John Schettler's Blog

 Available Now, An Hour For Vengeance

Kirov Series Special Edition, Volume #68

From a Temporal Cyclone to burning ships struck by terrible new weapons of Imperial Japan in 2030, the War in Limbo continues right where Volume #67 left off. Karpov and Kirov have already seen what can happen when locking horns with this modern Japanese Empire, in a world made possible by Ivan Volkov. With Letters of Marque from Director Kamenski, he takes Kirov to sea again in waters swarming with ships of the Combined Fleet, and with Odo Nobunaga set on exacting revenge for the duplicity and betrayal of the Siberians when his war prize fails to function as expected.  Action from start to finish in this one, as Fedorov and Karpov hope to eventually find a way home to their Meridian in 2027.

Now on Amazon

An Hour for Vengeance, Kindle edition, $6.99

 Kirov Series Special Edition #68

The Kirov Series Revisited….

 

Most fans of the Kirov Series know by now that thenever ending story never really ended. The last two volumes of the main serieswere #63 Final Sortie, and #64 Journey’s end. Then, after over ten years dedicated to themighty Kirov, John took a break and put out a fivevolume Epic Fantasy series, TheChronicles of Innisfail, basicallylooking for more readers in that highly popular genre. But ever since Game ofThrones, fantasy has been absolutely saturated, and it was difficult to getnoticed.  So John then returned to hisKeyholders Saga, which arose as a subplot in the Kirov Series when thecharacter Sir Roger Ames hired one Ian Thomas to burrow beneath Churchill’sburial site to obtain his ashes so they could be compressed to make a diamondby services like Eterneva, EverDear, Lonite and many others. Ever since that,Sir Roger has been wagering that diamond in a number of games with wealthyadversaries. These men all seem to have mysterious keys that open highlyengineered gates to hidden passages concealing rifts in time. So time travel is again at the heart of thesestories, which end up being highly textured alternate histories.

Of course the keyssoon become prominent in the Kirov Series as other characters beginseeking them out, like Elena Fairchild, and eventually Fedorov and Karpov aswell. We learn how they are used in the Kamenski Device to open more and morefeatures of that magic box. Meanwhile, Sir Roger leads us through fourexcellent alternate histories of famous battles from British History.  The first was Field of Glory (Waterloo),then Zulu Hour (Isandlwana). Returning to this series Johnadded The Devil Ship (The Opium Wars) and then The Sands of Honor, (Sudan and Omdurman), with Sir Roger Ames againinvolved in both stories. These are books that are pretty much stand alonenovels, so the Keyholder’s Saga can be read in any order.

Now then… the neverending Kirov Saga suddenly hadan Encore, (Series volume #65) and that volumeactually seemed a more appropriate way to tie things off for the series as awhole.  While it focused on the officersand crew, the vehicle was the airship Baikal, not the Mighty Kirov.But it did get us sitting in on the plans and plots of Karpov and Fedorov, and ona fairly wild mission to both polar regions.

Next John went back to the ship he devoted so much love,time, and energy to and put out two quick volumes a month apart. They were Clashof Empires, Kirov Series #66, where Director Kamenski recruited ourheroes and their intrepid battlecruiser to clean up a mess caused by thedisappearance of a Chinese warship. It was followed in just one month by Warin Limbo, volume #67.

With Kirov fighting in just about every historicalwar possible, this time John took his imagination forward to the year 2030, andin a future made possible by Ivan Volkov’s interventions. In the War in Limbo,we learn that Volkov gave “the Bomb” to the Japanese a year before the end ofWWII, and that enabled Japan to stage a surprise attack on Halsey while he musteredin Truk Lagoon. That ended the war by treaty instead of unconditional surrenderfor Japan, and voila, what do we have in 2030, a ravenously Samuraisouled Imperial Japanese Empire dominating all the Western Pacific, but withmodern day ships and missiles in their Imperial Navy.

Kirov gets marooned in this Limbo in volume #67,quite literally tossed aground on the island named Limbo by a big Typhoon. Itis not long before the Japanese become aware of the ship, and they meet thesame character that they encountered when this world was first introduced in the main series,Captain Sato. Things then take a darker turn, and things transpire that seriesfans never thought possible. Mid-way through this story there are dramaticevents which cannot be revealedhere. This puts both Fedorov and Karpov to the test, and they devise a plan totry and reverse their setbacks and escape this world.

The ending of War in Limbo presents an eerie stalking of the ship and crew by the force ofParadox, which appears as a massive Temporal storm. So while a physical typhoonbegins the story, it is bookended by a Temporal Cyclone,  and that is where we left it last month. Wellguess what mister prolific has for us in June. The Kirov Series gets yetanother sequel, Series Volume #68, AnHour For Vengeance is coming soon, and while the other Encores were standalone stories, this one connects directly to War in Limbo, picking up rightwhere that story ended. The two volumes even share a similar cover design.

So this month thestory takes off again, and puts us right back on the bridge of Kirov to resolve the ending of Warin Limbo. Saying more about An Hour for Vengeance might spoil things for you, but needless tosay, Karpov is pissed off with the Imperial Japanese Navy for what they put theship and crew through, and he shows them what Mizuchi can really do. Comingthis June, possibly around the 15th again, we get another Kirov fix thatis utterly classic, and it looks like these books revisiting the series arebecoming a stealth Season Nine. Like the four or five Star Trek spinoffs, theremay be more to come as the Kirov series reboots in these tales. Don’tmiss out! 

~ The The WritingShop Press

Season 9: The Encore Series for Kirov

Volume 65: Encore

Volume 66: Clash of Empires

Volume 67: War in Limbo

Volume 68: An Hour for Vengeance

 A Kirov Series Special Edition!

Available Now on Amazon!

Kirov has gone to many grim futures, but this one wasone of the most dangerous. After preying on the Imperial Japanese Navy in WWIIon many occasions, Karpov finds a pleasure cruise for the ship and crew runsafoul of turbulent weather, and they are marooned in Limbo after they aregrounded by a massive Typhoon. Soon they are found by old enemies, made farmore dangerous by the modern ships and weapons they now command. It is an enemythey have faced and fought before, the product of a twisted history that hasspun off a new altered Meridian. Was Ivan Volkov responsible for this future?Though Volkov is dead, Kirov must now face and fight the new dominantPacific power in the year 2030, not China, but a rejuvenated Imperial JapaneseEmpire that has risen from the ashes of WWII like a dark Phoenix.

The Empire has but one weakness, its center is unformed andthe young Emperor in waiting has no real power. Instead the Empire is ruled byquarreling Daimyos who serve as Regents and command powerful fleets.While planning to begin new conquests, they remain bitter rivals, eachmaneuvering to gain face and force to propel them to the coveted rank of Shogun, a military dictator who will seizethe reins of power and unite all the warring Clans.

One among them, Odo Nobunaga, has discovered a most unusualship aground within his Regency, and he soon learns the secret of theirtremendous power. As Odo maneuvers to gain possession of the the KamenskiDevice, Fedorov and Karpov must negotiate with the Japanese to secure safepassage home to Petropavlovsk. But Mother Time has other plans for the ship andcrew, and sets her mind on ending its offensive voyages once and for all. Thisbrings Kirov to a fateful hour that no one aboard ever thought theywould face.

This Kirov Series special Edition (Series Volume #67) is a stand alone novel focused on the ship and crew.

 A Kirov Series Special Edition, Volume #67

Coming Monday, May 15th!

It was only a pleasure cruise, sun, white sand, and islandgirls, until a Devil in the Banda Sea finds Kirov and crew and caststhem ashore into a grim future ruled by one of their their most ardent enemies,Imperial Japan.

When Ivan Volkov gave Japan the bomb a year before theAmericans completed theirs in WWII, the Japanese Empire set a dangerous trap atTruk Lagoon that destroyed much of Halsey’s Fast Carrier fleet. As a result,the Pacific War ends by treaty instead of Japan’s unconditional surrender, andJapan survives to become a powerful modern day Pacific Power.

Yet the empire has a weakness, its soft and unformed center.The young crown prince will not take the throne for another five years. Untilthat time, the Empire is ruled by powerful Daimyos serving as Regents,each commanding fleets of modern warships. In a brilliant depiction of thismodern day Japanese Empire, rival Clan leaders struggle to obtain the best new shipsand further their own devious aims while also fending off the incursion of theUnited States Navy into the neutral Zone in the Central Pacific. The Americansset their sights on recovering both Truk and the Marianas, and a new modern dayclash at sea is imminent.

Enter Kirov, the ship and crew once again cast intothis strange and dangerous future in the year 2030. Grounded and marooned by aterrible storm, Typhoon Setan, the ship’s hull is under repair when the JapaneseCaptain Sato appears with a heavy cruiser and three destroyers. He remembersthis old nemesis, for he has fought Kirov before, just three monthsearlier when the Siberians last appeared on this Meridian. Tense negotiationsensue, which soon see Fedorov and Karpov swept into the convoluted Imperialintrigue between clan leaders when the head of the local Regency, Odo Nobunaga,discovers Kirov is the ship that has plagued Japan for decades, Mizuchi.Realizing Kirov is indeed that ship, Odo soon learns the secret of itstremendous power, and strives to take it for his own.

Meanwhile, the Toki-Akechi Clan that Odo commands must facedown another old enemy, the United States Navy. Odo struggles to bring otherrival clans into the war and forge a union in the face of this powerful enemy,and we get a tale that is reminiscent of a modern day Shogun, the title Odo seeks as military dictator to unite theentire realm.

It’s the most comprehensive look at this altered future yet,a Meridian engineered by the late Ivan Volkov. This time, Kirov is lostin a crucible of fate, and brought to a fateful hour when they must finallyface the consequences of their meddling in the business of Mother Time, andImperial Japan. With the Kamenski Device damaged, they cannot simply flee tosafe waters elsewhere, and now Kirov fights a harrowing battle with theJapanese. As their missile count thins, they also face an even more seriousthreat that cannot be defeated by Zircons—for their plan to escape this worldleads to Paradox.

 

Coming Monday, May 15th!

A Kirov Series Special Edition, Volume #67

 AVAILABLE NOW - Kirov Series #66 ~ Clash of Empires

After ending the Kirov Series last year, author John Schettler has been sneaking out stand alone novels based on the ship and crew, and putting them out as "Special Editions."

The first was Encore, appropriately titled, and a book that became Kirov Series #65. This spring we will get two more stand alone novels, each one a specific mission that needs a warship to resolve. While Encore was a jaunt to the distant future on the Airship Baikal, the next two books will be centered on the ship and crew, and they will be a mission to the past in Clash of Empires, released April 15. Next month, we get another book, one complete mission for Kirov and crew entitled War in Limbo. So if you have had an urge to walk that deck again, these two books will be just what you need.

OTHER NEWS on Website and Email.

The hosting company for my web site and email service notifiedme that they are getting out of the hosting business altogether. So there Iwas, with a 400 page web site that suddenly needed to find a new host.

I’ve been wanting to simplify the web site for some timenow, and so this was a good reason to start. Here’s what I have done.

1)      The web site has moved

I’ve registered a new Domain, which is now“writingshop.press”

In the short run, I pointed the old writingshop.ws at a muchleaner web site at www.writingshop.press.

Anyone typing www.writingshop.wswill get forwarded to the new, much simpler web site. It will showcase myvarious book series, and announce new releases, but I will no longer create apage for each series book. I’ll probably expand this site in the months ahead,but for now it just has a home page and one subpage—ah, simplicity. And alsobecause of this move…

2)      My email has changed

I can now be reached at: John@writingshop.press 

In the short term I think mail sent to John@writingshop.ws will still reach me,but it will soon phase out, so you should switch to the .press email address tocontact me reliably.

3) About Clash of Empires

 Clash of Empires marks a return to the Kirov Series for stand alone books that involve one mission or sortie, and these will be intensely focused on the ship and crew. In Clash of Empires, the book also takes us to the period of the Boxer Rebellion (1900) as Kirov goes back after a missing Chinese super destroyer, Anshan, pictured above. Clash of Empires will stand Kirov series Volume #66, (Encore being #65), and it will be followed next month with series Volume #67 War in Limbo. Again, this will be one sortie by Kirov, mostly focused on the ship and crew, and it will have some very dramatic events.

What can I say? Paraphrasing Michael Corleone:“Just when you think you’re out, I pull you back in!” After Kirov’scameo appearance in Sands of Honor, I just needed to walk that deckagain, and I hope you support these volumes, as they will probably decidewhether or not there will be any further cruises on Kirov in the monthsand years ahead.

Thank you all for your interest and support for my books. Ihope I’m giving you something good in return.

 

Best Regards

John Schettler

         

 Coming Soon! A medley of John's entire universe.

The price of honor has been high, for an Empire, a nation, a single man. And that price has been paid on battlefields all over the earth, in the hinterlands of Empire, beyond the frontiers of national power. For England, the world’s greatest empire in the late 1800s, the price of honor was paid with the blood of her soldiers, in Europe, Afghanistan, India, China, Egypt, Sudan, and Natal, and the often desolate places where that blood was shed, the battlefields where men fought, and strove and died, became the sands of honor. England sent her diplomats, politicians, her heroes and her soldiers in their khaki tunics to those battlefields, and in The Sands of Honor these ‘desert loving Englishmen’ will face and fight the whirlwind Army of the Dervish, the zealots who had rallied to the banners of the Mahdi, he who was promised to come.

On the morning of the 2nd of September, 1898, with Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian Army encamped in a large defensive position against the Nile called a zeriba, the British 21st Lancer Regiment rode out to find and fix the enemy’s intentions. They would reach and climb the grey gravel slopes of Jebel Surgham just off the right flank of the camp, whereupon they heard ‘a mighty rumbling as of tempestuous rollers and surf bearing down upon a rock bound shore.’ There they saw ‘a moving, undulating plain of men, flecked with banners and glistening  steel’ extending over a front three to four miles wide. It was a dense mass, a deep bodied flood of anger raging towards that hill, aiming to flow over and around it like a mighty sea of arms. Soon the shouts of that mass were plainly heard—Allah u Akbar! Rasool Allah el Mahdi! They brandished thick bladed swords and long cruel spears, masses of tightly packed warriors led by proud Emirs on horseback surrounded by bannermen and troops of Baggara horsemen.

The vast Dervish army, approaching 60,000 in number, could have come the previous night, like wolves in the dark, but instead they waited for the dawn, choosing to attack beneath the eyes of Allah. Why should they creep and snipe in the dark against these, who they would now surely destroy? Now, there was nothing between this vast host and Kitchener’s Army of 22,000 but the 320 men of the 21st Lancers, watching from that lonesome desert promontory. With them, was a young Lieutenant, out to make a name for himself, a medal seeking, glory hunting 23 year old named Winston Churchill….

On came the venomous Dervish fighters in their fearless fury.

Coming 15 MAR 2023

Kindle and Trade paperback

36 Chapters, 350+ Pages

The Sands of Honor

By
John Schettler

Prologue – Rise of The Mahdi
 Part I – China Gordon
Part II – The Work of the Faithful
Part III – On Desperate Ground
Part IV – The Road Less Traveled
Part V – Reconnaissance
Part VI – Atbara
Part VII – Omdurman
Part VIII– Consequences
Part IX – The Uninvited Guest
Part X –  The Last Battle
Part XI – While the Iron is Hot
Part XII – Men of Valour

Epilogue

Time Terminology Lexicon

Genres: Historical Fiction, Military Fiction, Alternate History, Time Travel

Characters: Sir Roger Ames, Ian Thomas, Generals Gordon and Kitchener, Captain Gordon MacRae, Captain Anton Fedorov, Admiral Leonid Volsky, Kandemir Troyak, Pavel Kamenski, Hicks Pasha, Sheikh Ali, The Mahdi, The Khalifa, Colonels Broadwood and Martin, Winston Churchill, The Meridian Project Team--Paul Dorland, Maeve Lindford, Kelly Ramer, Robert Nordhausen, and a special mission for BCG Kirov.

The Desperate attempt to save Gordon of Khartum, then General Kitchener's bold advance up the Nile to fight the Dervish, first at Atbara, then on to the decisive battle of Omdurman, where the life of a single man could change all future history from that day forward. Make room on your Kindle for this one!

 And I'm Opening a New Substack Blog.

Hail to all my blog subscribers and those of you who signed up for emails!

The latest  news is that there are now two books in the pipeline, and Kirov & company get pages in each one. These are presently scheduled for March and April, and my Substack will be sending out the details on these projects later. There are still spots in the Advance Review Teams for each book, so if you want to be a team member, and get the book two weeks before anyone else, email me.

                        Coming April 15                                            Coming March 15

The Writing Shop is opening space on Substack!

I’ve decided to move blog and weekly email traffic to Substack where I can opine on other things and write about topics of interest. I know it’s a busy world out there for you, both online or off, and I’m just one more pulse in the wire. On Substack I’ll be hitting some different vibrations, on the craft of writing, the history behind my books, the characters walking my pages, and then even things like current events.

But my Substack won’t just be a book tour thing. I just threw up a post about ChatGPT again, the hot topic of the day, where I asked it to write fiction, do some research, and proofread as a writer’s tool. How did it do? (Hint, it’s a great proofreader). The transcript of that conversation is posted there if this AI thing is of any interest to you. I respect your time, and privacy, so I did not load my email list into Substack. If you want to get my Substack posts, news, special offers, announcements, team openings, polls & surveys, articles and such, you can find me here:

Https://Writingshop.substack.com 

 

I hope you’ll tune in!

John Schettler

 Here's what Readers preferred in our latest survey

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”
—J.R.R. Tolkien

READER SURVEY RESULTS:

We asked readers to sound off in a brief survey, and here’s what they said. 

• When asked why they read fiction, it was to escape, leave their troubles behind, indulge imagination, gain knowledge, and just have fun. But by far the most common response was to escape into another world and time, from Minas Tirith to the battle bridge of Kirov.

• Readers enjoying military fiction said they liked a mix of land action and naval battles. Their favorite eras were WWI & WWII, modern conflicts, and then the Age of Imperialism and the US Civil War. I was pleased to see that most of those responded said they wanted to see another novel featuring Kirov in either a modern or historical setting. For me that was akin to Samwise Gamgee’s remark about the great stories never ending. As my characters intervene in the history, they struggle with the same question Samwise asked: How could the world ever go back to the way it was?

I’ll soon have two new books for you to continue exploring these questions.  Watch this space for more on these books. I do want to hear from more of you about your reading interest. It will be an important factor to determine my writing projects. The survey will stay on for another week. If you have not already, please spend 3-5 minutes taking it. Voice your opinion, and get it heard.

Please Note
I've moved my novel Field of Glory out of the Kirov Series and into the Keyholder's series. It's really in both, but Amazon makes me choose one or the other.

So the three books in the Keyholders Series are now:

Field of Glory
Zulu Hour
The Devil Ship

And these books can be read in any order.

 A Devil Ship meets Imperial China

In my latest book I introduced one William Jardine, the Scottish trader who established the J&M (Jardine Matheson & Company) that came to be the center of the opium trade. Jardine got rich and powerful with his fleet of China Clippers running opium  from India to China, and bringing back teas and silks to England. He came to be known as the Tai-Pan, or supreme leader of the China Trade, and he also helped the mighty British East India Company take a nice profit from that trade. Then he sees  the Devil Ship, which he mistakenly calls the “HMS” Nemesis. Even though it was a purpose-built ship, not for the Royal Navy, but for the British East India Company who would profit from the war it would enable.

I first met this man (Jardine) in the landmark novel Tai-Pan by James Clavell, one of my most admired writers. I read Shogun nearly 40 years ago in 1975 when it was in everyone’s lap on trains, planes, and subways, the book that was Clavell’s breakthrough novel. Then I discovered Tai-Pan had been written eleven years earlier in 1966, and I devoured it. Returning to that book this year after finishing The Devil Ship, I was delighted to see it covered some of the same history as my latest novel.  I even found a scene where Clavell’s Tai-Pan, who he called “Dirk Struan” instead of the man’s real name, catches his first glimpse of the paddle steamer Nemesis in the book Tai-Pan. He swears at it roundly, seeing it for what it was, the coming of a new age in shipping, and the harbinger of the death of his prized China Clippers, the most beautiful sailing ships that ever graced the seas. 

These were the sort of things I explored in The Devil Ship, a time of conflict between two empires, two ages in naval technology, two starkly different cultures. It was a time where new ships, iron-hulled steamers, were just coming into regular service, and the sparks of inevitable conflict ignited by the grinding of two cultures, the British and Chinese, started the fires of war. They were both Imperial powers with long histories that were locked in a struggle in the mid to late 19th Century, and among the prizes Great Britain secured in those wars was the island that became the glittering jewel of a city we know today as Hong Kong. They held it for over 100 years.

I hope you’ll take the time to pick up a copy of The Devil Ship and enjoy it! In my story, there had to be mention of the Tai-Pan as well, for I had learned that William Jardine all but spoon-fed the plan the British used to defeat Qing China in the Opium Wars to Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary at that time.  So here was a perfect setting, the Age of Sail meets the coming of Steam and Iron, ships that ‘endured the disgust of the seas and the contempt of the wind’ as Clavell’s Tai-Pan laments. Throw in the last days of the red coated British infantry, the Martini & Henry Rifle, the new quick firing Nordenfeld field guns, Maxim Machine Guns, a Devil Ship sailing up river to Canton with the Royal Navy, and it was a whirl of a story.

The Devil Ship starkly illustrates the importance of a powerful navy. 42 Ships of the Royal Navy and less than 20,000 British regulars were able to bring down a dynasty that had ruled China since 1636, with an army of over 1 million soldiers. How could that have happened? Read The Devil Ship and see. Yet Britain could never do today what it easily accomplished in 1842.  Since then, England’s Navy has dramatically reduced in size, to a point where it now has only five destroyers, while modern day China has over six times as many and will build five new ships in that class every year. It pays to look at history and remember the vital importance of sea power. That is as true today as it was in the 19th Century. 

 

Chat GPT is here to stay… But should it?

Headlines lead article after article, like: “Chat GPT: The AI Tech that’s revolutionizing teaching.”

The child of Elon Musk’s OpenAI, the application is  a chatbot built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is optimized for dialogue. It also claims it can write both fiction and nonfiction. I tested it in both areas, asking it to list reasons for the lopsided outcome of the Opium Wars, and it responded with some very cogent reasons rooted in the history. But it is not infallible. I asked it about the Seymour expedition to try and relieve Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, and it listed many good reasons, though it claimed Gaselee led that expedition. (He led a later expedition, I replied, but Seymour led the “Seymour Expedition.”) The AI politely apologized for the error.

Chat GPT is here to stay… But should it?

Another caveat on any non-fiction it writes: it often just lifts text directly from source material it relies on, so due diligence on plagiarism is recommended. Furthermore, it has simply cited references that turned out to be entirely fake, just made up by the AI itself as if to justify its own assertions. I found that disturbing. These were alarming discoveries  and cause for real caution when relying on this new Technology at the outset.

Like Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, we would do well to encode laws into all AI to limit and guide its activities, and to do that now, before it becomes widely deployed. I learned it can also write and debunk computer code, but I would never teach AI how to write code—because it will. In doing so we are handing a loaded gun to a child. Don’t be surprised if it shoots its teacher one day. Think for a moment—what new technology has ever failed to be weaponized? Even things as innocuous as railroads became conduits for war. We humans are remarkably short sighted, and forever fail to see the more distant implications of the things we create. Just ask Robert Oppenheimer.

Now can it write fiction? It’s going to need a great amount of further development. I asked it to write a scene of at least 1000 words, and it consistently failed to meet that requirement, even writing fewer words than its initial attempt when asked to try again with that word count mandatory. Was it just thumbing its nose at me? I prompted Chat GPT to write a scene from one of my novels, and it returned 4th Grade level prose that, while accurate as to grammar, was utterly lifeless compared to the work of any human writer. I soon realized that it should never be relied upon for fiction writing, at least not now. And no self-respecting writer should ever use such a tool for their work.

The initial experience with it is like playing with a new toy, but it has far broader and more serious societal impacts that should be the focus of our thinking about it now. Students have rushed to use it to knock off a quick term paper or other writing assignment. The education community has responded by either banning use of the application, or finding other software that can scan and identify an AI generated text. The developers’ response? They implore the education sector to “be open to change.” Sure, like we’re open to Bird Flu after gain of function research on the damn virus. And I guess they implore students to not learn how to write on their own as well. Software like a word processor was a great leap over typewriters, and voice recognition or voice to text another innovative leap. But software that wants to remove the human writer from the loop is a grave mistake. Let’s never go there.

 Yet the fact remains—AI is emerging into more and more sectors of our lives from our cars to our jobs and classrooms, and it’s not going away, any more than bullets are. As the years go by, it will just get better, but I’m not holding my breath for it to write a cogent novel any time soon, or even a decent short story. 

What do you think? Have you tried the AI that is becoming the rage of Gen Z and the Millennials?  One Reddit user actually asked ChatGPT to write him a post headline that would be sure to get thousands of clicks. Well, forgive my doubting soul on this application. You can write it off to the fact that I stand in a more mature generation, and I can hear it now… “OK, Boomer.”