On July 20, 2026, ten months after the parties reached a historic $1.5 billion class action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted final approval of the settlement and entered final judgment in the case. On September 4, I got an email from the Anthropic Copyright Settlement Administrator confirming that I have a valid claim for Anthropic's use of a pirated copy of The Krone Experiment with a claim number and my very own PIN number. Looks as if I will collect about $3000 as I'm both the author and own the rights. No clear indication yet as to when this will happen, so my plan is to hold my breath until it does. I note that Open AI did similar things but a judge in its equally long-running case against the New York Times just found that its case was "fair use" by materially altering the material with no harm to anyone (except writers and publishers).
In August, I worked basically seven days a week on my father's biography. I wrote 400 - 500 words on "good" days and 200 on a few others, trying to capture his retirement years. I'm attempting to balance my effort to show his complex daily life in retirement – building on two houses, helping my sister and her Cherokee husband construct kachina dolls, running a Native American jewelry store for my sister, interacting with extended family on both sides in Colorado and beyond, baby-sitting his grandkids, fixing cars – without getting bound down in details. I have a tendency to overwrite.
This is not exactly a writing experience of the sort I try to capture in these blogs, but I also put an immense effort in July and August into editing a couple of scientific papers on supernova spectropolarimetry, teasing out shapes of distant explosions from subtle clues in the radiation. These papers started out as one conjoined unit, but that did not work, so we split them into two papers, one on observations led by a brilliant young Chinese colleague and one on theoretical interpretations led by a more senior brilliant German colleague. For both the original draft and the final two papers, I found myself going basically sentence by sentence unscrambling meaning and suggesting changes. I did not keep formal track, but I estimate I spent of order a hundred hours in total. Tricky things, English syntax and German syntax.
The Westbank Writers group tackled an interesting topic in its meetings on July 27 and August 3: applying the "Save the Cat" philosophy to structuring a novel. The concept came from screenwriter Blake Snyder who wrote a series of "how to" books with the title Save the Cat Writes a Screenplay. The notion is that at a key point the protagonist performs a morally praiseworthy act, like saving a cat, to make them likable to the audience. This moment is intended to engage viewers and establish a connection with the character early in the story. Snyder's work was followed by the book Save the Cat Writes a Novel by novelist Jessica Brody who applied Snyder's structure to writing a novel. The structure follows 15 "beats," which are the structural pillars of any novel (or screenplay). The most prominent five are: Catalyst, Break into Act Two, Midpoint, All is Lost, and the Finale. I mightily resisted the notion that one could follow a cookbook, color-by-numbers, prescription and produce a good novel. Then I skimmed through The Krone Experiment and found that, in my naivete, I had followed the prescription to a "t." In practice, what I had done was to attempt to follow Robert Ludlum's technique for encouraging a reader to turn the page at the end of each chapter and start the next. Maybe Ludlum knew the power of cats.
At the August 17 meeting of the Westbank group, we heard from Greg Buford. Buford writes humorous self-deprecating memoirs as a "kept" husband raising three children as his spouse is posted around the world in the diplomatic service. He was a strong advocate of Substack, the use of which I had been pondering. He also pointed out that Amazon KDP allows free giveaways of ebooks for 5 random days every 90 days. Buford found that active use of the opportunity provided a boost to his sales. He advertises Amazon freebies on Facebook. The giveaways draw attention, lead to sales, and make him some money. His audience is women over 30 who love the idea of a man doing the child raising while the woman works.
On August 24, we talked about the use of maps to guide a story, not necessarily illustrating the map explicitly, just having it in mind. On September 1, we started a discussion of the employment of dreams in creative writing.
I thought I could try offering freebies of The Path to Singularity, but then realized that Prometheus, not Amazon KDP, has the ebook rights. I still might try to do this promotion with The Krone Experiment or Krone Ascending (or Krone Triumphant if I ever write it).
I explored the possibility of posting blogs on Substack instead of, or in addition to, my Authors Guild page. I discovered that my recently initiated short postings on technology advances on Substack were "notices." Blogs are "articles." Buford had pointed out that you could specify the date of original postings, whereas the Authors Guild only registers the current date of a posting. I located my first ever three blogs that I posted on lablit.com when I discovered back in 2012 that I was writing in that genre, contemporary science fiction as opposed to futuristic stuff. I decided I was writing astrolit, a sub-genre of lablit. I have those first three blogs and 31, going on 32, newer ones. I've now posted the first three dealing with various adventures with The Krone Experiment on Substack and on some sort of schedule I will post the newer 32+.
On August 19, the Austin Forum on Science and Society had a panel discussion on data centers. Jay Boisseau, the director of Austin Forum, and the panelists tried to take pragmatic tone, acknowledging the public resistance in Texas and beyond, but outlining the practical realities that the trained and hosted AI could do a lot of good, and that some fears were overdone. Nevertheless, I had the sense that an undertone of hostility pervaded the audience that normally embraces the topics addressed.
The next day, I joined an online Austin Forum discussion of the novel Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. It's about machine consciousness and is told from the point of view of the machine, a live-in sex robot. We had a quite lively discussion. We talked about people bonding with AI, and I remarked that I saw a parallel with the whole influencer scene, where people bond with an online presence whom they have never met but nevertheless trust. Being an old fogie, I don't understand why anyone would buy a particular cosmetic because a young woman from Indiana whom they have not met recommends it on YouTube.
I had submitted samples from my collection of travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, to be considered for a prize from the Texas Writer's League. I also paid a small fee to get a critique independent of the prize judging. I got an email reply to the latter on August 27. The reviewer said, "This is such rich material - it's worth the effort to revise!" One of the revisions the reviewer suggested was to add more local color, which I might do. The other was to insert comments throughout from my current point of view. That, I'm not doing.
I mentioned in the previous blog, #31, Gary Keith and his first novel, Austin Blues. I finished reading it in late August. It's a rip-roaring story told from numerous points of view of Vietnam war recovery, politics, and legal shenanigans set against the background of 1970's Austin music venues and other iconic sites. Great fun. Read it!
I don't think this blog follows the Save the Cat structure.