Free Write-Newspaper Reader

 

Hurray! 

For the first time in several months the three  Free Writers are in the same country, town, café for the Free Write.

We looked for a "victim" a human we could write about. In getting the photo we had to be careful our "victim" could not be identified. 

All three of us seemed to to hit on the same idea.

Rick's Free Write 

He moseyed in through the automatic sliding door, stepped carefully down the stairs to the pastry counter, ordered only a noisette, and carried it back to the terrace level, choosing the corner table.

He grabbed both tabloid newspapers off the center counter – Le Temps and TDG – and parked his black backpack in one of the three vacant chairs.

The chaleur was the main news in both, which meteorologists had declared to be fini after 10 days. But despite the brief evening rain and overnight drop in temperatures, another heat dome was expected within a week and would again be 33, 34, 35C…

He turned his attention to the world news. The ceasefire in War 1 was on again. Supposedly. The ceasefire in War 2 had held for 10 days with only a few people killed each day. The ceasefire in War 3 - only 7 had died, all children. The ceasefire in War 3 never was.

Ah, sports. Wawrinka was retiring. He and Federer would play an exhibition in November at Palexpo. Tickets had sold out immediately.

South Africa was the first to get knocked out of the World Cup round of 16. Canada had a new unlikely hero.

He finished his mini-coffee, returned the papers to the counter, grabbed his backpack and slid out the auto door.

D-L's Free Write

"Scandal. Damned politicians." Frank turned to page two to continue reading the story. He would get back to stories on Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires,

His espresso was cooling.

He looked at his watch. He had another hour before Maria said he could come home. 

When he retired, it almost broke up his marriage. Was it his fault that he thought of a better schedule for her? Wanted to rearrange the furniture? 

Retired Husband Syndrome, the marriage counselor told them. Marie had had days to herself to do what she wanted for years. No longer.

The solution? Frank would get out of the house, get an espresso, read the paper. Sometimes the news was so depressing like today.

The tea room doors opened and Sally and her four-year old son  came in.

Bobby ran straight for his new friend Frank. "We're going to the park. Wanta come?"

"Maybe he has something else to do,"Sally said. 

He didn't. It would be nice to watch Bobby play on the slide as he had watched his own sons so long ago. 

"If retirement is boring, it's your job to make it interesting," Marie had said.¨

"I'd love to come."

Julia's Free Write 

Ah the luxury – a free morning.

After having pondered on what he “should” do, he decided to do what he wanted to do – once in a lifetime would surely be O.K.?

Thu it was that he found himself in one of his favorite coffee shops, a corner table overlooking green spaces with a glimpse of lake in the distance.

As he settled in for his coffee with one of his favorite papers, he reflected on his luck.

And perhaps should have stuck to that instead of opening said newspaper.

The world outside was falling apart from famine in one corner to war in several others.

Then there was the multitude of articles trying to explain the thought process of world leaders who had no clear thoughts, or only those of “it’s mine, I want it”, “you owe me because I say so” or “I’ll take what I want, mankind be damned”.

Here and there would be an article on the current devastating natural disasters.

Enough already he said to himself as he put down his paper and picked up his novel: time for escape reading!

 

 

 

Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.com, a weekly newsletter reporting the airline industry  top stories . He is the author of The Robot in the Simulator. AI in Aviation Training.  

Visit D-L.'s website  https://dlnelsonwriter.com, She is the author of 15 fiction and three non fiction books. Her 300 Unsung Women, bios of women who battled gender limitations, can be purchased  at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/300-unsung-women-d-l-nelson/1147305797?ean=9798990385504 

Visit Julia's blog. She has written and taken photos and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

 

Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles - Fertility fights

In researching the book Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles, two of the most depressing things were the fight to keep birth control away from women. The second was the individual women's stories. Even when I was engaged my doctor told me to come back for a diaphragm after I was married.

Fertility Fights

 What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence. 

When Margaret Sanger became active in fighting for women to have access to birth control, she was often ignored. The message that too many children could destroy a family because of inadequate resources took years to reach lawmaker’s ears.

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) made the term “birth control” popular. Much of her early adult life was spent crusading for women to have access to birth control. To do it, she had to break the law.

Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in Corning, New York. Her father, Michael H. Higgins, was an Irish immigrant who left the Catholic church. Although he wanted to be a doctor, he ended up working as a stonemason.

Her mother, Anne, emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine. The couple had 11 children and seven unsuccessful births. Anne died at 49.

How being a child from such a large family shaped Sanger’s attitudes about birth control is conjecture.

Her older sisters helped Sanger go to Claverack College and Hudson River Institute. She started nurses training at White Plains Hospital.

She married William Sanger in 1902. They had three children.

After a fire destroyed the Sanger couple’s home in Hastings-on Hudson, the family moved to New York City.

The marriage ended in 1921. Although she remarried, she continued her work under the Sanger name.

Not Preventing Pregnancy Led to Abortions

Sanger worked in the slums as a visiting nurse. Her husband was an architect. Both were social activists. What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence.

The advice was unrealistic and unsatisfactory.

Sanger considered women controlling their own fertility mandatory. Her method of activism to promote her belief that contraception and empowerment were linked was through the written word.

She created pamphlets, which could not legally be distributed through the mail because of the Comstock Laws. Instead she used family-planning and birth control clinics such as Harlem Birth Control, which she founded, boosting distribution to several hundred thousand copies.

The clinic had all-female doctors and a 100% African-American advisory council. Later, African-Americans were added to the staff.

She created a monthly newsletter, The Woman Rebel. Its slogan was “No Gods, No Masters,” borrowed from the Industrial Workers of the World who used it in the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. Sanger’s pamphlets with detailed descriptions of contraception methods challenged the Comstock Laws.

The Postal Service suppressed seven of 11 issues of her newsletter. Sanger was arrested. She escaped to the U.K. in 1914. While there, she came under the influence of Havelock Ellis, who believed sex should be safe and pleasurable for women.

Sanger wrote two articles for New York Call that would produce some outrage for their frankness:   

• “What Every Mother Should Know”       
•  “What Every Girl Should Know”
•  They were published in book format in 1916. A1917 edition also had information on:  
•  Cervical caps  
•  Diaphragms 
• Douches

Her book, Family Limitation, caused her to be prosecuted again under the Comstock Laws. It is still available in a 2017 edition. On Amazon, many of the reader reviews show a lack of understanding of the danger that this advice, the best available at the time, brought her.

It is hard to believe today that something like distributing birth control information would lead to 30 days in a workhouse and include force-feeding. That happened to Sanger’s sister and fellow birth-control advocate Ethel Byrne. Even more disturbing, at Sanger’s trial the judge said that women did not have the right to “to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”

Sanger would be arrested eight times.

She refused to promise she would not break the law again. A victory of sorts happened when Judge Frederick E. Crane ruled in the New York Court of Appeals that doctors could provide contraception information. The catch was that they should only prescribe birth control for reasons of health.

In 1917 Sanger began publishing the Birth Control Review, which was designed to promote support to the medical and legislative communities as well as the middle and upper classes. It encouraged readers to join the American Birth Control League (she founded ABCL in 1921), which later became Planned Parenthood. Publication stopped in 1929. The themes were:

• Children should be conceived in love
• Children should be born of their mother’s conscious desire
• Children should be created only under conditions which make possible the heritage of health

Sanger had the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr. for her ABCL.

Her work was not limited to the U.S. She discovered that the method of family planning in Asia was infanticide, most often of a female baby. She worked with writer and 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature winner and fighter for women’s rights Pearl Buck to open a family planning clinic in Shanghai.

Sanger had internal political problems with one group. Recently, her belief in eugenics sparked criticism that surfaced again in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign for U.S. president.

Sanger divided society into three groups:

1.  The educated and informed, who limited family size
2.  The intelligent and responsible, who wanted to control family size despite lacking some of the resources
3.   Irresponsible and reckless people with “religious scruples” She felt that the third group should be stopped from reproducing.       

Her National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, a lobbying group to overturn restrictions on contraception, began in 1929.

Frustrated by lack of results, she ordered a diaphragm in 1931 by mail, which was confiscated.

Finally, in 1936, a court decision overturned part of the Comstock Laws. Doctors could order contraception products.

A greater victory came in 1937. The American Medical Association decided contraception was a medical service and was added to the curriculum of many medical schools.

She was nominated for but did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sanger died at age 86 from congestive heart failure, but she lived to see the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control for married women.

Today birth control in many forms is considered normal. Many people today cannot imagine that not only was birth control once considered immoral it could result in prison much as abortion today in some places.

Climate Change is REAL

 

Canicule, French for heat wave. A pretty word to hear. It just slides off your tongue.

The reality of a canicule isn't pretty. Some 30,000 people died from the 2003 canicule some 14,000 in France alone.

Admittedly in Europe, air conditioning isn't as common as it is in the U.S. where it is often kept at pneumonia-producing highs. But that's not the point.

In most of my Swiss and/or French summers, I could keep my home comfortable. I'd let in the cool morning breeze early. When the sun started to rise, close the window, shutters and drapes until afternoon or early evening when again the air was comfortable. Usually in July a fan helped.

In 2003 fans no longer worked as temperatures soared. I was still working corporate then. We had no air conditioning. Executives closed my organization at 3 pm (15:00). Large bottles of water were distributed to everyone.

Although it was only a 10 minute walk home through the alphabet UN  agencies, the few minutes on a sweltering bus was better.

The 2003 winter when I went to the U.S. for Christmas, I wanted to key every SUV and gas guzzling vehicle I saw. When George W. Bush said that America would lose money by fighting climate change, and he didn't want that, I resisted kicking in the television. To people calling climate change a hoax I wanted to roast them.  

Canicules have been shorter but still there since 2003. 

Every trip from the south of France to Geneva or vice versa we notice more solar panels covering fields and parking lots. Charging stations increase at all the rest stops for electric cars. Even signs announcing the electric changing stations are all along the autoroutes next to those telling of gas, toilets, play areas, restaurants at the next stop. 

Some countries are running a good part of their electrical grid on renewables. Regulations are calling for savings. More and more wind turbines dance their dance. 

Trump's attitude toward climate change is to not just deny it but to make matters worse cutting regulations and supporting fossil fuels.

Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, are trapped within a heat dome. Even the U.K. is caught. 

People are dying. 

Animals are dying. 

Businesses are losing customers. Canicules are not good business.

No hope in sight for the next ten days. More all time heat records have been or will be broken.

Climate change is real. 

How stupid or how greedy are people that they don't see that they can destroy our species, or maybe we deserve it if we continue to mark progress with possessions that consume, consume, consume until we consume ourselves.

George Carlin said that we shouldn't be saying "save the planet. We should be saying save ourselves." 

 

AI Fiction Writing -- Not good/good Sometimes

 

If you go to see Swan Lake, which would you rather see? Real ballerinas or robots dancing?

Would you rather read a book written by a human or AI?  

I'm in the middle of writing a novella, The Ring. Two middle-aged sisters fight over their late mother's ring. I will serialize it on this blog when done. 

Because as a reader I loved illustrations like Rita Mae Brown and Alexander McCall Smith have done with some of their books before AI. I've wanted to illustrate my work. 

I'm not anti-AI. 

The artwork in this blog is AI generated. It's creatively fun to illustrate my writing. I would never use art AI in place of using a real artist.

When I published my anthology,  The Corporate Virgin  www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-corporate-virgin-d-l-nelson/1149289313, I illustrated each story with an AI illustration.  

I'm not pro AI either. It depends how it is used. 

I'm anti AI fiction writing.

When I write, or should I say rewrite. there is much polishing done from the rough first draft, which is almost a free write to when I consider the work finished. Some of the steps...

• Write X number of pages then go over it all. 
• First polish. Rework the first draft
• Write some chapters or pages 
• Change or cut the placement of paragraphs if necessary
• Change words for stronger words
• Change ing verbs if stronger verbs come to mind
• Examine details. DO I need another, or do I have too many? What will make each paragraph more visual?
• Check details such as spelling of place names, years, whatever to make sure of accuracy 
• Illuminate ly words 
• Try and catch typos
• Repeat above as many times that is necessary. It could be anywhere from 2x to 10+X
• Reread, rework, reread, rework until it is ready to release.  

I can't believe AI writing  polishes and weighs words, sentences, paragraphs.

• At the University of Maryland and Google DeepMindIn introduced Story Scope: AI written stories compared against human-written stories for:
• Structures 
• Story progress 
• Tension 
• Conflict

Some 60,000 stories of around 5000 words were examined.

The results? 

93% the human written story was identified against the AI one.

Is it good news that the AI failed in the same way bad or novice writers fail? AI had

• Over explanation 
• Less flashbacks 
• Less time jumps
• Too many metaphors
• Less originality in explaining human emotion
• Less subplots
• Less scenes
• Less dialogue
• Overly didactic 
• Not good at comedy 

 There were other comparisons. 

1. AI over-explains its themes instead of letting readers figure it out.
2. Human writing is less linear (more time-jumps and flashbacks).
3. AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion (81% vs. 38% human).
4. Humans reference specific texts, brands, places (nearly 2x the AI rate).
5. AI narrative is less diverse (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue). 

This blog only discusses fiction writing, not what happens to students who use AI to not do the research and intellectual work of a class assignment. 

 

As readers, my husband and I often start or the day by reading in bed. We interrupt each other to share an especially clever phrase or description. 

 

I know how hard we work to get exactly the right word, the right balance. Sure AI could probably do it faster but I want to share those words with not only my husband or the real live human who poured a bit of his/her heart and soul into creating them for me. 

---

Notes 

Cory Doctorow  Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

https://xix.ai/live/4781 A Study by the University of Maryland and Google DeepMindN

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/305860/20240619/google-deepmind-study-reveals-ai-struggles-write-comedy.htm