writing

On Confronting Expectations

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

NOTE: I’m not normally one to warn about spoilers, but this post will talk about the nitty gritty of the movie American Sweatshop as well as my first novel, Moore Hollow. It’s nearly ten years old now and I like to think it’s worth a read even if it’s been “spoiled,” but if you’ve not read it and want to be surprised, go do it now (watch American Sweatshop while you’re at it – it’s pretty good) and then come back to this. Ready? Let’s begin!

You pick up a book. The cover is a lush painting of a rural scene. There are a couple of horses, in full saddle. The “people” you see really aren’t – one’s an elf, another an oversized ogre type being. The one actual person has tall hat on that just screams “wizard!”

You’d probably expect that book to be some kind of high fantasy story, probably involving a quest of some kind. The appearance of non-humans indicate a depth of world building that will include countless races and fantastic creatures. Adventure awaits!

Except the book isn’t anything like that. The cover represents a painting that is the subject of the story, which is really about the relationship between the painter and his grandson and how they bridge the generations to find love, meaning and understanding. No big battles or nifty spells or sword wielding included.

Now, this might be the best book that’s ever been written on the subject – or at all! – but you’re likely to be disappointed. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it’s not the kind of book you expected it to be. Expectations can sometimes poison a reader or viewer and create a boundary between them and the work as it actually is. They can be tricky things.

Take American Sweatshop, for example.

It’s a movie about Daisy, who works for a YouTube-style social media company as a content moderator. In other words, she watches loads of videos all day to see whether they should be blocked or, perhaps, reported to authorities. This is still a real thing, even in the age of AI. Naturally, Daisy comes across a video that appears to show a woman being killed.

This sounds like the setup for a taught thriller or horror movie – indeed, it is, to my understanding, precisely the setup for the remake/sequel/whatever to Faces of Death that just came out. The kind of thing that goes all noir as Daisy descends into the darker corners of the world in pursuit of justice for the potential murder victim.

But it isn’t that kind of movie, for the most part (it is a little confused, which is its biggest flaw). Rather, while Daisy does try to track down who made the video and determine whether it was even real, it’s less about that drive for justice/vengeance than it is on what the investigation does to Daisy’s psyche. Along the way we see how others doing the same job are coping (or not) with their particular stressors and how the company tries to help (not well!). The result is more psychological drama with a hint of satire than thriller.

For some people, that simply didn’t work. The currently solitary review of the movie on Rate Your Music (2/5 stars) starts that the “trailer was so good” but concludes: “I expected a thriller but I got something more like a video HR will show you.”

The issue, of course, is that you need to advertise your movie and in doing so the things you put out in the world – the poster, the tagline, whatever – creates expectations as a means to find an audience. People might watch a thriller with this setup who would never watch a documentary covering the same ground.

I know this from my first novel, Moore Hollow.

It has hints that it’s a certain kind of story. That it’s part of the Appalachian Paranormal series says something. So does that cover. Turn the book over the blurb had the “z word” in it – zombies! So it’s one of those kinds of stories, right?

Except it’s not. The zombies in Moore Hollow aren’t the typical monsters of Night of the Living Dead(which are peculiar in their own right) or The Walking Dead. In other words, it’s not this kind of story:

Rather, it’s a story where the zombies are poor creatures to be pitied and protected from the outside world, not monsters that need killing. The conflict derives from Ben Potter coming to West Virginia to find proof that these zombies exist and deciding whether he’s going to tell the world about them (to his professional and familial benefit) or keep the secret of their existence and continue his fairly miserable life.

This has led to some interesting conversations with potential readers. If they’re “oh, sweet, zombies!” I have to try and talk them down a bit, temper expectations. If they’re more like, “oh, I don’t do zombies,” then I can try to convince them it’s really not the kind of book. I don’t want people to come into the book expecting one thing and getting another and disliking it for that reason. It can make marketing kind of tricky.

The paradox is that most artists, I think, want people to engage with their work with an open mind, on its own terms. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and all that, right? But the truth is people do judge based on covers and part of getting people to read a book or watch a movie is to convince them it’s something they want to read or see in the first place.

There are people unsatisfied with season two of The Pitt because it lacked the single, huge, trauma even of season one’s mass shooting. I’ve seen people who watched all of DTF St. Louis only to be disappointed that it was never really a murder whodunnit in the first place. Expectations, again, getting in the way of engagement.

The goal is to find the fine line that entices without promising too much, so when they get to the end they don’t feel they’ve been cheated out of something. I’m not sure where that line is, precisely, but if I figure it out I might become a rich man.

A Writing Update

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Now that 2026 is in full swing and we’ve thawed out here in West Virginia, I thought it would make sense to bring everybody up to speed on my writing life these days.

First, of course, there’s the new story in the Lesser Cryptids of Appalachia anthology, which you can read more about here.

Second, I’m still working on getting The Fall whipped into shape. It’s going through my writers’ group right now, which will take another few months (we take turns doing chunks of everybody’s project). My hope is that it’s through that process and ready to be put into final form by the end of the year. Here’s hoping for a 2027 release. I’m excited for everybody to see it.

Finally, I’m happy to announce that I’ve started working, in earnest, on book three of the Paranormal Appalachia series. In this yet-untitled book Ben Potter has to confront his unusually deep feelings about ghosts. And maybe find love. The inspiration for the story is the tale of the Greenbrier Ghost, about which I’ll say more later.

Of course, I’ll endeavor to keep updating the blog here weekly (I do have a few other things lined up to talk about), but if I miss a week, now you know why!

Thoughts on Character “Arcs”

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As I mentioned last month, one of my favorite TV shows from last year was Pluribus, from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan.

Rhea Seahorn (also of Better Call Saul) stars as Carol, a best-selling but unfulfilled romantacy author who turns out to be one of about a dozen people in the world who can resist an alien virus-type-device that transforms the rest of Earth’s population into a gigantic hive mind. Some people also can’t survive the transformation process, including Carol’s wife.

None of this can constitute spoilers, by the way – it all happens in the first episode. Some of what I talk about below falls into that category, however, if you care about those kinds of things.

So Carol begins the story not just literally cut off from what is now the human experience but in grief. She’s angry about what she’s lost personally and acts on that anger. She’s not, at this point, all that tuned in to what it might mean for humanity to be a big hive mind (good or bad). Carol’s pain and anger is personal, small, and, in some ways, petty.

To her surprise, this puts Carol at odds with the rest of the dozen or so folks who haven’t been absorbed yet. While she’s pushing for fighting back, they’re largely OK with it. Not for nothing do they have connections to this new hive mind, in the form of loved ones or friends who are part of it (or are they?). Carol is all alone and that loneliness is what largely drives her.

This does start to change about midway through the season. She accepts the help that the hivemind can offer (there’s a fabulous scene where a wave of drones show up to restock a Whole Foods just so she can go shopping). She accepts the presence of a companion, a woman sent to her by the hive mind because she resembles the hero from Carol’s books (the version she always wanted to write, anyway). There’s even a kind of romantic connection that develops. None of this suggests that Carol has fundamentally changed who she is or what she thinks about the hivemind, but she’s learning to live with it.

Things come to a head when Manousos, another of the unabsorbed who had locked himself away in Paraguay, makes the long trek to New Mexico to find Carol, whose early radio pleas for help indicate she’s a kindred spirit. Always more radical than Carol, he’s chagrined to learn, when he shows up, that she appears to have lost whatever fighting spirit she once had. When he starts trying various ways to injure hivemind members (and perhaps restore their individuality) she objects.

Yet, that’s not where the end of the first season leaves us. Manousos stays in New Mexico while Carol and her companion jaunt around the world, the kind of bucket-list vacation you’ll never get to take in real life. It’s during that that she learns that the hivemind’s ultimate goal of assimilating her (along with the others) could be done without her consent. This snaps Carol out of it and she returns to the Albuquerque cul-de-sac and Manousos just in time for a crate containing an atomic bomb to be delivered. End season one.

So, in a way, Carol ends the season just where she began – committed to acting against the hivemind and, maybe, saving humanity. I saw a lot of complaints online after the season finale to the effect of “she’s the same she was from the beginning, what was the point?” It made me chuckle, since that seems to miss the entire point of the season.

To a certain extent a season of TV, or a book, is a journey you send characters on. In many instances you’re literally getting them from Point A to Point B, whether those are actual physical locations (a quest from home to a far away land) or something internal (an emotionally wounded person learning to love, etc.). But sometimes, the journey looks like it brings the character back to where they began, only the character has changed.

I hate to fall back on cliche, but sometimes the journey itself is more important than the destination. While end-of-season Carol seems like she’s basically in the same place as start-of-season Carol – s resist the hivemind! – she’s there for a different reason. Earlier Carol was reacting largely from ignorance. She wasn’t interested in listening to the few other people in her situation about whether the hivemind was good and, perhaps, worth joining voluntarily. End-of-season Carol has some perspective one what the hivemind can offer, albeit a limited one.

Carol, as a person, has grown over the course of the season. She went from essentially lashing out from pain and grief to finding a resolve to fight because of what joining the hivemind would mean to her. So while her ultimate goal appears to be the same now as at the beginning, the motivation is different. That matters, at least in fiction.

That will probably not content those who didn’t enjoy the first season of Pluribus. It was definitely a slow burn (probably helped that we binged it at the end of the season), but it was going somewhere and it was important that Carol get there. Does that make for a compelling season of TV? Not for everybody, but I was definitely down for it.

New Story! New Anthology!

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

You’ve heard me mention Cicada Books & Coffee in Huntington before. I’ve done a couple of events there and the owner is part of my writers’ group, so I was thrilled when she said they were going set up a small press and start doing anthologies. Brood XIV Books was born and, now, it’s published its first anthology!

It’s called Lesser Cryptids of Greater Appalachia and the idea is to tell some stories of local beasties beyond the big names like Mothman or the Flatwoods Monster.

It’s filled with cool stories – and one of mine! It’s called “A Pool of Tears” and it is about a little beast from the Western Pennsylvania woods called a squonk.

I first learned of him thanks to a Genesis song called “Squonk” that had this explanation in the liner notes:

The Squonk is of a very retiring disposition and due to its ugliness, weeps constantly. It is easy prey for hunters who simply follow a tear-stained trail. When cornered it will dissolve itself into tears. True or False?

I’d always wanted to write a story about the little guy and this was a great chance to do it. It’s a Ben Potter story and actually slots in after the next (as of yet unwritten) book in the series, at it involves a new character that will make her appearance in that book. I tried to take a different angle on beast encounters.

Grab Lesser Cryptids in ebook here (or here for Kindle folks) or print here – or, of course, head on down to Cicada and get a copy there!

Blog Hiatus

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

It’s that time of the year again. Even though National Novel Writing Month is officially dead, I still think of November as a month to lay other things aside and focus on writing, so that’s what I’m going to do. Things will be silent for a while around here as I, hopefully, make some progress on a couple of projects.


First will be a short story for the third volume of Old Bones, the journal of the Henlo Press. The inspiration is worms. I think I’ve got a fun angle on it.

Then I’m planning to dive into my next novel (The Fall is still percolating through the editing process, don’t worry!). At this point it will probably be the sequel to The Triplets of Tennerton, as the prep work for it is largely done. That said, who knows if something else might catch my fancy in the next couple of weeks before November starts?

Tune back in around the start of December to find out!

“Which One Is Your Favorite?”

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Last weekend, at the Writer’s Block event hosted by Henlo Press, I had a discussion with a potential customer that threw me for a loop. Surveying my books, she asked, “which one is your favorite?” It’s a harder question than you’d think and one I’d never put any real thought into.

The cliched answer for an artist is to say that their newest project (either the just-released one they’re promoting or the one that’s about to come out) is their favorite, which I suppose makes some sense. The latest work is the one into which you’ve most recently poured your heart and soul. It’s very front of mind. And, of course, it’s new and shiny and you want people to buy it?

But, in my experience at least, the latest project is often your least favorite, at least in some ways. It’s also the one you’ve just sweated over and bled for, the one you’ve wrestled into a final form that is “done” but you think could probably be better if you just spent another week/month/year/decade working on it. Once I’m done with a book I’m sort of “and good riddance!”, at least for a little while.

A year on from the release of The Triplets of Tennerton that feeling has pretty much gone away. I’m quite proud of it and think of it as my “best” work, given that it’s the culmination of everything I’ve learned and practiced over the past 15 years or so of writing fiction. But is that the same thing as being my “favorite”? It’s a hard question.

Without doubt, Moore Hollow would be an easy choice for favorite, since it was my first novel (I love The Last Ereph for being its gawky, awkwardness and it being the real first book, but it’s not in consideration for “favorite”). It was, after all, the proof that I could do this and got me out there talking to people about stories I was telling, which is awesome! That said, Moore Hollow (and Triplets) are both more or less set in the “real” world.

It wasn’t until The Water Road (and its sequels) that I dove head first into the kind of ground-up world building that’s been a part of so many stories I’ve loved over the years. If Moore Hollow was proof I could write a novel, The Water Road was proof I could create a world and bring readers into a place that only existed in my mind. I was able to tell a full, compelling story of a world that doesn’t exist, filled with “people” who aren’t even human, and that doesn’t include typical fantasy magic. How could that not be my favorite?

But then again, the Gods of the Empire and its sequels showed I could do it all again! I can’t speak for other creators, but I kind of always feel, in the back of my head, that when I finish one book that I might never finish another. So being able to put The Water Road trilogy to bed and turning to a completely different world and build it up from scratch made me feel pretty good. It was a different experience doing it with what I’d learned from The Water Road in my head. So that trilogy is maybe tighter and more put together than the first?

All this goes to show that I can’t actually name a favorite book and, in fact, it’s not a great question to ask a creative person. Would you ask me to choose a favorite between these two?

Of course you wouldn’t!

The better question, if you’re ever in the same position as my potential reader this weekend, is “which would you recommend?” That turns the focus from what I think to what you, the reader, is looking for. You like semi-mysteries with a dash of the paranormal and a smart-ass protaganist? I’ve got that. Epic fantasy, with deep political and social world building, but not worried about the absence of magic or human beings? That, too. Something steampunky? Lemme show you these.

Because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I think or feel about my own work. It’s about how best I can match you up with a new book you’re going to love.

On Historical Fiction

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Years ago – I mean years ago  – I remembered Roger Ebert describing Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in this withering way:

“Pearl Harbor” is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.

At the time I thought that was just a good burn on a bad, schlocky, blockbuster (surely less entertaining than the commentary track for whichever Kevin Smith film it was where they bust on co-star Ben Affleck relentlessly for it), but the more I think about it, Ebert’s observation identifies a key difficulty when it comes to historical fiction – are you telling a story about a historical event or about people in a historical time who might be impacted by it?

That dilemma hit me recently as I read a pair of books built around a period of local history known as the West Virginia Mine Wars. They take very different approaches to the material which left one much more successful than the other, at least for me.

The first was Rednecks, by Taylor Brown.

“Rednecks,” for those not familiar, was the term used to describe striking miners who would tie a red bandana around their necks (it was derogatory at first, then adopted by the miners). The book Rednecks acts almost as a kind of sequel to the great John Sayles’ film Matewan, starting with the “Matewan Massacre” that was the culmination of the film. It then tells of the events that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict in the United States since the Civil War (so far, at least).

The second book was Storming Heaven, by Denise Giardina.

While it ends in roughly the same place as Rednecks, Storming Heaven covers the whole of the Mine Wars period, starting with the railroads coming into the West Virginia/Kentucky border area in the 1890s and buying up property using sketchy methods.

Beyond that, the two books differ in whose story is being told. The main characters in Rednecks are a local doctor (of Lebanese extraction, apparently inspired by one of the author’s ancestors) and a miner, both fictional, but lots of the smaller roles are filled by real people – Mother Jones, Sid Hatfield, and such. We get chapters from their points-of-view and some big speeches that are probably historically accurate. The downside is that they tend to drain the momentum of the main characters’ stories and can come off like one of those “you are there!” books for young readers.

By contrast, in Storming Heaven all the characters are fictional. They do occasionally interact with real people and some are fictional takes on real people – Sid Hatfield, for instance, gets a doppelganger who is also assassinated on the courthouse steps. In fact, the book takes place in a couple of fictional counties (one in West Virginia, on in Kentucky), but manages to interact with the “real world” enough to retain a sense of realism.

The result is that Rednecks feels like a book that was written to bring knowledge of a particular historical event to the public via fiction. That’s a noble pursuit and it’s certainly a mode of fiction that does a lot of work across literature, film, and TV. What it doesn’t really feel like is a story of people, characters, who feel alive and real in their own. I was far more engaged with Rednecks when it focused on the fictional doc and miner than when it leaned on actual historical figures.

Storming Heaven, by contrast feels like a fully fleshed out work of fiction that happens to be set during a particular historical period. I didn’t care about the characters because of the events they were living through, I cared about them as individuals. In the process, I think you get a better feel for what the historical period was like. No doubt, Rednecks is a lot more granular in terms of how Blair Mountain went down, but Storming Heaven hits harder emotionally, even with less historical detail.

I did an interview recently where I said that the most important element in good writing is building interesting characters. If you don’t care about the people to whom the events of the story are happening nothing else really matters. I think details of events are better left to non-fiction, to the work of historians and journalists. Historical fiction works best when it’s trying to capture the feeling of what it meant to live during the time period involved.

Or you can do what I do and plunder history for ideas and turn them into fantasy or sci-fi stories. Then there’s no worry about getting history “right” because the history is whatever you think it should be!

A Statement About AI

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Just before I went on hiatus courts in two separate lawsuits by creatives against generative AI companies handed down similar decisions indicating that AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Both concluded that using existing copyright-protected works to train AI engines falls under the doctrine of “fair use.” As one article explained:

The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without the copyright owner’s permission in some circumstances.

Fair use is a key legal defense for the tech companies, and Alsup’s decision is the first to address it in the context of generative AI.

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that U.S. copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”

Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Alsup agreed with Anthropic on Monday that its training was “exceedingly transformative.”

You can read more about the nuances of the various cases here. And this column points out how restrictive copyright can be when a real human being wants to use something that’s currently protected.

While I’m not a party to either suit, I do know that some of my books (likely scraped from pirate sites) are included in at least one collection that’s used for AI training, so I do have some skin in the game. In light of that, I wanted to say a few more words about AI and make some public promises about it.

Part of the trouble we’re having with AI is down to the fact that the law has never really grappled with the nature of computer power in the 21st Century. The pro-AI argument for training on existing works is that it’s the same thing that humans do – all artists and creators are building their own work on whatever they’ve read or seen or heard before. Nobody could seriously argue that a young would-be writer who borrows a bunch of books from friends or families and then writes their own story was fucking with anybody’s copyright. The problem with AI is that it can do that on a massive scale that the law can’t quite fathom.

It’s somewhat similar to what’s happened with criminal records and arrest reports over the past few decades. Those things were always (for the most part) public and accessible to anyone who had the time and desire to go to the courthouse and wade through files to find them. But who actually did, outside of people doing it for a living? Now it’s just a matter of a quick Web search to see if your neighbor was arrested for DUI over the weekend. The law is mostly concerned with the public/private dichotomy, without factoring in accessibility.

Years ago, the Supreme Court was confronted with how to deal with GPS trackers placed on cars and whether they implicated the Fourth Amendment. Generally speaking, to assert a Fourth Amendment violation you have to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the place that was searched. By definition, there’s no such expectation when you’re out in public, so there’s never been a problem with the police following people who they suspect of something (but lack the probable cause necessary to arrest them). GPS trackers take that and multiply the amount of data available exponentially in a way that flesh-and-blood cops could never handle. Rather than confront this head-on in the case, the Court took a step back and concluded that the actual placement of the tracker was the problem. We’re still trying to figure out what mass data means when it comes to the Fourth Amendment.

It’s the same with AI and it’s doubtful the law is going to get itself in gear anytime soon.  With that said, I have a few promises I’ll make to readers when it comes to AI:

I will not knowingly allow my work to be used for AI training. A good chunk of the AI discourse when it comes to creators is the copyright angle, but even if the AI companies came up with arrangements to compensate creators for the use of their work in training there are still huge issues with generative AI. It’s horrible for the environment. Its products are the worst kind of unimaginative slop. It’s bad for the soul – creativity is a large part of what makes us human and we best not be willing to outsource it to machines. Count me out, regardless of potential reward.

I will not knowingly use generative AI in my writing or music. This should come as no surprise, particularly in light of my NaNoWriMo post linked above, but I won’t knowingly use generative AI in my work. There are other AI variants that are much more common and less problematic (like spell check) that I have always used and will continue to use, but every idea that gets put on a page or in a song is only going to come from my own head – for better or worse! Otherwise, what’s the point?

I will not knowingly work with others who use generative AI. I am happy to say that Deranged Doctor Designs, who have done the (current) covers for all my books, are committed to going forward without resorting to generative AI in their work. I will strive to ensure the same with anybody else I work with in the production process.

All this may be pointless, standing on the tracks of “progress” while the train inevitably barrels over me. I may be shouting into the void (I did use to have a blog called Feeding the Silence so it wouldn’t be the first time). As one snappy commenter put it:

Gone Writin’ – Back In A Bit

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t had a lot to say about actually writing here recently. There’s a good reason for that. My final NaNo project, The Fall, is continuing through the editing process – slowly but surely. That leaves me trying to figure out what to do next, with several interesting options in the aether. So I’m going to take a summer siesta from blogging and try and dig into my next book.

Talk again in a month or so when I have some idea what I’m doing – stay cool!