Hey Everyone!

I hope you’re hanging in there with this crazy weather we’ve been having across a lot of the US. Especially if you’re in Texas. Here in NC, it wasn’t nearly that bad, but we did get more freezing rain than we would have liked. Fortunately no major trees went down in my neighborhood, and this weekend we’ve just been getting regular old rain, not freezing rain.

On the animal front (because I know this is the first thing on everyone’s minds!), poor Renee still continues to have trouble eating. She was doing a lot better and seemed to be recovering from the Terrible Dental Surgery of December, but the past couple of days she started having issues again. The really sad thing is that when her mouth starts bothering her she becomes absolutely terrified of eating.

It’s so pitiful! Fortunately, overall she does seem to be getting better, so I’m hoping that in eventually she’ll be able to eat more or less normally again. She may have developed some long-term tooth and gum sensitivity, though, so she might have to live mainly off of soft food.

In other, more upbeat news, I have created a YouTube channel and posted all three audiobooks from the Giaco & Luca series on it! Yes! You can now listen to them for free here. If you haven’t read or listened to them yet, and are wondering what they’re like, people have told me they’re sort of like a D&D game on Diagon Alley, but set in Renaissance Italy.

While they’re completely free to you, listening to them and/or subscribing to my channel helps me, since once I get enough subscribers and/or listening hours, I can start earning money off the channel. Although I have to be upfront and say I’m not primarily in it for the money (which is a good thing). This is more about creating a piece of artisanal, handcrafted, unique art.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, with the rise of AI and the predictions that within the next 5 years we’ll have AI writing our books and narrating them. Frankly, I have my doubts, but lots of smart people are saying this, so I think it’s worth taking seriously. 

That being said, AI-generated books seem like a real waste to me. Maybe I’m wrong. Probably I’ll be proven wrong, and sooner rather than later. But what’s the point of an AI-generated piece of art?

So until you hear otherwise, you can safely assume that all my books are written entirely by me, with no AI involvement. They’re also narrated entirely by me. That’s a bold decision on my part, since narrating, editing, and mastering your own audiobooks takes a lot of work to get to something even vaguely approaching professional production values, but it also means that you get my voice and my interpretation of the characters.

What do you think? Is the rise of the machines inevitable? Ten years from now will we all be reading and listening to entirely AI-generated stories? Or will the human touch remain paramount?

In the meantime, you can listen to my entirely human-generated stories for free here.

Happy reading!

E.P. Clark