed.

Not a plea for pity

I've always wanted to sing, and in my heart, when I do, I hit notes true. Yet, when Mr. Vincent, the only male teacher in our all-girls private school, whom all the girls have a massive crush on, though he knows I know he has a crush on Sasha, on one of the male ballet dancers at Les Grand Ballet Canadiens where I study dance "seriously", and therefore, he kind likes me more than any of the other frivolous girls with their insipid emotions, listens to me sing, and instead of letting me sing one of the solos, or in the choir during our Christmas concert, we are giving in the beautiful Saint James church down the street, he gives me bells to jingle and a leather strap to snap, which I foolishly interpret as a kind of solo, until my friend Ann jokingly expounds about my tone deafness, many years later, to my teenage kids, as we rest at the top of Mount Royal Park looking down at the city, and while everyone laughs, I shrink inward because I had never been on the joke, even back then.

#booksIlove: Teaching a Stone to Talk

Title: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, by Annie Dillard
First time I read the book: when it was first printed in 1982

This book has always been one of my Top Ten Favourite Books. Annie Dillard is a singularly brilliant writer about creativity, writing, life, loss, and everything in between. She has such finesse in how she puts her ideas on paper.

This is the book I restored at the bookbinding workshop I took this week because it was falling apart and I wanted to make sure it always has its proper place on my bookshelf.

Dancing with angels

 “Oh human being, learn to dance,
otherwise the angels in heaven
will not know what to do with you.”

— Aurelius Augustinus

This is such a relief, for if there is one thing I know, it is how to dance. How to follow a lead. How to dance with abandon.

Will the dancing in heaven be a silent rave, each of us hearing the music inside our heads or bodies separately? The only noise heard: the creaking of bones and the occasional beatboxing beneath the breath of someone who has forgotten the rules. Or will it be a beautiful orgy of sounds, body limbs swirling, bending, sliding to the rhythm of the music?

It does not matter, I’m ready for anything. That is, if I can choose my costume: a light green satin gown of my younger body, the burnt-orange cashmere cummerbund of a mother-wife who finally loves and is loved, all draped in a midnight-blue sequined tulle of this older me, whose heart and brain are those of a warrior.

What a dancer I will be.

Finding my way back

 VORSATZ

Auf dem Weg nach vorn 
mit der Flut der Wörter 
die ungenauer werden 
je häufiger man sie ausspricht  

gehen wir zurück
Wort für Wort
einzuholen
was uns vorschwebt  

Heinz Kattner

I'm running ahead with writing the book, chapter after chapter I kept a quick pace. Now, I have reached a point, the pinnacle of my journey and the words have run out. I can't seem to figure out how to climb this last incline. It's about what Dave taught me about sailing and life, but it is actually about dying and death.  

Each time I write the chapter, I take so many detours that the results are confusing and convoluted to the point there is nothing to do but start again. No morsel to clasp onto. No passage to save.  

I write and write, thinking this is going somewhere. Then I reread what I've written a few days later and discover what I've written is completely trash. Thus the need to start again. Or maybe I should go back before going forward. Find some way to use what I have written in the other chapters to prompt me into this chapter about Dave.

Don't you love it!

Mother in hijab
Alone with her three young sons
Steering an e-boat.

Not playing by the rules

In January, I took a fascinating ten-day course offered by Alison Jones called, The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge. The course was fabulous and resulted in my writing a book proposal for my book, which I would never have been able to do without taking the course.  Jones, a publisher herself, walked us step-by-step through this document, explaining what is needed from a publisher’s perspective.

 
My resulting book proposal is a very solid first draft. I would recommend the course to anyone wanting to write a non-fiction business book, or even, as in my case, a creative non-fiction book, whether you are going to seek a publisher or self-publish.

It was very challenging to write a book proposal about a book that was, at that time, only in my head. Yet the process has helped me enormously now that I have started writing the book.

I have continued to ruminate on Jones’ insights into the world of publishing and about being a first-time author. I did not know whether to seek a publisher or self-publish. It took a conversation with my son to make up my mind. He’s a solution architect, i.e., a computer scientist, and not an author. This made his perspective even more intriguing to me because I have also not yet published a book.

His advice was to self-publish. He suggested I pay a freelance editor and layouter and not worry about branding and marketing the book. He also said that the bottom line is that if 30 people end up reading my book, that’s fine. There is no correlation between the number of readers you have and the book's worth.
He believes, much in the way that is happening on social media, that bookshelves will soon become inundated with AI-generated books. This will, for a while, make it difficult for readers to find books written by human authors, other than those who already have a name. The probability of a first-time author finding a large readership with their first book is small.

There is also the reality that publishers, who give their heart and soul to publishing books, are no longer able to do much more than carry the editing, layout, and printing costs. There is an expectation from their side that you, as a new author, will dedicate a fair amount of your time each day to setting the stage, as it were, while you are writing the book.

Then, in the days leading up to the book launch, and in the weeks and months afterwards, you work full-time writing blog articles, getting yourself invited onto podcasts, and writing editorials or articles for online magazines or newspapers. Much in the way actors are expected to do the circuit when a film they perform in premieres, most writers now have to enter this circuit as well.

I think my friend, Charlotte, did a brilliant job of marketing of her new book, We Need New Leaders. She probably surpassed the expectations of her publisher. It was inspiring to witness.

Even though we have been friends for over twenty years, she still has the capacity to awe me. The way she stepped up to writing the book in six months, handled all the marketing and sales, and turned it into a bestseller was amazing. Yet, her journey made me realise how little I am presently capable of, or willing to, follow the same path.

This does not mean that I will not approach publishers. Never say never. Rather, my plans for the moment are to consult with a publisher, pay an editor to do the final edit, hire a graphic designer for the cover page, and probably do the layout myself. It will be an interesting and less costly process.

Less costly because, as a first-time author trying to get a publisher interested in taking on your book, the book not only has to fit within the scope of their catalogue, but you also have to say upfront how many hundreds of copies you are willing to buy from the run of the first print. The more you are willing to buy, the more likely they are to take your book on. I did some research and believe the upfront costs of self-publishing are on par with those of working with a smaller publisher.

It is such a paradox. Even before writing my book, I am getting tangled in a game I know I have little talent for. Is it possible to write a book the old way? To take this time in my life and dedicate it to mastering the art of writing?

Not as an act of self-indulgence, but as a creative practice. One I have carried out behind closed doors my whole life.

It has been a fascinating six months learning about the publishing world and how first-time writers can successfully publish their books. For now, though, I will take my son's advice and write the book and self-publish, knowing that the book may only be read by a few people, but hopefully loved by those who do.

By the pool house

I remember the lime tree growing precariously on a small patch of grass that sloped down to the lip of the cliff. Waves broke sonorously over the reef, exposing its coral tips when the tide was low. Salted winds roared up the cliffside and over the edge, drawing the moisture from the grass and curling the fallen leaves. Only the green limes survived the battering of the elements.

The sugar pot on the corner table

Sitting at the corner table of her favourite café with one of her friends, she listens attentively to what her friend is saying, all the while sipping her tea as punctuation. The quiet within her body resembles that of a brooding hen.

Her friend folds out all her despair onto the table: the hateful words her lover spoke, how the situation had escalated into a full-blown, almighty fight, the hurt, the pleading, the slammed door, the grabbing of keys, and the sound of the car engine as he drove away. The silence of his not picking up his phone.

Her friend recounts every detail, as if rubbing away a stain that will not disappear. “Out, damned spot, out, I say!”

She is at a loss as to what she can say to her friend. She who has never loved before, never allowed herself the indulgence of deep despair or blissful pleasure. Her mind wanders away from the stream of words her friend is speaking in her direction, but not to her.

As if her friend notices the lull in attention, she stops talking and looks over, waiting for some words of consolation. She moves her gaze away from wherever it had wandered and back in the direction of her friend’s dilemma.

She accidentally tips over the sugar pot. Her friend continues talking while she scoops up the sugar and places it back into the pot.