Only a good writer, that truly enjoys their craft, is able to masterfully insert a witty dry pun like that into their work. Bravo!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

https://rxjourney.net

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https://dsebastien.net

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.

In the future, everyone's aidoru will be famous for fifteen minutes.

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

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.)

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.