Matthew Hurst

Pulp Asylum has just published my latest short story, The Man Who Said Too Much, which features an ice storm, stealing old chairs, and a Russian genius. Read it here: bit.ly/4y6ypBF #crime #thriller #amwriting #writingcommunity #writersky

Read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum 📚 on audiobook, which came out two years ago. So much of what @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu says about countries run by greedy narcissistic bullies could now be said about the US. #booksky #books #reading

Read: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark 📚 One of those ‘how autobiographical is this?’ games about a struggling 1940s writer. Snarky and funny and far more tricksy than I expected. #reading #books #booksky

Read: The Pretender by Jo Harkin 📚Peasant Pretender puppeteered by powerful Plantagenet proponents. Wolf Hall minus the portentousness. #booksky #reading #books

Read: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚As in his ‘Say Nothing’, Keefe clearly disentangles a lot of complicated world views and confabulations to illuminate a particular world, though the overarching story isn’t as sharply defined. #reading #books #booksky

Read: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚Cormac McCarthy with a sense of humour and optimism, and also an editor, and all the more likeable for it. #books #reading #booksky

Read: Last One Out A Novel by Jane Harper 📚Her usual territory: resident returns to Australian small town and insular relationships (often between 3 male friends) which led to a tragedy a few years before. Realistic characters, well observed interactions, but nothing new. #booksky #reading #books

Read: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚Fantastically researched especially the bits the TV series smoothed over. You do wonder exactly why Adams hasn’t sued over the allegations it makes about him. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Read: Pearl by Siân Hughes 📚Hughes is an award winning poet, and it shows, in a good way as her narator writes intensely and immersively about her mother’s death. As someone who felt no cause to grieve my own mother’s death, it was… informative. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Read: Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell 📚Big, detailed, accurate and gruesome. Also a cracking story (though not exactly genre-expanding). Great for immersion… #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Read: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚Freshman outrage at the shock of big companies being unscrupulous about how they make money. Nothing you can’t hear him perform any day of the week for free. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Guardian top 100 novels of all time I’ve read 25/100 and given up on a lot more on the list. Maybe I tried them too young. Also… no Hemingway? And I really don’t think Middlemarch (one of my DNFs) is the best novel of all time. #booksky

Read: Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius 📚Drips realism and apparently the CIA uses it as an exemplar of Middle Eastern espionage. The detail draws you in and the conflicts between ethnicities and sects is tragically still relevant. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

I mean, that’s a slightly different thing than writers not using LLMs and there are reasons like the environmental impact and putting people out of jobs for not using LLMs, but the biggest one is that it will only ever produce derivative retreads.

Some books have always been derivative slop of course - they were called ‘pulp’ for a reason - and really the only reason for not using LLMs to create more is that even hacks deserve bread on the table (speaking as a hack).

LLMs are only ever going to come up with the most likely version of the next word given its instructions, and that probability is based on what’s out there already. So, always derivative shit. That’s why not to use AI.

Read: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford 📚Dark smart pastiche of Fielding, Sterne, etc, in late 18th century New York, but there’s more to it than just quality fanfiction. The characters are ludicrously alive and you can smell the horse shit and ambition. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Read: The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd 📚 Juicy atmospheric procedural set in Paris just after the Germans marched in during June 1940. Not spies, but feels like Furst, Gerlis, Robert Harris. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

I’ve stumbled into being a sportsfan for the first time in my life, as a 57 year old Brit. Mostly, I’m in it for the incomprehensible commentary.

Recently moved to Canada, just in time to latch onto the Toronto Blue Jays getting narrowly beaten in the final of the World Series, and then my wife announced she’d got a Sportsnet subscription. And now I know what stacking your bases and platooning is.

But 90% of the commentary still sounds like

And here comes Bravetti to the plate, sets his flonkers, gives the wrist-crank, and delivers — oh, that’s a high floopster, drifting toward the schnozz zone, and Palumwick gets under it, tracks it back to the warnle, makes the snab! Beautiful snab by Palumwick, who’s been snabbing everything in the deep dubris tonight. Two gromps, one blurtle, and the count sits at three-and-wumble.

It’s like Debussy writing sports coverage, or Monet in his late ‘lost my glasses’ phase. The details swoosh past in an infinite scroll of pleasurable enough to keep going.

It’s setting the audience (fans? crowd? My arts background still pokes through here and there) up for a massive dopamine spike. Depending on a largely random contact between ball and bat, my alloted champions might go four ahead, or they might lose the series.

I’m pretty sure the rules were written by BF Skinner. A pitch becoming a ball or a strike is the definition of intermittent reinforcement - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, based on no consistent criteria I can divine. Trying to figure out the rules is enough to keep me pulling the lever for more cheese.

And in the meantime, I’m going to figure out whether a floopster in the schnozz zone is a good thing or a bad thing.

Read: The Pariah by Dan Fesperman 📚Happily facetious palate freshener involving the a murderous Eastern European dictator, metoo’d American comedian, chimney cakes (whatever they are), delicate egos and many violent deaths. #booksky #books

Read: All the Sinners Bleed A Novel by S. A. Cosby 📚Nails the atmosphere of Deep(ish) South small town revenge, tangled up in barely hidden racism, fully developed characters. Solid genre procedural but stands in its own right too. #booksky #books

My latest ’excursion’ into podcasting is up - an interview with spy writer Michael Dylan about his latest book The New Spy, for @spybrary. Find it where-ever you get your etc. etc. spybrary.com/the-new-s… #booksky #authorsky

Trump: I want Iran’s oil

ATTACKS IRAN

Media: Let us ponder why Trump is attacking Iran.

I mean. Come on.

Read: There There by Tommy Orange 📚Most of the book is perceptively drawn scenes of disparate cast in the runup to a powwow in Oakland. When tragic violence explodes there, it’s both the point and beside the point that they’re all native American. #booksky #books

Read: The Fraud by Zadie Smith 📚Meaty and slightly meandering like the 19th century English novels it pastiches, with a nuanced human take on slavery’s effects rather than performative shouty self righteousness. #booksky #books

Saw #onebattleafteranother. Self indulgent self righteous simplistic mess congealed by four over privileged stars riffing cringey stoner ‘humour’ on Pynchon pretension for spurious intellectual validation and only winning #Oscars because everything else is even worse.

I use AI a lot in writing, to get over blank screen paralysis. I get it to generate a bunch of words which I know will be so infuriatingly bad I’ll be forced to rewrite them entirely till none of its version remains and I have created my first draft #writingcommunity #amwriting #writersky