I love bots. My career is about natural language and language generation, and bots (will) sit right in that realm, when they’re done well. And it turns out that having a bot as a co-author creates a unique marketing opportunity. I know a lot about designing bot-like things, but not so much about building them. So when I decided this summer I wanted to experiment with a storytelling bot for the Damn Shames characters, I went…
A sharp chill is in the air. Writing season is officially upon me. My friends and family know that November is NaNoWriMo month. According to my stats, I’ve participated 12 years now — TWELVE! — including a 10-year participation streak; and I’ve “won,” or written 50k words in November, three times. (I seem to recall four, but I might have stopped tracking on the website after a while when I was writing Daugment in 2014.)…
One of my very enterprising peer-friends, Nikki, told me about a year ago that I needed to start getting my brand in order. My…brand? was my clueless response. She meant the brand of my online presence, the composite virtual face I was presenting to the world. At the time, I had little more than a LinkedIn page and a personal Twitter account used for silly interactions with my colleagues. Nikki’s advice was sound. I’ve been trying…
I’m really grateful for the online community I built as a kid interested in the Redwall series. I might talk about it more at length another day, but for now, know that I grew up alongside a diverse group of creative people of all ages, many of whose art I still follow today. Carolyn Paplham is one of those people – she makes delightfully whimsical, imaginative art that could have come straight from my childhood stories. She’s…
