Call me maybe

And my swarm of literary robots!

Thanks for the kind words last week. It took patience and pressure to get that interview out. But now once it was, the well seemed a little empty, and I have spent the week enjoyably replenishing it.

Call me maybe!

There were two articles I really liked in the New Yorker. One was Andrew O’Hagan on the Murdochs. Made me really rue not going up to him when I saw him at a book launch – I think you can build a life on a couple of goings up to people. The other article was one by Thomas Meaney, who I did once go up to in an airport. That piece sent me back to his one about the former New York Review of Books editor Bob Silvers.

“Bob understood the needs and feelings of writers in a way that made other editors often seem obtuse by comparison. He warmed to revisions, thrilled to last-minute corrections, made it seem nothing could be more important than the piece at hand, and was fastidious in avoiding unnecessary fiddling. I cannot remember anyone saying that a piece had not been improved in his hands.”

I’ve been trying to improve my editing. There aren’t that many instructionals for it, but I’ve been reading pieces like that and listening to a few podcast episodes, of which this has been my favourite so far. Leo Carey suggests always calling the writer and asking things like, “So was there anything you nearly put in that you didn’t?”

The dream, I suppose, is to have a few writers you really like, who stay with you, and with whom you form a relationship of trust and knowledge. Sending back thoughts is better than sending back changes and ringing up to talk about the article may be better still. It is much easier for the writer to tell you what they are thinking, and you have to express yourself in a natural way. I must say the phone calls I tried from my desk this week seemed quite productive in that way as well as feeling extremely chic. I love phone calls. Probably someone will comment an idiotic boob that I wasted their time with.

I’ll be back!

I love AI so much and have gone totally crazy this week drumming up a veritable swarm of literary drones. We have agreed before that committing your soul to the written word uses up your lifetime allowance of romance and you otherwise have to be ruthlessly practical. Now I think you have to go further, and become half cyborg. Here are my new, metallic limbs.

For the last two years or so I have always pasted highlights from the articles I have read into documents called “year-month-reading”. Now I have uploaded all of those to a Google programme called NotebookLM. In an instant I can ask, what was that thing I read about that thing? What articles have I read by that guy? What articles in this month did I give my dollar-sign approval mark to? It’s really useful.

With books I have always taken highlights on my Kindle. But if you copy and paste them from the online clippings webpage into a document, it is dismally formatted. I rustled up the couple of computer science modules I took at uni to make a web app that turns the raw paste into a formatted document. You can add the table of contents so that it adds headings at the right place, it flags any highlights that got truncated so you can fill them back in. Now I am building a digital library of all my highlights from all the books I’ve read.

Lastly I made a robot that will check my articles for sense, spelling and the in-house style guide. I can mostly do it alone but it’s useful to have a checker. Now that you can code in AI prompts, some things are much easier. Like the rule the NS has of capitalising “FBI” because you pronounce the letters but not “Nato” because you pronounce the words could never have been coded with hard logic, but it can be explained to AI.

Are you regular?

More than ever it seems that newsletters with a face at the top are the future. It’s not quite like novels or essays where I have obvious north stars from the past to follow. So I am buying collections of all the columns I can think of that were lifey but a bit political and really sparked people’s imagination. I’ve finished Boris Johnson’s car reviews, am quite far through Dolly Alderton’s agony aunts, am liking Marina Hyde’s collection, and am seeking copies of the original columns that became Bridget Jones and Sex and the City. I’m also going to write to the Ham & High asking to see the archive of Michael Foot’s columns. But please tell me all your favourite old columnists so I can draw on them. It’s just such a romantic and attractive image that it might be part of your weekly routine to sit down and do your column. Ugh!

Ticking on

I’m really enjoying seeing your word counts in the comments each week. This week my own fiction in this latest effort passed 20,000 words, which I think is now cause to head outside, buy the papers, get a cappuccino and a croissant, and enjoy the morning!

GM