• Every novel feels like an impossibly tall mountain

    Updated: 2023-10-30 19:00:00
    I’m in the homestretch of finishing a new middle grade novel, which will mark the sixth novel I’ve written, in addition to two nonfiction guides. With nearly eight books under my belt (five of which are published), one would think I just crank them out now. I don’t. And here’s something that’s struck me every […]

  • Movemate standing board review — fixing your back, legs from sedentary decline from a tech job

    Updated: 2023-10-29 07:00:00
    The Movemate board fits into the genre of work-focused standing boards designed to reduce fatigue while standing at a computer. This Movemate review is a bit different from the normal tech comm content on my blog, but I believe it's just as relevant. If you're sitting right now, does your back hurt a bit? Do your legs feel like they've been shut off and are atrophying? Are you tired of sitting all day every day in front of a screen? It doesn't have to be like that.

  • Musk sinks Twitter in just a year (This week in books)

    Updated: 2023-10-27 19:00:00
    This week! Books! I’ll never forget it. When I was on vacation in Hawaii in the late 2000s, I checked my email and it was nothing but “new follower” notifications from Twitter. Sandwiched in between hundreds of these alerts was a congratulations. I’d made Twitter’s inaugural “Who to follow” list. Everyone from Mike Tyson to […]

  • A very good nonfiction query (query critique)

    Updated: 2023-10-26 19:00:00
    If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in the discussion forums: Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your […]

  • My experience trying to write original, full-length human-sounding articles using Claude AI

    Updated: 2023-10-25 07:00:00
    You can use AI tools like Claude to help you write full-length content. By going paragraph-by-paragraph, you can direct the AI while seemingly maintaining your own voice and ideas. However, despite my attempts to use AI with writing, I've found that it's harder to pull off than I thought. I can come kind of close, but due to the way AI tools are trained, they inevitably steer into explanation more than argument. This can remove much of the interest from a personal essay.

  • Just write

    Updated: 2023-10-23 19:00:00
    During the pandemic, lots of writers used the extra time to write, to take writing classes, to read writing guides, and to engage with writing communities. While on the whole this has been an excellent case of turning Covid lemons into novel lemonades, in my work with authors I am also seeing quite a few […]

  • Was the publishing industry really serious about diversity? (This week in books)

    Updated: 2023-10-20 19:00:00
    This week! Books! First up, I don’t mean to paint an entire industry with too broad of a brush and there have certainly been pockets of commitment to reversing a checkered legacy of hiring and publishing patterns within the book business. But one of the looming questions was whether the publishing industry would really sustain […]

  • Chatting about AI trends and tech comm with Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti

    Updated: 2023-10-20 07:00:00
    In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti, a tech writer in Barcelona who blogs at passo.uno and works for Splunk, about various AI news topics. We talk about the Forrester AI jobs impact forecast, the community element in documentation, the way the profession is changing with AI, content design roles with LLMs, how complex processes and interactions can't be automated, whether the word 'content' is problematic, and more.

  • [Podcast] AI and APIs: What works, what doesn't

    Updated: 2023-10-14 07:00:00
    In conversations about AI, a lot of tech writers are asking what kind of scenarios is AI good for? What works, what doesn’t? In which scenarios? You may have read my responses to these questions before in previous posts, but this time I recorded a podcast with slides. In the podcast, I try to pull together these ideas into more of a narrative shape and flow. This podcast focuses on clarifying those scenarios where AI excels and where it doesn’t, particularly for technical writers creating documentation. I also argue for the inevitability of AI integration through an argument referred to as the 'obsolescence regime.'

  • Forrester Report, Coding jobs, Hyper-personalization, RFPs, Call center replacement (Oct 9, 2023)

    Updated: 2023-10-09 07:00:00
    The following are links from around the web for October 10, 2023. Forrester predicts a major AI impact on U.S. jobs in 2023. A CEO faces backlash for replacing and criticizing human staff with ChatGPT. Zeb Larson assures coders that ChatGPT isn't a job threat, while Rex Woodbury explores the rise of hyper-personalization. Finally, sales execs welcome AI's role in their industry.

  • Open-source contribution myths, Hiring poets to train LLMs, Problems with 'content', AI agents (Oct 6, 2023)

    Updated: 2023-10-05 07:00:00
    The following are summaries of interesting articles from around the web, as well as my commentary. Daniel Beck debunks myths surrounding open-source documentation portfolios. Silicon Valley's top AI firms are intriguingly recruiting poets. Jason Bailey supports Emma Thompson's stance on the term 'content' being disrespectful. The potential of A.I. is examined beyond the hype, emphasizing its aid for human writers and editors. Ivan Walsh provides insights on optimizing ChatGPT prompts for technical summaries, while Ellis Pratt discusses how AI agents can be a time-saver for technical writers.

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