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> Throughout all of this, Horse News was the only stable work I had.
Only a good writer, that truly enjoys their craft, is able to masterfully insert a witty dry pun like that into their work. Bravo!
It’s a good pun but let’s not pretend that it takes a professional writer. I mean, have you met dads?
> I root for Horse Laws and grow sad when a state bucks them.
Another cute one!
Calling the horse/stable job a witty pun today is quite a stretch.
Maybe I'm just old and tired, but this pun is exactly like what you'd find in a movie review, which is literally the worst type of literature for that exact reason, and should be banned worldwide.
This would be an instance of those mimetic "how I got to own a house at 29" stories where the first 6 steps are rational and the seventh is "have rich parents"
For most people, writing is not sufficiently lucrative to sustain a living income and supplements other income streams or is net negative.
Also: read "new grub street" by George Gissing, 1891
But this patchwork of low paid freelance work is the most reasonable way to make it sustainable for most people.
This is a negative comment. The author is someone who is clearly struggling, and trying to do her best to make ends meet by working multiple jobs that she makes clear she is desperately in search of. She also can't use her hands and is in chronic pain. Please, have some empathy.
> This would be an instance of those mimetic "how I got to own a house at 29" stories where the first 6 steps are rational and the seventh is "have rich parents"
You don't need to have rich parents. I also make a living as a writer, and I'll say an alternative to having rich parents would be to get a high-paying job for a couple years and just save a little. Just for when the initial pay is a little low.
Have you actually seen someone write an article like that where one of the instructive steps was "have rich parents"?
She doesn’t explicitly say it, but it sounds like she has thoracic outlet syndrome - it’s familiar to me because I have it, and it sucks. Looking up her name plus that, yes, that’s what she has.
Sat here after a night of crappy sleep poking this out with hands that feel like they’re in tight rubber gloves, but life goes on, but it’s never even crossed my mind to see it as a disability, just as “one of those things”.
The only things that it has made extremely difficult for me are things like rock climbing or climbing very long ladders - but not impossible, if I take the time to pause and windmill my arms until they aren’t useless numb pain obelisks, or until other people start to get impatient with me. Other things I’ve had to just adapt to - stuff with fine motor control I have to take frequent breaks and ensure I’m supporting my hand and arm. Washing dishes, which she cites in another piece, I deal with by pincering a sponge between my fingers and using the back of my hand. It just became the new normal. Gross stuff, I find little difference with, although it definitely aggravates it if I spend a day doing heavy work involving my arms. Buy now, pay later.
Maybe it’s a generational or cultural thing. Maybe hers is worse than mine. I don’t know - I just found it jarring to hear someone describe it as a disability, as that idea has literally never even crossed my mind.
Beautiful text, easy to read, one can immediately feel that author knows what she is doing. Light, but long and sad at the same time. With an aftertaste of hope at the end. Nice work.
One of the ironically (or maybe not ironic and just expected?) beneficial outcomes of AI tools is that "human-like" qualities are going to become more in-demand. The more weird, charismatic, or unique your personality is, the better you're probably going to do in the creative marketplace. The creators that will thrive are ones that manage to build an audience around their identity, and not merely ones that write/film/create the best works.
So you mean that personality will trump content? The cult of personality?
I think we're already seeing that in the most-watched Youtube videos. The most followed Youtubers usually are the ones who are most "way-out-there" in terms of personality.
You are probably thinking this means life will be more like that Jack Kerouac line "the mad ones..." I am imagining how what you describe plays out is more like a billion reality TV stars all trying to one up each other.
Or rather - the more weird, charismatic, and unique your AI-generated personalities are.
In the future, everyone's aidoru will be famous for fifteen minutes.
I don't see why ai wouldn't be able to copy that 'personality'.
Everything ai can read or watch, it can copy. So someone showing his personality on YouTube video, Instagram or even tiktok, you get all the video, feed it into an AI and you get an enhanced clone.
The piece provides an open and modest behind-the-scenes look at the author's dedication to her work and will to maintain her creative identity in the face of adversity.
As someone who just started blogging and sharing stories, I'm reminded of how much passion and hardship influence creative work.
My weakness is also my self-doubt.
I understand that living a creative life does not require waiting for the right circumstances; rather, it requires working hard in the face of criticism, uncertainty, or lack of reward.
Thanks for sharing.
Loved this article . It took me back to the days of just reading random stuff out of the blue and just enjoying it undistracted.
Hitting CTRL+F and searching for AI all over the piece, there are 0 mentions. I would have loved to read what a writer thinks of the coming AI takeover in creative writing.
Virtually all the jobs mentioned can already be replaced with AI for a fraction of the cost.
One thing is clear from this text: she can definitely write. I wonder what her erotic stories read like even though I'm not exactly the demographic they were aiming for.
> Virtually all the jobs mentioned can already be replaced with AI for a fraction of the cost.
I’m not so sure. First, they are already paying pennies to the writers. Second, who’s gonna write the prompt? The bosses certainly not, so they would hire prompters. Now, you cannot simply hire a prompter with zero experience in copywriting or editing; these people would not accept less than pennies for their work. So you just go ahead and hire people with writing experience. It’s easier.
Edit: besides, assuming AI will take over, if you want an original and catchy story, you need to provide a good prompt. I cannot think someone more suitable to provide such prompts than the writers themselves. Is like saying: anyone can create their own app with LLMs. Well, I can tell you my mom or my 21 year old cousin wouldn’t be able to do so (they wouldn’t be able to be more specific than a simple “I want a spotify-like app but in red”. They wouldn’t know what to do with the LLM output, even if it comes as an executable that you just need to drop in your phone). So you need developers here as well.
> Hitting CTRL+F and searching for AI all over the piece, there are 0 mentions. I would have loved to read what a writer thinks of the coming AI takeover in creative writing.
I make a living as a writer and I don't use AI. In fact, I hate AI and I work for an AI-free writing website. There is an audience for it, and we make enough money to support ourselves as well.
Here's what I think as an amateur writer:
* AI fulfills a prompt. "Write me a story" or "write me an article" or "write me song lyrics" will get you a story or an article or song lyrics and that in itself is pretty amazing in itself, but as someone who has tried all of these things at various levels of sophistication, it's pretty clear to me that there's often something missing from these results, and of course there is, because you have to put whatever "something" is in the prompt to have good chances "something" will show up. Do you know what that something is when you conceive the story / article / song lyrics? You might... but you might not, the art might be half in the process you work through to figure out what "something" is, hand in hand with the work of giving it form. I can see how AI can help and have already used it this way, but I've already seen how it will often fail or produce Content™ rather than something that fulfills the full profile implied in the impulse to make the thing.
* "a fraction of the cost" is ... speculative to put it charitably. Users aren't exposed to anything remotely like the costs involved right now, the tech is only available at the moment by burning a huge amount of venture / research funding (on top the huge uncompensated labor heists that torching enlightenment copyright bargains represents). The true economics are pretty opaque before you even get deeper questions of like the implications of introducing an external dependency that may not be truly fungible and may represent unknown influences into the thought-level substrate of human culture / experience.
My prediction is that all "anonymous" writing will be replaced by AI. By anonymous, I mean: copywriting, corporate-style neutral writing, product descriptions, news summaries, headlines, and so on. Anything where the identity of the author is unknown or not important.
However, writers that lean into their identity and inject their personality into the writing, use video, and generally have a public brand will probably do fine. The fact is: we live in a video world now, so unless you can latch onto the brand of a larger entity to grow your audience, you're probably going to need to be on camera.
(This is basically how many writers are successful on Substack.)
Writers will also continue to be needed in fields where there is zero tolerance for errors (say, technical writers at complex manufacturing companies.)
Not everything needs to be about AI. Not everything should be.
For many writers and creative types I've read and talked to, the use of AI for pretty much any reason is equivalent to crossing the picket line.
When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.
What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.
What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?
From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.
I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.
What do HN folks want to read that isn't tech news? What are you reading reading these days?
I have just made the leap into becoming a full-time writer. I had an early stroke of luck and sold a screenplay – which let me write full-time for the next 6 months or so. I write primarily military/espionage fiction, would love to hear what the HN crowd is hungry for on that front.
There have been pretty periodic recommended book "ask HN" posts through the years, you could go have a look at some. Even a quick skim will make it extremely clear you don't want to take book recommendations, or especially writing guidance, from these people.
I wonder if there is room for books about day to day professions. There are plenty of books about how an airline pilots or chefs job works.
Why not books about how a plumber, librarian, or widget salesmans job happens. Everyone knows when they move industries that there is a huge amount of stuff in any job (see the "Horse News" from the original article)
Stuff like business models, how profits is made spiced with the odd funny story. Easy to find a friend, uncle or to interview.
I'd point to the youtube channels about topics like this with 200,000 subscribers (and sometimes a lot more).
Feel like you could write a pretty absurd story about the espionage implications of accepting a jumbo jet from a foreign adversary.
The part of this essay that convinced me that I like this person was this:
"Horse News makes me feel like a bad person sometimes. Racing is an odd, archaic, and often cruel sport. The more I read about it, the more convinced I become that it should not exist. I root for Horse Laws and grow sad when a state bucks them."
Part of her paycheck comes from the horse racing industry so to be honest in this way is courageous. If she were in any of the common HN industries she would've written how horses have been her life-long passion, ever since she saw a picture of one in some random children's book, and how writing about horse racing allows her to share her passion with the world. She'd also have another job as a life coach.
She’s a good writer, I really enjoyed the article. It was one topic regarding being a writer today I was curiously waiting for while reading: gpt. Nothing can be more transforming for writers right now? The erotic novella will probably be written by AI very soon. YouTube is overflowing with AI generated and narrated stories now. Just a couple of months ago they were quite bad, but it’s huge improvements weekly and this week they have become so good that I’ll say they are better than magazine stories. We can just imagine how good they will be in two months from now.
Could AI have written this touching, funny article? There will still be a market for great writers, for now people crave connection to a real person at the other end. In this case, I'm reading it to understand something about being human. But it's true that the market for human writing as a whole will shrink further.
They will never replace lived experience, in the same way McDonalds will never replace a meal made by mom.
A friend of mine was determined to make an actual career as a writer, and she gradually followed the money switching jobs in the direction of those that paid the most. She now easily makes upwards of $15K per month writing, sustainably over years (although she does work a lot, like 60 hour weeks). Catch is, it is mostly marketing content for scam companies, crypto peddlers, illegal trading companies, and associated ecosystem (like lead suppliers, salesmen sourcers and so forth).
I can't write erotica or porn no matter how much I practice. I have read some great writers fails like a champ when they had tried to do the same. So, what if I fail. Sometimes I fall in erotica/porn scenes like not wanting to go that way. A detail just spontaneous popupping in my mind. And yes, then It's good. But is not erotica if it happen every 100 pages. PS: practice to write erotica, admin.
Extremely entertaining read!
I concur. … Not sure where, but empathy stopped me before the end.
As a person with a lifetime handicap, reading this article with its plethora of examples and debilitating health issues:
Why did this person insist on denying their handicap and status as a disabled person and pursue benefits available to provide for basic needs, if available in Canada or elsewhere?
There are other options than going to the “dark side” as I call an avenue like Horse News.
I’m sure she’s intelligent enough to admit that “reputation management” is a fucked up way of relabeling “propaganda outlet” so it’s more palatable.
Honestly I’ve got no qualms with the smut angle because that’s a long running tradition and readers very much have made it a worthwhile enterprise over hundreds of years.
I do find some odd comedy in taking a position that writing literary pornography is actually the lesser of two evils, morally speaking, in her method of making a living. I won’t be checking out her book because of the pervasive comments about her health issues. I have a far worse one and I rarely bring it up and that’s my choice, as it’s hers to wave the flag or tout overcoming it as some kind of accomplishment to celebrate. I suppose in some ways it is, but personally speaking working for “reputation management” is absolutely distasteful to me and I won’t try to rationalize it, even in the context of physical limitations.
> I have a far worse one and I rarely bring it up and that’s my choice, as it’s hers to wave the flag or tout overcoming it as some kind of accomplishment to celebrate.
It’s one of a handful of things in your HN bio. The pinned article on your blog is largely about its effects on your life.
That’s okay.
I think it’s admirable for people to talk frankly about their struggles with disability, and I think it’s hypocritical of you to criticize the article’s author for doing so.
A totally different working life compared to mine. Definitely worth reading, thank you!
Was enjoying the article 'till a massive popup tried to grab my attention. Unfortunately I have a policy that requires the page be closed within 5 seconds of any such popups :'(, hope the horse writing turned out OK for him/her/them/they.
You don't?
So born rich is the strat?
Writing is fun. I have a small personal blog with 21 subscribers -
If you like it and you're feeling extra generous, you can leave a donation.
I've been writing for many years, and I I'm still very far from being able to pay rent