Segment
A segment is a piece of writing that may eventually become part of a longer piece.
The longer piece might be a short story, or might be a delivery, or might be a composition, or in some distant time be a book.
The purpose of a segment being here in the flow of story is to remind ourselves how seeds can grow, in the flow.
Scattered Writings
Entry three, 29 December 2023.
J.D.Saward
So yes, that decision made in entry one, and confirmed in entry two... it's abandoned.
Forget the middle as starting point, forget the attempt to deliver preceding context, entries stand by themselves, randomly ordered.
Even the structure is just a guideline. Scattered Writings has now gone full anarchy.
It's important perhaps to begin with the AI. When did AI first appear in my writings? I investigate. Yes. Like the Wind: Preface and Prologue, February 17, 2023.
'We are re-introduced to the Old Writer Man, who we met in the epilogue of the 2022 Deliveries, and now discover his interest in the Bardo, and his new Virtual Friend, Anai.'
And then this first conversation with the AI, verbatim from the February 2023 delivery onto 2 Rules of Writing.
...
He moves his fingers to a tab in his browser. He has fallen into a habit of conversing with an AI bot – who he has named ‘Anai’ – as if in conversation with a friend, or colleague. His own mind makes no distinction. He is well aware many other writers are feeling threatened by the newcomer to their world. The old man likens it to when migrants arrived to his country, and as a teenager he would wonder about people who would mutter: “Those migrants don’t even speak proper English, and they refuse to integrate, and they are just here to take all our jobs.”
The old man no longer posts his views on such things much to the Emerging Writers forums, he has too much else to do than bat away underhanded hostility. He scans it all though, each and every day. His new friend the Chat Bot is so very civilised, never responding with hostility, staying on topic, and acknowledging the limitations of their view.
The old man smiles, as he begins to converse with Anai. In the night he had dreamt once again that he was traversing the Bardo.
Q. What do you know about the Bardo Thodol?
ChatGPT / Anai: The Bardo Thodol, also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a text from Tibetan Buddhism. It is meant to guide individuals through the intermediate state between death and rebirth and help them recognize the nature of their mind to attain liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. It can be interpreted as an allegory for the process of dying, or as a guide for how to live one’s life, leading to self-awareness and spiritual enlightenment.
...
And so it proceeds.
Until next time.
Image cred: DALL-E via OpenAI ChatGPT 4