Lonely Reflections

To be honest, I’m a little worried about the state of creative writing as AI develops. I don’t think AI will kill it, but I do think it’s changing the landscape of professional writing for the worse. For one, a few publications I liked that would compensate authors for submissions have shut down in the last few years. Sad to see them go, and while it wasn’t exactly AI that killed them, it certainly won’t help the existing body of authors looking to sell their work. If you’ve gone to a few submission pages lately, you may have noticed a bevy of changes. Most, if not all, perfectly illustrate the changing times by specifically calling out work created by AI as unwelcome and cause for an immediate ban from submitting anything else. Is it heavy handed? Maybe. Enforceable? Likely not. Fresh emails take seconds to create, so anybody willing to work the system won’t be too deterred.

What separates an artist or author from AI? Looking at my photos, clearly even I have found some benefit to using AI at this very early stage of the site’s online life. But the thing AI can’t replace is connection. Sure, I hope you read my stories and may they send shivers down your neck, but really I’m interested in bridging the gap between author and reader. I like the idea of a horror community devoted to appreciating the uncanny, and celebrating the surreal. So running Lonely Reflections immediately presents both a challenge, and a truth just in its name alone. It can be lonely being an author. It can be lonely running a site like this, where most communication ends up only going one way. And the marketplace is absolutely flooded with reflections of greatness, reflections that really only serve to make us feel a bit lonelier. So I suppose this is my way of trying to put out something good into the world and see if there’s still connections to be made out there.

As for the site, there’s a lot planned. This post will be public as I consider it a foundational letter of intent regarding the site itself. Links to all the stories I write will reside here as well, as public posts. When I do start to solicit work from other authors, nearly all of those stories will be made public here as well. Really the only private posts will be some reviews of other stories I’ve read, or stories that I’m working on that aren’t quite ready to be released. Some private posts will include story prompts I’ve made but haven’t picked up to write yet, or more personal posts about the site itself and how things are going. But through all of this, I hope you’ll appreciate my efforts and enjoy what my site has to offer. Maybe you’ll even come away with a few more nagging thoughts that linger a few days after reading something from here. One can only hope. Anyways, thank you for your support. It means the world to me.